Datasets:

euirim
/

goodwiki

Dataset card Data Studio Files Files and versions Community

Split (1)

train · 44.8k rows

pageid int64 12 74.6M	title stringlengths 2 102	revid int64 962M 1.17B	description stringlengths 4 100 ⌀	categories list	markdown stringlengths 1.22k 148k
36,448,028	George Headley	1,173,108,474	West Indian cricketer	[ "1909 births", "1983 deaths", "Commonwealth XI cricketers", "Cricketers who made a century on Test debut", "Jamaica cricketers", "Jamaican cricketers", "Jamaican people of Barbadian descent", "Members of the Order of the British Empire", "Recipients of the Order of Distinction", "Sir L. Parkinson's XI cricketers", "Sportspeople from Colón, Panama", "West Indies Test cricket captains", "West Indies Test cricketers", "Wisden Cricketers of the Year" ]	George Alphonso Headley OD, MBE (30 May 1909 – 30 November 1983) was a West Indian cricketer who played 22 Test matches, mostly before World War II. Considered one of the best batsmen to play for the West Indies and one of the greatest cricketers of all time, Headley also represented Jamaica and played professional club cricket in England. West Indies had a weak cricket team through most of Headley's playing career; as their one world-class player, he carried a heavy responsibility and the side depended on his batting. He batted at number three, scoring 2,190 runs in Tests at an average of 60.83, and 9,921 runs in all first-class matches at an average of 69.86. He was chosen as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1934. Headley was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, where he quickly established a cricketing reputation as a batsman. He soon gained his place in the Jamaican cricket team, and narrowly missed selection for the West Indies tour of England in 1928. He made his Test debut in 1930, against England in Barbados, and was instantly successful. Further successes followed in series against Australia and in three more against England, as Headley dominated the West Indian batting of the period. Following his tour of England in 1933, Headley signed as a professional at Haslingden in the Lancashire League, where he played until the outbreak of war in 1939. The war interrupted Headley's career; although he returned to Tests in 1948, he was hampered by injuries and did not achieve his previous levels of success. Even so, he was chosen as West Indies captain in 1948 against England, the first black player to be appointed to the position, although a combination of injuries and politics meant he only led his team for one Test match. He did not play Tests between 1949 and 1953, but resumed his career in English league cricket, first in Lancashire and later in the Birmingham League. His playing career ended in 1954 on his return to Jamaica, after a public subscription paid his fare from England. After retiring as a player, Headley was employed as a cricket coach by the Jamaican government until 1962. He lived until 1983; his son Ron and his grandson Dean each played Test match cricket, for West Indies and England respectively. ## Early life Headley was born in Colón, Panama, on 30 May 1909, the son of DeCourcy Headley and Irene Roberts. Neither of Headley's parents was from Panama; his father was from Barbados and his mother from Jamaica, but they had moved to Panama while DeCourcey worked on the construction of the Panama Canal. By the time Headley was five years old the Canal was complete, and the family moved to Cuba in search of further employment. In 1919, concerned by the amount of Spanish being spoken by her son, Headley's mother took him to Jamaica so he could be educated in an English-speaking school. Headley moved in with his mother's sister-in-law Mrs Clarence Smith, in Rae Town, Kingston, and remained with her until her death in 1933. His mother returned to Cuba, but regularly exchanged letters with her son. He attended Calabar Elementary School, where he played for the school cricket team as a wicket-keeper, although a meagre sporting budget meant he had to do so without gloves. Later, he continued his education at Kingston High School. Taking part in all-day cricket matches at the local Crabhole Park, Headley began to attract local attention, and aged 16, he joined Raetown Cricket Club. In 1925 he scored his first century, batting at number three in the batting order in a match for Raetown against Clovelly. On leaving school, Headley was appointed as a temporary clerk in a magistrate's court; this enabled him to play competitive cricket for the St Andrew's Police side in 1926, in a cup competition. Some impressive performances for the club earned him an invitation to practice with the Jamaica Colts team. However, his job made it impossible to attend, and he was not considered for the Jamaican side against Lord Tennyson's English touring side in 1927. That year, Headley began working for Keeling–Lindo Estates, in St Catherine. The firm were enthusiastic cricket patrons, allowing employees time off to play in matches, so that Headley was able to attend practice with the Jamaica team on a regular basis. He also moved to the St Catherine Cricket Club, captained by his immediate superior in Keeling–Lindo. To generate more income, Headley took a second job, working for the Jamaica Fruit and Shipping Company, but he wanted a secure profession. To this end, he planned to move to America to pursue a career in dentistry. However, he was now on the verge of the Jamaica team and a delay in the arrival of the application forms for his American work permit allowed him to make his first-class debut for Jamaica against another touring team led by Lord Tennyson. ## Early career Headley made his Jamaica debut against Lord Tennyson's XI at Sabina Park on 9 February 1928, in a match won easily by the home team. Batting at number three, his first innings yielded 16 runs, but in the second innings, he scored 71, reaching fifty runs in as many minutes. In the second game against Lord Tennyson's XI which began in Kingston on 18 February, Headley scored his maiden first-class century. Having scored 22 not out after the first day's play, he reached 50 runs by playing very carefully but subsequently played more adventurous shots. He hit the bowling of Alan Hilder for four consecutive fours and twice hit Lord Tennyson for three fours in a row. At one point, thirteen of his scoring shots in a row went for four. He was finally out for 211, the highest score at the time by a West Indian batsman against an English team. After the innings, Tennyson compared Headley to Victor Trumper and Charlie Macartney, batsmen considered among the best who ever played. Headley concluded the series against Tennyson's team with innings of 40 and 71, to give him an aggregate of 409 runs at an average of 81.80. He also took his maiden first class wicket. Following his success, Headley abandoned his prospective career in dentistry. Although some critics expected his selection for the West Indies tour of England in 1928, Headley was not chosen. While West Indies played their inaugural Test series during that tour, Headley continued to play for St Catherine's. He had another opportunity against English opposition in 1929, when a team led by Julien Cahn arrived to play two first-class games. Jamaica's distance from other Caribbean islands made it difficult for their cricketers to gain good-quality playing experience, so the frequent visits by English sides were important to the development of Jamaican cricket. These tours also served to build Headley's reputation. In the first match, Headley played a slow, defensive innings of 57, but he did not reach fifty in his other three innings. Even so, he was chosen by the Jamaican selectors for a West Indies XI, which included players from other islands, to play Cahn's team in their final tour match. The home side lost the toss and had to bat in very difficult conditions following rain. Headley found the fast bowlers difficult, but survived the period when the pitch was most difficult to bat on before he was out for 44. In the second innings, he attacked from the start and used a wide range of shots to reach 143 before he was run out. In three matches against the tourists, Headley scored 326 runs, averaging 54.33. A change in the location of his job meant that Headley moved to the Lucas Cricket Club in 1929. He visited America and played some exhibition matches for the Jamaican Athletic Club in New York, scoring a century against a touring team from Bermuda; his parents had moved to America by then, which enabled Headley to combine the cricket with his first visit to his parents in ten years. ## Test match career ### Debut and first Test series In 1930 the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) undertook a tour of the West Indies which included four Test matches—the first Tests to be played in the West Indies. The MCC side was not at full international strength; it included players who were either just beginning or just ending their international careers, and several star English bowlers were missing. The first Test was played in Barbados and Headley was selected, making his debut for the West Indies on 11 February 1930—to the disapproval of some Barbadians who thought his place should have gone to a local player. Batting at number three, he played aggressively in the first innings but the crowd barracked him and he was bowled for 21. However, in the second innings he scored 176, becoming the first West Indian to score a century on his Test debut and only their second centurion overall. He shared century partnerships with both Clifford Roach and Frank de Caires, but these were insufficient to force victory, and the match was drawn. Headley remained in the Test side for the rest of the series, the only home player other than Roach to appear in all four Tests. In Trinidad, during the second Test, Headley found the unfamiliar conditions difficult—Trinidad was the only Test match ground in the Caribbean which was played on a pitch made from matting instead of grass. Headley scored eight and 39 as West Indies lost the match. The home side levelled the series with their first ever Test victory in the third match of the series, played in British Guiana. In this match Headley became the first West Indian, and only the fifth cricketer of any nation, to score two separate hundreds in a Test match. His first innings of 114 was played mainly in support of Roach, who scored a double century. In the second innings, Headley scored 112 as West Indies batted with a big first innings lead, attacking defensive English bowling. While en route to the final Test in Jamaica, the West Indies team stopped in Panama and Costa Rica where official functions were held in Headley's honour. In Jamaica, where there was widespread jubilation, Headley attended several receptions and celebrations. When the cricket resumed, Headley scored 64, 72 and 55 in three innings against MCC for Jamaica. With the Test series level, it was agreed that the final match of the series would be played until one team won, regardless of how long it took—the other Tests had been limited to four days each. On the first three days, England scored 849. In reply West Indies could only manage 286, with Headley out for ten runs. England batted again, to set West Indies an eventual victory target of 836. This time, Headley batted for 390 minutes, faced 385 balls and hit 28 fours while scoring 223. He and Karl Nunes added 227 for the second wicket. Headley played the hook very effectively and hit many short deliveries for runs. When Headley was stumped, he had made what was at the time the fourth highest individual score in all Test cricket and the highest in a second innings. When West Indies still needed 428 runs, rain fell for two days and the match had to be abandoned after its ninth scheduled day. Headley ended the series with 703 runs at an average of 87.87. ### Australian tour Headley was selected for the West Indian tour of Australia in the 1930–31 season, under the captaincy of Jackie Grant. After a brief visit to New Zealand where they played a non-first-class match against Wellington, the tourists arrived in Sydney. Headley made a good start to the tour and attracted praise from the press in Australia and West Indies. The first match of the Australian leg was against New South Wales, where the West Indians were bowled out for 188 and Headley was stumped for 25. However, his runs came in less than two overs and Learie Constantine later rated this as one of Headley's best innings. In the second innings, Headley made 82, the top score, but could not prevent the tourists losing. The next match was also lost, as Bert Ironmonger took thirteen wickets in the match for Victoria. In the first innings, Headley scored 131 out of 212, regarded by one critic as one of the best centuries scored on the ground, and top-scored again with 34 in the second innings. By this stage the Australian bowlers had realised that Headley excelled when hitting the ball through the off side, and they began to alter their tactics accordingly. In the final match before the Test series began, against South Australia, Headley had problems playing the Australian bowlers, particularly the leg spin of Clarrie Grimmett. The Australians bowled at Headley's leg stump with fielders concentrated on the leg side, making it difficult for him to score runs. Headley scored 27 and 16 as his team were heavily defeated. These bowling tactics were used in subsequent matches, and Headley found difficulty in countering them. At the beginning of the first Test, West Indies were bowled out 296 as Grimmett took seven wickets, including Headley first ball. In the second innings, with West Indies 80 behind, Grimmett again attacked Headley's leg stump. After having his scoring restricted, Headley lost patience and after scoring 11 was stumped, trying to hit Grimmett. Bowled out for 249, West Indies lost by ten wickets. After scoring only three in the following tour match against Tasmania, Headley contributed 14 and two in an innings defeat in the second Test. After two heavy Test defeats for the tourists, some critics believed that the series was too one-sided and that some of the five Tests should be cancelled. Headley's poor run of form continued in the West Indian victory over Queensland and, having put on weight, he was also struggling with his fitness. In an effort to overcome Australia's leg stump attack Headley had altered his batting stance; instead of standing at right angles to the bowler, he turned his body more front-on, to enable him to improve his placement of the ball on the leg side. His quick footwork enabled him to alter his position if necessary to play the ball on the off side. He also eliminated from his strokes a risky cover drive he had developed on Caribbean pitches. During the third Test at Brisbane, Headley made his first substantial contribution to the series, after Australia scored 558 batting first. Facing Grimmett's leg side tactics, Headley managed to score freely, and forced Grimmett to alter to an off stump attack. With ten fours in total, Headley became the first West Indian to score a century against Australia, and was left 102 not out when West Indies were bowled out for 193. Forced to follow-on, West Indies were dismissed for 148 of which Headley made 28, the highest score of the innings. Ironmonger tricked him into playing the leg glance and he was caught by the wicket-keeper who had moved across in anticipation of the shot. Headley maintained his good form in matches against Victoria and South Australia after the third Test, scoring 77 and 113 in the first match and 75 and 39 in the second. Although neither match was won, the West Indians needed to take only one more wicket to win the first match when it ended drawn, and lost the second by a single wicket. However, the fourth Test was lost by an innings as Ironmonger again caused difficulties for the West Indies batsmen. Headley top-scored with 33 out of the first innings total of 99 but made only 11 on his second attempt, being dismissed both times by Ironmonger. By now the tour was making a financial loss, forcing the tourists to take economy measures such as travelling by tram. In conversation with a member of the Australian Board of Control, Headley, Constantine and fellow tourist Tommy Scott suggested the authorities should produce faster pitches to enable the public to see more attacking cricket. It seems this advice may have been heeded; the pitch was faster in a match against New South Wales, won by the West Indians, in which Headley scored 70 and two. In the fifth Test, West Indies won the toss and batted first, which proved an advantage in a match plagued by uncertain weather. Headley and fellow Jamaican Frank Martin scored centuries on the first day despite bowling from the Australians which the Jamaican newspaper Daily Gleaner described as good. Headley, playing Grimmett comfortably by now, batted for 146 minutes, and hit 13 fours. In the course of the innings he achieved the rare feat in Australia of reaching 1,000 first-class runs on the tour. Grant, the West Indies captain, declared the innings closed after rain had fallen to make the pitch more difficult for batting. Australia were then bowled out for 224, 126 runs behind West Indies. The tourists scored 124 more runs in their second innings, of which Headley made 30, before more rain fell and Grant declared for the second time in the match. Subsequently, the bowlers dismissed Australia for 220 to give West Indies their first win over Australia, although the series ended 4–1 to the home side. Headley scored 336 runs in the Test matches at an average of 37.33, and 1,066 runs at 44.41 in all first-class games. On their return home, the West Indian players were well received by the public and officials; Headley received praise and once again attended functions arranged in his honour. In Australia Donald Bradman, the star Australian batsman, praised Headley, particularly for the way in which he had overcome his problems against Grimmett. C. L. R. James, the writer and historian, later wrote that Headley's success demonstrated his mastery of batting. Headley arrived in Australia as a primarily off-side player which accounted for his difficulty against the Australian bowlers' tactics. However, James notes: "What he did, under fire, so to speak, was to reorganise his batting to meet the new attack." So successful was Headley that he was described by Grimmett as the best on-side batsman against whom the bowler had played. ### Tour by Lord Tennyson's team Headley resumed playing for Lucas on his return to Jamaica, attracting great crowds and high expectations. Once the cricket season ended, he embarked on another trip to America to play exhibition matches, visiting his parents on the journey. On his return for the 1931–32 season, he was appointed captain of Lucas and began preparing for the forthcoming tour of Jamaica by another team led by Lord Tennyson. In addition to his regular practice, Headley began a programme of running and swimming to improve his overall fitness. After performing well in the trial matches for Jamaica, he was selected in the first match against the tourists. Jamaica made an uncertain start, losing five wickets by the time their score reached 215 but Headley had scored 130. He then shared a partnership of 487 for the sixth wicket with Clarence Passailaigue; 236 not out after the first day's play, Headley went on to score an unbeaten 344, after batting for 407 minutes and hitting 39 fours. Jamaica totalled 702, and won the match by an innings. During his innings, Headley passed the previous highest score by any West Indian batsman, 304 not out by Percy Tarilton in 1920, and the highest score in the West Indies by any batsman, Andy Sandham's 325 in 1930. His partnership with Passailaigue took 248 minutes, and as of 2015 remains a world record for the highest sixth wicket partnership in a first-class match. The success of two home batsmen led to celebrations in Jamaica and praise from the English bowlers for Headley's batting. Headley continued his success in the second game, opening the batting and top-scoring with 84 in the first innings. In the second innings, opening again, he made 155 not out to guide West Indies to their victory target of 363. In the final match, Headley scored his third century of the series after returning to number three, accumulating 140 of Jamaica's total of 561. Jamaica won the match to win the series 3–0; Headley scored 723 runs at an average of 361.50. In the remainder of the season, Headley led Lucas to victory in the Senior Cup, scoring a century in the final. ### 1933 tour of England After playing in two trial matches, Headley was selected to tour England in 1933 under the continuing captaincy of Jackie Grant. The English press speculated on Headley's ability to cope with English conditions, while expecting him to perform to a high standard. In the event, Wisden believed he justified the expectations and increased his reputation. In the first match of the tour he scored 52 out of a total of 129 against Northamptonshire, in difficult batting conditions on a wet pitch. He scored fifties in each of his next three matches before scoring a century against the MCC during his first appearance at Lord's Cricket Ground. In the second innings of this match, a short ball from Bill Bowes struck Headley on the chest, and as a result of this injury he missed three games, but when he returned to the team he scored 129 against Glamorgan and 224 not out against Somerset. A quieter match followed against Middlesex, but Headley reached his second double century of the tour in the match against Derbyshire, which took him past 1,000 runs for the season. Despite Headley's contributions, the West Indians won only one of these matches and subsequently lost the first Test against England by an innings. Headley scored 13 in the West Indies first innings, and his 50 was the highest score when West Indies followed-on. Critics were impressed by Headley's second innings performance, in which he scored his runs out of 64 added while he was batting. Between the first and second Tests, in matches where conditions were difficult for batting and ideal for spin bowlers, Headley scored three fifties and achieved his side's highest score in each of four innings. West Indies drew the second Test, avoiding defeat for the first time in a Test in England. Headley scored 169 in 375 minutes with 18 fours, sharing a partnership of 200 in 205 minutes with Ivan Barrow—who became the first West Indian to score a Test century in England, minutes before Headley became the second. When the innings ended, Headley was still not out and the crowd gave him an excellent reception. Wisden described Headley's batting as magnificent, displaying "a ready adaptability and perfection of timing." The West Indies bowlers used Bodyline tactics in the England innings; England's Nobby Clark used the tactic in the West Indian second innings, in which Headley scored 24 runs. He was one of the few of his side's batsmen able to resist the bowling tactics. After scoring an unbeaten 257 in a minor match against Norfolk, Headley scored 89 in his team's victory over Glamorgan and 182 against Warwickshire. However, he failed in the third and final Test, scoring nine and 12 as West Indies were defeated by an innings. The tourists thus lost the series 2–0; in the three Tests Headley's aggregate was 277 runs at an average of 55.40, the best figures for the team. After the Test matches were over, Headley had an operation to remove a sebaceous cyst from his forehead and missed several games, before returning for an end-of-season festival match in which he scored 167 against an England XI. When the tour concluded, Headley had scored 2,320 runs with seven hundreds, at an average of 66.28. This was over 1,000 runs more than any other tourist and placed him third in the English first-class batting averages for the season. Ivan Barrow believed Headley reached his batting peak during the tour. He recalled how many bowlers tried to hit his pads with the ball but Headley simply flicked the ball away. Headley's performances earned him selection as one of Wisden's Cricketers of the Year. The accompanying article called his tour "almost a triumphant march" and described him as "the best batsman the West Indies have ever produced." Wisden editor Sydney Southerton also described him as a giant in the team and wrote: "From what we had been told by English players who had been to the West Indies, we were fully prepared for Headley's success, but even so, he astonished most of us." Headley bowled more than he had previously: prior to the tour, he had taken three first class wickets, but took 21 wickets in England at an average of 34.33, bowling off spin. During the tour, Headley received news that his aunt had been killed by floods in Kingston which had also destroyed his home. Headley was greatly affected by the news, particularly the nature of her death. Although not able to attend the funeral, he wanted to leave England on an earlier ship than the rest of the team, but this could not be arranged in time. ### Lancashire League Following his success in England in 1933, Headley was offered a two-year contract to play professional cricket for Haslingden in the Lancashire League for £500 per season, the highest of several offers. The money was far more than he was earning from working as a fruit picker in Jamaica, and after consulting the Jamaican Cricket Board, who advised him to accept, he signed with the club on 8 September 1933. There was a special provision which allowed Headley to be released to play for West Indies. Living in Haslingden where there were few, if any, other black people, Headley faced some prejudice from residents. However, he was generally welcomed and accepted. His first season was in 1934 and his first match was against Nelson, for whom Headley's West Indian Test colleague Learie Constantine played. Headley had a difficult match. As the professional, he was expected to open the bowling although, as a spinner, he would normally have bowled later in an innings. When he batted he was run out for a duck by Constantine after facing one delivery, and Haslingden lost the match. After this poor start, Headley scored 1,063 runs in the season at an average of 50.62, with three centuries. He changed his bowling style to medium pace and took 59 wickets at an average of 16.59. In 1935 he scored over 900 runs at an average of 61.13, and took 34 wickets; his contract was renewed for another two years. In 1936 he again scored over 900 runs, and took 54 wickets. In 1937 he broke the record for most runs scored by any player in a Lancashire League season, accumulating 1,360 at an average of 97.15, with five centuries; he also took 41 wickets. Headley's final two-year contract with the club covered the seasons 1938 and 1940, since he was expected to tour England with the West Indies team in 1939. The war prevented him playing in 1940, so his last season with Haslingden was 1938. Although in that year his overall batting performance declined, to 677 runs at an average of 37.61, he took 76 wickets at 9.70 and had success in the Worsley Cup competition, including one innings of 189 not out in a match played over five evenings. ### Career in mid-1930s Headley did not play any first-class cricket in the West Indies in 1933–34, but returned to Jamaica in readiness for the 1934–35 MCC tour. The visiting team, under the captaincy of Bob Wyatt, was stronger than English teams that had previously toured the Caribbean; despite some shortcomings, Wisden and other critics considered it strong enough for the task in hand. The first Test in Barbados was badly affected by rain which made the pitch almost impossible to bat on. West Indies batted first and were bowled out for 102; Headley's 44 was the highest score of the match. In reply, England had scored 81 for seven when Wyatt declared in an attempt to make West Indies bat while the pitch was difficult. In the second innings, Headley was out for a duck and Jackie Grant declared when West Indies had scored 51 for six, so that England required 73 to win; they did so after losing six wickets. In the second Test, Headley scored 25 in his first innings; in the second, he adopted a cautious approach as his team led by 44, hitting 93 in 225 minutes. West Indies subsequently bowled out England to win the match and level the series. The rain-affected third Test was drawn, with Headley's 53 his side's top score. The MCC went to Jamaica for the final leg of their tour. Headley played two matches for Jamaica against the tourists; he failed in the first game but scored 127 in the second. The teams went into the fourth and final Test with the series still level at one win apiece. West Indies batted first, facing accurate bowling. The local press criticised the West Indies batsmen for slow batting on the first day, but Headley scored 132. The Daily Gleaner noted that Headley maintained the controlled approach he had established in the season. On the second day, he took his score to 270 not out, and the Gleaner described him as "the genius we all know, scoring with all his old freedom and audacity." In total, he batted for 495 minutes and hit 30 fours, recording the highest score by a West Indian batsman. It remained a West Indian record until Garfield Sobers scored 365 not out in 1958, and was the team's highest against England until Lawrence Rowe scored 302 in 1974. West Indies scored 535 for seven and bowled out England twice to record their first victory in a Test series. Headley contributed 485 runs at an average of 97.00. Headley returned to England to play for Haslingden in the 1935 English season, and played a single first-class game, scoring a century for Sir L Parkinson's XI against Leicestershire. In the 1935–36 season, the Yorkshire team toured Jamaica, playing three first-class matches, winning one and drawing the others. The touring county considered Headley the key batsman, and targeted him by bowling defensively in an attempt to frustrate him. Headley lost his wicket through impatience in the first match, although he scored a pair of fifties, but scored a century in the third game. In total, he scored 266 runs at an average of 53.20, but Yorkshire won the series after winning the first game, Jamaica's first defeat at home in a first-class game for ten years. The matches were played in a very competitive atmosphere, but scoring was slow and Yorkshire played attritional cricket. During the series, Headley demanded expenses, which were not normally granted to the players. The Jamaican Board were reluctant to pay but Headley pointed out that, as a professional cricketer, he was entitled to the same treatment as the Yorkshire players, whose expenses were provided. The Board eventually relented before the series ended. ### Second tour of England In 1936 Headley returned to England, and played no more first-class cricket until the two trial matches for the 1939 tour of England. These matches were played in Trinidad where it was believed the matting pitches would most closely replicate English conditions; Jamaica played Trinidad and a combination team. When Jamaica's captain, Crab Nethersole, withdrew from the tour due to political commitments, Headley led Jamaica in both matches and scored 160 and 103. Subsequently, he was chosen for his second tour of England, under the captaincy of Rolph Grant. Headley opened his tour with fifties in his first two matches and by the time the Test series started, although the tourists had lost three matches, he had scored three centuries—103 against Cambridge University, 116 not out in a victory over Essex and 227 as the tourists defeated Middlesex. In the first Test, West Indies suffered their only defeat of the series. However, Norman Preston, the editor of Wisden, wrote: "the match provided a personal triumph for Headley", as he became only the second cricketer after Herbert Sutcliffe to make two hundreds in the same Test match on two separate occasions, having previously done so against England in 1930. He became the first player to score two hundreds in a Lord's Test, a feat not repeated until 1990. In the first innings, Headley scored 106 with 13 fours. After sharing a big partnership with Jeff Stollmeyer, he received little help from the other batsmen. He played cautiously during his 250-minute innings, as he was aware that his team were relying on his success. By the time West Indies batted again, England had established a lead of 127. Headley again batted defensively to score 107, taking two hours to reach 50, as West Indies needed to bat for a long time to secure a draw. However, he scored runs from any loose bowling and batted in all for 230 minutes, hitting eight fours. Preston, writing in Wisden, believed the West Indians relied too much on Headley's batting. He also noted that Headley had to play cautiously for his team and although he hit powerful shots, "he was not the same dashing batsmen that England knew in 1933." Headley had scored three centuries in consecutive Test innings, but he could not prevent England winning this first Test by eight wickets. He continued to score heavily in the tour matches, making an unbeaten 234 in an innings win over Nottinghamshire, followed by 61 against Yorkshire on a sticky wicket, one of the best innings Neville Cardus had seen. The second Test was drawn, after being badly affected by rain. Headley, although troubled by the English bowling on a difficult pitch, top-scored with 51 in West Indies' first innings but the other batsmen contributed little. Headley scored just five in West Indies' brief second innings, bringing to an end a sequence of six fifties in successive Test innings. After the Test, Headley scored 93 against Surrey but failed to reach fifty in his next three games, which included three single figure scores. West Indies needed to win the final Test to level the series and the team established a first-innings lead of 146. Headley played cautiously for 140 minutes, attempting to tire out the bowlers, but was run out for 65 in a misunderstanding with Vic Stollmeyer. The remaining batsmen played well, attacking the English bowling. Preston believed this match demonstrated West Indies' ability to compete at the highest level. However, England were able to bat long enough to secure a draw. In the Test series, Headley scored 334 runs at an average of 66.80, but did not play again on the tour after the final Test, as the team were advised to abandon the last seven matches because of the deteriorating political situation in Europe. They arrived in Canada on the day that Britain declared war on Germany. In all first-class matches during the tour, Headley scored 1,745 runs at 72.70, placing him at the top of the season's first-class averages. Wisden judged Headley to be the best batsman of the 1939 season, while other critics rated him among the best batsmen in the world, with favourable comparisons to Bradman. C. B. Fry, a former England captain turned journalist, wrote that Headley's "middle name should be Atlas", suggesting that he carried the team on his shoulders. ## Later career ### After the war Following the outbreak of war, the Lancashire League clubs cancelled professionals' contracts, meaning Headley did not complete his final year with Haslingden. Having returned to Jamaica, he worked in the Labour Department for the government and played cricket for Lucas, enjoying batting success and captaining his team to victory in the Senior Cup on three occasions. Headley continued to play for the team until 1947, when he left to play for the Kensington Club. Unlike other Caribbean teams, Jamaica did not take part in inter-island competition, and although Headley played some exhibition matches in America in 1945, it was not until June 1946 that he took part in his next first-class match. Trinidad played three matches in Jamaica and Headley scored 52 in the second game but only reached his best form when he scored 99 in the third. However, he was successful as a bowler, taking five for 33 in the first game, the only five wicket return of his career. This included a spell of three wickets without conceding a run in 14 deliveries, prompting a pitch invasion by the crowd. Headley also captained Jamaica in the final two matches of the series against Trinidad after the official captain was injured during the home team's win in the first match—the other two were drawn. Prior to a visit by Barbados in March 1947, Headley was officially appointed as Jamaican captain. Previous captains of island teams had been almost exclusively white. Around this time, Headley requested the Jamaican board provide support for low income players with their kit and transport costs. In the first game against Barbados, Headley scored 203 not out and 57 not out, took four for 40 in the tourists' first innings and another wicket in the second. Although the game was drawn, he had recorded Jamaica's highest score in a match between the Caribbean islands. The second match was also drawn; Headley made 79 before he had to retire when he fell and injured his knee. Another American tour followed, in which Headley was accompanied by promising young players, before he led the Jamaican team to British Guiana in October 1947. He played only two innings in the two matches, scoring 36 and 4 not out. A thumb injury in the first match meant he could not bat, although he bowled 44 overs in the game. Headley was verbally abused by a section of the crowd, who disapproved of a black captain; he was also dissatisfied with the impartiality of the umpires. Crab Nethersole, the Jamaican manager for the tour, reported that injuries to key players and the poor attitude of the crowd made the tour difficult, although Headley's captaincy was universally praised. ### Resumption of Test career For reasons related to class and race, it had been unthinkable before the war for the West Indies to appoint a black Test captain, but the postwar world saw social and political changes in the Caribbean. Although opinion was still divided over the merits of a black captain, Headley was appointed as one of the West Indian captains for the series against the England team which toured the Caribbean in 1948. Crab Nethersole, the former Jamaican captain and member of the Board of Control for cricket, argued Headley should be outright captain but a compromise was reached. Headley was scheduled to captain the first and fourth Test matches, played in Barbados and Jamaica, and the white players Gerry Gomez and John Goddard were given the captaincy of the second and third matches. In the event, Headley only played in the first Test. In the first innings, he scored 29 but strained his back while fielding. Batting towards the end of West Indies' second innings, he scored seven not out. Rain helped England to draw the match. Headley's back caused him to miss the second and third Tests, but he was fit enough to play for Jamaica when the tourists arrived there to play two games against the island before the fourth and final Test. After the first island game, in which he scored 65, Headley's request to miss the second match to rest his back was refused by the Jamaican Board. He scored 36 not out, but aggravated his back pains and he withdrew from the final Test. West Indies won this game under the captaincy of Goddard, who had earlier led West Indies to victory in the third Test. He was subsequently chosen to captain West Indies in India in 1948–49, despite Headley's availability and apparently superior claims to the position. Selected for the Indian tour after a specific request by the Indian cricket authorities, Headley did not have much success in the early matches and in the drawn first Test he scored only two in a total of 631. West Indies then moved to Pakistan; in a non-first-class game Headley took six wickets as a bowler, but then in a match against a representative Pakistan XI he fell and injured his side while attempting to take a catch. He batted in discomfort, scoring 57 not out. This injury meant that he played no further part in the five-match Test series against India. Although he continued to travel with the team, he was unable to play in any further matches until the final game of the tour, when he scored 100 against Ceylon Schools as the tourists travelled home via Ceylon. Headley played for the Kensington Club until 1950, when he resumed league cricket in England; he returned for a final season with Kensington in 1955 before retiring from Senior Cup cricket. Meanwhile, he took a new job as an insurance agent. This affected his availability for cricket as he was no longer able to take leave when playing for a team; if he did not work, he received no wages. Consequently, he did not accept the captaincy of Jamaica during the Test trials for the 1950 tour of England and did not travel with the team. Press reaction was unfavourable towards Headley but the West Indies Board still wanted to select him for the tour. However, Headley accepted a contract with Bacup in the Lancashire League, to replace Everton Weekes who was in the touring party. For Bacup Headley scored 909 runs and took 20 wickets in 1950, before signing to play for Dudley in the Birmingham League in 1951. He and his family moved to Birmingham, and in each the next four seasons Headley averaged over 65 with the bat and under 17 with the ball. In his second season, the club topped the league. In total, he scored 2,878 runs for Dudley and, resuming off spin bowling, took 102 wickets. While in England during this time, he played several first-class matches for a Commonwealth XI against an England XI; he scored 20 in 1951 and accumulated 98 and 61 in 1952. ### End of Test career Headley's success for Dudley was watched keenly in Jamaica and commentators began to discuss his availability for the 1954 series against England. A public subscription to finance his travel to Jamaica, opened by the Daily Gleaner, raised over £1,000, and despite his reservations, Headley returned to Jamaica. Playing in a fund-raising match, he sustained a hand injury and playing for the Combined Parishes in a minor match against the MCC, a short ball from Fred Trueman struck Headley's arm. The latter injury kept him out of the first-class match between Jamaica and the MCC, but he played in the second where, although hampered by his injury, he scored 53 not out. The Test selectors had seen enough to include Headley in the team for the first Test. Reaction among critics was mixed, and Headley, nearing his 45th birthday, remains the oldest man as of 2015 to play a Test match for West Indies. Headley batted at number six, and it appeared that England, under the captaincy of Len Hutton, let Headley score an easy run to begin his innings, which Hutton later confirmed to be the case. However, Headley later argued that the run was given to ensure that he was batting at the beginning of the next over, so that England could try to get him out before he settled down. Headley scored 16 and 1 in the match, his final Test appearance. He used his experience to influence the captain, Jeff Stollmeyer, advising him not to enforce the follow on and to use leg theory bowling to slow down the tourists' scoring. These tactics helped West Indies to a 140-run win in a match they might have lost; Stollmeyer followed a similar approach in the following match. In 22 Tests, Headley scored 2,190 runs at an average of 60.83. Headley finished his career at Dudley at the end of 1954; his son Ron played for the club from 1957, having already played for its second team in 1952 as a 13-year-old. After his final Test match appearance, Headley's only other first-class match was in the Commonwealth XI fixture in 1954, when he scored 64 in his final first-class innings. In a career total of 103 first-class games he aggregated 9,921 runs at 69.86, with 33 centuries, and took 51 wickets at 36.11. ## Style, technique and legacy Headley is regarded by critics as one of the best batsmen from the Caribbean and one of the greatest batsmen of all time. In his history of West Indies cricket, Michael Manley described Headley as "the yardstick against whom all other West Indian batsmen are measured". In 1988, The Cricketer magazine placed him in an all-time West Indian team, as did a panel of judges for another such team in July 2010, while in 2004, another panel of experts named him among the top five West Indian players. He was given the nicknames "the Black Bradman" and "Atlas" by commentators, and was the first world-class batsman from the West Indies who was black. Bradman remarked in 1988 "I'm proud to think that they dubbed him the 'Black Bradman' - perhaps it should have been in reverse." According to historian Gideon Haigh, Headley's role was made harder by the weakness of his colleagues, as few outstanding players find it easy to play in teams which lose frequently. Although he was a naturally attacking player, Headley felt the need to play cautiously owing to the way his team depended on him. C. L. R. James believed that no other great batsman had to carry such a burden for so long. In the years before the war, Headley scored 25.61% of the runs scored in Tests by West Indies, more than twice as many as the next best batsman, and two-thirds of the team's centuries, scoring ten of the team's first fourteen centuries in Test cricket. Headley usually batted at number three and as the opening batsmen were often dismissed quickly, he frequently began his innings early. As of 2023, Headley's average in Test matches of 60.83 is third highest among those with 2,000 runs, behind Bradman and Graeme Pollock. In all first-class matches, he has the third highest average with 69.86, behind Bradman and Vijay Merchant among those who played 50 innings. He averaged a century every fourth innings in which he batted, second again to Bradman, and did not suffer a poor series in his career before the war. Manley describes Headley as just under medium height with sloping shoulders. His movements were precise and economical on the cricket field; his cap was usually at a slight angle and his sleeves were buttoned down to the wrist. Wisden noted in 1933 that his timing and placement of the ball was perfect. Exceptionally quick on his feet, he watched the ball onto the bat more than any other batsman. According to Wisden, all his shots were equally good but most notable was his on drive played from the back foot. He hit the ball hard and was very difficult to get out. He faced criticism for playing off the back foot so often, but R. C. Robertson-Glasgow believed his square cut, late cut, and hook were exceptionally good. Headley was particularly effective on bad batting wickets. C. L. R. James calculated that Headley averaged 39.85 and passed fifty on seven occasions in thirteen innings on difficult wickets. According to James's reckoning, Bradman in similar conditions passed fifty once, and averaged 16.66 in fifteen innings. Headley himself preferred batting when the odds favoured the bowlers as he had to go for his shots and play his natural attacking game. He stated: "On a bad wicket, it was you and the bowler ...no nonsense." Beyond cricket, Headley's success was regarded as important. Of Headley's meeting with the king of England in 1939, the West Indian writer Frank Birbalsingh said: "That one of us—a black man—could shake the hand of a king introduced possibilities formerly undreamt of in our colonial backwater of racial inferiority, psychological subordination and political powerlessness." Manley notes that Headley rose to success at a time of political awakening in Jamaica, when the black majority of the population were increasingly determined to end the minority rule of landowners and challenge the racism of the time. According to Manley, the middle classes saw in Headley "the reassurance which they needed. He demonstrated black capacity." The white upper classes were proud of his achievements as a West Indian, but Manley writes "it was to the black masses that Headley had the deepest significance ... [He] became the focus for longing of an entire people for proof: proof of their own self-worth, their own capacity. Furthermore, they wanted this proof to be laid at the door of the white man who owned the world which defined their circumstances." Manley sees the title of "Atlas" not just in sporting terms, but in his carrying "the hopes of the black, English-speaking Caribbean man ... He was black excellence personified in a white world and in a white sport." ## Personal life ### Coaching career Following the 1955 cricket season, Headley was invited to become a national coach, a post created by the Jamaican government, which involved working mainly with young people. Headley and his second son travelled back to Jamaica, while the rest of the family remained in England. Headley had a heavy workload, particularly in rural areas; together with his assistant Dickie Fuller his role involved encouraging school children to watch and play cricket, and trying to improve standards and facilities throughout the country. Headley became involved in the selection of teams, taking some of them overseas. At this time, he discovered the future West Indian Test player Roy Gilchrist and future Jamaican cricketer Henry Sewell. However, critics in the 1960s complained that there were not enough Jamaicans in the Test side and blamed Headley and Fuller, although the government remained supportive of their performance. In 1961, Headley coached for six months in Nigeria and earned praise from the Nigerian Cricket Association. His official coaching role in Jamaica ended after a new government withdrew funding for coaching in 1962. ### Family and retirement Headley married Rena Saunders in 1939. He had nine children in total, including Ron Headley who was born two days after the end of the Lord's Test of 1939. Ron Headley went on to play professional cricket for the English counties Worcestershire and Derbyshire, and represented Jamaica before playing two Tests for West Indies in 1973. Another son, Lynn, reached the semi-finals of the 100 metres and came fourth in the 100 metres relay at the 1964 Olympics; he also won a gold medal with Jamaican sprint relay teams in the Central American and Caribbean Games of 1966 and silver with the relay team at the Commonwealth Games of the same year. Ron's son Dean, Headley's grandson, played Test cricket for England; the family thus became the first to have three generations play Test cricket. After his retirement from coaching, Headley remained associated with cricket, presenting awards and playing in friendly matches. He was the official representative of the Jamaican Cricket Board at Constantine's funeral in 1971. Official recognition came Headley's way when he was awarded the M.B.E. in 1956 and was made an honorary life member of the MCC in 1958. In 1969, a bronze sculpture of his head was unveiled in Jamaica's National Stadium, and in 1973 the Norman Manley Foundation gave him the Award for Excellence in Sports. In the latter year, he also received the Order of Distinction. He died in Kingston on 30 November 1983. ## See also - List of Test cricketers born in non-Test playing nations
5,682,210	Mascarene parrot	1,120,710,499	Extinct species of bird from Réunion	[ "Bird extinctions since 1500", "Birds described in 1771", "Birds of Réunion", "Extinct birds of Indian Ocean islands", "Fauna of the Mascarene Islands", "Psittaculini", "Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus", "Taxobox binomials not recognized by IUCN" ]	The Mascarene parrot or mascarin (Mascarinus mascarinus) is an extinct species of parrot that was endemic to the Mascarene island of Réunion in the western Indian Ocean. The taxonomic relationships of this species have been subject to debate; it has historically been grouped with either the Psittaculini parrots or the vasa parrots, with the latest genetic study favouring the former group. The Mascarene parrot was 35 cm (14 in) in length with a large red bill and long, rounded tail feathers. Its legs were red, and it had naked red skin around the eyes and nostrils. It had a black facial mask and partially white tail feathers, but the colouration of the body, wings and head in the living bird is unclear. Descriptions from life indicate the body and head were ash grey, and the white part of the tail had two dark central feathers. In contrast, stuffed specimens and old descriptions based on them indicate that the body was brown and the head bluish. This may be due to the specimens having changed colour as a result of ageing and exposure to light. Very little is known about the bird in life. The Mascarene parrot was first mentioned in 1674, and live specimens were later brought to Europe, where they lived in captivity. The species was scientifically described in 1771. Only two stuffed specimens exist today, in Paris and Vienna. The date and cause of extinction for the Mascarene parrot is unclear. The latest account, from 1834, is considered dubious, so it is probable that the species became extinct prior to 1800, and may have become extinct even earlier. ## Taxonomy The Mascarene parrot was first mentioned by the French traveller Sieur Dubois in his 1674 travelogue and only described a few times from life afterwards. At least three live specimens were brought to France in the late 18th century and kept in captivity, two of which were described while alive. Today, two stuffed specimens exist; the holotype, specimen MNHN 211, which is in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, while the other, specimen NMW 50.688, is in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. The latter specimen was bought from the Leverian Museum during a sale in London in 1806. A third stuffed specimen existed around the turn of the 18th century. The Mascarene parrot was scientifically described as Psittacus mascarinus (abbreviated as "mascarin") by the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in 1771. This name was first used by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760 but was not intended as a scientific name. The name is a reference to the Mascarene Islands, which were themselves named after their Portuguese discoverer, Pedro Mascarenhas. Early writers claimed the Mascarene parrot was found on Madagascar, an idea that led the French naturalist René Primevère Lesson to coin the junior synonym Mascarinus madagascariensis in 1831. His new genus name prevailed and, when the Italian zoologist Tommaso Salvadori combined it with the earlier specific name in 1891, it became a tautonym (a scientific name in which the two parts are identical). Lesson also included species of the Tanygnathus and Psittacula genera in Mascarinus, but this was not accepted by other writers. The following year, the German herpetologist Johann Georg Wagler erected the genus Coracopsis for the Mascarene parrot (which became Coracopsis mascarina under this system) and the lesser vasa parrot (Coracopsis nigra). The English zoologist William Alexander Forbes, believing that mascarinus was invalid as a specific name, since it was identical to the genus name, coined the new name Mascarinus duboisi in 1879, in honour of Dubois. An unidentified dark parrot seen alive by the Swedish naturalist Fredrik Hasselqvist in Africa was given the name Psittacus obscurus by Linnaeus in 1758, who again synonymised it with the Mascarene parrot in 1766. Because of this association, some authors believed it was from the Mascarene Islands as well, but this dark parrot's description differs from that of the Mascarene parrot. This disagreement led some authors to use now-invalid combinations of the scientific names, such as Mascarinus obscurus and Coracopsis obscura. The unidentified parrot may have been a grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) instead. Another unidentified parrot specimen, this one brown and housed in Cabinet du Roi, was described by the French naturalist Comte de Buffon in 1779 under his entry for the Mascarene parrot, in which he pointed out similarities and differences between the two. In 2007, the English palaeontologist Julian Hume suggested the possibility that this might have been a lesser vasa parrot, if not a discoloured old Mascarene grey parakeet (Psittacula bensoni). The specimen is now lost. English zoologist George Robert Gray assigned some eclectus parrot (Eclectus roratus) subspecies from the Moluccas to Mascarinus in the 1840s, but this idea was soon dismissed by other writers. Subfossil parrot remains were later excavated from grottos on Réunion and reported in 1996. X-rays of the two existing stuffed Mascarene parrots made it possible to compare the remaining bones with the subfossils and showed these were intermediate in measurements in comparison to the modern specimens. The lesser vasa parrot was introduced to Réunion as early as 1780 but, though the subfossil parrot bones were similar to that species in some aspects, they were more similar to those of the Mascarene parrot and considered to belong to it. The binomial name was emended from M. mascarinus to M. mascarin by the IOC World Bird List in 2016, to conform with how other species epithets by Linnaeus have been treated. In 2020, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature conserved the name M. mascarinus as a justified emendation of the original spelling. ### Evolution The affinities of the Mascarene parrot are unclear, and two hypotheses have competed since the mid-19th century. Some authors grouped it with the Coracopsinae (of African origin) due to its dark plumage, and others with the Psittaculinae parrots (of Asian origin) based on the large red beak, a feature which is diagnostic for that group. Its plumage pattern was mostly atypical for a psittaculine, though other members have black facial patterns. Although little is known about most extinct parrot species of the Mascarenes, subfossil remains show that they shared common features, such as enlarged heads and jaws, reduced pectoral bones, and robust leg bones. Hume supported their common origin in the radiation of the Psittaculini tribe based on morphological features and the fact that Psittacula parrots have managed to colonise many isolated islands in the Indian Ocean. Sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene, so it was possible for species to colonise the Mascarene Islands from other areas. As suggested by the British ecologist Anthony S. Cheke and Hume in 2008, the Psittaculini could have invaded the area several times, as many of the species were so specialised that they may have evolved significantly on hotspot islands before the Mascarenes emerged from the sea. Réunion is 3 million years old, which is enough time for new genera to evolve, but many endemics would have been wiped out by the eruption of the volcano Piton des Neiges between 300,000 and 180,000 years ago. Most recent and extant species would therefore probably be descendants of animals which had recolonised the island from Africa or Madagascar after this event. If the Mascarene parrot had in fact evolved into a distinct genus on Réunion prior to the volcanic eruption, it would have been one of the few survivors of this extinction event. A 2011 genetic study by the British geneticist Samit Kundu and colleagues (which sampled the Paris specimen) found that the Mascarene parrot was grouped among the subspecies of the lesser vasa parrot from Madagascar and nearby islands and therefore not related to the Psittacula parrots. It also found that the Mascarene parrot line diverged 4.6 to 9 million years ago, prior to the formation of Réunion, indicating this must have happened elsewhere. In 2012, Leo Joseph and colleagues acknowledged the finding but pointed out that the sample might have been damaged and that further testing was needed before the issue could be fully resolved. They also noted that if Mascarinus was confirmed to be embedded within the genus Coracopsis, the latter would become a junior synonym, since the former name is older. In 2012, Hume expressed surprise at these findings due to the anatomical similarities between the Mascarene parrot and other parrots from the Mascarene islands that are believed to be psittaculines. He also pointed out that there is no fossil evidence found on other islands to support the hypothesis that the species evolved elsewhere before reaching Réunion. In 2017, the German biologist Lars Podsiadlowski and colleagues sampled the Vienna specimen for a new genetic study and found that the Mascarene parrot was indeed part of the Psittacula group as suggested by Hume, clustering with the extinct Seychelles parakeet (P. wardi) and Asian subspecies of the Alexandrine parakeet (P. eupatria). The Mascarene parrot was therefore interpreted as having descended from an ancestral lineage of Alexandrine parakeets that had dispersed from Asia towards the Mascarene islands across the Indian Ocean. The researchers suggested that the 2011 genetic study had probably used a composite of sequences from two other parrot species sampled for the study (including a lesser vasa parrot), a result of contamination during laboratory procedures. The 2017 study also found that the parrots of the genus Tanygnathus were grouped among Psittacula parrots, and proposed that Tanygnathus and Mascarinus should therefore be merged into the genus Psittacula. The cladograms below shows the placement of the Mascarene parrot according to the 2011 and 2017 DNA studies: Kundu and colleagues, 2011: Podsiadlowski and colleagues, 2017: In 2018, the American ornithologist Kaiya L. Provost and colleagues also found the Mascarene parrot (using the sequence of Podsiadlowski and colleagues) and Tanygnathus species to group within Psittacula, and stated this argued for breaking up the latter genus. To solve the issue that the genera Mascarinus, Tanygnathus, as well as Psittinus fell within the genus Psittacula according to genetic studies, making that genus paraphyletic (an unnatural grouping), the German ornithologist Michael P. Braun and colleagues proposed in 2019 that Psittacula should be split into multiple genera, thereby retaining Mascarinus. ## Description The Mascarene parrot was 35 cm (14 in) in length. The wing was 211 mm (8.3 in), the tail 144–152 mm (5.7–6.0 in), the culmen 32–36 mm (1.3–1.4 in), and the tarsus 22–24 mm (0.87–0.94 in). It had a large red bill and moderately long, rounded tail feathers. It had a black velvet-like facial mask on the front part of the head. There are several discrepancies in how the colour of the body, wings, tail feathers and the head have historically been described and depicted. In 1674, Dubois described live specimens as being "petit-gris" which is the colour of the dark phase of the red squirrel. According to Hume, this colour is a dark blackish grey or brown. In 1760, Brisson published the following description based on a captive bird (which may have been the specimen now preserved in Paris): > Upperparts of head and neck clear (ash) grey. Back, rump, underparts of neck, breast, belly, sides, legs, scapular feathers, upper coverts of tail very-dark (ash) grey. Wing feathers of the same colour. The tail is composed of 12 feathers: the two median ones are also very-dark (ash) grey. All the lateral ones are of the same colour, except that they have a little white at their base. The eyes are surrounded by a naked skin, bright red. Pupil black, iris red. The base of the superior half of the beak is also surrounded by a red naked skin in which the nostrils are placed. Beak similarly red. Legs pale flesh. Claws grey-brown. I am unaware from which country it is found. I have seen it living in Paris. Instead of grey, several later authors described the body as brown and the head as bluish lilac, based on stuffed specimens, and this has become the "orthodox image" of the bird. Live birds were never described with these colours. Hume proposed that this colouration is an artifact of the taxidermy specimens having aged and being exposed to light, which can turn grey and black to brown. Such a transformation has also turned an aberrant dickcissel (Spiza americana) specimen (sometimes considered a distinct species, "Townsend's dickcissel"), from grey to brown. The two extant Mascarene parrot specimens also differ from each other in colouration. The Paris specimen has a greyish-blue head and a brown body, paler on the underparts. Its tail and wing feathers were severely damaged by sulphuric acid in an attempt at fumigation in the 1790s. The Vienna specimen is a pale brown on the head and body overall, with an irregular distribution of white feathers on the tail, back, and wings. In 2017 the Australian ornithologist Joseph M. Forshaw found it hard to accept that all the illustrations that showed the colour as brown were wrong; he found it more likely that the brown would have merely faded in intensity rather than from grey to brown. He stated that by the time the earliest known illustrations of the bird were made, it is unlikely they would already have faded to brown because of exposure to light. He also doubted that poor diet of caged birds would have consistently turned them brown, and instead accepted the "orthodox image" of the bird as brown. Confusion over the colouration of the Mascarene parrot has also been furthered by a plate by French engraver François-Nicolas Martinet in Buffon's 1779 Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux, the first coloured illustration of this species. It shows the bird as brown with a purplish head, and the strength of these colours differs considerably between copies, a result of having been hand-coloured by many different artists who worked under Martinet in his workshop. Across these copies, the body ranges from chestnut brown to greyish chocolate, the tail from light grey to blackish grey-brown, and the head from bluish grey to dove-grey. The plate also lacks two dark central tail feathers without white bases, a feature described by Brisson, and these features have been repeated by subsequent artists. Martinet's illustration and Buffon's description were perhaps based on the Paris specimen. In 1879, Forbes stated the cere was covered by feathers which concealed the nostrils. This contradicts other accounts that mention that the nostrils were surrounded by red skin. Forbes based his description on the Paris specimen which had its skull and mandible removed for study by the French zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards prior to 1866. This may have led to the distortion of the shape of the head and nostrils as indicated by the illustration in Forbes' article. The skull of the Mascarene parrot was moderately flattened from top to bottom, the diameter of the nares (bony nostril) was larger than the width of the internal septum (the wall between the nostrils), and there was an indistinct notch on the upper edge of the rostrum (bony beak). The mandibular fenestra (opening at the side of the mandible) was absent, and the back end of the mandibular symphysis (where the two halves of the lower jaw connected) was broadly oval, the angulus mandibulae (the lower margin at the back of the mandible) was flattened instead of angled, and the symphysis was sharply angled downward. ## Behaviour and ecology Very little is known about the Mascarene parrot in life. Since several specimens were kept alive in captivity, it was probably not a specialised feeder. That the Vienna specimen was partially white may have been the result of food deficiency during a long period in captivity; the clipped primary wing feathers indicate it was caged. Little was known about parrot-diet in the 1700s, and the Vienna specimen may not have received enough of the amino acid tyrosine through its food, which it would have needed for melanin synthesis. In other parrots, this would have resulted in orange instead of white colour in the affected feathers, due to the presence of the pigment psittacin, but Coracopsis parrots and the Mascarene parrot are the only parrots that lack this pigment. The specimen has also been described as "partially albinistic" at times, though true albinism (lack of the enzyme tyrosinase) can by definition never only be partial. In 1705, the French cartographer Jean Feuilley gave a description of the parrots of Réunion and their ecology which indicates that they fattened themselves seasonally: > There are several sorts of parrot, of different sizes and colours. Some are the size of a hen, grey, the beak red [Mascarene parrot]; others the same colour the size of a pigeon [Mascarene grey parakeet], and yet others, smaller, are green [Réunion parakeet]. There are great quantities, especially in the Sainte-Suzanne area and on the mountainsides. They are very good to eat, especially when they are fat which is from the month of June until the month of September because at that time the trees produce a certain wild seed that these birds eat. The Mascarene parrot may have once inhabited Mauritius as well based on a 17th-century account by the English traveller Peter Mundy which mentioned "russet parrots". This is a possibility, since Réunion and Mauritius do share some types of animals, but no fossil evidence has yet been discovered. Many other endemic species of Réunion became extinct after the arrival of humans and the resulting disruption of the island's ecosystem. The Mascarene parrot lived alongside other recently extinct birds such as the hoopoe starling, the Réunion ibis, the Réunion parakeet, the Mascarene grey parakeet, the Réunion swamphen, the Réunion scops owl, the Réunion night heron, and the Réunion pink pigeon. Extinct Réunion reptiles include the Réunion giant tortoise and an undescribed Leiolopisma skink. The small Mauritian flying fox and the snail Tropidophora carinata lived on Réunion and Mauritius but vanished from both islands. ## Extinction Of the eight or so parrot species endemic to the Mascarenes, only the echo parakeet (Psittacula echo) of Mauritius has survived. The others probably all became extinct due to a combination of excessive hunting and deforestation. The cause and date of extinction for the Mascarene parrot itself is uncertain. In 1834, the German zoologist Carl Wilhelm Hahn published an often-cited account of a live Mascarene parrot in the possession of King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. The bird must have been very old at the time, and Hahn claimed an accompanying illustration was drawn after this specimen. The IUCN Red List accepts the 1834 account as the last mention of a live specimen. The veracity of Hahn's claim was questioned as early as 1876, and the illustration appears to be plagiarised from the plate by François-Nicolas Martinet which was published at least 50 years earlier. After King Maximilian died in 1825, his collection was auctioned off, but no Mascarene parrot was mentioned in the inventory of species. Hahn did not mention the date in which he actually saw the bird which could have been long before 1834. The fact that Martinet's image was copied and that no mounted specimen exists (though such a rare bird would probably have been preserved) makes Hahn's account dubious. He may instead have based his account on other sources or even hearsay. If Hahn's account is disregarded, the Mascarene parrot probably became extinct prior to 1800. The last account of wild specimens on Réunion is from the 1770s. It is thought that the Mascarene parrot went extinct in the wild while captive specimens still survived in Europe, since specimens are known to have lived there after the last mention of wild birds. In the 1790s, French naturalist François Levaillant stated that the bird was rare and that he had seen three of them in France. One of the last definite accounts of live specimens is the following 1784 description by Mauduyt based on captive birds: > The Mascarin is found at Ile Bourbon [Réunion]; I have seen several alive in Paris, they were rather gentle birds; they had in their favour only that the red beak contrasted agreeably with the dark background of their plumage; they had not learnt to talk. Contrary to Feuilley's claims, Dubois mentioned that the Mascarene parrot was not edible which may have led to Réunion visitors mostly ignoring it. It was the last of the indigenous parrots of Réunion to become extinct. The only endemic bird species on Réunion that disappeared after the Mascarene parrot was the hoopoe starling in the mid-19th century. ## Cited texts
188,050	Ninety-five Theses	1,169,849,693	Disputation by Martin Luther on indulgences	[ "1517 in Christianity", "1517 in the Holy Roman Empire", "1517 works", "16th-century Christian texts", "Disputations", "Latin texts", "Reformation in Germany", "Wittenberg", "Works by Martin Luther" ]	The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences is a list of propositions for an academic disputation written in 1517 by Martin Luther, then a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. The Theses is retrospectively considered to have launched the Protestant Reformation and the birth of Protestantism, despite various proto-Protestant groups having existed previously. It detailed Luther's opposition to what he saw as the Roman Catholic Church's abuse and corruption by Catholic clergy, who were selling plenary indulgences, which were certificates supposed to reduce the temporal punishment in purgatory for sins committed by the purchasers or their loved ones. In the Theses, Luther claimed that the repentance required by Christ in order for sins to be forgiven involves inner spiritual repentance rather than merely external sacramental confession. He argued that indulgences led Christians to avoid true repentance and sorrow for sin, believing that they could forgo it by obtaining an indulgence. These indulgences, according to Luther, discouraged Christians from giving to the poor and performing other acts of mercy, which he attributed to a belief that indulgence certificates were more spiritually valuable. Though Luther claimed that his positions on indulgences accorded with those of Pope Leo X, the Theses challenge a 14th-century papal bull stating that the pope could use the treasury of merit and the good deeds of past saints to forgive temporal punishment for sins. The Theses are framed as propositions to be argued in debate rather than necessarily representing Luther's opinions, but Luther later clarified his views in the Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences. Luther sent the Theses enclosed with a letter to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, on 31 October 1517, a date now considered the start of the Reformation and commemorated annually as Reformation Day. Luther may have also posted the Ninety-five Theses on the door of All Saints' Church and other churches in Wittenberg—in accordance with University custom—on 31 October or in mid-November. The Theses were quickly reprinted and translated, and distributed throughout Germany and Europe. They initiated a pamphlet war with the indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel, which spread Luther's fame even further. Luther's ecclesiastical superiors had him tried for heresy, which culminated in his excommunication in 1521. Though the Theses were the start of the Reformation, Luther did not consider indulgences to be as important as other theological matters which would divide the church, such as justification by faith alone and the bondage of the will. His breakthrough on these issues would come later, and he did not see the writing of the Theses as the point at which his beliefs diverged from those of the Roman Catholic Church. ## Background Martin Luther, professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg and town preacher, wrote the Ninety-five Theses against the contemporary practice of the church with respect to indulgences. In the Roman Catholic Church, which was practically the only Christian church in Western Europe at the time, indulgences were part of the economy of salvation. In this system, when Christians sin and confess, they are forgiven and no longer stand to receive eternal punishment in hell, but may still be liable to temporal punishment. This punishment could be satisfied by the penitent's performing works of mercy. If the temporal punishment is not satisfied during life, it needs to be satisfied in Purgatory, a place believed by Catholics to exist between Heaven and Hell. By indulgence (which may be understood in the sense of "kindness"), this temporal punishment could be lessened. Under abuses of the system of indulgences, clergy benefited by selling indulgences and the pope gave official sanction in exchange for a fee. Popes are empowered to grant plenary indulgences, which provide complete satisfaction for any remaining temporal punishment due to sins, and these were purchased on behalf of people believed to be in purgatory. This led to the popular saying, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs". Theologians at the University of Paris criticized this saying late in the 15th century. Earlier critics of indulgences included John Wycliffe, who denied that the pope had jurisdiction over Purgatory. Jan Hus and his followers had advocated a more severe system of penance, in which indulgences were not available. Johannes von Wesel had also attacked indulgences late in the 15th century. Political rulers had an interest in controlling indulgences because local economies suffered when the money for indulgences left a given territory. Rulers often sought to receive a portion of the proceeds or prohibited indulgences altogether, as Duke George did in Luther's Electoral Saxony. In 1515, Pope Leo X granted a plenary indulgence intended to finance the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It would apply to almost any sin, including adultery and theft. All other indulgence preaching was to cease for the eight years in which it was offered. Indulgence preachers were given strict instructions on how the indulgence was to be preached, and they were much more laudatory of the indulgence than those of earlier indulgences. Johann Tetzel was commissioned to preach and offer the indulgence in 1517, and his campaign in cities near Wittenberg drew many Wittenbergers to travel to these cities and purchase them, since sales had been prohibited in Wittenberg and other Saxon cities. Luther also had a rather negative experience and idea with the indulgences connected to All Saints' Church, Wittenberg. By venerating the large collection of relics at the church, one could receive an indulgence. He had preached as early as 1514 against the abuse of indulgences and the way they cheapened grace rather than requiring true repentance. Luther became especially concerned in 1517 when his parishioners, returning from purchasing Tetzel's indulgences, claimed that they no longer needed to repent and change their lives in order to be forgiven of sin. After hearing what Tetzel had said about indulgences in his sermons, Luther began to study the issue more carefully, and contacted experts on the subject. He preached about indulgences several times in 1517, explaining that true repentance was better than purchasing an indulgence. He taught that receiving an indulgence presupposed that the penitent had confessed and repented, otherwise it was worthless. A truly repentant sinner would also not seek an indulgence, because they loved God's righteousness and desired the inward punishment of their sin. These sermons seem to have ceased from April to October 1517, presumably while Luther was writing the Ninety-five Theses. He composed a Treatise on Indulgences, apparently in early autumn 1517. It is a cautious and searching examination of the subject. He contacted church leaders on the subject by letter, including his superior , Bishop of Brandenburg, sometime on or before 31 October, when he sent the Theses to Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. ## Content The iconic first thesis states, "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." In the first few theses Luther develops the idea of repentance as the Christian's inner struggle with sin rather than the external system of sacramental confession. Theses 5–7 then state that the pope can only release people from the punishments he has administered himself or through the church's system of penance, not the guilt of sin. The pope can only announce God's forgiveness of the guilt of sin in his name. In theses 14–29, Luther challenged common beliefs about purgatory. Theses 14–16 discuss the idea that the punishment of purgatory can be likened to the fear and despair felt by dying people. In theses 17–24 he asserts that nothing can be definitively said about the spiritual state of people in purgatory. He denies that the pope has any power over people in purgatory in theses 25 and 26. In theses 27–29, he attacks the idea that as soon as payment is made, the payer's loved one is released from purgatory. He sees it as encouraging sinful greed, and says it is impossible to be certain because only God has ultimate power in forgiving punishments in purgatory. Theses 30–34 deal with the false certainty Luther believed the indulgence preachers offered Christians. Since no one knows whether a person is truly repentant, a letter assuring a person of his forgiveness is dangerous. In theses 35 and 36, he attacks the idea that an indulgence makes repentance unnecessary. This leads to the conclusion that the truly repentant person, who alone may benefit from the indulgence, has already received the only benefit the indulgence provides. Truly repentant Christians have already, according to Luther, been forgiven of the penalty as well as the guilt of sin. In thesis 37, he states that indulgences are not necessary for Christians to receive all the benefits provided by Christ. Theses 39 and 40 argue that indulgences make true repentance more difficult. True repentance desires God's punishment of sin, but indulgences teach one to avoid punishment, since that is the purpose of purchasing the indulgence. In theses 41–47 Luther criticizes indulgences on the basis that they discourage works of mercy by those who purchase them. Here he begins to use the phrase, "Christians are to be taught..." to state how he thinks people should be instructed on the value of indulgences. They should be taught that giving to the poor is incomparably more important than buying indulgences, that buying an indulgence rather than giving to the poor invites God's wrath, and that doing good works makes a person better while buying indulgences does not. In theses 48–52 Luther takes the side of the pope, saying that if the pope knew what was being preached in his name he would rather St. Peter's Basilica be burned down than "built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep". Theses 53–55 complain about the restrictions on preaching while the indulgence was being offered. In theses 56–66, Martin Luther criticizes the doctrine of the treasury of merit on which the doctrine of indulgences is based. He states that everyday Christians do not understand the doctrine and are being misled. For Luther, the true treasure of the church is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This treasure tends to be hated because it makes "the first last", in the words of Matthew 19:30 and 20:16. Luther uses metaphor and wordplay to describe the treasures of the gospel as nets to catch wealthy people, whereas the treasures of indulgences are nets to catch the wealth of men. In theses 67–80, Luther discusses further the problems with the way indulgences are being preached, as he had done in the letter to Archbishop Albert. The preachers have been promoting indulgences as the greatest of the graces available from the church, but they actually only promote greed. He points out that bishops have been commanded to offer reverence to indulgence preachers who enter their jurisdiction, but bishops are also charged with protecting their people from preachers who preach contrary to the pope's intention. He then attacks the belief allegedly propagated by the preachers that the indulgence could forgive one who had violated the Virgin Mary. Luther states that indulgences cannot take away the guilt of even the lightest of venial sins. He labels several other alleged statements of the indulgence preachers as blasphemy: that Saint Peter could not have granted a greater indulgence than the current one, and that the indulgence cross with the papal arms is as worthy as the cross of Christ. Luther lists several criticisms advanced by laypeople against indulgences in theses 81–91. He presents these as difficult objections his congregants are bringing rather than his own criticisms. How should he answer those who ask why the pope does not simply empty purgatory if it is in his power? What should he say to those who ask why anniversary masses for the dead, which were for the sake of those in purgatory, continued for those who had been redeemed by an indulgence? Luther claimed that it seemed strange to some that pious people in purgatory could be redeemed by living impious people. Luther also mentions the question of why the pope, who is very rich, requires money from poor believers to build St. Peter's Basilica. Luther claims that ignoring these questions risks allowing people to ridicule the pope. He appeals to the pope's financial interest, saying that if the preachers limited their preaching in accordance with Luther's positions on indulgences (which he claimed was also the pope's position), the objections would cease to be relevant. Luther closes the Theses by exhorting Christians to imitate Christ even if it brings pain and suffering. Enduring punishment and entering heaven is preferable to false security. ## Luther's intent The Theses are written as propositions to be argued in a formal academic disputation, though there is no evidence that such an event ever took place. In the heading of the Theses, Luther invited interested scholars from other cities to participate. Holding such a debate was a privilege Luther held as a doctor, and it was not an unusual form of academic inquiry. Luther prepared twenty sets of theses for disputation at Wittenberg between 1516 and 1521. Andreas Karlstadt had written a set of such theses in April 1517, and these were more radical in theological terms than Luther's. He posted them on the door of All Saints' Church, as Luther was alleged to have done with the Ninety-five Theses. Karlstadt posted his theses at a time when the relics of the church were placed on display, and this may have been considered a provocative gesture. Similarly, Luther posted the Ninety-five Theses on the eve of All Saints' Day, the most important day of the year for the display of relics at All Saints' Church. Luther's theses were intended to begin a debate among academics, not a popular revolution, but there are indications that he saw his action as prophetic and significant. Around this time, he began using the name "Luther" and sometimes "Eleutherius", Greek for "free", rather than "Luder". This seems to refer to his being free from the scholastic theology which he had argued against earlier that year. Luther later claimed not to have desired the Theses to be widely distributed. Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that his claimed surprise at their success may have involved self-deception and Hans Hillerbrand has claimed that Luther was certainly intending to instigate a large controversy. At times, Luther seems to use the academic nature of the Theses as a cover to allow him to attack established beliefs while being able to deny that he intended to attack church teaching. Since writing a set of theses for a disputation does not necessarily commit the author to those views, Luther could deny that he held the most incendiary ideas in the Theses. ## Distribution and publication On 31 October 1517, Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Brandenburg, under whose authority the indulgences were being sold. In the letter, Luther addresses the archbishop out of a loyal desire to alert him to the pastoral problems created by the indulgence sermons. He assumes that Albert is unaware of what is being preached under his authority, and speaks out of concern that the people are being led away from the gospel, and that the indulgence preaching may bring shame to Albert's name. Luther does not condemn indulgences or the current doctrine regarding them, nor even the sermons which had been preached themselves, as he had not seen them firsthand. Instead he states his concern regarding the misunderstandings of the people about indulgences which have been fostered by the preaching, such as the belief that any sin could be forgiven by indulgences or that the guilt as well as the punishment for sin could be forgiven by an indulgence. In a postscript, Luther wrote that Albert could find some theses on the matter enclosed with his letter, so that he could see the uncertainty surrounding the doctrine of indulgences in contrast to the preachers who spoke so confidently of the benefits of indulgences. It was customary when proposing a disputation to have the theses printed by the university press and publicly posted. No copies of a Wittenberg printing of the Ninety-five Theses have survived, but this is not surprising as Luther was not famous and the importance of the document was not recognized. In Wittenberg, the university statutes demand that theses be posted on every church door in the city, but Philip Melanchthon, who first mentioned the posting of the Theses, only mentioned the door of All Saints' Church. Melanchthon also claimed that Luther posted the Theses on 31 October, but this conflicts with several of Luther's statements about the course of events, and Luther always claimed that he brought his objections through proper channels rather than inciting a public controversy. It is possible that while Luther later saw the 31 October letter to Albert as the beginning of the Reformation, he did not post the Theses to the church door until mid-November, but he may not have posted them on the door at all. Regardless, the Theses were well known among the Wittenberg intellectual elite soon after Luther sent them to Albert. The Theses were copied and distributed to interested parties soon after Luther sent the letter to Archbishop Albert. The Latin Theses were printed in a four-page pamphlet in Basel, and as placards in Leipzig and Nuremberg. In all, several hundred copies of the Latin Theses were printed in Germany in 1517. in Nuremberg translated them into German later that year, and copies of this translation were sent to several interested parties across Germany, but it was not necessarily printed. ## Reaction Albert seems to have received Luther's letter with the Theses around the end of November. He requested the opinion of theologians at the University of Mainz and conferred with his advisers. His advisers recommended he have Luther prohibited from preaching against indulgences in accordance with the indulgence bull. Albert requested such action from the Roman Curia. In Rome, Luther was immediately perceived as a threat. In February 1518, Pope Leo asked the head of the Augustinian Hermits, Luther's religious order, to convince him to stop spreading his ideas about indulgences. Sylvester Mazzolini was also appointed to write an opinion which would be used in the trial against him. Mazzolini wrote A Dialogue against Martin Luther's Presumptuous Theses concerning the Power of the Pope, which focused on Luther's questioning of the pope's authority rather than his complaints about indulgence preaching. Luther received a summons to Rome in August 1518. He responded with Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences, in which he attempted to clear himself of the charge that he was attacking the pope. As he set down his views more extensively, Luther seems to have recognized that the implications of his beliefs set him further from official teaching than he initially knew. He later said he might not have begun the controversy had he known where it would lead. The Explanations have been called Luther's first Reformation work. Johann Tetzel responded to the Theses by calling for Luther to be burnt for heresy and having theologian Konrad Wimpina write 106 theses against Luther's work. Tetzel defended these in a disputation before the University of Frankfurt on the Oder in January 1518. 800 copies of the printed disputation were sent to be sold in Wittenberg, but students of the University seized them from the bookseller and burned them. Luther became increasingly fearful that the situation was out of hand and that he would be in danger. To placate his opponents, he published a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, which did not challenge the pope's authority. This pamphlet, written in German, was very short and easy for laypeople to understand. Luther's first widely successful work, it was reprinted twenty times. Tetzel responded with a point-by-point refutation, citing heavily from the Bible and important theologians. His pamphlet was not nearly as popular as Luther's. Luther's reply to Tetzel's pamphlet, on the other hand, was another publishing success for Luther. Another prominent opponent of the Theses was Johann Eck, Luther's friend and a theologian at the University of Ingolstadt. Eck wrote a refutation, intended for the Bishop of Eichstätt, entitled the Obelisks. This was in reference to the obelisks used to mark heretical passages in texts in the Middle Ages. It was a harsh and unexpected personal attack, charging Luther with heresy and stupidity. Luther responded privately with the Asterisks, titled after the asterisk marks then used to highlight important texts. Luther's response was angry and he expressed the opinion that Eck did not understand the matter on which he wrote. The dispute between Luther and Eck would become public in the 1519 Leipzig Debate. Luther was summoned by authority of the pope to defend himself against charges of heresy before Thomas Cajetan at Augsburg in October 1518. Cajetan did not allow Luther to argue with him over his alleged heresies, but he did identify two points of controversy. The first was against the 58th thesis, which stated that the pope could not use the treasury of merit to forgive temporal punishment of sin. This contradicted the papal bull Unigenitus promulgated by Clement VI in 1343. The second point was whether one could be assured that they had been forgiven when their sin had been absolved by a priest. Luther's Explanations on thesis seven asserted that one could based on God's promise, but Cajetan argued that the humble Christian should never presume to be certain of their standing before God. Luther refused to recant and requested that the case be reviewed by university theologians. This request was denied, so Luther appealed to the pope before leaving Augsburg. Luther was finally excommunicated in 1521 after he burned the papal bull threatening him to recant or face excommunication. ## Legacy The indulgence controversy set off by the Theses was the beginning of the Reformation, a schism in the Roman Catholic Church which initiated profound and lasting social and political change in Europe. Luther later stated that the issue of indulgences was insignificant relative to controversies which he would enter into later, such as his debate with Erasmus over the bondage of the will, nor did he see the controversy as important to his intellectual breakthrough regarding the gospel. Luther later wrote that at the time he wrote the Theses he remained a "papist", and he did not seem to think the Theses represented a break with established Roman Catholic doctrine. But it was out of the indulgences controversy that the movement which would be called the Reformation began, and the controversy propelled Luther to the leadership position he would hold in that movement. The Theses also made evident that Luther believed the church was not preaching properly and that this put the laity in serious danger. Further, the Theses contradicted the decree of Pope Clement VI, in 1343, that indulgences are the treasury of the church. This disregard for papal authority presaged later conflicts. 31 October 1517, the day Luther sent the Theses to Albert, was commemorated as the beginning of the Reformation as early as 1527, when Luther and his friends raised a glass of beer to commemorate the "trampling out of indulgences". The posting of the Theses was established in the historiography of the Reformation as the beginning of the movement by Philip Melanchthon in his 1548 Historia de vita et actis Lutheri. During the 1617 Reformation Jubilee, the centenary of 31 October was celebrated by a procession to the Wittenberg Church where Luther was believed to have posted the Theses. An engraving was made showing Luther writing the Theses on the door of the church with a gigantic quill. The quill penetrates the head of a lion symbolizing Pope Leo X. In 1668, 31 October was made Reformation Day, an annual holiday in Electoral Saxony, which spread to other Lutheran lands. 31 October 2017, the 500th Anniversary of Reformation Day, was celebrated with a national public holiday throughout Germany. ## See also - Chinese 95 theses
477,505	Halo 2	1,172,115,324	2004 video game	[ "2004 video games", "BAFTA winners (video games)", "Bungie games", "Cooperative video games", "D.I.C.E. Award for Action Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Online Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design winners", "Esports games", "First-person shooter multiplayer online games", "First-person shooters", "Games for Windows", "Halo (franchise) games", "Microsoft games", "Multiplayer and single-player video games", "Multiplayer online games", "Science fiction video games", "Spike Video Game Award winners", "Video game sequels", "Video games developed in the United States", "Video games scored by Martin O'Donnell", "Video games scored by Michael Salvatori", "Video games set in Kenya", "Video games set in the 26th century", "Video games using Havok", "Windows games", "Xbox games" ]	Halo 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox console. Halo 2 is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved. The game features new weapons, enemies, and vehicles, another player character, and shipped with online multiplayer via Microsoft's Xbox Live service. In Halo 2's story mode, the player assumes the roles of the human Master Chief and alien Arbiter in a 26th-century conflict between the United Nations Space Command, the genocidal Covenant, and the parasitic Flood. After the success of Halo: Combat Evolved, a sequel was expected and highly anticipated. Bungie found inspiration in plot points and gameplay elements that had been left out of their first game, including online multiplayer. A troubled development and time constraints forced cuts to the scope of the game, including the wholesale removal of a more ambitious multiplayer mode, and necessitated a cliffhanger ending to the game's campaign mode. Among Halo 2's marketing was an early alternate reality game called "I Love Bees" that involved players solving real-world puzzles. Bungie supported the game after release with new multiplayer maps and updates to address cheating and glitches. The game was followed by a sequel, Halo 3, in September 2007. Halo 2 was a commercial and critical success and is often listed as one of the greatest video games of all time. The game became the most popular title on Xbox Live, holding that rank until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. Halo 2 is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game, with more than 8 million copies sold worldwide. The game received critical acclaim, with the multiplayer lauded; in comparison, the campaign and its cliffhanger ending was divisive. The game's online component was highly influential and cemented many features as standard in future games and online services, including matchmaking, lobbies, and clans. Halo 2's marketing heralded the beginnings of video games as blockbuster media. A port of the game for Windows Vista was released in 2007, followed by a high-definition remake as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection in 2014. ## Gameplay Halo 2 is a shooter game. Players primarily experience gameplay from a first-person perspective, with the viewpoint shifting to third-person for vehicle segments. Players use a combination of human and Covenant weaponry and vehicles to progress through the game's levels. Certain weapons can be dual-wielded, allowing the player to trade accuracy, the use of grenades, and melee attacks for raw firepower. The player can carry two weapons at a time (or three if dual-wielding, with one weapon remaining holstered), with each weapon having strengths in different combat situations. Most Covenant weapons, for example, eschew disposable ammo magazines for a contained battery, which cannot be replaced once depleted. However, these weapons overheat if fired continuously. Human weapons are less effective at penetrating shields and require reloading ammunition, but cannot overheat due to prolonged fire. Players can hijack enemy vehicles and quickly assume control of them. The player is equipped with a damage-absorbing shield that regenerates when not taking fire; their health bar is not visible. The game's "Campaign" mode offers options for both single-player and cooperative multiplayer participation. In campaign mode, the player must complete a series of levels that encompass Halo 2's storyline. These levels alternate between the Master Chief and a Covenant Elite called the Arbiter, who occupy diametrically opposed roles in the story's conflict. Aside from variations in storyline, the Arbiter differs from Master Chief only in that his armor lacks a flashlight; instead, it is equipped with a short duration rechargeable form of active camouflage that disappears when the player attacks or takes damage. There are four difficulty levels in campaign mode: Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary. An increase in difficulty will result in an increase in the number, rank, health, damage, and accuracy of enemies; a reduction of duration and an increase in recharge time for the Arbiter's active camouflage; a decrease in the player's health and shields; and occasional changes in dialogue. Enemy and friendly artificial intelligence is dynamic, and replaying the same encounters repeatedly will demonstrate different behavior. ### Multiplayer Like Halo: Combat Evolved, the Xbox version of Halo 2 features a multiplayer system that allows players to compete with each other in split-screen and system link modes; in addition, it added support for online multiplayer via Xbox Live. The Xbox Live multiplayer and downloadable content features of the Xbox version of Halo 2 were supported until the discontinuation of the service in April 2010, with the final multiplayer session concluding May 10, almost a month after the service was officially terminated. Multiplayer for the PC version of the game used Games for Windows – Live. PC multiplayer servers were taken offline in June 2013. Instead of implementing multiplayer by having players manually join lobbies, as was common in games at the time, Halo 2 used matchmaking. Players chose the general type of match they want to play, and the game selected the map and gametype and automatically found other players. This "playlist" system automated the process of finding matches to keep a steady flow of games available at all times, and combined a skill-ranking system on top. ## Synopsis ### Setting Halo 2 takes place in the 26th century. Humans, under the auspices of the United Nations Space Command or UNSC, have developed faster-than-light slipspace travel and colonized numerous worlds. Human worlds come under attack by a collective of alien races known as the Covenant. Declaring humanity an affront to their gods, the Forerunners, the Covenant begin to obliterate the humans with their superior numbers and technology. After the human planet Reach is destroyed, a single ship, The Pillar of Autumn, follows protocol and initiates a random slipspace jump to lead the Covenant away from Earth. The crew discovers a Forerunner ringworld called Halo. Though the Covenant believe Halo's activation will lead to divine salvation, the humans discover that the rings are actually weapons, built to contain a terrifying parasite called the Flood. The human supersoldier Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and his AI companion Cortana learn from Halo's AI monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, that activation of the Halos will destroy all sentient life in the galaxy to prevent the Flood's spread. Instead of activating the ring, Master Chief and Cortana detonate the Pillar of Autumn's engines, destroying the installation and preventing the escape of the Flood. Master Chief and Cortana race back to Earth to warn of an impending invasion by Covenant forces. ### Plot Halo 2 opens with the trial of a Covenant Elite commander aboard the Covenant's capital city-ship of High Charity. For his failure to stop Halo's destruction, the Elite is stripped of his rank, branded a heretic, and tortured by Tartarus, the Chieftain of the Covenant Brutes. Spared execution, the Covenant leadership—the High Prophets Truth, Regret, and Mercy—give the Elite the chance to become an Arbiter, a rank given to Elites in times of great crisis or turmoil. As the Arbiter, the Elite quells a rebellion and recovers 343 Guilty Spark. On Earth, Fleet Admiral Hood commends the Master Chief and Sergeant Avery Johnson for their actions at the first Halo, with Commander Miranda Keyes accepting a medal on behalf of her deceased father, Captain Jacob Keyes. A Covenant fleet suddenly appears near Earth. In the ensuing battle, a single ship carrying the Prophet of Regret slips through Earth's defenses and besieges the African city of New Mombasa. Master Chief assists in repelling the invasion. With his fleet destroyed, Regret makes a hasty slipspace jump, and Keyes, Johnson, Cortana, and the Master Chief follow aboard the UNSC ship In Amber Clad. The crew discovers another Halo installation; realizing the danger the ring presents, Keyes sends Master Chief to kill Regret while she and Johnson search for the Index, Halo's activation key. Responding to Regret's distress call, High Charity and the Covenant fleet arrive at the Halo. After Master Chief kills Regret, the Covenant bombard his location; he falls into a lake, where he is dragged away by tentacles. Regret's death triggers discord among the races of the Covenant, as the Prophets give the Brutes the Elites' traditional role as their honor guard. The Arbiter subdues Johnson and Keyes and retrieves the Index. Tartarus appears and reveals that the Prophets have ordered the annihilation of the Elites, and sends the Arbiter falling down a deep chasm. The Arbiter meets the Master Chief in the bowels of the Halo, brought together by a Flood creature called the Gravemind. The Gravemind reveals to the Arbiter that the Great Journey is a lie, and sends the two soldiers to different places to stop Halo's activation. The Master Chief is teleported to High Charity as the Covenant falls into civil war. The Flood-infested In Amber Clad crashes into the city, and Cortana realizes that the Gravemind used them as a distraction. As the parasite overruns the city, the Prophet of Mercy is consumed. As for Tartarus, the Prophet of Truth consigns him to Halo with Keyes, Johnson, and Guilty Spark to activate the ring. Master Chief follows Truth aboard a Forerunner ship leaving the city; Cortana remains behind to destroy High Charity and Halo if Tartarus succeeds in activating the ring. On the surface of Halo, the Arbiter joins forces with Johnson and confronts Tartarus in Halo's control room. When the Arbiter tries to convince Tartarus that the Prophets have betrayed them, Tartarus instead activates the ring, and a battle ensues. The Arbiter and Johnson kill Tartarus while Keyes removes the Index; the unexpected deactivation sets Halo and all the other rings on standby for remote activation from a place 343 Guilty Spark calls "the Ark." Meanwhile, Truth's ship arrives at Earth, and Master Chief informs Admiral Hood that he is "finishing this fight." In a post-credits scene, Gravemind assumes control of High Charity. Cortana agrees to answer the Flood intelligence's questions. ## Development Halo had never been planned as a trilogy, but the critical and commercial success of Combat Evolved—selling more than five million copies in three years—made a sequel expected. Xbox general manager J Allard confirmed Halo 2 was in production at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2002, with a planned release in time for Holiday 2003. Many at Bungie wanted to make a sequel, building on cut ideas from Combat Evolved with a more ambitious follow-up. The added publisher support for a sequel allowed greater leeway and the ability to return to more ambitious ideas lost during Combat Evolved's development. Not satisfied with merely adding back cut content to the sequel, designer Jaime Griesemer recalled that the team "tripled everything," rebuilding the game engine, changing the physics engine, and prototyping a system for stencil shadow volumes. The game's development would suffer from a lack of clear leadership. Early development discussions happened in small, unconnected teams that did not talk with each other. Bungie cofounder and project lead Jason Jones, who had been exhausted shipping Combat Evolved, similarly burned out during Halo 2's production. Jones left the project to work on another Bungie game, Phoenix, leaving fewer people to work on Halo 2. The departure of Bungie's cofounder Alex Seropian in 2002 caused additional friction and politics in the workplace where Seropian had once mediated tensions. Writer Joseph Staten described the team's ambitions thusly: > Then we just plowed ahead, much like we'd done with Halo, with one notable exception. We ordered ourselves a giant sandwich, took a bite but didn't realize exactly how big it was before we started in. And we did that across the board, technically, artistically, and story wise. But of course, we didn't figure that out until way too late. Griesemer put it more bluntly: "What's the phrase? Putting ten pounds of crap into a five-pound bag? We really tried to cram it too full, and we paid the price." An important feature for Halo 2 was multiplayer using Xbox Live. Multiplayer in Combat Evolved was accomplished via System Link and had nearly been scrapped altogether in the rush to complete the game. Most players never played large maps, while a subset greatly enjoyed 16-player action, connecting consoles together with network cables for group play. "We looked at the small set of fans who were able to do this," said engineering lead Chris Butcher, "and just how much they were enjoying themselves, and asked ourselves if we could bring that to everybody. That would be something really special, really unique." Initially, Combat Evolved's multiplayer was supposed to involve larger maps and player counts than what shipped, and members of the team wanted to resurrect those plans for Halo 2. The smaller multiplayer modes and local split-screen capabilities of the first game would have been removed. Designer Max Hoberman successfully argued against wholesale removal of a successful component from the previous game. He was put in charge of a small team to further develop the small-scale arena multiplayer, while the rest of the team developed a larger "Warfare" mode. Bungie promised in previews that the core of this multiplayer would be squad-based online battles between human Spartans and Covenant Elites, with players able to call in airstrikes. Hoberman's pitch for Halo 2's arena multiplayer was to bring the fun of couch multiplayer online. As Hoberman was not an excellent video game player, he wanted to make sure the game remained fun for even lower-skilled players, rather than catering to the very competitive ones. The system of playlist matchmaking and allowing friends to "party up" to play games together were crucial to creating a global community of players. The story for Halo 2 grew out of all the elements that were not seen in Combat Evolved. Jason Jones organized his core ideas for the sequel's story and approached Staten for input. According to Staten, among the elements that did not make it to the finished game was a "horrible scene of betrayal" where Miranda Keyes straps a bomb to the Master Chief's back and throws him into a hole in revenge for her father's death; "Jason was going through a rather difficult breakup at the time and I think that had something to do with it," he said. Staten and Griesemer discussed seeing the war from the Covenant perspective, forming the idea to have part of the game told from the perspective of a Covenant warrior known as the Dervish. Late in development, the Dervish became the Arbiter, after legal teams at Microsoft were afraid the game was sending a message about Islam. In February 2003, Bungie began developing a gameplay demonstration for E3 2003. The demo, which was the first gameplay seen by the public, showcased new enemies and abilities. Many elements of the trailer, however, were not game-ready; the entire graphics engine used in the footage had to be discarded, and the trailer's environment never appeared in the final game due to limitations on how big the game environments could be. Elements like vehicle hijacking were entirely scripted, and in order to keep performance at an acceptable level, a Bungie staff member deleted objects from the game as the player passed through. The restructuring of the engine meant that there was no playable build of Halo 2 for nearly a year, and assets and environments produced by art and design teams could not be prototyped, bottlenecking development. Griesemer recalled that development was "moving backwards", and after E3 the team realized that much of what the team had worked on for the past two years would have to be scrapped. In order to ship the game, Bungie began paring back their ambitions for the single- and multiplayer parts of the game. All other Bungie projects, including Phoenix, were cancelled, with their teams folded into Halo 2 to complete the game. The campaign was completely rethought and remained unplayable for more than a year while the multiplayer was being developed. Ultimately, a third act of the game where Master Chief and Arbiter came together on Earth to defeat the Prophets was cut entirely. Staten hoped the resulting cliffhanger would be treated like the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Planned vehicles, such as variants of the Warthog and an all terrain vehicle, were scrapped. With the single-player mode in trouble, very little had been done with the large Warfare multiplayer mode. Eventually, the entire warfare mode was cut, and Hoberman's small team project became the shipping multiplayer suite. Engineer Chris Butcher commented, "For Halo 2 we had our sights set very high on networking. Going from having no internet multiplayer to developing a completely new online model was a big challenge to tackle all at once, and as a result we had to leave a lot of things undone in order to meet the ship date commitment that we made to our fans." As one of Microsoft's tentpole games, the publisher had two full-time user experience researchers managing a team of game testers working on the title. The researchers used playtests, surveys, and usability testing to provide Bungie with input on how the game would be received. Feedback of the game's matchmaking system was very unfavorable, with the testers preferring the control offered by traditional servers. Researcher John Hopson recalled that while they suggested to Bungie they should change the matchmaking system, the developers remained steadfast their new approach would be better in the real world; Hopson later agreed with their choice, saying that his team had only narrowly avoided ruining the game. To test real-world network conditions, Bungie ran a closed alpha of the multiplayer with 1000 Microsoft employees for five weeks. Outside of Bungie, Combat Evolved's success had become a problem for Halo 2's development, as the success of the Xbox platform was riding on Halo. Microsoft originally pressured Bungie to have the game ready as a launch title for Xbox Live in November 2002, which Bungie employees told them was impossible. At one point, Microsoft executives had a vote over whether to force Bungie to ship the incomplete game, or give them another year of development time. Microsoft Studios head Ed Fries walked out of the vote and threatened to resign to get Bungie the extra time. Missing the Xbox's last holiday season before its successor console, the Xbox 360, shipped was not an option. To hit its new November 9, 2004, release date, Bungie went into the "mother of all crunches" in order to finish the game. "A lot of people sacrificed themselves in ways that you should never have to for your job," design lead Paul Bertone recalled; he kenneled his dog for nearly two months and slept in the office for the final days of development. Griesemer said that this lack of a "polish" period near the end of the development cycle was the main reason for Halo 2's shortcomings. Butcher retrospectively described Halo 2's multiplayer mode as "a pale shadow of what it could and should have been" due to the tight schedule. ### Audio Halo 2's soundtrack was composed primarily by Martin O'Donnell and his musical partner Michael Salvatori, the team that had composed the critically acclaimed music of Halo. O'Donnell noted in composing the music for Halo 2 that "making a sequel is never a simple proposition. You want to make everything that was cool even better, and leave out all the stuff that was weak." O'Donnell made sure that no part of the game would be completely silent, noting "Ambient sound is one of the main ways to immerse people psychologically. A dark room is spooky, but add a creaking floorboard and rats skittering in the walls and it becomes really creepy." Halo 2, unlike its predecessor, was mixed to take full advantage of Dolby 5.1 Digital surround sound. In the summer of 2004, producer Nile Rodgers and O'Donnell decided to release the music from Halo 2 on two separate CDs; the first (Volume One) would contain all the themes present in the game as well as music "inspired" by the game; the second would contain the rest of the music from the game, much of which was incomplete, as the first CD was shipped before the game was released. The first CD was released on November 9, 2004, and featured guitar backing by Steve Vai. Additional tracks included various outside musicians, including Steve Vai, Incubus, Breaking Benjamin, and Hoobastank. The Halo 2 Original Soundtrack: Volume Two CD, containing the game music organized in suite form, was released on April 25, 2006. ## Release ### Promotion Halo 2 was officially announced in September 2002 with a cinematic trailer, scheduled for a Holiday 2003 release. The first major look at the game came with the E3 2003 demo in May; Halo 2 was Microsoft's strongest showing at the event, and some journalists believed the game looked too good to be live gameplay and must have been a scripted cutscene. After delays, the game was shifted to a first-quarter 2004 release, then to Holiday 2004. The final November 9 release date was confirmed at E3 2004, where the game's multiplayer was playable on the show floor. Microsoft executive Peter Moore rolled up his sleeve to reveal the date tattooed on his bicep. Microsoft intended to market Halo 2 not just as a video game, but as a cultural event. Part of its widespread appeal would come from the social nature of the game's multiplayer, but Microsoft also heavily promoted and marketed the game. A trailer for the game was shown in movie theaters, making Halo 2 the first video game so advertised. Hype for the title was fueled by the press, with Microsoft telling one journalist that their Halo 2 review would be the most consequential of their career. The marketing heavily focused on Master Chief and the defense of earth, leaving the reveal of the Arbiter as a playable character a surprise. Halo 2 's release was preceded with promotions and product tie-ins. There was a Halo 2 Celebrity Pre-Release Party at E3 2004, in which a private home was transformed to replicate the world of Halo, complete with camouflaged Marines and roaming Cortanas. Launch events were held worldwide, with players waiting for hours in a line that stretched two blocks in Times Square, New York City. The French version of the game leaked on the internet in October, and circulated widely. In addition to more traditional forms of promotion, Halo 2 was also part of an elaborate Alternate Reality Game project titled I Love Bees. Microsoft approached 42 Entertainment's Elan Lee, who had helped launch the Xbox with Microsoft, on producing a tie-in game. I Love Bees cost an estimated one million dollars. The game centered on a hacked website, supposedly a site about beekeeping, where an AI from the future was residing. The project garnered significant attention, drawing attention away from the ongoing 2004 Presidential Election. The game won an award for creativity at the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards and was nominated for a Webby award. Ultimately, nearly 3 million people participated in the game. Halo 2 was sold in a standard edition and "Limited Collector's Edition". The Collector's Edition includes the game, packaged in a metal case. It also includes bonus content on an extra DVD, such as a making-of documentary, art gallery, and audio tests. The instructional booklet is also written from the Covenant point of view rather than from the UNSC point of view used in the regular edition. ### Sales Halo 2 first released on November 9, 2004, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Anticipation for the game was high; a record 1.5 million copies were pre-ordered three weeks before release. Massive lines formed at midnight releases of the game at more than 7000 stores across North America and attracted significant media attention. This was followed by releases on November 10, 2004, in France and parts of Europe, and November 11 in the UK, Japan, and elsewhere; the game released in eight languages and a total of 27 countries. The game sold 2.4 million copies and earned up to US\$125 million in its first 24 hours on store shelves, outgrossing the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as the highest-grossing release in entertainment history. The game sold 260,000 units in the United Kingdom in its first week, making it the third fastest-selling title in that territory. It ultimately received a "Double Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 600,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It was the second best-selling game of 2004 in the United States (after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), where it sold 4.2 million copies that year. On release, Halo 2 was the most popular video game on Xbox Live, holding that rank until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. In the first ten weeks of release, players collectively logged 91 million hours playing the game; by June 2006, more than 500 million games of Halo 2 had been played, and more than 710 million hours logged on Xbox Live. Over five million players had played by 2007. Halo 2 is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game with at least 6.3 million copies sold in the United States and 8.46 million copies in total. ## Reception Halo 2 received critical acclaim upon release. On review aggregate site Metacritic, the Xbox version has an overall score of 95 out of 100. Critics judged it a worthy successor to the acclaimed Combat Evolved. GameSpot's Greg Kasavin wrote that the game successfully built on its predecessor's foundation, and despite shortcomings, the game's breadth of content made it one of the best action games available. The game's audiovisual presentation was praised. Multiplayer especially was noted in being the best on Xbox Live at the time. Game Informer, along with numerous other publications, rated it higher than Halo: Combat Evolved, citing enhanced multiplayer and less repetitive gameplay. Most critics noted that Halo 2 stuck with the formula that made its predecessor successful, and was alternatively praised and faulted for this decision. Edge's review concluded that Halo 2 could be summed up with a line from its script: "It's not a new plan. But we know it'll work." The game's campaign mode received some criticism for being too short, and for featuring an abrupt cliffhanger ending. GameSpot noted that although the story's switching between the Covenant and human factions made the plot more intricate, it distracted the player from Earth's survival and the main point of the game; while Edge labeled the plot "a confusing mess of fan-fiction sci-fi and bemusing Episode-II-style politics." Halo 2 won multiple awards at the 8th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, including "Console Game of the Year", "Console First Person Action Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay" and "Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design", as well as a nomination for "Game of the Year". The game received more than 38 individual awards. It received runner-up placements in GameSpot's 2004 "Best Shooter", "Best Sound Effects" and "Best Original Music" categories across all platforms. The game was listed in Electronic Gaming Monthly's "The Greatest 200 Video Games of Their Time" in 2006. ## Post-release ### Updates and DLC Halo 2's multiplayer suffered from widespread cheating on release. Some players used "standbying" or "lag killing" to cheat, where the player hosting the game intentionally pressed the standby button on his or her modem. This resulted in all other players freezing in place and allowed the cheater to kill other players or capture objectives. Another exploit called "BXR" allowed players to cancel melee animations and quickly attack for an instant kill. Rather than rely solely on user reports of misbehavior, Bungie leveraged its game statistics collection to proactively find cheating players, creating an automated banning system. Bungie released several map packs for Halo 2, adding new environments for multiplayer matches. The Multiplayer Map Pack, released July 5, 2005, made Xbox Live content and updates available to offline players. The disc contains the game's software update, nine new multiplayer maps, a making-of documentary, and a bonus cinematic called "Another Day on the Beach", among other features. The Blastacular Map Pack contained two additional maps and released April 2007. On July 7 Bungie made the Blastacular Map Pack free. Halo 2 was one of the Xbox games that was backwards-compatible on the Xbox 360. On the newer console, the game runs at high-definition 720p with scene-wide anti-aliasing. The online services of the Halo 2 were discontinued alongside other original Xbox console games in 2010. ### Ports and rereleases In February 2006, Microsoft announced a PC port of Halo 2, exclusively for the Windows Vista operating system. Like the Xbox version, the release of Halo 2 Vista was repeatedly delayed. The May 22, 2007, release date was pushed to May 31 after the discovery of partial nudity in the game's map editor—a photograph of Charlie Gough, one of the Lead Engineers, mooning Steve Ballmer during his visit to the studio, was presented as part of the ".ass" error message. Microsoft offered patches to remove the nude content and revised the box ratings. The game could be enabled to play on Windows XP through an unauthorized third-party patch. Halo 2 Vista was ported by a small team at Microsoft Game Studios (codenamed Hired Gun) who worked closely with Bungie. As one of the launch titles of Games for Windows – Live, the game offered Live features not available in the Xbox version, such as Guide support and Achievements. The Windows port also added two exclusive multiplayer maps and a map editor. A high-definition remaster of Halo 2 titled Halo 2 Anniversary was released as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection on November 11, 2014, for the Xbox One, later being released on PC for Steam and Windows Store. ## Legacy Halo 2's release was part of a shift towards blockbuster gaming releases. In 2004, the video game industry was estimated to gross \$7.76 billion in the United States, behind the \$9.4 billion gross of the domestic box office. Halo 2's success was seen by the press as evidence of a generational shift in entertainment. The CBC's Greg Bolton remarked that prior to Halo 2's splashy release, "the video-game industry hadn’t yet found a recognizable public face, a universally acclaimed megastar." The Ringer called Halo 2 "the birth of the video game as we know it today: a mass shared experience," and credited it with birthing modern multiplayer infrastructure and popularizing American esports. Halo 2's matchmaking technology was one of the turning points in the gaming industry during the 2000s, setting a new standard for other games. G4's Sterling McGarvey wrote that "Bungie's sequel was a shot in the arm for Xbox Live subscriptions and previewed many of the features that would set the standard for Microsoft's online service on the next machine". Critics credited the game with bringing online multiplayer to the console masses, and as serving as Xbox Live's killer app. The Province's Paul Chapman wrote that games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would not be enjoyable if not for the ground Halo 2 broke.
36,628,575	Mike Capel	1,173,827,595	American baseball player	[ "1961 births", "Baseball players from Texas", "Chicago Cubs players", "Denver Zephyrs players", "Houston Astros players", "Iowa Cubs players", "Living people", "Lodi Crushers players", "Major League Baseball pitchers", "Midland Cubs players", "Milwaukee Brewers players", "People from Marshall, Texas", "Pittsfield Cubs players", "Quad Cities Cubs players", "Texas Longhorns baseball players", "Tucson Toros players" ]	Michael Lee Capel (born October 13, 1961) is an American professional baseball pitcher who played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Chicago Cubs, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Houston Astros. In 49 career games, Capel pitched 62+1⁄3 innings, struck out 43 batters, and had a career win–loss record of 3–4 with a 4.62 earned run average (ERA). While he played in MLB, Capel stood at 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) and weighed 175 pounds (79 kg). A starting pitcher in college and parts of his Minor League Baseball career, he converted to relief pitching while in Chicago's minor league system. The Philadelphia Phillies chose Capel in the 24th round of the 1980 MLB draft, but the 18-year-old did not sign with the team; instead, he opted to attend the University of Texas. Capel played on the 1982 USA College All-Star Team, which competed in the Amateur World Series in Seoul and placed third. The next year, Capel and the Texas Longhorns won the College World Series. After he was drafted by the Cubs, Capel left Texas and signed to play professional baseball; he played in six seasons of Minor League Baseball before he made his MLB debut in 1988. Capel spent the entire 1989 season in Triple-A, one level below the majors, but the Cubs released him at the end of the year. He agreed to terms with the Brewers and played in MLB after an injury opened a spot on Milwaukee's roster, but was again released at the end of the season. A free agent, the Astros signed Capel, and over the course of the season he pitched in 25 games for the team. He spent the final part of his career in the Astros farm system, and after he made the 1992 Triple-A All-Star team, Capel played his last season in 1993. After retirement, Capel worked as the general manager of a car dealership in Houston, Texas. ## Early life Capel was born on October 13, 1961, in Marshall, Texas, and attended Spring High School in Harris County. As a child, he watched the Astros play on weekends. During his senior year in 1979, the Spring Lions won the AAAA conference state championship, and Capel was named to the All-State team, composed of the best high school players in the state. He set several pitching records at Spring High School. Future teammate Calvin Schiraldi called Capel a "hard thrower when he came out of high school" and "the top guy out of the state in 1980"; Roger Clemens said he was "probably the best pitcher in the state at that time". The Philadelphia Phillies drafted Capel with the 605th overall pick in the 1980 MLB Draft, and offered him \$45,000 () to sign. Instead of signing with the Phillies, he chose to attend the University of Texas. ## Collegiate career Aside from intrateam scrimmages, Capel did not play baseball his freshman season due to a torn ligament (or stretched ligaments) in his elbow. Capel pitched sidearm for the remainder of his collegiate career to compensate for a loss in the velocity of his fastball. In 1982, he was named to the All-Southwest Conference team and pitched to a 9–0 win–loss record with a 3.68 ERA, as the Longhorns finished 59–6. In the 1982 College World Series, Texas defeated the Oklahoma State Cowboys and the Stanford Cardinal, but losses to the Miami Hurricanes and the Wichita State Shockers eliminated them from play, per the tournament's double-elimination format. Capel played on the United States team in the 1982 Amateur World Series, overseen by the International Baseball Federation. Starting against Australia, he pitched a 14–4 complete game victory, with the match ending after seven innings per the championship's ten-run rule. The United States eventually placed third in the competition. The 1983 Longhorns finished the regular season with a 61–14 record and were ranked as the number one team in the nation by Collegiate Baseball Magazine. That season, the Texas team featured four future MLB pitchers: Capel, Clemens, Bruce Ruffin, and Schiraldi. In the 1983 College World Series, Capel allowed four hits in a complete game against the Michigan Wolverines as the Longhorns advanced to the World Series finals. Facing the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Longhorns made Clemens their starting pitcher and won 4–3. The championship was the fourth World Series title in University of Texas history, and their first since 1975. Capel finished the season with a 13–1 record and a 2.98 ERA. , his career winning percentage (.957) ties him with Rick Burley for the fifth-best in Texas Longhorns history (with a minimum of ten decisions). In June, before the College World Series, he was drafted by the Cubs with the 320th overall pick in the 1983 MLB draft. ## Professional career ### Chicago Cubs After he signed a professional contract with the Cubs, Capel no longer threw sidearmed. Capel began professional baseball with the Double-A Midland Cubs, but was demoted to the Class A Quad Cities Cubs after pitching to a 1–1 record with a 6.91 ERA in Double-A. Now in Single-A, Capel recorded a 3–2 record with a 2.42 ERA and a 1.03 walks plus hits per inning pitched rate. In 1984, Capel split playing time between the Class A-Advanced Lodi Crushers and Midland; he led Midland in losses (10) and wild pitches (11) and had the second-worst ERA (6.31) on the team. With Midland, Capel started 11 games out of the 16 in which he appeared. On his 0–7 record for the Crushers, Tom Alexander of the Lodi News-Sentinel wrote that Capel's luck "has been all bad when it comes to wins". Both Lodi and Midland finished their seasons with losing records. From 1985 to 1986, he played for the Double-A Pittsfield Cubs of the Eastern League. In 1986, Capel only pitched in relief, had a career-best 1.87 ERA over 62+2⁄3 innings pitched, and led his team with 13 saves. After he was promoted to the Triple-A Iowa Cubs, Capel split time between starting and relieving roles in 1987. At 7–10, Capel tied for Iowa's lead in wins and losses, and led the team in strikeouts, with 75; his seven wins became a career high, and his loss total matched a career high set in Midland three years earlier. After the season, Ray Sons of the Chicago Sun-Times said Capel "may be ready for middle relief in Chicago", and Dave van Dyck listed him as a prospect for the 1988 season. During winter, Capel, Greg Maddux, Manny Trillo, Damon Berryhill, and several other Cubs played for teams in the Caribbean. Capel played for the Águilas del Zulia of Venezuela and led the team with five saves. Capel played in spring training ball as he tried to make Chicago's opening day roster. After the Cubs acquired Mike Bielecki from the Pittsburgh Pirates on March 31, 1988, they assigned Capel to Triple-A despite a Sun-Times prediction that he would be on the MLB roster. Prior to the acquisition, when Al Nipper was supposed to become the Cubs' fifth starter, Capel was to take his spot in the bullpen. The Cubs recalled Capel and Mark Grace to the majors on May 3, while Drew Hall and Rolando Roomes were optioned to Iowa; at the time, he had a 1.54 ERA and two saves in Triple-A ball. On May 7, Capel made his MLB debut: he pitched the final 1+2⁄3 innings of a game against the San Francisco Giants, allowing no runs and no hits but issuing a walk in a 2–1 Cubs loss. His first career win came the following day against the Giants, although he blew a save by giving up a two-run home run to Bob Brenly and lost a 5–4 lead. The Cubs ultimately won 13–7. Capel continued to pitch for the club until June 30, when the Cubs optioned him to Iowa to open a roster spot for Rich "Goose" Gossage to come off the 15-day disabled list (DL). He returned to the MLB club on August 8 to replace Schiraldi, but was demoted on August 13 before making an appearance, as Chicago activated Les Lancaster from the DL. Capel rejoined the club on August 31, and pitched in five more games before the season's end. Over his first MLB season, Capel pitched in 20 games and allowed 16 earned runs over 29+1⁄3 innings for a 4.91 ERA. He pitched the entire 1989 season for Iowa, appearing in 64 games for the team. On October 15, Capel was granted free agency by the Cubs; he signed with the Brewers two months later. ### Milwaukee Brewers Capel competed against 22 other pitchers for an MLB roster spot in the Brewers' spring training camp. The Brewers optioned Capel to their Triple-A affiliate, the Denver Zephyrs, on April 5, before the start of Milwaukee's 1990 season. On May 17, Denver placed Capel on the DL with a strained Achilles tendon, which opened a roster spot on the Zephyrs and allowed the Brewers to send Jaime Navarro back to Denver. When the Brewers needed a replacement for the injured Bill Wegman, Capel was called up to the major leagues. For his Brewers debut, Capel faced five batters and allowed four runs (two charged to Capel) against the Baltimore Orioles. His strikeout of Billy Ripken was the only MLB out Capel recorded in 1990. On June 8, he made his second and final outing with the Brewers and allowed four runs (three charged to Capel) against the Toronto Blue Jays; combined, batters hit .857 against Capel as he finished the season with a 135.00 ERA. When Greg Vaughn, returning from a turf toe injury and a sprained left ankle, was activated from the DL on June 11, Capel was sent to Triple-A. He finished the season with Denver where he had a 4–3 record with a 4.26 ERA. On October 4, the Brewers granted Capel free agency; he signed with the Astros on January 5, 1991. ### Houston Astros By 1991, Capel threw four pitches: a fastball, a forkball, a slider, and occasionally a curveball. He began his 1991 season with the Triple-A Tucson Toros; the Astros added Capel to their MLB roster on June 7. Two days later, against the New York Mets, Capel allowed the game-winning home run to Howard Johnson in the top of the 11th inning. Against the Mets on June 14, Capel, starting pitcher Pete Harnisch, and closer Jim Clancy combined for a four-hitter. His final MLB appearance came on August 14 against the San Diego Padres, when he pitched one inning in relief of Jim Corsi in a 4–1 loss. Capel said pitching for Houston was "the high point of [his] career". Over 25 games pitched, Capel finished the season with a 1–3 record and a 3.03 ERA. To reduce their roster to 35 players, the Astros assigned Capel and seven others to the Toros prior to the 1992 MLB season. Capel was selected to the Triple-A All-Star Game to replace Tim Scott, whom the Padres promoted to MLB. He told Javier Morales of the Arizona Daily Star "this [was] one of the greatest thrills of [his] career," and that he hoped it showed the Astros he could pitch in MLB. Doug Jones worked as Houston's closer in 1992, however, and Capel never played for the MLB club. For the Toros, Capel had a 6–6 record and a 2.19 ERA with a team-leading 18 saves. The following season, the Montreal Expos invited Capel to their spring camp as a non-roster invitee. Capel elected to remain with the Astros organization where he allowed 26 earned runs in 32+2⁄3 innings and pitched the entire season in Triple-A. The Toros, managed by Rick Sweet, finished first in the Pacific Coast League (PCL) South Division with an 83–60 record and made the playoffs. Unlike the 1993 MLB playoffs, in which four teams competed, only two teams could make the PCL playoffs. In the championship series, the Toros faced the Portland Beavers, champions of the North Division and holders of a PCL-best 87–56 record. In a best-of-seven series, the Toros defeated the Beavers four games to two. After the season, the Astros did not re-sign Capel. While playing in MLB, Capel stood at 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) and weighed 175 pounds (79 kg). ## Personal life In February 1986, Capel pitched in the University of Texas Alumni v. Varsity game, which ended in a 14–14 tie. Capel started to use dipping tobacco in 1976 and in March 1988 had a non-cancerous lesion removed from his lip; he tried to quit the product in March 1988. Capel met his wife, Elizabeth, at Roger Clemens' wedding. Outside of baseball, he is a close friend of Clemens, and during Clemens' 2012 perjury trial, Capel testified on his work ethic and character. In 2012, Mike worked as the general manager of a car dealership in Houston. Capel's son, Conner, played baseball as an outfielder for Seven Lakes High School in Katy, Texas, where he had a .456 batting average with 23 stolen bases and 36 runs scored in his senior year. The Cleveland Indians drafted Conner in the fifth round of the 2016 MLB draft.
9,006,217	Sky Blue Sky	1,155,698,439	null	[ "2007 albums", "Albums produced by Jeff Tweedy", "Nonesuch Records albums", "Wilco albums" ]	Sky Blue Sky is the sixth studio album by American rock band Wilco, released on May 15, 2007 by Nonesuch Records. Originally announced on January 17, 2007 at a show in Nashville, Tennessee, it was the band's first studio album with guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone. Before its release, the band streamed the entire album on its official website and offered a free download of "What Light". Sky Blue Sky was Wilco's highest debuting album on the Billboard 200 at number four. The self-produced album received mostly favorable reviews by critics. Publications such as PopMatters and Rolling Stone praised its maturity, while Playlouder and Pitchfork criticized its "dad-rock" sound. While some critics praised the direct lyrical approach, others criticized it when compared to previous Wilco albums. In 2021, Pitchfork published an article revising their opinion, calling the album "essential". ## Production In April 2006, Wilco was still touring in support of their most recent studio album, A Ghost Is Born which was released in 2004. The band performed a few new songs during this leg of the tour, including "Walken", "Either Way", and "On and On and On". The following month, drummer Glenn Kotche mentioned to Pitchfork that those new songs were going to be recorded as demos for a new album release. During a January 17, 2007 solo concert, frontman Jeff Tweedy announced that the band would release their sixth studio album on May 15, 2007 through Nonesuch Records. The album was named Sky Blue Sky, a reference to a childhood memory of Tweedy's, of a Memorial Day parade in Belleville, Illinois. He had come home from St. Louis with his family, but could not reach his house because the parade blocked the main street. This led Tweedy to reflect upon his future in the town: he knew that he would have to leave when he grew up because it was too small. The album was recorded by TJ Doherty at The Loft in Irving Park, Chicago, where Tweedy had recorded Loose Fur's Born Again in the USA and most of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In an interview with Billboard, the band revealed that the album would be less experimental than the two previous albums and more influenced by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones. Also, unlike the previous albums, Sky Blue Sky was made with minimal involvement from Jim O'Rourke; resulting in very few overdubs. ### Composition The band sought to be more direct with this record than the previous two, resulting in a more mellow album. Tweedy attributes the lyrical directness to his listening to material by The Byrds and Fairport Convention while recording the album. He disliked the reliance on studio effects on previous albums: > I got nervous about the technology on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. If you need a certain amp or pedal to make a song what it is, it isn't a song. Many of the album's songs were recorded in a single day, with the band reaching a consensus on how each song should sound. Eighteen songs were recorded for the album and twelve were selected for the album's track listing. The outtake "Let's Not Get Carried Away" was included with iTunes digital downloads, and a full-band version of "The Thanks I Get" was released on the band's Myspace page. Some albums that were shipped to independent record stores included an EP featuring the outtake "One True Vine" and a live version of "Theologians" recorded at The Vic Theater in Chicago. A deluxe edition of Sky Blue Sky was also released, which included a DVD with eight live performances from the Wilco Loft. Unlike previous Wilco albums, Sky Blue Sky features more songwriting collaboration between Tweedy and the other members of the band. As a result, a variety of lyrical themes appear on Sky Blue Sky (Tweedy was the only designer of the songs on A Ghost Is Born, using Pro Tools, before presenting them to the band). The title track references the worries Tweedy had as a child in a small town while "On and On and On" is an ode to Tweedy's father's experience after the death of Tweedy's mother. "Hate It Here" describes a man who tries to fill his free time with chores after breaking up with his lover. Sky Blue Sky was the band's first studio record to feature the expanded lineup that premiered on Kicking Television: Live in Chicago. Guitarist Jeff Tweedy provided the lead vocals for the album and John Stirratt, the only other original member of the band, played bass guitar and added background vocals. Glenn Kotche played drums and Mikael Jorgensen performed on a variety of keyboards. New to the band since the previous studio album were lead guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone. Additional instrumentation was provided by violist Karen Waltuch and multi-instrumentalist Jim O'Rourke. The album was mixed by Jim Scott at PLYRZ Studios in Santa Clarita, California. ### Artwork The cover artwork of Sky Blue Sky is a photograph by Manuel Presti titled "Sky Chase." The photograph was taken in Rome, Italy, and helped Presti win the 2005 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The same photograph is featured in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic. Nathaniel Murphy provided several illustrations for the liner booklet, which include a tree on a hill, a hand, and a flock of birds. The booklet also contains photographs of the band members by Frank Ockenfels. Graphic design was provided by Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Azerrad. ## Marketing and promotion On March 3, 2007, Wilco's official website hosted a Sky Blue Sky "listening party", which streamed the new album in its entirety. Two days later, the track "What Light" was made available for download on the band's website and was streamed on its MySpace page. On March 11, 2007, the official website streamed the album in its entirety again. "The Thanks I Get", a song recorded during the Sky Blue Sky sessions but not included on the album, was made available as a free download to purchasers of the album. During the European segment of the promotional tour, Wilco included a five-song extended play with purchase of the album. The EP contained the songs "The Thanks I Get", "One True Vine", "Let's Not Get Carried Away", and live versions of "Impossible Germany" and "Hate It Here". Wilco made the EP available online for free to previous purchasers of Sky Blue Sky. Frustrated by the lack of radio airplay received by previous Wilco albums, the band decided to branch out into television advertising. Wilco had previously licensed songs for Telefónica Moviles, and Jeff Tweedy appeared in a series of advertisements for Apple Computer. In May 2007, Volkswagen began running a pair of commercials with "You Are My Face" and bonus track "The Thanks I Get" playing in the background. The band commented on their website that "we feel okay about VWs. Several of us even drive them." The band licensed six songs for the campaign, which was created by advertising agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky. The move was met with criticism from both fans and popular media. A promotional tour followed the release of the album. The band performed "Sky Blue Sky" and "You Are My Face" on Later... with Jools Holland on May 25, 2007 and was interviewed on The Dermot O'Leary Show the next day. Beginning June 13, 2007, Wilco played fourteen shows in North America with Low as its opening act. Following this, the band made plans to tour Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, and Spain before playing a few more North American shows, including a performance on The Tonight Show. ## Release and reception Nonesuch released the album on May 15, 2007; the following week became Wilco's best-ever sales week. The album debuted at number four on the U.S. Billboard 200, selling 87,000 copies domestically in its first week. Sky Blue Sky was also an international success, peaking at number 7 in Norway, number 21 in Belgium, number 23 in Australia and Ireland, number 26 in Sweden, number 32 in New Zealand, number 36 in Germany, and number 39 in the United Kingdom. The album maintains a score of 73 out of 100 from Metacritic from 38 critics based on "generally favorable reviews" upon its release. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone pondered in his review whether Wilco had ever made a song as good as "Impossible Germany," praising how the song builds into a "twin guitar epic" in the mold of Television and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac. Michael Metivier of PopMatters commented that while the album took a while to understand, it was full of "exquisitely beautiful melodies and performances". AllMusic writer Mark Deming called the album "Wilco's strongest album as an ensemble to date," and found the return to roots rock music a fresh new method for the band. Blender gave it three-and-a-half stars out of five and said that the album "often feels like the [Grateful] Dead's American Beauty if Jerry Garcia had taken Paxil instead of acid." Colin Stutz of Filter gave the album a score of 91% and stated: "Wilco has constructed their most straightforward release in recent memory, which relies heavily on the inspired intricacies of a full-hearted band." Richard Cromelin of Los Angeles Times gave the album three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "The most musically direct and down to earth of the band's six-album career." Andrew C. Bradick of Prefix Magazine gave the album a favorable review and called it "Wilco's first step toward aging well, but it transcends transition and is an album that sounds right in its place and time." Alan Shulman of No Ripcord gave it a score of eight stars out of ten and said, "Wilco has come up with 50% of a classic album and 50% of a merely decent one. Buy it for the moments you simply won’t hear anywhere else." Will Hermes of Spin gave it a score of eight out of ten and called it "A near-perfect album by a band that seems, finally, to have found their identity." Alternative Press gave it four stars out of five and said, "It's apparent it takes deft skill to sound this simple." Tiny Mix Tapes also gave it four stars out of five and stated: "While the elders will rejoice [in] this sober, satisfied, and craftily subdued effort, the younglings of the bunch, with their abbreviated attention spans, iPod shuffles, and demand for instant gratification, will declare the album a boring and lethargic affair." Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine likewise gave it four stars out of five and said that "Though it may not fit comfortably alongside any other albums in Wilco's catalogue, Sky Blue Sky is further confirmation that, even at their most retro, they're among contemporary pop music's most vital acts." Likewise, Graeme Thomson of The Observer gave it four stars and said, "The closer you listen to the jazzy guitars, Beatles touches and easy, shuffling rhythms ... the more it transpires that Tweedy is simply allowing the songs sufficient room to speak up for themselves." John Pareles of The New York Times gave the album a positive review and said, "The production is straightforward, but the song structures aren’t; that’s where Wilco’s idiosyncrasies still hide out." Joan Anderman of The Boston Globe also gave it a positive review and said the band "hasn't forsaken its experimental streak, and the group uses it in the service of darkness -- or rather the threat of darkness." However, not all publications praised the new style of Sky Blue Sky. Stylus Magazine editor Ian Cohen criticized the album's disregard for the "fourth wall", and expressed concern about its dissimilarities to Kicking Television: Live in Chicago. Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian gave the album three stars out of five and said, "On its own terms, Sky Blue Sky succeeds: it's tender, poignant and sumptuously textured, occasionally jolted into fiery life by flaring guitar passages redolent of Neil Young or Television." Now gave it a positive review and stated: "All those self-consciously avant bits of the two previous albums have been ditched along with Jeff Tweedy's laughable lyrical abstractions in favour of tuneful, direct songs that at least seem to carry some emotional weight." Ted Grant of Playlouder gave the album two stars out of five and called it the "blandest and most creatively uninspired record of their career", finding that the album was leading to tame "dad-rock". Pitchfork writer Rob Mitchum also used the "dad-rock" colloquialism, dismissing its straightforwardness and arguing "Tweedy merely ended up with the wrong personnel to articulate his mood here." Mojo also gave the album three stars out of five, stating that "Many longtime listeners... are sure to be disappointed with the radio-friendly production and sheer innocuousness of [the] lyrics." Andy Gill of Uncut gave the album three stars out of five and called it "a slight disappointment". Billboard gave it an average review and stated: "On first listen, it might seem too derivative, even dull, but Jeff Tweedy's intricate vocal melodies and Nels Cline's ferocious guitar work keep things interesting." Under the Radar gave it five stars out of ten and called it "a very professional but almost inconsequential set... flat and ultimately uninspired." John Walshe of Hot Press gave it a mixed review and said the album was "just too 'nice'." The lyrical content was considered by critics to be somewhat experimental, but more straightforward than previous Wilco albums. Michael Metevier of PopMatters found the lyrics to be "some of the most affecting and least clumsy" of the band's career, though he worried that they might strike some Wilco fans as dull. Rob Sheffield said that while he was unimpressed with the lyrics of other Wilco albums, he liked the songwriting on Sky Blue Sky. However, Brandon Kreitler of Dusted Magazine felt that the lyrics seem like an insular Tweedy confessional, and Doug Freeman of The Austin Chronicle described the collaborative songwriting as yielding "fatalistic ambivalence" while giving the album two stars out of five. The album received a nomination at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album. It placed 12th in the 2008 Pazz & Jop Poll. This album was \#42 on Rolling Stone's list of the Top 50 Albums of 2007, and the song "Impossible Germany" was \#71 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Best Songs of 2007. WXPN named "Impossible Germany" as the \#1 song of 2007 and named the album as a whole the \#1 album of 2007. Sky Blue Sky was named one of the ten best albums of the year by Billboard, Paste, Uncut, and The A.V. Club. The album was placed at \#97 on the Rolling Stone 100 Best Albums Of The 2000s list. In a 2021 article revising a collection of the website's previous reviews, Pitchfork writer Sam Sodomsky called the album "essential" and informally revised its 5.2 score to an 8.5. ## Track listing ## Personnel Wilco - Nels Cline – Lead Electric Guitar (1,3,5), Lead Electric 12-String Guitar (2), Lap Steel Guitar (4,10,11), Electric Guitar (6,8,9,11), Loops (9), Electric 12-String Guitar (12) - Mikael Jorgensen – Piano (1-5,7-10), Hammond A100 Organ (3,11,12), Wurlitzer (6), Hammond B3 Organ (10) - Glenn Kotche – Drums (1-6,8-12), Percussion (3,6,11,12), Glockenspiel (7) - Pat Sansone – Hammond A100 Organ (1,2,5), Vocals (2), Acoustic Guitar (2,7), Electric Guitar (3,6,10), Chamberlin (4), Mellotron (5,9), Wurlitzer (8), Harpsichord (9), Piano (11,12), Backing Vocals (11) - John Stirratt – Bass (1-12), Vocals (2), 8-String Guitar (8), Backing Vocals (11) - Jeff Tweedy – Vocals (1-12), Electric Guitar (1-10), Acoustic Guitar (4,7), Acoustic 12-String Guitar (11) Additional musicians - Jim O'Rourke – Feedback (2), Percussion (8), Acoustic Guitar (11), String Arrangements (1,12) - Karen Waltuch – Viola (1,12), Violin (1,12) Production and design - Lawrence Azerrad – graphic design - TJ Doherty – recording - Robert Ludwig – mastering - Nathaniel Murphy – illustrations - Frack Ockenfels – photography - Manuel Presti – cover photograph - Jim Scott – mixing - Jason Tobias, Tom Gloady, Kevin Dean – assistant engineering ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts
46,854	Wallis Simpson	1,173,284,157	Wife of the former King Edward VIII (1896–1986)	[ "1896 births", "1986 deaths", "20th-century American memoirists", "20th-century American women writers", "Abdication of Edward VIII", "American Episcopalians", "American emigrants to France", "American expatriates in the United Kingdom", "American socialites", "American women memoirists", "American women philanthropists", "British duchesses by marriage", "British royal memoirists", "Burials at the Royal Burial Ground, Frogmore", "Deaths from bronchopneumonia", "Deaths from pneumonia in France", "House of Windsor", "Jewellery collectors", "Mistresses of Edward VIII", "People from Franklin County, Pennsylvania", "People with dementia", "Philanthropists from Maryland", "Philanthropists from Pennsylvania", "Sex scandals", "Time Person of the Year", "Wallis Simpson", "Warfield family", "Wives of British princes", "Writers from Baltimore", "Writers from Pennsylvania" ]	Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (born Bessie Wallis Warfield, later Simpson; June 19, 1896 – April 24, 1986), was an American socialite and wife of the former King Edward VIII. Their intention to marry and her status as a divorcée caused a constitutional crisis that led to Edward's abdication. Wallis grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father died shortly after her birth, and she and her widowed mother were partly supported by their wealthier relatives. Her first marriage, to United States Navy officer Win Spencer, was punctuated by periods of separation and eventually ended in divorce. In 1931, during her second marriage, to Ernest Simpson, she met Edward, then Prince of Wales. Five years later, after Edward's accession as King of the United Kingdom, Wallis divorced Ernest to marry Edward. The King's desire to marry a woman who had two living ex-husbands threatened to cause a constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom and the Dominions, ultimately leading to his abdication in December 1936 to marry "the woman I love". After abdicating, Edward was made Duke of Windsor by his brother and successor, George VI. Wallis married Edward six months later, after which she was formally known as the Duchess of Windsor, but was not allowed to share her husband's style of "Royal Highness". Before, during, and after the Second World War, Wallis and Edward were suspected by many in government and society of being Nazi sympathizers. In 1937, without government approval, they visited Germany and met Adolf Hitler. In 1940, Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas, and the couple moved to the islands until he relinquished the office in 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, they shuttled between Europe and the United States, living a life of leisure as society celebrities. After Edward's death in 1972, Wallis lived in seclusion and was rarely seen in public. Her private life has been a source of much speculation, and she remains a controversial figure in British history. ## Early life and education An only child, Bessie Wallis (sometimes written "Bessiewallis") Warfield was born on June 19, 1896, in Square Cottage at Monterey Inn, a hotel directly across the road from the Monterey Country Club, in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. A summer resort close to the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, Blue Ridge Summit was popular with Baltimoreans escaping the season's heat, and Monterey Inn, which had a central building, as well as individual wooden cottages, was the town's largest hotel. Wallis's father was Teackle Wallis Warfield, the fifth and youngest son of Henry Mactier Warfield, a flour merchant, described as "one of the best known and personally one of the most popular citizens of Baltimore", who ran for mayor in 1875. Her mother was Alice Montague, a daughter of stockbroker William Latane Montague. Wallis was named in honor of her father (who was known as Wallis) and her mother's elder sister, Bessie (Mrs. D. Buchanan Merryman), and was called Bessie Wallis until, at some time in her youth, the name Bessie was dropped. According to a wedding announcement published in The Baltimore Sun on November 20, 1895, Wallis's parents were married by C. Ernest Smith at Baltimore's Saint Michael and All Angels' Protestant Episcopal Church on November 19, 1895, which suggests she was conceived out of wedlock. Wallis said that her parents were married in June 1895. Her father died of tuberculosis on November 15, 1896. For her first few years, Wallis and her mother were dependent upon the charity of her father's wealthy bachelor brother Solomon Davies Warfield, postmaster of Baltimore and later president of the Continental Trust Company and the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Initially, they lived with him at the four-story row house, 34 East Preston Street, that he shared with his mother. In 1901, Wallis's aunt Bessie Merryman was widowed, and the following year Alice and Wallis moved into her four-bedroom house on West Chase Street, Baltimore, where they lived for at least a year until they settled in an apartment, and then a house, of their own. In 1908, Wallis's mother married her second husband, John Freeman Rasin, son of prominent Democratic party boss Isaac Freeman Rasin. On April 17, 1910, Wallis was confirmed at Christ Episcopal Church, Baltimore, and between 1912 and 1914 her uncle paid for her to attend Oldfields School, the most expensive girls' school in Maryland. There she became a friend of heiress Renée du Pont, a daughter of Senator T. Coleman du Pont of the du Pont family, and Mary Kirk, whose family founded Kirk Silverware. A fellow pupil at one of Wallis's schools recalled, "She was bright, brighter than all of us. She made up her mind to go to the head of the class, and she did." Wallis was always immaculately dressed and pushed herself hard to do well. A later biographer wrote of her, "Though Wallis's jaw was too heavy for her to be counted beautiful, her fine violet-blue eyes and petite figure, quick wits, vitality, and capacity for total concentration on her interlocutor ensured that she had many admirers." ## First marriage In April 1916, Wallis met Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a US Navy aviator, in Pensacola, Florida, while visiting her cousin Corinne Mustin. It was at this time that Wallis witnessed two airplane crashes about two weeks apart, resulting in a lifelong fear of flying. The couple married on November 8, 1916, at Christ Episcopal Church in Baltimore, which had been Wallis's parish. Win, as her husband was known, was a heavy drinker. He drank even before flying and once crashed into the sea, but escaped almost unharmed. After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Spencer was posted to San Diego as the first commanding officer of a training base in Coronado, known as Naval Air Station North Island; they remained there until 1921. In 1920, Edward, Prince of Wales, visited San Diego, but he and Wallis did not meet. Later that year, Spencer left his wife for a period of four months, but in the spring of 1921 they were reunited in Washington, D.C., where Spencer had been posted. They soon separated again, and in 1922, when Spencer was posted to the Far East as commander of the USS Pampanga, Wallis remained behind, continuing an affair with an Argentine diplomat, Felipe de Espil. In January 1924, she visited Paris with her recently widowed cousin Corinne Mustin, before sailing to the Far East aboard a troop carrier, USS Chaumont. The Spencers were briefly reunited until she fell ill, after which she returned to Hong Kong. Wallis toured China, and while in Beijing stayed with Katherine and Herman Rogers, who were to remain her longterm friends. According to the wife of one of Win's fellow officers, Mrs. Milton E. Miles, in Beijing Wallis met Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini's son-in-law and Foreign Minister, had an affair with him, and became pregnant, leading to a botched abortion that left her infertile. The rumor was later widespread but never substantiated and Ciano's wife, Edda Mussolini, denied it. The existence of an official "China dossier" (detailing the supposed sexual and criminal exploits of Wallis in China) is denied by historians and biographers. Wallis spent over a year in China, during which time—according to the socialite Madame Wellington Koo—she managed to master only one Chinese phrase: "Boy, pass me the champagne". By September 1925, she and her husband were back in the United States, though living apart. Their divorce was finalized on December 10, 1927. ## Second marriage By the time her marriage to Spencer was dissolved, Wallis had become involved with Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive and former officer in the Coldstream Guards. He divorced his first wife, Dorothea (by whom he had a daughter, Audrey), to marry Wallis on July 21, 1928, at the Register Office in Chelsea, London. Wallis had telegraphed her acceptance of his proposal from Cannes, where she was staying with her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers. The Simpsons temporarily set up home in a furnished house with four servants in Mayfair. In 1929, Wallis sailed back to the United States to visit her sick mother, who had married legal clerk Charles Gordon Allen after the death of Rasin. During the trip, Wallis's investments were wiped out in the Wall Street Crash, and her mother died penniless on November 2, 1929. Wallis returned to England and with the shipping business still buoyant, the Simpsons moved into a large flat with a staff of servants. Through a friend, Consuelo Thaw, Wallis met Consuelo's sister Thelma, Viscountess Furness, at the time the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. On January 10, 1931, Lady Furness introduced Wallis to Prince Edward at Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray. Edward was the eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary, and heir apparent to the British throne. Between 1931 and 1934, he met the Simpsons at various house parties, and Wallis was presented at court. Ernest was beginning to encounter financial difficulties, as the Simpsons were living beyond their means, and they had to fire a succession of staff. ## Relationship with Edward, Prince of Wales In January 1934, while Lady Furness was away in New York City, Wallis allegedly became Edward's mistress. Edward denied this to his father, despite his staff seeing them in bed together as well as "evidence of a physical sexual act". Wallis soon ousted Furness, and Edward distanced himself from a former lover and confidante, the Anglo-American textile heiress Freda Dudley Ward. By the end of 1934, Edward was irretrievably besotted with Wallis, finding her domineering manner and abrasive irreverence toward his position appealing; in the words of his official biographer, he became "slavishly dependent" on her. According to Wallis, it was during a cruise on Lord Moyne's private yacht Rosaura in August 1934 that she fell in love with Edward. At an evening party in Buckingham Palace, he introduced her to his mother; his father was outraged, primarily on account of her marital history, as divorced people were generally excluded from court. Edward showered Wallis with money and jewels, and in February 1935, and again later in the year, he holidayed with her in Europe. His courtiers became increasingly alarmed as the affair began to interfere with his official duties. In 1935, the head of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch told the Metropolitan Police Commissioner that Wallis was also having an affair with Guy Marcus Trundle, who was "said to be employed by the Ford Motor Company". Rumors of an affair were doubted, however, by Captain Val Bailey, who knew Trundle well and whose mother had an affair with Trundle for nearly two decades, and by historian Susan Williams. ## Abdication crisis On January 20, 1936, George V died at Sandringham and Edward ascended the throne as Edward VIII. The next day, he broke royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his accession from a window of St James's Palace, in the company of the still-married Wallis. It was becoming apparent to court and government circles that the new king-emperor meant to marry her. Edward's behaviour and his relationship with Wallis made him unpopular with the Conservative-led British government, as well as distressing his mother and his brother the Duke of York. The British media remained deferential to the monarchy, and no stories of the affair were reported in the domestic press, but foreign media widely reported their relationship. After the death of George V, before her divorce from her second husband, Wallis reportedly said, "Soon I shall be Queen of England [sic]." The monarch of the United Kingdom is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. At the time of the proposed marriage (and until 2002), the Church of England disapproved of, and would not perform, the remarriage of divorced people if their former spouse was still alive. Constitutionally, the King was required to be in communion with the Church of England, but his proposed marriage conflicted with the Church's teachings. Additionally, at the time both the Church and English law only recognized adultery as a legitimate ground for divorce. Since she had divorced her first husband on grounds of "mutual incompatibility", there was a possibility that her second marriage, as well as her prospective marriage to Edward, would be considered bigamous if her first divorce had been challenged in court. The British and Dominion governments believed that a twice-divorced woman was politically, socially, and morally unsuitable as a prospective consort. Wallis was perceived by many in the British Empire as a woman of "limitless ambition" who was pursuing the King because of his wealth and position. Wallis had already filed for divorce from her second husband on the grounds that he had committed adultery with her childhood friend Mary Kirk and the decree nisi was granted on October 27, 1936. In November, the King consulted with the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, on a way to marry Wallis and keep the throne. Edward suggested a morganatic marriage, where he would remain king but Wallis would not be queen, but this was rejected by Baldwin and the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, and the Union of South Africa. If Edward were to marry Wallis against Baldwin's advice, the government would be required to resign, causing a constitutional crisis. Wallis's relationship with Edward had become public knowledge in the United Kingdom by early December. She decided to flee the country as the scandal broke, and was driven to the south of France in a dramatic race to outrun the press. For the next three months, she was under siege by the media at the Villa Lou Viei, near Cannes, the home of her close friends Herman and Katherine Rogers, whom she later thanked effusively in her ghost-written memoirs. According to Andrew Morton, who relied on an interview with the stepdaughter-in-law of Herman Rogers conducted 80 years later, Simpson confessed during the writing of her memoirs that Rogers was the love of her life. However, at her instruction, the ghostwriter omitted this revelation from the final memoirs. At her hideaway, Wallis was pressured by Lord Brownlow, the King's lord-in-waiting, to renounce Edward. On December 7, 1936, Brownlow read to the press Wallis's statement, which he had helped her draft, indicating her readiness to give up Edward. However, Edward was determined to marry Wallis. John Theodore Goddard, Wallis's solicitor, stated: "[his] client was ready to do anything to ease the situation but the other end of the wicket [Edward VIII] was determined." This seemingly indicated that Edward had decided he had no option but to abdicate if he wished to marry Wallis. Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication on December 10, 1936, in the presence of his three surviving brothers, the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent. Special laws passed by the Parliaments of the Dominions finalized Edward's abdication the following day, or in Ireland's case one day later. The Duke of York then became King George VI. On December 11, Edward said in a radio broadcast, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." Edward left Britain for Austria, where he stayed at Schloss Enzesfeld, the home of Baron Eugen and Baroness Kitty de Rothschild. Edward had to remain apart from Wallis until there was no danger of compromising the granting of a decree absolute in her divorce proceedings. Upon her divorce being made final in May 1937, she changed her name by deed poll to Wallis Warfield, resuming her maiden name. The couple were reunited at the Château de Candé, Monts, France, on May 4, 1937. ## Third marriage: Duchess of Windsor Wallis and Edward married one month later on June 3, 1937, at the Château de Candé, lent to them by French millionaire Charles Bedaux. The date would have been King George V's 72nd birthday; Queen Mary thought the wedding had been scheduled for then as a deliberate slight. No member of Edward's family attended. Wallis wore a "Wallis blue" Mainbocher wedding dress. Edward presented her with an engagement ring that consisted of an emerald mount in yellow gold set with diamonds, and the sentence "We are ours now" was engraved on it. While the Church of England refused to sanction the wedding, Robert Anderson Jardine, Vicar of St Paul's, Darlington, offered to perform the service, an offer that was accepted by the couple. Guests included Randolph Churchill, Baron Eugène Daniel von Rothschild, and the best man, Major Fruity Metcalfe. The marriage produced no children. In November, Ernest Simpson married Mary Kirk. Edward was created Duke of Windsor by his brother King George VI prior to the marriage. However, letters patent, issued by the new king and unanimously supported by the Dominion governments, prevented Wallis, now Duchess of Windsor, from sharing her husband's style of "Royal Highness". George VI's firm view that the Duchess should not be given a royal title was shared by Queen Mary and George's wife, Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother). At first, the British royal family did not accept Wallis and would not receive her formally, although the former king sometimes met his mother and siblings after his abdication. Some biographers have suggested that Wallis's sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth remained bitter towards her for her role in bringing George VI to the throne (which she may have seen as a factor in his early death) and for prematurely behaving as Edward's consort when she was his mistress. These claims were denied by Elizabeth's close friends, such as the Duke of Grafton, who wrote that she "never said anything nasty about the Duchess of Windsor, except to say she really hadn't got a clue what she was dealing with." Elizabeth was said to have referred to Wallis as "that woman", while Wallis referred to Queen Elizabeth as "Mrs. Temple" and "Cookie", alluding to her solid figure and fondness for food, and to her daughter Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) as "Shirley", as in Shirley Temple. Wallis bitterly resented the denial of the royal title and the refusal of Edward's relatives to accept her as part of the family. Within the household of the Duke and Duchess, the style "Her Royal Highness" was used by those who were close to the couple. According to the wife of former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, Diana Mitford, who knew both Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Windsor but was only friendly with the latter, Elizabeth's antipathy toward her sister-in-law may have resulted from jealousy. Lady Mosley wrote to her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, after the death of the Duke of Windsor, "probably the theory of their [the Windsors'] contemporaries that Cake [a Mitford nickname for the Queen Mother] was rather in love with him [the Duke] (as a girl) & took second best, may account for much." Wallis and Edward lived in France in the pre-war years. In 1937, they made a high-profile visit to Germany and met Adolf Hitler at the Berghof, his Berchtesgaden retreat. After the visit, Hitler said of Wallis, "she would have made a good queen". The visit tended to corroborate the strong suspicions of many in government and society that Wallis was a German agent, a claim that she ridiculed in her letters to Edward. US FBI files compiled in the 1930s also portray her as a possible Nazi sympathizer. Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg told the FBI that Wallis and leading Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop had been lovers in London. There were even rather improbable reports during the Second World War that she kept a signed photograph of Ribbentrop on her bedside table. Edward wrote in the New York Daily News of December 13, 1966: "In a roundabout way [Hitler] encouraged me to infer that Red Russia was the only enemy and that it was in Britain's interest and in Europe's too, that Germany be encouraged to strike east and smash Communism forever ... I confess frankly that he took me in. ... I thought the rest of us could be fence-sitters while the Nazis and the Reds slogged it out." ## Second World War As the German troops advanced, the Windsors fled south from their Paris home, first to Biarritz then to Spain in June. Wallis told United States ambassador to Spain Alexander W. Weddell that France had lost because it was "internally diseased". The couple moved to Portugal in July. They stayed in Cascais, at Casa de Santa Maria, the home of Ricardo do Espírito Santo e Silva, a banker who was suspected of being a German agent. In August 1940, the Duke and Duchess traveled by commercial liner to the Bahamas, where Edward was installed as governor. Wallis performed her role as the governor's consort competently for five years; she worked actively for the Red Cross and in the improvement of infant welfare. However, she hated Nassau, calling it "our St Helena" in a reference to Napoleon's final place of exile. She was heavily criticized in the British press for her extravagant shopping in the United States, undertaken when Britain was enduring privations such as rationing and blackout. She referred to the local population as "lazy, thriving niggers" in letters to her aunt, which reflected her upbringing in Jim Crow Baltimore. Prime Minister Winston Churchill strenuously objected in 1941 when she and her husband planned to tour the Caribbean aboard a yacht belonging to Swedish magnate Axel Wenner-Gren, who Churchill said was "pro-German", and Churchill complained again when the Duke gave a "defeatist" interview. Another of their acquaintances, Charles Bedaux, who had hosted their wedding, was arrested on charges of treason in 1943 but committed suicide in jail in Miami before the case was brought to trial. The British establishment distrusted Wallis; Sir Alexander Hardinge wrote that her suspected anti-British activities were motivated by a desire for revenge against a country that rejected her as its queen. The couple returned to France and retirement after the defeat of Nazi Germany. ## Later life In 1946, when Wallis was staying at Ednam Lodge, the home of the Earl of Dudley, some of her jewels were stolen. There were rumors that the theft had been masterminded by the royal family as an attempt to regain jewels taken from the Royal Collection by Edward, or by the Windsors themselves as part of an insurance fraud—they made a large deposit of loose stones at Cartier the following year. However, in 1960, career criminal Richard Dunphie confessed to the crime. The stolen pieces were only a small portion of the Windsor jewels, which were either bought privately, inherited by the Duke, or given to Edward when he was Prince of Wales. In 1952 the Windsors were offered the use of a house by the Paris municipal authorities. The couple lived at 4 route du Champ d'Entraînement in the Bois de Boulogne, near Neuilly-sur-Seine, for most of the remainder of their lives, essentially living a life of easy retirement. They traveled frequently between Europe and America aboard ocean liners. They bought a second house in the country, Moulin de la Tuilerie or "The Mill" in Gif-sur-Yvette, where they soon became close friends with their neighbors, Oswald and Diana Mosley. Years later, Diana Mosley said that Wallis and Edward shared her and her husband's views that Hitler should have been given a free hand to destroy Communism. In 1965, the Duke and Duchess visited London as Edward required eye surgery for a detached retina; Edward's niece Queen Elizabeth II and sister-in-law Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, visited them. Edward's sister, the Princess Royal, also visited them just 10 days before her death. Wallis and Edward attended her memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Later, in 1967, they joined the royal family in London for the unveiling of a plaque by Elizabeth II to commemorate the centenary of Queen Mary's birth. The couple spoke to Kenneth Harris for an extensive BBC television interview in 1970. Both Queen Elizabeth II and her son Charles, Prince of Wales, visited the Windsors in Paris in Edward's later years, the Queen's visit coming only shortly before Edward died. For much of their later life, Wallis and Edward were served by their valet and footman Sydney Johnson. ## Widowhood Upon Edward's death from throat cancer in 1972, Wallis traveled to the United Kingdom to attend his funeral, staying at Buckingham Palace during her visit. Wallis became increasingly frail and eventually succumbed to dementia, living the final years of her life as a recluse, supported by both her husband's estate and an allowance from the Queen. She suffered several falls and broke her hip twice. After Edward's death, Wallis's French lawyer, Suzanne Blum, assumed power of attorney. Blum sold items belonging to the Duchess to her own friends at lower than market value and was accused of exploiting her client in Caroline Blackwood's The Last of the Duchess, written in 1980 but not published until 1995, after Blum's death. Later, royal biographer Hugo Vickers called Blum a "Satanic figure ... wearing the mantle of good intention to disguise her inner malevolence". In 1980, Wallis lost her ability to speak. Towards the end, she was bedridden and did not receive any visitors, apart from her doctor and nurses. ## Death Wallis died on April 24, 1986, at her home in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, at the age of 89 from bronchial pneumonia. Her funeral was held on April 29 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, attended by her two surviving sisters-in-law – Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester – and other members of the royal family. Elizabeth II; her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; and their son and daughter-in-law, Charles and Diana, attended both the funeral ceremony and the burial. The Princess of Wales said afterwards that it was the only time she had seen the Queen weep. Wallis was buried next to Edward in the Royal Burial Ground near Windsor Castle, as "Wallis, Duchess of Windsor". Prior to an agreement with Queen Elizabeth II in the 1960s, Wallis and Edward had previously planned for a burial in a purchased cemetery plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, where Wallis's father was interred. In recognition of the help France gave to the Windsors in providing them with a home, and in lieu of death duties, Wallis's collection of Louis XVI style furniture, some porcelain, and paintings were made over to the French state. The British royal family received no major bequests. Most of her estate went to the Pasteur Institute medical research foundation, on the instructions of Suzanne Blum. The decision took the royal family and Wallis's friends by surprise, as she had shown little interest in charity during her life. In a Sotheby's auction in Geneva, in April 1987, Wallis's jewelry collection raised \$45 million for the institute, approximately seven times its pre-sale estimate. Blum later claimed that Egyptian entrepreneur Mohamed Al-Fayed tried to purchase the jewels for a "rock bottom price". Al-Fayed bought much of the non-financial estate, including the lease of the Paris mansion. An auction of his collection was announced in July 1997 for later that year in New York. Delayed by his son's death in the car crash that also claimed the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, the sale raised more than £14 million for charity in 1998. ## Legacy Wallis was plagued by rumors of other lovers. The gay American Jimmy Donahue, an heir to the Woolworth fortune, said he had a liaison with her in the 1950s, but Donahue was notorious for his inventive pranks and rumor-mongering. Wallis's memoir The Heart Has Its Reasons was published in 1956, and biographer Charles Higham said that "facts were remorselessly rearranged in what amounted to a self-performed face-lift". He describes Wallis as "charismatic, electric and compulsively ambitious". Fictional depictions of the Duchess include the novel Famous Last Words (1981) by Canadian author Timothy Findley, which portrays her as a manipulative conspirator, and Rose Tremain's short story "The Darkness of Wallis Simpson" (2006), which depicts her more sympathetically in her final years of ill health. Hearsay and conjecture have clouded assessment of Wallis's life, not helped by her own manipulation of the truth. But, in the opinion of her biographers, there is no document that proves directly that she was anything other than a victim of her own ambition, who lived out a great romance that became a great tragedy. In the words of one, "she experienced the ultimate fairy tale, becoming the adored favorite of the most glamorous bachelor of his time. The idyll went wrong when, ignoring her pleas, he threw up his position to spend the rest of his life with her." Wallis herself is reported to have summed up her life in a sentence: "You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance." ## Titles and styles - June 19, 1896 – November 8, 1916: Miss Bessie Wallis Warfield - November 8, 1916 – July 21, 1928: Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. - July 21, 1928 – May 7, 1937: Mrs. Ernest Aldrich Simpson - May 7, 1937 – June 3, 1937: Mrs. Wallis Warfield Wallis resumed her maiden surname by deed poll on May 7, 1937, but continued to use the title "Mrs". - June 3, 1937 – April 24, 1986: Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor The Duchess of Windsor was unofficially styled Her Royal Highness within her own household.
34,224,726	Southampton Cenotaph	1,079,283,999	War memorial in Southampton, England	[ "British military memorials and cemeteries", "Buildings and structures completed in 1920", "Buildings and structures in Southampton", "Cenotaphs in the United Kingdom", "Featured articles", "Grade I listed buildings in Hampshire", "Grade I listed monuments and memorials", "Military monuments in Hampshire", "Monuments and memorials in Hampshire", "War memorials by Edwin Lutyens", "Works of Edwin Lutyens in England", "World War I memorials in England", "World War II memorials in England" ]	Southampton Cenotaph is a First World War memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and located in Watts Park in the southern English city of Southampton. The memorial was the first of dozens by Lutyens to be built in permanent form and it influenced his later designs, including the Cenotaph in London. It is a tapering, multi-tiered pylon which culminates in a series of diminishing layers before terminating in a sarcophagus (or cenotaph, 'empty tomb') which features a recumbent figure of a soldier. In front is an altar-like Stone of Remembrance. The cenotaph contains multiple sculptural details including a prominent cross, the town's coat of arms, and two lions. The names of the dead are inscribed on three sides. Although similar in outline, later cenotaphs by Lutyens were much more austere and featured almost no sculpture. The design uses abstract, ecumenical features and lifts the recumbent soldier high above eye level, anonymising him. The memorial was unveiled at a public ceremony on 6 November 1920. Shortly afterwards, concerns emerged that the list of names on the cenotaph was incomplete. After a newspaper campaign, more than 200 further names were identified and these were eventually added to the cenotaph. The names of most Jewish casualties were omitted, the Jewish community being unhappy that the memorial featured a Christian cross. By the beginning of the 21st century, the engravings on the memorial had deteriorated noticeably. Rather than re-cut them and damage the stonework, they were supplemented by a series of glass panels that bear all the names from the cenotaph, as well as names from the Second World War and later conflicts. The panels were unveiled in 2011. The memorial is a Grade I listed building, having been upgraded in 2015 when Lutyens's war memorials were declared a national collection. ## Background In the aftermath of the First World War and its unprecedented casualties, thousands of war memorials were built across the United Kingdom. Amongst the most prominent designers of memorials was Sir Edwin Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the leading English architect of his generation". Lutyens established his reputation before the war by designing country houses for wealthy clients and through his work on the new Indian Imperial headquarters at New Delhi. The war affected him deeply and, following it, he devoted much of his time to memorialising its casualties. His biographer, Jane Brown, records that, in the 1920s, more than half of his commissions were "for memorials and tombs, (his) clients more the dead than the living". He designed Southampton Cenotaph at around the same as his most famous memorial, The Cenotaph in London. That, along with Lutyens' work for the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), led to commissions for war memorials across Britain and its empire. Being a major port town, Southampton was heavily involved in the British war effort from the outset. It became the main embarkation point for troops crossing the English Channel to France and the main receiving point for wounded personnel being evacuated back to Britain; much of Southampton Common became an assembly point. Over the course of the war, more than eight million soldiers passed through Southampton on their way to the front. As elsewhere, many men from the town quickly volunteered for military service after Britain declared war on Germany, a preponderance of them joining the Hampshire Regiment. Many others from Southampton served on merchant vessels, several of which were sunk during the course of the war, such as the , an armed merchant cruiser sunk in February 1916, and the , an ocean liner converted to a hospital ship, which was sunk in March 1917. The names of the casualties were routinely printed in the local press. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Southampton docks were still busy with military movements, starting with repatriation of prisoners of war and casualties, followed by other soldiers and matériel returning from the front lines. ## Commissioning Shortly after the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, a public meeting was held in the city of Southampton at which it was resolved to construct a memorial to honour the city's war dead. A committee, headed by the Lord Mayor of Southampton, Sidney Kimber, was elected and discussions began as to what form such a memorial should take. The committee decided that their preferred option would be to construct a single, high-quality memorial in a good location within Southampton and began to consider architects and locations, with a proposed budget of £10,000. Alfred Gutteridge, an architect on one of the sub-committees, knew and recommended Lutyens, who travelled to Southampton to meet Kimber, Gutteridge, and other members of the committee in January 1919. Lutyens argued successfully against the committee's initial proposed location on Asylum Green in favour of Watts Park. His initial design featured a Stone of Remembrance (an altar-like monolith used in most IWGC cemeteries and several of Lutyens' memorials in Britain) with a substantial archway on either side, each archway supporting a recumbent figure of a soldier on a sarcophagus. This was rejected due to the likely cost and instead Lutyens suggested a single empty sarcophagus or cenotaph, supported by a plinth, on top of a pillar (pylon) with pine cones mounted on urns standing on each side. This was agreed to at a public meeting in September 1919 and detailed work on the project began. The London firm of Holloway Brothers was selected as the contractor for the memorial; the project was completed on time in 1920 at a total cost of £9,845. ## Design and symbolism The memorial stands on the east side of Watts Park, alongside Above Bar Street. It consists of a cenotaph—a pylon surmounted by a sarcophagus bearing a recumbent effigy of a fallen soldier—raised on five stone steps, in front of which is a Stone of Remembrance raised on two further steps. The cenotaph is a tapering, five-tiered pillar, connected by a low wall to two flanking columns topped by sculpted pine cones, which symbolise eternal life (being the fruit of an evergreen tree, the tree of life). The thin sheets of white Portland stone on the outside of the monument hide an inner brick core. The pillar itself culminates in a series of diminishing tiers between the main body and the sarcophagus. It contains multiple sculptural details—a cross bearing a sword is engraved on the front (east) face of the largest (second) tier, on the tier above on the front and rear is carved Southampton's coat of arms, and on the fourth tier a lion stands on each side. Finally, on the fifth tier, below the sarcophagus, are wreaths which each contain emblems, representing the British Army, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and the Merchant Navy. The pillar is slightly curved (entasis) in imitation of the pillars at the Parthenon in Athens, and a similar effect was later repeated by Lutyens at the Whitehall Cenotaph. Besides the names of the dead, the only inscription on the cenotaph reads OUR GLORIOUS DEAD; The Stone of Remembrance is inscribed THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE, a phrase from the Book of Ecclesiasticus chosen by Rudyard Kipling. The names of the dead are cut into recessed panels on the north, south, and west faces. Lutyens' design predominantly draws on a cleaner, more streamlined version of the classical symbolism used in earlier monuments. He reacted to the criticism of this sometimes cluttered approach by adopting cleaner architectural forms, but still retaining the ideal of a peaceful, "beautiful death". He used shapes derived from classical architecture and with an ecumenical appeal. Southampton's cenotaph features a slender cross, a late addition at the insistence of the committee, although Lutyens was reluctant to feature overtly religious symbolism on his memorials and he resisted pressure to incorporate a cross into several of his later cenotaphs, including Whitehall. Whereas memorials from previous wars, particularly the Second Boer War, often used allegorical figures, Southampton Cenotaph makes use of an abstract, beautiful design intended to remove the viewer from the real world, and focus them on an idealised sense of self-sacrifice and death. The recumbent figure of a soldier is placed high atop the structure, anonymising him and allowing the onlooker to believe that he could be somebody they personally mourned. By placing the figure at the top of the pylon, Lutyens also draws attention to the detail at the top of the pylon, connecting the beauty of the design to the memory of the fallen soldier. Southampton's is significant as the first of Lutyens' First World War memorials to be completed in permanent form. It became the first of multiple cenotaphs by Lutyens across England and the British Empire. The heavy use of sculpture contrasts sharply with Lutyens' later cenotaphs (for example Whitehall or Manchester Cenotaph), which—although of a similar shape and size—were far more austere and relied on subtler forms of expression. Additionally, the Whitehall cenotaph, and several of Lutyens' later cenotaphs, terminate in an empty coffin rather than a recumbent figure. Lutyens reused several elements of his previous work at Southampton. He first designed the pine cones and piers (which flank the cenotaph) for a war shrine in Hyde Park in London. The war shrine was never built, but Lutyens re-used the flanking piers (without the pine cones) for the entrance to Étaples Military Cemetery in France, which he designed for the IWGC. Lutyens re-used several parts of the Southampton design, including the recumbent figure, in his proposal for the Royal Artillery Memorial in London, although that proposal was rejected by the client, who favoured a memorial with greater realism. The design that was eventually built, by sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger, features a dead soldier directly at eye level, as though just fallen. The soldier is covered by his greatcoat, thus still anonymised, but the stark imagery contrasts sharply with Lutyens' abstract, "beautiful" portrayal of death with the soldier raised high above the ground. ## History The Cenotaph was unveiled by Major-General John Seely, the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, and dedicated by the Right Reverend Edward Talbot, Bishop of Winchester, at a public ceremony on 6 November 1920. Seely first removed a canvas covering the whole structure and then a Union Flag which covered the effigy of the soldier, after which the Last Post was played and the crowd observed a two-minute silence. The crowd recited the Lord's Prayer then sang the national anthem, God Save the King, after which Kimber handed the memorial over to the town council. Kimber was very pleased with both the project and Lutyens, and he hoped to build a second war memorial in Southampton using the architect—Lutyens even offered to design a War Cross free of charge—though the project never came to fruition. The committee was left with a surplus of just over £100 once it wound up, which it donated towards the Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Winchester War Memorial at Winchester Cathedral. Issues arose shortly after the unveiling concerning the names inscribed on the memorial. The committee had identified 1,793 names of Southampton men, and a number of women, who had died during the war and these had been inscribed on the Cenotaph. After the unveiling of the monument, multiple relatives approached the committee to request that additional names be added, only to be told that this was not possible. The Hampshire branch of the Comrades of the Great War took up the case and wrote to the Southern Daily Echo newspaper, appealing for families to come forward with more names of unlisted casualties. Kimber eventually agreed and 203 additional names were inscribed in November 1921. Another name was added in 1922, bringing the total to 1,997. More controversy surrounded the exclusion of the Jewish war dead from the memorial. Jews in Southampton had donated to the committee on the understanding that the memorial would commemorate not only Christian casualties but Jewish ones as well: one in ten adult male Jews in Southampton died during the conflict, twice the proportion for Southampton as a whole. The final decision on the design of the Cenotaph, however, featured a prominent Christian cross. This upset the Jewish community, and ultimately Jewish names were predominantly excluded from the memorial; only one Jewish name was finally inscribed on it. By the start of the 21st century, it became evident that the soft stone of the Cenotaph was deteriorating badly as a result of water damage and frost. Recutting the names on the monument was discounted due to the long-term damage this repeated work would cause to the Cenotaph's structure. The council, supported by the Royal British Legion, decided instead to expand the war memorial. A memorial wall, designed by Martin Donlin, consisting of eight large glass panels, 2.85 m (9 ft 4 in) by 1.2 m (3 ft 11 in) mounted in blocks of Portland stone, was installed, with four panels on each side of the Cenotaph, at a cost of £130,000, which was met by the city council and through public donations. The panels were engraved with the names of the World War I casualties and, in addition, those from Southampton who had died in later conflicts. The opportunity was taken to add names missing from the original monument so the Memorial Wall included a total of 2,368 names from the First World War as well as 927 from the Second World War and four from later conflicts—two from the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), and one each from the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960). This addition to the Cenotaph was unveiled on 11 November 2011. Two additional stones were later added to the west of the Stone of Remembrance; one commemorates Southampton civilians who were killed in the Second World War and the other is dedicated to all service personnel from Southampton who died in the line of duty. Another stone was laid by the Cenotaph in 2018, dedicated to Southampton-born Major-General Daniel Marcus William Beak, VC, DSO, MC, who fought in and survived the First World War, and was awarded the Victoria Cross. A small metal plaque mounted on a concrete plinth was installed by Southampton City Council on 28 October 2006 to commemorate members of the International Brigades, communist paramilitaries who fought for the Spanish republican government against the rebelling nationalists (who were supported by Nazi Germany) in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). It stands in a flower bed to the north-east of the cenotaph and lists the names of four casualties, along with a dedication. Southampton Cenotaph was designated a Grade II\* listed building in 1981. Listing provides legal protection from demolition or modification; Grade II\* is applied to "particularly important buildings of more than special interest" and applied to about 5.5% of listings. It was upgraded to Grade I (the highest grade, reserved for buildings of "exceptional interest" and applied to only 2.5% of listings) in November 2015, when Historic England formed a national collection of Lutyens' 44 war memorials. ## See also - Rochdale Cenotaph, another Lutyens memorial similar in design to Southampton's - Grade I listed buildings in Hampshire - Grade I listed war memorials in England - Listed buildings in Southampton
981,989	Harry Glicken	1,172,857,284	American geologist and volcanologist	[ "1958 births", "1991 deaths", "20th-century American geologists", "Academic staff of Tokyo Metropolitan University", "American volcanologists", "Deaths in volcanic eruptions", "Filmed deaths during natural disasters", "Natural disaster deaths in Japan", "Stanford University alumni", "United States Geological Survey personnel", "University of California, Santa Barbara alumni", "University of Tokyo alumni" ]	Harry Glicken (March 7, 1958 – June 3, 1991) was an American volcanologist. He researched Mount St. Helens in the United States before and after its 1980 eruption, and was very distraught about the death of volcanologist David A. Johnston, who was Glicken's mentor and supervisor in Spring 1980 at Mount St. Helens. Glicken was initially assigned to the USGS observation post in the weeks leading up to the eruption but was called away the night before the eruption. In 1991, while conducting avalanche research on Mount Unzen in Japan, Glicken and fellow volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft were killed by a pyroclastic flow. His remains were found four days later and were cremated in accordance with his parents' request. Glicken and Johnston remain the only American volcanologists known to have died in volcanic eruptions. Despite a long-term interest in working for the United States Geological Survey, Glicken never received a permanent post there because there was a hiring freeze for federal agencies when he graduated with his PhD. While conducting research from sponsorships granted by the National Science Foundation and other organizations, Glicken accrued expertise in the field of volcanic debris avalanches. He also wrote several major publications on the topic, including his doctoral dissertation based on his research at Mount St. Helens titled "Rockslide-debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington" that initiated widespread interest in the phenomenon. Since being published posthumously by Glicken's colleagues in 1996, the report has been acknowledged by many other publications on debris avalanches. Following his death, Glicken was praised by associates for his love of volcanoes and commitment to his field. ## Life and career ### Early work Glicken was born in 1958 to Milton and Ida Glicken. He graduated from Stanford University in 1980. Later that year, while a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he was temporarily hired by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to help monitor the volcano Mount St. Helens in Washington state. St. Helens, dormant since the 1840s and 1850s, resumed activity in March 1980. As seismic and volcanic activity increased, volcanologists working for the USGS in its Vancouver branch prepared to observe any impending eruption. Geologist Don Swanson and others placed reflectors on and around the growing lava domes, and, on May 1, 1980, established the Coldwater I and II observation posts to use laser ranging to measure how the distances to these reflectors changed over time as the domes deformed. Glicken monitored the volcano for two weeks, taking shelter in a trailer at the Coldwater II site located a little more than 5 miles (8 km) northwest of the volcano. On May 18, 1980, after working for six days straight, Glicken took the day off to attend an interview for his graduate work with his professor, Richard V. Fisher, in Mammoth Lakes, California. His research adviser and mentor David A. Johnston replaced him at his post, despite expressing concerns about its safety given indications of mobile magma within the volcano. After a magnitude 5.1 earthquake centered directly below the north slope triggered that part of the volcano to slide at 8:32 a.m., Mount St. Helens erupted. Johnston was killed after he was enveloped by swift pyroclastic flows that traveled down the mountain's flanks at near supersonic speeds. After the eruption, Glicken went to Toutle High School, the center for relief efforts, where he joined Air Force Reserve Rescue Squadron officials in a helicopter to look for Johnston or any sign of his post. Despite searching with three separate crews over a span of nearly six hours, Glicken found no trace. He attempted to enlist a fourth helicopter crew to aid his search, but they declined, fearing dangerous conditions. In his distraught state, Glicken refused to accept Johnston's death, and had to be comforted by Swanson before calming down. In mid-1980, after the May eruption, USGS Survey scientists decided to establish the David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, intending to closely monitor volcanoes in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Glicken returned to St. Helens hoping to join the 'autopsy' team. However, every aspect of the eruption had been claimed by different survey scientists, and as a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara studying with Richard Fisher, Glicken was not a survey employee. Instead, he found work with newly appointed Survey employee Barry Voight, a specialist in landslides. Under Voight's guidance, Glicken absorbed himself in his work, motivated to earn a job at the Survey, and to relieve some of his anguish over Johnston's death. Glicken and a team of geologists mapped the debris field left over from St. Helens's structural collapse, which consisted of roughly a quarter of the mass of the volcano. Through extensive, meticulous analysis, the team traced the origins and the means of movement of each piece of debris, ranging from blocks 100 yards (91 m) in width to mere fragments. With his group, Glicken compiled a landmark study in the field of volcanic landslides, establishing the principle that tall volcanoes have a tendency to collapse. The study garnered praise for its unique conclusions and attention to detail, inspiring volcanologists to identify similar deposit mounds at volcanoes around the world. After the findings from his dissertation were published in several shorter articles throughout the 1980s, Glicken earned recognition as the first geologist to explain the creation of hummock fields near tall volcanoes. ### Research after St. Helens and death In the years following the eruption, activity at Mount St. Helens diminished, prompting USGS to reduce CVO's budget and contemplate closing the station. Glicken continued helping the Survey until 1989, also serving as an assistant researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 1989 to 1991, Glicken continued his volcanological studies in Japan as a postdoctoral fellow at the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo, supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Later, while a research professor and translator at Tokyo Metropolitan University, Glicken became involved with research at Mount Unzen. The volcano had recently resumed eruptive activity in November 1990, after being dormant for 198 years. In the months after its first activity, it erupted sporadically, and the government evacuated its vicinity near the end of May 1991. On June 2, 1991, Glicken visited the mountain with Katia and Maurice Krafft. The three entered a danger zone near the base of the volcano the following day, assuming that any potentially hazardous pyroclastic flows would follow a turn in the landscape and safely bypass them. Later that day, a lava dome collapsed, sending a large flow down the valley at 60 miles per hour (97 km/h). The current reached the turn before separating into two parts, and the upper, hotter part swiftly overcame the volcanologists' post, killing them upon impact. In total, 41 or 42 people died in the incident, including press members who had been watching the volcanologists. The volcano burned down 390 houses, and the remains of the flow extended 2.5 miles (4 km) in length. Glicken's remains were found four days later, and were cremated according to his parents' wishes. To date, Glicken and Johnston are the only American volcanologists known to have been killed by a volcanic eruption. ### Posthumous report At the time of his death, Glicken had been seeking to publish his doctoral dissertation in one piece, having earlier published elements as shorter articles. He had already defined the criteria for debris avalanches on the slopes of volcanoes, and authored several publications on the subject; Swanson named him one of the foremost experts in the field. After the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, research in the niche area grew as more studies identified debris at well-known volcanoes. His work on flows at Mount St. Helens is considered the most complete in the field to date. It was later published in 1996 as a single report by his acquaintances Carol Ostengren, John Costa, Dan Dzurisin, and Jon Major, among others, at the United States Geological Survey. In his preface to Glicken's publication, Major comments that "the Mount St. Helens deposit will never be mapped in such detail again." Glicken's report is titled "Rockslide-debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington". It comprises his extensive laboratory and field work, supplemented by photographs of the eruption, writings that describe St. Helens before the eruption, and references to previous publications, including Voight's work. In the report, Glicken constructed a map of the landslide deposit at a scale of 1:24000, followed by a lithologic map describing rock varieties at a scale of 1:12000. The report also provides a conclusion for the movement of each slide block, using photographs and other data to estimate the velocity of each landslide, describing the composition of each, and recounting the interactions between blocks. ## Tributes and legacy Despite their appreciation of his work, many of Glicken's associates considered him eccentric and highly disorganized. Chatty, noted for being extremely sensitive, Glicken also paid meticulous attention to detail. One of his friends writes, "Harry was a character his whole life. ... Everyone who knew him was amazed he was such a good scientist." Regarding Glicken's driving habits, the same acquaintance describes him as "a cartoon character" who "would drive at full speed down the road, talking about whatever was important to him, and ... come to a four-way stoplight and he'd sail through it, never knowing he'd just gone through". Glicken's father said in 1991 that his son died pursuing his passion, and that he was "totally absorbed" with volcanology. United States Geological Survey co-worker Don Peterson adds that Glicken was keen in his enthusiastic approach to observation, and praises his accomplishments throughout his career and as a graduate student. Speaking about Glicken's personal passion for his field, his mentor and professor Richard V. Fisher writes, "What happened at St. Helens is something that troubled [Glicken] deeply for a very long time, and, in a way, I think it made him even more dedicated than he was before." Associate Robin Holcomb remarks that "Harry was very enthusiastic, very bright, and very ambitious, ambitious to do something worthwhile on volcanoes." Many studies have utilized Glicken's criteria for volcanic landslide recognition, and many subsequent papers on avalanches have acknowledged or referenced Glicken's 1996 report. Reflecting on Glicken's body of work, USGS employee Don Swanson names him as "a world leader in studies of volcanic debris avalanches". Glicken was closely connected to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned his doctorate and conducted research. To remember his association with the university, each year the Department of Earth Science awards an outstanding graduate geology student the "Harry Glicken Memorial Graduate Fellowship", established by the Harry Glicken Fund, which aims to support students "who will pursue research relating to the understanding of volcanic processes". ## Selected publications Most of Glicken's published work centers around the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. He also coauthored works with other volcanologists that focused on debris avalanches. Colleague Jon Major writes that "The full scope of Harry's work ... has never been published."
54,190,143	2010 Twenty20 Cup final	1,152,655,994	English cricket match	[ "2010 in English cricket", "T20 Blast finals" ]	The 2010 Twenty20 Cup Final, known for sponsorship purposes as the 2010 Friends Provident t20 Final, was a 20 overs-per-side cricket match between Hampshire County Cricket Club and Somerset County Cricket Club played on 14 August 2010 at the Rose Bowl in Southampton. It was the eighth final of the Twenty20 Cup. Hampshire were making their first appearance in a Twenty20 final, while Somerset were playing in their third, and their second in successive years, having previously won the Twenty20 Cup in 2005. Having won the toss, Somerset chose to bat first and reached 173 for six; Craig Kieswetter was their highest scorer with 71 runs, but was criticised for his slow start. Kieron Pollard was hit in the eye by a bouncer while batting, and had to be taken to hospital, meaning he was not available to bowl for Somerset. In reply, Hampshire reached 62 from their six-over powerplay, but then lost a cluster of wickets. A steadying partnership between Neil McKenzie and Sean Ervine took them to the brink of victory, but another pair of wickets lost led to a tense finish. The scores were eventually tied, and Hampshire won the title having lost fewer wickets. ## Background The Twenty20 Cup was a 20 overs-per-side competition established in England and Wales in 2003, which replaced the 50 overs-per-side Benson & Hedges Cup. The 20-over format was introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board because they believed that a shorter version of the game was needed in order to attract families to matches. In 2010, it was one of three tournaments played by first-class county cricket teams, in what the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack editor Scyld Berry described as the worst fixture list since 1919, due to the inconsistent scheduling which sometimes included Twenty20 games the day before or after a four-day County Championship match. Andy Flower, the head coach of the England men's cricket team, concurred, complaining that "You can't create consistently high standards with those schedules." The tournament split the eighteen county teams into two groups. Within each group every team played each other twice, home and away; the sixteen group-stage fixtures per team were an increase from the ten played the previous season. The top four from each group progressed to the quarter-finals. The competition culminated on "Finals' Day", during which both semi-finals and the final were played, at the same ground, to determine the tournament champions. In 2010 the life insurance company Friends Provident took over as sponsors of the competition, which became known as the Friends Provident t20. Hampshire County Cricket Club, who played under the moniker "Hampshire Royals" in one-day cricket, had never reached the final of the competition before, although they had won the 2009 Friends Provident Trophy, a 50-over tournament. Despite their historic lack of success in Twenty20 cricket, at the start of the tournament The Guardian described them as being one of the favourites, with odds of 15–2. Somerset, who discarded their one-day nickname in 2009, had previously won the Twenty20 Cup in 2005, and had been losing finalists in 2009. They were similarly rated as among the favourites at the outset of the tournament, given odds of 8–1 by The Guardian. ## Route to Finals' Day Both teams featured in the south group of the competition. Somerset won eleven of their sixteen matches to finish top of the group, including victories in both of their matches against Hampshire. In the quarter-final, Somerset hosted Northamptonshire. Somerset's spin bowlers, Murali Kartik and Arul Suppiah both bowled economically to help restrict Northamptonshire to 112 runs. Somerset reached their target with three overs to spare, and secured a place in the competition's showcase Finals' Day. Hampshire, who had finished fourth in the group stage having won eight and lost eight of their matches, travelled to Warwickshire for their quarter-final. Warwickshire batted first and scored 153; Danny Briggs took three important wickets for Hampshire. In reply, James Vince remained not out, scoring 66 runs to help his side to victory with one ball remaining. ## Build-up Finals' Day was broadcast live on Sky Sports, was hosted at Hampshire's home ground, the Rose Bowl in Southampton. The ground had been chosen in 2008 as the venue for the finals, as part of a package of matches awarded to the ground by the England and Wales Cricket Board. Hampshire were missing four of their first-team players; Dimitri Mascarenhas, Nic Pothas, Michael Lumb and Kabir Ali, due to injury. They also chose not to include Kevin Pietersen, who had announced his intention to leave the club. Hampshire's chairman, Rod Bransgrove, explained the omission of Pietersen: "it would not be fair on the lads who took Hampshire into the Twenty20 finals if one of them had to step aside so he could be parachuted into the team." Patrick Kidd of The Times rated James Vince as Hampshire's most dangerous batsman, though his team-mate Jimmy Adams entered Finals' Day as the competition's leading run-scorer, with 600 runs. Wisden Cricketers' Almanack's Hugh Chevallier rated them as the weakest of the four teams to reach the semi-finals, and The Times concurred, giving them the joint-longest odds of any finalists; 7–2. Once the four semi-finalists were known, Somerset were touted as favourites by ESPNcricinfo, who described them as a team "with no clear chink in their armour." The Somerset team featured the competition's two leading wicket-takers, Alfonso Thomas and Kieron Pollard. Kidd highlighted Somerset's strong batting line-up, and listed them as second favourites with odds of 9–4. ### Semi-finals Hampshire featured in the first of the day's semi-finals; playing against Essex. Having been asked to bat first, Essex scored 156; Briggs once again took three wickets for Hampshire, and Dominic Cork and Abdul Razzaq each bowled very economically. Essex bowled well to leave Hampshire needing 42 runs from the final four overs, but aggressive play from Sean Ervine, Neil McKenzie and Michael Carberry took Hampshire to a six-wicket victory. Rain delayed the start of the second match, in which Somerset batted first against Nottinghamshire. Attacking batting performances from Marcus Trescothick, who scored a 28-ball 60, and Jos Buttler, who made 55 not out from 23 balls, propelled Somerset to 182 runs from their twenty overs. Further rain inbetween innings meant that Nottinghamshire required a Duckworth–Lewis adjusted target of 152 runs from 16 overs. Aware that there was more rain around which might further curtail the match, they played attacking cricket, and remained around their required rate throughout the innings, until the wicket of Samit Patel fell at the start of the 13th over. Rain then came in, and the match finished at the end of that over; Somerset won by three runs, using the Duckworth–Lewis method. ## Match ### Summary Played on the same day as both the semi-finals, the match was a day/night game, and started at 7:25 pm. The Somerset captain, Trescothick, won the toss and elected to bat first. The second of the semi-finals had been shortened due to rain, and leading up to the final the ESPNcricinfo commentary described conditions as "murky". After three overs Kieswetter had faced 16 of the 19 deliveries, and scored 12 runs. He was criticised in the press; ESPNcricinfo's Andrew McGlashan said that he had a "stodgy start", while in The Daily Telegraph, Berry said that Kieswetter's "poor form since the World Twenty20 continued". Despite not facing many deliveries initially, Kieswetter's opening partner, Trescothick, scored quickly from those he did face, making 19 runs from 8 deliveries. He struck two boundary sixes, the first of which, a hard front-foot shot over deep cover, was described as the shot of the day by ESPNcricinfo's James Aitcheson. He was dismissed in the fifth over, mishitting a long hop from Abdul Razzaq to Daniel Christian fielding at midwicket. Peter Trego joined Kieswetter at the wicket, but the pair initially struggled on the damp ground, particularly against Hampshire's young left-arm spin bowler, Briggs, whose performance was praised by both McGlashan and David Lloyd, a former cricketer writing for The Independent. Trego added 33 runs from 24 balls, Somerset's second highest score of the innings, before being caught in the outfield in the twelfth over, leaving Somerset on 97 for two. After Trego's dismissal, Kieswetter began scoring more quickly, hitting 3 fours and 2 sixes before both himself and James Hildreth were dismissed in quick succession. Hildreth, who had scored 12 runs, hit a full toss from Razzaq to Christian fielding at gully, and then four balls later, Kieswetter sliced a delivery from Christian to extra cover, where it was caught by Carberry. Kieswetter had scored 71 from 59 balls, after taking 37 deliveries to score his first 29 runs; writing in The Guardian, Vic Marks said that the performance "did not really signal a return to form", as he "willed himself to a significant score, seldom timing the ball". The dismissals moved the Somerset score to 149 for four, and brought two new batsmen to the crease, Pollard and Buttler. Pollard struck a four and two consecutive sixes during the penultimate over, before Cork took the wicket of Buttler in the next over. With three balls of the innings remaining, Pollard was surprised by a bouncer from Cork which got in through the gap in his helmet grille and struck him in the face. Pollard's eye was swollen shut, and he had to retire injured from the match and be taken to hospital. Cork, who was shaken by the incident, dismissed Suppiah with the penultimate ball of the innings, and then prevented any runs from the final ball. He conceded three runs from the final over, restricting Somerset to a score of 173 for six. Lloyd described Somerset's score as a little above par, and suggested that Hampshire would need a "flying start to their pursuit". Jimmy Adams and Razzaq opened the batting for Hampshire, and scored quickly to start the innings. Their total of 62 for one at the end of the six-over powerplay was their second-highest of the competition. The majority of the runs came from two overs; Zander de Bruyn bowled the fourth over, and conceded 16 runs, while Ben Phillips allowed 17 from the subsequent over. The Guardian's Paul Coupar questioned the use of a part-time medium-pace bowler, de Bruyn, during the powerplay – he had not bowled during the semi-final, and was only doing so due to the injury to Pollard. Razzaq was dismissed with two balls of the powerplay remaining, when he was caught behind by Kieswetter, having got a top edge to a delivery from Trego. At the start of the next over, Vince was run out without scoring, and Hampshire were 62 for two. Adams and the new batsman, McKenzie, added 22 runs in the next three overs, before Adams got an inside edge to a delivery from Suppiah, and was bowled. With the score on 84 for three, Ervine joined McKenzie at the crease, and the pair played what McGlashan described as "smart, risk-free batting"; they shared a partnership of 79, moving the score onto 163. At the start of the penultimate over, Hampshire needed eleven runs to win. McKenzie mishit the first ball of the over and was caught at cover for 52, and the next ball Ervine was dropped by Somerset's substitute fielder, Nick Compton. The new batsman, Carberry, was caught behind off a top edge, leaving Hampshire 164 for five, needing to score eight runs from the final over. De Bruyn returned to bowl the last over; from the first four balls, the Hampshire batsmen scored two byes and two runs, only managing to hit the ball once. Kieswetter twice threw at the stumps, aiming to run the batsmen out, but missed both times. Hampshire needed four to win from the final two deliveries, but by virtue of losing fewer wickets, they would also claim the title in the event of a tied match, so three runs would suffice. From the penultimate delivery, Christian hit the ball to deep mid-wicket for two runs, but while running he pulled his hamstring. Christian was on strike for the final delivery, and another Hampshire player had come out to run for him. Christian missed the ball, which struck his pads. Somerset appealed for leg before wicket (lbw), and the Hampshire batsmen ran a single. In the confusion and excitement, Christian himself ran, as well as his runner, meaning that he could have been run out. However, Somerset were distracted with their appeal, and did not notice. After consultation, the umpires confirmed that it was not lbw, and the match was tied; Hampshire won the title by virtue of losing fewer wickets. ### Scorecard - Toss: Somerset won the toss and elected to bat first - Result: Hampshire won by losing fewer wickets Umpires: - Rob Bailey and Richard Illingworth Key - \* – Captain - – Wicket-keeper - c Fielder – Indicates that the batsman was dismissed by a catch by the named fielder - b Bowler – Indicates which bowler gains credit for the dismissal ## Aftermath Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Scyld Berry and Oliver Brown suggested that it was unlikely that the players were aware that Christian could have been run out, saying that "most professional cricketers are most unprofessional when it comes to knowledge of the laws." Chevallier's report in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack went a step further, blaming "Somerset's glaring ignorance of the laws". Asked about the incident post-match, the Somerset captain Trescothick said that they "clearly just did not think at the end there". In his autobiography, Brian Rose, who was Somerset's Director of Cricket, admitted that very few of the Somerset staff and players were aware of that particular law. The Times's Simon Wilde described the loss of Pollard to injury during the match as a major setback for Somerset, particularly as his two replacements performed poorly: as substitute fielder, Compton dropped a catch, while de Bruyn conceded 29 runs from three overs. Speaking after the match, Cork described the victory as vindication for Hampshire's selection policy, saying "We've been slaughtered throughout this campaign in some circles: why weren't we playing this person?", but he praised the blend of youth and experience for building a team "that can play against the best and beat them". Hampshire were awarded £200,000 for winning the competition, while Somerset collected £84,000. As man of the match in the final, McKenzie received £2,000. In the 2011 Twenty20 Cup, Hampshire and Somerset met at the semi-final stage; the scores were level based on Duckworth–Lewis, and Somerset won the resulting super over. They subsequently lost the final to Leicestershire; making them runners-up in the competition three years in a row. Somerset also finished as runners-up in the 2010 and 2011 one-day cup competitions. In 2012, Hampshire won both the Twenty20 and the one-day cup competitions.
2,134,878	Byzantine navy	1,156,191,513	Naval force of the Byzantine Empire	[ "Byzantine navy", "Deforestation in Turkey", "Military history of the Mediterranean", "Naval warfare of the Middle Ages", "Warfare of the Middle Ages" ]	The Byzantine navy was the naval force of the Eastern Roman Empire (a.k.a. Byzantine Empire). Like the empire it served, it was a direct continuation from its Imperial Roman predecessor, but played a far greater role in the defence and survival of the state than its earlier iteration. While the fleets of the unified Roman Empire faced few great naval threats, operating as a policing force vastly inferior in power and prestige to the legions, the sea became vital to the very existence of the Byzantine state, which several historians have called a "maritime empire". The first threat to Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean was posed by the Vandals in the 5th century, but their threat was ended by the wars of Justinian I in the 6th century. The re-establishment of a permanently maintained fleet and the introduction of the dromon galley in the same period also marks the point when the Byzantine navy began departing from its late Roman roots and developing its own characteristic identity. This process would be furthered with the onset of the Muslim conquests in the 7th century. Following the loss of the Levant and later Africa, the Mediterranean Sea was transformed from a "Roman lake" into a battleground between Byzantines and Arabs. In this struggle, the Byzantine fleets were critical, not only for the defence of the Empire's far-flung possessions around the Mediterranean basin, but also for repelling seaborne attacks against the imperial capital of Constantinople itself. Through the use of the newly invented "Greek fire", the Byzantine navy's best-known and feared secret weapon, Constantinople was saved from several sieges and numerous naval engagements were won for the Byzantines. Initially, the defence of the Byzantine coasts and the approaches to Constantinople was borne by the great fleet of the Karabisianoi. Progressively however it was split up into several regional (thematic) fleets, while a central Imperial Fleet was maintained at Constantinople, guarding the city and forming the core of naval expeditions. By the late 8th century, the Byzantine navy, a well-organized and maintained force, was again the dominant maritime power in the Mediterranean. The antagonism with the Muslim navies continued with alternating success, but in the 10th century, the Byzantines were able to recover a position of supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean. During the 11th century, the navy, like the Empire itself, began to decline. Faced with new naval challenges from the West, the Byzantines were increasingly forced to rely on the navies of Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa, with disastrous effects on Byzantium's economy and sovereignty. A period of recovery under the Komnenos dynasty was followed by another period of decline, which culminated in the disastrous dissolution of the Empire by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. After the Empire was restored in 1261, several emperors of the Palaiologan dynasty tried to revive the navy, but their efforts had only a temporary effect. Emperor Andronikos II even dissolved the navy completely, allowing the Venetians to defeat the Romans in two wars, the first of which resulting in a humiliating treaty that saw the Venetians keep multiple islands captured from the Romans during the war and forced the latter to repay the Venetians for the destruction of the Venetian Quarter in Constantinople at the hands of some of the Genoese residents of the city. By the mid-14th century, the Byzantine fleet, which once could put hundreds of warships to sea, was limited to a few dozen at best, and control of the Aegean passed definitively to the Italian and Ottoman navies. The diminished navy, however, continued to be active until the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans in 1453. ## Operational history ### Early period #### Civil wars and barbarian invasions: the 4th and 5th centuries The Byzantine navy, like the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire itself, continued the systems of the Roman Empire. After the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, in the absence of any external threat in the Mediterranean, the Roman navy performed mostly policing and escort duties. Massive sea battles, like those fought centuries before in the Punic Wars (264 to 146 BC), no longer occurred, and the Roman fleets comprised relatively small vessels, best suited to their new tasks. By the early 4th century AD, the permanent Roman fleets had dwindled, so that when the fleets of the rival emperors Constantine the Great and Licinius clashed in 324 AD, they were composed to a great extent of newly built or -commandeered ships from the port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. The civil wars of the 4th and early 5th centuries, however, did spur a revival of naval activity, with fleets mostly employed to transport armies. Considerable naval forces continued to be employed in the Western Mediterranean throughout the first quarter of the fifth century, especially from North Africa, but Rome's mastery of the Mediterranean was challenged when Africa was overrun by the Vandals (429 to 442). The new Vandalic Kingdom of Carthage, under the capable Geiseric (r. 428–477), immediately launched raids against the coasts of Italy and Greece, even sacking and plundering Rome in 455. The Vandal raids continued unabated over the next two decades, despite repeated Roman attempts to defeat them. The Western Empire was impotent, its navy having dwindled to almost nothing, but the eastern emperors could still call upon the resources and naval expertise of the eastern Mediterranean. A first Eastern expedition in 448, however, went no further than Sicily, and in 460, the Vandals attacked and destroyed a Western Roman invasion fleet at Cartagena in Spain. Finally, in 468, a huge Eastern expedition assembled under Basiliscus, reputedly numbering 1,113 ships and 100,000 men, but it failed disastrously. About 600 ships were lost to fire ships, and the financial cost of 130,000 pounds of gold and 700,000 pounds of silver nearly bankrupted the Empire. This forced the Romans to come to terms with Geiseric and to sign a peace treaty. After Geiseric's death in 477, however, the Vandal threat receded. #### Sixth century – Justinian restores Roman control over the Mediterranean The 6th century marked the rebirth of Roman naval power. In 508, as antagonism with the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Theodoric flared up, the Emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518) is reported to have sent a fleet of 100 warships to raid the coasts of Italy. In 513, the general Vitalian revolted against Anastasius. The rebels assembled a fleet of 200 ships which, despite some initial successes, were destroyed by admiral Marinus, who employed a sulphur-based incendiary substance to defeat them. In 533, taking advantage of the absence of the Vandal fleet, sent to suppress a revolt in Sardinia, an army of 15,000 under Belisarius was transported to Africa by an invasion fleet of 92 dromons and 500 transports, beginning the Vandalic War, the first of the wars of the reconquest of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565). These were largely amphibious operations, made possible by the control of the Mediterranean waterways, and the fleet played a vital role in carrying supplies and reinforcements to the widely dispersed Byzantine expeditionary forces and garrisons. This fact was not lost on the Byzantines' enemies. Already in the 520s, Theodoric had planned to build a massive fleet directed against the Byzantines and the Vandals, but his death in 526 limited the extent to which these plans were realized. In 535, the Gothic War began with a double-pronged Byzantine offensive, with a fleet again carrying Belisarius' army to Sicily and then Italy, and another army invading Dalmatia. Byzantine control of the sea was of great strategic importance, allowing the smaller Byzantine army to successfully occupy the peninsula by 540. In 541 however, the new Ostrogoth king, Totila, created a fleet of 400 warships with which to deny the seas around Italy to the Empire. Two Byzantine fleets were destroyed near Naples in 542, and in 546, Belisarius personally commanded 200 ships against the Gothic fleet that blockaded the mouths of the Tiber, in an unsuccessful effort to relieve Rome. In 550, Totila invaded Sicily, and over the next year, his 300-ship fleet captured Sardinia and Corsica, and raided Corfu and the coast of Epirus. However, a defeat in a sea battle off Sena Gallica marked the beginning of the final Imperial ascendancy. With the final conquest of Italy and southern Spain under Justinian, the Mediterranean once again became a "Roman lake". Despite the subsequent loss of much of Italy to the Lombards, the Byzantines maintained control of the seas around the peninsula. As the Lombards rarely ventured to sea, the Byzantines were able to retain several coastal strips of Italian territory for centuries. The only major naval action of the next 80 years occurred during the siege of Constantinople by the Sassanid Persians, Avars and Slavs in 626. During that siege, the Slavs' fleet of monoxyla was intercepted by the Byzantine fleet and destroyed, denying the Persian army passage across the Bosporus and eventually forcing the Avars to retreat. ### Struggle against the Arabs #### Emergence of the Arab naval threat During the 640s, the Muslim conquest of Syria and Egypt created a new threat to Byzantium. Not only did the Arabs conquer significant recruiting and revenue-producing areas, but, after the utility of a strong navy was demonstrated by the short-lived Byzantine recapture of Alexandria in 644, they took to creating a navy of their own. In this effort the new Muslim elite, which came from the inland-oriented northern part of the Arabian peninsula, largely relied on the resources and manpower of the conquered Levant (especially the Copts of Egypt), which until a few years previously had provided ships and crews for the Byzantines. There is, however, evidence that in the new naval bases in Palestine shipwrights from Persia and Iraq were also employed. The lack of illustrations earlier than the 14th century means that nothing is known about the specifics of the early Muslim warships, although it is usually assumed that their naval efforts drew upon the existing Mediterranean maritime tradition. Given a largely shared nautical nomenclature, and the centuries-long interaction between the two cultures, Byzantine and Arab ships shared many similarities. This similarity also extended to tactics and general fleet organization; translations of Byzantine military manuals were available to the Arab admirals. After seizing Cyprus in 649 and raiding Rhodes, Crete and Sicily, the young Arab navy decisively defeated the Byzantines under the personal command of Emperor Constans II (641–668) in the Battle of the Masts of 655. This catastrophic Byzantine defeat opened up the Mediterranean to the Arabs and began a centuries-long series of naval conflicts over the control of the Mediterranean waterways. From the reign of Muawiyah I (661–680), raids intensified, as preparations were made for a great assault on Constantinople itself. In the long first Arab siege of Constantinople, the Byzantine fleet proved instrumental to the survival of the Empire: the Arab fleets were defeated through the use of its newly developed secret weapon, known as "Greek fire". The Muslim advance in Asia Minor and the Aegean was halted, and an agreement to a thirty-year truce concluded soon after. In the 680s, Justinian II (r. 685–695, 705–711) paid attention to the needs of the navy, strengthening it by the resettlement of over 18,500 Mardaites along the southern coasts of the Empire, where they were employed as marines and rowers. Nevertheless, the Arab naval threat intensified as they gradually took control of North Africa in the 680s and 690s. The last Byzantine stronghold, Carthage, fell in 698, although a Byzantine naval expedition managed to briefly retake it. The Arab governor Musa bin Nusair built a new city and naval base at Tunis, and 1,000 Coptic shipwrights were brought to construct a new fleet, which would challenge Byzantine control of the western Mediterranean. Thus, from the early 8th century on, Muslim raids unfolded unceasingly against Byzantine holdings in the Western Mediterranean, especially Sicily. In addition, the new fleet would allow the Muslims to complete their conquest of the Maghreb and to successfully invade and capture most of the Visigoth-controlled Iberian Peninsula. #### Byzantine counter-offensive The Byzantines were unable to respond effectively to the Muslim advance in Africa because the two decades between 695 and 715 were a period of great domestic turmoil. They did react with raids of their own in the East, such as the one in 709 against Egypt which captured the local admiral, but they also were aware of a coming onslaught: as Caliph al-Walid I (r. 705–715) readied his forces for a renewed assault against Constantinople, Emperor Anastasios II (r. 713–715) prepared the capital, and mounted an unsuccessful pre-emptive strike against the Muslim naval preparations. Anastasios was soon overthrown by Theodosius III (r. 715–717), who in turn was replaced, just as the Muslim army was advancing through Anatolia, by Leo III the Isaurian (r. 717–741). It was Leo III who faced the second and final Arab siege of Constantinople. The use of Greek fire, which devastated the Arab fleet, was again instrumental in the Byzantine victory, while a harsh winter and Bulgar attacks further sapped the besiegers' strength. In the aftermath of the siege, the retreating remains of the Arab fleet were decimated in a storm, and Byzantine forces launched a counter-offensive, with a fleet sacking Laodicea and an army driving the Arabs from Asia Minor. For the next three decades, naval warfare featured constant raids from both sides, with the Byzantines launching repeated attacks against the Muslim naval bases in Syria (Laodicea), and Egypt (Damietta and Tinnis). In 727, a revolt of the provincial thematic fleets, largely motivated by resentment against the Emperor's iconoclasm, was put down by the imperial fleet through the use of Greek fire. Despite the losses this entailed, some 390 warships were reportedly sent to attack Damietta in 739, and in 746 the Byzantines decisively defeated the Alexandrian fleet at Keramaia in Cyprus, breaking the naval power of the Umayyad Caliphate. The Byzantines followed this up with the destruction of the North African flotillas and coupled their successes at sea with severe trading limitations imposed on Muslim traders. Given the Empire's new ability to control the waterways, this strangled Muslim maritime trade. With the collapse of the Umayyad state shortly thereafter and the increasing fragmentation of the Muslim world, the Byzantine navy was left as the sole organized naval force in the Mediterranean. Thus, during the latter half of the 8th century, the Byzantines enjoyed a second period of complete naval superiority. It is no coincidence that in the many Islamic apocalyptic texts composed and transmitted during the first and second Islamic centuries, the End Times are preceded by a seaborne Byzantine invasion. Many traditions from the period stress that manning the guard posts (ribat) on the coasts of Syria is tantamount to partaking in the jihad, and authorities like Abu Hurayrah were cited as considering one day of ribat more pious an act than a night of prayer in the Kaaba. These successes enabled Emperor Constantine V (r. 741–775) to shift the fleet from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea during his campaigns against the Bulgars in the 760s. In 763, a fleet of 800 ships carrying 9,600 cavalries and some infantry sailed to Anchialus, where he scored a significant victory, but in 766, a second fleet, allegedly of 2,600 ships, again bound for Anchialus, sank en route. At the same time, however, the Isaurian emperors undermined Byzantium's naval strength: with the Arab threat gone for the moment, and with the largely iconodule naval themes staunchly opposed to their iconoclastic policies, the emperors reduced the navy's size and downgraded the naval themes. #### Renewed Muslim ascendancy The Byzantine naval predominance lasted until the early 9th century when a succession of disasters at the hands of the resurgent Muslim fleets spelled its end and inaugurated an era that would represent the zenith of Muslim ascendancy. Already in 790, the Byzantines suffered a major defeat in the Gulf of Antalya, and raids against Cyprus and Crete recommenced during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809). Around the Mediterranean, new powers were rising, foremost amongst them the Carolingian Empire, while in 803, the Pax Nicephori recognized the de facto independence of Byzantine Venice, which was further entrenched by the repulsion of a Byzantine attack in 809. At the same time, in Ifriqiya, the new Aghlabid dynasty was established, which immediately engaged in raids throughout the central Mediterranean. The Byzantines, on the other hand, were weakened by a series of catastrophic defeats against the Bulgars, followed in 820 by the Revolt of Thomas the Slav, which attracted the support of a large part of the Byzantine armed forces, including the thematic fleets. Despite its suppression, the revolt had severely depleted the Empire's defences. As a result, Crete fell between 824 and 827 to a band of Andalusian exiles. Three successive Byzantine recovery attempts failed over the next few years, and the island became a base for Muslim piratical activity in the Aegean, radically upsetting the balance of power in the region. Despite some Byzantine successes over the Cretan corsairs, and the razing of Damietta by a Byzantine fleet of 85 ships in 853, Arab naval power in the Levant was steadily reviving under Abbasid rule. Further Byzantine attempts to recover Crete, in 843 and 866, were complete failures. The situation was even worse in the West. A critical blow was inflicted on the Empire in 827, as the Aghlabids began the slow conquest of Sicily, aided by the defection of the Byzantine commander Euphemios and the island's thematic fleet. In 838, the Muslims crossed over into Italy, taking Taranto and Brindisi, followed soon by Bari. Venetian operations against them were unsuccessful, and throughout the 840s, the Arabs were freely raiding Italy and the Adriatic, even attacking Rome in 846. Attacks by the Lombards and Lothair I failed to dislodge the Muslims from Italy, while two large-scale Byzantine attempts to recover Sicily were heavily defeated in 840 and 859. By 850, the Muslim fleets, together with large numbers of independent ghazi raiders, had emerged as the major power of the Mediterranean, putting the Byzantines and the Christians in general on the defensive. The same period, when a battered Byzantium defended itself against enemies on all fronts, also saw the emergence of a new, unexpected threat: the Rus' made their first appearance in Byzantine history with a raid against Paphlagonia in the 830s, followed by a major expedition in 860. ### Byzantine Reconquest: the era of the Macedonian dynasty During the course of the later 9th and the 10th century, as the Caliphate fractured into smaller states and Arab power became weakened, the Byzantines launched a series of successful campaigns against them. This "Byzantine Reconquest" was overseen by the able sovereigns of the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056), and marked the noontide of the Byzantine state. #### Reign of Basil I The ascension of Emperor Basil I (867–886) heralded this revival, as he embarked on an aggressive foreign policy. Continuing the policies of his predecessor, Michael III (842–867), he showed great care to the fleet, and as a result, successive victories followed. In 868, a fleet under the droungarios tou ploïmou Niketas Ooryphas relieved Ragusa from an Arab siege and re-established Byzantine presence in the area. A few years later, he twice heavily defeated the Cretan pirates at Kardia and in the Corinthian Gulf, temporarily securing the Aegean. Cyprus also was temporarily recovered and Bari occupied. At the same time, however, the Muslim presence in Cilicia was strengthened, and Tarsos became a major base for land and seaborne attacks against Byzantine territory, especially under the famed emir Yazaman al-Khadim (882–891), despite the heavy defeat of one of his raids before Euripos. In the West, the Muslims continued to make steady advances, as the local Byzantine forces proved inadequate: the Empire was forced to rely on the aid of their nominal Italian subjects, and had to resort to the transfer of the eastern fleets to Italy to achieve any progress. Following the fall of Enna in 855, the Byzantines were confined to the eastern shore of Sicily, and under increasing pressure. A relief expedition in 868 achieved little. Syracuse was attacked again in 869, and in 870, Malta fell to the Aghlabids. Muslim corsairs raided the Adriatic, and although they were driven out of Apulia, in the early 880s they established bases along the western Italian coast, from where they would not be completely dislodged until 915. In 878, Syracuse, the main Byzantine stronghold in Sicily, was attacked again and fell, largely because the Imperial Fleet was occupied with transporting marble for the construction of the Nea Ekklesia, Basil's new church. In 880, Ooryphas' successor, the droungarios Nasar, scored a significant victory in a night battle over the Aghlabids who were raiding the Ionian Islands. He then proceeded to raid Sicily, carrying off much booty, before defeating another Muslim fleet off Punta Stilo. At the same time, another Byzantine squadron scored a significant victory at Naples. These successes allowed a short-lived Byzantine counter-offensive to develop in the West in the 870s and 880s under Nikephoros Phokas the Elder, expanding the Byzantine foothold in Apulia and Calabria and forming the theme of Longobardia, which would later evolve into the Catepanate of Italy. A heavy defeat off Milazzo in 888, however, signalled the virtual disappearance of major Byzantine naval activity in the seas around Italy for the next century. #### Arab raids during the reign of Leo VI Despite the successes under Basil, during the reign of his successor Leo VI the Wise (886–912), the Empire again faced serious threats. In the north, a war broke out against the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon, and a part of the Imperial Fleet was used in 895 to ferry an army of Magyars across the Danube to raid Bulgaria. The Bulgarian war produced several costly defeats, while at the same time the Arab naval threat reached new heights, with successive raids devastating the shores of Byzantium's naval heartland, the Aegean Sea. In 891 or 893, the Arab fleet sacked the island of Samos and took its strategos (military governor) prisoner, and in 898, the eunuch admiral Raghib carried off 3,000 Byzantine sailors of the Cibyrrhaeots as prisoners. These losses denuded Byzantine defences, opening the Aegean up to raids by the Syrian fleets. The first heavy blow came in 901, when the renegade Damian of Tarsus plundered Demetrias, while in the next year, Taormina, the Empire's last outpost in Sicily, fell to the Muslims. The greatest disaster, however, came in 904, when another renegade, Leo of Tripoli, raided the Aegean. His fleet penetrated even into the Dardanelles, before proceeding to sack the Empire's second city, Thessalonica, all while the Empire's fleet remained passive in the face of the Arabs' superior numbers. Furthermore, the Cretan corsairs' raids reached such intensity, that by the end of Leo's reign, most of the southern Aegean islands were either abandoned or forced to accept Muslim control and pay tribute to the pirates. It is no surprise that a defensive and cautious mindset was prevalent in Leo's contemporary instructions on naval warfare (Naumachica). The most distinguished Byzantine admiral of the period was Himerios, the logothetes tou dromou. Appointed admiral in 904, he was unable to prevent the sack of Thessalonica, but he scored the first victory in 905 or 906, and in 910, he led a successful attack on Laodicea. The city was sacked and its hinterland plundered and ravaged without the loss of any ships. A year later, however, a huge expedition of 112 dromons and 75 pamphyloi with 43,000 men, that had sailed under Himerios against the Emirate of Crete, not only failed to recover the island, but on its return voyage, it was ambushed and comprehensively defeated by Leo of Tripoli off Chios (October 912). The tide began to turn again after 920. Coincidentally, the same year witnessed the ascension of an admiral, Romanos Lekapenos (920–944), to the imperial throne, for the second (after Tiberios Apsimaros) and last time in the Empire's history. Finally, in 923, the decisive defeat of Leo of Tripoli off Lemnos, coupled with the death of Damian during a siege of a Byzantine fortress in the next year, marked the beginning of the Byzantine resurgence. #### Recovery of Crete and the northern Levant The Empire's growing might be displayed in 942, when Emperor Romanos I dispatched a squadron to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Using Greek fire, the squadron destroyed a fleet of Muslim corsairs from Fraxinetum. In 949, however, another expedition of about 100 ships, launched by Constantine VII (945–959) against the Emirate of Crete, ended in disaster, due to the incompetence of its commander, Constantine Gongyles. A renewed offensive in Italy in 951–952 was defeated by the Fatimids, but another expedition in 956 and the loss of an Ifriqiyan fleet in a storm in 958 temporarily stabilized the situation in the peninsula. In 962, the Fatimids launched an assault on the remaining Byzantine strongholds on Sicily; Taormina fell on Christmas Day 962 and Rometta was besieged. In response, a major Byzantine expedition was launched in 964 but ended in disaster. The Fatimids defeated the Byzantine army before Rametta and then annihilated the fleet at the Battle of the Straits, notably through the use of divers bearing incendiary devices. Both powers focusing their attention elsewhere, a truce was concluded between Byzantium and the Fatimids in 967, which curbed Byzantine naval activity in the West: the seas of Italy were left to the local Byzantine forces and the various Italian states until after 1025, when Byzantium again actively intervened in southern Italy and Sicily. In the East, in 956 the strategos Basil Hexamilites inflicted a crushing defeat on the Tarsiot fleet, opening the way for another grand expedition to recover Crete. It was entrusted to Nikephoros Phokas, who in 960 set out with a fleet of 100 dromons, 200 chelandia, and 308 transports, carrying an overall force of 77,000 men, to subdue the island. Although the navy ultimately had a limited combat role in the campaign, it was essential for keeping the sea-lanes open after a disastrous attack into the interior of the island required supplies to be brought in by sea. The conquest of Crete removed the direct threat to the Aegean, Byzantium's naval heartland, while Phokas' subsequent operations led to the recovery of Cilicia (in 963), Cyprus (in 968), and the northern Syrian coast (in 969). These conquests removed the threat of the once mighty Muslim Syrian fleets, effectively re-establishing Byzantine dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean so that Nikephoros Phokas could boast to Liutprand of Cremona with the words "I alone command the sea". A few raids and naval clashes occurred as antagonism with the Fatimids mounted in the late 990s, but peaceful relations were restored soon after, and the Eastern Mediterranean remained relatively calm for several decades to come. During the same period, the Byzantine fleet was active in the Black Sea as well: a Rus' fleet that was threatening Constantinople in 941 was destroyed by 15 hastily assembled old ships equipped with Greek fire, and the navy played an important role in the Rus'–Byzantine War of 970–971, when John I Tzimiskes (969–976) sent 300 ships to blockade the Kievan Rus' from retreating over the Danube. ### Komnenian period #### Decline during the 11th century Throughout most of the 11th century, the Byzantine navy faced few challenges. The Muslim threat had receded, as their navies declined and relations between the Fatimids, especially, and the Empire were largely peaceful. The last Arab raid against imperial territory was recorded in 1035 in the Cyclades, and was defeated in the next year. Another Rus' attack in 1043 was beaten back with ease, and with the exception of a short-lived attempt to recover Sicily under George Maniakes, no major naval expeditions were undertaken either. Inevitably, this long period of peace and prosperity led to complacency and neglect of the military. Already in the reign of Basil II (976–1025), the defence of the Adriatic was entrusted to the Venetians. Under Constantine IX (1042–1055), both the army and navy were reduced as military service was increasingly commuted in favour of cash payments, resulting in an increased dependency upon foreign mercenaries. The large thematic fleets declined and were replaced by small squadrons subject to the local military commanders, geared more towards the suppression of piracy than towards confronting a major maritime foe. By the last quarter of the 11th century, the Byzantine navy was a shadow of its former self, having declined through neglect, the incompetence of its officers, and lack of funds. Kekaumenos, writing in c. 1078, laments that "on the pretext of reasonable patrols, [the Byzantine ships] are doing nothing else but ferrying wheat, barley, pulse, cheese, wine, meat, olive oil, a great deal of money, and anything else" from the islands and coasts of the Aegean, while they "flee [the enemy] before they have even caught sight of them, and thus become an embarrassment to the Romans". By the time Kekaumenos wrote, new and powerful adversaries had risen. In the West, the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which had expelled the Byzantines from Southern Italy and had conquered Sicily, was now casting its eye on the Byzantine Adriatic coasts and beyond. In the East, the disastrous Battle of Manzikert in 1071 had resulted in the loss of Asia Minor, the Empire's military and economic heartland, to the Seljuk Turks, who by 1081 had established their capital at Nicaea, barely a hundred miles south of Constantinople. Soon after, Turkish as well as Christian pirates appeared in the Aegean. The Byzantine thematic fleets, which once policed the seas, were by then so depleted by neglect and the successive civil wars that they were incapable of responding effectively. #### Attempts at recovery under Alexios I and John II At this point, the sorry state of the Byzantine fleet had dire consequences. The Norman invasion could not be forestalled, and their army seized Corfu, landed unopposed in Epirus and laid siege to Dyrrhachium, starting a decade of war which consumed the scant resources of the embattled Empire. The new emperor, Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118), was forced to call upon the assistance of the Venetians, who in the 1070s had already asserted their control of the Adriatic and Dalmatia against the Normans. In 1082, in exchange for their help, he granted them major trading concessions. This treaty, and subsequent extensions of these privileges, practically rendered the Byzantines hostage to the Venetians (and later also the Genoese and the Pisans). Historian John Birkenmeier notes that: > Byzantium's lack of a navy [...] meant that Venice could regularly extort economic privileges, determine whether invaders, such as the Normans or Crusaders entered the Empire, and parry any Byzantine attempts to restrict Venetian commercial or naval activity. In the clashes with the Normans through the 1080s, the only effective Byzantine naval force was a squadron commanded, and possibly maintained, by Michael Maurex, a veteran naval commander of previous decades. Together with the Venetians, he initially prevailed over the Norman fleet, but the joint fleet was caught off guard and defeated by the Normans off Corfu in 1084. Alexios inevitably realized the importance of having his own fleet, and despite his preoccupation with land operations, he took steps to re-establish the navy's strength. His efforts bore some success, especially in countering the attempts by Turkish emirs like Tzachas of Smyrna to launch fleets in the Aegean. The fleet under John Doukas was subsequently used to suppress revolts in Crete and Cyprus. With the aid of the Crusaders, Alexios was able to regain the coasts of Western Anatolia and expand his influence eastwards: in 1104, a Byzantine squadron of 10 ships captured Laodicea and other coastal towns as far as Tripoli. By 1118, Alexios was able to pass on a small navy to his successor, John II Komnenos (1118–1143). Like his father, John II concentrated on the army and regular land-based campaigns, but he took care to maintain the navy's strength and provisioning system. In 1122, however, John refused to renew the trading privileges that Alexios had granted to the Venetians. In retaliation, the Venetians plundered several Byzantine islands, and, with the Byzantine fleet unable to confront them, John was forced to renew the treaty in 1125. Evidently, the Byzantine navy at this point was not sufficiently powerful for John to successfully confront Venice, especially since there were other pressing demands on the Empire's resources. Not long after this incident, John II, acting on the advice of his finance minister John of Poutza, is reported to have cut funding to the fleet and transferred it to the army, equipping ships on an ad hoc basis only. #### Naval expeditions of Manuel I The navy enjoyed a major comeback under the ambitious emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–1180), who used it extensively as a powerful tool of foreign policy in his relations with the Latin and Muslim states of the Eastern Mediterranean. During the early years of his reign, the Byzantine naval forces were still weak: in 1147, the fleet of Roger II of Sicily under George of Antioch was able to raid Corfu, the Ionian islands and into the Aegean almost unopposed. In the next year, with Venetian aid, an army accompanied by a very large fleet (allegedly 500 warships and 1,000 transports) was sent to recapture Corfu and the Ionian Islands from the Normans. In retaliation, a Norman fleet of 40 ships reached Constantinople itself, demonstrating in the Bosporus off the Great Palace and raiding its suburbs. On its return voyage however it was attacked and destroyed by a Byzantine or Venetian fleet. In 1155, a Byzantine squadron of 10 ships in support of Norman rebel Robert III of Loritello arrived at Ancona, launching the last Byzantine bid to regain Southern Italy. Despite initial successes and reinforcements under megas doux Alexios Komnenos Bryennios, the expedition was ultimately defeated in 1156, and 4 Byzantine ships were captured. By 1169, the efforts of Manuel had evidently borne fruit, as a large and purely Byzantine fleet of about 150 galleys, 10-12 large transports and 60 horse transports under megas doux Andronikos Kontostephanos was sent to invade Egypt in cooperation with the ruler of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. The invasion failed, however, and the Byzantines lost half the fleet in a storm on the way back. Following the Empire-wide seizure and imprisonment of all Venetians in March 1171, the Byzantine fleet was strong enough to deter an outright attack by the Venetians, who sailed to Chios and settled for negotiations. Manuel sent a fleet of 150 ships under Kontostephanos to confront them there and employed delaying tactics, until, weakened by disease, the Venetians began to withdraw and were pursued by Kontostephanos' fleet. It was a remarkable reversal of fortunes, compared with the humiliation of 1125. In 1177, another fleet of 70 galleys and 80 auxiliary ships under Kontostephanos, destined for Egypt, returned home after appearing off Acre, as Count Philip of Flanders and many important nobles of the Kingdom of Jerusalem refused to participate in the campaign. However, by the end of Manuel's reign, the strains of constant warfare on all fronts and the Emperor's various grandiose projects had become evident: the historian Niketas Choniates attributes the rise of piracy in the latter years of Manuel's reign to the diversion of the funds intended for the maintenance of the fleet for other needs of the imperial treasury. ### Decline #### Angelos dynasty and the Fourth Crusade After the death of Manuel I and the subsequent demise of the Komnenian dynasty in 1185, the navy declined swiftly. The maintenance of galleys and the upkeep of proficient crews were very expensive, and neglect led to a rapid deterioration of the fleet. Already by 1182 the Byzantines had to pay Venetian mercenaries to crew some of their galleys, but in the 1180s, as the bulk of the Komnenian naval establishment persisted, expeditions of 70–100 ships are still recorded in contemporary sources. Thus Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–1185) could still gather 100 warships in 1185 to resist and later defeat a Norman fleet in the Sea of Marmara. However, the subsequent peace treaty included a clause that required the Normans to furnish a fleet for the Empire. This, together with a similar agreement made by Isaac II Angelos (1185–1195 and 1203–1204) with Venice the next year, in which the Republic would provide 40–100 galleys at six months' notice in exchange for favourable trading concessions, is a telling indication that the Byzantine government was aware of the inadequacy of its own naval establishment. The period also saw the rise of piracy across the Eastern Mediterranean. The pirate activity was high in the Aegean, while pirate captains frequently offering themselves as mercenaries to one or the other of the region's powers, providing for the latter a quick and cheap way of raising a fleet for particular expeditions, without the costs of a standing navy. Thus a Byzantine fleet of 66 vessels sent by Isaac II to recapture Cyprus from Isaac Komnenos was destroyed by the pirate Margaritus of Brindisi, who was in the employ of the Normans of Sicily. The depredations of the pirates, especially the Genoese captain Kaphoures, described by Niketas Choniates and his brother, the Metropolitan of Athens Michael Choniates, finally forced the Angeloi to action. The fleet tax was once again levied from the coastal regions and a navy of 30 ships was equipped, which was entrusted to the Calabrian pirate Steiriones. Despite scoring a few early successes, Steiriones' fleet was destroyed in a surprise attack by Kaphoures off Sestos. A second fleet, augmented by Pisan vessels and again commanded by Steiriones, was finally able to defeat Kaphoures and end his raids. At the same time, however, the then megas doux, Michael Stryphnos, was accused by Niketas Choniates of enriching himself by selling off the equipment of the imperial fleet, while by the early 13th century the authority of the central government had weakened to such an extent that various local potentates began seizing power in the provinces. The general atmosphere was one of lawlessness, which enabled men like Leo Sgouros in southern Greece and the imperial governor of Samos, Pegonites, to use their ships for their own purposes, launching raids of their own. Even Emperor Alexios III Angelos (1195–1203) is said to have licensed one of his commanders, Constantine Phrangopoulos, to launch pirate raids against commerce in the Black Sea. The Byzantine state and its fleet were thus in no state to resist the naval might of Venice, which supported the Fourth Crusade. When Alexios III and Stryphnos were alerted to the fact that the Crusade was sailing for Constantinople, only 20 "wretched and decayed" vessels could be found, according to Niketas Choniates. During the first Crusader siege of the city in 1203, the attempts of the Byzantine ships to oppose the Crusader fleet from entering the Golden Horn were repulsed, and the Byzantine attempt to employ fireships failed due to the Venetians' skill at handling their ships. #### Nicaea and the Palaiologan period After the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Byzantine Empire was partitioned between the Crusaders, while three Greek successor states were set up, the Despotate of Epirus, the Empire of Trebizond, and the Empire of Nicaea, each claiming the Byzantine imperial title. The former did not maintain a fleet, the Trapezuntine navy was minuscule and mostly used for patrols and transporting troops, while the Nicaeans initially followed a policy of consolidation and used their fleet for coastal defence. Under John III Vatatzes (1222–1254), a more energetic foreign policy was pursued, and in 1225, the Nicaean fleet was able to occupy the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, and Icaria. It was, however, no match for the Venetians: attempting to blockade Constantinople in 1235, the Nicaean navy was defeated by a far smaller Venetian force, and in another similar attempt in 1241, the Nicaeans were again routed. Nicaean efforts during the 1230s to support a local rebellion in Crete against Venice were also only partially successful, with the last Nicaean troops being forced to leave the island in 1236. Aware of the weakness of his navy, in March 1261 the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1259–1282) concluded the Treaty of Nymphaeum with the Genoese, securing their aid against Venice at sea, in return for commercial privileges. Following the recapture of Constantinople a few months later however, Michael VIII was able to focus his attention on building up his own fleet. In the early 1260s, the Byzantine navy was still weak and depended still greatly on Genoese aid. Even so, the allies were not able to stand up to Venice in a direct confrontation, as evidenced by the defeat of a combined Byzantine–Genoese fleet of 48 ships by a much smaller Venetian fleet in 1263. Taking advantage of the Italians' preoccupation with the ongoing Venetian–Genoese war, by 1270 Michael's efforts had produced a strong navy of 80 ships, with several Latin privateers sailing under imperial colours. In the same year, a fleet of 24 galleys besieged the town of Oreos in Negroponte (Euboea), and defeated a Latin fleet of 20 galleys. This marked the first successful independent Byzantine naval operation and the beginning of an organized naval campaign in the Aegean that would continue throughout the 1270s and would result in the recapture, albeit briefly, of many islands from the Latins. This revival did not last long. Following the death of Charles of Anjou in 1285 and the end of the threat of an invasion from Italy, Michael's successor Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328) assumed that, by relying on the naval strength of his Genoese allies, he could do without the maintenance of a fleet, whose particularly heavy expenditure the increasingly cash-strapped treasury could no longer afford. At the same time, Andronikos was less concerned with the West and more with affairs in Asia Minor and his—eventually futile—attempt to stop the Turkish advance there, a policy where the fleet lacked a role. Consequently, the entire fleet was disbanded, its crews dismissed and the ships are broken up or left to rot. The results were quick to follow: during Andronikos' long reign, the Turks gradually took permanent possession of the Aegean coasts of Anatolia, with the Empire unable to reverse the situation, while the Venetian fleet was able to attack Constantinople and raid its suburbs at will during the 1296–1302 war. Andronikos' decision aroused considerable opposition and criticism from contemporary scholars and officials almost from the outset, and historians like Pachymeres and Nikephoros Gregoras dwell long on the disastrous long-term effects of this short-sighted decision: piracy flourished, often augmented by the crews of the disbanded fleet who took service under Turkish and Latin masters, Constantinople was rendered defenceless towards the Italian maritime powers, and more and more Aegean islands fell under foreign rule—including Chios to the Genoese Benedetto Zaccaria, Rhodes and the Dodecanese to the Hospitallers, Lesbos and other islands to the Gattilusi. As Gregoras commented, "if [the Byzantines] had remained masters of the seas, as they had been, then the Latins would not have grown so arrogant [...], nor would the Turks ever have gazed upon the sands of the [Aegean] sea, [...] nor would we have to pay to everyone tribute every year." After 1305, bowing to popular pressure and the need to contain the Catalan Company, the Emperor belatedly tried to rebuild the navy of 20 vessels, but although a few ships were built and a small fleet appears to have been active over the next couple of years, it eventually was disbanded again. In the 14th century, recurrent civil wars, attacks from Bulgaria and Serbia in the Balkans and the devastation caused by ever-increasing Turkish raids hastened the collapse of the Byzantine state, which would culminate in its final fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Several emperors after Andronikos II also tried to re-build a fleet, especially in order to secure the security and hence the independence of Constantinople itself from the interference of the Italian maritime powers, but their efforts produced only short-term results. Thus Andronikos II's successor Andronikos III Palaiologos (1328–1341), immediately after his accession, with the help of contributions from various magnates, assembled a large fleet of reportedly 105 vessels. This he personally led in the last major foray of a Byzantine navy in the Aegean, recovering Chios and Phocaea from the Genoese and forcing various smaller Latin and Turkish principalities to come to terms with him. His campaigns against the Ottomans in Bithynia were failures, however, and soon the Ottomans had established their first naval base at Trigleia on the Sea of Marmara, from where they raided the coasts of Thrace. To defend against this new threat, towards the end of Andronikos III's reign a fleet of some 70 ships was built at Constantinople to oppose the Turkish raids, and headed by the megas doux, Alexios Apokaukos. This fleet was very active during the civil war of 1341–1347, in which its commander played a prominent role. Following the civil war, Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–1354) tried to restore the navy and merchant fleet, as a means of both reducing the Empire's economic dependency on the Genoese colony of Galata, which controlled the trade passing through Constantinople, and of securing the control of the Dardanelles against passage by the Turks. To that end, he enlisted the aid of the Venetians, but in March 1349, his newly built fleet of nine warships and about 100 smaller vessels were caught in a storm off the southern shore of Constantinople. The inexperienced crews panicked, and the ships were either sunk or captured by the Genoese. Undeterred, Kantakouzenos launched another effort at building a fleet, which allowed him to re-establish Byzantine authority over Thessalonica and some coastal cities and islands. A core of this fleet was maintained at Constantinople, and although Byzantine ships remained active in the Aegean, and scored some successes over Turkish pirates, they were never able to stop their activities, let alone challenge the Italian navies for supremacy at sea. Lack of funds condemned the fleet to a mere handful of vessels maintained at Constantinople. It is characteristic that in his 1418 pamphlet to the despotes Theodore II Palaiologos, the scholar Gemistos Plethon advises against the maintenance of a navy, on the grounds that resources were insufficient to adequately maintain both it and an effective army. Henceforth, the impoverished Byzantine state became a pawn of the great powers of the day, trying to survive by exploiting their rivalries. Thus, for instance, in 1351, Kantakouzenos was induced to side with Venice in its war with Genoa, but, abandoned by the Venetian admirals, his fleet was easily defeated by the Genoese and he was forced to sign an unfavourable peace. During the brief usurpation of John VII in 1390, Manuel II (1391–1425) was able to gather only five galleys and four smaller vessels (including some from the Hospitallers of Rhodes) to recapture Constantinople and rescue his father John V. Six years later, Manuel promised to arm ten ships to assist the Crusade of Nicopolis; twenty years later, he personally commanded 4 galleys and 2 other vessels carrying some infantry and cavalry, and saved the island of Thasos from an invasion. Byzantine ships were active throughout the Ottoman Interregnum, when Byzantium sided with various rival Ottoman princes in turn. Manuel used his ships to ferry the rival pretenders and their forces across the Straits. With Genoese assistance, Manuel's fleet was also able to muster a fleet of eight galleys and capture Gallipoli in May 1410, albeit for a brief time; and in August 1411, the Byzantine fleet was instrumental in the failure of a siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman prince Musa Çelebi, when it defeated Musa's attempt to blockade the city by sea as well. Likewise, in 1421, 10 Byzantine warships were engaged in support of the Ottoman pretender Mustafa against Sultan Murad II. The last recorded Byzantine naval victory occurred in 1427 in a battle off the Echinades Islands, when the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (1425–1448) defeated the superior fleet of Carlo I Tocco, Count of Cephalonia and Despot of Epirus, forcing him to relinquish all his holdings in the Morea to the Byzantines. The last appearance of the Byzantine navy was in the final Ottoman siege of 1453, when a mixed fleet of Byzantine, Genoese and Venetian ships (varying numbers are provided by the sources, ranging from 10 to 39 vessels) defended Constantinople against the Ottoman fleet. During the siege, on 20 April 1453, the last naval engagement in Byzantine history took place when three Genoese galleys escorting a Byzantine transport fought their way through the huge Ottoman blockade fleet and into the Golden Horn. ## Organization ### Early period (4th – mid-7th centuries) Very little is known about the organization of the Roman fleets of late Antiquity, from the gradual break-up of the large provincial fleets into smaller squadrons in the 3rd century to the formation of a new navy at the onset of the Muslim conquests. Despite the evidence of considerable naval activity in this period, earlier scholars believed that the Roman navy had all but vanished by the 4th century, but more recent work has altered this picture towards a transformation into a mainly fluvial and coastal force, designed for close co-operation with the army. Under Emperor Diocletian (284–305), the navy's strength reportedly increased from 46,000 men to 64,000 men, a figure that represents the numerical peak of the late Roman navy. The Danube Fleet (Classis Histrica) with its attendant legionary flotillas is still well attested in the Notitia Dignitatum, and its increased activity is commented upon by Vegetius (De Re Militari, IV.46). In the West, several fluvial fleets are mentioned, but the old standing praetorian fleets had all but vanished (De Re Militari, IV.31) and even the remaining western provincial fleets appear to have been seriously understrength and incapable of countering any significant barbarian attack. In the East, the Syrian and Alexandrian fleets are known from legal sources to have still existed in c. 400 (Codex Justinianus, XI.2.4 & XI.13.1), while a fleet is known to have been stationed at Constantinople itself, perhaps created out of the remnants of the praetorian fleets. In 400 it was sufficient to slaughter a large number of Goths who had built rafts and tried to cross the strip of sea that separates Asia from Europe. Its size, however, is unknown, and it does not appear in the Notitia. For operations in the Mediterranean during the 5th century, fleets appear to have been assembled on an ad hoc basis and then disbanded. The first permanent Byzantine fleet can be traced to the early 6th century and the revolt of Vitalian in 513–515, when Anastasius I created a fleet to counter the rebels' own. This fleet was retained and under Justinian I and his successors it was developed into a professional and well-maintained force. Because of the absence of any naval threat, however, the navy of the late 6th century was relatively small, with several small flotillas in the Danube and two main fleets maintained at Ravenna and Constantinople. Additional flotillas must have been stationed at the other great maritime and commercial centres of the Empire: at Alexandria, providing the escort to the annual grain fleet to Constantinople, and at Carthage, controlling the western Mediterranean. Justinian also stationed troops and ships at the more remote outposts of the Empire, at Septem (Ceuta), Cherson in the Crimea, and Aelana (Eilat) in the Gulf of Aqaba. The long-established naval tradition and infrastructure of those areas made the maintenance of the fleet easier, and, in the event of a naval expedition, a large fleet could be quickly and inexpensively assembled by impressing the numerous merchant vessels. ### Middle period (late 7th century – 1070s) #### Fleet organization In response to the Arab conquests during the 7th century, the whole administrative and military system of the Empire was reformed, and the thematic system established. According to this, the Empire was divided into several themes (Ancient Greek: θέματα, romanized: themata, sing. θέμα, thema), which were regional civil and military administrations. Under the command of a strategos, each theme maintained its own, locally levied forces. Following a series of revolts by thematic forces, under Constantine V the larger early themes were progressively broken up, while a central imperial army, the tagmata, was created, stationed at or near Constantinople, serving as a central reserve that henceforth formed the core of campaigning armies. ##### Rise and fall of the Karabisianoi A similar process was followed in the fleet, which was organized along similar lines. In the second half of the 7th century, the fleet of the Karabisianoi (Ancient Greek: Καραβισιάνοι, lit. 'the Ships' Men') was created. The exact date is unknown, with suggestions ranging from the 650s/660s, in response to the Battle of the Masts, or following the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 672–678. Its origin is also unknown: it was recruited possibly from the remainders of the old quaestura exercitus, or the army of the Illyricum. It was headed by a strategos (strategos ton karabon/karabisianon, lit. 'general of the ships/seafarers'), and included the southern coast of Asia Minor from Miletus to the frontier with the Caliphate near Seleucia in Cilicia, the Aegean islands and the imperial holdings in southern Greece. Its headquarters was initially perhaps at Samos, with a subordinate command under a droungarios at Cibyrrha in Pamphylia. As its name suggests, it comprised most of the Empire's standing navy, and faced the principal maritime threat, the Arab fleets of Egypt and Syria. The Karabisianoi however proved inadequate and were replaced in the early 8th century by a more complex system composed of three elements, which with minor alterations survived until the 11th century: a central imperial fleet based at Constantinople, a small number of large regional naval commands, either naval themes or independent commands termed "droungariates", and a greater number of local squadrons charged with purely defensive and police tasks and subordinate to the local provincial governors. Unlike the earlier Roman navy, where the provincial fleets were decidedly inferior in numbers and included only lighter vessels than the central fleets, the Byzantine regional fleets were probably formidable formations in their own right. ##### The Imperial Fleet The capital's navy had played a central role in the repulsion of the Arab sieges of Constantinople, but the exact date of the establishment of the Imperial Fleet (βασιλικὸς στόλος, basilikos stolos, or βασιλικὸν πλόϊμον, basilikon ploïmon) as a distinct command is unclear. The Irish historian J. B. Bury, followed by the French Byzantinist Rodolphe Guilland, considered it "not improbable" that the Imperial Fleet existed as a subordinate command under the strategos ton karabisianon already in the 7th century. On the other hand, the droungarios of the Imperial Fleet first appears in the Taktikon Uspensky of c. 842/3; and as there is little evidence for major fleets operating from Constantinople during the 8th century, the Greek Byzantinist Hélène Ahrweiler dated the fleet's creation to the early 9th century. From that point on, the Imperial Fleet formed the main naval reserve force and provided the core of various expeditionary fleets. ##### Maritime themes The first and for a long time only maritime theme (θέμα ναυτικόν, thema nautikon) was the Theme of the Cibyrrhaeots (θέμα Κιβυρραιωτῶν, thema Kibyrrhaioton). It was created from the Karabisianoi fleet, and assigned to the administration and defence of the southern coasts of Asia Minor. The exact date of its creation is unclear, with one view proposing c. 719 and another c. 727. Its strategos, first mentioned in 734, was based at Attaleia. His principal lieutenants were the katepano (head commander) of the Mardaites, an ek prosopou (deputy commander) at Syllaeum and droungarioi of Attaleia and Kos. Being located closest to the Muslim Levant, it remained the Empire's principal naval fleet for centuries, until it was reduced with the decline of the Arab naval threat. The fleet is last mentioned in 1043, and thereafter the theme became a purely civilian province. The Cibyrrhaeots were complemented by two independent naval commands in the Aegean, each headed by a droungarios: the Aigaion Pelagos ('Aegean Sea'), covering the northern half of the Aegean and the Dardanelles and Marmara Sea, and the command variously known as the Dodekanesos ('Twelve Islands') and Kolpos ('Gulf'), which was based at Samos and comprised the southern Aegean including the Cyclades. Unlike the other droungarioi, who headed subordinate commands, these two circumscriptions were completely independent, and their droungarioi exercised both civil and military authority over them. Eventually, they were raised to full maritime themes, the Theme of the Aegean Sea (θέμα τοῦ Αἰγαίου Πελάγους, thema tou Aigaiou Pelagous) in c. 843, while the eastern parts of the Dodekanesos/Kolpos droungariate formed the Theme of Samos (θέμα Σάμου, thema Samou) in the late 9th century. It comprised it the Ionian coast, and its capital was at Smyrna. ##### Local squadrons Some of the other, 'land' themes also maintained sizeable squadrons, usually placed under a tourmarches (mentioned collectively as tourmarchai ton ploïmaton in the Taktikon Uspensky). They played an intermediate role between the large thematic fleets and the central Imperial Fleet: they were permanent squadrons with professional crews (taxatoi), maintained by resources from the imperial treasury and not the province they were stationed in, but subordinate to the local thematic strategos and charged mainly with local defence and police duties. These were: - The Theme of Hellas (θέμα Ἑλλάδος, thema Hellados), founded in c. 686–689 by Justinian II, it encompassed the imperial possessions of southern Greece with capital at Corinth. Justinian settled 6,500 Mardaites there, who provided oarsmen and garrisons. While not exclusively a naval theme, it maintained its own fleet. It was split in 809 into the Theme of the Peloponnese and the new Theme of Hellas, covering Central Greece and Thessaly, which also retained smaller fleets. - The Theme of Sicily (θέμα Σικελίας, thema Sikelias) was responsible for Sicily and the imperial possessions in south-western Italy (Calabria). Once the bastion of Byzantine naval strength in the West, by the late 9th century it had greatly diminished in strength and disappeared after the final loss of Taormina in 902. Distinct tourmarchai are attested for Sicily proper and Calabria. - The Theme of Cephallenia (θέμα Κεφαλληνίας, thema Kephallenias), controlling the Ionian Islands, was established in the mid- to late 8th century, to protect imperial communications with Italy and defend the Ionian Sea from Arab raids. The new imperial possessions in Apulia were added to it in the 870s, before they were made into a separate theme (that of Longobardia) in about 910. - The Theme of Paphlagonia (θέμα Παφλαγονίας, thema Paphlagonias) and the Theme of Chaldia (θέμα Χαλδίας, thema Chaldias) were split off from the Armeniac Theme in c. 819 by Emperor Leo V and provided with their own naval squadrons, possibly as a defence against Rus' raids. Isolated regions of particular importance for the control of the major sea-lanes were covered by separate officials with the title of archon, who in some cases may have commanded detachments of the Imperial Fleet. Such archontes are known for Chios, Malta, the Euboic Gulf, and possibly Vagenetia and "Bulgaria" (whose area of control is identified by Ahrweiler with the mouths of the Danube). These vanished by the end of the 9th century, either succumbing to Arab attacks or being reformed or incorporated into themes. #### Manpower and size Just as with its land counterpart, the exact size of the Byzantine navy and its units is a matter of considerable debate, owing to the scantness and ambiguous nature of the primary sources. One exceptions are the numbers for the late 9th and early 10th century, for which we possess a more detailed breakdown, dated to the Cretan expedition of 911. These lists reveal that during the reign of Leo VI the Wise, the navy reached 34,200 oarsmen and perhaps as many as 8,000 marines. The central Imperial Fleet totalled some 19,600 oarsmen and 4,000 marines under the command of the droungarios of the Imperial Fleet. These four thousand marines were professional soldiers, first recruited as a corps by Basil I in the 870s. They were a great asset to the Imperial Fleet, for whereas previously it had depended on thematic and tagmatic soldiers for its marines, the new force provided a more reliable, better trained and immediately available force at the Emperor's disposal. The high status of these marines is illustrated by the fact that they were considered to belong to the imperial tagmata, and were organized along similar lines. The Aegean thematic fleet numbered 2,610 oarsmen and 400 marines, the Cibyrrhaeot fleet stood at 5,710 oarsmen and 1,000 marines, the Samian fleet at 3,980 oarsmen and 600 marines, and finally, the Theme of Hellas furnished 2,300 oarsmen with a portion of its 2,000 thematic soldiers doubling as marines. The following table contains estimates, by Warren T. Treadgold, of the number of oarsmen over the entire history of the Byzantine navy: Contrary to popular perception, galley slaves were not used as oarsmen, either by the Byzantines or the Arabs, or by their Roman and Greek predecessors. Throughout the existence of the Empire, Byzantine crews consisted of mostly lower-class freeborn men, who were professional soldiers, legally obliged to perform military service (strateia) in return for pay or land estates. In the first half of the 10th century, the latter were calculated to be of the value of 2–3 pounds (0.91–1.36 kg) of gold for sailors and marines. Use was however made of prisoners of war and foreigners as well. Alongside the Mardaites, who formed a significant part of the fleet's crews, an enigmatic group known as the Toulmatzoi (possibly Dalmatians) appears in the Cretan expeditions, as well as many Rus', who were given the right to serve in the Byzantine armed forces in a series of 10th-century treaties. In his De Ceremoniis, Constantine Porphyrogennetos gives the fleet lists for the expeditions against Crete of 911 and 949. These references have sparked a considerable debate as to their interpretation: thus the numbers given for the entire Imperial Fleet in 949 can be interpreted as either 100, 150 or 250 ships, depending on the reading of the Greek text. The precise meaning of the term ousia (οὺσία) is also a subject of confusion: traditionally, it is held to have been a standard complement of 108 men, and that more than one could be present aboard a single ship. In the context of the De Ceremoniis however, it can also be read simply as "unit" or "ship". The number of 150 seems more compatible with the numbers recorded elsewhere, and is accepted by most scholars, although they differ as to the composition of the fleet. Makrypoulias interprets the number as 8 pamphyloi, 100 ousiakoi and 42 dromones proper, the latter including the two imperial vessels and the ten ships of the Stenon squadron. As for the total size of the Byzantine navy in this period, Warren Treadgold extrapolates a total, including the naval themes, of c. 240 warships, a number which was increased to 307 for the Cretan expedition of 960–961. According to Treadgold, the latter number probably represents the approximate standing strength of the entire Byzantine navy (including the smaller flotillas) in the 9th and 10th centuries. It is however noteworthy that a significant drop in the numbers of ships and men attached to the thematic fleets is evident between 911 and 949. This drop, which reduced the size of thematic fleets from a third to a quarter of the total navy, was partly due to the increased use of the lighter ousiakos type instead of the heavier dromon proper, and partly due to financial and manpower difficulties. It is also indicative of a general trend that would lead to the complete disappearance of the provincial fleets by the late 11th century. #### Rank structure Although naval themes were organized much the same way as their land counterparts, there is some confusion in the Byzantine sources as to the exact rank structure. The usual term for admiral was strategos, the same term used for the generals that governed the land themes. Under the strategos were two or three tourmarchai (sing. tourmarches, effectively 'vice admiral'), in turn overseeing a number of droungarioi (sing. droungarios, corresponding to 'rear admiral'). Until the mid-9th century, the governors of the themes of the Aegean and Samos are also recorded as droungarioi, since their commands were split off from the original Karabisianoi fleet, but they were then raised to the rank of strategos. As the thematic admirals also doubled as governors of their themes, they were assisted by a protonotarios (chief secretary) who headed the civilian administration of the theme. Further staff officers were the chartoularios in charge of the fleet administration, the protomandator (chief messenger), who acted as chief of staff, and a number of staff kometes ('counts', sing. komes), including a komes tes hetaireias, who commanded the bodyguard (hetaireia) of the admiral. The Imperial Fleet was a different case, as it was not tied to the thematic administration, but was considered as one of the tagmata, the professional central reserve forces. Consequently, the commander of the Imperial Fleet remained known as the droungarios tou basilikou ploïmou (later with the prefix megas, 'grand'). Originally very lowly ranked, the office rose quickly in the hierarchy: by 899 he was placed immediately before or after the logothetes tou dromou, and ahead of various senior military and civil officials. He was also notable in not being classed with the other military commanders, whether of the themes or of the tagmata, but in the special class of military officials, the stratarchai, where he is listed second after the hetaireiarches, the commander of the imperial bodyguard. His title is still found in the Komnenian era, albeit as commander of the imperial escort squadron, and survived until the Palaiologan era, being listed in the 14th-century Book of Offices of Pseudo-Kodinos. The office of a deputy called topoteretes is also mentioned for the Imperial Fleet, but his role is unclear from the sources. He may have held a post similar to that of a port admiral. Although some of these senior officers were professional seamen, having risen from the ranks, most fleet commanders were high court officials, who would have relied on their more experienced professional subordinates for nautical expertise. In the lower levels of organization, there was more uniformity: squadrons of three or five ships were commanded by a komes or droungarokomes, and each ship's captain was called kentarchos ('centurion'), although literary sources also used more archaic terms like nauarchos or even trierarchos. Each ship's crew, depending on its size, was composed of one to three ousiai. Under the captain, there was the bandophoros ('banner bearer'), who acted as executive officer, two protokaraboi (sing. protokarabos, 'first ship-man'), sometimes also referred to archaically as kybernetes, and a bow officer, the proreus. The protokaraboi were helmsmen, in charge of the steering oars in the stern, as well as of the rowers on either side of the ship. The senior of the two was the "first protokarabos (protos protokarabos). In actual terms, there probably were several of each kind of officer upon each ship, working in shifts. Most of these officers rose from the ranks, and there are references in the De Administrando Imperio to first oarsmen (protelatai) who rose to become protokaraboi in the imperial barges, and later assumed still higher offices; Emperor Romanos Lekapenos being the most successful example. There were also a number of specialists on board, such as the two bow oarsmen and the siphonatores, who worked the siphons used for discharging the Greek fire. A boukinator (trumpeter) is also recorded in the sources, who conveyed orders to the rowers (koplatai or elatai). Since the marine infantry were organized as regular army units, their ranks followed those of the army. ### Late period (1080s–1453) #### Reforms of the Komnenoi After the decline of the navy in the 11th century, Alexios I rebuilt it on different lines. Since the thematic fleets had all but vanished, their remnants were amalgamated into a unified imperial fleet, under the new office of the megas doux. The first known occupant of the office was Alexios' brother-in-law John Doukas, in c. 1092. The megas droungarios tou ploïmou, once the overall naval commander, was subordinated to him, acting now as his principal aide. The megas doux was also appointed as overall governor of southern Greece, the old themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese, which were divided into districts (oria) that supplied the fleet. Under John II, the Aegean islands also became responsible for the maintenance, crewing and provision of warships, and contemporary sources took pride in the fact that the great fleets of Manuel's reign were crewed by "native Romans", although use continued to be made of mercenaries and allied squadrons. However, the fact that the fleet was now exclusively built and based around Constantinople, and that provincial fleets were not reconstituted, did have its drawbacks, as outlying areas, in particular Greece, were left vulnerable to attack. #### Nicaean navy With the decline of the Byzantine fleet in the latter 12th century, the Empire increasingly relied on the fleets of Venice and Genoa. Following the sack of 1204 however, sources suggest the presence of a relatively strong fleet already under the first Nicaean emperor, Theodore I Laskaris, although specific details are lacking. Under John III and Theodore II (r. 1254–1258), the navy had two main strategic areas of operations: the Aegean, entailing operations against the Greek islands (chiefly Rhodes) as well as the transport and supply of armies fighting in the Balkans, and the Sea of Marmara, where the Nicaeans aimed to interdict Latin shipping and threaten Constantinople. Smyrna provided the main shipyard and base for the Aegean, with a secondary one at Stadeia, while the main base for operations in the Marmara Sea was Holkos, near Lampsakos across the Gallipoli peninsula. #### Palaiologan navy Despite their efforts, the Nicaean emperors failed to successfully challenge the Venetian domination of the seas, and were forced to turn to the Genoese for aid. After regaining Constantinople in 1261 however, Michael VIII initiated a great effort to lessen this dependence by building a "national" navy, forming a number of new corps to this purpose: the Gasmouloi (Γασμοῦλοι), who were men of mixed Greek-Latin descent living around the capital; and men from Laconia, called Lakones) or Tzakones (Τζάκωνες), were used as marines, forming the bulk of Byzantine naval manpower in the 1260s and 1270s. Michael also set the rowers, called Prosalentai (Προσαλενταί) or Proselontes (Προσελῶντες), apart as a separate corps. All these groups received small grants of land to cultivate in exchange for their service, and were settled together in small colonies. The Prosalentai were settled near the sea throughout the northern Aegean, while the Gasmouloi and Tzakones were settled mostly around Constantinople and in Thrace. These corps remained extant, albeit in a diminished form, throughout the last centuries of the Empire; indeed the Gasmouloi of Gallipoli formed the bulk of the crews of the first Ottoman fleets after the Ottomans captured the area. Throughout the Palaiologan period, the fleet's main base was the harbour of Kontoskalion on the Marmara shore of Constantinople, dredged and refortified by Michael VIII. Among the provincial naval centres, probably the most important was Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. At the same time, Michael and his successors continued the well-established practice of using foreigners in the fleet. Alongside the mistrusted Italian city-states, with whom alliances shifted regularly, mercenaries were increasingly employed in the last centuries of the Empire, often rewarded for their services with fiefs. Most of these mercenaries, like Giovanni de lo Cavo (lord of Anafi and Rhodes), Andrea Morisco (successor of de lo Cavo in Rhodes) and Benedetto Zaccaria (lord of Chios and Phocaea), were Genoese, the Byzantines' major ally in the period. Under Michael VIII, for the first time a foreigner, the Italian privateer Licario, became megas doux and was given Euboea as a fief. In 1303, another high rank, that of amerales (ἀμηράλης or ἀμηραλῆς) was introduced. The term had already entered Byzantine usage through contact with the Kingdom of Naples and other Western nations, but was rarely used; it was adopted as part of the imperial hierarchy, coming after the megas doux and the megas droungarios, with the arrival of the mercenaries of the Catalan Company. Only two holders are known, Ferran d'Aunés and Andrea Morisco, both from 1303 to 1305, although the rank continued to be mentioned in various lists of offices long after that. Thus, according to the mid-14th century Book of Offices, the subordinates of the megas doux were the megas droungarios tou stolou, the ameralios, the protokomes, the junior droungarioi, and the junior kometes. Pseudo-Kodinos also records that, while the other warships flew "the usual imperial flag" (βασιλικὸν φλάμουλον, basilikon phlamoulon) of the cross and the firesteels, the megas doux flew an image of the emperor on horseback as his distinctive ensign. ## Ships ### Dromons and their derivatives The primary warship of the Byzantine navy until the 12th century was the dromon and other similar ship types. Apparently an evolution of the light liburnian galleys of the imperial Roman fleets, the term first appears in the late 5th century, and was commonly used for a specific kind of war-galley by the 6th. The term dromon (δρόμων) itself comes from the Greek root δρομ-(άω), lit. 'to run', thus meaning 'runner'; 6th-century authors like Procopius are explicit in their references to the speed of these vessels. During the next few centuries, as the naval struggle with the Arabs intensified, heavier versions with two or possibly even three banks of oars evolved. Eventually, the term was used in the general sense of 'warship', and was often used interchangeably with another Byzantine term for a large warship, chelandion (χελάνδιον, from the Greek word keles, 'courser'), which first appeared during the 8th century. #### Evolution and features The appearance and evolution of medieval warships is a matter of debate and conjecture: until recently, no remains of an oared warship from either ancient or early medieval times had been found, and information had to be gathered by analyzing literary evidence, crude artistic depictions and the remains of a few merchant vessels. Only in 2005–2006 did archaeological digs for the Marmaray project in the location of the Harbour of Theodosius (modern Yenikapi) uncover the remains of over 36 Byzantine ships from the 6th to 10th centuries, including four light galleys of the galea type. The accepted view is that the main developments which differentiated the early dromons from the liburnians, and that henceforth characterized Mediterranean galleys, were the adoption of a full deck (katastrōma), the abandonment of the rams on the bow in favour of an above-water spur, and the gradual introduction of lateen sails. The exact reasons for the abandonment of the ram (Latin: rostrum; ἔμβολος, embolos) are unclear. Depictions of upward-pointing beaks in the 4th-century Vatican Vergil manuscript may well illustrate that the ram had already been replaced by a spur in late antique galleys. One possibility is that the change occurred because of the gradual evolution of the ancient shell-first mortise and tenon hull construction method, against which rams had been designed, into the skeleton-first method, which produced a stronger and more flexible hull, less susceptible to ram attacks. Certainly by the early 7th century, the ram's original function had been forgotten, if we judge by Isidore of Seville's comments that they were used to protect against collision with underwater rocks. As for the lateen sail, various authors have in the past suggested that it was introduced into the Mediterranean by the Arabs, possibly with an ultimate origin in India. However, the discovery of new depictions and literary references in recent decades has led scholars to antedate the appearance of the lateen sail in the Levant to the late Hellenistic or early Roman period. Not only the triangular, but also the quadrilateral version were known, used for centuries (mostly on smaller craft) in parallel with square sails. Belisarius' invasion fleet of 533 was apparently at least partly fitted with lateen sails, making it probable that by the time the lateen had become the standard rig for the dromon, with the traditional square sail gradually falling from use in medieval navigation. The dromons that Procopius describes were single-banked ships of probably 50 oars, arranged with 25 oars on each side. Again unlike Hellenistic vessels, which used an outrigger (parexeiresia), these extended directly from the hull. In the later bireme dromons of the 9th and 10th centuries, the two oar banks (elasiai) were divided by the deck, with the first oar bank was situated below, whilst the second oar bank was situated above deck; these rowers were expected to fight alongside the marines in boarding operations. Makrypoulias suggests 25 oarsmen beneath and 35 on the deck on either side for a dromon of 120 rowers. The overall length of these ships was probably about 32 meters. Although most contemporary vessels had a single mast (histos or katartion), the larger bireme dromons probably needed at least two masts in order to manoeuvre effectively, assuming that a single lateen sail for a ship this size would have reached unmanageable dimensions. The ship was steered by means of two quarter rudders at the stern (prymne), which also housed a tent (skene) that covered the captain's berth (krab[b]at[t]os). The prow (prora) featured an elevated forecastle (pseudopation), below which the siphon for the discharge of Greek fire projected, although secondary siphons could also be carried amidships on either side. A pavesade (kastelloma), on which marines could hang their shields, ran around the sides of the ship, providing protection to the deck crew. Larger ships also had wooden castles (xylokastra) on either side between the masts, similar to those attested for the Roman liburnians, providing archers with elevated firing platforms. The bow spur (peronion) was intended to ride over an enemy ship's oars, breaking them and rendering it helpless against missile fire and boarding actions. The four galeai ships uncovered in the Yenikapi excavations, dating to the 10th–11th centuries, are of uniform design and construction, suggesting a centralized manufacturing process. They have a length of c. 30 m, and are built of European Black Pine and Oriental plane. #### Ship types By the 10th century, there were three main classes of bireme (two oar-banks) warships of the general dromon type, as detailed in the inventories for the Cretan expeditions of 911 and 949: the [chelandion] ousiakon ([χελάνδιον] οὑσιακόν), so named because it was manned by an ousia of 108; the [chelandion] pamphylon ([χελάνδιον] πάμφυλον), crewed with up to 120–160 men, its name either implying an origin in the region of Pamphylia as a transport ship or its crewing with "picked crews" (from πᾶν+φῦλον, 'all tribes'); and the dromon proper, crewed by two ousiai. In the De Ceremoniis, the heavy dromon is said to have an even larger crew of 230 rowers and 70 marines; naval historian John H. Pryor considers them as supernumerary crews being carried aboard, while the Greek scholar Christos Makrypoulias suggests that the extra men correspond to a second rower on each of the upper-bank oars. A smaller, single-bank ship, the moneres (μονήρης, 'single-banked') or galea (γαλέα, from which the term 'galley' derives), with c. 60 men as crew, was used for scouting missions but also in the wings of the battle line. The galea in particular seems to have been strongly associated with the Mardaites, and Christos Makrypoulias even suggests that the ship was exclusively used by them. Three-banked ('trireme') dromons are described in a 9th-century work dedicated to the parakoimomenos Basil Lekapenos. However, this treatise, which survives only in fragments, draws heavily upon references on the appearance and construction of a Classical trireme, and must therefore be used with care when trying to apply it to the warships of the middle Byzantine period. The existence of trireme vessels is, however, attested in the Fatimid navy in the 11th and 12th centuries, and references made by Leo VI to large Arab ships in the 10th century may also indicate trireme galleys. For cargo transport, the Byzantines usually commandeered ordinary merchantmen as transport ships (phortegoi) or supply ships (skeuophora). These appear to have been mostly sailing vessels, rather than oared. The Byzantines and Arabs also employed horse-transports (hippagoga), which were either sailing ships or galleys, the latter certainly modified to accommodate the horses. Given that the chelandia appear originally to have been oared horse-transports, this would imply differences in construction between the chelandion and the dromon proper, terms which otherwise are often used indiscriminately in literary sources. While the dromon was developed exclusively as a war galley, the chelandion would have had to have a special compartment amidships to accommodate a row of horses, increasing its beam and hold depth. In addition, Byzantine sources refer to the sandalos or sandalion (σάνδαλος, σανδάλιον), which was a boat carried along by the bigger ships. The kind described in the De Ceremoniis had a single mast, four oars and a rudder. In the earlier years of the empire, shipbuilding wood for transport and supply ships was mainly from conifers, but in the later years from broad-leaved trees, possibly from forests in what is now Turkey. ### Western designs of the last centuries The exact period when the dromon was superseded by galea-derived ships of Italian origin is uncertain. The term dromon continued in use until the late 12th century, although Byzantine writers were indiscriminate in their use of it. Contemporary Western writers used the term to denote large ships, usually transports, and there is evidence to support the idea that this usage had also spread to the Byzantines. William of Tyre's description of the Byzantine fleet in 1169, where "dromons" are classed as very large transports, and the warships with two oar banks are set apart from them, may thus indeed indicate the adoption of the new bireme galley types by the Byzantines. From the 13th century on, the term dromon fell into gradual disuse and was replaced by katergon (κάτεργον, meaning 'detailed to/owing a service'), a late-11th century term which originally applied to the crews, who were drawn from populations detailed to military service. During the latter period of the Byzantine Empire, Byzantine ships were based on Western models: the term katergon is used indiscriminately for both Byzantine and Latin ships, and the horse-carrying chelandion was replaced by the Western taride (itself deriving from Arabic tarrida, adopted as tareta, ταρέτα, in Greek). A similar process is seen in surviving sources from Angevin Sicily, where the term lang was replaced by the taride, although for a time both continued to be used. No construction differences are mentioned between the two, with both terms referring to horse-carrying vessels (usserii) capable of carrying from 20 to 40 horses. The bireme Italian-style galleys remained the mainstay of Mediterranean fleets until the late 13th century, although again, contemporary descriptions provide little detail on their construction. From that point on, the galleys universally became trireme ships, i.e. with three men on a single bank located above deck, each rowing a different oar; the so-called alla sensile system. The Venetians also developed the so-called "great galley", which was an enlarged galley capable of carrying more cargo for trade. Little is known on particular Byzantine ships during the period. The accounts of the 1437 journey by sea of the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Florence, by the Byzantine cleric Sylvester Syropoulos and the Greek-Venetian captain Michael of Rhodes, mention that most of the ships were Venetian or Papal, but also record that Emperor John VIII travelled on an "imperial ship". It is unclear whether that ship was Byzantine or had been hired, and its type is not mentioned. It is, however, recorded as having been faster than the Venetian great merchant galleys accompanying it, possibly indicating that it was a light war galley. Michael of Rhodes also wrote a treatise on shipbuilding, which provided construction instructions and illustrations of the main vessels, both galleys and sailing ships, used by Venice and the other maritime states of the region in the first half of the 15th century. ## Tactics and weapons The Byzantines took care to codify, preserve and pass on the lessons of warfare at land and sea from past experience, through the use of military manuals. Despite their sometimes antiquarian terminology, these texts form the basis of our knowledge on Byzantine naval affairs. The main surviving texts are the chapters on sea combat (peri naumachias) in the Tactica of Leo the Wise and Nikephoros Ouranos (both drawing extensively from the Naumachiai of Syrianos Magistros and other earlier works), complemented by relevant passages in the De Administrando Imperio of Constantine Porphyrogennetos and other works by Byzantine and Arab writers. ### Naval strategy, logistics and tactics When examining ancient and medieval naval operations, it is necessary to first understand the technological limitations of galley fleets. Galleys did not handle well in rough waters and could be swamped by waves, which would be catastrophic in the open sea; history is replete with instances where galley fleets were sunk by bad weather (e.g. the Roman losses during the First Punic War). The sailing season was therefore usually restricted from mid-spring to September. The maintainable cruising speed of a galley, even when using sails, was limited, as were the amount of supplies it could carry. Water in particular, being essentially a galley's "fuel" supply, was of critical importance. There is no evidence that the navy operated dedicated supply ships to support the warships. With consumption levels estimated at 8 litres a day for every oarsman, its availability was a decisive operational factor in the often water-scarce and sun-baked coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Smaller dromons are estimated to have been able to carry about four days' worth of water. Effectively, this meant that fleets composed of galleys were confined to coastal routes, and had to make frequent landfall to replenish their supplies and rest their crews. This is well attested in Byzantine overseas endeavours, from Belisarius' campaign against the Vandals to the Cretan expeditions of the 9th and 10th centuries. It is for these reasons that Nikephoros Ouranos emphasizes the need to have available "men with accurate knowledge and experience of the sea [...], which winds cause it to swell and which blow from the land. They should know both the hidden rocks in the sea, and the places which have no depth, and the land along which one sails and the islands adjacent to it, the harbours and the distance such harbours are the one from the other. They should know both the countries and the water supplies." Medieval Mediterranean naval warfare was therefore essentially coastal and amphibious in nature, carried out to seize coastal territory or islands, and not to exercise "sea control" as it is understood today. Furthermore, following the abandonment of the ram, the only truly "ship-killing" weapon available prior to the advent of gunpowder and explosive shells, sea combat became, in the words of John Pryor, "more unpredictable. No longer could any power hope to have such an advantage in weaponry or the skill of crews that success could be expected." It is no surprise therefore that the Byzantine and Arab manuals emphasize cautious tactics, with the priority given to the preservation of one's own fleet, and the acquisition of accurate intelligence, often through the use of spies posing as merchants. Emphasis was placed on achieving tactical surprise and, conversely, on avoiding being caught unprepared by the enemy. Ideally, battle was to be given only when assured of superiority by virtue of numbers or tactical disposition. Importance is also laid on matching one's forces and tactics to the prospective enemy: Leo VI, for instance, contrasted (Tactica, XIX.74–77) the Arabs with their heavy and slow ships (koumbaria), to the small and fast craft (akatia, chiefly monoxyla), of the Slavs and Rus'. On campaign, following the assembly of the various squadrons at fortified bases (aplekta) along the coast, the fleet consisted of the main body, composed of the oared warships, and the baggage train (touldon) of sailing vessels and oared transports, which would be sent away in the event of battle. The battle fleet was divided into squadrons, and orders were transmitted from ship to ship through signal flags (kamelaukia) and lanterns. The navy played key role in supplying land-based forces. On the approach to and during an actual battle, a well-ordered formation was critical: if a fleet fell into disorder, its ships would be unable to lend support to each other and probably would be defeated. Fleets that failed to keep an ordered formation or that could not order themselves into an appropriate counter-formation (antiparataxis) to match that of the enemy, often avoided, or broke off from battle. Tactical manoeuvres were therefore intended to disrupt the enemy formation, including the use of various stratagems, such as dividing one's force and carrying out flanking manoeuvres, feigning retreat or hiding a reserve in ambush (Tactica, XIX.52–56). Indeed, Leo VI openly advised (Tactica, XIX.36) against direct confrontation and advocates the use of stratagems instead. According to Leo VI (Tactica, XIX.52), a crescent formation seems to have been the norm, with the flagship in the centre and the heavier ships at the horns of the formation, in order to turn the enemy's flanks. A range of variants and other tactics and counter-tactics was available, depending on the circumstances. Once the fleets were close enough, exchanges of missiles began, ranging from combustible projectiles to arrows and javelins. The aim was not to sink ships, but to deplete the ranks of the enemy crews before the boarding actions, which decided the outcome. Once the enemy strength was judged to have been reduced sufficiently, the fleets closed in, the ships grappled each other, and the marines and upper bank oarsmen boarded the enemy vessel and engaged in hand-to-hand combat. ### Armament Unlike the warships of Antiquity, Byzantine and Arab ships did not feature rams, and the primary means of ship-to-ship combat were boarding actions and missile fire, as well as the use of inflammable materials such as Greek fire. Despite the fearsome reputation of the latter, it was only effective under certain circumstances, and not the decisive anti-ship weapon that the ram had been in the hands of experienced crews. Like their Roman predecessors, Byzantine and Muslim ships were equipped with small catapults (mangana) and ballistae (toxoballistrai) that launched stones, arrows, javelins, pots of Greek fire or other incendiary liquids, caltrops (triboloi) and even containers full of lime to choke the enemy or, as Emperor Leo VI suggests, scorpions and snakes (Tactica, XIX.61–65). Marines and the upper-bank oarsmen were heavily armoured in preparation for battle (Leo referred to them as "cataphracts") and armed with close-combat arms such as lances and swords, while the other sailors wore padded felt jackets (neurika) for protection and fought with bows and crossbows. The importance and volume of missile fire during sea combat can be gauged from the fleet manifests for the Cretan expeditions of the 10th century, which mention 10,000 caltrops, 50 bows and 10,000 arrows, 20 hand-carried ballistrai with 200 bolts myai, 'flies') and 100 javelins per dromon. From the 12th century on, the crossbow (called τζᾶγγρα, tzangra in Greek) became increasingly important in Mediterranean warfare, remaining the most deadly weapon available until the advent of fully rigged ships with gunpowder artillery. The Byzantines made infrequent use of the weapon, chiefly in sieges, although its use is recorded in some sea battles. Cannons were introduced in the latter half of the 14th century, but they were rarely used by the Byzantines, who only had a few artillery pieces for the defence of the land walls of Constantinople. Unlike the Venetians and Genoese, there is no indication that the Byzantines ever mounted any on ships. ### Greek fire "Greek fire" was the name given by Western Europeans to the flammable concoction used by the Byzantines, so called because the Europeans viewed the Byzantines as Greeks instead of Romans. The Byzantines themselves used various descriptive names for it, but the most common was 'liquid fire' (ὑγρόν πῦρ). Although the use of incendiary chemicals by the Byzantines has been attested to since the early 6th century, the actual substance known as Greek fire is believed to have been created in 673 and is attributed to an engineer from Syria, named Kallinikos. The most common method of deployment was to emit the formula through a large bronze tube (siphon) onto enemy ships. Alternatively, it could be launched in jars fired from catapults; pivoting cranes (gerania) are also mentioned as a method of pouring combustibles onto enemy ships. Usually the mixture would be stored in heated, pressurized barrels and projected through the tube by some sort of pump while the operators were sheltered behind large iron shields. A portable version (cheirosiphon) also existed, reputedly invented by Leo VI, making it the direct analogue to a modern flamethrower. The means of its production was kept a state secret, and its components are only roughly guessed or described through secondary sources like Anna Komnene, so that its exact composition remains to this day unknown. In its effect, the Greek fire must have been rather similar to napalm. Contemporary sources make clear that it could not be extinguished by water, but rather floated and burned on top of it; sand could extinguish it by depriving it of oxygen, and several authors also mention strong vinegar and old urine as being able to extinguish it, presumably by some sort of chemical reaction. Consequently, felt or hides soaked in vinegar were used to provide protection against it. Despite the somewhat exaggerated accounts of Byzantine writers, it was by no means a "wonder weapon", and did not avert some serious defeats. Given its limited range, and the need for a calm sea and favourable wind conditions, its usability was limited. Nevertheless, in favourable circumstances and against an unprepared enemy, its great destructive ability and psychological impact could prove decisive, as displayed repeatedly against the Rus'. Greek fire continued to be mentioned during the 12th century, but the Byzantines failed to use it against the Fourth Crusade, possibly because they had lost access to the areas (the Caucasus and the eastern coast of the Black Sea) where the primary ingredients were to be found. The Arabs fielded their own 'liquid fire' after 835, but it is unknown if they used the Byzantine formula, possibly obtained through espionage or through the defection of strategos Euphemios in 827, or whether they independently created a version of their own. A 12th-century treatise prepared by Mardi bin Ali al-Tarsusi for Saladin records a version of Greek fire, called naft (naphtha), which had a petroleum base, with sulphur and various resins added. ## Role of the navy in Byzantine history It is not easy to assess the importance of the Byzantine navy to the Empire's history. On one hand, the Empire, throughout its life, had to defend a long coastline, often with little hinterland. In addition, shipping was always the quickest and cheapest way of transport, and the Empire's major urban and commercial centres, as well as most of its fertile areas, lay close to the sea. Coupled with the threat posed by the Arabs in the 7th to 10th centuries, this necessitated the maintenance of a strong fleet. The navy was perhaps at its most significant in the successful defence of Constantinople from the two Arab sieges, which ultimately saved the Empire. Throughout the period however, naval operations were an essential part of the Byzantine effort against the Arabs in a game of raids and counter-raids that continued up to the late 10th century. On the other hand, the nature and limitations of the maritime technology of the age meant that the neither the Byzantines nor any of their opponents could develop a true thalassocracy. Galley fleets were confined to coastal operations, and were not able to play a truly independent role. Furthermore, as the alternation of Byzantine victories and defeats against the Arabs illustrates, no side was able to permanently gain the upper hand. Although the Byzantines pulled off a number of spectacular successes, such as Nasar's remarkable night-time victory in 880 (one of a handful of similar engagements in the Middle Ages), these victories were balanced off by similarly disastrous losses. Reports of mutinies by oarsmen in Byzantine fleets also reveal that conditions were often far from the ideal prescribed in the manuals. Combined with the traditional predominance of the great Anatolian land-holders in the higher military and civil offices, all this meant that, as in the Roman Empire, the navy, even at its height, was still regarded largely as an adjunct to the land forces. This fact is clearly illustrated by the relatively lowly positions its admirals held in the imperial hierarchy. It is clear nevertheless that the gradual decline of the indigenous Byzantine naval power in the 10th and 11th centuries, when it was eclipsed by the Italian city-states, chiefly Venice and later Genoa, was of great long-term significance for the fate of the Empire. The sack of the Fourth Crusade, which shattered the foundations of the Byzantine state, was due in large part to the absolute defencelessness of the Empire at sea. This process was initiated by Byzantium itself in the 9th century, when the Italians were increasingly employed by the Empire to compensate for its own naval weakness in the West. The Italian republics also profited from their role as intermediaries in the trade between the Empire and Western Europe, marginalizing the Byzantine merchant marine, which in turn had adverse effects on the availability of Byzantine naval forces. Inevitably however, as the Italian republics slowly moved away from the Byzantine orbit, they began pursuing their own policies, and from the late 11th century on, they turned from protection of the Empire to exploitation and sometimes outright plunder, heralding the eventual financial and political subjugation of Byzantium to their interests. The absence of a strong navy was certainly keenly felt by the Byzantines at the time, as the comments of Kekaumenos illustrate. Strong and energetic emperors like Manuel Komnenos, and later Michael VIII Palaiologos, could revive Byzantine naval power, but even after landing heavy strokes against the Venetians, they merely replaced them with the Genoese and the Pisans. Trade thus remained in Latin hands, its profits continued to be siphoned off from the Empire, and after their deaths, their achievements quickly evaporated. After 1204, and with the brief exception of Michael VIII's reign, the fortunes of the now small Byzantine navy were more or less tied to the shifting alliances with the Italian maritime republics. When viewing the entire course of Byzantine history, the waxing and waning of the navy's strength closely mirrors the fluctuation of the Empire's fortunes. It is this apparent interrelation that led the French Byzantinist Louis Bréhier to remark: "The epochs of [Byzantium's] dominion are those in which it held control of the sea, and it was when it lost it, that its reverses began." ## See also
19,572,217	Influenza	1,172,085,182	Infectious disease, often just "the flu"	[ "Airborne diseases", "Animal viral diseases", "Healthcare-associated infections", "Influenza", "Vaccine-preventable diseases", "Wikipedia emergency medicine articles ready to translate", "Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate", "Zoonoses" ]	Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms begin from one to four days after exposure to the virus (typically two days) and last for about 2–8 days. Diarrhea and vomiting can occur, particularly in children. Influenza may progress to pneumonia, which can be caused by the virus or by a subsequent bacterial infection. Other complications of infection include acute respiratory distress syndrome, meningitis, encephalitis, and worsening of pre-existing health problems such as asthma and cardiovascular disease. There are four types of influenza virus: A, B, C, and D. Aquatic birds are the primary source of Influenza A virus (IAV), which is also widespread in various mammals, including humans and pigs. Influenza B virus (IBV) and Influenza C virus (ICV) primarily infect humans, and Influenza D virus (IDV) is found in cattle and pigs. IAV and IBV circulate in humans and cause seasonal epidemics, and ICV causes a mild infection, primarily in children. IDV can infect humans but is not known to cause illness. In humans, influenza viruses are primarily transmitted through respiratory droplets produced from coughing and sneezing. Transmission through aerosols and intermediate objects and surfaces contaminated by the virus also occur. Frequent hand washing and covering one's mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing reduce transmission. Annual vaccination can help to provide protection against influenza. Influenza viruses, particularly IAV, evolve quickly, so flu vaccines are updated regularly to match which influenza strains are in circulation. Vaccines provide protection against IAV subtypes H1N1 and H3N2 and one or two IBV subtypes. Influenza infection is diagnosed with laboratory methods such as antibody or antigen tests and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to identify viral nucleic acid. The disease can be treated with supportive measures and, in severe cases, with antiviral drugs such as oseltamivir. In healthy individuals, influenza is typically self-limiting and rarely fatal, but it can be deadly in high-risk groups. In a typical year, 5–15% of the population contracts influenza. There are 3–5 million severe cases annually, with up to 650,000 respiratory-related deaths globally each year. Deaths most commonly occur in high-risk groups, including young children, the elderly, and people with chronic health conditions. In temperate regions of the world, the number of influenza cases peaks during winter, whereas in the tropics influenza can occur year-round. Since the late 1800s, large outbreaks of novel influenza strains that spread globally, called pandemics, have occurred every 10–50 years. Five flu pandemics have occurred since 1900: the Spanish flu in 1918–1920, which was the most severe flu pandemic, the Asian flu in 1957, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, the Russian flu in 1977, and the swine flu pandemic in 2009. ## Signs and symptoms The time between exposure to the virus and development of symptoms, called the incubation period, is 1–4 days, most commonly 1–2 days. Many infections, however, are asymptomatic. The onset of symptoms is sudden, and initial symptoms are predominately non-specific, including fever, chills, headaches, muscle pain or aching, a feeling of discomfort, loss of appetite, lack of energy/fatigue, and confusion. These symptoms are usually accompanied by respiratory symptoms such as a dry cough, sore or dry throat, hoarse voice, and a stuffy or runny nose. Coughing is the most common symptom. Gastrointestinal symptoms may also occur, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and gastroenteritis, especially in children. The standard influenza symptoms typically last for 2–8 days. A 2021 study suggests influenza can cause long lasting symptoms in a similar way to long COVID. Symptomatic infections are usually mild and limited to the upper respiratory tract, but progression to pneumonia is relatively common. Pneumonia may be caused by the primary viral infection or by a secondary bacterial infection. Primary pneumonia is characterized by rapid progression of fever, cough, labored breathing, and low oxygen levels that cause bluish skin. It is especially common among those who have an underlying cardiovascular disease such as rheumatic heart disease. Secondary pneumonia typically has a period of improvement in symptoms for 1–3 weeks followed by recurrent fever, sputum production, and fluid buildup in the lungs, but can also occur just a few days after influenza symptoms appear. About a third of primary pneumonia cases are followed by secondary pneumonia, which is most frequently caused by the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus. ## Virology ### Types of virus Influenza viruses comprise four species. Each of the four species is the sole member of its own genus, and the four influenza genera comprise four of the seven genera in the family Orthomyxoviridae. They are: - Influenza A virus (IAV), genus Alphainfluenzavirus - Influenza B virus (IBV), genus Betainfluenzavirus - Influenza C virus (ICV), genus Gammainfluenzavirus - Influenza D virus (IDV), genus Deltainfluenzavirus IAV is responsible for most cases of severe illness as well as seasonal epidemics and occasional pandemics. It infects people of all ages but tends to disproportionately cause severe illness in the elderly, the very young, and those who have chronic health issues. Birds are the primary reservoir of IAV, especially aquatic birds such as ducks, geese, shorebirds, and gulls, but the virus also circulates among mammals, including pigs, horses, and marine mammals. IAV is classified into subtypes based on the viral proteins haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). As of 2019, 18 H subtypes and 11 N subtypes have been identified. Most potential combinations have been reported in birds, but H17-18 and N10-11 have only been found in bats. Only H subtypes H1-3 and N subtypes N1-2 are known to have circulated in humans. The IAV subtypes in circulation as of 2018 are H1N1 and H3N2. IAVs can be classified more specifically by natural host species, geographical origin, year of isolation, and strain number, such as H1N1/A/duck/Alberta/35/76. IBV mainly infects humans but has been identified in seals, horses, dogs, and pigs. IBV does not have subtypes like IAV but has two antigenically distinct lineages, termed the B/Victoria/2/1987-like and B/Yamagata/16/1988-like lineages, or simply (B/)Victoria(-like) and (B/)Yamagata(-like). Both lineages are in circulation in humans, disproportionately affecting children. IBVs contribute to seasonal epidemics alongside IAVs but have never been associated with a pandemic. ICV, like IBV, is primarily found in humans, though it also has been detected in pigs, feral dogs, dromedary camels, cattle, and dogs. ICV infection primarily affects children and is usually asymptomatic or has mild cold-like symptoms, though more severe symptoms such as gastroenteritis and pneumonia can occur. Unlike IAV and IBV, ICV has not been a major focus of research pertaining to antiviral drugs, vaccines, and other measures against influenza. ICV is subclassified into six genetic/antigenic lineages. IDV has been isolated from pigs and cattle, the latter being the natural reservoir. Infection has also been observed in humans, horses, dromedary camels, and small ruminants such as goats and sheep. IDV is distantly related to ICV. While cattle workers have occasionally tested positive to prior IDV infection, it is not known to cause disease in humans. ICV and IDV experience a slower rate of antigenic evolution than IAV and IBV. Because of this antigenic stability, relatively few novel lineages emerge. ### Genome and structure Influenza viruses have a negative-sense, single-stranded RNA genome that is segmented. The negative sense of the genome means it can be used as a template to synthesize messenger RNA (mRNA). IAV and IBV have eight genome segments that encode 10 major proteins. ICV and IDV have seven genome segments that encode nine major proteins. Three segments encode three subunits of an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) complex: PB1, a transcriptase, PB2, which recognizes 5' caps, and PA (P3 for ICV and IDV), an endonuclease. The matrix protein (M1) and membrane protein (M2) share a segment, as do the non-structural protein (NS1) and the nuclear export protein (NEP). For IAV and IBV, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) are encoded on one segment each, whereas ICV and IDV encode a hemagglutinin-esterase fusion (HEF) protein on one segment that merges the functions of HA and NA. The final genome segment encodes the viral nucleoprotein (NP). Influenza viruses also encode various accessory proteins, such as PB1-F2 and PA-X, that are expressed through alternative open reading frames and which are important in host defense suppression, virulence, and pathogenicity. The virus particle, called a virion, is pleomorphic and varies between being filamentous, bacilliform, or spherical in shape. Clinical isolates tend to be pleomorphic, whereas strains adapted to laboratory growth typically produce spherical virions. Filamentous virions are about 250 nanometers (nm) by 80 nm, bacilliform 120–250 by 95 nm, and spherical 120 nm in diameter. The virion consists of each segment of the genome bound to nucleoproteins in separate ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes for each segment, all of which are surrounded by a lipid bilayer membrane called the viral envelope. There is a copy of the RdRp, all subunits included, bound to each RNP. The envelope is reinforced structurally by matrix proteins on the interior that enclose the RNPs, and the envelope contains HA and NA (or HEF) proteins extending outward from the exterior surface of the envelope. HA and HEF proteins have a distinct "head" and "stalk" structure. M2 proteins form proton ion channels through the viral envelope that are required for viral entry and exit. IBVs contain a surface protein named NB that is anchored in the envelope, but its function is unknown. ### Life cycle The viral life cycle begins by binding to a target cell. Binding is mediated by the viral HA proteins on the surface of the envelope, which bind to cells that contain sialic acid receptors on the surface of the cell membrane. For N1 subtypes with the "G147R" mutation and N2 subtypes, the NA protein can initiate entry. Prior to binding, NA proteins promote access to target cells by degrading mucus, which helps to remove extracellular decoy receptors that would impede access to target cells. After binding, the virus is internalized into the cell by an endosome that contains the virion inside it. The endosome is acidified by cellular vATPase to have lower pH, which triggers a conformational change in HA that allows fusion of the viral envelope with the endosomal membrane. At the same time, hydrogen ions diffuse into the virion through M2 ion channels, disrupting internal protein-protein interactions to release RNPs into the host cell's cytosol. The M1 protein shell surrounding RNPs is degraded, fully uncoating RNPs in the cytosol. RNPs are then imported into the nucleus with the help of viral localization signals. There, the viral RNA polymerase transcribes mRNA using the genomic negative-sense strand as a template. The polymerase snatches 5' caps for viral mRNA from cellular RNA to prime mRNA synthesis and the 3'-end of mRNA is polyadenylated at the end of transcription. Once viral mRNA is transcribed, it is exported out of the nucleus and translated by host ribosomes in a cap-dependent manner to synthesize viral proteins. RdRp also synthesizes complementary positive-sense strands of the viral genome in a complementary RNP complex which are then used as templates by viral polymerases to synthesize copies of the negative-sense genome. During these processes, RdRps of avian influenza viruses (AIVs) function optimally at a higher temperature than mammalian influenza viruses. Newly synthesized viral polymerase subunits and NP proteins are imported to the nucleus to further increase the rate of viral replication and form RNPs. HA, NA, and M2 proteins are trafficked with the aid of M1 and NEP proteins to the cell membrane through the Golgi apparatus and inserted into the cell's membrane. Viral non-structural proteins including NS1, PB1-F2, and PA-X regulate host cellular processes to disable antiviral responses. PB1-F2 aso interacts with PB1 to keep polymerases in the nucleus longer. M1 and NEP proteins localize to the nucleus during the later stages of infection, bind to viral RNPs and mediate their export to the cytoplasm where they migrate to the cell membrane with the aid of recycled endosomes and are bundled into the segments of the genome. Progeny viruses leave the cell by budding from the cell membrane, which is initiated by the accumulation of M1 proteins at the cytoplasmic side of the membrane. The viral genome is incorporated inside a viral envelope derived from portions of the cell membrane that have HA, NA, and M2 proteins. At the end of budding, HA proteins remain attached to cellular sialic acid until they are cleaved by the sialidase activity of NA proteins. The virion is then released from the cell. The sialidase activity of NA also cleaves any sialic acid residues from the viral surface, which helps prevent newly assembled viruses from aggregating near the cell surface and improving infectivity. Similar to other aspects of influenza replication, optimal NA activity is temperature- and pH-dependent. Ultimately, presence of large quantities of viral RNA in the cell triggers apoptosis, i.e. programmed cell death, which is initiated by cellular factors to restrict viral replication. ### Antigenic drift and shift Two key processes that influenza viruses evolve through are antigenic drift and antigenic shift. Antigenic drift is when an influenza virus' antigens change due to the gradual accumulation of mutations in the antigen's (HA or NA) gene. This can occur in response to evolutionary pressure exerted by the host immune response. Antigenic drift is especially common for the HA protein, in which just a few amino acid changes in the head region can constitute antigenic drift. The result is the production of novel strains that can evade pre-existing antibody-mediated immunity. Antigenic drift occurs in all influenza species but is slower in B than A and slowest in C and D. Antigenic drift is a major cause of seasonal influenza, and requires that flu vaccines be updated annually. HA is the main component of inactivated vaccines, so surveillance monitors antigenic drift of this antigen among circulating strains. Antigenic evolution of influenza viruses of humans appears to be faster than influenza viruses in swine and equines. In wild birds, within-subtype antigenic variation appears to be limited but has been observed in poultry. Antigenic shift is a sudden, drastic change in an influenza virus' antigen, usually HA. During antigenic shift, antigenically different strains that infect the same cell can reassort genome segments with each other, producing hybrid progeny. Since all influenza viruses have segmented genomes, all are capable of reassortment. Antigenic shift, however, only occurs among influenza viruses of the same genus and most commonly occurs among IAVs. In particular, reassortment is very common in AIVs, creating a large diversity of influenza viruses in birds, but is uncommon in human, equine, and canine lineages. Pigs, bats, and quails have receptors for both mammalian and avian IAVs, so they are potential "mixing vessels" for reassortment. If an animal strain reassorts with a human strain, then a novel strain can emerge that is capable of human-to-human transmission. This has caused pandemics, but only a limited number have occurred, so it is difficult to predict when the next will happen. ## Mechanism ### Transmission People who are infected can transmit influenza viruses through breathing, talking, coughing, and sneezing, which spread respiratory droplets and aerosols that contain virus particles into the air. A person susceptible to infection can then contract influenza by coming into contact with these particles. Respiratory droplets are relatively large and travel less than two meters before falling onto nearby surfaces. Aerosols are smaller and remain suspended in the air longer, so they take longer to settle and can travel further than respiratory droplets. Inhalation of aerosols can lead to infection, but most transmission is in the area about two meters around an infected person via respiratory droplets that come into contact with mucosa of the upper respiratory tract. Transmission through contact with a person, bodily fluids, or intermediate objects (fomites) can also occur, such as through contaminated hands and surfaces since influenza viruses can survive for hours on non-porous surfaces. If one's hands are contaminated, then touching one's face can cause infection. Influenza is usually transmissible from one day before the onset of symptoms to 5–7 days after. In healthy adults, the virus is shed for up to 3–5 days. In children and the immunocompromised, the virus may be transmissible for several weeks. Children ages 2–17 are considered to be the primary and most efficient spreaders of influenza. Children who have not had multiple prior exposures to influenza viruses shed the virus at greater quantities and for a longer duration than other children. People who are at risk of exposure to influenza include health care workers, social care workers, and those who live with or care for people vulnerable to influenza. In long-term care facilities, the flu can spread rapidly after it is introduced. A variety of factors likely encourage influenza transmission, including lower temperature, lower absolute and relative humidity, less ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and crowding. Influenza viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract like H1N1 tend to be more mild but more transmissible, whereas those that infect the lower respiratory tract like H5N1 tend to cause more severe illness but are less contagious. ### Pathophysiology In humans, influenza viruses first cause infection by infecting epithelial cells in the respiratory tract. Illness during infection is primarily the result of lung inflammation and compromise caused by epithelial cell infection and death, combined with inflammation caused by the immune system's response to infection. Non-respiratory organs can become involved, but the mechanisms by which influenza is involved in these cases are unknown. Severe respiratory illness can be caused by multiple, non-exclusive mechanisms, including obstruction of the airways, loss of alveolar structure, loss of lung epithelial integrity due to epithelial cell infection and death, and degradation of the extracellular matrix that maintains lung structure. In particular, alveolar cell infection appears to drive severe symptoms since this results in impaired gas exchange and enables viruses to infect endothelial cells, which produce large quantities of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Pneumonia caused by influenza viruses is characterized by high levels of viral replication in the lower respiratory tract, accompanied by a strong pro-inflammatory response called a cytokine storm. Infection with H5N1 or H7N9 especially produces high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. In bacterial infections, early depletion of macrophages during influenza creates a favorable environment in the lungs for bacterial growth since these white blood cells are important in responding to bacterial infection. Host mechanisms to encourage tissue repair may inadvertently allow bacterial infection. Infection also induces production of systemic glucocorticoids that can reduce inflammation to preserve tissue integrity but allow increased bacterial growth. The pathophysiology of influenza is significantly influenced by which receptors influenza viruses bind to during entry into cells. Mammalian influenza viruses preferentially bind to sialic acids connected to the rest of the oligosaccharide by an α-2,6 link, most commonly found in various respiratory cells, such as respiratory and retinal epithelial cells. AIVs prefer sialic acids with an α-2,3 linkage, which are most common in birds in gastrointestinal epithelial cells and in humans in the lower respiratory tract. Furthermore, cleavage of the HA protein into HA<sub>1</sub>, the binding subunit, and HA<sub>2</sub>, the fusion subunit, is performed by different proteases, affecting which cells can be infected. For mammalian influenza viruses and low pathogenic AIVs, cleavage is extracellular, which limits infection to cells that have the appropriate proteases, whereas for highly pathogenic AIVs, cleavage is intracellular and performed by ubiquitous proteases, which allows for infection of a greater variety of cells, thereby contributing to more severe disease. ### Immunology Cells possess sensors to detect viral RNA, which can then induce interferon production. Interferons mediate expression of antiviral proteins and proteins that recruit immune cells to the infection site, and they also notify nearby uninfected cells of infection. Some infected cells release pro-inflammatory cytokines that recruit immune cells to the site of infection. Immune cells control viral infection by killing infected cells and phagocytizing viral particles and apoptotic cells. An exacerbated immune response, however, can harm the host organism through a cytokine storm. To counter the immune response, influenza viruses encode various non-structural proteins, including NS1, NEP, PB1-F2, and PA-X, that are involved in curtailing the host immune response by suppressing interferon production and host gene expression. B cells, a type of white blood cell, produce antibodies that bind to influenza antigens HA and NA (or HEF) and other proteins to a lesser degree. Once bound to these proteins, antibodies block virions from binding to cellular receptors, neutralizing the virus. In humans, a sizeable antibody response occurs \~1 week after viral exposure. This antibody response is typically robust and long-lasting, especially for ICV and IDV. In other words, people exposed to a certain strain in childhood still possess antibodies to that strain at a reasonable level later in life, which can provide some protection to related strains. There is, however, an "original antigenic sin", in which the first HA subtype a person is exposed to influences the antibody-based immune response to future infections and vaccines. ## Prevention ### Vaccination Annual vaccination is the primary and most effective way to prevent influenza and influenza-associated complications, especially for high-risk groups. Vaccines against the flu are trivalent or quadrivalent, providing protection against an H1N1 strain, an H3N2 strain, and one or two IBV strains corresponding to the two IBV lineages. Two types of vaccines are in use: inactivated vaccines that contain "killed" (i.e. inactivated) viruses and live attenuated influenza vaccines (LAIVs) that contain weakened viruses. There are three types of inactivated vaccines: whole virus, split virus, in which the virus is disrupted by a detergent, and subunit, which only contains the viral antigens HA and NA. Most flu vaccines are inactivated and administered via intramuscular injection. LAIVs are sprayed into the nasal cavity. Vaccination recommendations vary by country. Some recommend vaccination for all people above a certain age, such as 6 months, whereas other countries recommendation is limited for high at risk groups, such as pregnant women, young children (excluding newborns), the elderly, people with chronic medical conditions, health care workers, people who come into contact with high-risk people, and people who transmit the virus easily. Young infants cannot receive flu vaccines for safety reasons, but they can inherit passive immunity from their mother if inactivated vaccines are administered to the mother during pregnancy. Influenza vaccination also helps to reduce the probability of reassortment. In general, influenza vaccines are only effective if there is an antigenic match between vaccine strains and circulating strains. Additionally, most commercially available flu vaccines are manufactured by propagation of influenza viruses in embryonated chicken eggs, taking 6–8 months. Flu seasons are different in the northern and southern hemisphere, so the WHO meets twice a year, one for each hemisphere, to discuss which strains should be included in flu vaccines based on observation from HA inhibition assays. Other manufacturing methods include an MDCK cell culture-based inactivated vaccine and a recombinant subunit vaccine manufactured from baculovirus overexpression in insect cells. ### Antiviral chemoprophylaxis Influenza can be prevented or reduced in severity by post-exposure prophylaxis with the antiviral drugs oseltamivir, which can be taken orally by those at least three months old, and zanamivir, which can be inhaled by those above seven years of age. Chemoprophylaxis is most useful for individuals at high-risk of developing complications and those who cannot receive the flu vaccine due to contraindications or lack of effectiveness. Post-exposure chemoprophylaxis is only recommended if oseltamivir is taken within 48 hours of contact with a confirmed or suspected influenza case and zanamivir within 36 hours. It is recommended that it be offered to people who have yet to receive a vaccine for the current flu season, who have been vaccinated less than two week since contact, if there is a significant mismatch between vaccine and circulating strains, or during an outbreak in a closed setting regardless of vaccination history. ### Infection control Hand hygiene is important in reducing the spread of influenza. This includes frequent hand washing with soap and water, using alcohol-based hand sanitizers, and not touching one's eyes, nose, and mouth with one's hands. Covering one's nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing is important. Other methods to limit influenza transmission include staying home when sick, avoiding contact with others until one day after symptoms end, and disinfecting surfaces likely to be contaminated by the virus, such as doorknobs. Health education through media and posters is often used to remind people of the aforementioned etiquette and hygiene. There is uncertainty about the use of masks since research thus far has not shown a significant reduction in seasonal influenza with mask usage. Likewise, the effectiveness of screening at points of entry into countries is not well researched. Social distancing measures such as school closures, avoiding contact with infected people via isolation or quarantine, and limiting mass gatherings may reduce transmission, but these measures are often expensive, unpopular, and difficult to implement. Consequently, the commonly recommended methods of infection control are respiratory etiquette, hand hygiene, and mask wearing, which are inexpensive and easy to perform. Pharmaceutical measures are effective but may not be available in the early stages of an outbreak. In health care settings, infected individuals may be cohorted or assigned to individual rooms. Protective clothing such as masks, gloves, and gowns is recommended when coming into contact with infected individuals if there is a risk of exposure to infected bodily fluids. Keeping patients in negative pressure rooms and avoiding aerosol-producing activities may help, but special air handling and ventilation systems are not considered necessary to prevent the spread of influenza in the air. In residential homes, new admissions may need to be closed until the spread of influenza is controlled. When discharging patients to care homes, it is important to take care if there is a known influenza outbreak. Since influenza viruses circulate in animals such as birds and pigs, prevention of transmission from these animals is important. Water treatment, indoor raising of animals, quarantining sick animals, vaccination, and biosecurity are the primary measures used. Placing poultry houses and piggeries on high ground away from high-density farms, backyard farms, live poultry markets, and bodies of water helps to minimize contact with wild birds. Closure of live poultry markets appears to the most effective measure and has shown to be effective at controlling the spread of H5N1, H7N9, and H9N2. Other biosecurity measures include cleaning and disinfecting facilities and vehicles, banning visits to poultry farms, not bringing birds intended for slaughter back to farms, changing clothes, disinfecting foot baths, and treating food and water. If live poultry markets are not closed, then "clean days" when unsold poultry is removed and facilities are disinfected and "no carry-over" policies to eliminate infectious material before new poultry arrive can be used to reduce the spread of influenza viruses. If a novel influenza viruses has breached the aforementioned biosecurity measures, then rapid detection to stamp it out via quarantining, decontamination, and culling may be necessary to prevent the virus from becoming endemic. Vaccines exist for avian H5, H7, and H9 subtypes that are used in some countries. In China, for example, vaccination of domestic birds against H7N9 successfully limited its spread, indicating that vaccination may be an effective strategy if used in combination with other measures to limit transmission. In pigs and horses, management of influenza is dependent on vaccination with biosecurity. ## Diagnosis Diagnosis based on symptoms is fairly accurate in otherwise healthy people during seasonal epidemics and should be suspected in cases of pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), sepsis, or if encephalitis, myocarditis, or breaking down of muscle tissue occur. Because influenza is similar to other viral respiratory tract illnesses, laboratory diagnosis is necessary for confirmation. Common ways of collecting samples for testing include nasal and throat swabs. Samples may be taken from the lower respiratory tract if infection has cleared the upper but not lower respiratory tract. Influenza testing is recommended for anyone hospitalized with symptoms resembling influenza during flu season or who is connected to an influenza case. For severe cases, earlier diagnosis improves patient outcome. Diagnostic methods that can identify influenza include viral cultures, antibody- and antigen-detecting tests, and nucleic acid-based tests. Viruses can be grown in a culture of mammalian cells or embryonated eggs for 3–10 days to monitor cytopathic effect. Final confirmation can then be done via antibody staining, hemadsorption using red blood cells, or immunofluorescence microscopy. Shell vial cultures, which can identify infection via immunostaining before a cytopathic effect appears, are more sensitive than traditional cultures with results in 1–3 days. Cultures can be used to characterize novel viruses, observe sensitivity to antiviral drugs, and monitor antigenic drift, but they are relatively slow and require specialized skills and equipment. Serological assays can be used to detect an antibody response to influenza after natural infection or vaccination. Common serological assays include hemagglutination inhibition assays that detect HA-specific antibodies, virus neutralization assays that check whether antibodies have neutralized the virus, and enzyme-linked immunoabsorbant assays. These methods tend to be relatively inexpensive and fast but are less reliable than nucleic-acid based tests. Direct fluorescent or immunofluorescent antibody (DFA/IFA) tests involve staining respiratory epithelial cells in samples with fluorescently-labeled influenza-specific antibodies, followed by examination under a fluorescent microscope. They can differentiate between IAV and IBV but can not subtype IAV. Rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) are a simple way of obtaining assay results, are low cost, and produce results quickly, at less than 30 minutes, so they are commonly used, but they can not distinguish between IAV and IBV or between IAV subtypes and are not as sensitive as nucleic-acid based tests. Nucleic acid-based tests (NATs) amplify and detect viral nucleic acid. Most of these tests take a few hours, but rapid molecular assays are as fast as RIDTs. Among NATs, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the most traditional and considered the gold standard for diagnosing influenza because it is fast and can subtype IAV, but it is relatively expensive and more prone to false-positives than cultures. Other NATs that have been used include loop-mediated isothermal amplification-based assays, simple amplification-based assays, and nucleic acid sequence-based amplification. Nucleic acid sequencing methods can identify infection by obtaining the nucleic acid sequence of viral samples to identify the virus and antiviral drug resistance. The traditional method is Sanger sequencing, but it has been largely replaced by next-generation methods that have greater sequencing speed and throughput. ## Treatment Treatment of influenza in cases of mild or moderate illness is supportive and includes anti-fever medications such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen, adequate fluid intake to avoid dehydration, and resting at home. Cough drops and throat sprays may be beneficial for sore throat. It is recommended to avoid alcohol and tobacco use while sick with the flu. Aspirin is not recommended to treat influenza in children due to an elevated risk of developing Reye syndrome. Corticosteroids likewise are not recommended except when treating septic shock or an underlying medical condition, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma exacerbation, since they are associated with increased mortality. If a secondary bacterial infection occurs, then treatment with antibiotics may be necessary. ### Antivirals Antiviral drugs are primarily used to treat severely ill patients, especially those with compromised immune systems. Antivirals are most effective when started in the first 48 hours after symptoms appear. Later administration may still be beneficial for those who have underlying immune defects, those with more severe symptoms, or those who have a higher risk of developing complications if these individuals are still shedding the virus. Antiviral treatment is also recommended if a person is hospitalized with suspected influenza instead of waiting for test results to return and if symptoms are worsening. Most antiviral drugs against influenza fall into two categories: neuraminidase (NA) inhibitors and M2 inhibitors. Baloxavir marboxil is a notable exception, which targets the endonuclease activity of the viral RNA polymerase and can be used as an alternative to NA and M2 inhibitors for IAV and IBV. NA inhibitors target the enzymatic activity of NA receptors, mimicking the binding of sialic acid in the active site of NA on IAV and IBV virions so that viral release from infected cells and the rate of viral replication are impaired. NA inhibitors include oseltamivir, which is consumed orally in a prodrug form and converted to its active form in the liver, and zanamivir, which is a powder that is inhaled nasally. Oseltamivir and zanamivir are effective for prophylaxis and post-exposure prophylaxis, and research overall indicates that NA inhibitors are effective at reducing rates of complications, hospitalization, and mortality and the duration of illness. Additionally, the earlier NA inhibitors are provided, the better the outcome, though late administration can still be beneficial in severe cases. Other NA inhibitors include laninamivir and peramivir, the latter of which can be used as an alternative to oseltamivir for people who cannot tolerate or absorb it. The adamantanes amantadine and rimantadine are orally administered drugs that block the influenza virus' M2 ion channel, preventing viral uncoating. These drugs are only functional against IAV but are no longer recommended for use because of widespread resistance to them among IAVs. Adamantane resistance first emerged in H3N2 in 2003, becoming worldwide by 2008. Oseltamivir resistance is no longer widespread because the 2009 pandemic H1N1 strain (H1N1 pdm09), which is resistant to adamantanes, seemingly replaced resistant strains in circulation. Since the 2009 pandemic, oseltamivir resistance has mainly been observed in patients undergoing therapy, especially the immunocompromised and young children. Oseltamivir resistance is usually reported in H1N1, but has been reported in H3N2 and IBVs less commonly. Because of this, oseltamivir is recommended as the first drug of choice for immunocompetent people, whereas for the immunocompromised, oseltamivir is recommended against H3N2 and IBV and zanamivir against H1N1 pdm09. Zanamivir resistance is observed less frequently, and resistance to peramivir and baloxavir marboxil is possible. ## Prognosis In healthy individuals, influenza infection is usually self-limiting and rarely fatal. Symptoms usually last for 2–8 days. Influenza can cause people to miss work or school, and it is associated with decreased job performance and, in older adults, reduced independence. Fatigue and malaise may last for several weeks after recovery, and healthy adults may experience pulmonary abnormalities that can take several weeks to resolve. Complications and mortality primarily occur in high-risk populations and those who are hospitalized. Severe disease and mortality are usually attributable to pneumonia from the primary viral infection or a secondary bacterial infection, which can progress to ARDS. Other respiratory complications that may occur include sinusitis, bronchitis, bronchiolitis, excess fluid buildup in the lungs, and exacerbation of chronic bronchitis and asthma. Middle ear infection and croup may occur, most commonly in children. Secondary S. aureus infection has been observed, primarily in children, to cause toxic shock syndrome after influenza, with hypotension, fever, and reddening and peeling of the skin. Complications affecting the cardiovascular system are rare and include pericarditis, fulminant myocarditis with a fast, slow, or irregular heartbeat, and exacerbation of pre-existing cardiovascular disease. Inflammation or swelling of muscles accompanied by muscle tissue breaking down occurs rarely, usually in children, which presents as extreme tenderness and muscle pain in the legs and a reluctance to walk for 2–3 days. Influenza can affect pregnancy, including causing smaller neonatal size, increased risk of premature birth, and an increased risk of child death shortly before or after birth. Neurological complications have been associated with influenza on rare occasions, including aseptic meningitis, encephalitis, disseminated encephalomyelitis, transverse myelitis, and Guillain–Barré syndrome. Additionally, febrile seizures and Reye syndrome can occur, most commonly in children. Influenza-associated encephalopathy can occur directly from central nervous system infection from the presence of the virus in blood and presents as suddent onset of fever with convulsions, followed by rapid progression to coma. An atypical form of encephalitis called encephalitis lethargica, characterized by headache, drowsiness, and coma, may rarely occur sometime after infection. In survivors of influenza-associated encephalopathy, neurological defects may occur. Primarily in children, in severe cases the immune system may rarely dramatically overproduce white blood cells that release cytokines, causing severe inflammation. People who are at least 65 years of age, due to a weakened immune system from aging or a chronic illness, are a high-risk group for developing complications, as are children less than one year of age and children who have not been previously exposed to influenza viruses multiple times. Pregnant women are at an elevated risk, which increases by trimester and lasts up to two weeks after childbirth. Obesity, in particular a body mass index greater than 35–40, is associated with greater amounts of viral replication, increased severity of secondary bacterial infection, and reduced vaccination efficacy. People who have underlying health conditions are also considered at-risk, including those who have congenital or chronic heart problems or lung (e.g. asthma), kidney, liver, blood, neurological, or metabolic (e.g. diabetes) disorders, as are people who are immunocompromised from chemotherapy, asplenia, prolonged steroid treatment, splenic dysfunction, or HIV infection. Tobacco use, including past use, places a person at risk. The role of genetics in influenza is not well researched, but it may be a factor in influenza mortality. ## Epidemiology Influenza is typically characterized by seasonal epidemics and sporadic pandemics. Most of the burden of influenza is a result of flu seasons caused by IAV and IBV. Among IAV subtypes, H1N1 and H3N2 circulate in humans and are responsible for seasonal influenza. Cases disproportionately occur in children, but most severe causes are among the elderly, the very young, and the immunocompromised. In a typical year, influenza viruses infect 5–15% of the global population, causing 3–5 million cases of severe illness annually and accounting for 290,000–650,000 deaths each year due to respiratory illness. 5–10% of adults and 20–30% of children contract influenza each year. The reported number of influenza cases is usually much lower than the actual number of cases. During seasonal epidemics, it is estimated that about 80% of otherwise healthy people who have a cough or sore throat have the flu. Approximately 30–40% of people hospitalized for influenza develop pneumonia, and about 5% of all severe pneumonia cases in hospitals are due to influenza, which is also the most common cause of ARDS in adults. In children, influenza is one of the two most common causes of ARDS, the other being the respiratory syncytial virus. About 3–5% of children each year develop otitis media due to influenza. Adults who develop organ failure from influenza and children who have PIM scores and acute renal failure have higher rates of mortality. During seasonal influenza, mortality is concentrated in the very young and the elderly, whereas during flu pandemics, young adults are often affected at a high rate. In temperate regions, the number of influenza cases varies from season to season. Lower vitamin D levels, presumably due to less sunlight, lower humidity, lower temperature, and minor changes in virus proteins caused by antigenic drift contribute to annual epidemics that peak during the winter season. In the northern hemisphere, this is from October to May (more narrowly December to April), and in the southern hemisphere, this is from May to October (more narrowly June to September). There are therefore two distinct influenza seasons every year in temperate regions, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. In tropical and subtropical regions, seasonality is more complex and appears to be affected by various climatic factors such as minimum temperature, hours of sunshine, maximum rainfall, and high humidity. Influenza may therefore occur year-round in these regions. Influenza epidemics in modern times have the tendency to start in the eastern or southern hemisphere, with Asia being a key reservoir of influenza viruses. IAV and IBV co-circulate, so the two have the same patterns of transmission. The seasonality of ICV, however, is poorly understood. ICV infection is most common in children under the age of two, and by adulthood most people have been exposed to it. ICV-associated hospitalization most commonly occurs in children under the age of three and is frequently accompanied by co-infection with another virus or a bacterium, which may increase the severity of disease. When considering all hospitalizations for respiratory illness among young children, ICV appears to account for only a small percentage of such cases. Large outbreaks of ICV infection can occur, so incidence varies significantly. Outbreaks of influenza caused by novel influenza viruses are common. Depending on the level of pre-existing immunity in the population, novel influenza viruses can spread rapidly and cause pandemics with millions of deaths. These pandemics, in contrast to seasonal influenza, are caused by antigenic shifts involving animal influenza viruses. To date, all known flu pandemics have been caused by IAVs, and they follow the same pattern of spreading from an origin point to the rest of the world over the course of multiple waves in a year. Pandemic strains tend to be associated with higher rates of pneumonia in otherwise healthy individuals. Generally after each influenza pandemic, the pandemic strain continues to circulate as the cause of seasonal influenza, replacing prior strains. From 1700 to 1889, influenza pandemics occurred about once every 50–60 years. Since then, pandemics have occurred about once every 10–50 years, so they may be getting more frequent over time. ## History It is impossible to know when an influenza virus first infected humans or when the first influenza pandemic occurred. The first influenza epidemic may have occurred around 6,000 BC in China, and possible descriptions of influenza exist in Greek writings from the 5th century BC. In both 1173–1174 AD and 1387 AD, epidemics occurred across Europe that were named "influenza". Whether these epidemics or others were caused by influenza is unclear since there was then no consistent naming pattern for epidemic respiratory diseases, and "influenza" did not become clearly associated with respiratory disease until centuries later. Influenza may have been brought to the Americas as early as 1493, when an epidemic disease resembling influenza killed most of the population of the Antilles. The first convincing record of an influenza pandemic was chronicled in 1510. It began in East Asia before spreading to North Africa and then Europe. Following the pandemic, seasonal influenza occurred, with subsequent pandemics in 1557 and 1580. The flu pandemic in 1557 was potentially the first time influenza was connected to miscarriage and death of pregnant women. The 1580 flu pandemic originated in Asia during summer, spread to Africa, then Europe, and finally America. By the end of the 16th century, influenza was beginning to become understood as a specific, recognizable disease with epidemic and endemic forms. In 1648, it was discovered that horses also experience influenza. Influenza data after 1700 is more accurate, so it is easier to identify flu pandemics after this point, each of which incrementally increased understanding of influenza. The first flu pandemic of the 18th century started in 1729 in Russia in spring, spreading worldwide over the course of three years with distinct waves, the later ones being more lethal. The second flu pandemic of the 18th century was in 1781–1782, starting in China in autumn. From this pandemic, influenza became associated with sudden outbreaks of febrile illness. The next flu pandemic was from 1830 to 1833, beginning in China in winter. This pandemic had a high attack rate, but the mortality rate was low. A minor influenza pandemic occurred from 1847 to 1851 at the same time as the third cholera pandemic and was the first flu pandemic to occur with vital statistics being recorded, so influenza mortality was clearly recorded for the first time. Highly pathogenic avian influenza was recognized in 1878 and was soon linked to transmission to humans. By the time of the 1889 pandemic, which may have been caused by an H2N2 strain, the flu had become an easily recognizable disease. The microbial agent responsible for influenza was incorrently identified in 1892 by R. F. J. Pfeiffer as the bacteria species Haemophilus influenzae, which retains "influenza" in its name. In succeeding years, the field of virology began to form as viruses were identified as the cause of many diseases. From 1901 to 1903, Italian and Austrian researchers were able to show that avian influenza, then called "fowl plague", was caused by a microscopic agent smaller than bacteria by using filters with pores too small for bacteria to pass through. The fundamental differences between viruses and bacteria, however, were not yet fully understood. From 1918 to 1920, the Spanish flu pandemic became the most devastating influenza pandemic and one of the deadliest pandemics in history. The pandemic, probably caused by H1N1, likely began in the United States before spreading worldwide via soldiers during and after the First World War. The initial wave in the first half of 1918 was relatively minor and resembled past flu pandemics, but the second wave later that year had a much higher mortality rate, accounting for most deaths. A third wave with lower mortality occurred in many places a few months after the second. By the end of 1920, it is estimated that about a third to half of all people in the world had been infected, with tens of millions of deaths, disproportionately young adults. During the 1918 pandemic, the respiratory route of transmission was clearly identified and influenza was shown to be caused by a "filter passer", not a bacterium, but there remained a lack of agreement about influenza's cause for another decade and research on influenza declined. After the pandemic, H1N1 circulated in humans in seasonal form up until the next pandemic. In 1931, Richard Shope published three papers identifying a virus as the cause of swine influenza, a then newly recognized disease among pigs that was characterized during the second wave of the 1918 pandemic. Shope's research reinvigorated research on human influenza, and many advances in virology, serology, immunology, experimental animal models, vaccinology, and immunotherapy have since arisen from influenza research. Just two years after influenza viruses were discovered, in 1933, IAV was identified as the agent responsible for human influenza. Subtypes of IAV were discovered throughout the 1930s, and IBV was discovered in 1940. During the Second World War, the US government worked on developing inactivated vaccines for influenza, resulting in the first influenza vaccine being licensed in 1945 in the United States. ICV was discovered two years later in 1947. In 1955, avian influenza was confirmed to be caused by IAV. Four influenza pandemics have occurred since WWII, each less severe than the 1918 pandemic. The first of these was the Asian flu from 1957 to 1958, caused by an H2N2 strain and beginning in China's Yunnan province. The number of deaths probably exceeded one million, mostly among the very young and very old. The 1957 pandemic was the first flu pandemic to occur in the presence of a global surveillance system and laboratories able to study the novel influenza virus. After the pandemic, H2N2 was the IAV subtype responsible for seasonal influenza. The first antiviral drug against influenza, amantadine, was approved for use in 1966, with additional antiviral drugs being used since the 1990s. In 1968, H3N2 was introduced into humans through a rearrangement between an avian H3N2 strain and an H2N2 strain that was circulating in humans. The novel H3N2 strain emerged in Hong Kong and spread worldwide, causing the Hong Kong flu pandemic, which resulted in 500,000–2,000,000 deaths. This was the first pandemic to spread significantly by air travel. H2N2 and H3N2 co-circulated after the pandemic until 1971 when H2N2 waned in prevalence and was completely replaced by H3N2. In 1977, H1N1 reemerged in humans, possibly after it was released from a freezer in a laboratory accident, and caused a pseudo-pandemic. Whether the 1977 "pandemic" deserves to be included in the natural history of flu pandemics is debatable. This H1N1 strain was antigenically similar to the H1N1 strains that circulated prior to 1957. Since 1977, both H1N1 and H3N2 have circulated in humans as part of seasonal influenza. In 1980, the classification system used to subtype influenza viruses was introduced. At some point, IBV diverged into two strains, named the B/Victoria-like and B/Yamagata-like lineages, both of which have been circulating in humans since 1983. In 1996, HPAI H5N1 was detected in Guangdong, China and a year later emerged in poultry in Hong Kong, gradually spreading worldwide from there. A small H5N1 outbreak in humans in Hong Kong occurred then, and sporadic human cases have occurred since 1997, carrying a high case fatality rate. The most recent flu pandemic was the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which originated in Mexico and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was caused by a novel H1N1 strain that was a reassortment of human, swine, and avian influenza viruses. The 2009 pandemic had the effect of replacing prior H1N1 strains in circulation with the novel strain but not any other influenza viruses. Consequently, H1N1, H3N2, and both IBV lineages have been in circulation in seasonal form since the 2009 pandemic. In 2011, IDV was discovered in pigs in Oklahoma, USA, and cattle were later identified as the primary reservoir of IDV. In the same year, avian H7N9 was detected in China and began to cause human infections in 2013, starting in Shanghai and Anhui and remaining mostly in China. HPAI H7N9 emerged sometime in 2016 and has occasionally infected humans incidentally. Other AIVs have less commonly infected humans since the 1990s, including H5N6, H6N1, H7N2-4, H7N7, and H10N7-8, and HPAI H subtypes such as H5N1-3, H5N5-6, and H5N8 have begun to spread throughout much of the world since the 2010s. Future flu pandemics, which may be caused by an influenza virus of avian origin, are viewed as almost inevitable, and increased globalization has made it easier for novel viruses to spread, so there are continual efforts to prepare for future pandemics and improve the prevention and treatment of influenza. ### Etymology The word influenza comes from the Italian word influenza, from medieval Latin influentia, originally meaning 'visitation' or 'influence'. Terms such as influenza di freddo, meaning 'influence of the cold', and influenza di stelle, meaning 'influence of the stars' are attested from the 14th century. The latter referred to the disease's cause, which at the time was ascribed by some to unfavorable astrological conditions. As early as 1504, influenza began to mean a 'visitation' or 'outbreak' of any disease affecting many people in a single place at once. During an outbreak of influenza in 1743 that started in Italy and spread throughout Europe, the word reached the English language and was anglicized in pronunciation. Since the mid-1800s, influenza has also been used to refer to severe colds. The shortened form of the word, "(the) flu", is first attested in 1839 as flue with the spelling flu confirmed in 1893. Other names that have been used for influenza include epidemic catarrh, la grippe from French, sweating sickness, and, especially when referring to the 1918 pandemic strain, Spanish fever. ## Research Influenza research is wide-ranging and includes efforts to understand how influenza viruses enter hosts, the relationship between influenza viruses and bacteria, how influenza symptoms progress, and what make some influenza viruses deadlier than others. Non-structural proteins encoded by influenza viruses are periodically discovered and their functions are continually under research. Past pandemics, and especially the 1918 pandemic, are the subject of much research to understand flu pandemics. As part of pandemic preparedness, the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System is a global network of laboratories that monitors influenza transmission and epidemiology. Additional areas of research include ways to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of influenza. Existing diagnostic methods have a variety of limitations coupled with their advantages. For example, NATs have high sensitivity and specificity but are impractical in under-resourced regions due to their high cost, complexity, maintenance, and training required. Low-cost, portable RIDTs can rapidly diagnose influenza but have highly variable sensitivity and are unable to subtype IAV. As a result of these limitations and others, research into new diagnostic methods revolves around producing new methods that are cost-effective, less labor-intensive, and less complex than existing methods while also being able to differentiate influenza species and IAV subtypes. One approach in development are lab-on-a-chips, which are diagnostic devices that make use of a variety of diagnostic tests, such as RT-PCR and serological assays, in microchip form. These chips have many potential advantages, including high reaction efficiency, low energy consumption, and low waste generation. New antiviral drugs are also in development due to the elimination of adamantines as viable drugs and concerns over oseltamivir resistance. These include: NA inhibitors that can be injected intravenously, such as intravenous formulations of zanamivir; favipiravir, which is a polymerase inhibitor used against several RNA viruses; pimodivir, which prevents cap-binding required during viral transcription; and nitazoxanide, which inhibits HA maturation. Reducing excess inflammation in the respiratory tract is also subject to much research since this is one of the primary mechanisms of influenza pathology. Other forms of therapy in development include monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies that target viral proteins, convalescent plasma, different approaches to modify the host antiviral response, and stem cell-based therapies to repair lung damage. Much research on LAIVs focuses on identifying genome sequences that can be deleted to create harmless influenza viruses in vaccines that still confer immunity. The high variability and rapid evolution of influenza virus antigens, however, is a major obstacle in developing effective vaccines. Furthermore, it is hard to predict which strains will be in circulation during the next flu season, manufacturing a sufficient quantity of flu vaccines for the next season is difficult, LAIVs have limited efficacy, and repeated annual vaccination potentially has diminished efficacy. For these reasons, "broadly-reactive" or "universal" flu vaccines are being researched that can provide protection against many or all influenza viruses. Approaches to develop such a vaccine include HA stalk-based methods such as chimeras that have the same stalk but different heads, HA head-based methods such as computationally optimized broadly neutralizing antigens, anti-idiotypic antibodies, and vaccines to elicit immune responses to highly conserved viral proteins. mRNA vaccines to provide protection against influenza are also under research. In recent years, controversy emerged over the ethical justifications for conducting certain 'gain-of-function' (GOF) studies on influenza. ## In animals ### Birds Aquatic birds such as ducks, geese, shorebirds, and gulls are the primary reservoir of IAVs. In birds, AIVs may be either low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) viruses that produce little to no symptoms or highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses that cause severe illness. Symptoms of HPAI infection include lack of energy and appetite, decreased egg production, soft-shelled or misshapen eggs, swelling of the head, comb, wattles, and hocks, purple discoloration of wattles, combs, and legs, nasal discharge, coughing, sneezing, incoordination, and diarrhea. Birds infected with an HPAI virus may also die suddenly without any signs of infection. The distinction between LPAI and HPAI can generally be made based on how lethal an AIV is to chickens. At the genetic level, an AIV can be usually be identified as an HPAI virus if it has a multibasic cleavage site in the HA protein, which contains additional residues in the HA gene. Most AIVs are LPAI. Notable HPAI viruses include HPAI H5N1 and HPAI H7N9. HPAI viruses have been a major disease burden in the 21st century, resulting in the death of large numbers of birds. In H7N9's case, some circulating strains were originally LPAI but became HPAI by acquiring the HA multibasic cleavage site. Avian H9N2 is also of concern because although it is LPAI, it is a common donor of genes to H5N1 and H7N9 during reassortment. Migratory birds can spread influenza across long distances. An example of this was when an H5N1 strain in 2005 infected birds at Qinghai Lake, China, which is a stopover and breeding site for many migratory birds, subsequently spreading the virus to more than 20 countries across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. AIVs can be transmitted from wild birds to domestic free-range ducks and in turn to poultry through contaminated water, aerosols, and fomites. Ducks therefore act as key intermediates between wild and domestic birds. Transmission to poultry typically occurs in backyard farming and live animal markets where multiple species interact with each other. From there, AIVs can spread to poultry farms in the absence of adequate biosecurity. Among poultry, HPAI transmission occurs through aerosols and contaminated feces, cages, feed, and dead animals. Back-transmission of HPAI viruses from poultry to wild birds has occurred and is implicated in mass die-offs and intercontinental spread. AIVs have occasionally infected humans through aerosols, fomites, and contaminated water. Direction transmission from wild birds is rare. Instead, most transmission involves domestic poultry, mainly chickens, ducks, and geese but also a variety of other birds such as guinea fowl, partridge, pheasants, and quails. The primary risk factor for infection with AIVs is exposure to birds in farms and live poultry markets. Typically, infection with an AIV has an incubation period of 3–5 days but can be up to 9 days. H5N1 and H7N9 cause severe lower respiratory tract illness, whereas other AIVs such as H9N2 cause a more mild upper respiratory tract illness, commonly with conjunctivitis. Limited transmission of avian H2, H5-7, H9, and H10 subtypes from one person to another through respiratory droplets, aerosols, and fomites has occurred, but sustained human-to-human transmission of AIVs has not occurred. Before 2013, H5N1 was the most common AIV to infect humans. Since then, H7N9 has been responsible for most human cases. ### Pigs Influenza in pigs is a respiratory disease similar to influenza in humans and is found worldwide. Asymptomatic infections are common. Symptoms typically appear 1–3 days after infection and include fever, lethargy, anorexia, weight loss, labored breathing, coughing, sneezing, and nasal discharge. In sows, pregnancy may be aborted. Complications include secondary infections and potentially fatal bronchopneumonia. Pigs become contagious within a day of infection and typically spread the virus for 7–10 days, which can spread rapidly within a herd. Pigs usually recover from infection within 3–7 days after symptoms appear. Prevention and control measures include inactivated vaccines and culling infected herds. The influenza viruses usually responsible for swine flu are IAV subtypes H1N1, H1N2, and H3N2. Some IAVs can be transmitted via aerosols from pigs to humans and vice versa. Furthermore, pigs, along with bats and quails, are recognized as a mixing vessel of influenza viruses because they have both α-2,3 and α-2,6 sialic acid receptors in their respiratory tract. Because of that, both avian and mammalian influenza viruses can infect pigs. If co-infection occurs, then reassortment is possible. A notable example of this was the reassortment of a swine, avian, and human influenza virus in 2009, resulting in a novel H1N1 strain that caused the 2009 flu pandemic. Spillover events from humans to pigs, however, appear to be more common than from pigs to humans. ### Other animals Influenza viruses have been found in many other animals, including cattle, horses, dogs, cats, and marine mammals. Nearly all IAVs are apparently descended from ancestral viruses in birds. The exception are bat influenza-like viruses, which have an uncertain origin. These bat viruses have HA and NA subtypes H17, H18, N10, and N11. H17N10 and H18N11 are unable to reassort with other IAVs, but they are still able to replicate in other mammals. AIVs sometimes crossover into mammals. For example, in late 2016 to early 2017, an avian H7N2 strain was found to be infecting cats in New York. Equine IAVs include H7N7 and two lineages of H3N8. H7N7, however, has not been detected in horses since the late 1970s, so it may have become extinct in horses. H3N8 in equines spreads via aerosols and causes respiratory illness. Equine H3N8 perferentially binds to α-2,3 sialic acids, so horses are usually considered dead-end hosts, but transmission to dogs and camels has occurred, raising concerns that horses may be mixing vessels for reassortment. In canines, the only IAVs in circulation are equine-derived H3N8 and avian-derived H3N2. Canine H3N8 has not been observed to reassort with other subtypes. H3N2 has a much broader host range and can reassort with H1N1 and H5N1. An isolated case of H6N1 likely from a chicken was found infecting a dog, so other AIVs may emerge in canines. Other mammals to be infected by IAVs include H7N7 and H4N5 in seals, H1N3 in whales, and H10N4 and H3N2 in minks. Various mutations have been identified that are associated with AIVs adapting to mammals. Since HA proteins vary in which sialic acids they bind to, mutations in the HA receptor binding site can allow AIVs to infect mammals. Other mutations include mutations affecting which sialic acids NA proteins cleave and a mutation in the PB2 polymerase subunit that improves tolerance of lower temperatures in mammalian respiratory tracts and enhances RNP assembly by stabilizing NP and PB2 binding. IBV is mainly found in humans but has also been detected in pigs, dogs, horses, and seals. Likewise, ICV primarily infects humans but has been observed in pigs, dogs, cattle, and dromedary camels. IDV causes an influenza-like illness in pigs but its impact in its natural reservoir, cattle, is relatively unknown. It may cause respiratory disease resembling human influenza on its own, or it may be part of a bovine respiratory disease (BRD) complex with other pathogens during co-infection. BRD is a concern for the cattle industry, so IDV's possible involvement in BRD has led to research on vaccines for cattle that can provide protection against IDV. Two antigenic lineages are in circulation: D/swine/Oklahoma/1334/2011 (D/OK) and D/bovine/Oklahoma/660/2013 (D/660).
8,482,163	Magnetosphere of Jupiter	1,169,986,821	Cavity created in the solar wind	[ "Astronomical objects discovered in 1973", "Jupiter", "Magnetospheres", "Planetary science" ]	The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by Jupiter's magnetic field. Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun's direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Wider and flatter than the Earth's magnetosphere, Jupiter's is stronger by an order of magnitude, while its magnetic moment is roughly 18,000 times larger. The existence of Jupiter's magnetic field was first inferred from observations of radio emissions at the end of the 1950s and was directly observed by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1973. Jupiter's internal magnetic field is generated by electrical currents in the planet's outer core, which is composed of liquid metallic hydrogen. Volcanic eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io eject large amounts of sulfur dioxide gas into space, forming a large torus around the planet. Jupiter's magnetic field forces the torus to rotate with the same angular velocity and direction as the planet. The torus in turn loads the magnetic field with plasma, in the process stretching it into a pancake-like structure called a magnetodisk. In effect, Jupiter's magnetosphere is internally driven, shaped primarily by Io's plasma and its own rotation, rather than by the solar wind as at Earth's magnetosphere. Strong currents in the magnetosphere generate permanent aurorae around the planet's poles and intense variable radio emissions, which means that Jupiter can be thought of as a very weak radio pulsar. Jupiter's aurorae have been observed in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, visible, ultraviolet and soft X-rays. The action of the magnetosphere traps and accelerates particles, producing intense belts of radiation similar to Earth's Van Allen belts, but thousands of times stronger. The interaction of energetic particles with the surfaces of Jupiter's largest moons markedly affects their chemical and physical properties. Those same particles also affect and are affected by the motions of the particles within Jupiter's tenuous planetary ring system. Radiation belts present a significant hazard for spacecraft and potentially to human space travellers. ## Structure Jupiter's magnetosphere is a complex structure comprising a bow shock, magnetosheath, magnetopause, magnetotail, magnetodisk, and other components. The magnetic field around Jupiter emanates from a number of different sources, including fluid circulation at the planet's core (the internal field), electrical currents in the plasma surrounding Jupiter and the currents flowing at the boundary of the planet's magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is embedded within the plasma of the solar wind, which carries the interplanetary magnetic field. ### Internal magnetic field The bulk of Jupiter's magnetic field, like Earth's, is generated by an internal dynamo supported by the circulation of a conducting fluid in its outer core. But whereas Earth's core is made of molten iron and nickel, Jupiter's is composed of metallic hydrogen. As with Earth's, Jupiter's magnetic field is mostly a dipole, with north and south magnetic poles at the ends of a single magnetic axis. On Jupiter the north pole of the dipole (where magnetic field lines point radially outward) is located in the planet's northern hemisphere and the south pole of the dipole lies in its southern hemisphere. This is opposite from the Earth. Jupiter's field also has quadrupole, octupole and higher components, though they are less than one-tenth as strong as the dipole component. The dipole is tilted roughly 10° from Jupiter's axis of rotation; the tilt is similar to that of the Earth (11.3°). Its equatorial field strength is about 417.0 μT (4.170 G), which corresponds to a dipole magnetic moment of about 2.83 T·m<sup>3</sup>. This makes Jupiter's magnetic field about 20 times stronger than Earth's, and its magnetic moment \~20,000 times larger. Jupiter's magnetic field rotates at the same speed as the region below its atmosphere, with a period of 9 h 55 m. No changes in its strength or structure had been observed since the first measurements were taken by the Pioneer spacecraft in the mid-1970s, until 2019. Analysis of observations from the Juno spacecraft show a small but measurable change from the planet's magnetic field observed during the Pioneer era. In particular, Jupiter has a region of strongly non-dipolar field, known as the "Great Blue Spot", near the equator. This may be roughly analogous to the Earth's South Atlantic Anomaly. This region shows signs of large secular variations. ### Size and shape Jupiter's internal magnetic field prevents the solar wind, a stream of ionized particles emitted by the Sun, from interacting directly with its atmosphere, and instead diverts it away from the planet, effectively creating a cavity in the solar wind flow, called a magnetosphere, composed of a plasma different from that of the solar wind. The Jovian magnetosphere is so large that the Sun and its visible corona would fit inside it with room to spare. If one could see it from Earth, it would appear five times larger than the full moon in the sky despite being nearly 1700 times farther away. As with Earth's magnetosphere, the boundary separating the denser and colder solar wind's plasma from the hotter and less dense one within Jupiter's magnetosphere is called the magnetopause. The distance from the magnetopause to the center of the planet is from 45 to 100 R<sub>J</sub> (where R<sub>J</sub>=71,492 km is the radius of Jupiter) at the subsolar point—the unfixed point on the surface at which the Sun would appear directly overhead to an observer. The position of the magnetopause depends on the pressure exerted by the solar wind, which in turn depends on solar activity. In front of the magnetopause (at a distance from 80 to 130 R<sub>J</sub> from the planet's center) lies the bow shock, a wake-like disturbance in the solar wind caused by its collision with the magnetosphere. The region between the bow shock and magnetopause is called the magnetosheath. At the opposite side of the planet, the solar wind stretches Jupiter's magnetic field lines into a long, trailing magnetotail, which sometimes extends well beyond the orbit of Saturn. The structure of Jupiter's magnetotail is similar to Earth's. It consists of two lobes (blue areas in the figure), with the magnetic field in the southern lobe pointing toward Jupiter, and that in the northern lobe pointing away from it. The lobes are separated by a thin layer of plasma called the tail current sheet (orange layer in the middle). The shape of Jupiter's magnetosphere described above is sustained by the neutral sheet current (also known as the magnetotail current), which flows with Jupiter's rotation through the tail plasma sheet, the tail currents, which flow against Jupiter's rotation at the outer boundary of the magnetotail, and the magnetopause currents (or Chapman–Ferraro currents), which flow against rotation along the dayside magnetopause. These currents create the magnetic field that cancels the internal field outside the magnetosphere. They also interact substantially with the solar wind. Jupiter's magnetosphere is traditionally divided into three parts: the inner, middle and outer magnetosphere. The inner magnetosphere is located at distances closer than 10 R<sub>J</sub> from the planet. The magnetic field within it remains approximately dipole, because contributions from the currents flowing in the magnetospheric equatorial plasma sheet are small. In the middle (between 10 and 40 R<sub>J</sub>) and outer (further than 40 R<sub>J</sub>) magnetospheres, the magnetic field is not a dipole, and is seriously disturbed by its interaction with the plasma sheet (see magnetodisk below). ### Role of Io Although overall the shape of Jupiter's magnetosphere resembles that of the Earth's, closer to the planet its structure is very different. Jupiter's volcanically active moon Io is a strong source of plasma in its own right, and loads Jupiter's magnetosphere with as much as 1,000 kg of new material every second. Strong volcanic eruptions on Io emit huge amounts of sulfur dioxide, a major part of which is dissociated into atoms and ionized by electron impacts and, to a lesser extent, solar ultraviolet radiation, producing ions of sulfur and oxygen. Further electron impacts produce higher charge state, resulting in a plasma of S<sup>+</sup>, O<sup>+</sup>, S<sup>2+</sup>, O<sup>2+</sup> and S<sup>3+</sup>. They form the Io plasma torus: a thick and relatively cool ring of plasma encircling Jupiter, located near Io's orbit. The plasma temperature within the torus is 10–100 eV (100,000–1,000,000 K), which is much lower than that of the particles in the radiation belts—10 keV (100 million K). The plasma in the torus is forced into co-rotation with Jupiter, meaning both share the same period of rotation. The Io torus fundamentally alters the dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere. As a result of several processes—diffusion and interchange instability being the main escape mechanisms—the plasma slowly leaks away from Jupiter. As the plasma moves further from the planet, the radial currents flowing within it gradually increase its velocity, maintaining co-rotation. These radial currents are also the source of the magnetic field's azimuthal component, which as a result bends back against the rotation. The particle number density of the plasma decreases from around 2,000 cm<sup>−3</sup> in the Io torus to about 0.2 cm<sup>−3</sup> at a distance of 35 R<sub>J</sub>. In the middle magnetosphere, at distances greater than 10 R<sub>J</sub> from Jupiter, co-rotation gradually breaks down and the plasma begins to rotate more slowly than the planet. Eventually at the distances greater than roughly 40 R<sub>J</sub> (in the outer magnetosphere) this plasma is no longer confined by the magnetic field and leaves the magnetosphere through the magnetotail. As cold, dense plasma moves outward, it is replaced by hot, low-density plasma, with temperatures of up to 20 keV (200 million K) or higher) moving in from the outer magnetosphere. Some of this plasma, adiabatically heated as it approaches Jupiter, may form the radiation belts in Jupiter's inner magnetosphere. ### Magnetodisk While Earth's magnetic field is roughly teardrop-shaped, Jupiter's is flatter, more closely resembling a disk, and "wobbles" periodically about its axis. The main reasons for this disk-like configuration are the centrifugal force from the co-rotating plasma and thermal pressure of hot plasma, both of which act to stretch Jupiter's magnetic field lines, forming a flattened pancake-like structure, known as the magnetodisk, at the distances greater than 20 R<sub>J</sub> from the planet. The magnetodisk has a thin current sheet at the middle plane, approximately near the magnetic equator. The magnetic field lines point away from Jupiter above the sheet and towards Jupiter below it. The load of plasma from Io greatly expands the size of the Jovian magnetosphere, because the magnetodisk creates an additional internal pressure which balances the pressure of the solar wind. In the absence of Io the distance from the planet to the magnetopause at the subsolar point would be no more than 42 R<sub>J</sub>, whereas it is actually 75 R<sub>J</sub> on average. The configuration of the magnetodisk's field is maintained by the azimuthal ring current (not an analog of Earth's ring current), which flows with rotation through the equatorial plasma sheet. The Lorentz force resulting from the interaction of this current with the planetary magnetic field creates a centripetal force, which keeps the co-rotating plasma from escaping the planet. The total ring current in the equatorial current sheet is estimated at 90–160 million amperes. ## Dynamics ### Co-rotation and radial currents The main driver of Jupiter's magnetosphere is the planet's rotation. In this respect Jupiter is similar to a device called a Unipolar generator. When Jupiter rotates, its ionosphere moves relatively to the dipole magnetic field of the planet. Because the dipole magnetic moment points in the direction of the rotation, the Lorentz force, which appears as a result of this motion, drives negatively charged electrons to the poles, while positively charged ions are pushed towards the equator. As a result, the poles become negatively charged and the regions closer to the equator become positively charged. Since the magnetosphere of Jupiter is filled with highly conductive plasma, the electrical circuit is closed through it. A current called the direct current flows along the magnetic field lines from the ionosphere to the equatorial plasma sheet. This current then flows radially away from the planet within the equatorial plasma sheet and finally returns to the planetary ionosphere from the outer reaches of the magnetosphere along the field lines connected to the poles. The currents that flow along the magnetic field lines are generally called field-aligned or Birkeland currents. The radial current interacts with the planetary magnetic field, and the resulting Lorentz force accelerates the magnetospheric plasma in the direction of planetary rotation. This is the main mechanism that maintains co-rotation of the plasma in Jupiter's magnetosphere. The current flowing from the ionosphere to the plasma sheet is especially strong when the corresponding part of the plasma sheet rotates slower than the planet. As mentioned above, co-rotation breaks down in the region located between 20 and 40 R<sub>J</sub> from Jupiter. This region corresponds to the magnetodisk, where the magnetic field is highly stretched. The strong direct current flowing into the magnetodisk originates in a very limited latitudinal range of about 16 ± 1° from the Jovian magnetic poles. These narrow circular regions correspond to Jupiter's main auroral ovals. (See below.) The return current flowing from the outer magnetosphere beyond 50 R<sub>J</sub> enters the Jovian ionosphere near the poles, closing the electrical circuit. The total radial current in the Jovian magnetosphere is estimated at 60 million–140 million amperes. The acceleration of the plasma into the co-rotation leads to the transfer of energy from the Jovian rotation to the kinetic energy of the plasma. In that sense, the Jovian magnetosphere is powered by the planet's rotation, whereas the Earth's magnetosphere is powered mainly by the solar wind. ### Interchange instability and reconnection The main problem encountered in deciphering the dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere is the transport of heavy cold plasma from the Io torus at 6 R<sub>J</sub> to the outer magnetosphere at distances of more than 50 R<sub>J</sub>. The precise mechanism of this process is not known, but it is hypothesized to occur as a result of plasma diffusion due to interchange instability. The process is similar to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in hydrodynamics. In the case of the Jovian magnetosphere, centrifugal force plays the role of gravity; the heavy liquid is the cold and dense Ionian (i.e. pertaining to Io) plasma, and the light liquid is the hot, much less dense plasma from the outer magnetosphere. The instability leads to an exchange between the outer and inner parts of the magnetosphere of flux tubes filled with plasma. The buoyant empty flux tubes move towards the planet, while pushing the heavy tubes, filled with the Ionian plasma, away from Jupiter. This interchange of flux tubes is a form of magnetospheric turbulence. This highly hypothetical picture of the flux tube exchange was partly confirmed by the Galileo spacecraft, which detected regions of sharply reduced plasma density and increased field strength in the inner magnetosphere. These voids may correspond to the almost empty flux tubes arriving from the outer magnetosphere. In the middle magnetosphere, Galileo detected so-called injection events, which occur when hot plasma from the outer magnetosphere impacts the magnetodisk, leading to increased flux of energetic particles and a strengthened magnetic field. No mechanism is yet known to explain the transport of cold plasma outward. When flux tubes loaded with the cold Ionian plasma reach the outer magnetosphere, they go through a reconnection process, which separates the magnetic field from the plasma. The former returns to the inner magnetosphere in the form of flux tubes filled with hot and less dense plasma, while the latter are probably ejected down the magnetotail in the form of plasmoids—large blobs of plasma. The reconnection processes may correspond to the global reconfiguration events also observed by the Galileo spacecraft, which occurred regularly every 2–3 days. The reconfiguration events usually included rapid and chaotic variation of the magnetic field strength and direction, as well as abrupt changes in the motion of the plasma, which often stopped co-rotating and began flowing outward. They were mainly observed in the dawn sector of the night magnetosphere. The plasma flowing down the tail along the open field lines is called the planetary wind. The reconnection events are analogues to the magnetic substorms in the Earth's magnetosphere. The difference seems to be their respective energy sources: terrestrial substorms involve storage of the solar wind's energy in the magnetotail followed by its release through a reconnection event in the tail's neutral current sheet. The latter also creates a plasmoid which moves down the tail. Conversely, in Jupiter's magnetosphere the rotational energy is stored in the magnetodisk and released when a plasmoid separates from it. ### Influence of the solar wind Whereas the dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere mainly depend on internal sources of energy, the solar wind probably has a role as well, particularly as a source of high-energy protons. The structure of the outer magnetosphere shows some features of a solar wind-driven magnetosphere, including a significant dawn–dusk asymmetry. In particular, magnetic field lines in the dusk sector are bent in the opposite direction to those in the dawn sector. In addition, the dawn magnetosphere contains open field lines connecting to the magnetotail, whereas in the dusk magnetosphere, the field lines are closed. All these observations indicate that a solar wind driven reconnection process, known on Earth as the Dungey cycle, may also be taking place in the Jovian magnetosphere. The extent of the solar wind's influence on the dynamics of Jupiter's magnetosphere is currently unknown; however, it could be especially strong at times of elevated solar activity. The auroral radio, optical and X-ray emissions, as well as synchrotron emissions from the radiation belts all show correlations with solar wind pressure, indicating that the solar wind may drive plasma circulation or modulate internal processes in the magnetosphere. ## Emissions ### Aurorae Jupiter demonstrates bright, persistent aurorae around both poles. Unlike Earth's aurorae, which are transient and only occur at times of heightened solar activity, Jupiter's aurorae are permanent, though their intensity varies from day to day. They consist of three main components: the main ovals, which are bright, narrow (less than 1000 km in width) circular features located at approximately 16° from the magnetic poles; the satellites' auroral spots, which correspond to the footprints of the magnetic field lines connecting Jupiter's ionosphere with those of its largest moons, and transient polar emissions situated within the main ovals (elliptical field may prove to be a better description). Auroral emissions have been detected in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to X-rays (up to 3 keV); they are most frequently observed in the mid-infrared (wavelength 3–4 μm and 7–14 μm) and far ultraviolet spectral regions (wavelength 120–180 nm). The main ovals are the dominant part of the Jovian aurorae. They have roughly stable shapes and locations, but their intensities are strongly modulated by the solar wind pressure—the stronger solar wind, the weaker the aurorae. As mentioned above, the main ovals are maintained by the strong influx of electrons accelerated by the electric potential drops between the magnetodisk plasma and the Jovian ionosphere. These electrons carry field aligned currents, which maintain the plasma's co-rotation in the magnetodisk. The potential drops develop because the sparse plasma outside the equatorial sheet can only carry a current of a limited strength without driving instabilities and producing potential drops. The precipitating electrons have energy in the range 10–100 keV and penetrate deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter, where they ionize and excite molecular hydrogen causing ultraviolet emission. The total energy input into the ionosphere is 10–100 TW. In addition, the currents flowing in the ionosphere heat it by the process known as Joule heating. This heating, which produces up to 300 TW of power, is responsible for the strong infrared radiation from the Jovian aurorae and partially for the heating of the thermosphere of Jupiter. Spots were found to correspond to the Galilean moons Io, Europa and Ganymede. They develop because the co-rotation of the plasma interacts with the moons and is slowed in their vicinity. The brightest spot belongs to Io, which is the main source of the plasma in the magnetosphere (see above). The Ionian auroral spot is thought to be related to Alfvén currents flowing from the Jovian to Ionian ionosphere. Europa's is similar but much dimmer, because it has a more tenuous atmosphere and is a weaker plasma source. Europa's atmosphere is produced by sublimation of water ice from its surfaces, rather than the volcanic activity which produces Io's atmosphere. Ganymede has an internal magnetic field and a magnetosphere of its own. The interaction between this magnetosphere and that of Jupiter produces currents due to magnetic reconnection. The auroral spot associated with Callisto is probably similar to that of Europa, but has only been seen once as of June, 2019. Normally, magnetic field lines connected to Callisto touch Jupiter's atmosphere very close to or along the main auroral oval, making it difficult to detect Callisto's auroral spot. Bright arcs and spots sporadically appear within the main ovals. These transient phenomena are thought to be related to interaction with either the solar wind or the dynamics of the outer magnetosphere. The magnetic field lines in this region are believed to be open or to map onto the magnetotail. The secondary ovals are sometimes observed inside the main oval and may be related to the boundary between open and closed magnetic field lines or to the polar cusps. The polar auroral emissions could be similar to those observed around Earth's poles: appearing when electrons are accelerated towards the planet by potential drops, during reconnection of solar magnetic field with that of the planet. The regions within the main ovals emits most of auroral X-rays. The spectrum of the auroral X-ray radiation consists of spectral lines of highly ionized oxygen and sulfur, which probably appear when energetic (hundreds of kiloelectronvolts) S and O ions precipitate into the polar atmosphere of Jupiter. The source of this precipitation remains unknown but this is inconsistent with the theory that these magnetic field lines are open and connect to the solar wind. ### Jupiter at radio wavelengths Jupiter is a powerful source of radio waves in the spectral regions stretching from several kilohertz to tens of megahertz. Radio waves with frequencies of less than about 0.3 MHz (and thus wavelengths longer than 1 km) are called the Jovian kilometric radiation or KOM. Those with frequencies in the interval of 0.3–3 MHz (with wavelengths of 100–1000 m) are called the hectometric radiation or HOM, while emissions in the range 3–40 MHz (with wavelengths of 10–100 m) are referred to as the decametric radiation or DAM. The latter radiation was the first to be observed from Earth, and its approximately 10-hour periodicity helped to identify it as originating from Jupiter. The strongest part of decametric emission, which is related to Io and to the Io–Jupiter current system, is called Io-DAM. The majority of these emissions are thought to be produced by a mechanism called "cyclotron maser instability", which develops close to the auroral regions. Electrons moving parallel to the magnetic field precipitate into the atmosphere while those with a sufficient perpendicular velocity are reflected by the converging magnetic field. This results in an unstable velocity distribution. This velocity distribution spontaneously generates radio waves at the local electron cyclotron frequency. The electrons involved in the generation of radio waves are probably those carrying currents from the poles of the planet to the magnetodisk. The intensity of Jovian radio emissions usually varies smoothly with time. However, there are short and powerful bursts (S bursts) of emission superimposed on the more gradual variations and which can outshine all other components. The total emitted power of the DAM component is about 100 GW, while the power of all other HOM/KOM components is about 10 GW. In comparison, the total power of Earth's radio emissions is about 0.1 GW. Jupiter's radio and particle emissions are strongly modulated by its rotation, which makes the planet somewhat similar to a pulsar. This periodical modulation is probably related to asymmetries in the Jovian magnetosphere, which are caused by the tilt of the magnetic moment with respect to the rotational axis as well as by high-latitude magnetic anomalies. The physics governing Jupiter's radio emissions is similar to that of radio pulsars. They differ only in the scale, and Jupiter can be considered a very small radio pulsar too. In addition, Jupiter's radio emissions strongly depend on solar wind pressure and, hence, on solar activity. In addition to relatively long-wavelength radiation, Jupiter also emits synchrotron radiation (also known as the Jovian decimetric radiation or DIM radiation) with frequencies in the range of 0.1–15 GHz (wavelength from 3 m to 2 cm),. These emissions are from relativistic electrons trapped in the inner radiation belts of the planet. The energy of the electrons that contribute to the DIM emissions is from 0.1 to 100 MeV, while the leading contribution comes from the electrons with energy in the range 1–20 MeV. This radiation is well understood and was used since the beginning of the 1960s to study the structure of the planet's magnetic field and radiation belts. The particles in the radiation belts originate in the outer magnetosphere and are adiabatically accelerated, when they are transported to the inner magnetosphere. However, this requires a source population of moderately high energy electrons (\>\> 1 keV), and the origin of this population is not well understood. Jupiter's magnetosphere ejects streams of high-energy electrons and ions (energy up to tens megaelectronvolts), which travel as far as Earth's orbit. These streams are highly collimated and vary with the rotational period of the planet like the radio emissions. In this respect as well, Jupiter shows similarity to a pulsar. ## Interaction with rings and moons Jupiter's extensive magnetosphere envelops its ring system and the orbits of all four Galilean satellites. Orbiting near the magnetic equator, these bodies serve as sources and sinks of magnetospheric plasma, while energetic particles from the magnetosphere alter their surfaces. The particles sputter off material from the surfaces and create chemical changes via radiolysis. The plasma's co-rotation with the planet means that the plasma preferably interacts with the moons' trailing hemispheres, causing noticeable hemispheric asymmetries. Close to Jupiter, the planet's rings and small moons absorb high-energy particles (energy above 10 keV) from the radiation belts. This creates noticeable gaps in the belts' spatial distribution and affects the decimetric synchrotron radiation. In fact, the existence of Jupiter's rings was first hypothesized on the basis of data from the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, which detected a sharp drop in the number of high-energy ions close to the planet. The planetary magnetic field strongly influences the motion of sub-micrometer ring particles as well, which acquire an electrical charge under the influence of solar ultraviolet radiation. Their behavior is similar to that of co-rotating ions. Resonant interactions between the co-rotation and the particles' orbital motion has been used to explain the creation of Jupiter's innermost halo ring (located between 1.4 and 1.71 R<sub>J</sub>). This ring consists of sub-micrometer particles on highly inclined and eccentric orbits. The particles originate in the main ring; however, when they drift toward Jupiter, their orbits are modified by the strong 3:2 Lorentz resonance located at 1.71 R<sub>J</sub>, which increases their inclinations and eccentricities. Another 2:1 Lorentz resonance at 1.4 Rj defines the inner boundary of the halo ring. All Galilean moons have thin atmospheres with surface pressures in the range 0.01–1 nbar, which in turn support substantial ionospheres with electron densities in the range of 1,000–10,000 cm<sup>−3</sup>. The co-rotational flow of cold magnetospheric plasma is partially diverted around them by the currents induced in their ionospheres, creating wedge-shaped structures known as Alfvén wings. The interaction of the large moons with the co-rotational flow is similar to the interaction of the solar wind with the non-magnetized planets like Venus, although the co-rotational speed is usually subsonic (the speeds vary from 74 to 328 km/s), which prevents the formation of a bow shock. The pressure from the co-rotating plasma continuously strips gases from the moons' atmospheres (especially from that of Io), and some of these atoms are ionized and brought into co-rotation. This process creates gas and plasma tori in the vicinity of moons' orbits with the Ionian torus being the most prominent. In effect, the Galilean moons (mainly Io) serve as the principal plasma sources in Jupiter's inner and middle magnetosphere. Meanwhile, the energetic particles are largely unaffected by the Alfvén wings and have free access to the moons' surfaces (except Ganymede's). The icy Galilean moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, all generate induced magnetic moments in response to changes in Jupiter's magnetic field. These varying magnetic moments create dipole magnetic fields around them, which act to compensate for changes in the ambient field. The induction is thought to take place in subsurface layers of salty water, which are likely to exist in all of Jupiter's large icy moons. These underground oceans can potentially harbor life, and evidence for their presence was one of the most important discoveries made in the 1990s by spacecraft. The interaction of the Jovian magnetosphere with Ganymede, which has an intrinsic magnetic moment, differs from its interaction with the non-magnetized moons. Ganymede's internal magnetic field carves a cavity inside Jupiter's magnetosphere with a diameter of approximately two Ganymede diameters, creating a mini-magnetosphere within Jupiter's magnetosphere. Ganymede's magnetic field diverts the co-rotating plasma flow around its magnetosphere. It also protects the moon's equatorial regions, where the field lines are closed, from energetic particles. The latter can still freely strike Ganymede's poles, where the field lines are open. Some of the energetic particles are trapped near the equator of Ganymede, creating mini-radiation belts. Energetic electrons entering its thin atmosphere are responsible for the observed Ganymedian polar aurorae. Charged particles have a considerable influence on the surface properties of Galilean moons. Plasma originating from Io carries sulfur and sodium ions farther from the planet, where they are implanted preferentially on the trailing hemispheres of Europa and Ganymede. On Callisto however, for unknown reasons, sulfur is concentrated on the leading hemisphere. Plasma may also be responsible for darkening the moons' trailing hemispheres (again, except Callisto's). Energetic electrons and ions, with the flux of the latter being more isotropic, bombard surface ice, sputtering atoms and molecules off and causing radiolysis of water and other chemical compounds. The energetic particles break water into oxygen and hydrogen, maintaining the thin oxygen atmospheres of the icy moons (since the hydrogen escapes more rapidly). The compounds produced radiolytically on the surfaces of Galilean moons also include ozone and hydrogen peroxide. If organics or carbonates are present, carbon dioxide, methanol and carbonic acid can be produced as well. In the presence of sulfur, likely products include sulfur dioxide, hydrogen disulfide and sulfuric acid. Oxidants produced by radiolysis, like oxygen and ozone, may be trapped inside the ice and carried downward to the oceans over geologic time intervals, thus serving as a possible energy source for life. ## Discovery The first evidence for the existence of Jupiter's magnetic field came in 1955, with the discovery of the decametric radio emission or DAM. As the DAM's spectrum extended up to 40 MHz, astronomers concluded that Jupiter must possess a magnetic field with a maximum strength of above 1 milliteslas (10 gauss). In 1959, observations in the microwave part of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum (0.1–10 GHz) led to the discovery of the Jovian decimetric radiation (DIM) and the realization that it was synchrotron radiation emitted by relativistic electrons trapped in the planet's radiation belts. These synchrotron emissions were used to estimate the number and energy of the electrons around Jupiter and led to improved estimates of the magnetic moment and its tilt. By 1973 the magnetic moment was known within a factor of two, whereas the tilt was correctly estimated at about 10°. The modulation of Jupiter's DAM by Io (the so-called Io-DAM) was discovered in 1964, and allowed Jupiter's rotation period to be precisely determined. The definitive discovery of the Jovian magnetic field occurred in December 1973, when the Pioneer 10 spacecraft flew near the planet. ## Exploration after 1970 As of 2009 a total of eight spacecraft have flown around Jupiter and all have contributed to the present knowledge of the Jovian magnetosphere. The first space probe to reach Jupiter was Pioneer 10 in December 1973, which passed within 2.9 R<sub>J</sub> from the center of the planet. Its twin Pioneer 11 visited Jupiter a year later, traveling along a highly inclined trajectory and approaching the planet as close as 1.6 R<sub>J</sub>. Pioneer 10 provided the best coverage available of the inner magnetic field as it passed through the inner radiation belts within 20 R<sub>J</sub>, receiving an integrated dose of 200,000 rads from electrons and 56,000 rads from protons (for a human, a whole body dose of 500 rads would be fatal). The level of radiation at Jupiter was ten times more powerful than Pioneer's designers had predicted, leading to fears that the probe would not survive; however, with a few minor glitches, it managed to pass through the radiation belts, saved in large part by the fact that Jupiter's magnetosphere had "wobbled" slightly upward at that point, moving away from the spacecraft. However, Pioneer 11 did lose most images of Io, as the radiation had caused its imaging photo polarimeter to receive a number of spurious commands. The subsequent and far more technologically advanced Voyager spacecraft had to be redesigned to cope with the massive radiation levels. Voyagers 1 and 2 arrived at Jupiter in 1979–1980 and traveled almost in its equatorial plane. Voyager 1, which passed within 5 R<sub>J</sub> from the planet's center, was first to encounter the Io plasma torus. It received a radiation dosage one thousand times the lethal level for humans, the damage resulting in serious degradation of some high-resolution images of Io and Ganymede. Voyager 2 passed within 10 R<sub>J</sub> and discovered the current sheet in the equatorial plane. The next probe to approach Jupiter was Ulysses in 1992, which investigated the planet's polar magnetosphere. The Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, provided a comprehensive coverage of Jupiter's magnetic field near the equatorial plane at distances up to 100 R<sub>J</sub>. The regions studied included the magnetotail and the dawn and dusk sectors of the magnetosphere. While Galileo successfully survived in the harsh radiation environment of Jupiter, it still experienced a few technical problems. In particular, the spacecraft's gyroscopes often exhibited increased errors. Several times electrical arcs occurred between rotating and non-rotating parts of the spacecraft, causing it to enter safe mode, which led to total loss of the data from the 16th, 18th and 33rd orbits. The radiation also caused phase shifts in Galileo'''s ultra-stable quartz oscillator. When the Cassini spacecraft flew by Jupiter in 2000, it conducted coordinated measurements with Galileo. New Horizons passed close to Jupiter in 2007, carrying out a unique investigation of the Jovian magnetotail, traveling as far as 2500 R<sub>J</sub> along its length. In July 2016 Juno was inserted into Jupiter orbit, its scientific objectives include exploration of Jupiter's polar magnetosphere. The coverage of Jupiter's magnetosphere remains much poorer than for Earth's magnetic field. Further study is important to further understand the Jovian magnetosphere's dynamics. In 2003, NASA conducted a conceptual study called "Human Outer Planets Exploration" (HOPE) regarding the future human exploration of the outer Solar System. The possibility was mooted of building a surface base on Callisto, because of the low radiation levels at the moon's distance from Jupiter and its geological stability. Callisto is the only one of Jupiter's Galilean satellites for which human exploration is feasible. The levels of ionizing radiation on Io, Europa and Ganymede are inimical to human life, and adequate protective measures have yet to be devised. ## Exploration after 2010 The Juno New Frontiers mission to Jupiter was launched in 2011 and arrived at Jupiter in 2016. It includes a suite of instruments designed to better understand the magnetosphere, including a magnetometer as well as other devices such as a detector for plasma and radio waves called Waves. The Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument should also help to understand the magnetosphere. > A primary objective of the Juno mission is to explore the polar magnetosphere of Jupiter. While Ulysses briefly attained latitudes of \~48 degrees, this was at relatively large distances from Jupiter (\~8.6 RJ). Hence, the polar magnetosphere of Jupiter is largely uncharted territory and, in particular, the auroral acceleration region has never been visited. ... Juno'' revealed a planetary magnetic field rich in spatial variation, possibly due to a relatively large dynamo radius. The most surprising observation until late 2017 was the absence of the expected magnetic signature of intense field aligned currents (Birkeland currents) associated with the main aurora. One of the goals of the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, launched April, 2023, is to understand the magnetic field from Ganymede and how it impacts Jupiter. Tianwen-4 is a proposed Chinese mission that will either explore the moon Callisto or gather more information on Io. ## Cited sources
59,400,612	James A. Doonan	1,166,155,237	American Jesuit educator (1841–1911)	[ "1841 births", "1911 deaths", "19th-century American Jesuits", "19th-century American educators", "20th-century American Jesuits", "20th-century American educators", "Boston College faculty", "Burials at the Jesuit Community Cemetery", "Catholic chaplains", "Catholics from Georgia (U.S. state)", "Deans and Prefects of Studies of the Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences", "Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences alumni", "Loyola University Maryland faculty", "People from Augusta, Georgia", "Presidents of Georgetown University", "Saint Joseph's University faculty", "St. Stanislaus Novitiate (Frederick, Maryland) alumni", "University and college chaplains in America", "Woodstock College alumni" ]	James Aloysius Doonan SJ (November 8, 1841 – April 12, 1911) was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit, who was the president of Georgetown University from 1882 to 1888. During that time he oversaw the naming of Gaston Hall and the construction of a new building for the School of Medicine. Doonan also acquired two historic cannons that were placed in front of Healy Hall. His presidency was financially successful, with a reduction in the university's burdensome debt that had accrued during the construction of Healy Hall. Prior to his administration of Georgetown, Doonan was a student there and at Woodstock College. He then taught at Loyola College in Maryland and Boston College. He spent his later years teaching and ministering at Boston College and at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia, as well as at St. Francis Xavier College in New York and at the Catholic Summer School of America. ## Early life and education Doonan was born on November 8, 1841, in Augusta, Georgia. His parents were Ellen Doonan (née Barry) and Terrence Doonan, an engineer and wealthy railroad official who was one of the first Catholics in Atlanta. Terrence was entrusted by the local priest with keeping the parish records until a pastor was appointed, and the first Catholic baptism in Atlanta was performed in his home. Doonan enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1853, and then entered the Jesuit novitiate at Frederick, Maryland, in July 1857. Doonan's brother, John, also became a Jesuit priest. After four years there, James completed his classical course of study, during which he was the captain of the student cadet regiment. He then taught at Loyola College in Baltimore in 1861, where he remained for three years, during the Civil War. Doonan was said to frequently recount a story of the time he was present at a High Mass in Baltimore when word of the approaching Union Army caused the congregants to leave and take up arms. As a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, he was aggrieved at being forced by the Union Army to bear arms on their behalf and act as a sentinel for several hours. In 1864, Doonan went to Boston College to teach for three years, after which he returned to Washington, where he studied philosophy at Georgetown. His studies were paused in 1868 while he taught for a year at Georgetown, and he then resumed his philosophical and theological studies at the newly established Woodstock College. Doonan was put in charge of the choir at Woodstock, and was noted for his skills on the violin and for his bass voice. He was ordained a priest in 1874 by James Gibbons, at the time the Bishop of Richmond, and he completed his studies at Woodstock in 1875. ## Georgetown University Doonan was appointed a professor of poetry at Georgetown in 1874. In September 1875, he went to Frederick, before returning to Georgetown in 1877 as a professor of rhetoric. He also served as vice president of the university and prefect of studies. Upon Patrick Francis Healy's resignation of the presidency due to his declining health, Doonan became the acting president and vice rector on January 27, 1882. On August 17, he became the president of Georgetown University. In this position, he inherited a large debt, small student enrollment, and no endowment. He did continue to receive large donations that had been elicited during his predecessor's term of office; coupled with his sale of a villa in Tenleytown and a farm on Hickory Hill (near Glover Park) that were owned by the university, he was able to reduce the significant debt of more than \$300,000, equivalent to \$ in , which had accrued from the construction of Healy Hall. Doonan redoubled his predecessor's fundraising efforts among the alumni of Georgetown. His efforts were praised by the Jesuit provincial superior, Thomas J. Campbell, and Doonan would leave office with a greatly reduced debt. For several years, Doonan promoted the idea that a celebration of the university's centenary be organized, which culminated in an official celebration in February 1889. In anticipation of the occasion, in 1885, Doonan purchased two cannons in St. Inigoes, Maryland, for \$50. The cannons had been brought to America aboard the Ark and the Dove, which carried the first settlers to the Province of Maryland as part of Lord Baltimore's 1634 expedition to St. Mary's County. Doonan had them placed in front of Healy Hall on November 1, 1888. He also proposed that Healy Hall's main auditorium, which remained unfinished, be completed and named Gaston Memorial Hall after the school's first student, William Gaston. During Doonan's presidency, a new building was constructed for the School of Medicine, which was designed by Paul J. Pelz and erected on the corner of 10th and E Streets in the summer of 1886. In the following year, the Catholic University of America was established in Washington, leading to considerable tension between its founders and the Jesuits at Georgetown. Bishop John J. Keane, Catholic University's first rector, attempted to resolve this dispute by unsuccessfully offering to purchase Georgetown University, tendering this proposal to Doonan. Doonan's presidency came to an end in mid-August 1888, when he was sent by the Jesuit provincial superior to New York City, and was succeeded by Joseph Havens Richards. ## Later teaching Doonan taught philosophy for a year at St. Francis Xavier College in New York, and then for one year in Detroit, Michigan. In 1891, he went to Boston College, followed by a time at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia, where he remained until 1896. For at least part of his time at Saint Joseph's, he served as the college's chaplain. He also lectured several times at the Catholic Summer School of America, in such subjects as psychology and education. At this time, Doonan's active ministry came to an end due to his failing eyesight. Fearing that he would become totally blind, he completed a pilgrimage to the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in France; he never did lose his sight completely. Doonan then returned to Philadelphia, where he suffered a stroke, causing partial paralysis. Nonetheless, he led the annual retreat for the priests of the Diocese of Rochester at Saint Bernard's Seminary in 1897. In 1902, he was appointed the spiritual director of the Jesuit community at Saint Joseph's College and the Church of the Gesú in Philadelphia, succeeding Burchard Villiger. In 1906, he returned to Georgetown University, where he lived out the remainder of his life. Despite his impaired condition, he continued to say Mass daily until one week before his death on April 12, 1911. Doonan was buried in the Jesuit Community Cemetery at Georgetown.
4,298,408	Siamosaurus	1,172,994,254	Potentially dubious genus of spinosaurid theropod dinosaur	[ "Barremian genera", "Cretaceous Thailand", "Early Cretaceous dinosaurs of Asia", "Fossil taxa described in 1986", "Fossils of Thailand", "Spinosaurids", "Taxa named by Éric Buffetaut" ]	Siamosaurus (meaning "Siam lizard") is a genus of spinosaurid dinosaur that lived in what is now known as China and Thailand during the Early Cretaceous period (Barremian to Aptian) and is the first reported spinosaurid from Asia. It is confidently known only from tooth fossils; the first were found in the Sao Khua Formation, with more teeth later recovered from the younger Khok Kruat Formation. The only species Siamosaurus suteethorni, whose name honours Thai palaeontologist Varavudh Suteethorn, was formally described in 1986. In 2009, four teeth from China previously attributed to a pliosaur—under the species "Sinopliosaurus" fusuiensis—were identified as those of a spinosaurid, possibly Siamosaurus. It is yet to be determined if two partial spinosaurid skeletons from Thailand and an isolated tooth from Japan also belong to Siamosaurus. Since it is based only on teeth, Siamosaurus's body size is uncertain, though it has been estimated at between 5.1 to 9.1 metres (17 to 30 feet) in length. The holotype tooth is 62.5 millimetres (2.46 inches) long. Siamosaurus's teeth were straight, oval to circular in cross-section, and lined with distinct lengthwise grooves. Its teeth had wrinkled enamel, similar to teeth from the related genus Baryonyx. As a spinosaur it would have had a long, low snout and robust forelimbs, and one possible skeleton indicates the presence of a tall sail running down its back, another typical trait of this theropod family. Siamosaurus is considered by some palaeontologists to be a dubious name, with some arguing that its teeth are hard to differentiate from those of other Early Cretaceous spinosaurids, and others that it may not be a dinosaur at all. Based on dental traits, Siamosaurus and "S." fusuiensis have been placed in the subfamily Spinosaurinae. Like in all spinosaurids, Siamosaurus's teeth were conical, with reduced or absent serrations. This made them suitable for impaling rather than tearing flesh, a trait typically seen in largely piscivorous (fish-eating) animals. Spinosaurids are also known to have consumed pterosaurs and small dinosaurs, and there is fossil evidence of Siamosaurus itself feeding on sauropod dinosaurs, either via scavenging or active hunting. Siamosaurus's role as a partially piscivorous predator may have reduced the prominence of some contemporaneous crocodilians competing for the same food sources. Isotope analysis of the teeth of Siamosaurus and other spinosaurids indicates semiaquatic habits. Siamosaurus lived in a semi-arid habitat of floodplains and meandering rivers, where it coexisted with other dinosaurs, as well as pterosaurs, fishes, turtles, crocodyliforms, and other aquatic animals. ## History of discovery The Sao Khua Formation, where the first Siamosaurus fossils were discovered, is part of the Khorat Group. The formation is dated to the Barremian stage of the Early Cretaceous period, 129.4 to 125 million years ago. In 1983, French palaeontologist Éric Buffetaut and his Thai colleague Rucha Ingavat described a set of fossil teeth recovered from the Phu Pratu Teema locality of the Sao Khua Formation, in the Phu Wiang area of Khon Kaen Province. They did not conclude as to what animal they originated from, their opinion being that the specimens belonged "either to an unusual theropod dinosaur or to some unknown crocodilian". In 1986, a reassessment of the remains by the same authors attributed them to a new genus and species of spinosaurid theropod, which they named Siamosaurus suteethorni. The generic name alludes to the ancient name of Thailand, "Siam", and is combined with the Ancient Greek word σαῦρος (sauros), meaning "lizard" or "reptile". The specific name honours Thai geologist and palaeontologist Varavudh Suteethorn, and his contributions to vertebrate palaeontology discoveries in Thailand. The best-preserved specimen from the teeth described, designated DMR TF 2043a, was chosen as the holotype of Siamosaurus. The paratypes comprise eight other well-preserved teeth catalogued as DMR TF 2043b to i. The original fossils are currently housed in the palaeontological collection of the Department of Mineral Resources, Bangkok. Siamosaurus teeth are common in the Sao Khua Formation, and further isolated specimens were found later throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Sculptures of the animal have been erected in various places across northeastern Thailand, including Si Wiang Dinosaur Park, the Siam Paragon shopping mall in Bangkok, the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum, and the Sirindhorn Museum. S. suteethorni was also illustrated on Thai postage stamps released in 1997, along with fellow Thai dinosaurs Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae, Siamotyrannus isanensis, and Psittacosaurus sattayaraki. Thailand's Khok Kruat Formation is dated to the Aptian age (between 125 and 113 million years ago), younger than the Sao Khua Formation. The Khok Kruat Formation has provided many spinosaurid teeth, including ones from Siamosaurus and closely allied forms. Given the varied size and morphology of the teeth found, the presence of multiple spinosaur taxa in the region is likely. Nearly 60 fossil teeth were recovered from the formation during fieldwork by Thai-French palaeontological teams between 2003 and 2008, including specimens from the Sam Ran, Khok Pha Suam, and Lam Pao Dam localities. Eight of these teeth were described in detail by Kamonrak and colleagues in 2019, and classified into two main morphotypes: the Khok Kruat morphotype, which is found only in the Khok Kruat Formation, and the Siamosaurus morphotype, which includes forms widely recovered from both the Sao Khua and Khok Kruat Formations. Siamosaurus is the first reported spinosaurid dinosaur from Asia, and subsequently to its naming, material resembling or possibly belonging to the genus has been found across the continent. In 1975, Chinese palaeontologist Hou Lian-Hai and colleagues described five teeth as a new species of the pliosauroid Sinopliosaurus, which they named S. fusuiensis, the specific name is in reference to Fusui County in Guangxi, China, from which the fossils were collected. Four of these teeth—one was not found in the museum collection—were reassigned by Buffetaut and colleagues in 2008 to a spinosaurid theropod and referred to as "Sinopliosaurus" fusuiensis. The researchers deemed it as "closely related to, if not identical with", S. suteethorni. In 2019, "S." fusuiensis was referred to by Thai palaeontologist Wongko Kamonrak and colleagues as Siamosaurus sp. (of uncertain species). Later in 2019, Thai palaeontologist Adun Samathi and colleagues considered the teeth as belonging to an indeterminate spinosaurid. The specimens were retrieved from China's Early Cretaceous Xinlong Formation, in which spinosaurid teeth are frequently reported, though most of them are hard to differentiate from those of Japan or Thailand without more complete fossil material, such as a skull. Buffetaut and Suteethorn suggested that the Xinlong Formation could be geologically related to the Sao Khua or Khok Kruat Formation, since similar types of fossils have been recovered in all three regions. In 1994, an isolated tooth (specimen GMNH-PV-999) was found by a fossil prospector in the Sebayashi Formation, Japan. The tooth was believed, until 2003, to belong to a marine reptile, when Japanese palaeontologist Yoshikazu Hasegawa and colleagues assigned it to ?Siamosaurus sp. The tooth came from rocks dated to the Barremian, similar in age to sediments that Siamosaurus teeth have been recovered from in Thailand. In 2015, a more incomplete tooth was recovered from the same formation by two local children. Kept under the specimen number KDC-PV-0003, the tooth was assigned to an indeterminate spinosaurid in 2017 by Japanese palaeontologist Kubota Katsuhiro and colleagues. Further spinosaurid teeth from unnamed and indeterminate forms have been discovered in central China and Malaysia. In 2004, excavation began on a partial skeleton from an outcrop of the Khok Kruat Formation near the city of Khon Kaen. The specimen (SM-KK 14) consists of cervical (neck) and dorsal (back) vertebrae, a 60-centimetre (24-inch) high neural spine (upwards-extending process from top of vertebra), pelvis (hip) fragments, a possible metacarpal (long bone of the hand), and a chevron from the tail. The cervical vertebrae and pelvic region resemble those of the European spinosaur Baryonyx walkeri, and the neural spine is elongated, similarly to those of other spinosaurids. A Siamosaurus tooth found nearby indicates the skeleton may belong to this genus, though this could also represent evidence of scavenging. The skeleton, as well as two well-preserved teeth—SM2016-1-147 and SM2016-1-165, also attributed to Siamosaurus—are currently stored in the vertebrate fossil collection of the Sirindhorn Museum, Kalasin Province. In 2019, a series of spinosaurid caudal (tail) vertebrae possibly belonging to S. suteethorni were recovered from the Sao Khua Formation, and described in a dissertation by Samathi. The fossils (SM-PW9B-11 to 17, SM-PW9B, SM-PW9A-unnumbered, SM-PW9-unnumbered, and SM 2017-1-176) were designated by Samathi as "Phuwiang spinosaurid B", and bear similarities to the possible spinosaurid Camarillasaurus and a Baryonyx specimen discovered in Portugal. ## Description In 2004, American dinosaur researcher Don Lessem estimated Siamosaurus at 9.1 metres (30 feet) long. In 2005, British author Sussana Davidson and colleagues gave a lower estimate of 8 m (26 ft) in length and weighing 1 tonne (1.1 short tons; 0.98 long tons). In a 2016 popular book, Spanish palaeontologists Rubén Molina-Pérez and Asier Larramendi estimated it at approximately 5.1 m (17 ft) long, 1.45 m (4.8 ft) tall at the hips, and weighing 255 kilograms (562 pounds). However, reliable calculations on the weight and body size of fragmentary dinosaurs like Siamosaurus are hindered by the lack of good material, such as a skull or postcranial skeleton, and thus estimates are only tentative. "Phuwiang spinosaurid B" was calculated as approximately 5 m (16 ft) long by Samathi in 2019. As a spinosaurid, Siamosaurus would have had low, narrow, and elongated jaws; well-built forelimbs; relatively short hindlimbs; and elongated neural spines on the vertebrae forming a sail on its back. ### Type specimens Fossil theropod teeth are typically identified by attributes such as the proportions, size, and curvature of the crown, as well as the presence and/or shape of the denticles (serrations). The holotype of S. suteethorni (specimen DMR TF 2043a) is 62.5 millimetres (2.46 in) in total length, with the crown being 47.7 mm (1.88 in) long, and 16.6 by 12.5 mm (0.65 by 0.49 in) wide at its base. It is among the larger teeth discovered by Buffetaut and Ingavat. One much smaller specimen (DMR TF 2043b) measures 24.3 mm (0.96 in) in length. According to the authors, this dramatic size range suggests the teeth are from individuals of different ages. Among theropods, this may also indicate size variation along the tooth row in the jaws, which is observed to have been prevalent in spinosaurids. The holotype tooth is relatively straight, with only minor front to back curvature. It is oval in cross-section while other specimens are nearly circular in this aspect. Unlike in most theropods, the carinae (cutting edges) of Siamosaurus teeth lack well-defined serrations, though unworn teeth do exhibit very fine denticles. Some teeth (including the holotype) have a wave-like double recurvature when viewed from the front or back, which Buffetaut and Ingavat compared to that seen in carnosaur teeth from the same formation and one Deinonychus tooth described by John Ostrom in 1969. The S. suteethorni holotype is symmetrically concave front to back, and bears 15 flutes (lengthwise grooves) on its lingual (inward facing) and labial (outward facing) surfaces. These flutes run from the base of the crown before stopping 5 mm (0.20 in) from the rounded tooth tip. A region of the holotype where the enamel (outer layer of the teeth) has weathered away reveals that these flutes extend down to the dentin (second layer of the teeth). The enamel also has a granular (finely wrinkled) texture, as seen in teeth from the spinosaurid Baryonyx. Some of the root is preserved in the holotype and, as in all theropods, there is a large pocket for the tooth pulp, which would have housed blood vessels and nerves. ### Khok Kruat teeth Of the two Khok Kruat Formation tooth morphotypes assigned by Kamonrak and colleagues in 2019, morphotype I, the Khok Kruat morphotype, is on average 46.35 mm (1.825 in) in total length, of which the crown takes up 43.77 mm (1.723 in), with a 18.40 by 13.5 mm (0.724 by 0.531 in) wide base. They are oval in cross-section, have well-defined carinae, and a smooth enamel surface, which becomes wrinkled at the base of the crown. They bear fine, sharply defined flutes, of which there are about 21 to 32 on each side. Morphotype II, the Siamosaurus morphotype, is on average 51.25 mm (2.018 in) long, with a 48.30 mm (1.902 in) tall crown that is 17.30 by 14.65 mm (0.681 by 0.577 in) wide at the base. They are also oval in cross-section and have distinct carinae, but unlike the Khok Kruat morphotype, the entire length of the crown has wrinkled enamel, and the flutes are coarser and fewer in number, with 11 to 16 on each side. The Siamosaurus morphotype also shares with S. suteethorni, GMNH-PV-999, and IVPP V 4793 a wrinkled enamel surface and between 12 and 15 flutes on each side. ### Possible material #### Teeth The first Sebayashi Formation specimen (GMNH-PV-999) is an isolated tooth crown with a partially intact root. It is not known in which jaw the tooth was positioned or which surface faced the inside or outside of the mouth. The tooth's front and back carinae are well-defined, though the former is not well-preserved. Besides having a broader, 20 by 14 mm (0.79 by 0.55 in) wide base and being slightly smaller at 51 mm (2.0 in) in length, GMNH-PV-999 has a very similar morphology to the S. suteethorni holotype. Features shared between the two specimens include: a straight and only slightly compressed shape; a somewhat oval cross-section; no serrations on the carinae (possibly due to bad preservation); and flutes on the crown surface, the Japanese specimen having 12 on each side. The teeth also share a crown surface with numerous small granular structures oriented parallel to their lengths. Because of these resemblances, Hasegawa and colleagues regarded GMNH-PV-999 as nearly identical to the S. suteethorni holotype tooth. The blood grooves (tiny furrows in the gaps between each denticle) of GMNH-PV-999 have an oblique orientation of 45 degrees, as in Baryonyx and KDC-PV-0003, the second Sebayashi formation tooth, which consists of a slightly recurved crown fragment with an almost circular cross-section. It has better preservation of small details than the former specimens, such as visible, though poorly defined serrations, with two to three denticles per mm (0.039 in). Like GMNH-PV-999, it has a granular texture and at least 12 flutes on its surface, not all of which stretch to the crown's full length. Out of the four teeth attributed to "S." fusuiensis, specimen IVPP V 4793 is the most intact, although still somewhat deformed. The crown, which is missing its tip, is 69 mm (2.7 in) long and 16.5 by 13 mm (0.65 by 0.51 in) wide at the base. The tooth is straight, only slightly recurved, and has an oval cross-section. The front and rear carinae are distinct, though their serrations have been heavily eroded, similar to those of KDC-PV-0003. Like the Thai and Japanese teeth, the "S." fusuiensis specimens bear developed flutes and a granular surface. As in both Sebayashi Formation teeth, there are 12 flutes on each face of the "S." fusuiensis teeth. Like in KDC-PV-0003, these flutes vary in length. Buffetaut and colleagues found the "S." fusuiensis teeth most similar to those of Siamosaurus, given their identical crown shape, fluting, and granular enamel. #### Postcrania Though no skeletal elements were associated with the original Siamosaurus teeth, the Khok Kruat skeleton, SM-KK 14, may be attributable to the genus. The cervical vertebrae of SM-KK 14 had elongated centra (vertebral bodies) with articulating surfaces that were not offset, as well as prominent epipophyses (processes to which neck muscles attached) and strong ligament scars. All of these characteristics were also present in Baryonyx. The cervicals also became longer towards the front of the neck and—based on comparison with Baryonyx—may represent the fourth, sixth, seventh, and tenth vertebrae. The dorsal vertebrae had enlarged infraprezygapophyseal fossae—depressions under the prezygapophyses, which connect adjacent vertebrae—and their neural spines were elongated similarly to those of other spinosaurids, indicating the presence of a sail on the animal's back; like in the Asian spinosaurid Ichthyovenator. One of the neural spines of SM-KK 14 measured at least 60 centimetres (24 inches) in height. The chevron lacked a process on its front end, as in other spinosaurids. Viewed distally (towards the centre of attachment), the lower end of the pubis had an L-shape, similar to that of Ichthyovenator and the African Suchomimus. Also as in Ichthyovenator, the hind rim of the pubis had a notch-like obturator foramen. However, in SM-KK 14 the front of the pubis was concave and the chevrons were curved backwards, in contrast to the straight condition these bones had in Ichthyovenator. ## Classification In 1986, Buffetaut and Ingavat classified Siamosaurus as a theropod because of the straight, tall crown and double sideways recurvature of its teeth. At the time, Siamosaurus's particular combination of dental characteristics, especially the longitudinal fluting and lack of serrations, had not been observed in other theropods. The authors noted similarities in Siamosaurus's teeth to those of ceratosaurian tooth crowns, some of which also have longitudinal flutes. However, this identification was ruled out, since ceratosaur teeth are more narrow and blade-like in cross-section, bear far fewer dental flutes, and have distinct serrations. Buffetaut and Suteethorn concluded that the closest taxon in dentition to Siamosaurus was Spinosaurus aegyptiacus from Egypt, whose fragmentary fossils had been destroyed during World War II. Like Siamosaurus, this African taxon had straight and unserrated conical teeth. Though Spinosaurus lacked the developed flutes seen in Siamosaurus, Buffetaut and Ingavat noted that both smooth and fluted spinosaur teeth had been reported from Africa. Therefore, they tentatively placed Siamosaurus in the family Spinosauridae, based on the close similarities in dentition to S. aegyptiacus. Many palaeontologists later questioned Buffetaut and Ingavat's identification of Siamosaurus, given that spinosaurid teeth, including many from Asia, have often been mistaken for those of aquatic reptiles like crocodilians, plesiosaurs, and ichthyosaurs. In view of this, the German palaeontologist Hans-Dieter Sues and colleagues in 2002 asserted that there is not enough material to confidently identify Siamosaurus as a dinosaur. In 2004, American palaeontologist Thomas Holtz and colleagues considered it a dubious name, stating that the teeth might instead belong to a contemporaneous fish such as a saurodontid or an ichthyodectid teleost. The same year, American palaeontologist David Weishampel and colleagues considered Siamosaurus an indeterminate theropod. In 2012, an analysis by American palaeontologist Matthew Carrano and colleagues agreed with the possibility of confusion with other reptiles, and regarded the genus as a possible indeterminate spinosaurid. They noted that oftentimes, isolated teeth are an unstable foundation for naming new theropod taxa, and most species based on them turn out to be invalid. This problem is especially common with spinosaurids, given that skull and skeletal fossils from the group are rare. Authors such as Buffetaut and Ingavat in 1986, and Hasegawa and colleagues in 2003, have noted that since crocodilian teeth are usually more strongly recurved than spinosaur teeth, they can be distinguished from each other. Crocodilians also lack the lateral double recurvature of Siamosaurus's tooth crowns, which, based on their shape, were vertically inserted into the jaw, whereas long-snouted crocodilian teeth are usually angled outwards from the mouth. Though Siamosaurus and plesiosaur teeth are similar in overall shape, Buffetaut and Ingavat pointed out that plesiosaur teeth were significantly more recurved. Other researchers also noted that compared to plesiosaurs, Asian spinosaurid teeth also have coarser and more numerous flutes that extend almost the whole length of the crown. In 2008, Buffetaut and colleagues stated that the "S." fusuiensis teeth bear carinae on the plane of the crown's curvature, a condition not observed in plesiosaur teeth. The discovery of the Khok Kruat skeleton and of baryonychine teeth with dental flutes similar to those of Siamosaurus, were also brought up by the researchers as further evidence of Siamosaurus's spinosaurid classification. Later discoveries revealed that largely straight tooth crowns with flutes and a lack or reduction of serrations were unique characteristics of spinosaurid teeth. In 2014, Italian palaeontologist Federico Fanti and colleagues considered the various spinosaurid teeth from East Asia, including those of S. suteethorni, as identical to those of Spinosaurus. In 2017, Brazilian palaeontologists Marcos Sales and Cesar Schultz suggested that the various Asian teeth might eventually be attributed to Ichthyovenator-like forms. The researchers accepted Siamosaurus as a spinosaurid, but stated that its teeth and those of "S." fusuiensis are too similar to those of other Early Cretaceous spinosaurids to erect new taxa unequivocally; and thus considered both taxa as dubious. Carrano and colleagues noted that the Khok Kruat skeleton may provide answers to their identification. Authors such as Milner and colleagues in 2007, Bertin Tor in 2010, Holtz in 2011, and Kamonrak and colleagues in 2019 regarded the Khok Kruat skeleton as first definitive evidence of spinosaurs in Asia. In 2012, French palaeontologist Ronan Allain and colleagues described a partial skeleton from the Grès supérieurs Formation of Laos, and used it to name the new spinosaurid genus and species Ichthyovenator laosensis. They considered it the first definitive evidence of spinosaurids in Asia, in light of the debated identity of Siamosaurus and "S." fusuiensis. In a 2014 abstract, Allain announced that further Ichthyovenator material, including three teeth, had been excavated. Typically of spinosaurines, Ichthyovenator's teeth bore straight and unserrated crowns, though no comparison was made to the other Asian teeth. The taxonomic and phylogenetic affinities of the Spinosauridae are subject to active research and debate, given that in comparison to other theropod groups, many of the family's taxa are based on poor fossil material. Traditionally, the group is split into the subfamilies Spinosaurinae (unserrated, straight teeth with well marked flutes and more circular cross-sections) and Baryonychinae (finely serrated, somewhat recurved teeth with weaker flutes and a more oval cross-section). Since spinosaurines were, on average, larger animals than baryonychines, their teeth were also generally larger. The morphological variation seen in spinosaurid teeth, however, has shown that the aforementioned characteristics are not always consistent within the subfamilies. Likewise, the Khok Kruat skeleton shares mixed characteristics between Baryonyx and Spinosaurus, and its precise phylogenetic placement is uncertain pending a description of the material. The possibility that Baryonychinae is a paraphyletic (unnatural) grouping has been suggested by researchers such as Sales and Schultz, on the basis that genera such as Irritator and Angaturama (the two are possible synonyms) may represent intermediate forms between baryonychines and spinosaurines. As it is definitively known only from teeth, Siamosaurus's exact position within the Spinosauridae is difficult to determine. In 2004, Brazilian palaeontologists Elaine Machado and Alexander Kellner suggested it as a possible spinosaurine, given its lack of dental serrations. Likewise in 2010, British palaeontologist David Hone and colleagues placed Siamosaurus and "S." fusuiensis in the Spinosaurinae. British palaeontologist Thomas Arden and colleagues identified Siamosaurus as a basal (early diverging or "primitive") member of this subfamily in 2019; their cladogram can be seen below: Later in 2019, the Khok Kruat Formation teeth were also referred to the Spinosaurinae by Kamonrak and colleagues, on the basis that both the Khok Kruat and Siamosaurus morphotypes lack characteristics seen in baryonychines, such as long and slender roots, 0–10 flutes on each side, no well defined carinae, a sculptured surface of the crown base, and 45 degree orientation of the blood grooves. But they share with spinosaurines a sub-circular to oval cross-section, fluted tooth crowns, well defined front and rear carinae, distinct striations on the crown, varying denticle size, and a wrinkled surface of the crown base. The authors also noted that unlike spinosaurines such as Irritator and Spinosaurus, Asian spinosaurines usually have more laterally compressed tooth crowns, and wrinkles across more of the enamel surface. In 2020, a paper by British palaeontologist Robert Smyth and colleagues considered S. suteethorni a dubious name and attributed its teeth to an indeterminate spinosaurine, given the uncertainties of classifying spinosaurid teeth at the genus or species level, as well as the degree of heterodonty (variation within the tooth row) that spinosaurines apparently exhibited. Due to new discoveries and research on spinosaurid teeth since Siamosaurus was named in 1986, a reassessment of the genus' validity is currently being prepared by Buffetaut. ## Palaeobiology ### Diet and feeding Buffetaut and Ingavat suggested in 1986 that Siamosaurus probably led a heavily piscivorous (fish-eating) lifestyle, since its dentition—like those of other spinosaurids—had a highly specialised morphology better suited for piercing rather than tearing flesh, due to the long, straight conical tooth crowns with reduced or absent serrations. The authors noted that this dental morphology is also seen in other piscivorous predators like plesiosaurs and long-snouted crocodilians. Such a dietary preference had been suggested for Baryonyx the same year by British palaeontologists Angela Milner and Alan Charig, and was later confirmed in 1997 with the discovery of acid-etched fish scales inside the body cavity of its holotype skeleton. The elongate, interlocking jaws of spinosaurids also had snout tips that fanned out into a rosette-like shape—a trait also observed in highly piscivorous crocodilians such as gharials—which made them well-adapted to catching and feeding on fish. Fossil evidence has shown that besides aquatic prey, spinosaurids also consumed other dinosaurs and pterosaurs. In the Sao Khua Formation, localities such as Wat Sakawan have yielded sauropod remains in association with tooth crowns from Siamosaurus, documenting either predation or scavenging on part of the latter. In 2006, Thai biologist Komsorn Lauprasert examined fossils collected from the Phu Kradung, Sao Khua, and Khok Kruat Formations. In this study, the teeth of Siamosaurus and a Moroccan spinosaurid were compared to those of crocodilians using scanning electron microscopy. Lauprasert found that spinosaurids and crocodilians may have employed similar feeding tactics and been under comparable mechanical constraints, based on resemblances in the microstructure of their tooth enamel. Therefore, Lauprasert suggested that Siamosaurus—as a piscivorous predator—could have replaced the ecological niche of contemporaneous long-snouted crocodilians. He noted that this likely occurred in correlation with the rising aridity of the Sao Khua and Khok Kruat Formations during the Early Cretaceous, since Siamosaurus had better mobility in a dry environment than crocodilians did. This might explain the absence of long-snouted crocodilian fossils from that time and place. Goniopholidid crocodilians were prevalent, however, and since this group had broader, shorter snouts and thus more varied diets, Lauprasert suggested that this would have kept them from competing with Siamosaurus. A similar scenario was proposed for spinosaurids by Hone and colleagues in 2010, who also noted that compared to large crocodilians and obligate aquatic predators, they could more easily travel from one body of water to another in search of prey. ### Aquatic habits In 2008, French palaeontologist Romain Amiot and colleagues compared the oxygen isotope ratios of remains from theropod and sauropod dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles, and freshwater fish recovered from eight localities in northeastern Thailand. The study revealed that Siamosaurus teeth had isotope ratios closer to those of crocodilians and freshwater turtles than other theropods, and so it may have had semiaquatic habits similar to these animals, spending much of its daily life near or in water. Discrepancies between the ratios of sauropods, Siamosaurus, and other theropods also indicate these dinosaurs drank from different sources, whether river, pond, or plant water. In 2010, Amiot and colleagues published another oxygen isotope study on turtle, crocodilian, spinosaurid, other theropod remains, this time including fossils from Thailand, China, England, Brazil, Tunisia, and Morocco. The analysis showed that Thai spinosaurid teeth tended to have the largest difference from the ratios of other, more terrestrial theropods, while those of Spinosaurus from Tunisia and Morocco tended to have the least difference, despite the advanced piscivorous adaptations in the skull observed for this genus. The authors suggested that piscivory and semiaquatic habits may explain how spinosaurids coexisted with other large theropods. By feeding on different prey items and occupying a distinct ecological role, a phenomenon that is known as niche partitioning, the different types of theropods would have been out of direct competition. Further lines of evidence have since demonstrated that spinosaurids, especially those within the Spinosaurinae, developed strong adaptations for aquatic environments, such as dense limb bones for buoyancy control; reduction of the pelvic girdle; and elongated neural spines on the tail, likely used for underwater propulsion. ## Palaeoenvironment and palaeobiogeography Of all the Mesozoic formations in northeastern Thailand, the Sao Khua is the most abundant and diverse in vertebrate fossil discoveries. The Khorat Group yields fossil taxa only of continental origin, with no definitive evidence for marine fossils or sedimentary structures found so far. In 1963, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi of Hokkaido University reported ichthyosaur and plesiosaur teeth from the Sao Khua Formation, but these have now been identified as belonging to Siamosaurus and a crocodilian respectively. The sediments of the Sao Khua Formation, which comprise red clays, mudstones, sandstones, siltstones, and conglomerate rocks, record a fluvial environment dominated by lakes, floodplains, and meandering low-energy rivers. This is consistent with the types of vertebrate fauna present in the formation, which comprise only terrestrial or freshwater animals. Besides Siamosaurus, there were theropod dinosaurs like the metriacanthosaurid Siamotyrannus isanensis, the ornithomimosaur Kinnareemimus khonkaenensis, the megaraptoran Phuwiangvenator yaemniyomi, the basal coelurosaur Vayuraptor nongbualamphuensis, a compsognathid theropod, and indeterminate birds. Theropod eggs with embryos have also been recovered from the formation. There were also sauropods like the titanosauriform Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae, mamenchisaurids, and indeterminate forms. Sauropod remains are some of the most abundant in the Sao Khua and Khok Kruat Formations. No ornithischian (or "bird-hipped") dinosaur fossils have been found in the Sao Khua Formation, possibly suggesting that they were uncommon compared to saurischian (or "lizard-hipped") dinosaurs. The faunal assemblage also included indeterminate pterosaurs; carettochelyid, adocid, and softshell turtles; hybodont sharks like hybodontids, ptychodontids, and lonchidiids; pycnodontiform fish; ray-finned fishes such as sinamiids and semionotids; and the goniopholidid crocodyliforms Sunosuchus phuwiangensis, Siamosuchus phuphokensis, and Theriosuchus grandinaris. The Sao Khua and Khok Kruat Formations had a more semi-arid climate than the older, more humid Phu Kradung Formation, dated to the Berriasian. The Khok Kruat Formation is composed mostly of sandstones, conglomerates, siltstones, and shales. Similar to the Sao Khua Formation, the deposition of these sediments occurred in an arid to semi-arid floodplain environment of slow-moving, meandering rivers. This ecosystem included pterosaurs, sinamiid fish; carettochelyid and acocid turtles; ptychodontid, hybodontid, and thaiodontid sharks; and the crocodyliform Khoratosuchus jintasakuli, as well as goniopholidids. Besides Siamosaurus, the dinosaur fauna of the Khok Kruat Formation included the carcharodontosaurid Siamraptor suwati; iguanodontians like Sirindhorna khoratensis, Ratchasimasaurus suranaerae, and Siamodon nimngami; a titanosauriform sauropod similar to Phuwiangosaurus; an indeterminate ceratopsian; and various indeterminate theropods. The formation is probably equivalent to the Grès supérieurs Formation of Laos, since animals like spinosaurids, sauropods, and derived ("advanced") iguanodontians have also been found there. In 2007, Milner and colleagues suggested that spinosaurids and iguanodontians may have spread from western to eastern Laurasia—the northern supercontinent at the time—during the Aptian, based on their distribution and presence in the Khok Kruat Formation. American palaeontologist Stephen Brusatte and colleagues noted in 2010 that the discovery of spinosaurids in Asia, a family previously known only from Europe, Africa, and South America, suggests a faunal interchange between Laurasia and Gondwana (in the south) during the early Late Cretaceous. Though it may also be possible that spinosaurids already had a cosmopolitan distribution before the Middle Cretaceous, preceding the breakup of Laurasia from Gondwana. However, the authors noted that more evidence is needed to test this hypothesis. In 2012, Allain and colleagues suggested such a global distribution may have occurred earlier across Pangaea before the Late Jurassic, even if Asia became separated from the supercontinent first. In 2019, Spanish palaeontologist Elisabete Malafaia and colleagues also indicated a complex biogeographical pattern for spinosaurs during the Early Cretaceous, based on anatomical similarities between Ichthyovenator and the European genus Vallibonavenatrix.
22,613,083	Edward Thomas Daniell	1,164,550,773	English landscape painter and etcher	[ "1804 births", "1842 deaths", "19th-century English Anglican priests", "19th-century English male artists", "19th-century English painters", "Artists from Norwich", "Deaths from malaria", "English etchers", "English male painters", "English watercolourists", "Infectious disease deaths in Turkey", "Infectious disease deaths in the Ottoman Empire", "Landscape artists", "People educated at Norwich School" ]	Edward Thomas Daniell (6 June 1804 – 24 September 1842) was an English artist known for his etchings and the landscape paintings he made during an expedition to the Middle East, including Lycia, part of modern-day Turkey. He is associated with the Norwich School of painters, a group of artists connected by location and personal and professional relationships, who were mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside. Born in London to wealthy parents, Daniell grew up and was educated in Norwich, where he was taught art by John Crome and Joseph Stannard. After graduating in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1828, he was ordained as a curate at Banham in 1832 and appointed to a curacy at St. Mark's Church, London, in 1834. He became a patron of the arts, and an influential friend of the artist John Linnell. In 1840, after resigning his curacy and leaving England for the Middle East, he travelled to Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and joined the explorer Sir Charles Fellows's archaeological expedition in Lycia (now in Turkey) as an illustrator. He contracted malaria there and reached Adalia (now known as Antalya) intending to recuperate, but died from a second attack of the disease. Daniell normally used a small number of colours for his watercolour paintings, mainly sepia, ultramarine, brown pink and gamboge. The distinctive style of his watercolours was influenced in part by Crome, J. M. W. Turner and John Sell Cotman. As an etcher he was unsurpassed by the other Norwich artists in the use of drypoint, and he anticipated the modern revival of etching which began in the 1850s. His prints were made by his friend and neighbour Henry Ninham, whose technique he influenced. His paintings of the Near East may have been made with future works in mind. ## Background Edward Daniell was associated with the Norwich School of painters, a regional school of landscape painters who were connected personally or professionally. Though mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside, many also depicted other landscapes, and coastal and urban scenes. The school's most important artists were John Crome, Joseph Stannard, George Vincent, Robert Ladbrooke, James Stark, John Thirtle and John Sell Cotman, along with Cotman's sons Miles Edmund and John Joseph Cotman. The school was a unique phenomenon in the history of 19th-century British art: Norwich was the first English city outside London which had the right conditions for a provincial art movement. It had more locally born artists than any other similar city, and its theatrical, artistic, philosophical and musical cultures were cross-fertilised in a way that was unique outside the capital. ## Life ### Early life and education Edward Thomas Daniell was born on 6 June 1804 at Charlotte Street in central London, to Sir Thomas Daniell, a retired attorney-general of Dominica, and his second wife Anne Drosier, the daughter of John Drosier of Rudham Grange, Norfolk. Sir Thomas' first wife, with whom he had a son Earle and a daughter Anne, died in London in 1792. Their daughter married John Holmes in Norfolk in 1802 and died in childbirth in 1805. Her brother Earle was an officer in the 12th Dragoons by 1806. Sir Thomas purchased land and slaves in the Leeward Islands, which were then part of the British Empire. His estates, including 291 acres (118 ha) at Dickenson Bay on Antigua, had been bought in 1779 from the family of his first wife. He retired and moved to the west of Norfolk, but his health deteriorated and he died of cancer in 1806, leaving a young widow and infant son. He left his Dominican lands to her, and his Antigua estate to his adult son Earle, subject to him providing a guaranteed annual income of £300 to the family in Norfolk. Anne Daniell and her son moved to a house in St. Giles Street, Norwich. She died in 1836 aged 64, and was buried in the nave of St Mary Coslany. Edward Daniell grew up with his mother in Norwich and was educated at Norwich Grammar School, where the drawing master was John Crome. He was involved in the art world at a young age; the brothers Thomas and Chambers Hall wrote to the artist John Linnell in 1822 about "our young friend Mr Daniells [sic] who accompanied us to your house last week and who wishes to possess a drawing". On 9 December 1823, aged 19, Daniell went to Balliol College, Oxford to read classics. He graduated in November 1828, despite having neglected his studies in favour of art. In a letter to Linnell, he wrote: "I find that the examinations for which I am preparing next month require a closer application to my literary studies than I had imagined and that I must not attempt to 'serve two masters'." He was introduced to etching by Joseph Stannard, and during the holidays practiced at Stannard's studio in St. Giles Terrace, around the corner from his own house. He graduated with a Master of Arts on 25 May 1831. ### Travels in Europe and Scotland Daniell had the financial means to travel abroad to find subjects to paint, and during 1829 and 1830 he spent the months between his classics studies and his master's degree on a Grand Tour through France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, producing scenic oil paintings and watercolours that the art historian William Dickes described as "well-centred performances, painted with a fluid brush, and revealing a delicate appreciation of tone". The route Daniell took during his eighteen months on the Continent is revealed by the order of his paintings. His travels through Switzerland are reminiscent of those of the artist James Pattison Cockburn, who published his Swiss Scenery in 1820. In Rome and Naples he met the artist Thomas Uwins, who wrote: "What a shoal of amateur artists we have got here! ... there is a Daniel too come to judgement! a second Daniel! – Verily, I have gotten more substantial criticism from this young man than from anyone since Havell was my messmate." Daniell may also have visited Spain, as his etchings of the country were copied by the Norwich artist Henry Ninham, but there is no direct evidence he went there. It is possible he returned home in time for the funeral of Joseph Stannard, who died from tuberculosis on 7 December 1830, aged 33. In the summer of 1832, Daniell went on a walking trip in Scotland, accompanied by two contemporaries from Oxford, George Denison and Edmund Walker Head. The trip provided him with subject material and influenced his use of drypoint etching, as he was able to study the work of etchers such as Andrew Geddes. In The Etchings of E. T. Daniell, Jane Thistlethwaite wrote that his Scottish scenes "testify in their subjects to his enthusiasm for the beauties of Scotland and in their technique to his almost certain acquaintance with the Scottish etchers". ### Church career On 2 October 1832 Daniell was ordained in Norwich Cathedral as a deacon, and three days later was licensed as the curate of the parish church at Banham, a post he held for eighteen months. Letters to John Linnell show he felt a need to increase his income during this period in his life. Little is known of his career as a Norfolk curate, but the Banham registers, all of which have been preserved, show he led an active life in the parish. He continued to etch at this time, and in Thistlethwaite's view whilst there produced his "loveliest and most sophisticated plates". On 2 June 1833, Daniell was ordained to the priesthood, but continued as the curate at Banham until 1834. That year he was appointed to the curacy of St. Mark's, North Audley Street in London, and took rooms in Park Street, Mayfair. He also worked at St. George's Hospital but, as with his curacy at St. Mark's, no official records of his employment have survived. In a letter written in 1835 to his Oxford tutor Joseph Blanco White, Daniell wrote: "You probably, thought I was haranguing the plough-boys in Norfolk, and you find me among the Dons of Grosvenor Square, and having to preach (as I must) next Wednesday at St. George's, Hanover Square. I wish you would come and give me some assistance." In about 1836 he moved to rooms in Green Street, near Grosvenor Square and close to St. Mark's, living there until his departure for the Holy Land in 1840. The outer shell of Norwich Castle's keep was refaced in Bath stone from 1834 to 1839, replicating the original blank arcading. Daniell was among those who strongly opposed the proposed refacing. Letters written from London show that he had not forgotten this contentious issue. He planned a plate of Ninham's drawing of the castle as a gesture of his opposition to the project, informing the antiquary Dawson Turner that "I have had a very beautiful drawing made of it, and I mean to etch it the size of the drawing." His etching of the old keep was never completed. ### Tour of the Near East At some date after June 1840, perhaps inspired by the Scottish painter David Roberts who had travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land to find landscapes to depict, Daniell resigned his curacy and left England to tour the Near East. He arrived in Corfu in September 1840. Although Roberts' paintings of the Middle East are thought to have compelled him to tour abroad, he had also been told of recent discoveries in Lycia (now part of modern Turkey) by the explorer Charles Fellows. Daniell was in Athens by the end of the year, and sailed to Alexandria early in 1841. He travelled up the Nile to Nubia, and then from Egypt to Palestine, on a route that took him past Mount Sinai. He reached Beirut in October 1841. He met Fellows in the Turkish city of Smyrna and joined his expedition, boarding HMS Beacon, a ship sent by the British Government to convey home antiquities recently discovered by Fellows at Xanthos. During the expedition 18 ancient cities were located. After spending the winter at Xanthos, Daniell chose to remain in Lycia to help survey the region, in company with Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and the naturalist Edward Forbes. Spratt was responsible for researching the area's topography and Forbes its natural history; Daniell was to make records of any discoveries. In Lycia he produced a series of watercolours, of which Laurence Binyon said, "What strikes one most at first is the astonishing air of space and magnitude conveyed, the fluid wash of sunlight in these towering gorges and open valleys." In March 1842, Fellows left for London on HMS Beacon, in order to obtain bigger ships for transporting the antiquities back to England. Daniell travelled to Selge, sketching and exploring its ruins. He made copies of inscriptions from monuments in Cibyratis, Pisidia and Pamphylia, and visited Sillyon, Marmara, Perga and Lyrbe. His original drawings are now lost, but they were later published in Travels in Lycia, Milyas, and the Cibyratis, in company with the Late E. T. Daniell, and his notes were transcribed (inaccurately) by Samuel Birch at the British Museum. Birch's collection contains a single page of Daniell's original manuscript. The expedition arrived at Adalia (now known as Antalya) in April 1842. Spratt and Forbes left the city before Daniell, who travelled overland after meeting the Pasha. He then visited Cyprus and painted a watercolour of the island, possibly while anchored off shore. The author Rita Severis has compared his painting with the watercolours of Turner, whom he was known to admire. In her book on artistic representations of the island from 1700 to 1960, she wrote: "The interplay of the blue sea and the sandy colour of the land – which is repeated successfully in the foreground of the picture – accentuates the distance between the viewer and the land while simultaneously increasing the desire to look more closely and attentively at the subject." ### Death In late May 1842 the ships HMS Monarch and Media arrived and Daniell accepted an offer of a passage to England. In June he left Rhodes to return to Lycia and rejoin Forbes and Spratt, but he missed his ship – Monarch and Media had set sail the previous day – and was forced to amend his plans. There was a chance to return to Rhodes by caïque and join the returning ships, but he instead travelled to Adalia with the newly-appointed consul for the city, John Purdie. During the journey Daniell became feverishly ill with malaria, contracted, according to Forbes and Spratt, "by lingering too long among the unhealthy marshes of the Pamphylian coast". He stayed at Purdie's residence to recuperate, and wrote to Forbes and Spratt describing his discoveries at Apollonia and Lyrbe. Before he had fully recovered he left the city to undertake a solitary expedition to Pamphylia and Pisidia, travelling during the hottest part of the year. He was forced back to Adalia after suffering a second attack of malaria, and at Purdie's house dictated what was to be his last letter, which expressed his intentions to continue his work. He lost consciousness after sleeping whilst exposed to the heat of the day on the front terrace of Purdie's residence, and died a week later, on 24 September. He was buried in the city. The Norfolk historian Frederick Beecheno wrote in 1889 that Daniell was "buried beneath an ancient granite column in the court of a Greek church in the centre of the town of Adalia". Forbes paid tribute to his friend Daniell, writing that his illness "destroyed a traveller whose talents, scholarship, and research would have made Lycia a bright spot on the map of Asia Minor, and whose manliness of character and kindness of heart endeared him to all who had the happiness of knowing him". A memorial was placed near his tomb in Antalya "by his affectionate and grieving relatives". Another memorial can be seen in Norwich, on the wall of the church of St. Mary Coslany. His will is preserved in the National Archives at Kew. ## Friends and associates Many of Daniell's etchings were printed in Norwich by Henry Ninham, who lived a short distance from Daniell's house on St. Giles Street. His friendships with Ninham and Joseph Stannard may have begun at school. Daniell was an active patrons of the arts and held regular dinner parties and other gatherings at his London home. It became a resort of painters including John Linnell, David Roberts, William Mulready, William Dyce, Thomas Creswick, Edwin Landseer, William Collins, Abraham Cooper, John Callcott Horsley, Charles Lock Eastlake, J. M. W. Turner and William Clarkson Stanfield. Alfred Story, Linnell's biographer, described Daniell's home as "a treasure-house of art, (which) comprised works by some of the best painters of the day". One of Daniell's pupils was the writer Elizabeth Rigby, who remembered him as the "old friend" who had introduced her to etching and admired her drawings. In 1891 she wrote: "My recollection of his face was that of one of the openest that could be seen – a superb forehead, and splendid teeth, which showed themselves with every smile, and no one smiled and laughed more genially." ### John Linnell Daniell first met the artist John Linnell while he was at Oxford. Linnell asked him to promote the sale of Illustrations of the Book of Job by the artist and poet William Blake, who was Linnell's great friend. Daniell commissioned him to produce the painting now known as View of Lymington, the Isle of Wight beyond for the price of thirty guineas. At a later date, he exchanged it for Boy Minding Sheep, paying the difference of twenty guineas. In 1828 Linnell made a portrait miniature of Daniell and taught him how to paint in oils. They corresponded regularly and Linnell was a frequent guest at Daniell's rooms in London. Daniell encouraged him to complete his St. John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness (1828–1833), offering to buy it himself if it did not sell. When the painting was exhibited in 1839 at the British Institution, it helped to enhance Linnell's reputation as an artist. Before leaving for the Middle East, Daniell commissioned a portrait of J. M. W. Turner from Linnell. Turner had previously refused to sit for the artist, and it was difficult to get his agreement to be portrayed. Daniell positioned the two men opposite each other at dinner, so Linnell could observe Turner carefully and portray his likeness from memory. Due to Daniell's death, the completed painting was never delivered. When Linnell's painting '' was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1840, Daniell came to his friend's assistance. The picture was taken to Daniell's house and hung above the fireplace, where it was admired by his dinner guests, including two members of the Academy. Daniell reprimanded them, saying "You are a pretty set of men to pretend to stand up for high art and to proclaim the Academy the fosterer of artistic talent, and yet allow such a picture to be rejected!" ### J. M. W. Turner Daniell's friendship with Turner, whom he first met in London, was short but intense. He was a regular guest at Daniell's gatherings and dinner parties, and they quickly became close friends. He was considered by Daniell's circle of artists to be their doyen. Beecheno, in his E. T. Daniell: a memoir, recalled that on one occasion Turner was asked his opinion of Daniell's work. "Very clever, Sir, very clever" was the great master's dictum, delivered in his usual blunt way." Elizabeth Rigby wrote of Daniell: > His admiration for Turner inspired Turner with genuine affection for him. Boxall has told me that at an R.A. dinner, he and Turner sitting with one between them, Turner leant back, and touched Boxall to attract silently his attention, and then pointing to a glass of wine in his other hand, whispered solemnly, "Edward Daniell". Roberts wrote that Daniell "adored Turner, when I and others doubted, and taught me to see and to distinguish his beauties over that of others ... the old man really had a fond and personal regard for this young clergyman, which I doubt he ever evinced for the other." He may have helped Turner spiritually. His biographer James Hamilton writes that he was "able to supply spiritual comfort that Turner required to help him fill the holes left by the deaths of his father and friends and to ease the fears of a naturally reflective man approaching old age". The old artist is known to have mourned Daniell's early death deeply, saying repeatedly to Roberts that he would never form such a friendship again. Roberts later wrote: "Poor Daniell, like Wilkie, went to Syria after me, but neither returned. Had Daniell returned to England, I have reason to know, from Turner's own mouth, he would have been entrusted with his law affairs." Turner's romantic style is approached by Daniell's watercolours painted during his travels abroad. Coincidentally, Turner toured Switzerland in 1829, visiting sites Daniell had earlier depicted. ## Works and artistic style As the son of a baronet, Daniell was of a higher social class than his Norwich School contemporaries. He lived during a time when "it was not suitable for young gentlemen to become artists", and his private income and position as a curate meant he was to remain an amateur artist throughout his life; in a letter to Rigby, he referred to himself as a "tree and house sketcher". The writer Derek Clifford believed Daniell's distinctive style was influenced by the methods of John Sell Cotman, an artist Daniell deeply admired, but the art historian Andrew Moore writes that "his artistic influences are not readily established," and Searle notes that he had an "assured individuality that recalls no one else". The historian Josephine Walpole, who believes Daniell's talent has yet to be properly recognised, has praised his ability to "create a sense of space, a feeling of heat or cold, of poverty or plenty, with apparent lack of effort". In 1832 Daniell exhibited a number of his own pictures of scenes in Italy, Switzerland and France with the Norwich Society of Artists, which were favourably commented upon by the Norwich Mercury. During the sole instance of an exhibition of his works with the Society, he showed Sketch from Nature, Lake of Geneva, from Lausanne, painted on the spot. Ruins of a Claudian Aqueduct, in the Campagna di Roma, and Ruined Tombs, on the Via Nomentana, Rome, painted on the spot. He served on bodies involved with the arts, becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1835, and a committee member of the Society for the Encouragement of British Art in May 1837. ### Oils and watercolours Daniell's oil paintings generally depicted subjects encountered on his continental travels, and he showed them at annual exhibitions in London. He was an honorary exhibitor with the Royal Academy, showing four pieces there: Sion in the Valais (1837); View of St. Malo (1838); Sketch from a picture of the Mountains of Savoy from Geneva (1839); and Kenilworth (1840), as well as four pictures at the British Institute (The Temple of Minerva (1836); Ruins of the Campagna of Rome (1838); Meadow scene (1839); and The Lake of Geneva, from near Lausanne (1840)). His watercolours draw from a deliberately limited palette, exemplified by the paintings from his tours of the Middle East, where he used sepia, ultramarine, brown pink and gamboge, with details emphasised using bistre, burnt sienna or white. The 120 large sketches at Norwich Castle and the further 64 at the British Museum may have been made in preparation for future works that were never made. Daniell's watercolours have been highly praised by art historians. They were described by Hardie as "the perfection of free sketching". Binyon described them as showing him "at the height of his subject", and according to Andrew Hemingway, some of them are "magnificent". In Moore's opinion, Daniell's "fluid, sensitive use of washes", testified by his early Bure Bridge, Aylsham, ranks him alongside William James Müller and David Roberts, and the drawings produced on his last tour "reveal a vision that emulates that of David Roberts and exceeds that of Edward Lear". Clifford identified Daniell's distinctively bold style and sense of draughtsmanship, but pointed out what he saw as weaknesses in some of the watercolours: a “fear” of using colour, the emptiness of some of the panoramic views, and an unsuitable use of coloured paper. Walpole sees Daniell's watercolours as having a style that "is all his own" – freely drawn, ambitious and "having a powerful feeling for the atmosphere of the landscape". She notes how his delicate outlines and distinctively varied tones convey a sense of space and give an illusion of detail, citing Interior of Convent, Mount Sinai as a watercolour that expresses to her all that is best about Daniell's "understated artistry". ### Etchings Daniell's 52 attributed etchings, though small in number and not exhibited during his lifetime, are the basis for his reputation as an artist. In 1899, Binyon considered his etchings to be – from a historical point of view – the most remarkable of his works, anticipating with their freedom of line the etching revival personified later in the century by Seymour Haden and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Malcolm Salaman, writing in the 1910s, observed: > No etcher of this early English period evinced a truer and more subtle understanding and handling of the medium than Crome's pupil, the Rev. E. T. Daniell, a very interesting artist of the Norwich School, whose plates, etched in the eighteen-twenties, are remarkable for genuine etcher's vision, expressive charm, and delicacy of craft. His View of Whitlingham, full of light and air, proves him to be in the direct line of the masters. Martin Hardie asserted: "If only more proofs from his fine plates been made available for collectors and museums he would be more readily placed among the great etchers of the world." Miklos Rajnai, a Keeper of Art at Norwich Castle Museum, compared Daniell's skill as an etcher with John Crome and John Sell Cotman. The British art historian Arthur Hind said the etchings "anticipated far more than nearly anything of Crome or Cotman the modern revival of etching". Daniell's first attempts at etching were made with Joseph Stannard in February 1824. The style of his earliest works were influenced by Stannard, but he later became more affected by the works of J. M. W. Turner. Three distinct groups of etchings can be identified: those produced in Norfolk, including Flordon Bridge, his masterpiece from his early years; a more grandiose group of etchings made during his tours of Scotland and the continent; and those made during his curacy at Banham, which includes his most assured work of this period, Whitlingham Lane near Trowse. He stopped etching after his move to London. Although his Norfolk prints are mostly landscapes, they were intended to be artistic rather than topographically accurate, and any figures were used simply to indicate the scale of the landscape they were set in. Daniell later employed a looser style, moving away from Stannard and towards that of Andrew Geddes and other Scottish etchers, whose output he almost certainly first saw while in Scotland during the summer of 1831. His was outstanding in the use of drypoint, strengthening his design by using the needle's point to create a burr in the plate. The burrs allowed the ink to collect, producing a darker tone in some of his prints. Thistlethwaite views the large drypoint etchings and Norfolk landscapes made after 1831 as being "supremely independent and for his time unique", once he had moved away from the traditional style of etchers like Geddes. He is thought to have introduced drypoint etching to his Norwich peers; both Thomas Lound and Henry Ninham etched in this way after 1831, producing works of a quality approaching Daniell's own. ## Legacy Most of Daniell's works form part of the Norfolk Museums Collections, or are held at the British Museum, which obtained some of them before 1852 and purchased his prints as early as 1856.The original impressions are generally held in public collections. Binyon's biographical article appeared in 1889. Although none of Daniells' etchings were exhibited or published during his lifetime, some were given to friends. They were first shown in public in 1891 in a Norwich Arts Circle exhibition. In 1882, the economist Inglis Palgrave wrote Twelve Etchings of the Rev. E. T. Daniell, and 24 copies of the book were printed, one of which is at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The book was never published. In 1921, Hardie delivered a lecture to the Print-Collectors' Club in which he discussed Daniell's plates. He has described them as "full of interest and technical value, and at the same time curiously modern in their spirit", adding of him: "He reaches a very high level of refined thought and execution in his Borough Bridge." Daniell's Middle East landscapes have provided important documentary evidence of the region during the 1840s. His works were exhibited at Aldeburgh in 1968, and at From Norfolk to Nubia: The Watercolours of E.T. Daniell'', an exhibition held at Norwich Castle in 2016.
272,599	Aylesbury duck	1,173,092,293	Breed of domesticated duck, bred mainly for its meat and appearance	[ "Animal breeds on the GEH Red List", "Animal breeds on the RBST Watchlist", "Aylesbury", "Buckinghamshire", "Duck breeds", "Duck breeds originating in the United Kingdom" ]	The Aylesbury duck is a breed of domesticated duck, bred mainly for its meat and appearance. It is a large duck with pure white plumage, a pink bill, orange legs and feet, an unusually large keel, and a horizontal stance with its body parallel to the ground. The precise origins of the breed are unclear, but raising white ducks became popular in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, in the 18th century owing to the demand for white feathers as a filler for quilts. Over the 19th century selective breeding for size, shape and colour led to the Aylesbury duck. Duck rearing became a major industry in Aylesbury in the 19th century. The ducks were bred on farms in the surrounding countryside. Fertilised eggs were brought into the town's "Duck End", where local residents would rear the ducklings in their homes. The opening of a railway to Aylesbury in 1839 enabled cheap and quick transport to the markets of London, and duck rearing became highly profitable. By the 1860s the duck rearing industry began to move out of Aylesbury into the surrounding towns and villages, and the industry in Aylesbury itself began to decline. In 1873 the Pekin duck was introduced to the United Kingdom. Although its meat was thought to have a poorer flavour than that of the Aylesbury duck, the Pekin was hardier and cheaper to raise. Many breeders switched to the Pekin duck or to Aylesbury-Pekin crosses. By the beginning of the 20th century competition from the Pekin duck, inbreeding, and disease in the pure-bred Aylesbury strain and the rising cost of duck food meant the Aylesbury duck industry was in decline. The First World War badly damaged the remaining duck industry in Buckinghamshire, wiping out the small scale producers and leaving only a few large farms. Disruption caused by the Second World War further damaged the industry. By the 1950s only one significant flock of Aylesbury ducks remained in Buckinghamshire, and by 1966 there were no duck-breeding or -rearing businesses of any size remaining in Aylesbury itself. Although there is only one surviving flock of pure Aylesbury ducks in the United Kingdom and the breed is critically endangered in the United States, the Aylesbury duck remains a symbol of the town of Aylesbury, and appears on the coat of arms of Aylesbury and on the club badge of Aylesbury United. ## Origins and description The precise origin of the Aylesbury duck is unclear. Before the 18th century, duck breeds were rarely recorded in England, and the common duck, bred for farming, was a domesticated form of the wild mallard. The common duck varied in colour, and as in the wild, white ducks would occasionally occur. White ducks were particularly prized, as their feathers were popular as a filler for quilts. In the 18th century selective breeding of white common ducks led to a white domestic duck, generally known as the English White. Since at least the 1690s ducks had been farmed in Aylesbury, and raising English Whites became popular in Aylesbury and the surrounding villages. By 1813 it was remarked that "ducks form a material article at market from Aylesbury and places adjacent: they are white, and as it seems of an early breed: they are bred and brought up by poor people, and sent to London by the weekly carriers". The duck farmers of Aylesbury went to great lengths to ensure the ducks retained their white colouring, keeping them clear of dirty water, soil with a high iron content and bright sunlight, all of which could discolour the ducks' feathers. Over time, selective breeding of the English White for size and colour gradually led to the development of the Aylesbury duck. A rather large duck breed, the Aylesbury duck has pure white plumage and bright orange legs and feet. Its legs are placed midway along the body and it stands with its underside parallel to the ground, giving it a body described as "boat-shaped". It has a relatively long and thin swan-like neck, and a long pink bill which comes straight out from the head. An Aylesbury duckling incubates in the egg for 28 days. Until eight weeks after hatching, the time of their first moult, ducks and drakes (females and males) are almost indistinguishable. After moulting, males have two or three curved tail feathers and a fainter, huskier quack than the female. By one year of age, females and males grow to an average weight of 6 and 7 pounds (2.7 and 3.2 kg) respectively, although males can reach around 10 pounds (4.5 kg). Unlike the Rouen duck, the other popular meat variety in England in the 19th century, Aylesbury ducks lay eggs from early November. Aylesbury ducks fatten quickly and by eight weeks after hatching weigh up to 5 pounds (2.3 kg), large enough to eat but still young and extremely tender. Consequently, their meat came onto the market from February onwards, after the close of the game season but before the earliest spring chickens were on sale. Rouen ducks, whose mallard-like coloration made them less valuable, lay eggs from early February and take six months to grow large enough to eat. As a consequence, Aylesbury ducks were sold primarily in the spring and summer, and Rouen ducks in the autumn and winter. ## Aylesbury duck farming > The white Aylesbury duck is, and deservedly, a universal favourite. Its snowy plumage and comfortable comportment make it a credit to the poultry-yard, while its broad and deep breast, and its ample back, convey the assurance that your satisfaction will not cease at its death. In parts of Buckinghamshire, this member of the duck family is bred on an extensive scale; not on plains and commons, however, as might be naturally imagined, but in the abodes of the cottagers. Round the walls of the living-rooms, and of the bedroom even, are fixed rows of wooden boxes, lined with hay; and it is the business of the wife and children to nurse and comfort the feathered lodgers, to feed the little ducklings, and to take the old ones out for an airing. Sometimes the "stock" ducks are the cottager's own property, but it more frequently happens that they are intrusted to his care by a wholesale breeder, who pays him so much per score for all ducklings properly raised. To be perfect, the Aylesbury duck should be plump, pure white, with yellow feet, and a flesh coloured beak. Unlike most livestock farming in England at this time, the duck breeders and duck rearers of Aylesbury formed two separate groups. Stock ducks—i.e., ducks kept for breeding—were kept on farms in the countryside of the Aylesbury Vale, away from the polluted air and water of the town. This kept the ducks healthy, and meant a higher number of fertile eggs. Stock ducks would be chosen from ducklings hatched in March, with a typical breeder keeping six males and twenty laying females at any given time. The females would be kept for around a year before mating, typically to an older male. They would then generally be replaced, to reduce the problems of inbreeding. Stock ducks were allowed to roam freely during the day, and would swim in local ponds which, although privately owned, were treated as common property among the duck breeders; breeders would label their ducks with markings on the neck or head. The stock ducks would forage for greenery and insects, supplemented by greaves (the residue left after the rendering of animal fat). As ducks lay their eggs at night, the ducks would be brought indoors overnight. Female Aylesbury ducks would not sit still for the 28 days necessary for their eggs to hatch, and as a consequence the breeders would not allow mothers to sit on their own eggs. Instead the fertilised eggs would be collected and transferred to the "duckers" of Aylesbury's Duck End. ### Rearing The duckers of Aylesbury would buy eggs from the breeders, or be paid by a breeder to raise the ducks on their behalf, and would raise the ducklings in their homes between November and August as a secondary source of income. Duckers were typically skilled labourers, who invested surplus income in ducklings. Many of the tasks related to rearing the ducks would be carried out by the women of the household, particularly the care of newly hatched ducklings. The eggs would be divided into batches of 13, and placed under broody chickens. In the last week of the four-week incubation period the eggs would be sprinkled daily with warm water to soften the shells and allow the ducklings to hatch. Newly hatched Aylesbury ducklings are timid and thrive best in small groups, so the duckers would divide them into groups of three or four ducklings, each accompanied by a hen. As the ducklings grew older and gained confidence, they would be kept in groups of around 30. Originally the ducks would be kept in every room in the ducker's cottage, but towards the end of the 19th century they were kept in outdoor pens and sheds with suitable protection against cold weather. The aim of the ducker was to get every duckling as fat as possible by the age of eight weeks (the first moult, the age at which they would be killed for meat), while avoiding any foods which would build up their bones or make their flesh greasy. In their first week after hatching, the ducklings would be fed on boiled eggs, toast soaked in water, boiled rice and beef liver. From the second week on, this diet would gradually be replaced by barley meal and boiled rice mixed with greaves. (Some larger-scale duckers would boil a horse or sheep and feed this to the ducklings in place of greaves.) This high-protein diet was supplemented with nettles, cabbage and lettuce to provide a source of vitamins. As with all poultry, ducks require grit in their diet to break up the food and make it digestible. Aylesbury ducklings' drinking water was laced with grit from Long Marston and Gubblecote; this grit also gave their bills their distinctive pinkish colour. Around 85% of ducklings would survive this eight-week rearing process to be sent to market. While ducks are naturally aquatic, swimming can be dangerous to young ducklings, and it can also restrict a duck's growth. Thus, although duckers would ensure the ducklings always had a trough or sink to paddle in, the ducklings would be kept away from bodies of water while they were growing. The exception was shortly before slaughter, when the ducklings would be taken for one swim in a pond, as it helped them to feather properly. Although there were a few large-scale duck rearing operations in Aylesbury, raising thousands of ducklings each season, the majority of Aylesbury's duckers would raise between 400 and 1,000 ducklings each year. Because ducking was a secondary occupation, it was not listed in Aylesbury's census returns or directories and it is impossible to know how many people were engaged in it at any given time. Kelly's Directory for 1864 does not list a single duck farmer in Aylesbury, but an 1885 book comments that: > In the early years of the present [19th] century almost every householder at the "Duck End" of the town followed the avocation of ducker. In a living room it was no uncommon sight to meet with young ducks of different ages, divided in pens and monopolizing the greatest space of the apartment, whilst expected new arrivals often were carefully lodged in the bedchamber. The Duck End was one of the poorer districts of Aylesbury. Until the end of the 19th century it had no sewers or refuse collections. The area had a number of open ditches filled with stagnant water, and outbreaks of malaria and cholera were common. The cottages had inadequate ventilation and lighting, and no running water. Faeces from the duck ponds permeated the local soil and seeped into the cottages through cracks in the floors. ### Slaughter and sale When the ducklings were ready for slaughter, the duckers would generally kill them on their own premises. The slaughter would generally take place in the morning, to ensure the ducks would be ready for market in the evening. To keep the meat as white as possible, the ducks would be suspended upside down and their necks broken backwards, and held in this position until their blood had run towards their heads. They were kept in this position for ten minutes before being plucked, as otherwise their blood would collect in those parts of the body from which the feathers had been plucked. The plucking was generally carried out by the women of the household. The plucked carcasses would be sent to market, and the feathers would be sold direct to London dealers. The market for duck meat in Aylesbury itself was small, and the ducks were generally sent to London for sale. By the 1750s Richard Pococke recorded that four cartloads of ducks were sent from Aylesbury to London every Saturday, and in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the ducks continued to be sent over the Chiltern Hills to London by packhorse or cart. On 15 June 1839 the entrepreneur and former Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham, Sir Harry Verney, 2nd Baronet, opened the Aylesbury Railway. Built under the direction of Robert Stephenson, it connected the London and Birmingham Railway's Cheddington railway station on the West Coast Main Line to Aylesbury High Street railway station in eastern Aylesbury. On 1 October 1863 the Wycombe Railway also built a line to Aylesbury, from Princes Risborough railway station to a station on the western side of Aylesbury (the present-day Aylesbury railway station). The arrival of the railway had a powerful impact on the duck industry, and up to a ton of ducks in a night were being shipped from Aylesbury to Smithfield Market in London by 1850. A routine became established in which salesmen would provide the duckers with labels. The duckers would mark their ducklings with the labels of the firm to whom they wished them to be sold in London. The railway companies would collect ducklings, take them to the stations, ship them to London and deliver them to the designated firms, in return for a flat fee per bird. By avoiding the need for the duckers to travel to market, or the London salesmen to collect the ducklings, this arrangement benefited all concerned, and ducking became very profitable. By 1870 the duck industry was bringing over £20,000 per year into Aylesbury; a typical ducker would make a profit of around £80–£200 per year. ## Developments in the late 19th century In 1845, the first National Poultry Show was held, at the Zoological Gardens in London; one of the classes of poultry exhibited was "Aylesbury or other white variety". The personal interest of Queen Victoria in poultry farming, and its inclusion in the Great Exhibition of 1851, further raised public interest in poultry. From 1853 the Royal Agricultural Society and the Bath and West of England Society, the two most prominent agricultural societies in England, included poultry sections in their annual agricultural shows. This in turn caused smaller local poultry shows to develop across the country. Breeders would choose potential exhibition ducks from among newly hatched ducklings in March and April, and they would be given a great deal of extra attention. They would be fed a carefully controlled diet to get them to the maximum weight, and would be allowed out for a few hours each day to keep them in as good a physical condition as possible. Before the show, their legs and feet would be washed, their bills trimmed with a knife and sandpapered smooth, and their feathers brushed with linseed oil. While most breeders would give the ducks a healthy meal before the show to calm them, some breeders would force-feed the ducks with sausage or worms, to get them to as heavy a weight as possible. Exhibition standards judged an Aylesbury duck primarily on size, shape and colour. This encouraged the breeding of larger ducks, with pronounced exaggerated keels, and loose baggy skin. By the beginning of the 20th century the Aylesbury duck had diverged into two separate strains, one bred for appearance and one for meat. ### Pekin ducks In 1873 the Pekin duck was introduced from China to Britain for the first time. Superficially similar in appearance to an Aylesbury duck, a Pekin is white with orange legs and bill, with its legs near the rear, giving it an upright stance while on land. Although not thought to have such a delicate flavour as the Aylesbury, the Pekin was hardier, a more prolific layer, fattened more quickly, and was roughly the same size as an Aylesbury at nine weeks. Aylesbury ducks, meanwhile, were becoming inbred, meaning fertile eggs were scarcer and the ducks were more susceptible to disease. Exhibition standards had led to selection for an exaggerated keel by breeders, despite it being unpopular with dealers and consumers. Poultry show judges also admired the long neck and upright posture of Pekin ducks over the boat-like stance of the Aylesbury. Some of the breeders in the Aylesbury area began to cross Pekin ducks with the pure Aylesbury strain. Although the Aylesbury-Pekin cross ducks did not have the delicate flavour of the pure Aylesbury, they were hardier and much cheaper to raise. Until the mid-19th century duck rearing was concentrated on the Duck End, but by the 1860s it had spread to many other towns and villages in the area, particularly Weston Turville and Haddenham. Contamination of Aylesbury's soil by years of duck rearing, and new public health legislation which ended many traditional practices, caused the decline of the duck rearing industry in the Duck End, and by the 1890s the majority of Aylesbury ducks were raised in the villages rather than the town itself. Population shifts and the improved national rail network reduced the need to rear ducks near London, and large duck farms opened in Lancashire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. Although the number of ducks raised nationwide continued to grow, between 1890 and 1900 the number of ducks raised in the Aylesbury area remained static, and from 1900 it began to drop. ## Decline By the time Beatrix Potter's 1908 The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck—about an Aylesbury duck although set in Cumbria—caused renewed interest in the breed, the Aylesbury duck was in steep decline. The duckers of Buckinghamshire had generally failed to introduce technological improvements such as the incubator, and inbreeding had dangerously weakened the breed. Meanwhile, the cost of duck food had risen fourfold over the 19th century, and from 1873 onwards competition from Pekin and Pekin cross ducks was undercutting Aylesbury ducks at the marketplace. The First World War devastated the remaining duckers of Buckinghamshire. The price of duck food rose steeply while the demand for luxury foodstuffs fell, and wartime restructuring ended the beneficial financial arrangements with the railway companies. By the end of the war small-scale duck rearing in the Aylesbury Vale had vanished, with duck raising dominated by a few large duck farms. Shortages of duck food in the Second World War caused further disruption to the industry, and almost all duck farming in the Aylesbury Vale ended. A 1950 "Aylesbury Duckling Day" campaign to boost the reputation of the Aylesbury duck had little effect; by the end of the 1950s the last significant farms had closed, other than a single flock in Chesham owned by Mr L. T. Waller, and by 1966 there were no duck breeders or rearers of any size remaining in Aylesbury. As of 2021 the Waller family's farm in Chesham remains in business, the last surviving flock of pure Aylesbury meat ducks in the country. Aylesbury ducks were imported into the United States in 1840, although they never became a popular breed. They were added to the American Poultry Association's Standard of Perfection breeding guidelines in 1876. As of 2013, the breed was listed as critically endangered in the United States by The Livestock Conservancy. ## Legacy The Aylesbury duck remains a symbol of the town of Aylesbury. Aylesbury United F.C. are nicknamed "The Ducks" and include an Aylesbury duck on their club badge, and the town's coat of arms includes an Aylesbury duck and plaited straw, representing the two historic industries of the town. The Aylesbury Brewery Company, now defunct, featured the Aylesbury duck as its logo, an example of which can still be seen at the Britannia pub. Duck Farm Court is a shopping area of modern Aylesbury located near the historic hamlet of California, close to one of the main breeding grounds for ducks in the town, and there have been two pubs in the town with the name "The Duck" in recent years; one in Bedgrove that has since been demolished and one in Jackson Road that has recently been renamed. ## See also - List of duck breeds
88,609	Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home	1,171,857,742	1986 American science fiction film directed by Leonard Nimoy	[ "1980s American films", "1980s English-language films", "1980s science fiction comedy films", "1986 films", "1986 science fiction films", "American sequel films", "American space adventure films", "Films about time travel", "Films about whales", "Films based on Star Trek: The Original Series", "Films directed by Leonard Nimoy", "Films produced by Harve Bennett", "Films scored by Leonard Rosenman", "Films set in 1986", "Films set in San Francisco", "Films set in the 23rd century", "Films shot in San Francisco", "Films with screenplays by Harve Bennett", "Films with screenplays by Leonard Nimoy", "Films with screenplays by Nicholas Meyer", "Films with screenplays by Peter Krikes", "Films with screenplays by Steve Meerson", "Paramount Pictures films", "Puppet films", "Time travel in Star Trek" ]	Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a 1986 American science fiction film directed by Leonard Nimoy and based on the television series Star Trek. It is the fourth feature installment in the Star Trek franchise, and is a sequel to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984); it completes the story arc begun in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and continued in The Search for Spock. Intent on returning home to Earth to face trial for their actions in the previous film, the former crew of the USS Enterprise finds the planet in grave danger from an alien probe attempting to contact now-extinct humpback whales. The crew travel to Earth's past to find whales who can answer the probe's call. After directing The Search for Spock, Nimoy was asked to direct the next feature, and given greater freedom regarding the film's content. Nimoy and producer Harve Bennett conceived a story with an environmental message and no clear-cut villain. Dissatisfied with the first screenplay produced by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, Paramount hired The Wrath of Khan writer and director Nicholas Meyer. Meyer and Bennett divided the story between them and wrote different parts of the script, requiring approval from Nimoy, lead actor William Shatner, and executives at Paramount Pictures. Principal photography commenced on February 24, 1986. Unlike previous Star Trek films, The Voyage Home was shot extensively on location; many real settings and buildings were used as stand-ins for scenes set around and in the city of San Francisco. Special effects firm Industrial Light & Magic assisted in post-production and the film's special effects. Few of the humpback whales in the film were real: ILM devised full-size animatronics and small motorized models to stand in for the real creatures. The film was dedicated to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which broke up 73 seconds after takeoff on the morning of January 28, 1986. The Voyage Home was released on November 26, 1986, in North America by Paramount Pictures, and became the top-grossing film at the weekend box office. The film's humor, acting, direction, special effects and unconventional story were well received by critics, fans of the series, and the general audience. It was financially successful, grossing \$133 million worldwide, and earned several awards and four Oscar nominations for cinematography and sound. ## Plot In 2286, an enormous cylindrical probe moves through space, sending out an indecipherable signal and disabling the power of every ship it passes. As it takes up orbit around Earth, its signal disables the global power grid and generates planetary storms, creating catastrophic, sun-blocking cloud cover. Starfleet Command sends out a planetary distress call and warns all space-faring vessels not to approach Earth. On the planet Vulcan, the former officers of the late USS Enterprise are living in exile after the events of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Accompanied by the Vulcan Spock, still recovering from his resurrection, the crew take their captured Klingon Bird of Prey (renamed the Bounty, after the Royal Navy ship) and return to Earth to face trial for their actions. Receiving Starfleet's warning, Spock determines that the probe's signal matches the song of extinct humpback whales, and that the object will continue to wreak havoc until its call is answered. The crew uses their ship to travel back in time via a slingshot maneuver around the Sun, planning to return with a whale to answer the alien signal. Arriving in 1986, the crew finds their ship's power drained by the time travel maneuver. Hiding the Bounty in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park using its cloaking device, the crew split up to accomplish several tasks: Admiral James T. Kirk and Spock attempt to locate humpback whales, while Montgomery Scott, Leonard McCoy, and Hikaru Sulu construct a tank to hold the whales they need for a return to the 23rd century. Uhura and Pavel Chekov are tasked to find a nuclear reactor, whose energy leakage can be collected and used to re-power the Klingon vessel. Kirk and Spock discover a pair of humpback whales in the care of Dr. Gillian Taylor at a Sausalito aquarium, and learn they will soon be released into the wild. Kirk tells her of his mission and asks for the tracking frequency for the whales, but she refuses to cooperate. Meanwhile, Scott and McCoy trade the formula of transparent aluminium for the materials needed for the whale tank, while Sulu secures the use of a "Huey" helicopter to transport them. Uhura and Chekov locate a nuclear powered ship, the aircraft carrier Enterprise. They collect the power they need, but are discovered on board. Uhura is beamed out, but Chekov is captured, interrogated (under the assumption he is a Soviet spy), and subsequently severely injured in an escape attempt. Gillian learns the whales have been released early, and goes to Kirk for assistance. Gillian, Kirk, and McCoy rescue Chekov from a nearby hospital and return to the now recharged Bird of Prey. After saving the whales from whalers and transporting them aboard, the crew returns with Gillian to their own time. On approaching Earth, the Bounty loses power due to the alien probe and crash-lands into the waters of San Francisco Bay. Once released from near-drowning, the whales respond to the probe's signal, causing the object to reverse its effects on Earth and return to the depths of space. Later, the Enterprise crew stand judgment before the Federation Council. The Council acknowledges their part in saving the planet and drops all charges, save one against Kirk for disobeying a superior officer. Kirk is demoted to the rank of captain and returned to the command of a starship. Kirk and Gillian part ways, as she has been assigned to a science vessel by Starfleet, while Spock's father Sarek finally accepts his son's earlier choice to enter Starfleet. The crew discovers they have been awarded the newly christened USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A), and leaves on a shakedown mission. ## Cast William Shatner portrays Admiral James T. Kirk, former captain of the Enterprise. Shatner was unwilling to reprise the role of Kirk until he received a salary of \$2 million and the promise of directing the next film. Shatner described The Voyage Home's comic quality as one "that verges on tongue-in-cheek but isn't; it's as though the characters within the play have a great deal of joy about themselves, a joy of living [and] you play it with the reality you would in a kitchen-sink drama written for today's life". Leonard Nimoy plays Spock, who was resurrected by the effects of the Genesis planet and had his "living spirit" restored to his body in the previous film. DeForest Kelley portrays Doctor Leonard McCoy, who is given many of the film's comedic lines; Kelley's biographer Terry Lee Rioux wrote that in the film "he seemed to be playing straight man to himself." On Earth, McCoy was paired with engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), as producer Harve Bennett felt that Kelley worked well with Doohan's "old vaudeville comic". The other members of the Enterprise crew include George Takei as helmsman Hikaru Sulu, Walter Koenig as Commander Pavel Chekov, and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura. Koenig commented that Chekov was a "delight" to play in this film because he worked best in comedic situations. Catherine Hicks plays Dr. Gillian Taylor, a cetologist on 20th-century Earth. During production, a rumor circulated that the part had been created after Shatner demanded a love interest, a regular aspect of the television series that was absent from the first three films. Writer Nicholas Meyer denied this, saying that the inspiration for Taylor came from a biologist featured in a National Geographic documentary about whales. Nimoy chose Hicks after inviting her to lunch with Shatner and witnessing a chemistry between the two. The role was originally written for Eddie Murphy as an astrophysicist at Berkeley. Majel Barrett reprises her role as Christine Chapel, the director of Starfleet Command's medical services. Many of her scenes—some reportedly very large—were omitted in the final cut, angering the actress. Her final role in the film consists of one line of dialogue and a reaction shot. Mark Lenard and Jane Wyatt play Spock's parents, Ambassador Sarek and Amanda Grayson, respectively, with both reprising the roles they had previously played in the 1967 episode "Journey to Babel". Wyatt commented that, although she generally disliked working with actors who were directing, she found Nimoy an exception because he could concentrate on being part of the cast as well as setting up the crew. Robin Curtis reprises the role of Saavik, a Starfleet lieutenant. Saavik's role is minimal in the film—originally, she was intended to remain behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant after she had mated with the younger Spock in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. In the final cut of the film, all references to her condition were dropped. The film contains several cameos and smaller roles. Alex Henteloff plays Dr. Nichols, plant manager of Plexicorp. Madge Sinclair makes an uncredited appearance as captain of the USS Saratoga (the first female Federation starship captain to appear in Star Trek). Musician Jane Wiedlin and tennis player Vijay Amritraj appear as Starfleet officers seen briefly on video screens at Starfleet Command. John Schuck appears as a Klingon ambassador, Robert Ellenstein as the Federation President, Michael Berryman as an alien display officer at Starfleet Command, and Brock Peters as Fleet Admiral Cartwright. Grace Lee Whitney reprises her role as Janice Rand from the original television series. ## Production ### Development Before The Search for Spock was released, its director Leonard Nimoy was asked to return to direct the next film in the franchise. Whereas Nimoy had been under certain constraints in filming the previous picture, Paramount gave the director greater freedom for the sequel. "[Paramount] said flat out that they wanted my vision," Nimoy recalled. In contrast to the drama-heavy and operatic events of the three previous Star Trek features, Nimoy and producer Harve Bennett wanted a lighter movie that did not have a clear-cut villain. As William Shatner was unwilling to return, Nimoy and Bennett spent eight months considering a prequel concept by Ralph Winter about the characters at Starfleet Academy, before Shatner received a pay increase and signed on to star. Nimoy and Shatner each received \$2.5 million for the film, less than their original demands, but the film cast's rising salaries caused Paramount to create a new television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), with less-expensive, lesser-known actors. Despite Shatner's doubts, Nimoy and Bennett selected a time travel story in which the Enterprise crew encounters a problem that could only be fixed by something only available in the present day (the Star Trek characters' past). They considered ideas about violin makers and oil drillers, or a disease that had its cure destroyed with the rainforests. "But the depiction of thousands of sick and dying people seemed rather gruesome for our light-hearted film, and the thought of our crew taking a 600-year round trip just to bring back a snail darter wasn't all that thrilling," explained Nimoy. The director read a book on extinct animals and conceived the storyline that was eventually adopted. Nimoy hit upon the idea of humpback whales after talking with a friend—their song added mystery to the story, and their size added logistical challenges the heroes would have to overcome. Nimoy approached Beverly Hills Cop writer Daniel Petrie Jr. to write the screenplay when a concept that executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg described as "either the best or worst idea in the world" arose—Star Trek fan Eddie Murphy wanted a starring role. Nimoy and Murphy acknowledged his part would attract non-Star Trek fans to the franchise following the rising popularity of Murphy, but it also meant the film might be ridiculed. Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes were hired to write a script with Murphy as a college professor who believes in aliens and likes to play whale songs. Murphy disliked the part, and chose to make The Golden Child. The character intended for Murphy was combined with those of a marine biologist and a female reporter to become Gillian Taylor. Paramount was dissatisfied with the script, so its head of production Dawn Steel asked Nicholas Meyer, the writer and director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to help rewrite it. Meyer never read the earlier script, reasoning it pointless to do so since the content had no appeal to the studio. He and Bennett split the task of conceiving the plot between them. Bennett wrote the first quarter of the story, up to the point where the crew goes back in time. Meyer wrote the story's middle portion, taking place on 20th-century Earth, and Bennett handled the ending. After 12 days of writing, Meyer and Bennett combined their separate portions. In this version, Gillian Taylor stays on 1986's Earth and vows to ensure the survival of the humpback whale despite the paradox it could create. Meyer preferred this "righter ending" to the film version, explaining "the end in the movie detracts from the importance of people in the present taking the responsibility for the ecology and preventing problems of the future by doing something today, rather than catering to the fantasy desires of being able to be transported in time to the near-utopian future." Meyer and Bennett cut out Krikes’ and Meerson's idea of having the Klingon Bird-of-Prey fly over the Super Bowl and the hint that Saavik remained on Vulcan because she was pregnant with Spock's child. Nimoy said Meyer gave the script "the kind of humor and social comment, gadfly attitude I very much wanted". He added that his vision was for "no dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy. I wanted people to really have a great time watching this film [and] if somewhere in the mix we lobbed a couple of big ideas at them, well, then that would be even better." One of Meyer's earlier films, Time After Time, was largely based in San Francisco; when he was told by the producers that The Voyage Home had to be set in the same city, he took the opportunity to comment upon cultural aspects not covered by his earlier film, such as punk rock—The Voyage Home's scene where Kirk and Spock meet an annoying punk rocker was based on a similar scene cut from Time After Time. Meyer found writing the script a smooth process. He would write a few pages, show it to Nimoy and Bennett for consultation, and return to his office to write some more. Once Nimoy, Bennett, and Meyer were happy, they showed the script to Shatner, who offered his own notes for another round of rewrites. The completed script was shown to Paramount executives, who were very pleased. ### Design Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was responsible for The Voyage Home's model design and optical effects. The alien probe was the responsibility of ILM's model shop, which brought in outside help like illustrator Ralph McQuarrie for concept art. The modelmakers started with art director Nilo Rodis' basic design, a simple cylinder with whalelike qualities. The prototype was covered with barnacles and colored. The ball-shaped antenna that juts out from the bottom of the probe was created out of a piece of irrigation pipe; internal machinery turned the device. Three sizes of the "whale probe" were created; the primary 8-foot (2.4 m) probe model was supplemented by a smaller model for wide shots and a large 20-foot (6.1 m) model that used forced perspective to give the probe the illusion of massive dimensions. The effects crew focused on using in-camera tricks to realize the probe; post-production effects were time-consuming, so lighting effects were done on stage while filming. Model shop supervisor Jeff Mann filled the probe's antenna with tube lamps and halogen bulbs that were turned on in sequence for different exposures; three different camera passes for each exposure were combined for the final effect. After watching the first shot, the team found the original, whalelike probe design lacking in menace. The modelmakers repainted the probe a shiny black, pockmarked its surface for greater texture and interest, and re-shot the scene. Although they wanted to avoid post-production effects work, the opticals team had to recolor the antenna ball in a blue hue, as the original orange looked too much like a spinning basketball. Aside from the probe, The Voyage Home required no new starship designs. The USS Saratoga, the first Federation starship disabled by the probe, was the USS Reliant model from The Wrath of Khan. The Bird-of-Prey model from The Search for Spock was reused, but ILM built additional sturdy versions for The Voyage Home's action sequences. The inside of the Bird-of-Prey was represented by a different set than The Search for Spock, but the designers made sure to adhere to a sharp and alien architectural aesthetic. To give the set a smokier, atmospheric look, the designers rigged display and instrumentation lights to be bright enough that they could light the characters, rather than relying on ambient or rigged lighting. While Paramount had instructed ILM to trash the large Spacedock model created for The Search for Spock, the team had been loath to discard the complicated model and its miles of fiber optic lighting. When The Voyage Home called for the return of Spacedock, ILM had only to reassemble the model from storage. Robert Fletcher served as costume designer for the film. During the Earth-based scenes, Kirk and his crew continue to wear their 23rd-century clothing. Nimoy debated whether the crew should change costumes, but after seeing how people in San Francisco are dressed, he decided they would still fit in. ### Filming Nimoy chose Donald Peterman, ASC, as director of photography. Nimoy said he regarded the cinematographer as a fellow artist, and that it was important for them to agree on "a certain look" that Peterman was committed to delivering. Nimoy had seen Peterman's work and felt it was more nuanced than simply lighting a scene and capturing an image. The film's opening scenes aboard the starship Saratoga were the first to be shot; principal photography commenced on February 24, 1986. The set was a redress of the science vessel Grissom's bridge from The Search for Spock, in turn a redress of the Enterprise bridge created for The Motion Picture. The scenes were filmed first to allow time for the set to be revamped as the bridge of the new Enterprise-A at the end of filming. As with previous Star Trek films, existing props and footage were reused where possible to save money, though The Voyage Home required less of this than previous films. The Earth Spacedock interiors and control booth sets were reused from The Search for Spock, although the computer monitors in these scenes featured new graphics—the old reels had deteriorated in storage. Stock footage of the destruction of the Enterprise and the Bird-of-Prey's movement through space were reused. While the Bird-of-Prey bridge was a completely new design, other parts of the craft's interior were also redresses; the computer room was a modification of the reactor room where Spock died in The Wrath of Khan. After all other Bird-of-Prey bridge scenes were completed, the entire set was painted white for one shot that transitioned into a dream sequence during the time travel. The Voyage Home was the first Star Trek film to extensively film on location—only one day was spent doing so in The Search for Spock. Much of the production was filmed in and around San Francisco during ten days of shooting. The production wanted to film scenes that were readily identifiable as the city. The use of extensive location shooting caused logistical problems; a scene in which Kirk is nearly run over by an irate cab driver required 12–15 cars to be repositioned if the shot was incorrect, taking a half-hour to reshoot. Other scenes were filmed in the city but used sets rather than real locations, such as an Italian restaurant where Taylor and Kirk eat. In the film, the Bird-of-Prey lands cloaked in Golden Gate Park, surprising trashmen who flee the scene in their truck. The production had planned to film in the real park, where they had filmed scenes for The Wrath of Khan, but heavy rains before the day of shooting prevented it—the garbage truck would have become bogged down in the mud. Will Rogers Park in western Los Angeles was used instead. When Kirk and Spock are traveling on a public bus, they encounter a punk rocker blaring his music on a boom box, to the discomfort of everyone around him. Spock takes matters into his own hands and performs a Vulcan nerve pinch. Part of the inspiration for the scene came from Nimoy's personal experiences with a similar character on the streets of New York; "[I was struck] by the arrogance of it, the aggressiveness of it, and I thought if I was Spock I'd pinch his brains out!" On learning about the scene, Kirk Thatcher, an associate producer on the film, convinced Nimoy to let him play the role; Thatcher shaved his hair into a mohawk and bought clothes to complete the part. Credited as "punk on bus", Thatcher (along with sound designer Mark Mangini) also wrote and recorded "I Hate You", the song in the scene, and it was his idea to have the punk—rendered unconscious by the pinch—hit the stereo and turn it off with his face. Much of the Cetacean Institute, Taylor's workplace, was created by using the real-life Monterey Bay Aquarium. A holding tank for the whales was added via special effects to the Aquarium's exterior. For close-ups of the characters as they watched the whales in the tank, the Aquarium's walls and railings were measured and replicated for a set on the Paramount parking lot. One scene takes place by a large glass through which observers view the whales—and Spock's initiation of a mind meld—underwater. Footage of the actors shot in front of them as they reacted to a brick wall in the Aquarium was combined with shots taken from their rear as they stood in front of a large blue screen at ILM to produce this scene. The footage of Spock's melding with the whales was shot weeks later in a large water tank used to train astronauts for weightlessness. In the film, Uhura and Chekov visit the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. The real Enterprise, out at sea at the time, was unavailable for filming, so the non-nuclear-powered carrier USS Ranger (CV-61) was used. Oakland International Airport was used for the foreground element of Starfleet Headquarters. Scenes in the San Francisco Bay were shot at a tank on Paramount's backlot. The scene in which Uhura and Chekov question passersby about the location of nuclear vessels was filmed with a hidden camera. However, the people with whom Koenig and Nichols speak were extras hired off the street for that day's shooting and, despite legends to the contrary, knew they were being filmed. In an interview with StarTrek.com, Layla Sarakalo, the extra who said, "I don't know if I know the answer to that... I think it's across the bay, in Alameda," stated that after her car was impounded because she missed the warnings to move it for the filming, she approached the assistant director about appearing with the other extras, hoping to be paid enough to get her car out of impoundment. She had been told to act naturally, and so she answered them and the filmmakers kept her response in the film, though she had to be inducted into the Screen Actors Guild in order for her lines to be kept. Vulcan and the Bird-of-Prey exterior was created with a combination of matte paintings and a soundstage. Nimoy had searched for a suitable location for the scene of the Enterprise crew's preparations to return to Earth, but various locations did not work, so the scene was instead filmed on a Paramount backlot. The production had to mask the fact that production buildings were 30 feet (9.1 m) away. A wide-angle shot of Spock on the edge of a cliff overlooking the scene was filmed at Vasquez Rocks, a park north of Los Angeles. The Federation council chamber was a large set filled with representatives from many alien races. Production manager Jack T. Collis economized by building the set with only one end; reverse angle shots used the same piece of wall. The positions of the Federation President's podium and the actors on the seats were switched for each shot. Since The Voyage Home was the first Star Trek film to show the operations at Starfleet Command, Bennett and Nimoy visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to learn how a real deep space command center might look and operate. Among the resulting set's features was a large central desk with video monitors that the production team nicknamed "the pool table"; the prop later became a fixture in USS Enterprise-D's engine room on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. ### Effects Nimoy approached ILM early in development and helped create storyboards for the optical effects sequences. Many shots used matte paintings to extend backgrounds and create establishing shots without the cost of building a set. Matte supervisor Chris Evans attempted to create paintings that felt less contrived and more real—while the natural instinct of filmmaking is to place important elements in an orderly fashion, Evans said that photographers would "shoot things that [...] are odd in some way" and end up with results that look natural instead. The task of establishing the location and atmosphere at Starfleet Headquarters fell to the matte department, who had to make it feel like a bustling futuristic version of San Francisco. The matte personnel and Ralph McQuarrie provided design input. The designers decided to make actors in the foreground more prominent, and filmed them on a large area of smooth concrete runway at the Oakland Airport. Elements like a shuttlecraft that thirty extras appeared to interact with were also mattes blended to appear as if they were sitting by the actors. Ultimately the artists were not satisfied with how the shot turned out; matte photography supervisor Craig Barron believed that there were too many elements in the scene. The scenes of the Bird-of-Prey on Vulcan were combinations of live-action footage—actors on a set in the Paramount parking lot that was covered with clay and used backdrops—and matte paintings for the ship itself and harsh background terrain. The scene of the ship's departure from Vulcan for Earth was more difficult to accomplish; the camera pans behind live-action characters to follow the ship as it leaves the atmosphere, and other items like flaming pillars and a flaring sun had to be integrated into the shot. Rather than try to match and combine camera pans of each element, each component was shot with a static camera and the pan was added to the resulting composite by a motion control camera. The sun (a light bulb focused by a convex lens) was shot in different passes to create realistic light effects on the Bird-of-Prey without having the light bleed around other elements in the shot. The script called for the probe to vaporize the Earth's oceans, generating heavy cloud cover. While effects cinematographer Don Dow wanted to go to sea and record plumes of water created by exploding detonating cords in the water, the team decided to create the probe's climatic effect in another way after a government fishing agency voiced concerns for the welfare of marine life in the area. The team used a combination of baking soda and cloud tank effects; the swirling mist created by the water-filled tank was shot on black velvet, and color and dynamic swirls were added by injecting paint into the tank. These shots were composited onto a painting of the Earth along with overlaid lightning effects, created by double-exposing lights as they moved across the screen. The Bird-of-Prey's travel through time was one of the most difficult effects sequences of the film. While ILM was experienced in creating the streaking warp effect they used for previous films, the sequence required the camera to trail a sustained warp effect as the Bird-of-Prey rounded the sun. Matching the effect to the model was accomplished through trial-and-error guesswork. The team did not have the time to wait for the animation department to create the sun for this shot. Assistant cameraman Pete Kozachic devised a way of creating the sun on-stage. He placed two sheets of textured plexiglass next to each other and backlit them with a powerful yellow light. The rig was rotated on a circular track and the sheet in front created a moire pattern as its position shifted. Animator John Knoll added solar flare effects to complete the look; Dow recalled that the effect came close to matching footage of the sun taken by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Traveling through time, Kirk and crew experience what author Jody Duncan Shay termed a "dreamlike state". The script's only direction for the effect was "now [they] go through time"; Nimoy and McQuarrie envisioned Kirk's dream as a montage of bizarre images. The filmmakers decided early on that part of the dream sequence would use computer-generated animation to give it an unreal quality divorced from the rest of the film. ILM worked from McQuarrie's storyboards and created a rough mock-up or animatic to show Nimoy and hone the direction of the sequence. For the very beginning of the dream, the inside of the Bird-of-Prey bridge was painted stark white. Part of the final sequence involved morphing the heads of the Enterprise crew into one another; ILM digitized the cast members' heads using a 3-D scanning technology developed by Cyberware and used the resulting data for the computer models. Because each head model had the same number of key points of reference, transforming one character into another was simple; more difficult, the animators recalled, was ensuring that the transformation looked "pleasing" and not "grotesque". The resulting thirty seconds of footage took weeks to render; the department used every spare computer they could find to help in the processing chores. ILM's stage, optical, and matte departments collaborated to complete other shots for the dream sequence. The shot of a man's fall to Earth was created by filming a small puppet on bluescreen. Shots of liquid nitrogen composited behind the puppet gave the impression of smoke. The background plate of the planet was a large matte that allowed the camera to zoom in very close. The final shot of marshy terrain was practical and required no effects. The filmmakers knew from the beginning of production that the whales were their biggest effects concern; Dow recalled that they were prepared to change to another animal in case creating the whales proved too difficult. When Humphrey the Whale wandered into the San Francisco Bay, Dow and his camera crew attempted to gather usable footage of the humpback but failed to do so. Other footage of real humpbacks either did not exist on 35 mm film or would have been difficult to match to specific actions required by the script. Compositing miniatures shot against bluescreen on top of water backgrounds would not have provided realistic play of light. Creating full-size mechanical whales on tracks would severely limit the types of angles and shots. To solve the whale problem, Rodis hired robotics expert Walt Conti. While Conti was not experienced in film, Rodis believed his background in engineering and design made him well equipped for Rodis' planned solution: the creation of independent and self-contained miniature whale models. After watching footage of whale movement, Conti determined that the models could be simplified by making the front of the whale entirely rigid, relying on the tail and fins for movement. Conti showed footage of the operation of a 30-inch (76 cm) prototype to Paramount executives, who according to Conti, "loved it... It really knocked them out." With Paramount's approval, ILM hired marine author, conservationist and illustrator Pieter Folkens to sculpt a realistic whale exterior.\> ILM decided on a finished model size of four feet (1.2 m)—the size prevented delicate components like the tail from buckling under stress—and fitted it with mechanics and radio equipment required for control and operation. To prevent water from ruining the whale's electronics, the modelmakers sealed every individual mechanical component rather than attempting to waterproof the entire whale. Balloons and lead weights were added to achieve the proper balance and buoyancy. The finished models were put in the swimming pool of Serra High School in San Mateo, California, for two weeks of shooting; the operation of the whales required four handlers and divers with video cameras to help set up the shots. Accurately controlling the whales was difficult because of the murky water—ILM added diatomaceous earth to the water to match realistic ocean visibility. For a few shots, such as the whales' breaching the water towards the end of the film, the creatures were represented by life-size animatronics shot at Paramount. Models of the starship USS Enterprise were destroyed in the previous film partly because visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston wanted to build a "more state-of-the-art ship for the next film", but the filmmakers made the less costly decision to have the crew return to serve on the duplicate USS Enterprise A, and six weeks were spent repairing and repainting the old model. A travel pod from Star Trek: The Motion Picture was also reused for the ending, although the 20-foot-long (6.1 m) interior set had to be rebuilt. Graphic designer Michael Okuda designed smooth controls with backlit displays for the Federation. Dubbed "Okudagrams", the system was also used for displays on the Klingon ship, though the buttons were larger. ### Sound James Horner, composer for The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, declined to return for The Voyage Home. Nimoy turned to his friend Leonard Rosenman, who had written the music to Fantastic Voyage, Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings, and two Planet of the Apes sequels. Rosenman wrote an arrangement of Alexander Courage's Star Trek television theme as the title music for The Voyage Home, but Nimoy requested an original composition. Music critic Jeff Bond writes, "The final result was one of the most unusual Star Trek movie themes," consisting of a six-note theme and variations set against a repetitious four-note brass motif; the theme's bridge borrows content from Rosenman's "Frodo March" for The Lord of the Rings. A cycle of fifths is heard for the second subject. The melody is played in the beginning of the film on Vulcan and the scenes of Taylor's search for Kirk to help find her whales. The Earth-based setting of the filming gave Rosenman leeway to write a variety of music in different styles. Nimoy intended the crew's introduction to the streets of San Francisco to be accompanied by something reminiscent of George Gershwin, but Rosenman changed the director's mind, and the scene was scored with a contemporary jazz fusion piece by Yellowjackets. When Chekov flees detention aboard the aircraft carrier, Rosenman wrote a bright cue that incorporates classical Russian compositions. The music for the escape from the hospital was done in a baroque style. More familiar Rosenman compositions include the action music for the face off between the Bird-of-Prey and a whaling ship in open water, and the atmospheric music (reminiscent of the composer's work in Fantastic Voyage) during the probe's communication. After the probe leaves, a Vivaldiesque "whale fugue" begins. The first sighting of the Enterprise-A uses the Alexander Courage theme before the end titles. Mark Mangini served as The Voyage Home's sound designer. He described it as different from working on many other films because Nimoy appreciated the role of sound effects and made sure that they were prominent in the film. Since many sounds familiar to Star Trek had been established—the Bird-of-Prey's cloaking device, the transporter beam, et al.—Mangini focused on making only small changes to them. The most important sounds were those of the whales and the probe. Mangini's brother lived near biologist Roger Payne, who had recordings of whale song. Mangini went through the tapes and chose sounds that could be mixed to suggest conversation and language. The probe's screeching calls were the whale song in distorted form. The humpback's communication with the probe at the climax of the film contained no dramatic music, meaning that Mangini's sounds had to stand alone. He recalled that he had difficulty with envisioning how the scene would unfold, leading Bennett to perform a puppet show to explain. It was at Bennett's suggestion that Paramount studio heads asked Nimoy to create subtitles for the probe's transmission at the start of the film and for the climactic dialogue with the whales. Both Nimoy and Meyer were adamantly against using any subtitles, and they eventually prevailed. Nimoy and the other producers were unhappy with Mangini's attempts to create the probe's droning operating noise; after more than a dozen attempts, the sound designer finally asked Nimoy what he thought the probe should sound like. Mangini recorded Nimoy's guttural "wub-wub-wub" response, distorted it with "just the tiniest bit of dressing", and used it as the final sound. The punk music during the bus scene was written by Thatcher after he learned that the sound for the scene would be by "Duran Duran, or whoever" and not "raw" and authentic punk. Thatcher collaborated with Mangini and two sound editors who were in punk bands to create their own music. They decided that punk distilled down to the sentiment of "I hate you", and wrote a song centered on the theme. Recording in the sound studio as originally planned produced too clean a sound, so they moved to the outside hallway and recorded the song in one take using cheap microphones to create a distorted sound. The song was also used in Paramount's Back to the Beach. ## Reception ### Release The Voyage Home opened theatrically in North America on Thanksgiving weekend, November 26, 1986. Since Star Trek had traditionally performed poorly internationally, the producers created a special trailer for foreign markets that de-emphasized the Star Trek part of the title, as well as retelling the events of The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock. Winter recalled that the marketing did not seem to make a difference. The Voyage Home was the first Star Trek film shown in the Soviet Union, screened by the World Wildlife Fund on June 26, 1987, in Moscow to celebrate a ban on whaling. Attending the screening with Nimoy, Bennett was amazed the film proved as entertaining to the Russians as it did with American audiences; he said "the single most rewarding moment of my Star Trek life" was when the Moscow audience applauded at McCoy's line, "The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. We'll get a freighter." Bennett believed it was a clear "messenger of what was to come". Vonda N. McIntyre wrote a novelization that was released at the same time as the film. It was the biggest tie-in novel published by Pocket Books, and spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, peaking at \#3. MCA Records released the film's soundtrack November 26, 1986. In its first week, The Voyage Home ended Crocodile Dundee's 8-week reign of the American box office. The Star Trek film made \$39.6 million in its first five days of release, exceeding The Search for Spock's opening by \$14 million. Ultimately, the film grossed a global total of \$133 million against its \$26 million cost. In six weeks, The Voyage Home sold \$81.3 million in tickets, more than the franchise's second or third film, and almost as much as Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film was a major commercial success for Paramount, which released five of the top ten films of the year, and garnered 22 percent of all money taken in at American theaters. Much of the credit for Paramount's success was given to chairman Frank Mancuso Sr., who moved The Voyage Home's release from Christmas to Thanksgiving after research showed that the film might draw filmgoers away from The Golden Child. ### Critical response The Voyage Home received mostly positive reviews—Nimoy called it the most well received of all Star Trek films made at that point—and it appealed to general audiences in addition to franchise fans. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 82% based on 44 reviews, and an average rating of 6.9/10. The critics' consensus reads, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is perhaps the lightest and most purely enjoyable entry of the long-running series, emphasizing the eccentricities of the Enterprise's crew." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale. The movie was a "loose, jovial, immensely pleasurable Christmas entertainment" for The Washington Post's Paul Attanasio, and a retrospective BBC review called the film "one of the series' strongest episodes and proof that the franchise could weather the absence of space-bound action and the iconic USS Enterprise, and still be highly enjoyable". Although Janet Maslin of The New York Times admitted the film's plot was "demented", she wrote that the film "has done a great deal to ensure the series' longevity". Rushworth Kidder of the Christian Science Monitor praised the film for giving audiences a view of their modern life from a different perspective (the mooreeffoc effect), while simultaneously proving that a film does not need to have murder, violence, innuendo or even a main villain for dramatic storytelling. The film's "fish out of water" comedy and acting were mostly lauded. The Courier Mail wrote that the film was funnier than its predecessors, and while not "flippant", a sense of humor was revealed through the efforts of the cast, writers and director. Newsweek's David Ansen considered The Voyage Home not only the most light-hearted of the movie franchise, but the most true in spirit to the original television series. A more negative review was offered by Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail, who wrote that under Nimoy's "choppy" direction there was a lack of comic timing paired with feeble humor. American film critic Pauline Kael commented, "The crewmates are supposed to be technical wizards of the 23rd century, but they deliver their lines as if they were ancient tortoises who had to get their heads out and up before they could say anything. It's a relief to hear two San Francisco garbagemen talk, because there's some energy in their voices, and when Madge Sinclair turns up for a minute, as the captain of the S. S. Saratoga, her crisp, urgent tone is like a handclap." The special effects were generally well received; critics for The Sydney Morning Herald and Courier Mail noted that the effects played a lesser role in the film compared to the characters and dialogue. Similarly, USA Today felt the lack of special effects allowed the cast to "prove themselves more capable actors than ever before". Maslin wrote that Nimoy's technical direction left "much to be desired" (pointing out a special effects scene where the Bird-of-Prey does not cast a shadow on the whaling ship as a mistake), but his "unmistakable" sincerity made up for these issues. The Voyage Home garnered 11 nominations at the 14th annual Saturn Awards, tying Aliens for number of nominations. Nimoy and Shatner were nominated for best actor for their roles, and Catherine Hicks was nominated for best supporting actress. At the 59th Academy Awards, The Voyage Home was nominated for Best Cinematography, Sound (Terry Porter, David J. Hudson, Mel Metcalfe and Gene Cantamessa), Sound Effects Editing, and Original Score. In 2018, Popular Mechanics ranked the scene where Chekov talks about 'nuclear wessels' the 50th-greatest moment in science fiction. ### Home media The Voyage Home was first released on VHS home media on September 30, 1987. Paramount Home Video spent \$20 million marketing the film's release alongside 10 episodes of The Original Series. The video sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States and Canadian markets, and was in the top ten rankings for sales and rentals in December and January 1988. Paramount re-released the film on March 12, 1992, with Fatal Attraction as part of a "Director's Series"; these editions had additional commentary and were presented in a widescreen letterboxed format to preserve the film's original cinematography. Nimoy was interviewed on the Paramount lots and discussed his acting career as well as his favorable opinion of the widescreen format. A "bare bones" DVD of the film was released on November 9, 1999. Aside from the film, the contents include the original theatrical trailer and the introduction from the "Director's Series" VHS release. Three-and-a-half years later, a two-disc "Collector's Edition" was released with supplemental material and the same video transfer as the original DVD release. Among other special features, it contains a text commentary by Michael Okuda and an audio commentary from director Leonard Nimoy and star William Shatner. The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in May 2009 to coincide with the new Star Trek feature, along with the other five films that feature the original crew in Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection. The Voyage Home was remastered in 1080p high definition. Each film in the set has an additional soundtrack, enhanced to 7.1 Dolby TrueHD standard. The disc features a new commentary track by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the writers of the 2009 Star Trek film. On July 7, 2021, it was announced that a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray box set containing the first four Star Trek films would be released on September 7 of that year to commemorate the franchise's 55th anniversary. ## See also - Star Trek film series - Whales Alive album
376,725	Burnley F.C.	1,173,670,747	Association football club in England	[ "1882 establishments in England", "Association football clubs established in 1882", "Burnley F.C.", "English Football League clubs", "FA Cup winners", "Football clubs in England", "Football clubs in Lancashire", "Premier League clubs", "Sport in Burnley", "The Football League founder members" ]	Burnley Football Club (/ˈbɜːrnli/) is an English association football club based in Burnley, Lancashire, that competes in the Premier League, the first tier of English football. Founded on 18 May 1882, the club was one of the first to become professional (in 1883) and subsequently put pressure on the Football Association to permit payments to players. The club entered the FA Cup for the first time in 1885–86 and was one of the 12 founder members of the Football League in 1888–89. From the 1950s until the 1970s, under chairman Bob Lord, the club became renowned for its youth policy and scouting system, and was one of the first to set up a purpose-built training ground. Burnley have been champions of England twice, in 1920–21 and 1959–60, have won the FA Cup once, in 1913–14, and have won the FA Charity Shield twice, in 1960 and 1973. They have been runners-up in the First Division twice, in 1919–20 and 1961–62, and FA Cup runners-up twice, in 1946–47 and 1961–62. Burnley are one of only five sides to have won all four professional divisions of English football, along with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Preston North End, Sheffield United and Portsmouth. During the 1920–21 season, Burnley embarked on a 30-match unbeaten league run, setting an English record. When the team won the 1959–60 Football League, the town of Burnley—with 80,000 inhabitants—became one of the smallest to have an English first-tier champion. The team have played home games at Turf Moor since 1883, after they had moved from their original premises at Calder Vale. The club colours of claret and blue were adopted before the 1910–11 season in tribute to the then Football League champions Aston Villa. The club is nicknamed "the Clarets" because of the dominant colour of its home shirts. Burnley's current emblem is based on the town's coat of arms. The team have a long-standing rivalry with nearby club Blackburn Rovers, with whom they contest the East Lancashire Derby. ## History ### Beginnings and the first major honours (1882–1946) The club was founded on 18 May 1882 by members of rugby team Burnley Rovers, who voted for a shift to association football, since several other sports clubs in the area had changed their codes to football. The suffix "Rovers" was dropped a few days later. The side won their first silverware in 1883: the Dr Dean's Cup, a knockout competition between amateur clubs in the Burnley area. By the end of the year, the club turned professional and signed many Scottish players. Burnley refused to join the Football Association (FA) and its FA Cup, since the association barred professional players. In 1884, Burnley led a group of 35 other clubs in the formation of the breakaway British Football Association (BFA) to challenge the FA's supremacy. The FA changed its rule in 1885, allowing professionalism, and Burnley made their first appearance in the FA Cup in 1885–86. In October 1886, Burnley's Turf Moor became the first professional ground to be visited by a member of the Royal Family, when Prince Albert Victor attended a friendly between Burnley and Bolton Wanderers. The club was among the twelve founders of the Football League in 1888–89 and one of the six based in Lancashire. In the second match, William Tait became the first player to score a league hat-trick, when his three goals gave Burnley their inaugural win in the competition. In 1889–90, they claimed their first Lancashire Cup, after beating local rivals Blackburn Rovers in the final. Burnley were relegated to the Second Division for the first time in 1896–97. The team won the division the next season; only two of thirty matches were lost before promotion was gained through a four-team play-off series called test matches, although the last game against First Division club Stoke was controversial. The tie finished 0–0 as both needed only a draw for a top flight place; it was later named "[t]he match without a shot at goal". Burnley were relegated again in 1899–1900 and found themselves at the centre of controversy when their goalkeeper, Jack Hillman, attempted to bribe opponents Nottingham Forest in the last match of the season. It is possibly the earliest recorded case of match fixing in football. The side continued to play in the Second Division and even finished in bottom place in 1902–03—but were re-elected—as the club got into financial difficulties. Harry Windle was named chairman in 1909, after which the club's finances turned around. The directors appointed John Haworth as the new manager in 1910, who changed the club's colours from green to the claret and blue of Aston Villa, the then First Division champions, as Haworth and the Burnley committee believed it might bring a change of fortune. In 1912–13, the side won promotion to the first tier; the following season, Burnley won their first major honour, beating Liverpool in the 1914 FA Cup Final. Bert Freeman scored the only goal, as Burnley became the first club to defeat five top tier sides in one cup season. Tommy Boyle became the first captain to receive the trophy from a reigning monarch, King George V. The team finished second to West Bromwich Albion in 1919–20, before winning their first ever First Division championship in 1920–21. Burnley lost the opening three games but went unbeaten in the following 30 league matches, setting an English record. Nine seasons later, the team were relegated to the Second Division. They struggled in the second tier and avoided a further relegation in 1931–32 by two points. The years through to the outbreak of the Second World War were characterised by mid-table league finishes. ### Progressive and golden era (1946–1976) In the first season of post-war League football, Burnley gained promotion and reached the 1947 FA Cup Final but were defeated by Charlton Athletic after extra time. The team's defence was nicknamed "The Iron Curtain", since they only conceded 29 goals in 42 league matches. Alan Brown was appointed manager in 1954, and Bob Lord chairman a year later. The club became one of the most progressive around under their tenures. Burnley were one of the first to set up a purpose-built training ground, at Gawthorpe, and they became renowned for their youth policy and scouting system, which yielded many young talents. In 1958, former Burnley player Harry Potts was appointed manager. His squad mainly revolved around the duo of captain Jimmy Adamson and Jimmy McIlroy, the team's playmaker. Potts often employed the then unfashionable 4–4–2 formation and he implemented a Total Football playing style. Burnley clinched a second First Division title in 1959–60. They had not topped the table until the last match was played out. The squad cost only £13,000 (equivalent to £ in 2023) in transfer fees—£8,000 on McIlroy in 1950 and £5,000 on left-back Alex Elder in 1959. The other players came from their youth academy. With 80,000 inhabitants, the town of Burnley became one of the smallest to have an English first tier champion. They travelled to the United States after the season ended to represent England in the International Soccer League, the first modern international American soccer tournament. The following season, Burnley played in European competition for the first time in the 1960–61 European Cup. They defeated former finalists Stade de Reims in the first round, but went out against Hamburger SV in the quarter-finals. The team finished the 1961–62 First Division as runners-up to newcomers Ipswich Town after winning only one of the last ten matches, and had a run to the 1962 FA Cup Final but lost against Tottenham Hotspur. Adamson was named FWA Footballer of the Year, however, with McIlroy as runner-up. The maximum wage in the Football League was abolished in 1961, which meant that clubs from small towns like Burnley could no longer compete financially with sides from bigger towns and cities. The controversial departure of McIlroy to Stoke City in 1963 and Adamson's retirement in 1964 also damaged the club's fortunes. Burnley retained their place in the First Division throughout the decade, however, finishing third in 1965–66 to qualify for the 1966–67 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. Potts was replaced by Adamson as manager in 1970. Adamson hailed his squad as the "Team of the Seventies", but he was unable to halt the slide as relegation followed in 1970–71. Burnley won the Second Division title in 1972–73, and were invited to play in the 1973 FA Charity Shield, where they emerged as winners against Manchester City. In 1975, the team were victims of one of the great FA Cup shocks of all time when Wimbledon, then in the Southern League, won 1–0 at Turf Moor. Adamson left the club in January 1976, and relegation from the First Division followed later that year. During this period, a drop in home attendances combined with an enlarged debt forced Burnley to sell star players such as Martin Dobson and Leighton James, which caused a rapid decline. ### Near oblivion and recovery (1976–2009) The team were relegated to the Third Division for the first time in 1979–80. Under the management of former Burnley player Brian Miller, they returned to the second tier as champions in 1981–82. However, this return was short-lived and lasted only one year. Managerial changes continued to be made in a search for success; Miller was replaced by Frank Casper in early 1983, he by John Bond before the 1983–84 season and Bond himself by John Benson a season later. Bond was the first manager since Frank Hill (1948–1954) without a previous playing career at the club. He was criticised by the fans for signing expensive players increasing Burnley's debt, and for selling the young talents Lee Dixon, Brian Laws and Trevor Steven. Benson was in charge when Burnley were relegated to the Fourth Division for the first time at the end of the 1984–85 season. The team avoided relegation to the Football Conference, the highest level of non-League football, on the last day in 1986–87, after they won against Orient and their rivals drew or lost. In 1988, Burnley played Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Final of the Associate Members' Cup but lost 2–0. The match was attended by 80,000 people, a record for a match between two sides from the fourth tier. The team won the Fourth Division in 1991–92 under manager Jimmy Mullen. He had succeeded Casper in October 1991 and won his first nine league matches as manager. By winning the fourth tier, Burnley became only the second club to win all four professional divisions of English football, after Wolverhampton Wanderers. Burnley won the Second Division play-offs in 1993–94 and gained promotion to the second tier. Relegation followed after one season, and in 1997–98 only a last-day victory over Plymouth Argyle prevented relegation back into the fourth tier. Under manager Stan Ternent, Burnley finished second in 1999–2000 and won promotion to the second tier. In early 2002, financial problems caused by the collapse of ITV Digital brought the club close to administration. Ternent was sacked in 2004, after he avoided relegation with a squad composed of several loaned players and some players who were not entirely fit. The 2008–09 campaign, with Owen Coyle in charge, ended with promotion to the Premier League. Sheffield United were defeated in the Championship play-off Final, which meant a return to the top flight after 33 years. Burnley also reached the semi-final of the League Cup for the first time in over 25 years but were beaten on aggregate by Tottenham in the last minutes of the second leg. ### Premier League football and back in Europe (2009–present) Promotion made the town of Burnley one of the smallest to host a Premier League club. The team started the season well and became the first newly promoted side in the competition to win their first four home games. However, Coyle left the club in January 2010 to manage local rivals Bolton Wanderers. He was replaced by former Burnley player Brian Laws, but the team's form plummeted and they were relegated after a single season. Sean Dyche was appointed manager in October 2012. In his first full season in charge, Dyche guided Burnley back to the Premier League in 2013–14 on a tight budget and with a small squad. The team went down after one season but won the Championship title on their return in 2015–16, when they equaled their 2013–14 tally of 93 points, and ended the season with a run of 23 league games undefeated. In 2017, the club completed construction of Barnfield Training Centre—the replacement of Gawthorpe—with Dyche being involved in the training ground's design. Burnley finished seventh in 2017–18, which meant qualification for the 2018–19 UEFA Europa League and a return to European football after 51 years. The team failed to reach the group stage, as they were eliminated in the play-off round by Greek club Olympiacos. In December 2020, American investment company ALK Capital acquired an 84% stake in Burnley for £170 million. It was the first time the club was run by anyone other than local businessmen and Burnley supporters. In 2021–22, Burnley were relegated back to the Championship after they lost on the final matchday and finished in 18th place. In June 2022, the Belgian Vincent Kompany was appointed Burnley's manager, becoming the first person from outside the British Isles to manage the club. During his first months in charge, he signed 16 players—mostly young and foreign—as he rebuilt the squad on a budget. Kompany also implemented a possession-based, attacking style of play. Burnley secured promotion back to the Premier League with seven matches remaining—a Championship record—before winning the Championship title following a 1–0 victory at local rivals Blackburn Rovers. ## Club identity ### Kits and colours In the early years, Burnley used various kit designs and colours. Throughout the first eight years, there were various permutations of blue and white, the colours of the club's forerunners Burnley Rovers. Before the start of the 1890–91 season, the club adopted an all-blue shirt, but changed it to all-white mid-season. After several years of claret and amber stripes, for much of the mid-1890s a combination of black with amber was used, although the team wore a shirt with pink and white stripes during the 1894–95 season. Between 1897 and 1900, the club used an all-red shirt and from 1900 until 1910 it wore an all-green jersey. In 1910, Burnley changed their colours to claret and blue, which they have had for most of their history, save for a spell in white shirts during the second half of the 1930s and the Second World War. The adoption of the claret and blue combination paid homage to Football League champions Aston Villa, who wore those colours. Burnley's committee and manager John Haworth believed it might bring a change of fortune. The club decided to re-register its colours as claret and blue in 1946, partly due to readers' letters to the Burnley Express. Burnley's jerseys were manufactured by local companies until 1975, when Umbro became the first to have its logo on the club's shirt. Since 1975, the team have had a variety of kit manufacturers and shirt sponsors. The club's first kit sponsor was POCO in 1982, while the mobile game Golf Clash became its first sleeve sponsor in 2017. ### Crest Burnley's first use of a crest was in December 1887, when they wore the royal arms on the shirt. Prince Albert Victor had watched the team play against Bolton Wanderers at Turf Moor in October 1886—the first visit to a professional football ground by a member of the royal family. To commemorate the visit, the club received a set of white jerseys featured with a blue sash and embellished with the royal coat of arms. The crest was regularly worn on the shirts until 1895, when it disappeared. During the 1914 FA Cup Final, watched by King George V, it featured again on the kits. From 1914, the team played in unadorned shirts, although they wore the coat of arms of Burnley during the 1934–35 FA Cup semi-final and the 1947 FA Cup Final. After winning the First Division in 1960, Burnley were allowed to wear the town's crest on their shirts. From 1969 to 1975, the team bore the letters "BFC" running downwards from left to right. In 1975, the club adopted a horizontal "BFC" cypher lettered in gold. Burnley used a designed badge with elements from the town and the club on their home shirts from 1979, before they adopted a simple horizontal "B.F.C." in 1983, lettered in white. In 1987, the club reinstated the crest used from 1979 to 1983. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1959–60 First Division title win in 2009, Burnley reintroduced the logo used from 1960 to 1969. The following season, its Latin motto "Pretiumque et Causa Laboris" (English: "The prize and the cause of [our] labour") was replaced with the inscription "Burnley Football Club". In 2023, Burnley coloured the elements in white and placed them on a claret shield. The club's current badge is based on the town's coat of arms. The stork at the top of the crest refers to the Starkie family, who were prominent in the Burnley area. In its mouth it holds a Lacy knot, of the de Lacy family, who held Burnley in the Middle Ages. The stork stands on a hill and cotton plants—which represents the town's cotton heritage. Beneath, the hand represents the town's motto "Hold to the Truth", derived from the Towneley family. The two bees refer to the town's hard work ethic, while the lion represents royalty. The chevron is a reference to the River Brun, which runs through the town. ## Stadium The team have played their home games at Turf Moor since February 1883, which replaced their original premises at Calder Vale. The Turf Moor site has been used for sport since at least 1843, when Burnley Cricket Club moved to the area. In 1883, they invited Burnley to a field adjacent to the cricket pitch. Both clubs have remained there since, and only Lancashire rivals Preston North End have continuously occupied their stadium—Deepdale—for longer. The ground originally consisted of only a pitch and the initial grandstand was not built until 1885. In 1888, the first league match at Turf Moor saw Burnley emerge as 4–1 winners over Bolton Wanderers, Fred Poland netting the first league goal at the stadium. Turf Moor's capacity was increased to 50,000 under the chairman Harry Windle during the 1910s. The ground hosted its only FA Cup semi-final in 1922, between Huddersfield Town and Notts County, and five years later it hosted its only full international match, between England and Wales for the British Home Championship. From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1960s, crowds in the stadium averaged in the 20,000–35,000 range, and Burnley averaged a club-record attendance of 33,621 in the 1947–48 First Division. The attendance record for a single match was already set in 1924 against Huddersfield Town in an FA Cup third round tie, when 54,775 spectators attended. In 1960, in an FA Cup fifth round replay game against Bradford City, there was an official attendance of 52,850. Some of the gates were broken down, however, and many uncounted fans poured into the ground. Turf Moor consists of four stands: the North Stand (formerly the Longside), the Jimmy McIlroy Stand (formerly the Bee Hole End), the Bob Lord Stand, and the Cricket Field Stand for home and away fans. The current capacity is 21,944 all-seated. Turf Moor's field had a slope until 1974, when the pitch was raised to minimise it. During the mid-1990s, the ground underwent further refurbishment when the Longside and Bee Hole End terraces were replaced by all-seater stands as a result of the Taylor Report. In 2019, the club built two corner stands for disabled home supporters between the Jimmy McIlroy and both the North and Bob Lord Stands to meet the Accessible Stadium Guide regulations. ## Supporters and rivalries ### Supporters Burnley's supporters are mainly drawn from East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. The club is one of the best supported sides in English football per capita, with average attendances of 20,000 in the Premier League in a town of approximately 73,000 inhabitants. Burnley have numerous supporters' clubs across the United Kingdom and overseas. The club's fans have had a long-standing friendship with supporters of Dutch team Helmond Sport since the 1990s. Several Burnley and Helmond fans regularly make an overseas journey to visit each other's matches. For 2022–23 and 2023–24, Helmond Sport adopted a claret and blue away kit in tribute to Burnley. A frequently sung chant since the early 1970s is "No Nay Never", an adaptation of the song "The Wild Rover", which has lyrics to offend main rivals Blackburn Rovers. In the early 1980s, a hooligan firm known as the Suicide Squad emerged from within Burnley's fanbase. The group later featured on the 2006 hooligan documentary series The Real Football Factories. In 2011, 12 members were sentenced to jail for a total of 32 years, after a high-profile incident with Blackburn Rovers supporters in 2009. The firm disbanded after the verdict. Notable Burnley fans have included football pioneer Jimmy Hogan, who was a regular attendee at Turf Moor; journalist Alastair Campbell, who has been regularly involved in events with the club; and cricketer James Anderson, who also worked in Burnley's ticket office on a part-time basis. King Charles III is also a supporter of the club. In 2019, Burnley fan Scott Cunliffe was honoured by the UEFA with the \#EqualGame Award "for his work as a role model highlighting diversity, inclusion and accessibility in football"; he ran to every away Premier League ground during Burnley's 2018–19 campaign and raised more than £55,000 for Premier League clubs' community trusts and community projects in Burnley. A popular drink served at home matches since the First World War is "Béné & Hot"—the French liqueur Bénédictine topped up with hot water. The East Lancashire Regiment soldiers acquired a taste for the drink while stationed at the birthplace of the beverage in Fécamp, Normandy, during the war. They drank it with hot water to keep warm in the trenches, and the surviving soldiers later returned to the East Lancashire area with the liqueur. In excess of 30 bottles are sold at each home game, which makes the club one of the world's biggest sellers of Bénédictine; Turf Moor is the only British football ground to sell it. ### Rivalries Burnley's main rivals are Blackburn Rovers, with whom they contest the East Lancashire derby, named after the region both clubs hail from. Games between these sides from mill towns are also known under the name "Cotton Mills derby". Both are founder members of the Football League and have won the First Division and the FA Cup. The two clubs are separated by only 14 miles (23 km) and besides the geographical proximity, they also have a long-standing history of rivalry; the earliest competitive clash was a Football League match in 1888. Four years earlier, however, they had met for the first time in a friendly, "with considerable pride at stake". Burnley hold the better head-to-head record, as the side have won 44 games to Blackburn's 41. Burnley's closest geographic rivals are actually Accrington Stanley, but as they have never competed at the same level—although defunct club Accrington did—there is no significant rivalry between them. Other rivalries include those with nearby clubs Blackpool, Bolton Wanderers and Preston North End. Burnley also share a Roses rivalry with West Yorkshire sides Bradford City and Leeds United. The team contested heated matches with Halifax Town, Plymouth Argyle, Rochdale and Stockport County in the 1980s and 1990s during their time in the lower leagues, although feelings of animosity were mainly one-sided; according to the Football Fans Census in 2003, Halifax and Stockport supporters considered Burnley to be their main rivals. ## Players ### First-team squad ### Out on loan ### Academy ## Management ### Football management Source: ### Managers Burnley-born Harry Bradshaw was Burnley's first manager—he was appointed in August 1894—and was the first to win a league title with the club, taking them to the top of the Second Division at the end of the 1897–98 season. John Haworth was the first manager in the club's history to win a major honour, the FA Cup in 1914; under Haworth, Burnley also became champions of England for the first time in 1920–21. Harry Potts led the club to its second First Division title during the 1959–60 campaign. Jimmy Adamson (1972–73 Second Division), Brian Miller (1981–82 Third Division), Jimmy Mullen (1991–92 Fourth Division), Sean Dyche (2015–16 Football League Championship), and Vincent Kompany (2022–23 EFL Championship) also led Burnley to league titles. ### Owners In 1897, the club incorporated as a limited company. From their establishment until 2020, Burnley were run by local businessmen and supporters. In December 2020, Velocity Sports Partners (VSP), the sports investment arm of American management firm ALK Capital, acquired an 84% stake in Burnley for £170 million. Alan Pace, managing partner of ALK Capital, subsequently replaced Mike Garlick as the club's chairman. ALK borrowed much of the takeover money, and the loan debts were transferred to the club. As a result of this leveraged takeover, Burnley went from being debt-free to being saddled with debts of around £100 million, at interest rates of about 8 per cent. However, in January 2023, Burnley were one of only two Championship clubs to score a "good" rating on Fair Game's "sustainability index", which included calculations of financial stability. In May 2023, J. J. Watt, a retired defensive end in American football's National Football League, and his wife, former United States women's national soccer team international Kealia Watt, were announced as new minority investors. In August 2023, YouTube group Dude Perfect also became minority investors in the club. ### Board of directors Source: ### Chairmen The following have been chairman of the club's board of directors: ## Honours and achievements Burnley were the second, and are one of only five teams to have won all four professional divisions of English football, along with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Preston North End, Sheffield United and Portsmouth. The club's honours include the following: ### League First Division (Tier 1) - Winners: 1920–21, 1959–60 - Runners–up: 1919–20, 1961–62 Second Division/Championship (Tier 2) - Winners: 1897–98, 1972–73, 2015–16, 2022–23 - Promoted: 1912–13, 1946–47, 2013–14 - Play–off winners: 2008–09 Third Division/Second Division (Tier 3) - Winners: 1981–82 - Promoted: 1999–2000 - Play–off winners: 1993–94 Fourth Division (Tier 4) - Winners: 1991–92 ### Cup FA Cup - Winners: 1913–14 - Runners–up: 1946–47, 1961–62 FA Charity Shield - Winners: 1960 (shared), 1973 - Runners–up: 1921 Texaco Cup - Runners–up: 1973–74 Anglo-Scottish Cup - Winners: 1978–79 Associate Members' Cup - Runners–up: 1987–88 #### Regional Lancashire Cup - Winners: (13) 1889–90, 1914–15, 1949–50, 1951–52, 1959–60, 1960–61, 1961–62, 1964–65, 1965–66, 1969–70, 1971–72, 1992–93, 2022–23 ## Records and statistics The record for the most first team appearances in all competitions for Burnley is held by goalkeeper Jerry Dawson, who played 569 games between 1907 and 1929. The club's top goal scorer is George Beel, who scored 188 goals from 1923 to 1932. In 1962, Jimmy Adamson won the FWA Footballer of the Year award, the first and to date only time a Burnley player achieved this. Willie Irvine became top goal scorer in the first tier in 1965–66 with 29 goals, a unique feat in the club's history. Jimmy McIlroy is the most capped player while at the club, as he made 51 appearances for Northern Ireland between 1951 and 1962. The first Burnley player to play in a full international match was John Yates, who took to the field for England against Ireland in March 1889. He scored a hat-trick but was never called up again. In January 1957, 17-year-old Ian Lawson netted a record four goals on his debut against Chesterfield in the FA Cup third round. The youngest player to play for the club is Tommy Lawton, who was aged 16 years and 174 days on his debut against Doncaster Rovers in the Second Division on 28 March 1936. His debut made him the then youngest centre-forward ever to play in the Football League. The oldest player is Len Smelt, who played his last match aged 41 years and 132 days against Arsenal in the First Division on 18 April 1925. The club's largest win in league football was a 9–0 victory against Darwen in the 1891–92 Football League. Burnley's largest victories in the FA Cup have been 9–0 wins over Crystal Palace (1908–09), New Brighton (1956–57) and Penrith (1984–85). The largest defeat is an 11–0 loss to Darwen Old Wanderers in the 1885–86 FA Cup first round, when Burnley fielded their reserve side, as most professionals were still prohibited entry due to rules of the FA that season. The team's longest unbeaten run in the league was between 6 September 1920 and 25 March 1921, to which they remained unbeaten for 30 games on their way to the First Division title. It stood as the longest stretch without defeat in a single English professional league season until Arsenal bettered it in 2003–04. The club's highest home attendance is 54,775, for an FA Cup third round match against Huddersfield Town on 23 February 1924; Burnley's record home attendance in the league is 52,869, for a First Division game against Blackpool on 11 October 1947. The highest transfer fees received are the £25 million from Everton and Newcastle United for Michael Keane and Chris Wood in 2017 and 2022 respectively. The highest transfer fee paid by Burnley is the £16.1 million paid to FC Basel for striker Zeki Amdouni in 2023. Bob Kelly broke the world transfer record in 1925, when he moved from Burnley to Sunderland for £6,500 (equivalent to £ in 2023).
23,977,980	Ellis Wackett	1,162,917,002	Royal Australian Air Force senior engineer	[ "1901 births", "1984 deaths", "Australian Commanders of the Order of the British Empire", "Australian Companions of the Order of the Bath", "Australian aerospace engineers", "Australian aviators", "Fellows of the Royal Aeronautical Society", "Graduates of the Royal Australian Naval College", "Military personnel from Queensland", "People from Townsville", "Royal Australian Air Force air marshals", "Royal Australian Air Force personnel of World War II", "Royal Australian Navy officers" ]	Air Vice Marshal Ellis Charles Wackett, CB, CBE (13 August 1901 – 3 August 1984) was a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Its chief engineer from 1935 to 1959, he served on the RAAF's controlling body, the Air Board, for a record seventeen years, and has been credited with infusing operations with new standards of airworthiness. Commencing his service career as a Royal Australian Navy cadet during World War I, Wackett transferred to the Air Force in 1923 while on an engineering course in Britain. He qualified as a pilot before completing his studies and returning to Australia, where he inaugurated parachute instruction within the RAAF and made the country's first freefall descent from a military aircraft in 1926. The following year, he led a three-month survey flight to Papua New Guinea. Wackett became the RAAF's senior engineer with his appointment as Director of Technical Services in 1935. A wing commander at the outbreak of World War II, he rose to air commodore by 1942 and assumed the role of Air Member for Engineering and Maintenance. He established the Technical Branch as a separate department of the RAAF in 1948, and was promoted to air vice marshal the same year. Wackett served as Air Member for Technical Services until leaving the military in 1959, having been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Companion of the Order of the Bath. From 1960 to 1968, he was a member of the Australian National Airlines Commission, parent of Trans Australia Airlines. Generally known as "Wack", or "EC" (to distinguish him from his elder brother, aircraft designer Lawrence James Wackett or "LJ"), his prominent chin and nose also earned him the nickname "Punch". He died in 1984, aged 83. ## Early career Born on 13 August 1901 in Townsville, Queensland, Ellis Wackett was the third and youngest child of James, an English-born storekeeper, and Alice Wackett (née Lawrence). Following schooling in Townsville, he entered the Royal Australian Naval College at Jervis Bay, New South Wales, in 1914, aged thirteen. Graduating in 1918, he served as a midshipman aboard the Royal Navy battleship HMS Monarch and battlecruiser HMS Renown, and later the RAN light cruiser HMAS Brisbane and battlecruiser HMAS Australia. He was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in January 1921, and posted to England for study in July. Wackett was at the Royal Naval Engineering College, Keyham, when he applied to join the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 1922. Accepted by the Air Force the following year, he finished at Keyham in August and trained as a pilot on Salisbury Plain. He then took a one-year post-graduate course in aeronautics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, before returning to Australia to take up his service as a flying officer with the RAAF. Wackett's first role was to establish parachute instruction within the Air Force. His trip home from England had been postponed at the last minute to enable him to be trained; he began instructing volunteers in 1926 at RAAF Station Richmond, New South Wales, and made Australia's first freefall descent from a military aircraft—an Airco DH.9—on 26 May. The Chief of the Air Staff, Group Captain Richard Williams, himself made a successful jump on 5 August, to set "a good example" before making the wearing of parachutes compulsory for all aircrew. On 21 August, Wackett piloted the DH.9 from which Flying Officer Frederick Scherger made the first public display of parachuting in Australia, at Essendon, Victoria. By August 1927, Wackett had been promoted flight lieutenant and given command of the Papuan Survey Flight formed at RAAF Station Laverton, Victoria. Consisting of two Supermarine Seagull III single-engined amphibious biplanes and six aircrew, the flight was to examine and photograph the Papuan and New Guinean coasts as far north as Aitape and, if possible, Bougainville. Stripped of all equipment considered non-essential—including radio sets—to increase range, the aircraft departed on 27 September and journeyed some 17,700 kilometres (11,000 mi), covering almost 130,000 square kilometres (50,000 sq mi) of country and taking 350 photos. Wackett's machine (serial A9-5) returned to Melbourne on 26 December and the other (A9–6) on 19 January 1928. Inclement weather prevented the expedition from reaching Bougainville, and thick jungle cover limited the usefulness of its photographic record. Nevertheless, the Air Force learned valuable lessons concerning the Seagull's capabilities in a potential wartime role, as it was found to be unsuited to operations in the tropics. On 14 August 1928, Wackett married Doreen Dove in Melbourne; they had two sons and a daughter. In 1933, Wackett was posted to England to attend RAF Staff College, Andover. Returning to Australia, he was promoted to squadron leader and became Director of Technical Services, an organisation within the RAAF's Supply Branch, in May 1935; the appointment made Wackett the Air Force's senior engineer. The same year, he took charge of the Resources Committee for Electrical Equipment, Scientific and Optical Instruments, one of several subcommittees on the federal government's Defence Resources Board set up to investigate and report on the readiness of Australian industry to provide munitions for defence in the event of international conflict. ## World War II Ranked wing commander at the outbreak of World War II, Wackett immediately faced major supply challenges in his role as Director of Technical Services. Spare parts for the RAAF's mainly British-built equipment were now in short supply, a fact complicated by the infancy of the local aircraft industry and a US arms embargo. His directorate made whatever use it could of civilian repair facilities, setting up recovery depots to salvage spares from damaged aircraft and other equipment. He also drew on the advice and support of his brother Lawrence, who had established the RAAF's technical services organisation in the 1920s and now, having retired from the Air Force, headed the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC). By late 1940, Wackett had been promoted temporary group captain, and joined the Flying Personnel Research Committee. Its members, drawn from the aviation, medical, scientific and technical disciplines, were to study and report upon such factors as aircrew safety, comfort, fatigue, survival, motion sickness, decompression and hypoxia. Wackett was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1941 New Year Honours. In June, he became the RAAF's representative on the federal Aircraft Advisory Committee, set up to assist the Director-General of Aircraft Production. As well as members from governmental and scientific bodies, the committee included delegates from aircraft manufacturers such as de Havilland Australia and CAC, Lawrence Wackett acting as Chief Technical Advisor. Later that year, the two brothers joined the academics on the newly formed Australian Council for Aeronautics, established by Prime Minister John Curtin to advise government, educational and scientific organisations on technical developments in the aircraft industry. Raised to air commodore, Wackett was appointed the first Air Member for Engineering and Maintenance (AMEM) on 4 June 1942. As AMEM, he sat on the Air Board, the RAAF's controlling body, which consisted of its most senior officers and was chaired by the Chief of the Air Staff. Along with the new position of Air Member for Supply and Equipment, filled by Air Commodore George Mackinolty, AMEM had been created to replace the positions of Director-General of Supply and Production, a civilian post, and Air Member for Organisation and Equipment. Wackett would serve on the Air Board for the next seventeen years, a record tenure for the RAAF, his experience and intellect making him, in the words of Air Force historian Alan Stephens, "singularly adept at bringing a committee around to his point of view". During the war, the Air Board oversaw expansion from a complement in 1939 of 246 obsolescent machines such as CAC Wirraways, Avro Ansons and Lockheed Hudsons, to a strength in 1945 of 5,620 sophisticated aircraft including Supermarine Spitfires, P-51 Mustangs, de Havilland Mosquitoes and B-24 Liberators; to support this force, the RAAF had provided all-through training for 18,000 technical staff, and further education for 35,000 more schooled initially outside the service. ## Post-war career Following the end of the war, Wackett contributed to "Plan D", the blueprint for restructuring the RAAF sponsored by the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Vice Marshal George Jones. A major facet of Plan D, adopted in June 1947, was its encouragement of local industry to design and build military trainers and produce more sophisticated combat aircraft under licence from overseas manufacturers. This policy eventually led to the CAC Winjeel basic trainer and Australian co-partnership in production of the CAC Sabre jet fighter and GAF Canberra jet bomber. Wackett also supported Air Vice Marshal Joe Hewitt, the Air Member for Personnel, in fostering apprenticeships as part of what Stephens considered the "education revolution" that took place in the RAAF during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Apprentice Training Scheme, designed to raise the standard of technical roles in the Air Force, opened early in 1948 at the Ground Training School in RAAF Station Wagga, New South Wales, to provide education and technical training for youths aged fifteen to seventeen. By 1952, it had been renamed the RAAF School of Technical Training. Wackett played a key role in establishing technical services as a distinct department within the RAAF, rather than forming part of the Supply Branch as in previous years. Mindful of the increasing responsibility that was being placed on scientific and technical resources in the modern Air Force, he had raised the question of a specialist engineering branch immediately after the war, and in March 1946 gained broad approval for its establishment. After eighteen months of work defining its scope and responsibilities, the Technical Branch was formed under Wackett's leadership on 23 September 1948, his goals being "to support the operational power of the RAAF by providing the most efficient technical organisation possible" and "to increase the effectiveness of air power through technical development". This in turn led to a separate "list" of engineering personnel, as opposed to the earlier Technical List subgroup under the General Duties Branch. For flexibility, and to ensure that the flying and engineering branches had a better appreciation of their respective operations, Wackett supported the practice of some general duties officers continuing to perform engineering work, and as many technical officers as possible receiving secondary training as aircrew. He was disappointed by the limits imposed by the Air Board on career advancement for his personnel: the General Duties Branch in the late 1940s was permitted to maintain thirty-seven officer positions of group captain and above but the Technical Branch was allowed only fourteen such slots, though both departments had an almost identical overall strength of just under 400 staff. This anomaly led Wackett to submit a dissenting report on the subject to the Air Board, one of the few occasions a board member exercised his right to such a protest. His new organisation caused some other tensions in the RAAF: new airworthiness considerations frustrated pilots who found their flying time restricted by the introduction of more rigorous maintenance procedures; supply officers feared being "outshone" by the new status accorded to engineers; and so-called "black handers"—old-school technical officers who had risen through the ranks—regarded with disdain the prospect of an influx of "silly young blokes with degrees". Wackett had been promoted temporary air vice marshal on 1 January 1947; this rank was made substantive following the formation of the Technical Branch. On 31 October 1949, his title was changed from Air Member for Equipment and Maintenance to Air Member for Technical Services (AMTS), in which capacity he would serve until his retirement from the RAAF in 1959. Appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1951 King's Birthday Honours, Wackett again worked closely with Air Vice Marshal Hewitt, now the Air Member for Supply and Equipment, to introduce the concept of acquiring spare parts based on "life-of-type", whereby the forecast number and type of spares necessary for an aircraft's projected service life would be ordered when it was first deployed, to reduce costs and delivery time. In 1953, Wackett established advanced diploma training for twenty-five airmen annually at Melbourne Technical College, the graduates receiving commissions as pilot officers. He also began recruiting university-qualified engineers to the Technical Branch, and put in place formal relationships with such bodies as CSIRO, the Council of Aeronautics (of which he was a member), Aeronautical Research Laboratories, and local aircraft manufacturers de Havilland Australia, Government Aircraft Factories, and CAC. He further initiated RAAF sponsorship of a chair of aeronautics at the University of Sydney. Wackett was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1957 New Years Honours. Two years later, his wife Doreen was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her service as Vice President and, from 1948, President of the RAAF Women's Association. ## Later life and legacy When Wackett left the Air Force on 31 December 1959, he was its longest-serving officer. The next year he joined the Australian National Airlines Commission (ANAC), the controlling body of the federal government's domestic carrier, Trans Australia Airlines (TAA). He rose to the Vice Chairmanship of ANAC before retiring in 1968. During his term on the commission, Wackett witnessed the arrival of the Jet Age on domestic air routes; TAA took delivery of its first Boeing 727 in 1964, and its first Douglas DC-9 in 1967. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Like his brother Lawrence, who wrote two books on the subject, Ellis Wackett's chief hobby was angling. He died in Warracknabeal, Victoria, on 3 August 1984; his wife predeceased him in 1975. For his commitment to the concept of airworthiness, as an attitude to quality and professionalism that went beyond simply whether aircraft were fit to fly or not, Wackett was described in the official history of the post-war Air Force as among the "outstanding officers of the post-war era". The establishment of a dedicated Technical Branch, which he founded in 1948, was a key factor in the RAAF developing the ability to successfully manage the maintenance and upgrade of such highly sophisticated aircraft as the General Dynamics F-111. Wackett's 17-year tenure on the Air Board, which was dissolved in 1976, remained the longest of any officer in the RAAF. He was followed by a series of leaders of the Technical Branch (renamed Engineering Branch in 1966) who shared his vision, including Air Vice Marshals Ernie Hey (1960–1972) and James Rowland (1972–75). Wackett was among those considered as possible successors to Air Marshal George Jones as Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) when the latter was retired in 1952, but Prime Minister Robert Menzies' federal government chose an RAF officer for the role, Air Marshal Sir Donald Hardman. In any case, Air Force regulations at that time stipulated that appointees had to belong to the RAAF's General Duties (Aircrew) Branch. In 1975, Air Marshal Rowland was appointed as CAS, though he had to transfer from Engineering to General Duties before this could be formalised. The following year, the requirement for CAS to be a member of the General Duties Branch was removed.
18,435,348	Meteorological history of Hurricane Gordon	1,171,668,842	null	[ "1994 Atlantic hurricane season", "Meteorological histories of individual tropical cyclones" ]	Hurricane Gordon developed during a fourteen-day period along an erratic, persistent, and highly unusual path. The hurricane formed near Panama in the southwestern Caribbean on November 8, 1994. As a tropical depression, it brushed Nicaragua and spent several days in the waters off the country's coast. Strengthening slightly into a tropical storm, Gordon wound its way north into the Greater Antilles. Despite warm waters, persistent wind shear prevented significant strengthening. Executing a slow turn to the north and then the northwest, Gordon made two more landfalls, on eastern Jamaica and eastern Cuba, while delivering tremendous rains to western Hispaniola. As Gordon made its fourth landfall crossing the Florida Keys, it interacted with a cyclone in the upper-troposphere and a series of cyclonic lows which lent the storm some sub-tropical characteristics. After a few days as an unusual hybrid of a tropical and a subtropical system in the Gulf of Mexico, the storm re-claimed its fully tropical form and made yet another landfall, this time across the Florida peninsula, and continued into the Atlantic Ocean. In the Atlantic, Gordon rapidly strengthened to a Category 1 hurricane. Gordon's characteristic wandering briefly brought it near North Carolina, but ultimately the storm headed south, weakening into a minor tropical storm before making its sixth and final landfall on Florida's east coast. Hurricane Gordon was the seventh named storm and third hurricane of the 1994 Atlantic hurricane season. Although it never made landfall as a hurricane, in its meandering course the storm included six separate landfalls: four as a tropical storm and two as a tropical depression. Three of its landfalls were in the U.S. state of Florida. ## Formation During the first week of November 1994, a large area of disturbed weather developed just north of Panama over the southwestern Caribbean Sea. A tropical wave passed through the area and gave it mild convection. A second wave passed through the area on November 6 and introduced cyclonic circulation to the disturbance. Over the next two days, the system gradually organized and sparked a deep convection off Nicaragua's southeast coast. This organization, with initial maximum sustained winds of 30 mph (48 km/h), was designated Tropical Depression Twelve. Moving northwest, the storm began to slowly strengthen and its upper-level outflow became favorable to further development. Spots of convection flared on the morning of November 9; banding features appeared as its center made landfall on the northeastern Nicaraguan coast near Puerto Cabezas. A full day later a trough to the storm's northwest over the Gulf of Mexico moved the depression offshore, to the northeast, and over the warm waters of the western Caribbean Sea. Fueled by these warm waters, on the night of November 9, it strengthened into Tropical Storm Gordon with 40 mph (64 km/h) winds. Lacking firm movement because of weak steering currents, Gordon meandered north-northeast in the presence of mild west-southwesterly wind shear, unable to strengthen under the adverse conditions. By November 11, a trough prodded Gordon to the north-northeast at 8 mph (13 km/h), and it strengthened by 6 mph (9.7 km/h) as it moved through the central Caribbean Sea. The trough continued steering Gordon, bending it eastward towards Jamaica on the afternoon on November 12. Despite the warm waters, Gordon did not strengthen that day as strong upper-tropospheric shear hindered development, disorganized the upper-level circulation, and reduced its winds to 40 mph (64 km/h). ## Through the Greater Antilles November 13 was an active day for Tropical Storm Gordon. The trough over southern Florida and the Gulf of Mexico continued to push Gordon eastward towards Jamaica. In the pre-dawn hours, the storm clipped the eastern edge of the island, leaving 7.44 in (18.9 cm) of rainfall. Southwesterly wind shear kept the storm from developing beyond 45 mph (72 km/h), but neither the shear nor the landfall significantly disrupted the cyclone's organization. Accelerating, Gordon turned towards the northeast. Continued shear prevented the upper-level development needed for typical cyclonic organization, but a strong lower-level circulation had formed. Its sustained winds were still only 40 mph (64 km/h), but as the system approached eastern Cuba a gust of 120 mph (190 km/h) was reported. The center crossed near Guantánamo Bay and the storm dumped heavy rainfall as it passed over the eastern portion of the island; even heavier rain fell in Haiti to the west, where 22.94 in (58.3 cm) of rain was recorded at Camp-Perrin. Meanwhile, the broad-scale circulation that was covering most of the Caribbean Sea (of which Tropical Storm Gordon was only a part) was interacting with an upper-tropospheric trough near the Straits of Florida. This trough strengthened the broad upper-level cyclone, which in turn strengthened Gordon and spawned several other low-level circulations in the western Caribbean Sea. When Gordon crossed eastern Cuba, the National Hurricane Center determined that it had become the most dominant of these low-level systems and had absorbed their convections. (Meteorologist Jose Fernandez-Partagas voiced the minority opinion that Gordon's circulatory center had dissipated over Cuba and that a low-pressure system near the Bahamas was now the dominant system, which would have meant the demise of Tropical Storm Gordon and the emergence of a new tropical storm. While possible, this view was not accepted by the official hurricane summaries.) By nightfall of November 13, Gordon had not only made two landfalls and survived interactions with three competing systems but also, in assimilating the Bahamian low, had gained the cool central core typical of a subtropical cyclone. The deep-layered cyclone within which Gordon was embedded steered the storm west-northwest, south of Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, on November 14. A large ridge of high-pressure near the U.S. Mid-Atlantic coast increased the pressure gradient around the storm, so although its sub-tropical elements (namely a lack of deep convection) precluded a core of strong winds immediately around the storm's nucleus, strong winds were supported outside the storm's circulatory center. These winds inched up to 50 mph (80 km/h) but did not strengthen any further. The ridge continued to steer the hybrid Tropical/Subtropical Storm Gordon west-northwestward past the western Bahamas. This brought the southern portion of the storm's circulation over northern Cuba, while the strengthening northern circulation produced 60 mph (97 km/h) winds near Palm Beach. The storm's fourth landfall occurred on November 15 when Gordon passed over the Florida Keys near Key West, Florida. The storm then continued west over the lower Keys and into the Straights of Florida, where the storm's center began to warm and deep convection signaled the return of Gordon's purely tropical characteristics. ## Second Florida landfall and peak strength Steering currents remained weak giving the storm a chance to fully re-develop its deep convection while immobile at sea. During this time, Tropical Storm Gordon began to spawn tornadoes. As the storm center was well offshore most were probably unreported, but six tornadoes touched down on the Florida coast. Four of the tornadoes were rated F0 on the Fujita scale, two were rated F1, and one was given an F2 rating with estimated wind speeds of 113–157 mph (182–253 km/h). After stalling offshore for almost a day, a mid- to upper-tropospheric trough over the central U.S. slowly pulled Tropical Storm Gordon northward then north-northeastward towards Florida's west coast. The storm made landfall between Ft. Myers and Naples with 50 mph (80 km/h) winds. The eastward component of the storm's movement increased, and Gordon moved northeastward onto the Florida Peninsula at 10 mph (16 km/h). The storm barely weakened as it crossed the landmass keeping its 50 mph (80 km/h) winds. Crossing the peninsula in a mere six hours, the storm continued to pick up speed. Early on November 17, back over the open ocean, the storm's central pressure began to fall. Improved organization was not apparent and wind shear was pulling at the core of the deep convection when, on November 17, Gordon suddenly spawned 75 mph (121 km/h) winds and was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane. ## Third Florida landfall and demise The shortwave trough that had been steering Gordon across Florida moved ahead of the storm and its influence was replaced by a mid-tropospheric ridge over the eastern United States. Under the influence of this new ridge, the storm, which had been speeding northeast at 25 mph (40 km/h), turned to the north late on November 17. The hurricane's loop continued, and as it moved to a west-northwesterly heading Gordon briefly threatened North Carolina's Outer Banks before stalling offshore once again. In the presence of weak steering currents once again, Gordon lost strength and slipped back to tropical storm status with 70 mph (110 km/h) winds. On November 18, about 90 mi (140 km) off the Outer Banks, Gordon began a southward drift away from the North Carolina coast. In its brush with the Mid-Atlantic States, Gordon dropped 2–5 in (5.1–12.7 cm) with a maximum of 5.25 in (13.3 cm) recorded at Norfolk, Virginia. Warm waters improved its organization, but this did not result in stronger winds and the storm continued to weaken. Strong upper-level winds battered the storm from the northwest. They sheared away Gordon's upper-level convection while polluting the storm with colder and drier air that weakened its lower level convection. A high-pressure system over the central United States drifted east and added a westward component to Gordon's southward motion, pulling the storm southwest towards Florida. The persistent shear and a continued lack of deep convection eventually reduced the storm's winds to below tropical storm force, and on the morning on November 20, Gordon became a tropical depression. The high pressure system over the continent continued pulling the depression towards the west until it made its final landfall near Cape Canaveral that night with winds of 30 mph (48 km/h). Between its three Floridian landfalls, Hurricane Gordon dumped 5–10 in (13–25 cm) of rain on Florida, with a station at Cooperstown recording 16.1 in (41 cm). The storm moved northward across Florida, northeastward across Georgia, and finally merged with a frontal system over South Carolina. ### Track and forecasting Gordon's track was likened to Hurricane Dawn in 1972. The National Hurricane Center described the storm as "a complex system, [which] followed an unusual, erratic path over the western Caribbean Sea and islands, Florida and the southwestern Atlantic." Due to the path, the agency had difficulties in forecasting Gordon, and the forecast errors were 10% to 30% above the average of the previous decade. ## See also - 1994 Atlantic hurricane season - List of Atlantic hurricanes - Timeline of the 1994 Atlantic hurricane season
5,398,365	Treehouse of Horror	1,172,679,163	Series of Halloween-themed episodes of The Simpsons	[ "1990 introductions", "American annual television specials", "Black comedy", "Halloween television specials", "Horror comedy", "The Simpsons", "Treehouse of Horror" ]	Treehouse of Horror is an annual series of special Halloween-themed anthology episodes of the animated sitcom The Simpsons, with 34 episodes as of 2022. Also known as The Simpsons Halloween Specials, each episode typically consists of three separate, self-contained segments. Each segment involves the Simpson family in some comical horror, science fiction, or supernatural setting; plot elements operate beyond the show's normal continuity, with segments exaggeratedly more morbid and violent than a typical Simpsons episode. Each Treehouse of Horror episode is numbered in Roman numerals, one less than the respective season it is in. The eponymous first installment "Treehouse of Horror" aired on October 25, 1990, during the second season, broadly inspired by EC Comics horror tales. In addition to parodies of horror, science fiction, and fantasy films, episodes include the recurring alien characters Kang and Kodos, unique opening sequences, and 'scary' pseudonyms in the credits. Treehouse of Horror episodes have earned high ratings and broad popularity, spawning a steady stream of merchandise, including an ongoing comic book series. ## Segments Treehouse of Horror episodes typically consist of four parts: an opening and Halloween-themed version of the credits, followed by three segments. These segments usually have a horror, science fiction or fantasy theme and quite often are parodies of films, novels, plays, television shows, Twilight Zone episodes, or old issues of EC Comics. Although they are sometimes connected by "wraparounds", the three segments rarely have any kind of continuing connection within the episode. Some have recurring elements, such as "Treehouse of Horror V", in which Groundskeeper Willie is killed by an axe in all three segments. The episodes are considered to be non-canon, which means they take place outside the normal continuity of the show. The number of episodes of Treehouse of Horrors matches the number of series of the show: there are no such specials in season 1, two in season 34 and one in each other season. From "Treehouse of Horror" to "Treehouse of Horror XIII" and resuming with "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII", all three segments were written by different writers. In some cases there was a fourth writer who wrote the opening and wraparound segments. For the original "Treehouse of Horror", there were three different directors for the episode. From season 15's "Treehouse of Horror XIV" to season 33's "Treehouse of Horror XXXII", however, only one writer was credited with writing each Treehouse of Horror episode. "Treehouse of Horror XXXII" featured five segments. One of the season 34 Treehouse of Horror specials, "Not It", is distinguished by its uncharacteristic title and one full-length segment (divided in the two parts). On occasion, the episodes will be used to showcase special animation, such as the "Treehouse of Horror VI" segment "Homer<sup>3</sup>", in which a computer-animated Homer is shown in a non-animated setting. At the time (1995), it was unusual for a television show to use such animation. The segment was executive producer Bill Oakley's idea and included live-action directed by David Mirkin. "Treehouse of Horror XX" included the segment "There's No Business Like Moe Business", which was the first to be musically themed. ## Traditions ### Opening sequence The first, second, and fifth Treehouse of Horror episodes open with Marge standing on a stage and warning parents about the content of the episode, advising them to put their children to bed. The warning in the first episode was put in as a sincere effort to warn young viewers, as the producers felt it was somewhat scary. The entire segment was a parody of Edward Van Sloan's pre-credits warning from the 1931 film Frankenstein. Marge's warnings quickly became a burden to write, particularly because – as she herself noted – they were mostly ignored, so after "Treehouse of Horror V", they were dropped. The segment returned in the season 31 episode "Thanksgiving of Horror". Other Treehouse of Horror episodes have opened with parodies; for example, "Treehouse of Horror III" had Homer introduce the episode in a manner similar to Alfred Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "Treehouse of Horror IV" had Bart introduce the episode and segments in a manner similar to Night Gallery, and "Treehouse of Horror V" featured a parody of The Outer Limits. The sixth and seventh episodes featured short clips with no lines because the episodes had run long, and longer segments were cut. Following "Treehouse of Horror VII", the opening has been upwards of a minute long and sometimes featured an introduction by a character, such as Mr. Burns in "Treehouse of Horror XVII" or included over-the-top violence, such as "Treehouse of Horror VIII" (which showed a Fox Network censor being brutally murdered) and "Treehouse of Horror XIV" (which showed the Simpson family killing each other). In the opening segment of the first five episodes, the camera zooms through a cemetery where tombstones with humorous epitaphs can be seen. These messages include the names of canceled shows from the previous season, deceased celebrities such as Walt Disney and Jim Morrison, and a tombstone with an inscription that read "TV violence" that was riddled with bullets as the camera panned on it. They were last used in "Treehouse of Horror V", which included a solitary tombstone with the words "Amusing Tombstones" to signal this. The tombstone gags were easy for the writers in the first episode, but like Marge's warnings, they eventually got more difficult to write, so they were abandoned. Another reason they were dropped was that the tombstones would list television shows that had been canceled the previous season; after a few years, several of the shows that were canceled were produced by former Simpsons writers. However, after two decades, this gag made a brief comeback in "Treehouse of Horror XXIX" at the very beginning, this time appearing before the main opening sequence and title. While the early Treehouse of Horror episodes featured a Halloween themed opening sequence, the later ones only included the title and the "created by" and "developed by" credits. Every episode between "Treehouse of Horror III" and "Treehouse of Horror X" featured a couch gag with a Halloween theme, including the Simpson family dressed as skeletons, zombies, and characters from previous Halloween episodes. ### Wraparounds The first four Treehouse of Horror episodes had brief wraparounds that occurred before each segment and loosely tied together all three stories. "Treehouse of Horror" was the only one that actually included a treehouse as a setting. In that episode, Bart and Lisa sat in it telling stories to each other. "Treehouse of Horror II" presented all of the segments as being nightmares of Lisa, Bart and Homer; "Treehouse of Horror III" had Lisa, Bart and Grampa telling stories at a Halloween party; and "Treehouse of Horror IV" is presented by Bart in a parody of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. After a few years, the amount of broadcast time for an episode was shortened, allowing less time to tell a proper story. There were no wraparounds for "Treehouse of Horror V" because they had been cut to make more time for the segments. Following that, the writers permanently dropped them. ### Kang and Kodos Two characters that are virtually exclusive to the Treehouse of Horror series are Kang and Kodos, a pair of large green space aliens who were introduced in the "Hungry are the Damned" segment of "Treehouse of Horror". Kang and Kodos have since appeared in every Treehouse of Horror episode, often in cameos. In some episodes, they only appear in the opening segment, but often they will make a cameo appearance in the middle of a different story. For example, a story about zombies attacking the town briefly cuts to them in their space ship, watching the events and laughing maniacally at the Earthlings' suffering. The action then switches back to the actual story. According to Al Jean in 2022, an unofficial rule is that they must be in every episode, although quite often they will be forgotten and are added at the last moment, resulting in only a brief appearance. Their scene in "Treehouse of Horror VIII" nearly did not make the final cut of the episode, but David X. Cohen managed to persuade the producers to leave the scene in. Kang and Kodos were prominent characters in the 2015 episode "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner", which was not Halloween themed. ### Scary names Beginning with "Treehouse of Horror II", the producers decided to give the cast and crew of the show 'scary names' in the opening and closing credits. Although the names quickly became more silly than scary, there have been a wide variety of special credits, from simple names like "Bat Groening" (for Matt Groening) or "Chains Hell Brooks" (for James L. Brooks) to complex ones like "David2+S.2=Cohen2" (for David X. Cohen). Sam Simon, who left the show during the fourth season, still receives "developed by" and "executive producer" credits, and until "Treehouse of Horror XXII", he had been listed in Treehouse of Horror episodes as "Sam 'Sayonara' Simon" and between "Treehouse of Horror XXII" and "Treehouse of Horror XXV" as "simonsam@TWITterror". However, following his death in March 2015, he has simply been credited as "Sam Simon" starting from "Treehouse of Horror XXVI". The idea for 'scary names' came from executive producer Al Jean, who was inspired by EC Comics because some of the issues also used 'scary' alternate names. The "scary names" became such a burden to write that they were cut for "Treehouse of Horror XII" and "Treehouse of Horror XIII", but after hearing complaints from the fans, Jean decided to bring them back. Matt Groening's rule for the "scary names" is that they cannot be longer than a person's real name, but this is rarely followed by anyone else. ### Cultural references References to films, novels, plays, television shows, and other media are commonly featured, and many segments have been parodies of a specific work in the horror, science fiction, or fantasy genre. Many segments are spoofs of episodes of The Twilight Zone, and entire segments will be based on a single episode. Some of the Twilight Zone episodes parodied include "A Kind of a Stopwatch", "To Serve Man", "A Small Talent for War", "Living Doll", "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "Little Girl Lost", and "The Little People". The "Bart's Nightmare" segment of "Treehouse of Horror II" parodies the episode "It's a Good Life" and is even presented in a format similar to an episode of The Twilight Zone. Horror and thriller films parodied include The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, King Kong, Night of the Living Dead, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Fly, Paranormal Activity, and Dead Calm. Robert Englund had a cameo appearance in "Treehouse of Horror IX" as his character from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger. Science fiction films have also occasionally been used as inspiration for segments, and in later episodes, many of the segments were based more on science fiction than horror. Science fiction works parodied include The Omega Man, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. In "Treehouse of Horror", Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" is read by James Earl Jones, while the parts are acted by various characters. Recent parodies have included films and television specials in more varied genres, including Mr. & Mrs. Smith, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Transformers, Sweeney Todd, the Twilight film series, and Jumanji. ### Closing logos A modified version of the production logo for Gracie Films is displayed after the closing credits. The shushing sound is replaced by either a scream or another sound effect from the episode, and the jingle is played in a minor key on a pipe organ. The first three episodes did not feature the scream. "Treehouse of Horror VI" and "Treehouse of Horror XIX" did not feature the organ or scream; the former incorporated a Myst homage and the latter used a piano rendition following its parody of Peanuts. The music in "Treehouse of Horror VI" was reused in "The Scorpion's Tale" without the Gracie Films jingle. ## Production The first Treehouse of Horror installment aired on 1990 as part of the second season, and its on-screen title was "The Simpsons Halloween Special." ("Treehouse of Horror XIII" was the first to feature "Treehouse of Horror" in the on-screen title.) It was inspired by EC Comics Horror tales. Although every episode is entitled Treehouse of Horror, the first was the only episode that actually used the treehouse motif. During production of the first episode, Matt Groening was nervous about "The Raven" segment, and felt it would be "the worst, most pretentious thing [they had] ever done." The Treehouse of Horror episodes are difficult for both the writers and the animators. The episodes were originally written at the beginning of the production run, but in later seasons they were written at the end and aired at the beginning of the next season as holdovers, giving the animators more time to work. Part of the difficulty for the animators is that the episodes always involve many complex backgrounds, new characters and new designs. They are difficult for the writers because they must produce three stories, an opening and, in the early episodes, a wraparound. They would have to try to fit all of this into a 20–22 minute episode. The episodes often go through many last minute changes, with rewrites requiring new lines to be recorded. "Treehouse of Horror III" in particular underwent somewhere between 80 and 100 line changes in the six-week period between the arrival of the animation from Korea and the airing of the episode. By the fourth season, executive producers Al Jean and Mike Reiss were less enamored of Treehouse of Horror episodes and considered dropping them, but the other writers insisted that they be kept. Part of the attraction for the writers is that they are able to break the rules and include violence that would not make a regular episode. In some cases, the writers will have an idea that is too violent and far-fetched or too short for a normal episode, but can be used as a segment in the seasonal special. Several of the writers, former executive producer David Mirkin among them, believe that the episodes should be scary and not just funny. "Treehouse of Horror V" was described by Mirkin as being one of "the most intense, disturbing Halloween show ever" as it was filled with violence and gore in response to new censorship rules. Early episodes seem mild compared to the carnage that followed in later episodes, according to Jean, who calls it "a societal thing". He points out that his 10-year-old daughter loves films like Coraline, and that, "[in] the age of scary stories [...] appropriateness has gotten lower." Although gruesome for the most part, some segments, such as "Citizen Kang" in "Treehouse of Horror VII", satirize political issues. The opening segment of "Treehouse of Horror XIX" featured Homer attempting to vote for Barack Obama but a rigged electronic voting machine instead registers a vote for John McCain. Rather than taking sides in the election, Jean says it is "mostly a comment on what many people believe to be the irregularities in our voting system". In "Treehouse of Horror XVII", a segment called "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid" ends with Kang and Kodos taking over Springfield as part of a mission called "Operation: Enduring Occupation". The script originally called for Kodos and Kang to look over the smoking ruins of Springfield and say: "This sure is a lot like Iraq will be." The Fox network did not have any objection to the line, but it was rejected by some of the writers as too obvious and was cut from the broadcast. While cut from the aired version, the line does appear in the "review" version sent to newspapers and magazines. The first Treehouse of Horror episode marked the first time that an alternate version of the theme that airs over the end credits was used. Originally, it was intended to use a theremin, but one could not be found that could hit all the necessary notes. Usually when the producers submit an episode for the Primetime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore)", they submit a Treehouse of Horror episode, and to date, seven episodes have been nominated. The closing of "Treehouse of Horror IV" features a version of the theme that is a combination of the instruments used in The Munsters theme song and the harpiscord and clicking from the Addams Family theme song. Üter Zörker is so far the only human character introduced in a Treehouse of Horror to make it into canon. His debut episode was "Treehouse of Horror IV" in the segment "Terror at 5+1⁄2 Feet". He is an obese German exchange student obsessed with candy and was voiced by Russi Taylor until her death. 2019's Treehouse of Horror was the 666th episode of the series. Jean stated that this was planned since 1989. For the 34th season of The Simpsons, two Treehouse of Horror episodes were produced; the first episode was "Not It", a parody of the 2017 supernatural horror film It and its 2019 sequel It Chapter Two. ## Scheduling Although Treehouse of Horror episodes are Halloween-themed, for several years new episodes premiered in November following the holiday, due to Fox's coverage of Major League Baseball's World Series. Season 12's "Treehouse of Horror XI" was the first episode to air in November. There have been several references to this in the show, such as in Season 15's "Treehouse of Horror XIV" where Kang looks at a TV Guide and says, "Pathetic humans. They're showing a Halloween episode... in November!" and Kodos replies "Who's still thinking about Halloween? We've already got our Christmas decorations up!" The camera then cuts to a shot of the fireplace with Christmas decorations, and festive Christmas music plays over the opening credits. Season 21's "Treehouse of Horror XX" aired October 18, before the World Series, but the following year's episode, Season 22's "Treehouse of Horror XXI", aired on November 7. Season 23's "Treehouse of Horror XXII aired on October 30, however, as the World Series (which went the maximum of seven games) had concluded on October 28. Subsequent Treehouse of Horror episodes have premiered in the month of October. The 31st season included a Thanksgiving-themed spinoff, "Thanksgiving of Horror". The 32nd season however pushed "Treehouse of Horror XXXI" to November 1, 2020 because the National League Championship Series went into Game 7, with the World Series that followed stretching to Game 6, resulting in Fox airing Treehouse after Halloween for the first time since 2010. Citytv in Canada however aired the episode as originally scheduled. "Treehouse of Horror XXXII", aired in 2021 on October 10 due to the MLB post-season running into the first week of November, and to avoid airing in November again due to the World Series overrun, and with no World Series game being played on a Sunday, "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII" aired in 2022 on October 30. Prior to 2011, new shows have been known to have aired exclusively on the West Coast at the appropriate time prior to the rest of the nation's airing after Halloween. ## Merchandise There has been a variety of merchandise based on the Treehouse of Horror episodes, including books, action figures, comic books, video games, DVDs and a "Treehouse of Horror" version of Hasbro's board game Monopoly. Although every Treehouse of Horror episode until "Treehouse of Horror XIX" has been released along with its season in a boxset, in 2003, The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror DVD was released. It includes Treehouse of Horrors V, VI, VII and XII. A Treehouse of Horror comic book was published annually from 1995 to 2017, and collected into several books, including The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Fun-Filled Frightfest, Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Spine-Tingling Spooktacular, Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Heebie-Jeebie Hullabaloo and The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Hoodoo Voodoo Brouhaha. Several video games based on The Simpsons include levels with a Halloween theme, including The Simpsons: Hit & Run and The Simpsons Game. In 2001, Fox Interactive and THQ released The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror on Game Boy Color. The entire game has a Halloween theme as the player tries to save the Simpson family from the Treehouse of Horror. Many of the special character designs featured in the episodes have become action figures. Four different playsets have been made by Playmates Toys and released as Toys "R" Us exclusives: 1. The "Treehouse of Horror I" set was released in 2000 and included a cemetery playset as well as "Devil Flanders", "Bart the Fly", "Vampire Burns", and "King Homer". It also came with an "Evil Krusty Doll" and Gremlin as accessories. 2. The "Treehouse of Horror 2" set was released in 2001 and included an interior alien spaceship playset as well as Kang, Kodos and "Alien Ship Homer". The entire set was based on "Treehouse of Horror". 3. The "Treehouse of Horror 3" set was released in 2002 and included a playset based on the "Ironic Punishment Division" of Hell in "Treehouse of Horror IV". It came with "Donuthead Homer", "Witch Marge", Hugo Simpson and "Dream Invader Willie". 4. The final "Treehouse of Horror 4" set was released in 2003 and included a playset based on Comic Book Guy's "Collector's all-plastic lair". It came with "The Collector", "Clobber Girl Lisa", "Stretch Dude Bart" and Lucy Lawless. All the designs were based on "Treehouse of Horror X". 5. On 2019, Funko revealed a 2-pack Kang and Kodos vinyl figure set presented as an exclusive for San Diego Comic Con 2019, along with a Treehouse of Horror Pop! wave, including King Homer (Treehouse of Horror III), Fly Bart (Treehouse of Horror VIII), Cat Marge (Treehouse of Horror XIII), Demon Lisa (Treehouse of Horror XXV), and Alien Maggie (Treehouse of Horror IX). After the Playmates Toys sets were finished, McFarlane Toys produced four Treehouse of Horror themed playsets including the "Ironic Punishment Box Set" released in 2004, the "In the Belly of the Boss — Homer & Marge Action Figures" released in 2005, "The Island of Dr. Hibbert Box Set" released in 2006, and a "Lard Lad Box Set" released in 2007. ## Reception The Treehouse of Horror episodes are often among the top-rated episodes of their seasons, and many of the Treehouse of Horrors have generally been well-received by fans. However, like The Simpsons itself, critics have noted a decline in the quality of the later episodes. In its first airing, "Treehouse of Horror" finished with a 15.7 Nielsen rating and a 25% audience share, less than The Cosby Show. It was said that it "set a level of excellence that viewers never expected creator Matt Groening to repeat", although it was also described as "kind of stupid and unsatisfying". "Treehouse of Horror V" is considered the best episode by several critics: it finished ninth on Entertainment Weekly's top 25 The Simpsons episode list, fifth on AskMen.com's "Top 10: Simpsons Episodes" list, and was named best episode of the sixth season by IGN.com. In 2006, James Earl Jones, who guest starred in "Treehouse of Horror" and "Treehouse of Horror V", was named seventh on IGN's "Top 25 Simpsons Guest Appearances" list. In 2006, IGN.com published a list of the top ten Treehouse of Horror segments, and they placed "The Shinning" from "Treehouse of Horror V" at the top, saying it was "not only a standout installment of the annual Halloween episode, but of The Simpsons, period". Rounding out the list were "Dial "Z" for Zombies", "The Devil and Homer Simpson", "Time and Punishment", "Hungry Are the Damned", "Clown Without Pity", "Citizen Kang", "If I Only Had a Brain", "Bart Simpson's Dracula", and "Starship Poopers". The third, fourth, and fifth episodes were each represented by two segments. The most recent episode on the list was "Treehouse of Horror IX", from 1998. In 2000, "Treehouse of Horror VII" was ranked Simpsons creator Matt Groening's seventh-favorite episode, and the line he likes best is: "We have reached the limit of what rectal probing can teach us." "King Homer" of "Treehouse of Horror III" is one of Groening's favorite segments. "Treehouse of Horror III" is also noted for the moment where Homer shoots Ned Flanders and Bart says "Dad, you killed the Zombie Flanders!" only for Homer to reply, "He was a zombie?" It is also one of Groening's favorite lines. ### Awards In 1996, the "Homer3" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI" was awarded the Ottawa International Animation Festival grand prize. In 1998, "Treehouse of Horror VIII" won a Golden Reel Award for "Best Sound Editing – Television Animated Specials"; the recipients were Robert Mackston, Travis Powers, Norm MacLeod, and Terry Greene. Bob Beecher also received a nomination for "Best Sound Editing in Television Animation – Music" for "Treehouse of Horror X". The second, third, fifth, eighth, ninth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and eighteenth Treehouse of Horror episodes were nominated for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore)" at the Primetime Emmy Awards. The second and third "Treehouse of Horror" episodes were also nominated for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Sound Mixing for a Comedy Series or a Special". In 1996, "Treehouse of Horror VI" was submitted for the Primetime Emmy Award in the "Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming less than One Hour)" category because it had a 3D animation sequence, which the staff felt would have given it the edge. The episode failed to win, and Bill Oakley later expressed regret about submitting the episode. The twenty-third and twenty-fifth Treehouse of Horror episodes were nominated for the same award in 2013 and 2015 respectively. ## See also - List of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episodes - "Halloween of Horror", the first Halloween episode not part of the "Treehouse of Horror" series - "Thanksgiving of Horror", a non-Halloween episode and also not part of the "Treehouse of Horror" series
18,733,814	2009 Giro d'Italia	1,158,388,831	null	[ "2009 Giro d'Italia", "2009 UCI World Ranking", "2009 in Italian sport", "Giro d'Italia by year", "May 2009 sports events in Europe" ]	The 2009 Giro d'Italia was the 92nd running of the Giro d'Italia, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It was held from 9 to 31 May 2009, and marked the 100th year since the first edition of the race. Starting in Venice and finishing in Rome, 22 teams competed over 21 stages. Four of the top ten finishers in this edition later had their results voided. The Giro was raced on a unique path through Italy, taking the peloton to some historic cities and towns in Italian cycling. Though the route lacked any well-known, storied climbs, the many intermediate and mountain stages in the second and third weeks of the race proved deceptively difficult. The 10th and the 16th stages were both called the race's queen stage, as both contained multiple difficult mountain climbs. Riders protested during the ninth stage, a criterium in Milan. This protest was nominally about the overall safety conditions of the stage, and was sparked by life-threatening injuries sustained by Pedro Horrillo the day before. In the protest, riders declined to contest the stage except for a final sprint finish, a decision that proved controversial with race organizers and fans. Denis Menchov won the race, having taken the lead in a long time trial in stage 12, and defended vigorously against attacks by his closest challenger, Danilo Di Luca, during the mountain stages of the final week. Di Luca came in second, 41 seconds behind the winner, and won the mauve jersey as points classification winner. Subsequent to the Giro, both he and third-place finisher Franco Pellizotti became embroiled in doping scandals, were given bans, and had their results stripped. ## Teams Twenty-two teams were announced for the Giro. These included fifteen ProTour teams, and seven Professional Continental teams. Three ProTour teams did not wish to participate, and were thus not invited: , , and . Conversely, the organizers of the race originally declined to invite , but changed this decision on 23 April, inviting them as the Giro's 22nd and final team. Each team sent a squad of nine riders, so the Giro began with a peloton of 198 cyclists. The 22 teams that took part in the race were: ## Pre-race favorites The Astana team did not include 2008 race champion Alberto Contador, who chose not to defend his championship, but did include Lance Armstrong, who had recently returned from retirement. Though his appearance was put in doubt after he crashed out of stage 1 of the Vuelta a Castilla y León and broke his collarbone, Armstrong announced on 16 April that he would start the Giro despite undergoing surgery for his injury. star Cadel Evans was originally announced to be taking part in the Giro, but he publicly announced shortly afterward that he would not ride it, and accused RCS Sport (the organizers of the race) of using his name to promote the event. Contador and Evans both chose to focus on the Tour de France later in the season. Many riders were named as contenders, including Ivan Basso, Levi Leipheimer, Armstrong, Damiano Cunego, Carlos Sastre, Gilberto Simoni, Danilo Di Luca, Marzio Bruseghin, and Denis Menchov. Before his collarbone injury, Armstrong was considered an overall favorite, and it was also noted that three time trials, including the insertion of an unusually long time trial mid-race, might favor him. Pre-race analysis noted that Armstrong, when on his best form, would be a rider very likely to gain from having such a long race against the clock included in the Giro. Former winner Stefano Garzelli named Leipheimer as the favorite, as did some American media outlets. Armstrong considered Basso to be the favorite when speaking about the Giro in December 2008. Other news outlets also referred to Basso as the pre-race favorite. Only a small number of stages were expected to end in a sprint, barring a successful breakaway. Sprinters in the event included Mark Cavendish, Alessandro Petacchi, Allan Davis, Filippo Pozzato, Robert Hunter, Robert Förster, Tyler Farrar, Juan José Haedo, and Oscar Gatto. ## Route and stages The first Giro d'Italia was held in 1909, and the 2009 route was designed to commemorate the 100th anniversary, though interruptions due to World War I and World War II meant this was only the 92nd race. Milan, which had for years been the city in which the Giro concluded, was the site of a ten-lap criterium on the same circuit that began the first Giro d'Italia. Every city that hosted a stage start or finish in the first Giro was visited in 2009 with the exception of Genoa, although Arenzano (in the province of Genoa) hosted the finish to stage 11. The 11th stage also went over the Passo del Turchino, a climb used every year in the classic cycling race Milan–San Remo. The tenth stage was planned to mimic stage 17 of the 1949 Giro d'Italia, which was won by Italian cycling legend Fausto Coppi en route to the overall victory. That route originally included the Col d'Izoard, a climb in France which has been featured in the Tour de France numerous times. Race organizers were forced to alter this stage to cover only the Italian side of the Alps rather than also visit France, as there were concerns over radio communication in the area, and the roads stood the risk of landslides. It was subsequently made longer than first planned, with an additional, shorter climb added. Stages 10 and 16, the latter of which went over Monte Petrano and two other first-category climbs, were both called the race's queen stage. The route received a small amount of criticism for failing to include any well-known and especially difficult climbs such as the Passo del Mortirolo or Monte Zoncolan, instead including stages featuring multiple climbs with lesser ascents. Race director Angelo Zomegnan responded to the criticism by saying, "I won't follow the philosophy that the selection of climbs has to be determined by their names." The 21 stages of the 2009 Giro d'Italia were divided into five categories: one team time trial, seven flat stages, four intermediate stages, seven mountain stages and two individual time trials. The type of stage together with the average speed of the winner decided how much time each cyclist would be allowed to finish that stage before being eliminated from the race. ## Race overview The Giro began with a team time trial in Lido, a barrier island in the city of Venice. The starting order of the teams was decided by a random draw. , the first team to take the course, won the stage, giving their star sprinter Mark Cavendish the first pink jersey as leader of the race. Cavendish was defeated in a sprint finish the following day by Italian Alessandro Petacchi, who was riding for the team. Petacchi became the next wearer of the pink jersey, after he won the Stage 3 sprint into Valdobbiadene. Cavendish went on to win three mass-start stages, but 's success was not limited to Cavendish's victories nor the team time trial, as Edvald Boasson Hagen and Kanstantsin Sivtsov also took stage wins. The first two high mountain stages of the Giro revealed the men who would battle for the overall race title. Danilo Di Luca of took the win in Stage 4, and put himself just 2 seconds off the pink jersey. The next day, he claimed the jersey, when he was second to stage winner Denis Menchov at Alpe di Siusi as an elite group of favorites emerged including Menchov, Di Luca, and others who had performed well on the climb and were in high places in the overall standings. Menchov was fifth after Alpe di Siusi, but rose to second before stage 12, the very long and hilly individual time trial in Cinque Terre. There, he claimed a convincing victory; only Levi Leipheimer finished within a minute of Menchov's winning time. Di Luca was nearly two minutes slower than him, finished sixth on the stage, and fell to second overall, with Menchov assuming the race lead. Di Luca tried repeatedly to shed Menchov during the remaining mountain stages to make up the time difference, which was never more than a minute. The two riders were involved in sprints for time bonuses at the finish line in stages 16 and 17, as well as an intermediate sprint in stage 20. Menchov was consistently quicker than Di Luca in these sprints. With his superior time-trial skills providing the difference in the final stage, the Russian was able to emerge as Giro champion, despite a dramatic fall in the final kilometre before the finish line. Stefano Garzelli was the winner of the mountains classification, gaining points for consistent high placings on the summit stage finishes, as well as a brief breakaway on the mountainous stage 10. The points classification was won by Di Luca, after he finished in the top ten in eight of the road stages. The youth classification was won by Kevin Seeldraeyers, who remained consistent after Thomas Lövkvist lost nearly 25 minutes on stage 16. Lövkvist had, for one day earlier in the race, led not just the youth but also the general classification. Controversy arose during the ten-lap Milan criterium of the ninth stage, when the riders staged a protest over what they viewed as unsafe riding conditions in that stage and those that preceded it. The most visible cause for the protest was Rabobank rider Pedro Horrillo's accident during the eighth stage; Horrillo sustained numerous fractures and head injuries after tumbling over a barricade on the roadside while descending the Culmine di San Pietro. Horrillo fell more than 60 m (200 ft), and nearly died as a result of his injuries. After spending five weeks in hospitals in both Italy and his native Spain, Horrillo eventually recovered, though the day on the Culmine di San Pietro was his last as a professional cyclist, as he retired before the 2010 season began. The protest at first only involved the criterium being neutralized – that is, the race director agreed that each rider would receive the same finishing time as the stage winner regardless of when they actually crossed the line. After the riders rode a lap of the course, they decided instead not to contest the stage at all, riding the first six circuits 20 km/h (12 mph) slower than previous stages. After four laps, they stopped altogether as race leader Di Luca addressed the unhappy crowd to explain their actions. The times for the stage did not count, and there was no aggressive riding until a final sprint finish. Along with Di Luca, Lance Armstrong was considered the principal voice speaking for the peloton on this day. Although the protest was referred to by some as "unanimous," cyclists such as Filippo Pozzato, who was himself bearing injuries sustained in a crash that would later force him to leave the race, said the riders had been too hasty in their decision, and that it should have been made conclusively before the stage began. Armstrong apologized to the fans for the effect the protest had on what was supposed to be a grand spectacle, but also contended that it was the correct decision for the peloton to make. Success in stages was limited to a few teams. Though there were nearly as many stages (21) as teams in the event (22), only eight teams ultimately came away with stage victories. Six different riders won multiple stages – Cavendish, Petacchi, Menchov, Di Luca, Carlos Sastre, and Michele Scarponi. Teammates of Sastre, Scarponi and Cavendish were also stage winners; Sastre's provided the winners to stages 14 (Simon Gerrans) and 21 (Ignatas Konovalovas), and Scarponi's teammate Leonardo Bertagnolli was the winner of stage 15. The only teams to be single stage winners were with Franco Pellizotti in stage 17, and with classics specialist Philippe Gilbert three days later in a stage thought to resemble a classic. Pellizotti was also the third-place overall finisher. With wins for Quick Step's Seeldraeyers in the youth classification, Garzelli of Acqua & Sapone in the climbers' competition, and in the Trofeo Fast Team ranking, 11 teams – half of the total entries – won significant prizes during the race. ### Aftermath About two months after the event concluded, on 22 July, it was announced that second place overall finisher and points classification winner Di Luca had given two positive tests for continuous erythropoietin receptor activator (CERA, an erythropoietin derivative) on 20 and 28 May, before the Cinque Terre time trial and the Mount Vesuvius stage in the race's final week. He was provisionally suspended with immediate effect by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling's governing body. It was announced on 8 August that the analyses of the B-samples from those controls confirmed the initial results, making it likely that Di Luca will be stripped of some or all of his results from the race. fired him on 13 August. Di Luca at first maintained his innocence and claimed a conspiracy against him by the labs handling the tests. A period of legal maneuvering between Di Luca and the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) followed. CONI officials asked their anti-doping tribunal (TNA) to suspend Di Luca for three years – while two years is a customary ban for a doping positive, CONI prosecutors sought a third year for recidivism, stemming from Di Luca's previous doping incident two years earlier. He was given a two-year suspension, retroactive to July 2009, and indicated that he would appeal it to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In October 2010, Di Luca was reinstated to active status by CONI, due to his cooperation with several ongoing doping investigations, though his results were indeed stricken from the record. On 10 January 2011, he signed with and indicated that he would return to the Giro in 2011 to support Katusha team leader Joaquim Rodríguez. Five days before the start of the 2010 Giro d'Italia, 2009 podium finisher Pellizotti was identified as a rider of interest to the UCI's biological passport program due to irregular blood values. He was removed from his team's start list for the Giro and provisionally suspended. The UCI asked that CONI open disciplinary proceedings against him, which had no resolution until after the 2010 season finished. TNA cleared him on 21 October and declared him free to race, at which time the Liquigas team intended to re-sign him. The UCI decided in January 2011 to appeal his case to the CAS. The hearing was held in March, and Pellizotti asked for a quick resolution, with plans to return with in the 2011 Tirreno–Adriatico if he were cleared. The court reached its decision after five days, upholding the UCI's appeal, handing Pellizotti a two-year ban, and stripping all his results from this Giro and the 2009 Tour de France. Consequently, Pellizotti has said he is quitting the sport. ## Classification leadership In the 2009 Giro d'Italia, four different jerseys were awarded. For the general classification, calculated by adding each cyclist's finishing times on each stage, and allowing time bonuses for the first three finishers on mass-start stages, the leader received a pink jersey. This classification is considered the most important of the Giro d'Italia, and the winner is considered the winner of the Giro. Additionally, there was a points classification, which awarded a mauve jersey. In the points classification, cyclists got points for finishing in the top 15 in a stage. The stage win awarded 25 points, second place awarded 20 points, third 16, fourth 14, fifth 12, sixth 10, and one point fewer per place down the line, to a single point for 15th. In addition, points could be won in intermediate sprints. There was also a mountains classification, which awarded a green jersey. In the mountains classifications, points were won by reaching the top of a mountain before other cyclists. Each climb was categorized as either first, second, or third category, with more points available for the higher-categorized climbs. The highest point in the Giro (called the Cima Coppi), which in 2009 was Sestrière in stage 10, afforded more points than the other first-category climbs. The fourth jersey represented the young rider classification, which awarded a white jersey. This was decided the same way as the general classification, but only riders born after 1 January 1984 were eligible. There were also two classifications for teams. The first was the Trofeo Fast Team. In this classification, the times of the best three cyclists per team on each stage were added; the leading team was the team with the lowest total time. The Trofeo Super Team was a team points classification, with the top 20 placed riders on each stage earning points (20 for first place, 19 for second place and so on, down to a single point for 20th) for their team. The rows in the following table correspond to the jerseys awarded after that stage was run. ## Final standings ### General classification ### Mountains classification ### Points classification ### Young rider classification ### Trofeo Fast Team classification ### Trofeo Super Team classification ### Minor classifications Other less well-known classifications, whose leaders did not receive a special jersey, were awarded during the Giro. These awards were based on points earned throughout the three weeks of the tour. Each mass-start stage had one intermediate sprint, the Traguardo Volante, or T.V. The T.V. gave bonus seconds towards the general classification, points towards the regular points classification, and also points towards the T.V. classification. This award was known in previous years as the "Intergiro" and the "Expo Milano 2015" classification. It was won by Italian Giovanni Visconti, of . Other awards included the Combativity classification, which was a compilation of points gained for position on crossing intermediate sprints, mountain passes and stage finishes. Mountains classification winner Stefano Garzelli won this award. The Azzurri d'Italia classification was based on finishing order, but points were awarded only to the top three finishers in each stage. It was won, like the closely associated points classification, by Danilo Di Luca. Additionally, the Trofeo Fuga Cervelo rewarded riders who took part in a breakaway at the head of the field, each rider in an escape of ten or fewer riders getting one point for each kilometre that the group stayed clear. 's Mauro Facci was first in this competition. Teams were given penalty points for minor technical infringements. and were most successful in avoiding penalties, and so shared leadership of the Fair Play classification. ### World Rankings points The Giro was one of 24 events throughout the season that contributed points towards the 2009 UCI World Ranking. Points were awarded to the top 20 finishers overall, and to the top five finishers in each stage.
5,806,794	Mount Price (British Columbia)	1,152,276,943	Stratovolcano in British Columbia, Canada	[ "Garibaldi Lake volcanic field", "Garibaldi Ranges", "Pleistocene North America", "Quaternary volcanoes", "Stratovolcanoes of Canada", "Subduction volcanoes", "Two-thousanders of British Columbia", "Volcanoes of British Columbia" ]	Mount Price is a small stratovolcano in the Garibaldi Ranges of the Pacific Ranges in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It has an elevation of 2,049 metres (6,722 feet) and rises above the surrounding landscape on the western side of Garibaldi Lake in New Westminster Land District. The mountain contains a number of subfeatures, including Clinker Peak on its western flank, which was the source of two thick lava flows between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago that ponded against glacial ice. These lava flows are structurally unstable, having produced large landslides as recently as the 1850s. A large provincial park surrounds Mount Price and other volcanoes in its vicinity. It lies within an ecological region that surrounds much of the Pacific Ranges. Mount Price is associated with a small group of volcanoes called the Garibaldi Lake volcanic field. This forms part of the larger Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, a north−south trending volcanic zone that represents a portion of the Canadian Cascade Arc. Mount Price began its formation 1.2million years ago and continued intermittently until sometime in the last 15,000 years. Although the mountain is not known to have been volcanically active for thousands of years, it could erupt again, which would potentially endanger the nearby populace. If this were to happen, relief efforts could be organized by teams such as the Interagency Volcanic Event Notification Plan who are prepared to notify people threatened by volcanic eruptions in Canada. ## Geography Mount Price is located south of Whistler on the western side of Garibaldi Lake in New Westminster Land District. It lies within the Pacific Ranges Ecoregion, a mountainous region of the southern Coast Mountains characterized by high, steep and rugged mountains made of granitic rocks. Much of this ecoregion encompasses the Pacific Ranges in southwestern British Columbia, although it also includes the northwesternmost portion of the Cascade Range in Washington state. Several coastal islands, channels and fjords occur along the western margin of the Pacific Ranges Ecoregion. The Pacific Ranges Ecoregion is part of the Coast and Mountains Ecoprovince which forms part of the Humid Maritime and Highlands Ecodivision. The Pacific Ranges Ecoregion is subdivided into seven ecosections, the Eastern Pacific Ranges Ecosection being the main ecosection at Mount Price. This ecosection is characterized by a rugged landscape of mountains that increase in elevation from south to north; the northern summits contain large icefields. A transitional climate between coastal maritime and interior continental climates dominates the Eastern Pacific Ranges Ecosection. It is characterized by little precipitation and mild temperatures due to Pacific air often passing over this area. During winter, cold Arctic air invades from the Central Interior, resulting in extreme cloud cover and snow. A number of other volcanoes are situated within the Eastern Pacific Ranges Ecosection. This includes Mount Meager, which lies near the headwaters of the Lillooet River, and Mount Garibaldi and Mount Cayley, which lie in the Squamish River watershed. Several rivers flow through the Eastern Pacific Ranges Ecosection, including the Fraser and Coquihalla rivers on its eastern side, the Cheakamus, Squamish and Elaho rivers on its western side and the Lillooet River in the middle. Coastal western hemlock forests dominate nearly all the valleys and lower slopes of this ecosection, the upper slopes containing subalpine mountain hemlock forests and, to a lesser extent, Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir forests. Alpine vegetation lies just above the subalpine forests, which is normally overlain by barren rock. Wildlife such as grey jays, chipmunks, squirrels, flickers, deer, mountain goats, wolverines, cougars and grizzly and black bears are locally present. The communities of Whistler, Pemberton, Mount Currie, Hope and Yale are situated within the Eastern Pacific Ranges Ecosection, all of which are connected to the Lower Mainland by a network of highways. ## Geology Mount Price is one of the three principal volcanoes in the southern segment of the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, the other two being Mount Garibaldi and The Black Tusk. Mount Price is also part of the Garibaldi Lake volcanic field. This consists of several volcanoes and lava flows that formed in the last 1.3million years; the oldest volcanic rocks are found at Mount Price and The Black Tusk. Several volcanic rocks with differing compositions are present in the Garibaldi Lake volcanic field. This includes andesite, dacite, basaltic andesite and basalt. It is unknown when the last eruption occurred but it may have been in the early Holocene. Although no hot springs are known in the Garibaldi area, there is evidence of anomalously high heat flow in Table Meadows just south of Mount Price and elsewhere. Like other volcanoes in the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, Mount Price formed as a result of subduction zone volcanism. As the Juan de Fuca Plate thrusts under the North American Plate at the Cascadia subduction zone, it forms volcanoes and volcanic eruptions. Unlike most subduction zones worldwide, there is no deep oceanic trench along the continental margin of Cascadia. There is also very little seismic evidence that the Juan de Fuca Plate is actively subducting. The probable explanation lies in the rate of convergence between the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. These two tectonic plates currently converge at a rate of 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 inches) per year, only about half the rate of convergence from seven million years ago. This slowed convergence likely accounts for reduced seismicity and the lack of an oceanic trench. The best evidence for ongoing subduction is the existence of active volcanism in the Cascade Volcanic Arc. ### Structure Mount Price attains an elevation of 2,049 metres (6,722 feet) and is one of several Garibaldi Belt volcanoes that have been volcanically active throughout the Quaternary. In contrast to most stratovolcanoes in Canada, Mount Price has a nearly symmetrical structure. Its western slope is flanked by Clinker Peak, a 1,983-metre-high (6,506-foot) parasitic stratovolcano containing a breached volcanic crater. Oxidation of Mount Price's volcanic rocks has given the mountain a red colour. Mount Price stands within a cirque-like basin cut into the plateau on the south side of the valley of Garibaldi Lake. This basin consists of a wall of granite, inclosing the volcano on its west and southwest sides. It is now almost completely filled up by Mount Price, but some small areas of its floor are exposed on the north side. The basin likely formed as a result of glacial action as its north side appears to have been almost certainly glaciated. It might otherwise have been attributed to explosive volcanism, but there are no fragmental materials around its margin which would confirm this. ### Volcanic history At least three phases of eruptive activity have been identified at Mount Price. The first eruptive phase 1.2million years ago deposited hornblende andesite lava and pyroclastic rocks on the floor of the cirque-like basin after an Early Pleistocene glacial event. During the Middle Pleistocene about 300,000 years ago, volcanism of the second phase shifted westward and constructed the nearly symmetrical stratovolcano of Mount Price. Episodic eruptions during this phase of activity produced andesite and dacite lavas, as well as pyroclastic flows from Peléan activity. Later, the volcano was overridden by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which covered a large portion of western North America during glacial periods of the Quaternary. After the Cordilleran Ice Sheet retreated from higher elevations less than 15,000 years ago, andesite eruptions of the third eruptive phase occurred from a satellite vent at Price Bay. These eruptions resulted in the creation of a small lava dome or scoria cone on Mount Price's northern flank with an elevation of 1,788 metres (5,866 feet). Possibly contemporaneous volcanism occurred at Clinker Peak with the eruption of two hornblende-biotite andesite lava flows. They are both at least 300 metres (980 feet) thick and 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) long, extending to the northwest and southwest. Their unusually large thickness is due to them ponding and cooling against the Cordilleran Ice Sheet when it still filled valleys at lower elevations. Age estimates for this final volcanic phase have varied from 15,000 years ago to as recently as 8,000 years ago. A prominent feature of the Clinker Peak lava flows are the levees that demarcate the lava channels. The northwest lava flow forms a volcanic dam known as The Barrier. This retains the Garibaldi Lake system and has been the source of two large landslides in the past. The most recent major landslide in 1855–1856 resulted from failure along vertical rock fractures. It travelled 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) down Rubble Creek to the Cheakamus River valley, depositing 30,000,000 cubic metres (1.1×10<sup>9</sup> cubic feet) of rock. The southwest lava flow is in the upper reaches of the Culliton Creek valley and forms Clinker Ridge. Both lava flows form steep cliffs; the current face of The Barrier is a result of the mid-19th century landslide. ### Volcanic hazards Mount Price is one of the four highest threat volcanoes in Canada situated within close proximity to major populations with critical civil and economic infrastructure, the other three being Mount Meager, Mount Garibaldi and Mount Cayley. Although Plinian eruptions have not been identified at Mount Price, Peléan eruptions can also produce large amounts of volcanic ash that could significantly affect the nearby communities of Whistler and Squamish. Peléan eruptions might cause short and long term water supply problems for the city of Vancouver and most of the Lower Mainland. The catchment area for the Greater Vancouver watershed is downwind from Mount Price. An eruption producing floods and lahars could destroy parts of Highway 99, threaten communities such as Brackendale and endanger water supplies from Pitt Lake. Fisheries on the Pitt River would also be at risk. Mount Price is also close to a major air traffic route; volcanic ash reduces visibility and can cause jet engine failure, as well as damage to other aircraft systems. These volcanic hazards become more serious as the Lower Mainland grows in population. Because andesite is the main type of lava erupted from Mount Price, lava flows are a low to moderate hazard. Andesite is intermediate in silica content, indicating that it has a higher viscosity than basaltic lava but is less viscous than dacite or rhyolite lava. As a result, andesite lava flows typically move slower than basaltic lava flows and are less likely to travel as far from their source. Dacite and rhyolite lavas are normally too viscous to flow away from a volcanic vent, resulting in the formation of lava domes. An exception is the 15-kilometre-long (9.3-mile) Ring Creek dacite lava flow from Opal Cone on the southeastern flank of Mount Garibaldi, a length that is normally attained by basaltic lava flows. Concerns about The Barrier's instability due to volcanic, tectonic or heavy rainfall activity prompted the provincial government to declare the area immediately below it unsafe for human habitation in 1980. This led to the evacuation of the small resort village of Garibaldi nearby and the relocation of residents to new recreational subdivisions away from the hazard zone. The area below and adjacent to The Barrier has since been referred to as the Barrier Civil Defence Zone by BC Parks. Although landslides are unlikely to happen in the near future, warning signs are posted at the zone to make visitors aware of the potential danger and to minimize the chance of fatalities in the event of a slide. For safety reasons, BC Parks recommends visitors not to camp, stop or linger in the Barrier Civil Defence Zone. ### Monitoring Like other volcanoes in the Garibaldi Lake volcanic field, Mount Price is not monitored closely enough by the Geological Survey of Canada to ascertain its activity level. The Canadian National Seismograph Network has been established to monitor earthquakes throughout Canada, but it is too far away to provide an accurate indication of activity under the mountain. It may sense an increase in seismic activity if Mount Price becomes highly restless, but this may only provide a warning for a large eruption; the system might detect activity only once the volcano has started erupting. If Mount Price were to erupt, mechanisms exist to orchestrate relief efforts. The Interagency Volcanic Event Notification Plan was created to outline the notification procedure of some of the main agencies that would respond to an erupting volcano in Canada, an eruption close to the Canada–United States border or any eruption that would affect Canada. ## Human history ### Protection Mount Price and its eruptive products lie within a conservation area called Garibaldi Provincial Park. Founded in 1927 as a Class A provincial park, this wilderness park covers an area of 194,650 hectares (481,000 acres). Lying within its boundaries are a number of other volcanoes, such as Mount Garibaldi and The Black Tusk. Located 70 kilometres (43 miles) north of Vancouver in the glaciated Coast Mountains, Garibaldi Provincial Park contains diverse vegetation, iridescent waters and a rich geological history. The park also has abundant wildlife, such as squirrels, chipmunks, Canada jays and flickers. Garibaldi Provincial Park is named after Mount Garibaldi, which is in turn named after the Italian patriot and soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi. ### Naming Mount Price has had at least three names throughout its history. It was originally named Red Mountain for its red appearance, but the date when this name was adopted has not been cited. Another peak west of Overlord Mountain was identified as Red Mountain on a 1923 sketch by Canadian mountaineer Neal M. Carter. To avoid confusion, the name of that mountain was changed to Fissile Peak on September 2, 1930, for its fissility. In 1952, Canadian volcanologist William Henry Mathews identified Mount Price as Clinker Mountain in the American Journal of Science. Clinker is a geological term used to describe rough lava fragments associated with 'a'a flows. The fragments are characterized by several sharp, jagged spines and are normally less than 150 millimetres (5.9 inches) wide. The name Mount Price appeared on a topographic map of Garibaldi Provincial Park in 1928. It later appeared on National Topographic System maps 92G and 92J in 1930 after a committee of the Garibaldi Park Board was set up to deal with nomenclature. The committee requested that the Geographic Board of Canada adopt the name Mount Price for this mountain after Thomas E. Price, a former mountaineer and engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway who was a member of the Garibaldi Park Board at the time of the park's formation in 1927. Price was born at Vancouver in 1887 and was a member of a mountaineering party that had climbed Mount Garibaldi by a new route in 1908. Clinker Peak and Clinker Ridge were both officially named on September 12, 1972, to retain Mount Price's earlier name, Clinker Mountain. ### Geological studies The Clinker Peak lava flows were one of the first described occurrences of lava having been impounded by glacial ice. They were the subject of significant study by William Henry Mathews, a pioneer in the study of subglacial eruptions and volcano-ice interactions in North America. In 1952, Mathews cited substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the Clinker Peak lava flows ponded against glacial ice. This included the existence of glacially striated boulders in the lava flows, conformable relations with glacial till, abnormal structures indicative of extrusion into standing meltwater or against ice, and widespread breccia and pillows indicative of rapid quenching in meltwater or in water-soaked pyroclastic rocks under the ice. ## Accessibility Daisy Lake Road, 30 kilometres (19 miles) north of Squamish, provides access to Garibaldi Provincial Park from Highway 99. At the end of this 2.5-kilometre-long (1.6-mile) road is the Rubble Creek parking lot from which the 9-kilometre-long (5.6-mile) Garibaldi Lake Trail extends to the Garibaldi Lake campground and ranger station. A 5-kilometre-long (3.1-mile) hiking trail, known as the Mount Price Trail or the Mount Price Route, commences past the ranger station. This poorly marked path ascends to the shore of Garibaldi Lake and then returns inland where it traverses south along the lava flow forming The Barrier. The terrain of this part of the route is relatively rough, involving substantial scrambling over boulders of the lava flow. Eventually the trail reaches open terrain north of Mount Price and approaches the base of the volcano. Climbing Mount Price or Clinker Peak involves scree and snow plodding; both peaks do not require scrambling. ## See also - List of mountains of British Columbia - List of volcanoes in Canada - List of Cascade volcanoes - Volcanism of Western Canada
1,300,344	Joking Apart	1,170,532,668	BBC TV series, 1993–1995	[ "1990s British sitcoms", "1993 British television series debuts", "1995 British television series endings", "BBC television sitcoms", "British stand-up comedy television series", "English-language television shows", "Works about divorce" ]	Joking Apart is a BBC television sitcom written by Steven Moffat about the rise and fall of a relationship. It juxtaposes a couple, Mark (Robert Bathurst) and Becky (Fiona Gillies), who fall in love and marry, before getting separated and finally divorced. The twelve episodes, broadcast between 1993 and 1995, were directed by Bob Spiers and produced by Andre Ptaszynski for independent production company Pola Jones. The show is semi-autobiographical; it was inspired by the then-recent separation of Moffat and his first wife. Some of the episodes in the first series followed a non-linear parallel structure, contrasting the rise of the relationship with the fall. Other episodes were ensemble farces, predominantly including the couple's friends Robert (Paul Raffield) and Tracy (Tracie Bennett). Paul Mark Elliott also appeared as Trevor, Becky's lover. Scheduling problems meant that the show attracted low viewing figures. However, it scored highly on the Appreciation Index and accrued a loyal fanbase. One fan acquired the home video rights from the BBC and released both series on his own DVD label. ## Production ### Inception By 1990, Moffat had written two series of Press Gang, but the programme's high cost along with organisational changes at Central cast its future in doubt. As Moffat wondered what to do next and worried about his future employment, Bob Spiers, Press Gangs primary director, suggested that he meet with producer Andre Ptaszynski to discuss writing a sitcom. Moffat's father had been a headteacher and Moffat himself had taught English before writing Press Gang, so his initial proposal was a programme similar to what would become Chalk, a series that eventually aired in 1997. As he was separating from his wife, Moffat was going through a difficult period and aspects of it coloured his creative output. He introduced a proxy of his wife's new partner into the Press Gang episode "The Big Finish?", the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger). Moffat scripted unfortunate situations for the Magboy character, such as having a typewriter drop on his foot. Moffat says that the character's name was inspired by his wife's: "Magboy: Maggie's boy". During the pitch meeting at the Groucho Club, Ptaszynski realised that Moffat was talking passionately about his impending divorce and suggested that he write about that instead of his initial proposal, a school sitcom. Taking Ptaszynski's advice, Moffat's new idea was about "a sitcom writer whose wife leaves him". Speaking about the autobiographical elements of the show, the writer jokes that he has to remember that his wife didn't leave him for an estate agent; his wife was an estate agent. In 2003, Moffat told The New York Times that his "ex-wife wasn't terribly pleased about her failed marriage being presented as a sitcom on BBC2 on Monday nights". In an interview with Richard Herring, Moffat says that "the sit-com actually lasted slightly longer than my marriage". Conversely, his later sitcom Coupling was based on his relationship with his second wife, TV producer Sue Vertue. Moffat reused the surname 'Taylor', which is Mark's surname in Joking Apart, for Jack Davenport's character Steve in Coupling. ### Recording The pilot, directed by John Kilby, was filmed at Pebble Mill in Birmingham on 9–10 August 1990. It is practically identical to the first episode of the series proper; some scenes are even reused, notably the scene with Mark and Becky meeting when he accidentally turns up at a funeral. The reused footage gave rise to the first episode's shared director credit between Spiers and Kilby. The stand-up sequences were shot against a black background. Although this made it clearer that they were not "real", Moffat thought that it looked odd. The pilot was transmitted on BBC2 as part of its Comic Asides series of pilot shows on 12 July 1991. Moffat had written all six episodes of the first series before recording commenced. With series two, he had written only the first four episodes by the time recording had commenced, only delivering the final episode by the first day of rehearsals. All of the location shots were filmed at the beginning of the production block. Recording for the first series of six episodes began on location in the first half of April 1992 and were mainly filmed in Chelsea within a short distance from the director's home. The stand-up sequences were filmed in the Café Des Artistes on London's Fulham Road, now known as the Valmont Club, and were shot for the benefit of the studio audience, with the intention of reshooting them later for the broadcast version. Robert Bathurst has complained that, in order to save £5,000, this promised reshoot never materialised. The close ups of Bathurst were filmed in the studio for the second series, with stock footage of the club's audience reused. After the exterior shots had been filmed, the episodes were recorded at BBC Television Centre in April and May 1992 for the first series, and 12 November until 18 December 1993 for the second. Studio recording sessions were normally completed quickly; Gillies recalls "an hour and a half, tops". To a large extent, the editing occurred live during the studio recording with only tightening later. At the end of the recording on Sunday evenings Spiers would review the show before retiring to the bar, with the bulk of the work complete. Moffat contrasts this with the editing of modern sitcoms, which, he says, are edited more like film. ### Structure Many of the first six episodes of Joking Apart were constructed non-sequentially, with scenes from the beginning of the relationship juxtaposed with those from the end. Moffat describes this non-linear technique as a "romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy backwards because it ends with the couple unhappy". Moffat had experimented with non-linear narrative in Press Gang, such as the episode "Monday-Tuesday". Various episodes of Coupling played with structure, such as the fourth series episode "91⁄2 Minutes" which showed the same events from three perspectives. All of the episodes open with Bathurst portraying Mark Taylor, a sitcom writer, apparently performing stand-up in a small comedy club. These performances are fantasy sequences, playing out in the character's mind and portraying his internal creative processes as comedic monologues; these monologues mainly employ material from the character's failing marriage and are intended to show that "he thinks in punchlines, in comedy". Episodes regularly cut back to these fantasy performances, which usually open with the signature line: "My wife left me ...". Moffat felt that audiences needed to know from the start that the relationship would not survive. However, it was unclear to some viewers that the fantasy sequences were set in the writer's mind; many journalists reported that the character Mark was a stand-up comic, not a sitcom writer. In the fantasy sequences for the pilot, Bathurst was filmed against a completely black backdrop, which Moffat describes as "hell to look at". For the series, the sequences were filmed in a real club. Moffat describes this as the "wrong direction" as it became unclear that the fantasy sequences were "not real". Moffat observes that, like Seinfeld, an American sitcom that used a similar device, Joking Apart used less of the stand-up as the series progressed. In retrospect, Moffat regrets including the stand-up sequences. Bathurst, however, has considered refilming them as a video diary. Now with older features, he can portray a Mark Taylor reflecting on his earlier life. Both are very critical of the sequences in the DVD audio commentaries. The sequences have also drawn the sharpest criticisms from reviewers. The second series followed a more linear structure, although it retained the stand-up sequences. ### Music and titles "Fool (If You Think It's Over)", written by Chris Rea, was used for both the opening and closing credit sequences. The original Rea version was used for the pilot's closing credits, but for the series it was performed by Kenny Craddock, who arranged the incidental music with Colin Gibson. Beginning with a saxophone, only the chorus of the theme song accompanied the opening titles. These ran over legal imagery and a sequence of images of famous separated couples, including Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe; Winnie and Nelson Mandela; Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, and culminating in Mark and Becky. The closing credits featured a verse and chorus. The first part of the closing credits was usually over a still of the final frame, and faded to black with the line "All dressed in black." ## Characters Mark Taylor (Robert Bathurst) is a television sitcom writer. Other than episode one, where he is shown working on a script and references to a show of his that had aired during a dinner with Robert and Tracy the night before, his work is hardly mentioned. Mark is quick-witted, and the stand-up sequences indicate that he thinks in one-liners. However, this proves to be the downfall of his marriage with Becky, who says that she didn't sign on to become his "lawfully wedded straight man". In one episode, Mark jokes about worrying if his virginity will heal back; Becky articulates her frustration by responding "What page is that on?" Identifying his insecurities, she points out that the "thing about someone who uses humour as a weapon, is not the sense of humour, but the fact that they need a weapon". In interviews, Bathurst has compared Steven Moffat to his character: Mark is "a man whose wife leaves him because he talks in one-liners. And Steven Moffat's wife had just left him, because he talks in one-liners." Robert Bathurst, a former Footlights president, was cast as Mark Taylor. He was performing on a live topical programme on BSB called Up Yer News. A fellow performer on that show also auditioned for the part at what is now the Soho Theatre, then the old Soho Synagogue in Dean Street, and claimed that he would break Bathurst's legs if the latter got the job. In a 2005 interview, Bathurst recalls that the threat seemed not to be entirely jocular. Bathurst speaks very highly of Joking Apart, identifying it as a "career highlight" and the most enjoyable job he has ever done. Retrospectively, he wishes that he had "roughened up" Mark, as he was "too designery". Becky Johnson/Taylor (Fiona Gillies) meets Mark at a funeral and they eventually marry. Although irritated at being his comic foil, she is capable of her own quick-witted put-downs. In episode 3, for example, she wins an impromptu one-liner contest over Mark, whose put-downs fall flat. Becky is shown as an independent woman, meeting Mark on her terms. The first series revolves around her leaving Mark for estate agent Trevor, whom she subsequently cheats on in series two. This was Fiona Gillies' first major television role, having appeared in "The Hound of the Baskervilles", a 1988 episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the mini-series Mother Love. She was aware that some of her dialogue was based on what had been said to Moffat during his own separation. Robert and Tracy Glazebrook (Paul Raffield and Tracie Bennett) are their "increasingly bizarre and totally dim friends". They are initially Becky's friends, but soon befriend Mark, comforting him on the night Becky leaves him. Tracy, as Tracie Bennett identifies, is a stereotypical Tracy—normally a dysphemism for an intellectually inadequate, usually blonde, female. However, "she's not a bimbo: she's quite clever in her own logic". Bennett jokes that she was quite offended that such a character was named Tracy. Tracy's catchphrase of "you're a silly" was originally Moffat's typographical error, which Bennett faithfully reproduced in her performance. They decided that the amended version worked well for the character. They are both naive about sex and technology. Tracy, for example, attempts to telephone Robert to inform him that he's lost his mobile phone, and believes that she is a lesbian when she discovers her husband in women's clothing. They have a baby, who is seen or referred to occasionally. This reflects, as the writer observes, Moffat's inexperience of looking after children at the time. Trevor''' (Paul Mark Elliott) is Becky's lover. His job as an estate agent regularly provokes derision from Mark. (Moffat's ex-wife was an estate agent.) He is himself cheated on in the second series, as Becky dates her solicitor Michael (Tony Gardner). Trevor's debut appearance is in the third episode where he and Becky go to Robert and Tracy's house for dinner, but he generally features less regularly than the main ensemble. ## Episodes ### Series one The first episode shows the couple meeting at a funeral, marrying, and going through the honeymoon phase. The last section of the episode features a confrontation between Becky and Mark, in which the former admits that she is an adulteress before realising that all of her friends are hiding around her living room in preparation for a surprise party for her. The story continues directly into episode two, when Robert and Tracy return to the flat to check on Mark after his wife's departure. The three recall the circumstances in which they had first met. After their first date, the couple go back to Becky's flat. While she is in the bathroom, he strips down to his boxer shorts and handcuffs himself to the bedpost. Unable to free himself, he is found by Robert and Tracy as they walk in on him. Moffat used a similar scenario for the Coupling episode "The Freckle, the Key, and the Couple who Weren't" and reveals in its audio commentary that it is based on a situation with one of his ex-girlfriends. In the third episode, Mark arrives at Robert and Tracy's house on the wrong night for a dinner party. The couple are entertaining that night, but are instead expecting Becky and her new boyfriend Trevor. Hopeful of a reconciliation, Mark assumes that his friends are trying to smooth things over between them. They spend the evening trying to keep Mark and Trevor apart, each not knowing that the other is also there. Episode five makes extensive use of what Moffat labels "techno-farce", which uses technology, predominantly telephones, to facilitate the farcical situations. Moffat considers this episode the best of the show. Discussing the series as a whole, Moffat felt that the story ends after this episode. It begins when Mark attempts to return Robert's mobile phone and ends with Robert threatening to shoot Mark after the latter has slept with Tracy. The series ends with Becky and Trevor, and Robert and Tracy reconciling their relationships and Mark being left alone. ### Series two The format was changed for this series, with the dual timelines and many of the flashbacks dropped for a more linear narrative. Moffat felt that the relationship had already been sufficiently established in the first series so there was little point returning to the start. Set two months after the end of series one, Mark meets Becky in a newsagent, where he is purchasing pornographic magazines. He discovers the location of Becky and Trevor's house and breaks in using Tracy's keys. However, he is forced to hide under the bed when Becky and Trevor return home. Listening to them having sex, he becomes optimistic when he thinks that Becky is beginning to shout his name ("M..."). The name turns out to be Michael (Tony Gardner), Becky's solicitor, with whom she is now being unfaithful to Trevor. Robert and Tracy are given more stories than in the first series. Their main story arc begins in the third episode when Robert is caught by all of the main characters and his parents in a maid's outfit being spanked by a prostitute. The couple temporarily separate while Robert experiments with cross-dressing, but they are reunited by the end of the series. The fourth episode features a scene where Mark jams his dressing gown in the door and is forced to hide naked in his new neighbour's flat. This sequence was Moffat's revenge for Bathurst's late arrival at the series one press launch at the Café Royal in Regent Street, London. Moffat threatened that if they ever did a second series he would write a whole episode in which Bathurst was naked. After being mistaken for a flasher, Mark is punched by his neighbour's brother. When he awakens he is confronted by a man (Kerry Shale) in a red polo neck jumper who claims to be "his very best friend". In the fifth episode it transpires that the man, who identifies himself as Dick, is the personification of Mark's penis. The final episode begins after Becky and Michael had slept together while Becky is house sitting for Tracy and Robert, and Michael hides in the bathroom when the latter couple return. Tracy phones a morning television phone-in show and when she realises that the show's divorce expert is hiding in her bathroom she takes on his role (with a heavy Northern accent, actually a slightly exaggerated version of Bennett's own voice) to give herself advice on the other line. Bennett says this was the hardest thing she has had to do in her career. ## Scheduling After the pilot was transmitted on 12 July 1991, the BBC were interested in a series. However, Moffat had signed on to write the third and fourth series of Press Gang as one twelve-episode block so it was not until 1992 that they produced the series. After being postponed from the autumn schedules, the first series was transmitted on Thursday evenings on BBC2 from 7 January until 11 February 1993. The second series was filmed in late 1993. However, the controller of BBC2, Michael Jackson, had little faith in the project at the time, which, according to the writer, he now admits was wrong. Jackson felt that it was too mainstream for BBC2 and not mainstream enough for BBC1. The second series was scheduled to air from 11 June 1994, but was delayed many times. Bathurst articulates the group's frustration at the delay: > Every so often, I’d get a call from the producer saying, it’s going out at this time. The publicity people would be alerted, then we’d get a call saying no, it’s not, it’s been put back. That happened six times, I think, altogether – seven reschedules in a year or so ... It was extraordinary and inexplicable, and just one of these things that happen. I mean, a lot of shows are left on people’s desks and they hardly get seen, and Joking Apart was certainly one of those. Meanwhile, they were making about four series of The Brittas Empire, and you thought, "Bloody Hell! Come on, surely....?" To my mind, our show was a very superior product, and it upset me that other shows, which I, personally, felt were broader and less interesting, were getting precedence. The first series was repeated in preparation for the six episodes of the second series, which began transmission on Tuesday evenings from 3 January until 7 February 1995. The second series was only transmitted once even though the BBC had paid to show it twice. Moffat feels that the delay damaged the series because such bad scheduling hinders returning audiences and that the two-year gap meant that it seemed as if Mark "had been banging on about this sodding divorce for an awfully long time!" After winning the Montreux award it seemed inevitable that the show would get a third series. At a Christmas party, a BBC executive expressed a wish for the ratings of a third series "to go like Everest", indicating a steep slope with his hands. Bathurst replied, "But, Everest goes down the other side ..." The show was not recommissioned. Moffat says that he had no idea for a third series anyway, as it would have been difficult to contrive how a group of people who did not particularly like each other would get together so regularly. ## Reception The scheduling problems meant that the show did not get the momentum to achieve high viewing figures. Moffat jokes that "the eight people who saw it were very happy indeed". However, as Bathurst observes, "there's an underground of people who like it". The show rated highly on the Appreciation Index, meaning that viewers thought very highly of the programme. Bathurst says that drunks on the London Underground tell him in detail the plot of their favourite episode. The cast claim that the programme has a timeless, universal appeal as there are no time-specific references apart from the typewriter and the size of the mobile telephones. Gillies says that her accountant watches it to cheer himself up, while Bathurst recalls that a friend cheered so loudly when Mark pushes avocado into Trevor's face in the third episode that he woke his son. Critical reception was generally positive. In his overview of Moffat's celebrated Press Gang, Paul Cornell said that the writer "continues to impress" with Joking Apart. The Daily Express said that it was "flavoured with a delicious bitterness about the perfidy of women and the conscious-less nature of the male orgasm, it was plotted with the intricacy of a French farce". Another reviewer for the Express commented that "it's quite funny and an acute analysis" of the modern divorce, and that the first episode was "distinctly promising". Similarly DVD Review comments that "Moffat's distillation of his marriage melting down is as precise a piece of comic writing as you're likely to find." Not all reviews were completely positive. Criticising Bathurst for being too handsome to convey the frustrations of a writer, The Daily Telegraph said that the show had "its problems but possesses a dark, mordant wit". William Gallagher comments that "Press Gang was pretty flawless, but Joking Apart would veer from brilliance to schoolboy humour from week to week." While the transmission of series two was being delayed by BBC 2 controller Michael Jackson, the show won the Bronze Rose of Montreux and was entered for the Emmys. The show was remade in Portugal but used a linear structure rather than the flashbacks. Moffat reflects that although the remake is "not as dark or ground-breaking" as the original, it is "probably more fun" because it ends happily. ## Home media Both series have been released on DVD. A fan of the show, Craig Robins, bought the rights from 2Entertain, BBC Worldwide's DVD publishing company, and released it on his own independent label, Replay DVD. Robins put up £30,000 of his own money to buy the rights and produced the series one disc. As a professional videotape editor, Robins was able to restore the video, and author the disc himself, using a piece of freeware to transcribe the dialogue for the subtitles. The first series was released on DVD on 29 May 2006. It contains audio commentaries on four of the episodes from Moffat, Bathurst, Gillies and Bennett. It also contains a featurette, "Fool If You Think It's Over", with retrospective interviews. The second series was released on 17 March 2008 as a two-disc set. It contains audio commentaries on all episodes: five featuring a mix of Moffat, Bathurst, Gillies, Bennett, Raffield and Ptaszynski, with episode two featuring Spiers, and production manager Stacey Adair that concentrates on the behind-the-scenes production. The pilot from Comic Asides is also included on Disc 2, along with a complete set of Series Two scripts in Portable Document Format (PDF) and a PDF article entitled "Joking Apart in the Studio". The release includes a companion booklet. Replay DVD was commended in reviews for the quality of the disc. DVD Times reports that "Joking Apart looks much sharper than the average television show on DVD. The colours are also much richer and have obviously been fixed throughout to present a more uniform image while the picture is bright and clear." The featurette on the series 1 set is labelled "a great little feature", with Moffat particularly praised for his contribution. DVD Times identifies "a real sense of friendship and of a real liking for this show" within the commentaries, highlighting that Moffat "sounds really happy ... for Joking Apart'' to have finally gotten some recognition". ## See also - On The Up, another sitcom about the failure of a marriage
20,465,016	Plunketts Creek Bridge No. 3	1,112,104,171	Bridge over Plunketts Creek in Pennsylvania	[ "Bridges completed in 1875", "Bridges in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania", "Demolished bridges in the United States", "Historic American Engineering Record in Pennsylvania", "National Register of Historic Places in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania", "Road bridges on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania", "Stone arch bridges in the United States" ]	Plunketts Creek Bridge No. 3 was a rubble masonry stone arch bridge over Plunketts Creek in Plunketts Creek Township, Lycoming County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It was built between 1840 and 1875, probably closer to 1840, when the road along the creek between the unincorporated villages of Barbours and Proctor was constructed. Going upstream from the mouth, the bridge was the third to cross the creek, hence its name. The bridge was 75 feet (23 m) long, with an arch that spanned 44 feet (13 m), a deck 18 feet 8 inches (5.69 m) wide, and a roadway width of 15 feet 3 inches (4.65 m). It carried a single lane of traffic. In the 19th century, the bridge and its road were used by the lumber, leather, and coal industries active along the creek. By the early 20th century, these industries had almost entirely left, and the villages declined. The area the bridge served reverted mostly to second growth forest and it was used to access Pennsylvania State Game Lands and a state pheasant farm. Plunketts Creek Bridge No. 3 was considered "significant as an intact example of mid-19th century stone arch bridge construction", and was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on June 22, 1988. Although it was repaired after a major flood in 1918, a record flood on January 21, 1996, severely damaged the bridge, and it was demolished in March 1996. Before the 1996 flood about 450 vehicles crossed it each day. Later that year, a replacement bridge was built and the old stone structure was documented by the Historic American Engineering Record. It was removed from the NRHP on July 22, 2002. ## History ### Early inhabitants and name Plunketts Creek is in the West Branch Susquehanna River drainage basin, the earliest recorded inhabitants of which were the Susquehannocks. Their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, and by 1675 they had died out, moved away, or been assimilated into other tribes. The West Branch Susquehanna River valley was subsequently under the nominal control of the Iroquois, who invited displaced tribes, including the Lenape (Delaware) and Shawnee to live in the lands vacated by the Susquehannocks. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) led to the migration of many Native Americans westward to the Ohio River basin. On November 5, 1768, the British acquired the New Purchase from the Iroquois in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, including what is now Plunketts Creek. The first settlement along the creek by European colonists took place between 1770 and 1776. Plunketts Creek is named for Colonel William Plunkett, a physician, who was the first president judge of Northumberland County after it was formed in 1772. During conflicts with Native Americans, he treated wounded settlers and fought the natives. Plunkett led a Pennsylvania expedition in the Pennamite-Yankee War to forcibly remove settlers from Connecticut, who had claimed and settled on lands in the Wyoming Valley also claimed by Pennsylvania. For his services, Plunkett was granted six tracts of land that totaled 1,978 acres (800 ha) on November 14, 1776, although the land was not actually surveyed until September 1783. Plunkett's land included the creek's mouth, so Plunketts Creek was given his name. He died in 1791, aged about 100, and was buried in Northumberland without a grave marker or monument (except for the creek that bears his name). Lycoming County was formed from Northumberland County in 1795. When Plunketts Creek Township was formed in Lycoming County in 1838, the original name proposed was "Plunkett Township", but Plunkett's lack of active support for the American Revolution some years earlier had led some to believe his loyalty lay with the British Empire. The lingering suspicion of his loyalist sympathies led to the proposed name being rejected. Naming the township for the creek rather than its namesake was seen as an acceptable compromise. ### Villages and road In 1832, John Barbour built a sawmill on Loyalsock Creek near the mouth of Plunketts Creek. This developed into the village of Barbours Mills, today known as Barbours. In the 19th century, Barbours had several blacksmiths, a temperance hotel, post office, many sawmills, a school, store and wagon maker. In 1840, a road was built north from Barbours along Plunketts Creek, crossing it several times. This is the earliest possible date for construction of the bridge, but the surviving county road docket on the construction mentions neither bridges nor fords for crossing the creek. The bridge is at the mouth of Coal Mine Hollow, and the road it was on was used by the lumber and coal industries that were active in Plunketts Creek Township during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Creeks in the township supplied water power to 14 mills in 1861, and by 1876 there were 19 sawmills, a shingle mill, a woolen factory, and a tannery. By the latter half of the 19th century, these industries supported the inhabitants of two villages in Plunketts Creek Township. In 1868 the village of Proctorville was founded as a company town for Thomas E. Proctor's tannery, which was completed in 1873. Proctor, as it is now known, is 1.66 miles (2.67 km) north of Barbours along Plunketts Creek, and the main road to it crossed the bridge. The bark from eastern hemlock trees was used in the tanning process, and the village originally sat in the midst of vast forests of hemlock. The tannery employed "several hundred" workers at wages between 50 cents and \$1.75 a day. These employees lived in 120 company houses, which each cost \$2 a month to rent. In 1892, Proctor had a barber shop, two blacksmiths, cigar stand, Independent Order of Odd Fellows hall, leather shop, news stand, a post office (established in 1885), a two-room school, two stores, and a wagon shop. The road between Barbours and Proctor crosses Plunketts Creek four times and the four bridges are numbered in order, starting from the southernmost in Barbours near the mouth and going upstream. While evidence such as maps indicates that the third bridge was constructed close to 1840, the first definitive proof of its existence is a survey to relocate the road between the second and third bridges in 1875. The first bridge over Plunketts Creek was replaced with a covered bridge in 1880, and the second bridge was replaced in 1886. That same year, the road between the second and third bridges was moved again, returning to its original position on the west side of the creek. Finished sole leather was hauled over the bridge by horse-drawn wagon south about 8 miles (13 km) to Little Bear Creek, where it was exchanged for "green" hides and other supplies brought north from Montoursville. These were then hauled north across the bridge into Proctor. The hides, which were tanned to make leather, came from the United States, and as far away as Mexico, Argentina, and China. Hemlock bark, used in the tanning process, was hauled to the tannery from up to 8 miles (13 km) away in both summer and winter, using wagons and sleds. The lumber boom on Plunketts Creek ended when the virgin timber ran out. By 1898, the old growth hemlock was exhausted and the Proctor tannery, then owned by the Elk Tanning Company, was closed and dismantled. ### 20th century Small-scale lumbering continued in the watershed in the 20th century, but the last logs were floated under the bridge down Plunketts Creek to Loyalsock Creek in 1905. In 1918, a flood on the creek damaged the road for 100 feet (30 m) on both sides of the bridge, and caused "settling and cracking of the bridge itself". The bridge had needed repairs and reconstruction. In 1931, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passed legislation that gave the state responsibility for the costs of road and bridge maintenance for many highways belonging to local municipalities. This took effect in 1932, relieving Plunketts Creek Township and Lycoming County of the responsibility. Without timber and the tannery, the populations of Proctor and Barbours declined, as did traffic on the road and bridges between them. The Barbours post office closed in the 1930s and the Proctor post office closed on July 1, 1953. Both villages also lost their schools and almost all of their businesses. Proctor celebrated its centennial in 1968, and a 1970 newspaper article on its 39th annual "Proctor Homecoming" reunion called it a "near-deserted old tannery town". In the 1980s, the last store in Barbours closed, and the former hotel (which had become a hunting club) was torn down to make way for a new bridge across Loyalsock Creek. Plunketts Creek has been a place for lumber and tourism since its villages were founded, and as industry declined, nature recovered. Second growth forests have since covered most of the clear-cut land. Pennsylvania's state legislature authorized the acquisition of abandoned and clear-cut land for Pennsylvania State Game Lands in 1919, and the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) acquired property along Plunketts Creek for State Game Lands Number 134 between 1937 and 1945. The main entrance to State Game Lands 134 is just north of the bridge site, on the east side of the creek. The PGC established the Northcentral State Game Farm in 1945 on part of State Game Lands 134 to raise wild turkey. The farm was converted to ringneck pheasant production in 1981, and, as of 2007, it was one of four Pennsylvania state game farms that produced about 200,000 pheasants each year for release on land open to public hunting. The Northcentral State Game Farm is chiefly in the Plunketts Creek valley, just south of Proctor and north of the bridge. The opening weekend of the trout season brings more people into the village of Barbours at the mouth of Plunketts Creek than any other time of the year. On June 22, 1988, the bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), as part of the Multiple Property Submission (MPS) of Highway Bridges Owned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Transportation, TR. The MPS included 135 bridges owned by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), 58 of which were of the stone arch type. While the individual NRHP form for the bridge cites a 1932 inspection report (the year that the state took over its maintenance), the MPS form mistakenly gives the bridge's date of construction as 1932. ### Flood and destruction In January 1996, there was major flooding throughout Pennsylvania. The 1995–1996 early winter was unusually cold, and considerable ice buildup formed in local streams. A major blizzard on January 6–8 produced up to 40 inches (100 cm) of snow, which was followed on January 19–21 by more than 3 inches (76 mm) of rain with temperatures as high as 62 °F (17 °C) and winds up to 38 miles per hour (61 km/h). The rain and snowmelt caused flooding throughout Pennsylvania and ice jams made this worse on many streams. Elsewhere in Lycoming County, flooding on Lycoming Creek in and near Williamsport killed six people and caused millions of dollars in damage. On Plunketts Creek, ice jams led to record flooding, which caused irreparable major damage to the mid-19th century stone arch bridge. Downstream in Barbours, the waters were 4 feet (1.2 m) deep in what was then called the village's "worst flood in history". Plunketts Creek Bridge No. 3 was one of two destroyed in Lycoming County, and on January 31 a photograph of the damaged bridge was featured on the front page of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette with the caption "This old stone arch bridge over Plunketts Creek must be replaced." In neighboring Sullivan County, the Sonestown Covered Bridge, also on the NRHP, was so damaged by the flood that it remained closed for repairs until late December 1996. Throughout Pennsylvania, these floods led to 20 deaths and 69 municipal- or state-owned bridges being either "destroyed or closed until inspections could verify their safety". When it became clear that the bridge could not be repaired, PennDOT awarded an emergency contract for a temporary bridge before the end of January, citing "emergency vehicles that can no longer travel directly from Barbours" to Proctor and beyond. The temporary bridge cost \$87,000 and was 24 feet (7.3 m) wide. The photographs for the bridge's inclusion in the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) were taken in January, and the HAER "documentation package was prepared as mitigation for the emergency demolition" of the bridge, which was collapsed in March. The permanent replacement bridge was completed in 1996, and the old bridge was removed from the NRHP on July 22, 2002. ## Description and construction Plunketts Creek Bridge No. 3 was a rubble masonry stone arch bridge, oriented roughly east–west over Plunketts Creek. Its overall length was 75 feet (23 m) and its single semi-circular arch spanned 44 feet (13 m). The bridge deck width was 18 feet 8 inches (5.69 m), and its roadway was 15 feet 3 inches (4.65 m) wide, which could accommodate only a single lane of traffic. Just before the flood that led to the bridge's destruction, about 450 vehicles crossed the bridge daily. The outside corners of the wing walls were 25 feet (7.6 m) apart, which combined with the overall length of 75 feet (23 m) led to a total area of 1,875 square feet (174.2 m<sup>2</sup>) being listed on the NRHP. The bridge rested on abutments which had been jacketed with concrete after its original construction. The arch was supported by voussoirs made of "irregular rubble stone", without a keystone. There was also no stone giving the date or other construction information. The approaches were flanked by wing walls constructed of riprap stones, and the spandrel walls were topped by parapets made of "rough, crenellated stones". The bridge's road deck rested directly on the top of its arch. This led to a "narrow wall at the arch crown" and a "protruding rock parapet" atop this spandrel wall on either side. Most stone arch bridges have solid parapets without decoration; this bridge's parapet crenellation was an ornamental feature. The parapet construction and appearance made the bridge unique among the 58 Pennsylvania stone arch bridges with which it was nominated for the NRHP. Pennsylvania has a long history of stone arch bridges, including the oldest such bridge in use in the United States, the 1697 Frankford Avenue Bridge over Pennypack Creek in Philadelphia. Such bridges typically used local stone, with three types of finishing possible. Rubble or third-class masonry construction used stones just as they came from the quarry; squared-stone or second-class masonry used stones that had been roughly dressed and squared; and ashlar or first-class masonry used stones which had been finely dressed and carefully squared. Rubble masonry was the quickest and cheapest for construction, and had the largest tolerances. Many of the oldest stone bridges in Pennsylvania were built using rubble masonry techniques. Stone bridge construction started with the excavation of foundations for the abutments. Then a temporary structure known as a center or centering would be built of wood or iron. This structure supported the stone arch during construction. Once the stone arch was built, the spandrel walls and wing walls could be added. Then the road bed was built, with fill (loose stones or dirt) added to support it as needed. Wall and arch stones were generally set in place dry to ensure a good fit, then set in mortar. Once the bridge was complete and the mortar had properly hardened, the center was gradually lowered and then removed. In March 1996, after standing for between 156 and 121 years, the arch of Bridge No. 3 finally collapsed. ## Note ## See also - List of bridges documented by the Historic American Engineering Record in Pennsylvania - List of bridges on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania
67,147,146	Tornado over Kansas	1,163,898,854	1929 painting by John Steuart Curry	[ "1929 paintings", "Cats in art", "Chickens in art", "Dogs in art", "Farming in art", "Horses in art", "Paintings by John Steuart Curry", "Paintings in Michigan", "Tornadoes in art", "Works about Kansas" ]	Tornado over Kansas, or simply The Tornado, is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by the American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas. The artist is believed to have been influenced by Baroque art and photographs of tornadoes. He developed a fear of natural disasters and a reverence towards God during his childhood, both of which are apparent in the painting. Following its 1930 debut, Tornado over Kansas was considered a notable Regionalist work, but native Kansans disliked the choice of subject matter. Although the painting won awards and was lauded by some, others criticized Curry's amateur style of painting. Curry's work attracted criticism from contemporary painters Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton, and logical inconsistencies and technical errors in the composition have been noted. Tornado over Kansas is among several of Curry's works depicting natural disasters in Kansas, including the 1930 painting After the Tornado and the 1932 lithographs The Tornado. It has been widely reproduced in publications including Time and Life magazines, and is now among Curry's best-known works. Since 1935, the painting has remained in the Muskegon Museum of Art. ## Composition In Tornado over Kansas, sometimes referred to as just The Tornado, an incoming tornado towers in the background as part of a dark storm. A distressed Kansan farm family in the foreground hurries to enter their storm cellar. Nearest the entry is a green-faced mother cradling her infant. Close by, a red-headed father hurries his daughter and yells at his sons. The two sons are distracted with rescuing pets: one holds onto a struggling black cat and another brings a litter of puppies, watched closely by their canine mother. Panicked horses can be seen beyond the farm's buildings. In the midst of the chaos, a complacent chicken refuses to move. The painting's tornado is regarded for its physical accuracy, an accomplishment that was possibly aided by first-hand descriptions and photographs. The art historian Lauren Kroiz, however, noted multiple "compositional perplexities". The placement of the son with the cat behind the porch steps suggests that the family ran along the path covered in wooden boards, but a chained wooden gate blocks that path. The filled metal tub beside the porch indicates recent rainfall, yet no other parts of the scene appear wet. Finally, all of the painting's figures cast shadows except, inexplicably, for the mother. Tornado over Kansas is described as an example of Regionalist painting: by the mid-1930s, art critics were identifying any depictions of daily life in the rural Midwest as "regionalist". The work illustrates a "direct representation" of the artist's own land in favor of the "introspective abstractions" of contemporary European painting, which—according to a 1934 Time article on the contemporary U.S. art scene—were qualities characteristic of Regionalism. ## Context John Steuart Curry was born in Dunavant, Kansas, in 1897. He left in 1918 to attend Geneva College in Pennsylvania, where he worked as an illustrator for several years. He established a reputation as a painter with his critically acclaimed 1928 work Baptism in Kansas. Curry did not return to Kansas until 1929, when he traveled from his home in Westport, Connecticut, to visit his family's farm in Dunavant for six weeks. During this stay, the extreme weather and storms of the prairies inspired Curry to paint Tornado over Kansas, which he finished by fall of 1929. Curry's widow stated he had never witnessed a tornado in person, but he was likely familiar with accounts of tornadoes' destructive power. Photographs of a June 2, 1929, tornado passing through Hardtner, Kansas, were among the first to clearly capture a tornado's shape, and the art curator Henry Adams proposed that they may have served as visual guidance for Curry's tornado in Tornado over Kansas. The funnel shape seen in one photograph closely resembles that of the painting's tornado, and another photograph of the tornado approaching a barn is believed to have inspired the painting's compositional layout. Storms and tornadoes were not new to Curry; such natural disasters had frightened him ever since he was a child. He said that Tornado over Kansas was based on early life experiences when his family "used to beat it for the cellar before the storm hit." The art historian Irma Jaffe posited that Curry's Christian religious upbringing led to his construing natural disasters as signs of God's punishment. Thus, Jaffe saw Tornado over Kansas as one of Curry's attempts at controlling his fears through artistic expression. Natural disasters are a common motif in Curry's art. He sketched the ruins of Winchester, Kansas, following a May 1930 tornado, and made watercolors of horses panicked by lightning, a dust storm in Oklahoma, and the aftermath of floods along the Kansas River during the summers of 1929 and 1930. Curry's 1929 painting Storm over Lake Otsego was painted shortly after Tornado over Kansas, and has figures comparable to those of its predecessor. His 1930 work After the Tornado depicts an unharmed and smiling doll seated in a chair amid the wreck of a house recently destroyed by a tornado. In 1932, Curry produced a series of lithographs known as The Tornado, which show a family taking shelter from a coming storm. One impression from the set was sold for \$13,750 in 2020, while others are held by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Curry's 1934 landscape Line Storm contains a cloud system similar to that in Tornado over Kansas. Furthermore, a tornado appears behind the abolitionist John Brown in the painter's 1937–1942 mural Tragic Prelude. ## Commentary and influence According to Kroiz, the composition is "almost theatrically staged". Adams interpreted the barn on the left and the outbuilding to the right as the coulisses, or scenery flats, of a stage set. The painting's sense of drama is heightened by giving some of the figures others to rescue. The principal figures are painted as character stereotypes: the father is broad-shouldered and strong, while the mother and the daughter seem fearful and helpless as they look towards the father; despite the imminent danger, the two sons prioritize grabbing their pets. Adams considered the scene to be either a celebration or dismemberment of traditional American family values. Less ambiguous is the art historian J. Gray Sweeney's interpretation that Tornado over Kansas is an achievement of Curry's goal to "depict the American farmer's incessant struggle against the forces of nature." The central figures are reminiscent of paintings by Baroque artists like Peter Paul Rubens, whom Curry studied. Adams wrote that the turning father resembled Adonis in Rubens's 1635 painting Venus and Adonis, while the art historian Karal Ann Marling described the father as "Michelangelesque"; Marling also likened the mother and infant to a Madonna and Child. Adams said no American painter before Curry depicted a tornado in such a frightening manner. One artistic precedent is the waterspout in the background of Winslow Homer's 1899 The Gulf Stream, but Adams found this "far less frightening" than Curry's tornado because the waterspout plays a secondary role to the sharks that dominate the foreground. Adams noted another "direct precedent": the tornado in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which also strikes a Kansas farmstead. Tornado over Kansas is viewed as a sequel to Curry's 1928 Baptism in Kansas, though the former is considered visually and psychologically more dramatic than the latter. The two works share similar settings, and in both, crowded groups of figures in the foregrounds create a sense of claustrophobia (which Curry suffered from) while the near empty backgrounds evoke agoraphobia. Further similarities can be found in their fundamental shape patterns: inverting the water tank and windmill in Baptism in Kansas results in a "spiraling form" that resembles the tornado in Tornado over Kansas. ## Reception and provenance The painting was met with universal critical acclaim when first exhibited in 1930 at the Whitney Studio Club where it won a second-place award. It received another second-place prize at the 1933 Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh. A 1931 exhibition at a show of Curry's work in Wichita, Kansas, was less successful. Two years later, a Time article on the exhibition described Curry's tornado as a "giant cornucopia" and wrote that Kansans found the painting "uncivic". Marling explained this negative reaction, writing that locals did not want to see "[their state exposed] to opprobrium on account of a twister or two", especially by an artist native to the state. For example, Elsie Nuzman Allen—the art-collecting wife of former Kansas governor Henry Justin Allen—complained that Curry painted cyclones and other "freakish subjects" instead of "the glories of his home State". In 1934, Time magazine featured a color reproduction of the painting as part of an article on the contemporary U.S. art scene. It described Curry as "the greatest painter of Kansas" and Tornado over Kansas as one of his most famous works. The article did note that many Kansans were irritated by his paintings, as they believed that the subject matter "[was] best left untouched". Due to the magazine's readership of 485,000 during the 1930s, Time helped give Regionalist works a national audience while also eliciting resentment among some over the art movement's sudden popularity. For example, the American modernist painter Stuart Davis objected to Time's portrayal of Tornado over Kansas and other Regionalist paintings. In 1935, Davis even accused Curry of behaving "as though painting were a jolly lark for amateurs, to be exhibited in county fairs." Those who agreed with Davis included critics, historians, and even some of Curry's own friends who considered his paintings to be "labored", "conventional", or "embarrassing". The amateurish draftsmanship was noted by scholars including Kroiz, who wrote that Curry's use of color created "a riot of tertiary hues that confuse the viewer's eye". She described the work's green-blue shadows as "strange", and believed that the lighter halo-like region around the father's head was due to a mistake made while Curry was painting in the sky. Thus, Kroiz found that the painting is in stark contrast to more technically proficient works by the contemporary Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Benton even lamented that Curry's work sometimes had "a touch of vulgarity and cheapness". Curry himself admitted to both Tornado over Kansas's compositional shortcomings and his then lack of technical expertise, revealing what scholars interpreted as possible signs of the artist's depression, stress, and self-doubt. Nonetheless, Curry's openness instructed the public, and Kroiz believed it helped make painting more approachable for amateurs and common people. Sweeney was less critical than Kroiz in his assessment of the painting, describing Curry as "the least polemical and chauvinistic" of the Regionalists and writing that Curry's color and methods were "extremely sophisticated" in Tornado over Kansas. In 1931, real estate broker H. Tracy Kneeland offered to purchase Tornado over Kansas. In a letter to Curry, Kneeland explained his attraction to the work: > I find ... a certain native quality which interests me because I was born and brought up in Michigan and while I have never seen a tornado of this kind I can well remember school being let out and running for dear life for home, with the branches torn off the trees ... the whole picture seems to strike a home chord in me. Nevertheless, Tornado over Kansas was acquired in 1935 by the Hackley Art Gallery (now the Muskegon Museum of Art) from Ferargil Galleries, a venue for exhibitions of Curry's work during the early 1930s. Laurence Schmeckebier wrote in his 1943 biography of Curry that Tornado over Kansas was its artist's "best known and in many ways his greatest painting." The work was widely reproduced in surveys of American art published in the 1930s and 1940s. It has appeared in over 150 publications, including the 1936 first issue of Life magazine, and the 1996 film Twister. Because of its artistic and cultural significance, Tornado over Kansas was described by the Muskegon Museum of Art as a "national treasure" and a defining work of Curry's career and the Regionalist movement. ## See also - List of artwork by John Steuart Curry
3,620,463	Choiseul pigeon	1,170,057,506	An extinct bird from the Solomon Islands	[ "Bird extinctions since 1500", "Birds described in 1904", "Columbinae", "Endemic birds of the Solomon Islands", "Extinct birds of Oceania", "Taxa named by Walter Rothschild" ]	The Choiseul pigeon (Microgoura meeki) is an extinct species of bird in the pigeon and dove family, Columbidae. It was endemic to the island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands, although there are unsubstantiated reports that it may once have lived on several nearby islands. The last confirmed sighting was in 1904. Other common names were Solomons crested pigeon, Solomon Islands crowned-pigeon and Kuvojo. The Choiseul pigeon was monotypic within the genus Microgoura and had no known subspecies. Its closest living relative is believed to be the thick-billed ground pigeon, and some authors have suggested that the Choiseul pigeon may be a link between that species and the crowned pigeons. The adult pigeon was largely blue-grey, with a buffy orange belly and a distinctive slaty-blue crest. It is unknown how this crest was held by the bird in life. The bird's head sported a blue frontal shield surrounded by black feathers and a bicoloured beak. The wings were brown and the short tail was a blackish purple. It was described as having a beautiful rising and falling whistling call. As the bird became extinct before significant field observations could be made, not much is known about its behaviour. It is believed to have been a terrestrial species that laid a single egg in an unlined depression in the ground. It roosted in pairs or small groups of three or four in small shrubs and was reportedly very tame, allowing hunters to pick it up off its roost. The Choiseul pigeon lived in lowland forests, particularly in coastal swampy areas that lacked mangroves. It was only recorded by Albert Stewart Meek, who collected six adults and an egg from the northern part of the island in 1904. Despite many subsequent searches, the bird has not been definitively reported since. It is believed to have been rare when Meek collected his specimens. The indigenous peoples reported that the species was driven to extinction due to the introduction of cats, as the pigeon had never previously confronted a carnivorous mammal on Choiseul. The last unconfirmed report of a Choiseul pigeon was in the early 1940s, and the species is considered extinct. ## Taxonomy The Choiseul pigeon was described by Walter Rothschild in 1904 on the basis of six skins—three male and three female—and an egg collected by Albert Stewart Meek earlier that year. It was placed in the monotypic genus Microgoura, whose name comes from the Ancient Greek word mikros "small", and goura, a New Guinean aboriginal name for the similarly-crested crowned pigeons of the genus Goura. Rothschild named the species after Meek, giving the bird the specific name meeki. Though its relationships are unclear, the Choiseul pigeon is believed to have been closest to the thick-billed ground pigeon (Trugon terrestris) from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, which has similar plumage. It has been suggested that the Choiseul pigeon was a link between the thick-billed ground pigeon and the crowned pigeons; however, other sources argue that it may not have been closely related to the crowned pigeons as its crest was quite different. Based on behavioural and morphological evidence, Jolyon C. Parish proposed that the Choiseul pigeon should be placed in the Gourinae subfamily along with the Goura pigeons, the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, and others. The Choiseul pigeon has no known subspecies. Today, five skins and a partial skeleton are kept in the American Museum of Natural History, while a single skin and the egg are kept at the Natural History Museum at Tring. The Choiseul pigeon is also known as the Solomon crowned pigeon, Solomon Islands pigeon, Solomons crested pigeon, Solomon Islands crested pigeon, Choiseul crested pigeon, crested Choiseul pigeon, Meek's pigeon, Meek's ground pigeon, and dwarf goura. The indigenous peoples of Choiseul called the species either "kumku-peka" or "kukuru-ni-lua", which translates literally as "pigeon-belong-ground". ## Description The Choiseul pigeon was about 31 cm (12 in) long. The wing of the male was 195–197 mm (7.7–7.8 in), the tail 100–105 mm (3.9–4.1 in), the culmen 34 mm (1.3 in), and the tarsus was 60 mm (2.4 in). The wing of the female was 180–190 mm (7.1–7.5 in), the tail 100 mm (3.9 in), the culmen 33 mm (1.3 in), and the tarsus was 60 mm (2.4 in). Adult Choiseul pigeons of both sexes were blue-grey overall with a buffy orange belly. The pigeon had a distinctive long, rounded crest that had a hairy texture. This crest, like the crown, was slaty-blue and emerged from the bird's hindcrown. Though many artists have speculated, it is unknown how the pigeon held its crest in life as Meek's notes did not cover this subject. John Gerrard Keulemans (who produced the illustration accompanying Rothschild's original description), depicted the crest as being flat based on Meek's specimens; other artists have presented it as spread and scraggly like that of the crowned pigeons. It has been suggested that the crests of the museum specimens were flattened during preparation. On the bird's forehead was a naked and pale chalky-blue frontal shield. This was surrounded by short, velvety black feathers that extended from the base of the bill to the area just below and in front of the eye, while the area below the eye was a pinkish wash. The bird's chin and throat were sparsely covered with black, velvety feathers, while the neck was a slaty-blue that transitioned into a brownish-grey breast. The abdomen and undertail-coverts were a rich orange, while the undertail was a blackish-grey. The wing was slaty with a hint of brown at its base and became a warm, dark brown by the wingtips; the underwing was brown. The back was grey and transitioned into a browner rump, while the uppertail-coverts were a dark sooty-grey with blackish tips. The tail, which was short and rounded, was a very dark indigo that had a slightly purple iridescent sheen. The bill was bicoloured; the upper mandible was chalky-blue with a black tip while the lower mandible was red. The plumage of the juvenile is unknown. The bird's feet were a dull purplish-red and unfeathered up to the heel, while the iris was a dark brown. The bird's voice was never recorded; however, after it became extinct, the indigenous peoples described it as possessing a "beautiful rising and falling whistling call given from the roost site every evening." Others described the call as a low "c-r-r-ooo", "cr-ooo", or "cr-o-o-o". ## Behaviour and ecology Not much is known about the species' behaviour, as it became extinct before significant field observations could be made. It is likely that the Choiseul pigeon was a largely terrestrial species, feeding and nesting near the forest floor. The indigenous people of the town of Vundutura said that the pigeon would roost in pairs or small groups of three or four in small shrubs close to the ground. They claimed that the species was very tame, allowing local hunters to approach it and pick it up off of its perch by hand. They reported that the species had stones in its gizzard. It laid a single dark, cream-coloured egg in an unlined depression on the ground. The egg was about 43 by 31.3 mm (1.69 by 1.23 in) in size, which is considered small in proportion to the bird. ## Distribution and habitat The Choiseul pigeon was non-migratory and is thought to have lived on the forest floor in lowland forests, including coastal swampy areas that lacked mangroves. The Choiseul pigeon is usually considered to have been endemic to the island of Choiseul in the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea, where the only specimens were collected. The specimens Meek acquired were likely collected near Choiseul Bay in the northern part of the island. The last reports of the species from the indigenous population came from the Kolombangara River. It also reportedly lived on the neighboring islands of Santa Isabel and Malaita, and it is suspected that it may once have lived on Bougainville Island. However, these reports were never confirmed and must be considered anecdotal. It would be considered very unusual if the Choiseul pigeon were truly endemic to Choiseul as the island hosts no other endemic species, and the pigeon was never linked ecologically with another species on the island. ### Last sightings In January 1904 six specimens and an egg were collected by Albert Stewart Meek, a bird collector for Lord Walter Rothschild, near Choiseul Bay on Choiseul. Several local boys told Meek that the pigeon was also present on the nearby islands of Santa Isabel and Malaita. Though Meek did not travel to these islands, he did search for the Choiseul pigeon on the adjacent Bougainville Island, but did not find any evidence of its presence. No other specimens were ever collected or seen by Western scientists. The Choiseul pigeon was not searched for again until briefly in 1927 and again in October 1929, when five veteran collectors belonging to the Whitney South Seas Expedition dedicated three months to searching for the pigeon in multiple locations across Choiseul without success. The indigenous people interviewed by this expedition largely believed that the pigeon was extinct in 1929. The last reported indigenous sighting was sometime in the early 1940s near Sasamungga by the Kolombangara River, although this sighting was never confirmed. Searches of the small, cat-free islands of Rob Roy Island and Wagina off Choiseul's southeast coast and Choiseul's forested coastal swampland in the 1960s by British ornithologist Shane A. Parker did not discover any signs of the pigeon. American scientist Jared Diamond searched for the bird in 1974 without success. ## Relationship with humans This pigeon was a source of food for the local people, who would locate its roosting sites either due to the bird calling or by the droppings that had accumulated below its perches. It was well-remembered by the indigenous peoples, and stories of the delicious ground-dwelling pigeon were passed down by local elders after its extinction. One indigenous person implied that the gizzard stones of the pigeon may have had value locally. After the bird's extinction, the indigenous people have occasionally confused the Choiseul pigeon with the arboreal crested cuckoo-dove in modern folklore, and several claims of the pigeon's continued existence turned out to be based on the cuckoo-dove. After its discovery, several Western bird collections highly desired its skins; the Whitney South Seas Expedition spent three months at high expense on Choiseul with the primary objective being the acquisition of the Choiseul pigeon. In 2012 the Choiseul pigeon was commemorated on a stamp from Mozambique along with several other extinct birds. The Choiseul pigeon is depicted on the flag of the Choiseul Province. ### Extinction The indigenous population believed that the pigeon became extinct due to predation by feral cats and, to a lesser extent, feral dogs. As Choiseul has no indigenous carnivorous mammals, the ground-dwelling pigeon was particularly susceptible to the introduced cats. If the pigeon existed on islands that feral cats had never reached, it is believed that the clearance of its forest habitat would have led to its local extinction. As there have been no substantiated reports since 1904 despite multiple searches, the IUCN has declared it extinct. As several ornithologists had visited Choiseul and the nearby islands prior to Meek without noting any sign of the bird's existence, it is likely that the Choiseul pigeon was already close to extinction in 1904.
209,342	Catopsbaatar	1,171,092,749	Extinct species of mammal	[ "Cimolodonts", "Cretaceous mammals of Asia", "Fossil taxa described in 1974", "Fossils of Mongolia", "Prehistoric mammal genera", "Taxa named by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska" ]	Catopsbaatar is a genus of multituberculate, an extinct order of rodent-like mammals. It lived in what is now Mongolia during the late Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous epoch, about 72 million years ago. The first fossils were collected in the early 1970s, and the animal was named as a new species of the genus Djadochtatherium in 1974, D. catopsaloides. The specific name refers to the animal's similarity to the genus Catopsalis. The species was moved to the genus Catopsalis in 1979, and received its own genus (Catopsbaatar, Greek and Mongolian for 'visible hero') in 1994. Five skulls, one molar, and one skeleton with a skull are known; the last is the genus' most complete specimen. Catopsbaatar was a member of the family Djadochtatheriidae. The skull of Catopsbaatar was up to 70 mm (2.8 in) long and, as in other multituberculates, proportionally large. The external appearance of these animals' heads may have been similar to those of rodents. The skull was heavy-set and wide, with the zygomatic arches strongly expanded to the sides. The eye sockets were smaller and placed further back than in its relatives, and the snout was more elongated. Catopsbaatar had semicircular ridges on the side of the skull, to which the jaw muscles were attached. The mandible was strong and very elongated. It had very robust incisors, and cheek teeth with multiple cusps (for which multituberculates are named). The pelvic bones differed from those of other multituberculates in that they were not fused to each other. Catopsbaatar had spurs on its ankles, like those of the male platypus and echidna, without evidence of a venom canal (present in the former). The spurs of Catopsbaatar and other Mesozoic mammals may have been used for protection against theropod dinosaurs and other predators. Multituberculates are thought to have given live birth, and the fact that they had hair indicates they were homeothermic ("warmblooded"). Multituberculates would have been omnivorous; Catopsbaatar had powerful jaw muscles, and its incisors were well adapted for gnawing hard seeds, using a backwards chewing stroke. Multituberculates are thought to have had a sprawling posture, and Catopsbaatar may have been able to jump. Catopsbaatar is known from the Barun Goyot Formation, which is thought to be about 72 million years old. ## Taxonomy In 1970 and 1971, the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions collected mammalian fossils from the Barun Goyot Formation at the Red Beds of Hermiin Tsav (also spelled "Khermeen Tsav") area in Mongolia's Gobi Desert. About 100 specimens, recovered from four localities, are housed at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Two-thirds of the collected specimens were multituberculates: an extinct order of mammals with rodent-like dentition, named for the numerous cusps (or tubercles) on their molars. In 1974, Polish palaeontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska named a new species of the Mongolian multituberculate genus Djadochtatherium as D. catopsaloides, with specimen ZPAL MgM−I/78 from the Polish collection as the holotype. The specific name refers to the animal's similarity to the North American species Catopsalis joyneri, which Kielan-Jaworowska thought was a possible descendant. The specimen, collected at the Hermiin Tsav I locality, is an almost-complete skull of a juvenile with portions of the cranium damaged. Kielan-Jaworowska also assigned other specimens to the species: a damaged skull missing lower jaws (ZPAL MgM−I/79, an adult), a skull with partial lower jaws (ZPAL MgM−I/80), and a molar with a fragment of jaw (ZPAL MgM−I/159 from Khulsan, the only specimen not from the Hermiin Tsav I and II localities). Kielan-Jaworowska and American palaeontologist Robert E. Sloan considered the genus Djadochtatherium a junior synonym of Catopsalis, and created the new combination C. catopsaloides in 1979. American palaeontologists Nancy B. Simmons and Miao Desui conducted a 1986 cladistic analysis which indicated that Catopsalis was a paraphyletic taxon (an unnatural grouping of species), and C. catopsaloides required its own generic name. Kielan-Jaworowska followed Simmons and Miao's suggestion, moving C. catopsaloides to its own monotypic genus in 1994, Catopsbaatar. The word catops is derived from the Greek katoptos ("visible" or "evident"); baatar is Mongolian for "hero", and the name refers to Catopsbaatars similarity to the genus Catopsalis (as is the case for the specific name). The name Catopsalis itself consists of the Greek words for "visible" and "cutting shears" (psalis). The word baatar is used as a suffix in the names of many multituberculate genera, and alludes to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, which itself means "red hero". Later in 1994, Kielan-Jaworowska and the Russian palaeontologist Petr P. Gambaryan mentioned caudal (tail) vertebrae which may have belonged to Catopsbaatar; this attribution is uncertain, since they may instead belong to the related Tombaatar (named in 1997). A fourth skull (PIN 4537/4, a juvenile), discovered during the 1975 Soviet−Mongolian Expedition, was mentioned by Gambaryan and Kielan-Jaworowska in 1995. Canadian palaeontologist Phillip J. Currie found a new Catopsbaatar specimen during the 1999 Dinosaurs of the Gobi expedition, organised by the American Nomadic Expeditions Company. Housed at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar as PM120/107, this most completely preserved known specimen consists of the complete skull (which may be slightly flattened) and partial skeleton of an adult individual. The specimen has rather complete fore- and hind limbs, which were unknown for the genus until then and which are generally rarely preserved in multituberculates. Its pelvic ilia were stolen and destroyed by a schoolboy on tour at the Natural History Museum of Oslo, where it was being prepared in 2000. The specimen was reported in 2002 by Kielan-Jaworowska, Norwegian palaeontologist Jørn Hurum, Currie and Mongolian palaeontologist Rinchen Barsbold, who also mentioned another skull (PIN 4537/5, a juvenile) found during the 1975 expedition. Catopsalis joyneri, the basis of the name C. catopsaloides, was moved to the new genus Valenopsalis in 2015. ### Evolution Catopsbaatar belonged to the order Multituberculata, a group within Allotheria (an infraclass of mammals outside Theria, the group that contains modern placentals and marsupials). Multituberculates are characterised by having premolars and molars with multiple low cusps, arranged in longitudinal rows. They are the best-known group of mammals from the Mesozoic Era, when the dinosaurs dominated; although the earliest multituberculate remains are from the Jurassic Period, the group is known as recently as the Eocene Epoch (thereby surviving the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event). The group may have become extinct due to competition with eutherian mammals, such as rodents. Multituberculates were mainly known from teeth and jaws until the 1920s, when more complete specimens were discovered—first in Asia, and then elsewhere. Postcranial bones (the rest of the skeleton, other than the skull) remain rare. Kielan-Jaworowska originally classified Catopsbaatar as a member of the multituberculate family Taeniolabididae in 1974. In 1994, she suggested that Djadochtatherium was close to Catopsbaatar's ancestry. She and Hurum named a new family of multituberculates, Djadochtatheriidae (which they placed in the new suborder Djadochtatheria), in 1997. The family included the genera Djadochtatherium, Catopsbaatar, Kryptobaatar, and Tombaatar, all from the Gobi Desert. The family differs from other multituberculates (and other mammals) in that the front margins of its snout were confluent with the zygomatic arches (cheekbones), giving the snout a trapezoid shape when seen from above. In general, other mammals have snouts where the side margins are curved inward in front of the zygomatic arches. Kielan-Jaworowska and Hurum revised the higher ranks within Multituberculata in 2001, replacing the suborder Djadochtatheria with the superfamily Djadochtatherioidea (placed in the suborder Cimolodonta). The following cladogram shows the placement of Catopsbaatar among other multituberculates according to Kielan-Jaworowska and Hurum, 1997: ## Description ### Skull The most complete adult Catopsbaatar skull (specimen PM 120/107) is 63 mm (2.5 in) long and 55 mm (2.2 in) wide, with a 41 mm-long (1.6 in) lower jaw. By comparison, the skull of the juvenile holotype (ZPAL MgM−I/78) is about 53 mm (2.1 inches) long and 56 mm (2.2 inches) wide, with a 35 mm-long (1.4 in) lower jaw. The largest adult skull (ZPAL MgM−I/79) is 70 mm (2.8 in) long but, since it is incomplete, its other measurements are unknown. Catopsbaatar was larger than its relatives, Kryptobaatar and Djadochtatherium. Multituberculates had relatively large skulls and short necks; their skulls were proportionally longer and wider than those of similarly sized rodents and marsupials. The external appearance of their heads may have been similar to those of rodents. The skull of Catopsbaatar was heavy-set, with a wide margin across the front. It was shorter along the midline than at the sides, because the nuchal crest at the back of the head curved inwards at the middle, creating an indention at the hind margin of the skull when viewed from above. The zygomatic arches were strongly expanded to the sides, with the skull width (across the arches) about 85 percent of the skull length. The front of the orbits (eye sockets) were further back than in other djadochtatheriids, resulting in a more elongated snout (65 percent of the skull length) and small orbits. The premaxilla (front bone of the upper jaw) extended less than two-thirds of the length of the snout in front of the eyes, shorter than that of Kryptobaatar. The premaxilla consisted of parts of the face and the palate; djadochtatheriids had a premaxillary ridge on the boundary between the two (visible when viewing the skull from below). The palatal part of the premaxilla was concave, with many randomly arranged nutrient foramina (openings). The nasal bone—which formed the upper part of the snout—was relatively wide (becoming wider towards the back), and its front was covered with irregularly spaced vascular foramina. The suture between the nasal and frontal bones was less pointed forwards in the middle than were those of Catopsbaatar'''s relatives. The maxilla (the main part of the upper jaw) was extensive, and formed most of the side of the snout. It contained all the upper teeth, except the incisors. The infraorbital foramina (openings at the lower front of the maxilla) were slit-like in some specimens and rounded in others, and varied in number from one to three. One of the most characteristic features of the face of Catopsbaatar was the very large anterior zygomatic ridge on the sides of the upper jaw (a site for jaw-muscle attachment). It was much higher than in other djadochtatheriids except for Djadochtatherium, from which it differed in that the ridge was semicircular rather than roughly trapezoidal (other genera have elliptical ridges). The front margin of the anterior zygomatic ridge was thickened, which produced a bulge on the side margin of the snout when viewed from the side and above. The lower part of the suture between the maxilla and the squamosal bone extended along the hind border of the anterior zygomatic ridge. The palatal processes of the maxilla formed most of the palate. The major palatine foramina had shallow grooves extending forward. The postpalatine torus (a bony protrusion on the palate) of Catopsbaatar was less prominent than was that of Tombaatar. The frontal bone was large, and formed most of the cranial roof. The suture between the frontal and parietal bones formed a U-shaped part in the middle which pointed backwards—similar to the condition in Kryptobaatar but less deep, with smaller U-shaped structures at the sides. This differed from Djadochtatherium, which had a narrower V-shaped suture between the frontal and parietal bones. The intermediate zygomatic ridge on the squamosal bone (also for jaw-muscle attachment) was much smaller and lower than the anterior zygomatic ridge in front of it. Catopsbaatar differed from other djadochtatheriids in that the intermediate ridge contacted the anterior ridge with its front edge. The posterior zygomatic ridge at the lower back of the squamosal bone was the weakest of the three ridges, and only marked by a depression. The postorbital processes behind the orbit on the parietal bone were very long, and the parietal ridges extended from the hind margin of the postorbital processes towards each other (but without reaching). The nuchal crest was very prominent, and extended to the sides to form "wings". The occipital plate was almost vertical and slightly concave, and was obscured by the nuchal crest when the skull was viewed from above. Though incompletely preserved, it is assumed that the occipital plate sloped back and upwards from the occipital condyles (as in some relatives). The orbito-temporal vascular system inside the skull of Catopsbaatar did not differ much from those of related genera. Catopsbaatar's mandible was robust and very elongated. The diastema (gap between the front and cheek teeth) was concave, and extended for 20 percent of the dentary bone (the main bone of the lower jaw). Seen from above, the diastema formed a wide shelf that sloped downwards on the inner side of the jaw. The small mental foramen was close to the upper middle margin of the diastema. The coronoid process of the mandible appears to have been relatively longer and narrower than in other djadochtatherioids. It was separated from the alveolar process (where the teeth are contained) by a wide groove. The mandibular condyle (which articulated with the skull) was slightly above the level of the molars. The front part of the masseteric crest was very prominent, forming a bulge known as a masseteric protuberance. The robustness of this crest and the presence of the protuberance varies among related genera. The masseteric fovea (pit) in front of the masseteric fossa was probably more distinct than in other djadochtatherioids. Each half of the mandibular symphysis (where the two halves of the mandible connect) was shaped like an upside-down teardrop. The pterygoid fossa on the inner side of the mandible was very large, and occupied most of the hind part of the dentary. The lower part of this fossa had a boundary, known as the pterygoideus shelf. ### Dentition The dental formula (the number of teeth of each type in the tooth row of a mammal) of Catopsbaatar was (two incisors, no canines, three premolars and two molars in half of the upper tooth row, and one incisor, no canines, two premolars and two molars in half of the lower). By comparison, the dental formula of humans is . Each tooth in a mammal is designated with a letter and number by position (I for incisor, C for canine, P for premolar, M for molar); the letters are capitalised for the teeth of the upper jaw, but not for those in the lower jaw. The cusp formula shows the arrangement and number of cusps in consecutive rows of a tooth, from the outer to the inner side; each row is separated by a colon. Being a cimolodont, Catopsbaatar did not have I1 incisors. The I2 upper-front incisors of Catopsbaatar were very robust and had a sharply limited band of enamel. The two incisors converged slightly towards the middle, touching each other. The smaller I3 incisor behind was cone-shaped. The alveolus (tooth socket) of Catopsbaatars I3 incisor was formed by the premaxilla, rather than the premaxilla and maxilla (unlike in Tombaatar). The front upper premolars P1 and P3 were only present in juveniles (deciduous), disappearing (with their alveoli) in older individuals. P1 appears to have had two cusps, was single-rooted, and had a cone-like, blunt crown. P3 was single-rooted and smaller than P1. The cusp formula of the P4 premolar was 5−4:1, the central cusp being the largest. The P4 of Catopsbaatar was almost trapezoidal in shape (unlike in Djadochtatherium and Kryptobaatar, where it is crescent-shaped), smaller, and lacking ridges. Catopsbaatar also differed by having only three upper premolars, lacking the P2 (a feature shared with Tombaatar). Other mammals usually evolve the loss of teeth at the beginning or end of a tooth row, not in the middle (as in multituberculates). The cusp formula of the M1 molar was 5−6:5−6:4, with the inner ridge extending about 75 percent of the tooth's length. The cusps of M1 were sharp and unworn in juveniles, but worn and concave in older animals. The cusp formula of the M2 molar was 2:2−3:2−3. Catopsbaatar had a single lower pair of incisors, characteristic of multituberculates, which was very strong and compressed sideways. It had a sharply limited band of enamel, and grew continually. The p3 premolar was very small, and adhered entirely to the lower diastema under the larger p4. The blade-like p4 was roughly trapezoidal in side view, and had three cusps along the horizontal upper margin and one cusp on the outer back side. The p4 did not have the ridges on the outer and inner side, as are present in other multituberculates. The m1 molar was almost symmetrical, and its cusp formula was 4:4, the size of the cusps decreasing towards the back. The m2 had a cusp formula of 2−3:2, most specimens being 2:2. The cusps on the inner side were wider than those on the outer side, the inner row of cusps was shorter than the outer one, and the hind margin of the tooth was arranged obliquely. ### Postcranial skeleton The only Catopsbaatar specimen which preserves the postcranial skeleton is PM120/107, which is fragmentary. It includes elements that are unknown, or incompletely preserved, in other multituberculates. One lumbar vertebra (the fifth or sixth, from between the rib cage and the pelvis) had a spinous process which was stout in side view and long when seen from above. The clavicle was slightly less curved than that of Kryptobaatar (resembling a bent rod which widened at each end), and measured about 24.8 mm (0.98 in). The upper part of the scapulocoracoid was relatively wide in side view, and the lower part was very narrow. It was probably about 60 mm (2.4 in) long when complete. The preserved part of the humerus (upper arm bone) was about 37.5 mm (1.48 in) long. Its shaft was triangular in cross-section, relatively narrow when seen from above, and most of its width was occupied by the intertubercular groove. This groove was delimited on the side by the crest of the greater tubercle, whose middle part formed the deltopectoral crest. The ulnar condyle, where the ulna of the lower arm articulated with the humerus, was more prominent than the radial condyle (where the radius articulated), oval, and delimited from the radial condyle by a groove. The radius was about 26 mm (1.0 in) long, with a prominent head. Its shaft was smooth, compressed from top to bottom, and oval in cross-section. The ulna was compressed sideways, flatter than the radius, and about 40 mm (1.6 in) long as preserved. The contact from the ischium to the ilium and pubis of the pelvis was not fused, and the front end of the ischium formed a rugose suture. The pubis was roughly triangular, with a rough suture for the ilium above and a deep groove for the ischium at the lower front. Specimen PM120/107's pelvic bones differed from those of other multituberculates in not being fused together. The presence of sutures in the pelvis of PM120/107 indicates that it was a juvenile, although the skull appears adult; the meaning of this discrepancy is unknown. The femur (thigh bone) was proportionally similar to that of Eucosmodon and Nemegtbaatar—smaller than the former, but larger than the latter. The femur was stout relative to its length, and it may have been about 56 mm (2.2 in) long. The tibia of the lower leg was about 35.8 mm (1.41 in) long. Seen from behind the upper side, the tibia had a deep excavation (cavity) which may be characteristic of multituberculates. Unlike most other multituberculates and other mammals, the calcaneus bone at the back of the foot had a short tuber calcanei (like some tree kangaroos), with an expanded, anvil-shaped proximal process strongly bent downwards and to the side. Catopsbaatar had an os calcaris bone on the inner side of its ankle, a feature also seen in modern male monotremes (the platypus and the echidna) and other Mesozoic mammals. The os calcaris bone was plate-like and rectangular in outline; as in monotremes, it supported the cornu calcaris in forming a spur on the outer side of the tarsus (cluster of foot bones). Unlike with other Mesozoic mammals, these two elements were not fused together in multituberculates. The cornu calcaris was triangular, with a concavity in the middle, and was 13 mm (0.51 in) long. The spur was flattened, and was thicker at its conjunction with the os calcaris (where they connected via several ridges). As the spur of PM120/107 may have been moved from its original position, it is unknown whether it faced inwards (like in the platypus). Unlike in the platypus, there was no impression of a canal for venom. The cornu calcaris of Catopsbaatar was ossified (turned into bone) and would have been covered in keratin (the horny covering seen in nails and hoofs). The cornu calcaris of the platypus consists only of keratin, and is hollow. ## Palaeobiology Hurum, Zhe-Xi Luo, and Kielan-Jaworowska suggested in 2006 that the spurs on the ankles of Mesozoic mammals (such as Catopsbaatar) were homologous with those of monotremes, and were a basal (or "primitive") feature lost by later therian mammals. The male platypus uses the spur to deliver venom from a gland, but it is unknown if the extinct groups were venomous as well. Mesozoic mammals were mostly small (with exceptions such as the fox-sized Repenomamus) and, although they were too small to be prey for large theropod dinosaurs, smaller theropods, large lizards, crocodiles, and birds could have fed on them. For example, mammal jaws have been found in the abdomen of a specimen of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx; the jaws belonged to Zhangheotherium, which also had spurs, and the multituberculate Sinobaatar. Since dinosaurs dominated Earth during the Mesozoic, this period has been called the "dark ages" of mammalian history. The spur, which would have been more effective if venomous, was probably used as a defensive weapon by small, early mammals. It could also have been used during intraspecific competition or predation. The pelvic bones of Catopsbaatar specimen PM120/107 may not have been fused because fusion occurred late in development, because it was a sexually dimorphic feature occurring only in males (unfused pelvic bones might have enabled expansion of the birth canal in females), or pelvic fusion may be a taxonomic difference between Catopsbaatar and other multituberculates. Unlike with other mammals, the pelvis of multituberculates was very narrow; in other genera where the pelvis is known, each half of the pubis and ischium were fused together, forming a keel. The length and rigidity of the keel indicate that the pelvis could not have spread during birth. Because there would be little space for the passage of an egg (egg-laying monotremes have wide ischial arches), Kielan-Jaworowska suggested in 1979 that multituberculates were viviparous (gave live birth) and that the newborns were extremely small—similar to those of marsupials. Hair, structurally similar to that of modern mammals and associated with bones of the Mongolian multituberculate Lambdopsalis, has been identified in coprolites (fossilised feces) of carnivorous mammals from the Palaeocene Epoch. This indicates that multituberculates had hair for insulation, similar to modern mammals (and possibly fossil mammals), a feature probably related to homeothermy (warm-bloodedness). ### Feeding and diet Although multituberculates were thought to have been carnivores or herbivores, since American palaeontologist William A. Clemens and Kielan-Jaworowska suggested modern rat kangaroos as analogues for the group in 1979 they have been considered omnivores (feeding on both plants and animals). Uniquely among mammals, multituberculates employed a backward chewing stroke which resulted in the masticatory muscles—the muscles which move the mandible—being inserted more to the front than in other groups (including rodents). Gambaryan and Kielan-Jaworowska reconstructed the masticatory musculature of various multituberculates in 1995, and found that Catopsbaatar and its relatives had very powerful masticatory musculature, due to their high zygomatic arches and large anterior and intermediate zygomatic ridges and coronoid processes. Their powerful incisors, with limited bands of enamel, would have been well adapted to gnawing and to cutting hard seeds (similar to rodents). Since it was larger than some other multituberculates, Catopsbaatar would have to open its mouth only 25 degrees to crush hard seeds 12–14 mm (0.47–0.55 in) in diameter; a 40-degree gape would have caused dislocation. After the incisors cut, the premolars and molars would begin to grind with a "power stroke". According to Gambaryan and Kielan-Jaworowska, the adaptation for crushing hard seeds sometimes—as in Catopsbaatar—opposed the benefit of a low condylar process (which discourages mandibular dislocation). The anterior and intermediate zygomatic ridges of the skull were the origin of the superficial masseter muscle, which facilitates chewing. The separation of the origin of this muscle into two parts and the rounded muscle scars left by them are unique among mammals to multituberculates. The masticatory muscles of multituberculates independently evolved features shared with rodents and small herbivorous marsupials. As with rodents, multituberculates may have been capable of bilateral mastication—where both rows of teeth in the mandible perform the same function simultaneously—and unilateral mastication (where the rows on one side are used). ### Posture and locomotion The limb posture of multituberculates has been debated. According to some researchers, they employed a parasagittal stance with the erect limbs under the body; others consider a sprawling stance more likely. Kielan-Jaworowska and Hurum supported the latter theory in 2006 based on the presence of hind-leg spurs, a feature they considered present only in sprawling mammals. They pointed out that all early mammals preserved in lacustrine (lake) deposits were compressed from top to bottom, suggesting a sprawling stance, whereas later mammals were preserved on their flanks. Earlier arguments for a sprawling stance include deep pelvises and features of the legs. They also suggested that the feet of multituberculates would have been plantigrade (the sole touching the ground) at rest, but digitigrade (the sole not touching the ground) when jumping and running quickly; they dismissed the idea that the forelimbs of multituberculates and other early mammals were more parasagittal than their hindlimbs. Kielan-Jaworowska and Hurum depicted Catopsbaatar with plantigrade, sprawling legs, with mobile spurs which pointed inward when preparing for attack. In 2008, Kielan-Jaworowska and Hurum suggested that the long spinous process on a Catopsbaatar vertebra and the long transverse processes in Nemegtbaatar may indicate that some multituberculates were saltatorial (had the ability to jump). Catopsbaatar probably had strong muscles attaching to the tuber calcanei, which further supports the jumping hypothesis. Although it has been suggested that multituberculates were arboreal (lived in trees), most Asian taxa were probably terrestrial; some others were fossorial, digging and living underground. ## Palaeoenvironment All specimens of Catopsbaatar are known from the Barun Goyot Formation of the Gobi Desert, which probably dates to the late Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous epoch (about 72 million years ago). The specimens were discovered in the Red Beds of Hermiin Tsav area except for one molar from Khulsan. When Catopsbaatar was discovered, the Red Beds of Hermiin Tsav area was thought to be a distinct formation coeval (of the same geological age) with the Barun Goyot Formation, as they contain many of the same animals, but is now thought to correspond to different levels of the Barun Goyot and Nemegt formations. The rock facies of the Red Beds of Hermiin Tsav area consist of orange-coloured, thick-bedded sandstone, with a thin interbedding of light-coloured silt stones and claystones. The rock facies of the Barun Goyot Formation are considered to be the result of an arid or semi-arid environment, with aeolian (deposited by wind) beds. Other known mammals from the Red Beds of Hermiin Tsav include the multituberculates Nemegtbaatar, Chulsanbaatar and Nessovbaatar, and the therians Deltatheridium, Asioryctes, and Barunlestes. Dinosaurs include Heyuannia, Velociraptor, Saichania, Platyceratops, Gobiceratops, and some indeterminate theropods. Reptiles include the turtle Mongolemys, the lizards Gobinatus, Tchingisaurus, Prodenteia, Gladidenagama and Phrynosomimus, and an indeterminate crocodile. The frog Gobiates and an indeterminate alexornithiform bird are also known. Ostracods include Limnocythere, Cypridea, and Eucypris''.
525,087	Murder of Yvonne Fletcher	1,166,626,043	1984 shooting of a British police officer	[ "1980s in the City of Westminster", "1980s murders in London", "1984 in London", "1984 mass shootings in Europe", "1984 murders in the United Kingdom", "April 1984 events in the United Kingdom", "Crime in the City of Westminster", "Deaths by firearm in London", "Deaths by person in London", "Diplomatic incidents", "Female murder victims", "Libya–United Kingdom relations", "Mass shootings in London", "Metropolitan Police officers", "Metropolitan Police officers killed in the line of duty", "Protest-related deaths", "Unsolved murders in London", "Violence against women in London" ]	The murder of Yvonne Fletcher, a Metropolitan Police officer, occurred on 17 April 1984, when she was fatally wounded by a shot fired from the Libyan embassy on St James's Square, London, by an unknown gunman. Fletcher had been deployed to monitor a demonstration against the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and died shortly afterwards. Her death resulted in an eleven-day siege of the embassy, at the end of which those inside were expelled from the country and the United Kingdom severed diplomatic relations with Libya. Between 1980 and 1984 Gaddafi had ordered the deaths of several exiled opponents of his regime; bombings and shootings, targeted at Libyan dissidents, occurred in Manchester and London. Five Libyans thought to be behind the attacks were deported from the UK. During the anti-Gaddafi protest on 17 April 1984, two gunmen opened fire from the first floor of the embassy with Sterling submachine guns. In addition to the murder of Fletcher, eleven Libyan demonstrators were wounded. The inquest into Fletcher's death reached a verdict that she was "killed by a bullet coming from one of two windows on the west side of the front on the first floor of the Libyan People's Bureau". Following the breaking of diplomatic relations, Libya arrested six British nationals, the last four of whom were released after nine months in captivity. Two years after Fletcher's murder, the event became a factor in the decision by the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to allow the US bombing of Libya from bases in the UK. In 1999, a warming of diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya led to a statement from the Libyan government admitting culpability in Fletcher's shooting, and the payment of compensation. British police continued their investigation until 2017. Although sufficient evidence existed to prosecute one of the co-conspirators, no charges were brought as some of the evidence could not be raised in court due to national security concerns. As at 2023 no one has been convicted of Fletcher's murder, although in 2021 the High Court of Justice determined that Gaddafi's ally Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk was jointly liable for Fletcher's murder. ## Background ### Yvonne Fletcher Yvonne Joyce Fletcher was born on 15 June 1958 in the Wiltshire village of Semley, to Michael Fletcher and his wife Queenie (née Troke). Yvonne was the eldest of the couple's four daughters. At the age of three she told her parents that she wanted to join the police. By the time she was eighteen and a half—the minimum entry age into the Metropolitan Police Service—she was 5 feet 2.5 inches (1.59 m) tall, shorter than the 5 feet 4 inches (1.63 m) required. She applied to several police forces but was turned down on the basis of her height, and considered applying for entry to the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. Despite the height restriction, in March 1977 Fletcher was accepted onto the Metropolitan Police 20-week training course. She passed and was placed on the standard two-year probation period with the warrant number 4257; she was posted to Bow Street police station, where she completed her probation and was confirmed as a regular Woman Police Constable (WPC). She was highly regarded by her colleagues, who nicknamed her "Super Fletch", and she became engaged to PC Michael Liddle, who also worked at Bow Street. ### Relations between Britain and Libya From 1979 there had been no Libyan ambassador appointed to the United Kingdom. A "Revolutionary Committee" was in control of the Libyan embassy in London, located at 5 St James's Square; the embassy was renamed the "People's Bureau". In 1980 Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi—the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council—saw many exiles from Libya as traitors and had given orders for several of them to be murdered. On his instructions, bombs were planted in London newsagents that sold newspapers critical of Gaddafi. Moussa Koussa was appointed as Secretary of the Libyan People's Bureau in London in 1979. He was expelled from the UK in 1980, after stating in an interview with The Times that the Libyan government planned to murder two opponents of Gaddafi's government living in the UK. The Lord Privy Seal, Sir Ian Gilmour, told the House of Commons that the government wished "to maintain good relations with Libya", but that "we are making it clear that the Libyan authorities must understand what can and cannot be done under the law of the United Kingdom, and that criminal actions in the United Kingdom must cease". After several murders of Gaddafi's political opponents in the UK in 1980, there was a decrease in activity until 1983, when the Libyan General People's Congress—the country's legislature—began a campaign against what they saw as the bourgeois habits of staff at several of the People's Bureaux, particularly the office in London. In February 1983 the bureau chief and cultural attaché were recalled to Libya and replaced with a four-man committee of students who had all been involved in revolutionary activities in Libya. Soon after they were appointed, they gave a press conference at which they threatened action against Libyan dissidents. On 10 and 11 March 1984 there were a series of bomb attacks in London and Manchester targeted at critics of the Gaddafi regime. The Libyan government denied being involved, but on 16 March the British government deported five Libyans said to be connected to the attacks. ### Vienna convention and diplomatic protection The protection of diplomats and their official premises is based on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1961, an international treaty; it was signed by 141 countries, including the UK and Libya. It was incorporated into UK law in the Diplomatic Privileges Act 1964. Among other measures, the act protects diplomats from prosecution for any crime unless the diplomat's home country waives his right to immunity. A country can declare a diplomat from another state to be persona non grata, and demand that they leave the country, but no other action can be taken against them. Diplomatic premises are also protected from entry by the police or security services, unless given permission by the country's ambassador. ## Shooting: 16–17 April 1984 On 16 April 1984 two students—active opponents of Gaddafi's rule—were executed in public hangings at the University of Tripoli. In response Libyan dissidents in Britain—members of the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF)—decided to stage a demonstration outside the People's Bureau on St James's Square. On 16 April a telex was sent from the People's Bureau in London to Tripoli asking for advice on how to deal with the demonstration. They asked which of three options they should follow: do nothing; drag some dissidents into the bureau to physically assault them; or shoot some of the demonstrators. The answer came back from Gaddafi to open fire on the protestors. The message was intercepted and decrypted by the National Security Agency in the US, who passed the information on to Government Communications Headquarters in the UK, from where it was forwarded to MI5, Britain's counter-intelligence and security agency. They failed to pass on the information to the police or the Home Office. During the night of 16–17 April a delegation from the People's Bureau attended a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to complain about the forthcoming demonstration, and ask that it be stopped. The Libyans were told that the Metropolitan Police would be informed, but would be unable to prevent the demonstration from going ahead. On the morning of 17 April, police workmen placed crowd control barriers in St James's Square in preparation for the demonstration. One of the Libyans from the People's Bureau told a workman that there were guns in the Bureau and there would be fighting that day. The workman passed the message on to police, who decided not to take action. A detachment of around 30 police officers was sent to St James's Square to monitor the demonstration; among them were Fletcher and her fiancé. They were accompanied by members of the Diplomatic Protection Group. About 75 LNSF protestors arrived from across the country, particularly northern England; the demonstration began at around 10:00 am. The demonstrators—many wearing masks or balaclavas, to ensure photographers from the People's Bureau could not record their identities—stayed behind barriers placed opposite the Bureau; they chanted anti-Gaddafi slogans and carried banners and placards. A counter-demonstration by Gaddafi supporters had been arranged by the People's Bureau and took place outside the building. The demonstrations were filmed by several international television crews invited by the Libyans. At 10:18 am automatic gunfire was discharged from two windows of the People's Bureau in the direction of the anti-Gaddafi demonstration. The shots wounded eleven protestors; according to the post-mortem examination report, one round entered Fletcher's back, "10 inches (250 mm) below the top of the right shoulder, 5+1⁄2 inches (140 mm) to the right of the spine and 3+1⁄4 inches (83 mm) behind the back fold of the right armpit". The bullet travelled right to left, through her thoracic diaphragm, liver and gall bladder before it was deflected by the spinal column out through the left side of the body, and then into the left elbow. While the demonstrators were moved into Charles II Street, Fletcher was aided by her colleagues; as she lay in the road outside the People's Bureau, she advised them to "keep calm". She was moved to Charles II Street; she became unconscious and stopped breathing and a colleague gave her resuscitation. At 10:40 am an ambulance took her to Westminster Hospital. As she was being transferred from the ambulance to a hospital trolley, a single spent round of ammunition fell from her uniform. She was operated on, but died at approximately midday. The police evacuated members of the public from the offices around the square, which they sealed off with a cordon; armed police took up positions facing the People's Bureau and on the surrounding rooftops. The garage entrance at the rear of the People's Bureau was not sealed off until at least ten minutes after the shooting, and in that time some of those inside departed the premises through that exit. With Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, on an official visit to Portugal, and Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, in China, responsibility for handling the crisis fell to Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary. Events spread to Libya soon after the shooting, as around 60 members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps surrounded the British embassy in Tripoli, and put the premises under siege, trapping the staff of 25—including Oliver Miles, the ambassador. Three British nationals working in Tripoli were arrested on unspecified charges. The post-mortem on Fletcher was undertaken in the evening of 17 April by the forensic pathologist Iain West. Examining the entry of the shot, he wrote that: > The angle of the bullet wound indicates that she was shot in the back by a person who was situated at a considerably higher level. Assuming that she was standing upright at the moment she was shot, the track would indicate that she had been shot from one of the adjacent floors of an adjacent building. From the angle of the entry wound, and Fletcher's position in the street—captured on news cameras seconds before she was shot—West established that the shot had come from the first floor of the embassy. ## Siege: 18–27 April 1984 On 18 April, Miles was allowed to leave the British embassy to meet representatives of the Libyan government; the siege in Tripoli was lifted that day and one of the men arrested the previous day was also released. The following day Gaddafi appeared on Libyan television and blamed the British police and security forces for the attack; he said that "we are surprised how a responsible state like England carry on [sic] committing this crime". Over the next week five bombs were planted in London, four of which were defused; on 20 April the fifth bomb exploded in the baggage area of Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport, for which police suspected Libyan bombers. The British government's attitude towards Libya hardened as a result of the bombs, although they were also sensitive to Libya's behaviour in previous diplomatic impasses, whereby the regime would arrest citizens of a country and hold them until the normalisation of formal relations. There were 8,000 British workers in Libya, mostly working in the oil and construction industries. The British government requested access to the People's Bureau, which was denied by the Libyan government. Two Libyan diplomats who were not in the embassy at the time of the shooting acted as intermediaries between police negotiators and those inside the building. The government also put the Special Air Service on standby; they flew from Stirling Lines, their base in Credenhill, Herefordshire, to London in preparation. Negotiations did not progress well, and on 22 April Britain informed the Libyan government that diplomatic ties were broken; the diplomats in the embassy were given until midnight on 29 April to leave the country, and Britain instructed its embassy staff to leave Tripoli by the same time. Fletcher's hat and four other officers' helmets were left lying in the square during the ensuing siege. In the days that followed, images of them were repeatedly shown in the British media. In the early morning of 27 April a policeman acted against orders and retrieved the hat from the square. It was placed on Fletcher's coffin for her funeral, which took place the same day at Salisbury Cathedral. In addition to 600 police officers, Leon Brittan attended, as did Lawrence Byford, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary and Kenneth Newman, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. On the same day as Fletcher's funeral the evacuation of the embassy began with the dispatch of diplomatic luggage—four canvas bags, marked with a diplomatic seal, and immune from search or seizure by the British police. Neutral intermediaries from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey oversaw the exit of goods and staff. The 30 staff in the embassy were allowed out in groups of five, instructed to walk in single-file with a gap between each of them; there was a 15-minute pause between each group exiting the building. Each person was frisked, photographed and questioned, but when attempts were made to fingerprint the men, they objected and the neutral intermediaries advised the police that this was not allowed. After being taken to the Civil Service College at Sunningdale where they were held for the day and questioned, the Libyans were put on a flight to Tripoli just before 8:00 pm. The same day, the remaining members of staff from the British embassy, including the ambassador, returned to London. ## Aftermath: 27 April 1984 – 5 February 1985 Once the Libyans had left the People's Bureau, police forensics teams entered and searched the square and the embassy building. Within the building—where they spent four days searching—gunshot residue was found at two windows on the first floor and a spent cartridge. With that evidence, and from the location of the bullets in the square, the police ascertained that two Sterling submachine guns had been fired, one pointing down at the demonstrators and one on a flatter trajectory across the square. The police search of the bureau found 4,367 rounds of ammunition, three semi-automatic pistols, four .38 revolvers and magazines for Sterling submachine guns. The search of the embassy was made by civilian experts employed by the police, accompanied by observers from Saudi Arabia. The inquest into Fletcher's death opened on 25 April but was adjourned to allow for the police to undertake further investigations. When it reconvened, police reported that they had 400 lines of enquiry open into the murder, but had not narrowed the field of suspects down from any of the 30 Libyans in the embassy. Iain West stated that the bullet entered Fletcher's body at an angle of between 60 and 70 degrees. Paul Knapman, the coroner heading the inquest, considered the angle too steep to have been fired from the first floor and questioned West on the point. The pathologist stated that Fletcher must have been turning when she was shot which, he said, would have reduced the angle. The jury concluded that Fletcher "was killed by a bullet coming from one of two windows on the west side of the front on the first floor of the Libyan People's Bureau". In April and May 1984 six British men working in Libya were rounded up and detained as hostages by a Revolutionary Committee. The Libyans demanded the restoration of diplomatic relations and the release of Libyans arrested on terror offences. Two of the men were freed in September, and in October Terry Waite—special envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury—visited Libya in an attempt to negotiate the release of the remaining men, the first of his four visits. The hostages were freed on 5 February 1985, after nine months in detention. ## Subsequent developments ### Gaddafi era: 1985–2011 Although there were rumours that four members of the embassy had been executed on their return to Libya, the reports were not considered reliable by the British government. The government did not try to re-open diplomatic relations with Libya for several years, and interaction between the two governments remained poor. In 1986 Thatcher agreed to the use of Royal Air Force bases by American aircraft involved in the bombing of Libya; she said in the House of Commons that the murder of Fletcher weighed in her decision. In 1991 the warrants issued to two Libyan men for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing further damaged British–Libyan relations. Abdul Fatah Younis, Libya's Minister for Public Security, met Christopher Long, Britain's ambassador to Egypt in 1992. Younis apologised for his country's role in Fletcher's murder, and offered to assist with the extradition of her killers; the offer was not accepted, but led to discussions between the two countries, which were kept secret. The Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, broadcast in April 1996, posited that the shots were fired from a different building, from an upper floor that had been rented by MI5, and that the shots had been from agents of MI5 or the American CIA, to discredit the Libyan regime. The contents of the programme were raised in question in the House of Commons by Tam Dalyell, and answered by David Maclean, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, who stated that "The programme asks us to believe that WPC Fletcher was murdered by, or with the connivance of, a British or American intelligence officer. If it were not so offensive and obscene, it would be laughable." He concluded that it was the Libyans in the bureau who should co-operate with the murder investigation. In July 1999 the Libyan government publicly accepted responsibility for the murder, agreed to pay compensation of £250,000 to Fletcher's family and agreed to support the investigation into Fletcher's murder. In a statement to the House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook announced: > Libya accepts general responsibility for the actions of those in the Libyan People's Bureau at the time of the shooting. It expresses deep regret to the family of WPC Fletcher for what occurred and offers to pay compensation now to the family. Libya agrees to participate in and co-operate with the continuing police investigation and to accept its outcome. On 24 February 2004 the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 reported that Shukri Ghanem, the Libyan prime minister, had claimed his country was not responsible for Fletcher's murder or for the Lockerbie bombing. Ghanem said that Libya had made the admission and paid compensation to bring peace and an end to international sanctions. The following day a statement on Libyan radio said that Ghanem's comment was "inaccurate and regrettable"; the Libyan government offered entry to Libya for the Metropolitan Police to undertake its investigation in Tripoli. Although they were able to undertake some steps during their four-day investigation, they were not allowed to arrest anyone. On their return it was announced that a joint investigation by British police and a Libyan magistrate would undertake a formal investigation under Libyan law. British detectives were able to interview their main suspect for the murder in June 2007, following the normalisation of diplomatic relations between the UK and Libya. Detectives spent seven weeks in Libya interviewing both witnesses and suspects. Queenie, Fletcher's mother, described the developments as "promising". That year a senior Canadian lawyer undertook a review of the available evidence for the Crown Prosecution Service. He advised that Abdulmagid Salah Ameri, a junior diplomat in the People's Bureau at the time of the shooting, had been identified by witnesses who had observed him firing a weapon from the embassy window. The report also suggested that there was sufficient evidence for two men, Matouk Mohammed Matouk and Abdulqadir al-Baghdadi, to face charges of conspiracy to murder. Both had escaped out of the garage door of the embassy on the day of the shooting; neither had diplomatic status and could, therefore, face prosecution. The report was not publicly released, but a leaked copy was obtained by The Daily Telegraph in 2009. In 2009 Gaddafi was interviewed by Sky News and apologised for the killing of Fletcher. The same year it was established that during trade negotiations between Britain and Libya in 2006, an agreement was reached that Fletcher's killer would not be extradited for trial in the UK. In a letter to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, the Police Federation said they were "appalled and disgusted" by the decision. A spokesman for the Foreign Office denied that there was a secret deal, and stated that "Libyan law did not allow for the extradition for trial in other countries so a trial in Libya was the only outcome that would reflect our determination to see justice done". ### Post-Gaddafi era: 2011–2021 Following the 2011 Libyan civil war and the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in August that year, it was reported that one of the co-conspirators, Abdulqadir al-Baghdadi, had been killed during in-fighting among Gaddafi loyalists. In June the following year, two police officers flew to Libya to discuss developments in the case. The following month The Sunday Telegraph named Salah Eddin Khalifa, a high-level member of the former regime, as the pro-Gaddafi student who shot Fletcher. Within minutes of the shooting, he had left the embassy via a back door before it was surrounded by police. Khalifa was said to have moved to another north African city following the civil war. In November 2015 the Metropolitan Police arrested Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk, a former member of the Gaddafi government and a close ally of Gaddafi who was a key member of the revolutionary committee in control of the embassy on that day; in 2011 he claimed political asylum in the UK. Although initially arrested on charges of money laundering, he was bailed on charges of conspiracy to murder Fletcher. In May 2017 the charges against him were dropped as evidence against him could not be provided in court because of national security concerns. In November 2019, Flethcer's former colleague John Murray said he was still trying to find the murderer; in November 2021 a civil case he brought against Mabrouk, was heard at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Mabrouk was found to be jointly liable for Fletcher's death. ## Legacy In April 1984 the film director Michael Winner wrote to The Times to suggest that a memorial be placed in St James's Square "to commemorate not only the horrific death of this brave young girl, but also be a constant reminder to her killers of the feelings of the British people". After receiving sizeable donations, Winner set up the Police Memorial Trust on 3 May to erect memorials to honour British police officers killed in the line of duty. Fletcher became the first police officer honoured by the Police Memorial Trust. On 1 February 1985 her memorial was unveiled in St James's Square by Thatcher, in a ceremony attended by the leaders of the main British political parties. During her unveiling speech, Thatcher said: > This simple memorial, erected by the Police Memorial Trust, will be a reminder to Londoners and to visitors alike of the debt that we owe to Yvonne Fletcher and all her colleagues in the Police. Without them the law could not be upheld. Without them, indeed, there would be no law, and no liberty. The granite and Portland stone commemorative pillar lies in the north-east corner of St James's Square, facing the former Libyan embassy. Westminster City Council altered part of the pavement with a rounded extension into the roadway to create an area for people to stand in front of it. A cherry tree was planted in St James's Square in memory of Fletcher in 1984, and there is a memorial plaque in Charing Cross Police Station, London. In 1988 John Baker, the Bishop of Salisbury dedicated a stained glass window at St Leonard's Church, Semley, to Fletcher; the window was designed by the artist Henry Haig. Following a government review into the law surrounding inviolability of diplomatic premises, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 was introduced. Among other measures, the act allows the government to remove diplomatic status from premises which they consider to be misused. ## See also - List of British police officers killed in the line of duty - List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom
21,001,557	Second Test, 1948 Ashes series	1,165,553,860	Australia-England cricket test match	[ "1948 Ashes series", "1948 in English sport", "June 1948 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Test cricket matches", "The Invincibles (cricket)" ]	The Second Test of the 1948 Ashes series was one of five Tests in the The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England. The match was played at Lord's in London from 24 to 29 June, with a rest day on 27 June 1948. Australia won the match by 409 runs to take a 2–0 lead, meaning that England would need to win the remaining three matches to regain The Ashes. Australian captain Don Bradman won the toss and elected to bat. The tourists had won the First Test convincingly, and decided to field the same team, while England made three changes, mainly to adopt a more attacking bowling strategy. Australia started strongly, led by opener Arthur Morris, who scored 105 and took the score to 166/2 mid-way through the first day. However, the later batsmen struggled after his departure and fell to 258/7 by the end of the first day, handing the home team the advantage. However, a lower-order counterattack on the second morning saw Australia reach 350, wicket-keeper Don Tallon scoring 53. For England, the seamer Alec Bedser was the most successful bowler, taking 4/100. Australian paceman Ray Lindwall then cut through the English top-order, reducing them to 46/4. After a recovery an 87-run partnership between Denis Compton—who top-scored with 53—and captain Norman Yardley, both fell within one run of each other and England looked set to be dismissed short of the follow on mark when they were at 145/7. However, the lower order resisted stoutly and they ended at 215 early on the third morning; Lindwall took 5/70. Australia then set about extending their first innings lead, and opener Sid Barnes led the way, scoring 141. He put on an opening partnership of 122 with Morris (62), and added 174 with Bradman (89). Australia closed the third day at 343/4 after a productive day of batting, giving them a lead of 478 despite losing three quick wickets late in the afternoon. After the rest day, Australia proceeded to reach 460/7—Keith Miller making 74—before Bradman declared, setting England a target of 596 midway through the afternoon. The hosts reached 106/3 at stumps on the fourth day, but then collapsed on the final morning to be all out for 186, handing Australia a 409-run victory. Cyril Washbrook and Tom Dollery top-scored for England with 37 apiece. Ernie Toshack had the pick of the figures with 5/40 while Lindwall took 3/61. Although Toshack had the better figures, commentators credited Lindwall with orchestrating the England collapse; at the start of the innings he bowled at leading English batsmen Len Hutton at great pace before dismissing him. Hutton had appeared very unsettled by Lindwall and played meekly. He was severely criticised for his timid manner and was controversially dropped for the following match as the selectors thought he was providing a poor example to the junior members of the team. The Australians were very pleased with this decision, which they believed to be wrong, as they regarded Hutton as their most formidable opponent. The match set a new record for the highest attendance at a Test in England. ## Background Australia had proceeded through the first two months of the tour of England without defeat. After winning 10 of the first twelve matches before the Tests started, eight of these by an innings—the other two were drawn—they won the First Test by eight wickets. Between the Tests, they defeated Northamptonshire by an innings before drawing against Yorkshire. According to former English paceman Bill Bowes, England had approached the First Test with the intention of achieving a draw against a team they regarded as their superior, reflected in their selections and use of defensive tactics. Bowes himself believed the tactics to be correct and almost successful. However, he suspected that Walter Robins, one of the selectors, considered the English strategy to be misguided and that they should attack the Australians. This was reflected in the English selections. The home team made three changes; the leg spinner Doug Wright, who was forced to withdraw from the First Test at late notice due to lumbago, had regained his fitness and replaced the left arm orthodox spin of Young, who had taken match figures of 1/107 in the First Test—Australian wicket-keeper Don Tallon was his only wicket. However, he had managed to keep the batsmen quiet with his defensive leg theory, bowling 60 overs for 79 runs; Wright was a much more attacking and therefore expensive bowler. Jim Laker, who had been called into the First Test team due to Wright's lumbago, was initially the third spinner in the pecking order, but he took 4/138, including three specialist batsmen, and was retained. Alec Coxon took match figures of 4/113 for Yorkshire against Australia, taking four middle-order wickets, and scored 21 and 16 not out in the middle-order. He came into the team as an all-rounder, even though his performances during the rest of the English season had been mediocre; he had a batting average of 20.25 for the summer and took only ten wickets in seven matches prior to the county fixture against Australia. Bowes saw him as an attacking bowler compatible with Robins's strategic thinking. Tom Dollery was called into the team after a run of heavy scoring for Warwickshire on difficult pitches at Edgbaston. He had made two centuries and seven fifties in 12 first-class matches for the season. Batsman Charlie Barnett was dropped after scoring only eight and six in the First Test. Joe Hardstaff junior was also left out; he had scored a duck and 43 in the First Test, and had a toe infection, so the selectors were spared the predicament of deciding whether to drop him on performance grounds. With Wright in for Young, and Coxon selected in place of a specialist batsman, England had a more attacking bowling line-up, something the retired Australian Test leg spinner Bill O'Reilly praised. He also thought the selection of Coxon was beneficial, as his swing bowling would ease the workload of batsman Bill Edrich, who had opened the bowling in the previous Test. O'Reilly regarded Edrich as a mediocre bowler and thought the extra burden with the ball was detracting from his main duty, batting. Australia retained the same XI from the First Test at Trent Bridge. Ian Johnson was retained despite taking match figures of 1/85, as was Bill Brown, the opener who was batting out of position in the middle-order. Brown had scored 25, 26 and 17 in his three innings in the middle-order during the tour. O'Reilly criticised the selection of Brown, who had appeared to be noticeably uncomfortable in the unfamiliar role. He said that despite Brown's unbeaten double century in his previous Test at Lord's in 1938, Sam Loxton and Neil Harvey had better claims to selection. Following his groin injury at Trent Bridge, Lindwall was subjected to a thorough fitness test on the first morning. Bradman was not convinced of Lindwall's fitness, but the bowler's protestations were sufficient to convince his captain to gamble on his inclusion. Australia won the toss and elected to bat, allowing Lindwall further time to recover from his injury. Before the toss, Bradman had spent an unusually long time inspecting the wicket, and after correctly predicting the side of the coin, he looked at the surface for another period before announcing Australia's decision to bat. The all-rounder Keith Miller played, but was unfit to bowl. ## Scorecard ### Australia innings ### England innings ## 24 June: Day One At 8:00 on the morning of the Test, there was a storm to the south of London but the rain did not reach Lord's, which was located in the north of the English capital. The first over bowled by Bedser to Barnes was watchfully played to complete a maiden. The debutant Coxon opened the bowling with Bedser and he removed Barnes for a duck in his second over, caught by Hutton at short fine leg from a short delivery to leave Australia 3/1. Barnes tried to knock the ball through square leg but misjudged the pace of the wicket and played his shot too early, mishitting the ball to Hutton. Coxon bowled from very close to the wickets and left substantial footmarks just outside the right-hander's leg stump in an area ideal for a leg spinner. Although he was not of particularly fast pace, Coxon ran in vigorously and landed heavily after a pronounced delivery stride, making a significant impact on the surface. Bradman received a loud, positive reception from the crowd as he came out to bat in his final Test at Lord's. Bradman initially struggled against the English bowling. He faced his first ball from Coxon and inside edged it past his leg stump, before missing the third ball from Coxon and surviving a loud appeal for leg before wicket (lbw). Bowling from the other end, Bedser beat Bradman with seam movement off the pitch and one ball narrowly skimmed past the stumps. Standing up to the stumps, wicket-keeper Godfrey Evans removed the bails as Bradman leaned forward, but his foot had stayed firmly behind the crease. In another close call, Bradman inside edged a ball towards Yardley at short leg, but the English captain was slow to react and the ball landed in front of him. The Australian captain managed only three runs in the first 20 minutes and Australia had scored only 14 after the first 30 minutes. Coxon consistently moved the ball into a cautious Bradman, and the Australians scored only 32 runs in the first hour. Edrich then relieved Coxon, who had bowled his first seven overs in Test cricket for the loss of only 10 runs. Edrich bowled a bouncer, which Bradman tried to swing to the leg side, but the leading edge instead went in the air and landed behind point. On 13, Bradman leg glanced a Bedser ball from his legs, narrowly evading Hutton in the trap at short fine leg. After one hour, he was on 14. Bradman had fallen twice for the leg trap in the previous Test. Bedser continued to the probe the Australian captain with inswingers, trying to extract a lofted leg glance in the vicinity if the waiting Hutton. In contrast, Morris was playing fluently and scoring many runs from the back cut. Bedser was relieved after 70 minutes of bowling. The leg spin of Wright was introduced and Australia cut loose. Wright bowled a no-ball that Morris dispatched into the leg side crowd for six, before hitting another ball for four. Bradman and Morris settled down as Coxon and Wright operated. The Australian captain drove the debutant Coxon through the covers for two fours, and Yardley made frequent rotations of his bowlers. Coxon continued to significantly rough up the pitch outside the right-handed batsman's leg stump, and from the other, Wright was able to extract substantial spin on the first morning of the match, hitting Morris in the stomach with a ball that turned in sharply from outside off stump. At lunch, Australia were 82/1 with Morris on 45 and Bradman 35. The tourists had largely been content to wait for loose deliveries, rather than take risks, and as the Englishmen bowled accurately, the Australians did not score quickly. In the third over after the lunch break, with the score at 87, Bradman was caught for the third consecutive time in the series by Hutton off Bedser at short fine leg. Hutton had dropped Bradman in the same position when he was on 13. Including a county match against Yorkshire, it was the fourth time Hutton had caught Bradman in the leg trap from a glance. According to O'Reilly, this was evidence that Bradman was no longer the player he was before World War II, as he had been unable to disperse the close-catching fielders by counter-attacking, before eventually being dismissed. O'Reilly said this was the first time Bradman had fallen to the same trap three times in succession. Hassett came to the crease to join Morris, with the new ball already due. Still using the old ball, Bedser beat Hassett second ball with a delivery that moved back in, but the appeal for lbw was turned down. However, Yardley opted to not take the ball, and Hassett managed to score a single and get off strike before the English captain called for a replacement ball. O'Reilly said the failure to take the new ball immediately after the appeal was a missed opportunity to maximise the psychological pressure on Hassett. After a slow start, Morris had begun to take control. He drove the ball through the covers and clipped it through the leg side, and reached his century with consecutive boundaries from Coxon soon after the new ball was taken. Former Australian Test opener Jack Fingleton, covering the tour as a newspaper journalist, called it "a pretty Test century in the grandest of all cricket settings". The century ended a poor run of form for Morris earlier in the tour, when he had been shuffling uncertainly on the crease without decisively moving forward or back. O'Reilly called it Morris's best Test century to date, as this was the strongest English attack he had faced during his career, and because of the loss of wickets at the other end. O'Reilly said Morris had been disciplined in not playing loose shots outside off stump and missing or edging them, yet still being able to score quickly at every opportunity. Morris was out soon after for 105 runs with the score at 166/3, having struck 14 fours and one six. His innings, which was noted for powerful, well-placed cover drives, ended when he hit Coxon to Hutton in the gully. Miller came in and Bedser bowled three consecutive outswingers to him. A fourth ball swung the other way, and Miller did not offer a shot, expecting the ball to curve away and miss the stumps. Instead, he was hit in front of the wickets and given out lbw for four. O'Reilly said Miller's display was more akin to that of a tail-end batsman with minimal skill, and blamed his poor form with the bat on an excessive workload imposed on him by Bradman. With two quick wickets, England had put the match back in the balance. Batting out of position in the middle-order, Brown came in at 173/4 and helped Hassett to rebuild the innings. Both scored slowly, averaging more than three and a half minutes for each run. They realised Australia could not afford to lose any more wickets quickly and batted with extreme caution, reluctant even to attack long hops. Hassett was dropped three times before Yardley, who was bowling mainly in order to allow his frontline bowlers to recuperate, broke through his defences with a yorker. The English skipper trapped Brown lbw nine runs later to leave Australia at 225/6. Brown had hit two consecutive half-volleys off his pads through the leg side for four, and attempted a third boundary in a row to a similar delivery. However, this third delivery came off the pitch more quickly and beat Brown for pace. This left Johnson and Tallon as the new men at the crease. Johnson struggled to score, while Tallon did so freely in the last hour. Edrich had Johnson caught behind for four to leave Australia at 246/7. Johnson had contributed only four of the 30 runs scored while he was at the crease. Lindwall joined Tallon and the pair survived to the close of play. England were well placed when Australia ended at stumps on 258/7 with Tallon on 25 and Lindwall on 3. Tallon had dominated the scoring late in the day, making 25 of the 33 runs added. Bowes believed that Yardley attacked very well, keeping the pressure on Australia by rotating his bowlers effectively so his three main bowlers were always at the crease. O'Reilly praised Evans's agile display in his stumping attempts as the fastest and best he had seen. The English crowd were optimistic about England's position and some of them immediately camped outside the turnstiles upon leaving the ground. Arlott said England's "bowlers had done nobly". ## 25 June: Day Two The next day, the English crowd filled the ground early, anticipating a strong showing from the home team after their promising start on the first day, but Australia's lower order batted their team into control on the second morning. Tallon and Lindwall batted confidently from the start of the play, and the latter hit two cover drives for four from Bedser after the new ball was taken. O'Reilly said Lindwall was playing in the same manner as when he made his maiden Test century in the last Ashes series, but he then played around a straight ball from Bedser, and was bowled for 15 to leave the score at 275/8. Tallon kept on batting in a conventional manner, while Johnston and Toshack played adventurously, registering the highest Test scores of their careers. Both Johnston and Toshack swung hard at the ball, which often went in vastly different directions to where they had aimed their shots. Australia's wicket-keeper put on 45 with Johnston—who scored 29—before becoming Bedser's second victim of the morning, holing out to Yardley for 53. Toshack came out to join Johnston with the score at 320/9 and the last pair put on 30 more runs before the latter was stumped from Wright's leg spin, having overbalanced while leaning onto the front foot and trying to hit a ball for six. The Australians had regained the momentum, adding 92 runs in 66 minutes of hitting in the morning. One sequence of two overs from Edrich was taken for 28 runs, with many balls being unintentionally spooned over the slips or the covers from mishits. Both Johnston and Toshack—not known for their batting ability—played without inhibitions, joyfully revelling in their luck. Yardley was later criticised for not bringing Wright into the attack at an earlier stage, as the Australian tail was dealing efficiently with the English pacemen. Bedser was the most successful of the bowlers, ending with 4/100 from 43 overs, while debutant Coxon took 2/90 from 35 overs. The off spin of Laker was used sparingly, accounting for only seven overs, whereas the part-time medium pace of Edrich and Yardley had combined for 23 overs. Washbrook and Hutton then strode to the crease as England faced a short burst of Australian pace before the lunch break. Lindwall took the new ball and felt pain in his groin after delivering the first ball to Hutton. Despite this, Lindwall persevered, and his first over was a maiden. Seeing Lindwall struggle through the pain barrier, Bradman tossed the ball to Miller at the start off the second over to see if he could lift and bowl as well. However, Miller threw the ball back to his captain, indicating that his body would not be able to withstand the strain. This resulted in media speculation that Bradman and Miller had quarrelled. Although Bradman claimed the exchange had been amicable, others disputed this. Teammate Barnes later asserted that Miller had retorted by suggesting Bradman—a very occasional slower bowler—bowl himself. Barnes said the captain "was as wild as a battery-stung brumby" and warned his unwilling bowler that there would be consequences for his defiance. According to unpublished writings in Fingleton's personal collection, Bradman chastised his players in the dressing room at the end of the play, saying "I'm 40 and I can do my full day's work in the field." Miller reportedly snapped "So would I—if I had fibrositis"; Bradman had been discharged from the armed services during World War II on health grounds, whereas most of the team had been sent into battle. Miller had crash-landed while serving as a fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force in England and had suffered chronic back trouble ever since. Washbrook had been criticised after the First Test for playing aggressively and taking too many risks early in his innings, having fallen twice to attacking shots. He continued to play in a similar way, rather than adopting the traditional opener's strategy of not playing at any ball unless it was going to hit the stumps and waiting for the bowlers to tire. Lindwall had Washbrook caught behind for eight in his fourth over, playing at a ball outside off stump, and ended his pre-lunch spell with 1/7 from six overs, while Johnston accompanied him from the other end. Neither Hutton nor Washbrook appeared comfortable against the bowling, and the new batsman Edrich tried to hit Lindwall through the off side, leading to a loud appeal for caught behind, which was turned down. After lunch, Hutton did the majority of the scoring, before playing outside a Johnson off break on the front foot and being bowled for 20 to leave England at 32/2. The English opener had been uncertain against Johnson's spin and played forward too early at a slower ball, which went between a gap between his bat and pad. Compton came in, having been dismissed hit wicket after falling over in the last Test while trying to avoid a bouncer, and Lindwall delivered a few short balls straight away, but the new batsman was not caught off-guard. Lindwall then clean bowled Edrich—who was playing across the line—with an outswinger for five. Edrich had toiled for 70 minutes in scoring those runs. Dollery came out and played the first ball with his pads before being bowled for a duck from the next delivery. Dollery's bat was still about to start its downward swing towards by the time Lindwall's outswinger had passed him and hit the stumps. O'Reilly said Dollery's inability to deal with Lindwall was typical of English cricket's lack of answers to express pace bowling. This was part of a six-over post-lunch spell by Lindwall that yielded 2/11 as the batsmen appeared unable to deal with his extreme pace. England were 46/4 and Australia firmly in control. Compton was joined by his skipper Yardley and after playing defensively for a period, the pair rebuilt the innings, scoring 87 runs in 100 minutes. After the loss of four quick wickets, the Compton and Yardley elected to not play at any balls that were not on the line of the stumps, and Lindwall and Johnston were taken off to recuperate ahead of the second new ball. Australia had the option of taking the new ball just before the tea break, but Bradman decided to wait so his two pacemen could have an extra 20 minutes to replenish their energy levels. Meanwhile, Johnson and Toshack operated, and the English duo played them cautiously and comfortably. At tea, England had recovered to be 129/4, with Compton on 51 and Yardley 42. The English captain had been particularly successful against Johnson, capitalising on a series of overpitched balls and driving them away for runs. After tea, Lindwall and Johnston returned with the new ball, but the former appeared to be tired and lacking in spirit in his first over. Compton edged Johnston into the slips, where Miller took a low catch, ending his innings for 53. One run later, Lindwall clipped Yardley's off stump with the first ball of the next over to leave England at 134/6; the home skipper had made 44 before an outswinger had evaded his bat as he attempted to play a back foot defensive shot. Evans came to the crease and tried to counter-attack, hitting Lindwall for a boundary past square leg. Johnston then removed Evans for nine, caught by a diving Miller from a swing of the bat wide outside off stump, leaving the hosts at 145/7. Coxon and Laker came to the crease and put on a 41-run stand for the eighth wicket. After 85 minutes of resistance, Coxon hit a catch back to Johnson, ending his first Test innings for 19, and Laker was caught behind from the same bowler, having already been dropped twice in the slips. England's last pair added ten runs to close at stumps on 207/9 with Bedser on six and Wright eight, having just avoided the follow on. ## 26 June: Day Three On the third morning, Bedser and Wright survived for 20 minutes, and Lindwall tried to break their resistance by aiming a few bouncers at the former. Bedser eventually inside edged a Lindwall bouncer onto his stumps, ending England's innings at 215, giving Australia a 135-run first innings lead. Lindwall ended with 5/70, while Johnson took 3/72 and Johnston 2/43. Toshack was the other bowler used, sending down 18 overs for the loss of 23 runs. In later years, Bradman told Lindwall that he pretended not to notice his bowler's pain. Lindwall was worried his captain had noticed the injury, but Bradman later claimed to have feigned ignorance to allow his paceman to relax. O'Reilly said Lindwall "bowled as well as any fast bowler can bowl. He always seemed to have the situation sized up correctly and he knew just when to put his all into the task ... and enjoyed a triumph which seldom comes to any bowler." Arlott praised Lindwall for his subtle variations in pace, line and length, and how he kept the batsman guessing as to what was coming to them. The weather was fine as Australia started their second innings just after noon. From the second ball of the innings, bowled by Bedser, Barnes got off the mark to avoid his pair. Coxon took the new ball at the other end and Barnes and Morris saw it off. In contrast to their English counterparts, the Australian opening pair took a cautious approach to begin with, avoiding the hook shot and not playing at balls that were not going to hit the stumps and established a solid start for themselves. Yardley then introduced Laker, who induced Morris to hit a ball back down the pitch in the air, but the bowler was slow to react to the possibility of a caught and bowled. According to O'Reilly, most other bowlers would have been able to reach the ball and attempt a catch. Barnes survived a missed stumping opportunity from Laker in the same over when he was on 18; he came down the pitch and the ball bounced out of the footmarks and narrowly missed leg stump, but Evans fumbled it, and it went away for four byes. Barnes took advantage of his reprieve to combine with Morris in an opening stand of 122, as Yardley made frequent bowling changes in an attempt to disrupt their progress. Wright came on and bowled a no-ball, which Morris lofted into the crowd for six. Morris stopped shuffling, while Barnes decided to adopt a strategy of pre-emptively moving down the pitch to Laker. Earlier in the tour, Barnes had often been bowled or trapped lbw trying to force off breaks into the leg side. He drove Laker into the pavilion and Australia were 73/0 at lunch with Morris on 40 and Barnes 25, an overall lead of 208. After lunch, Morris was bowled for 62, knocking a ball from Wright onto his stumps, after attempting a sweep from a long hop. This brought Bradman in to join Barnes. Yardley surrounded the Australian captain with fielders and Laker beat his bat thrice in an over. Bedser was brought in with the leg trap again in place as he bowled on Bradman's pads with the second new ball. The Australian captain decided to avoid the danger of being caught at short fine leg from a leg glance by padding the inswingers away with his front leg. Bedser responded by changing his tactics by bowling a series of outswingers, beating the outside edge of his bat three times in a row, narrowly missing the off stump on one occasion. Barnes responded by manipulating the strike and shielding Bradman from Bedser. The Australian opener had little trouble against the leg trap Bedser set for him, scoring freely into the leg side and taking the shine off the new ball. Barnes was also quiet after lunch, and after one long period of defence, he drove Laker for four through the covers, eliciting a round of ironic applause. The Australian opener responded by placing his hand on his chest and bowing to the spectators. Barnes had started slowly, but he accelerated after reaching his half-century. Bradman took two consecutive boundaries from Wright to bring up his fifty. This left Barnes on 96 and Australia at 222/1, half an hour after tea. By this time, the pace of the pitch appeared to have slowed, making batting relatively easy. Barnes lingered for a further ten minutes on 96 before reaching his century with a straight drive from Laker. He had taken 255 minutes and hit ten fours. After registering his century, Barnes became particularly aggressive. Barnes stepped out to attack Laker but missed; luckily for him, Evans failed to collect the ball as it turned down the leg side. Barnes dispatched one Laker over for 21 runs, including two successive blows over the long on boundary for six, and two fours, and Australia's lead went past the 400 mark with nine wickets still in hand. Yardley then brought on the part-time left-arm unorthodox spin of Compton, and himself, in an attempt to stem Barnes' hitting. The Australian finally fell for 141, caught by Washbrook on the boundary from Yardley. The ball would have gone for another six had it not been intercepted by Washbrook. Barnes had struck 14 boundaries and two sixes in his innings. The speed of his batting had allowed Australia to reach 296/2 in minutes, after a 174-run partnership with Bradman. Yardley bowled Hassett for a golden duck off the inside edge, so Miller came to the crease at 296/3 to face Yardley's hat-trick ball. The Australian all-rounder survived a loud lbw appeal on his first ball, denying the English captain his hat-trick. Despite Yardley's failure to complete the hat-trick, he had taken four wickets in the match, and was going through an unusually productive period with his semi-regular bowling. While England's front-line bowlers struggled, Yardley managed 9 wickets at a bowling average of 22.66 for the series. His average was second only to Lindwall among all bowlers, and only Bedser (18) among his players dismissed more batsmen. In contrast, Yardley averaged less than two wickets every three matches throughout his first-class career, at an average above 30. Bradman was on 89 and heading towards a century in his last Test innings at Lord's when he fell to Bedser again, this time courtesy of a one-handed diving effort from Edrich. Bradman had been worried by Bedser's angle into his pads and the leg trap, but the seamer's leg cutter moved the ball the other way towards the slips and caught Bradman's outside edge. Bedser had dismissed Bradman all four times so far in the Test series. Brown joined Miller at 329/4 after Australia had lost 3/33. The tourists reached stumps at 343 without further loss, Miller striking one six over square leg into the grandstand. He had also offered two chances, but none of the catches were completed. This gave Australia a lead of 478 at the end of the third day, with Miller on 22 and Brown on 7. In all, England had missed seven catches or stumpings. O'Reilly said the loss of three quick wickets in the afternoon was not so much a sign of an English revival but Australian complacency due to the large size of the lead. ## 28 June: Day Four After the Sunday rest day, Australia resumed with a lead of 478 runs and six wickets in hand. The morning was punctuated by three rain stoppages, which increased England's chances of saving the game. Just ten minutes after the start of the day's play, heavy rain intervened. The weather cleared and Miller and Brown moved to lunch on 63 and 32 respectively, having advanced Australia to 409/4. Miller was given a life before lunch when he hit a ball high into the air; Dollery stood right under it and had ample time to prepare, but dropped the catch. In 88 minutes of play, Australia added a further 66 runs. During this time, the third new ball became available, but England opted not to use it immediately, as the wet and slippery ground had made it hard for the bowlers to grip the ball or run up to the crease with confidence; the hosts instead waited for drier conditions so they could exercise more control over the ball. However, after a period of using his slower bowlers, Yardley opted to take the new ball, and Miller hit three boundaries to pass 50, and both batsmen lifted their rate of scoring. It appeared that aside from the need to score quickly in preparation for the declaration, both players found the new ball easier to see than its muddied predecessor. Miller hooked Coxon repeatedly, and drove Bedser for many runs. Bradman was expected to declare just before lunch so he could attack the English openers for a short period before the adjournment, but a shower at this time deterred him from doing so, as his bowlers would have struggled to grip the ball; Lindwall had also been injured on a slippery surface in earlier times. After the resumption of play, Brown was caught behind from Coxon for 32 without adding to his lunch score, ending an 87-run partnership with Miller, and bringing Lindwall to the crease at 416/5. Miller and Lindwall attacked at every opportunity before the declaration. Miller's innings was noted for its driving, and he was out for 74, playing a hook shot that was caught by Bedser at square leg from Laker in pursuit of quick runs. He was followed by Lindwall, who ran out of his crease in attempt to hit Laker across the line to the boundary, missed, and was stumped for 25, prompting Bradman to declare with Australia at 460/7 with a lead of 595 runs. The tourists had added 51 runs for the loss of three wickets in approximately an hour's batting after lunch. Yardley and Laker had been the only multiple wicket-takers, with two each. The Australians had punished the spinners the most, taking more than 3.50 runs per over from each of Wright, Laker and Compton. It would take a world record chase from England to win the match. Yardley decided to use the medium roller to flatten out the surface, but further showers breathed more life into the pitch, forcing a rain break immediately after the start of England's run chase. The rain immediately stopped after the players returned to the pavilion, but upon promptly returning to the middle, the rain started again. The players returned after 15 minutes and played for approximately half an hour, before Washbrook and Hutton unsuccessfully appealed against the light. Rain then came again for another 40 minutes, which included the tea break. The weather cleared in time for the normal resumption of play at 4:30 after the scheduled adjournment. When the players returned, Lindwall and Johnston extracted steep bounce with the new ball, troubling the English batsmen. However, Washbrook changed his tactics and decided to eschew the hook shot, even allowing some short balls to hit him on the body. Washbrook drove Johnston for three runs and then pulled Lindwall for a four, almost collecting Barnes—who was standing close in at short leg—in the nose. He proceeded to score England's first 16 runs. Lindwall dropped Hutton from Johnston's bowling before the English batsman had scored. Johnston usually moved the ball into the right-handed batsmen, but on this occasion the ball went straight on and took the outside of the edge of the bat. Hutton had trouble dealing with Lindwall, and played and missed multiple times in the deteriorating light, hampered by the lack of a sightscreen. Fingleton described it as "probably Hutton's worst effort in a Test". In a fidgety display, Hutton played loosely outside the off stump and missed four times in one Johnston over. O'Reilly said Hutton "seemed to have lost all power of concentration and looked like a man being led to the gallows", and that he "was little more than a masquerader compared to the Hutton [of 1938]". Hutton took 32 minutes of batting to score his first run of the innings. Hutton and Washbrook took the score to 42, England's highest opening partnership of the series thus far, before the former edged Lindwall to Johnson in the slips and was out for 13. Edrich and Washbrook were then subjected to repeated short balls, and the latter was hit several times on the fingers while fending down Lindwall's bouncers, having decided to avoid the hook shot. Edrich ducked so low and so quickly that the top of the stumps could often be seen behind his back. Soon after, Toshack removed both Edrich and Washbrook in quick succession to leave England at 65/3. Edrich, having played only one scoring shot in the preceding 20 minutes, edged an overpitched delivery to Johnson low down in the slips, and decided to stand his ground after the catch was taken. The batsman thought he may have hit a bump ball into the ground before it flew to Johnson, but the umpire ruled otherwise and gave him out. Tallon then took a difficult catch to remove Washbrook. Washbrook inside edged a Toshack full toss directly downwards at Tallon's ankle. Bradman described the catch as "miraculous" because Tallon had to reach so low, so quickly, in order to take the catch. Up until this point, Washbrook had been beginning to find some fluency and was striking the ball confidently. Arlott speculated that Edrich and Washbrook may have lost concentration after Lindwall was replaced by Toshack, lulled into a false sense of security once Australia's leading bowler was no longer operating. However, Compton and Dollery added 41 in the last 30 minutes to take England to 106/3 at the close of play. Compton was on 29 and Dollery 21. The latter was particularly fluent in scoring on the leg side and he defied the Australian bowlers resolutely. Lindwall was brought back to put pressure on Dollery, having bowled him for a duck in the first innings, but the batsman had already been in the middle for a short period, and played the pace bowling with more assurance in the second innings. ## 29 June: Day Five The final day started poorly for England; after failing to hit a leg stump full toss for a boundary from the first ball of the day, Compton edged Johnston to a diving Miller at second slip from the second ball of the morning. Compton had aimed a square drive, but the delivery was Johnston's variation ball, which went away instead of into the batsman. It took the outside edge and flew to a diving Miller, who knocked the ball upwards before falling on his back and completing the catch as the ball went down. Compton stood his ground and waited for the umpire to confirm whether Miller had caught the ball cleanly, and was duly given out by the unhesitating official. O'Reilly described Miller's effort as "perhaps the very best slips catch of the whole series and ... a real match-winner." England had lost a wicket without adding to their overnight total. Yardley and Dollery took the score to 133 before Toshack bowled the former for 11. He trapped the new man Coxon two balls later in the same over for a duck, leaving England at 133/6. Coxon shuffled across his stumps and missed his first delivery, which hit him in front of the stumps and prompted a loud lbw appeal, and did the same thing to the next ball. During this spell, Toshack conceded only seven runs from eight overs, but was taken off as Bradman wanted to take the new ball and utilise Lindwall and Johnston. In the meantime, Dollery had continued to bat effectively, watching the ball closely onto his bat, and scoring three leg side boundaries from Johnston's bowling. Eight runs after Coxon's dismissal, Dollery shaped to duck a Lindwall bouncer, but it skidded through low and bowled him. Lindwall bowled Laker without scoring later in the same over to leave England at 141/8. Evans continued to resist stubbornly, remaining 24 not out as England were bowled out for 186 to cede a 409-run victory. Johnston had Bedser caught by Hassett for nine before Wright hit Toshack to Lindwall for four. Toshack ended the innings with 5/40, while Lindwall and Johnston took 3/61 and 2/62 respectively. The dominance of Australia's three-man seam attack was such that the off spinner Johnson bowled only two of the 78.1 overs. Arlott said that while Toshack had the best figures, Lindwall was the pivotal figure. He said that when Lindwall "so patently disturbed Hutton he struck a blow at the morale of the English batting that was never overcome." O'Reilly said England's second innings "had developed into an undignified scramble" and had allowed the Australian bowlers to pick up wickets as though they were playing against a weak county team. He blamed the low standards of county cricket for allowing English batsmen to accumulate large tallies of runs easily while not testing them against formidable bowling. O'Reilly said they had become soft after many matches against weak opposition, which had not forced them to concentrate as intensely as they would have had to in Test cricket. The gross attendance was 132,000 and receipts were £43,000—a record for a Test in England. ## Aftermath Wisden's verdict was that "this convincing victory confirmed the First Test realisations of Australia's clear superiority at all points. Only on the first day did England provide comparable opposition, and their Selectors must have been very disappointed at the lack of determination by some of the batsmen against an attack again below full strength ... Australia were the better team in batting, bowling, fielding and tactics, but England could not complain of lack of opportunities to wrest the initiative." Bowes considered England's attacking policy to be a failure and that, unlike the First Test, "there were no saving graces." The main talking point after the Test was the controversial omission of England's leading batsman Hutton for the Third Test. The reason was said to be Hutton's struggles with Lindwall's short-pitched bowling in the Second Test. Observers noticed Hutton backing away from the fast bowlers. The English selectors believed such a sight would have a negative effect on the rest of the side—which was not in good batting form—as it was a poor example from a leading batsman. The omission generated considerable acrimony, and pleased the Australians, who felt Hutton was their most formidable opponent with the bat. Former Australian batsman Jack Fingleton pointed out that while Hutton had batted erratically and appeared uncomfortable in the previous Test, he also had a strong track record against the tourists, having made 52 and 64 for the Marylebone Cricket Club against Australia in the lead-up matches, a game in which no other Englishman passed 35, and made 94, 76 and 122 retired ill in his last three Test innings during the previous Ashes series of 1946–47. Hutton's position was taken by debutant George Emmett, who made only 10 and a duck in a rain-shortened draw, and was subsequently dropped for the Fourth Test. Hutton's controversial exile thus ended after just one Test. However, both E. W. Swanton and Bill Bowes believed Hutton to be a better batsman once he returned to the side. He and Washbrook put on 168 for the first wicket, the first time England had put on more than 42 for the opening stand during the series, as the hosts went on to make 496, their highest score for the series. The pair added another triple-figure partnership in the second innings. Despite this, Australia's batsmen set a world record by chasing down 404 on the final day to win by seven wickets and take a series-winning 3–0 lead. The events of the Second Test also affected the career paths of other players. England's inability to cut down the Australians resulted in the dropping of three of their bowlers—Wright, Laker and Coxon—after the Lord's Test. Coxon's debut was his only Test match, something believed to be caused more by off-field events than sporting merit. There was a story that he punched Compton—whom he disliked and considered self-important—in the dressing room, but Coxon always denied this. However, there was certainly an altercation and Coxon was never selected again. The match was the last ever Test for Brown, who had struggled out of position in the middle-order, scoring 73 runs at 24.33 in three Test innings during the season. He had scored centuries on his previous Test outings at Lord's in 1934 and 1938, but the third visit proved to be the end of his international career. After the historic win in the Fourth Test, Australia had five tour matches before the final Test. They won three while two ended in rain-curtailed draws. Australia completed the series in style with an innings victory in the Fifth Test at The Oval to complete a 4–0 result. The Fifth Test was the last international match, and the tourists only had seven further matches to negotiate in order to fulfil Bradman's aim of going through the tour undefeated. Apart from two matches that were washed out after Australia had secured first innings leads of more than 200, Bradman's men had little difficulty, winning the remaining five fixtures by an innings. They thus became the first touring Test team to complete an English season undefeated, earning themselves the sobriquet The Invincibles.
212,019	Forest raven	1,153,532,218	Australian native bird	[ "Birds described in 1912", "Birds of New South Wales", "Birds of Tasmania", "Birds of Victoria (state)", "Corvus", "Endemic birds of Australia", "Ravens", "Taxa named by Gregory Mathews" ]	The forest raven (Corvus tasmanicus), also commonly known as the Tasmanian raven, is a passerine bird in the family Corvidae native to Tasmania and parts of southern Victoria, such as Wilsons Promontory and Portland. Populations are also found in parts of New South Wales, including Dorrigo and Armidale. Measuring 50–53 cm (20–21 in) in length, it has all-black plumage, beak and legs. As with the other two species of raven in Australia, its black feathers have grey bases. Adults have white irises; younger birds have dark brown and then hazel irises with an inner blue rim. New South Wales populations are recognised as a separate subspecies C. tasmanicus boreus, but appear to be nested within the Tasmanian subspecies genetically. The forest raven lives in a wide variety of habitats in Tasmania but is restricted to more closed forest on mainland Australia. Breeding takes place in spring and summer, occurring later in Tasmania than in New South Wales. The nest is a bowl-shaped structure of sticks sited high in a tree. An omnivorous and opportunistic feeder, the forest raven eats a wide variety of plant and animal material, as well as food waste from urban areas and roadkill. It has been blamed for killing lambs and poultry and raiding orchards in Tasmania, and is unprotected under Tasmanian legislation. The forest raven is sedentary, with pairs generally bonding for life and establishing permanent territories. ## Taxonomy and naming John Latham described the "South-Seas raven" in 1781, with loose throat feathers and found in "the Friendly Isles" in the South Seas, but did not give a binomial name. Although "the Friendly Isles" refers to Tonga, the specimen resembles what is now known as the forest raven and was collected by ships' surgeon William Anderson on the third voyage of James Cook in January 1777. Of the species, he had written, "Crows, nearly the same as ours in England". Tasked as the expedition's naturalist, Anderson collected many bird specimens but had died of tuberculosis in 1778 before the return home. Many collection localities were incorrect, and notes were lost or pieced together many years later. German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin gave the species the name Corvus australis in the 13th edition of Systema naturae in 1788. Since Australia was settled by Europeans, all species of crows and ravens have been colloquially known as crows by the general population and are difficult to distinguish. In his 1865 Handbook to the Birds of Australia John Gould noted a single species of corvid in Australia, Corvus australis, which he called the white-eyed crow. He used Gmelin's 1788 name, which took precedence by virtue of its age over Vigors and Horsfield's description. In 1912 Scottish naturalist William Robert Ogilvie-Grant clarified the species as C. coronoides (raven, and incorporating little and Australian ravens) and C. cecilae (Torresian crow). Subsequently, French-American ornithologist Charles Vaurie acted as First Revisor under Article 24 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) Code and discarded C. australis as a junior homonym – in 1788 Gmelin had used the same binomial name to describe the black nunbird – to preserve the stability of the name. This has been followed by later authors. Gregory Mathews described the forest raven as a distinct subspecies (Corvus marianae tasmanicus) of the Australian raven in 1912, its species name derived from Tasmania, the type locality. Ian Rowley raised the forest raven to species rank in 1970, noting there were no intermediate forms between it and the little raven (its closest relative) and that it was clearly larger with a much more massive bill. He described a second subspecies (Corvus tasmanicus boreus) the same year, observing that C. tasmanicus from Tasmania and southern Victoria has a very short tail compared with individuals from the northern New South Wales population. The term "crow" is colloquially applied to any or all species of Australian corvid. In 1970 Rowley gave the species name "forest raven", which was later designated the official name by the International Ornithologists' Union (IOC). Preliminary genetic analysis of the genus using mitochondrial DNA showed the three raven species to belong to one lineage and the two crows to another, and that the two lineages are not closely related. The genetic separation between species is small and there was a suggestion the forest raven may be conspecificity with the Australian raven. Subsequent multigene analysis using nuclear DNA by Jønsson and colleagues in 2012 clarified that the forest and little raven are each other's closest relative. The northern subspecies boreus turned out to be nested in the Tasmanian tasmanicus, indicating the populations separated very recently. It is still recognised as a distinct subspecies by the International Ornithological Committee. Ian Rowley proposed that the common ancestor of the five species diverged into a tropical crow and temperate raven sometime after entering Australia from the north. The raven diverged into the ancestor of the forest and little ravens in the east and Australian raven in the west. As the climate was cooler and drier, the aridity of central Australia split them entirely as the habitat between became inhospitable. Furthermore, the eastern diverged into nomadic little ravens and, in forested refuges, forest ravens. As the climate eventually became warmer, the western ravens spread eastwards and outcompeted forest ravens on mainland Australia, as evidenced by the forest ravens' being found only in closed forest refuges on the mainland but in a wider variety of habitats in Tasmania. ## Description The largest of the Australian corvids, the adult forest raven is 50–53 cm (20–21 in) long with a wingspan of 91–113 cm (36–44 in) and weighing approximately 650 g (1.43 lb). There is no seasonal variation in plumage, which is entirely glossy black with a blue or green sheen visible on the upperparts. The wings are long and broad, with the largest of its ten primary feathers (usually the seventh but occasionally the eighth) almost reaching the end of the tail when at rest. The tail is rounded or wedge-shaped. It is quite short in Tasmanian populations but longer in northern New South Wales. The beak is a similar shape to that of the little raven, though more massive and heavy-set. The upper mandible, including the nares and nasal groove, is covered with bristles. The mouth and tongue are black, as are the powerful legs and feet. The tibia is fully feathered and the tarsus is long. Sexes have identical plumage; the male is generally larger, but there is considerable overlap in size between individuals. The forest raven can be distinguished from the two species of crow occurring in Australia by the grey base of the feathers, which is white in the latter species. The demarcation between pale and black regions on the feather is gradual in the ravens and sharply delineated in the crows. Feather bases are not normally visible when observing birds in the field, but can sometimes be seen on a windy day if the feathers are ruffled. The three species of raven are more heavily set with a broader chest than the two crow species, with the forest raven the stockiest of all. Relative size is useful only when two species can be seen side by side, as the overlap in size is large and the difference in size small. In Tasmania, the forest raven could be confused with the black currawong, though the latter species has more slender wings with white markings, a longer tail and a very different call. Juveniles (birds up to a year old) have a shorter, shallower bill, which is dark grey with some pink at the base. The gape is pink. The plumage is softer and fluffier and often has a brown tint. It generally lacks the glossy sheen of adult birds, though a blue-purple sheen can be seen sometimes on mantle and shoulders plumage. Birds between one and two years old closely resemble adults but retain juvenile feathers on wings and tail and have smaller bills. Birds between two and three years have adult plumage but lack the adult eye colour. Eye colour varies with age: nestlings up to four months old have blue-grey eyes, juveniles aged from four to fourteen months have brown eyes, and immature birds have hazel eyes with blue eyerings around the pupil until age two years and ten months. ### Vocalization The call is considered the most reliable means of identification in areas where the forest raven's range overlaps with other corvids. It is a deep and husky "korr-korr-korr-korr" with a similarly drawn out last note to the Australian raven. It can also utter a barking alarm call. The calls of juveniles have a higher pitch than those of adult birds. Mated pairs greet each other with a specific return-home call; a long extended descending call, and characteristic flapping flight with reduced-amplitude wingbeats. ## Distribution and habitat The only member of the corvid family that has a permanent population in Tasmania, the forest raven is the most widely distributed bird species in the state. There are three populations in southern Victoria: from the vicinity of Lakes Entrance west across Gippsland to Wilsons Promontory, the Otway Ranges from 10 km (6.2 mi) west of Torquay to Port Campbell, and lastly in the Grampians and Millicent Plain extending into south-east South Australia. Isolated records suggest the latter two populations may actually be continuous. There are two disjunct populations in northern New South Wales. A coastal population is found from Tea Gardens north to Yuraygir National Park, while a more montane population is found along the Great Dividing Range and New England Tableland from Gloucester Tops in the south to Tenterfield in the north. The gap between the two populations is around 70 km (43 mi), shrinking to 30 km (19 mi) at Dorrigo. The forest raven inhabits a wide range of habitat within Tasmania such as woods, open interrupted forest, mountains, coastal areas, farmland and town and city fringes. A survey of Mount Wellington found it to be one of the few birds that remained in open and marshland habitat at higher elevations over the winter. Additionally, research within Tasmania found that ravens were thirty percent more likely to be observed in farmland habitat than in non-agricultural forested or urban areas. On mainland Australia it appears to be more confined to forests: wet and dry sclerophyll forest and cool temperate rainforest, as well as pine plantations in Victoria. Populations in Victoria and New South Wales are possibly expanding, with the species more evident in towns such as Forster-Tuncurry and Port Macquarie, and along segments of the Oxley Highway between Wauchope and Walcha, and Thunderbolts Way between Gloucester and Nowendoc, most likely due to roadkill from increased vehicular traffic. It is unclear whether records since the 1970s in areas where the forest raven was unknown are the result of range expansion or improved field observations and identification. Forest ravens fly from Tasmania and the mainland to islands well offshore in Bass Strait and may even traverse the strait entirely. First recorded on King Island in Bass Strait in 1979, the forest raven has become more numerous and flocks of several hundred birds were recorded by 1997. The island was previously inhabited by little ravens. ## Behaviour Sedentary and territorial, the forest raven is similar in breeding and feeding habits to the Australian raven. A single breeding pair and their brood occupy a territory of variable size – areas of 40 to 400 ha (99 to 988 acres) have been recorded – and remains there year-round, though groups of ravens may enter this area to forage. In northern New South Wales, forest ravens have been recorded nesting near Australian ravens and Torresian crows. They were observed warding off the Australian ravens but to a degree permitting the crows to pass through their territories. Forest ravens will defend their territory by chasing and mobbing intruding birds of prey as large as wedge-tailed eagles and white-bellied sea eagles. Agonistic displays to ward off potential intruders include flying to a high perch and calling loudly with head extended and hackles raised. Forest ravens will give their wings a flick on the upward wingbeat when flying to the perch and may continue flicking their wings after landing. Subadult and nonbreeding forest ravens form flocks that move around, though they may use the same roosting site for a few months at a time. Forest ravens generally walk when moving around on the ground, though do hop when hurrying, such as when trying to avoid an oncoming car on a road. ### Breeding Forest ravens breed after at least three years and form monogamous pairs. Birds breed later in Tasmania than in mainland Australia, though the species has been little studied. Eggs have been recorded from July to September and nestlings in September and October in New South Wales, while nestlings have been noted from September to December in Victoria. In Tasmania, the breeding season appears to take place from August to January. Forest ravens generally nest in forks in tall trees, usually eucalypts, below the canopy line. They have been recorded as nesting on the ground on some Bass Strait Islands. Breeding success rates were impacted severely by droughts in New South Wales. The nest is a bowl-shaped structure of twigs lined with available materials such as leaves, wool, grass, bark, feathers, or occasionally horse manure or hair from cattle. The sticks are generally 4–14 mm (0.16–0.55 in) thick. Nests are sometimes renovated from previous years. A clutch can comprise up to six eggs, though usually four or five are laid. Measuring 45 by 31 mm (1+3⁄4 × 1+1⁄4 in), eggs are green-cream and splotched with brown and grey markings. Eggs are laid every one to two days. Eggs are quite variable, and thus which Australian corvid laid them cannot be reliably identified. Incubation of the eggs is done solely by the female. The chicks are altricial and nidicolous; that is, they are born helpless, naked, and blind, and remain in the nest for an extended period. Both parents feed the young. ### Feeding The forest raven is an omnivore, though it eats more meat than other smaller corvids. Its diet includes a wide range of foods such as insects, carrion, fruit, grain, and earthworms. It has been known to attack and eat birds as large as the little penguin, though many birds and mammals are already dead when encountered. In general a significant proportion of its food appears to come from habitats in or near water. Forest ravens observed on the beach at Wilson's Promontory would glean the sand and turn over or disturb pieces of seaweed and debris for insect prey. They have also been reported taking crabs from sandbars and raiding seabird colonies for eggs and young. Forest ravens forage in pairs or groups of up to ten birds, though they may gather in much larger numbers if there is an abundant food source, such as a large carcass, rubbish, or insect swarm. The species is attracted to areas where people have discarded excess food, such as rubbish tips, picnic grounds, parks, gardens, and roads. Forest ravens sometimes forage in mixed-species flocks with Torresian crows, little and Australian ravens. In these situations the more abundant species may exclude the less abundant. In Tasmania, forest ravens have been recorded foraging with Pacific and silver gulls, and black currawongs. Foraging takes place in the early morning or late afternoon; birds rest in the hotter part of the day. Food is taken mainly from the ground, birds either find objects while walking along and looking and turn over objects with their bills as they go. Forest ravens often fly 1–2 m (3.3–6.6 ft) above the ground over marshland, heath, or beaches looking for food. Nests of various birds, including domestic chickens and burrowing seabirds, have been raided for eggs and young. Forest ravens have been observed attempting to raid the nest of ospreys on the New South Wales north coast. The species is often observed scavenging, particularly on roadkill. Across much of Tasmania, forest ravens have benefited from the disease-driven decline of the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) due to greater access to carrion. Additionally, forest ravens appear to scavenge heavily on roadkill throughout the entire year on the Bass Strait islands where mammalian scavengers, like devils and quolls, are now absent. In contrast, forest ravens within Tasmania appear to scavenge heavily on roadkill only during Autumn, when other resources like invertebrates and fruit are sparse. Forest ravens cache food items for later consumption, generally using trees to evade other scavengers. Field observations in Nambucca showed that they built stick-like platforms 30–40 cm (12–16 in) in diameter high in the canopies of trees as places to store and eat food. They were recorded storing food in tree forks 10–20 m (33–66 ft) above the ground and within the folds of the bark of paperbark trees. In another field study, a forest raven stole a cape barren goose egg and hid it in a grassy tussock to consume later. Alongside Australian ravens, forest ravens have been blamed for damaging orchards and killing lambs and poultry. This is not supported by fieldwork. They most often scavenge for afterbirth and newborn lamb feces, which are highly nutritious. They are thought to have a beneficial role in cleaning up carcasses and consuming insect pests. Forest ravens prey on the larvae of the pasture beetle Scitala sericans. The beetle can damage pastures and is an agricultural pest; the raven may uproot plants when digging out the grubs. ### Parasites The mite Knemidocoptes intermedius has been isolated from the forest raven. Infestation results in crusty grey lesions (knemidocoptiasis) around their tibiotarsal joints (ankles), caused by the mites living in tunnels under the skin. The channel-billed cuckoo (Scythrops novaehollandiae) has been recorded as a brood parasite. ## Conservation status Its large range and abundance mean the bird is classified as "least concern" on the IUCN Red List; some decrease has been noted but it is of insufficient size or duration to change classification. The populations of northern New South Wales have been classified as "near threatened" in 2000 by Garnett and Crowley and were estimated at the time to number about 10,000 breeding pairs. ## Relationship with humans Like the Australian raven on mainland Australia, the forest raven in Tasmania has a history of being shot or poisoned – generally by farmers as it is perceived to be a threat to livestock and orchard crops. It is not protected under Tasmania's Nature Conservation Act 2002 and no permit is required if landowners seek to kill them. Larger numbers of forest ravens (alongside swamp harriers and brown falcons) were killed in 1958 as rabbit populations dwindled due to myxomatosis and predatory birds were thought to have turned their attention to poultry and livestock. Studies on corvids elsewhere in Australia showed that the killing of healthy lambs was rare, but that sick animals were predisposed to be attacked, and hence their poor reputation was unjustified. Forest ravens may do more good than harm by preying on insects and removing carrion. Research within Tasmania has found that forest ravens are six times more likely to be observed in areas of high roadkill density compared to areas of no roadkill. Despite their fondness for roadkill, forest ravens are rarely hit by vehicles.
5,019,316	Pallid sturgeon	1,172,801,895	Species of fish	[ "Articles containing video clips", "ESA endangered species", "Endemic fish of the United States", "Fish described in 1905", "Freshwater fish of North America", "Scaphirhynchus", "Taxa named by Robert Earl Richardson", "Taxa named by Stephen Alfred Forbes" ]	The pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) is an endangered species of ray-finned fish, endemic to the waters of the Missouri and lower Mississippi river basins of the United States. It may have even reached the St. Croix River before colonization. Named for its pale coloration, it is closely related to the relatively common shovelnose sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus platorynchus), but is much larger, averaging between 30 and 60 inches (76 and 152 cm) in length and 85 pounds (39 kg) in weight at maturity. This species takes 15 years to mature and spawns infrequently, but can live up to a century. A member of the sturgeon family, Acipenseridae, which originated during the Cretaceous period 70 million years ago, the pallid sturgeon has changed little since then. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the pallid sturgeon on its endangered species list because few young individuals had been observed in the preceding decade and sightings had greatly diminished; the species is now rarely seen in the wild. It was the first fish species in the Missouri River drainage area to be listed as endangered, and a loss of its habitat is thought to be responsible for its decline. The vast majority of the Missouri River drainage system has been channeled and dammed, reducing the gravel deposits and slow-moving side channels that are its favored spawning areas. Until the middle of the 20th century, pallid sturgeon were common and anglers found catching such a large fish in fresh water a rewarding experience. The species is considered to be good-tasting, and its eggs have been used as caviar, although less commonly than those of many other sturgeon. Efforts to prevent the species from becoming extinct have had modest success. Pallid sturgeon are actively being raised in a dozen hatcheries and the offspring are being released back to the wild every year. To better understand pallid sturgeon behavior, researchers have implanted radio transmitters to track their movements and help identify possible spawning areas. Federal and state agencies are working together to improve habitat by restoring spawning areas since restoration of these areas is required if the species is to survive in the wild. ## Taxonomy and etymology Taxonomists S. A. Forbes and R. E. Richardson classified the pallid sturgeon in 1905, grouping it in the genus Parascaphirhynchus and the family Acipenseridae, which includes all sturgeon worldwide. Its closest relatives are the shovelnose sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus platorynchus), which is still relatively common, and the critically endangered Alabama sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus suttkusi), which may soon become extinct. These three species belong to the subfamily Scaphirhynchinae, which has only one other genus, Pseudoscaphirhynchus, represented by three species found in west-central Asia. The word pallid means "deficient in color", and compared to other species of sturgeon, the pallid is noticeably paler. The scientific name for the fish is derived from Scaphirhynchus, a Greek word meaning "spade snout" and albus which is Latin for "white". ## Biology ### DNA studies To better protect the pallid sturgeon from extinction, research on its DNA and that of other closely related species was conducted to assess the differences within various populations of pallid sturgeon, and the differences between pallid and shovelnose sturgeon. Early DNA research indicated that pallid sturgeon and shovelnose sturgeon were a single species. However, a 2000 study comparing DNA sequences in the three members of the genus Scaphirhynchus(pallid, shovelnose, and Alabama sturgeon) showed that the three are distinct species. Between 2001 and 2006, several studies examined two populations of pallid sturgeon located in the upper Great Plains section of the Missouri River and compared them to a southern population located in the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana. These DNA studies concluded that the northern populations of pallid sturgeon are reproductively isolated and are genetically distinct from the Atchafalaya population. However, the genetic variability among pallid sturgeon was found to be far less than that between them and the shovelnose sturgeon. Another reason for DNA testing was to determine the rates of hybridization between pallid and shovelnose sturgeon. The southern populations have more hybrids than are found in the middle sections of the Missouri River basin, while the northernmost populations have had few reports of hybrids. Hybrids are most common in the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana, and DNA sequencing in these hybrids showed a genetic distinction from pallid sturgeon, but based on the genetic markers assessed, they were genetically indistinguishable from shovelnose sturgeon. Because of this ability of two species to hybridize, some biologists have expressed concern that it is a violation of the Endangered Species Act to protect one species that may not be genetically isolated from another. It is not known if the hybrids are able to reproduce or not, although they appear to be the result of pallid sturgeon eggs being fertilized by shovelnose sturgeon males. ### Physical characteristics The pallid sturgeon is one of the largest freshwater fish species in North America. They are generally between 30 and 60 inches (76 and 152 cm) in length and weigh as much as 85 pounds (39 kg). The species is ancient and has remained virtually unchanged for 70 million years, since the Cretaceous period. The pallid sturgeon has a distinctive appearance that has been referred to as "primitive", "dinosaur-like" and even "ugly". Although visually similar, the shovelnose sturgeon is much smaller and usually weighs no more than 5 pounds (2.3 kg). Pallid sturgeon are much paler in coloration with grayish white backs and sides, while shovelnose sturgeon are brown. Pallid sturgeon turn whiter as they age and younger specimens are easily confused with adult shovelnose sturgeon since they are similar in color. Like the shovelnose sturgeon, their tails are heterocercal, with the top tail fin being longer than the bottom fin, though this is more pronounced in pallid sturgeon. As with other sturgeon, pallid sturgeon lack the scales or bones found in more "modern" species of fish. Instead, they have cartilaginous skeletons with five rows of thick cartilage plates that extend along their sides, undersides, and backs, as well as over most of the head. These thick cartilage plates are covered by the skin and serve as a protective armor. The bony cartilage also extends along the backside, from the dorsal fin to the tail. The pallid sturgeon's snout and head are longer than that of the shovelnose sturgeon. In both species, the mouth is located well back from the tip of the snout. Lacking teeth, they use their extendable mouths to suck up small fish, mollusks, and other food sources from river bottoms. Both species also have four barbels which descend from the snout near the front of the mouth. The barbels are believed to be sensory features to locate food sources. On pallid sturgeon, the two inner barbels are about half as long as the outer ones, while on the shovelnose sturgeon, all four barbels are the same length. The inner barbels of the pallid sturgeon are positioned in front of the outer ones, but those on the shovelnose sturgeon are all located in essentially a straight line. The length and positioning of the barbels is one of the best ways to distinguish the two species. ### Reproduction and lifecycle Pallid sturgeon have a long lifespan, living in excess of 50 and perhaps as long as 100 years. They lack bones and scales, which makes it more difficult to establish their age and determine exactly how long they live. As is true for many long-lived species, pallid sturgeon reach reproductive maturity relatively late. Males reach sexual maturity between the ages of 5 and 7 years, while females are believed to become capable of reproduction when they are at least 15 years old. One study of nine females indicated that they begin egg development between the ages of 9 and 12 years, but do not reach reproductive maturity until they are 15 years old. Reproduction does not take place every year; the average interval between spawnings is three years, although other studies suggest an interval as long as 10 years. Spawning usually takes place May to July. Prior to the construction of dams on the Missouri, pallid sturgeon migrated hundreds of miles upstream to spawn, and sought out rocky or hard surfaces to deposit hundreds of thousands of eggs. One female pallid sturgeon caught in the upper Missouri River was estimated to be carrying 170,000 eggs, representing over 11 percent of its total body weight. After fertilization, pallid sturgeon eggs hatch in 5 to 8 days, after which the larvae drift back downstream for several weeks. As the larvae develop tails, they seek out slower-moving waterways and slowly mature over a period of a dozen years. The rate of survival to maturity for pallid sturgeon larvae is extremely low, and of the hundreds of thousands of eggs spawned, only a few live to adulthood. For several decades, no natural reproduction of pallid sturgeon was observed, since all the fish that had been captured were older specimens. In the late 1990s, young pallid sturgeon were discovered living in a restored riparian area of the lower Missouri River. This was the first documented example of wild spawned pallid sturgeon in 50 years. In 2007, two female pallid sturgeon were also reported to have spawned in the Missouri National Recreational River area located downstream from Gavins Point Dam on the Missouri River. ## Ecology ### Distribution The pallid sturgeon's historical range spanned the entire Missouri River and into the Mississippi River. Historically, the species was rare to nonexistent in the upper Mississippi, probably due to a lack of proper habitat. Currently, the species is considered imperiled throughout its entire range. As of 2008, pallid sturgeon can still be found throughout their original range, but their population numbers have severely declined from the mid-20th century. The Missouri and Mississippi rivers from Montana to Louisiana, as well as the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana, continue to harbor an aging population of pallid sturgeon. Pallid sturgeon have never been very common; as early as 1905 when the species was first identified, they represented only one in five of all sturgeon in the lower Missouri River and as few as one in 500 where the Illinois River meets the Mississippi. Between 1985 and 2000, the ratio of pallid sturgeon to all sturgeon netted declined from one in about 400 to one in nearly 650. A 1996 study concluded that between 6,000 and 21,000 pallid sturgeon remained in their natural habitat at that time. Six areas were studied for wild pallid sturgeon population estimates and recovery recommendations by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) between 1990, when the species was declared endangered, and 2006. The USFWS has referred to these six areas of wild population studies as "recovery priority management areas" (RPMAs). In the northernmost region of the study, known as RPMA 1, located between the Marias River in Montana and the western reaches of Fort Peck Reservoir, only 45 wild (nonhatchery) individuals remain. Of these, no juveniles were observed and the population was declining. In RPMA 2, located between Fort Peck Dam, the headwaters of Lake Sakakawea, and the lower Yellowstone River up to the confluence of the Tongue River, Montana, only 136 wild specimens remain. In RPMA 3, stretching from upstream of the Niobrara River to Lewis and Clark Lake along the Missouri River, no native populations were recorded. All collected specimens appeared to be hatchery-raised. However, these specimens were apparently maturing and adjusting well to this section of the river. Recovery priority management area 4 extends from Gavins Point Dam to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This region also includes the Platte River. Here, at least 100 unique nonhatchery specimens were collected during the study period. Evidence also indicates some wild reproduction is going on in this region. In RPMA 5, between the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, several hundred specimens were documented. Again, some evidence suggests natural reproduction is occurring, as demonstrated by the recovery of a few examples of immature, nonhatchery-raised individuals. The Atchafalaya River basin is designated as RPMA 6 and the findings there were similar to those in RPMAs 4 and 5, but with greater numbers of unique individuals, near 500 in total. ### Habitat Pallid sturgeon prefer moderate to swift river currents and most captured specimens have been recovered in rivers and streams in which the current averages between 0.33 and 2.9 feet per second (0.10 and 0.88 m/s). They also prefer turbid waterways and water depths between 3 and 25 feet (0.91 and 7.62 m). The species is more commonly found where sandy substrates are plentiful, but also lives in predominately rocky waterways. Pallid sturgeon prefer swift river currents more often than do shovelnose sturgeon. In a study based in Montana and North Dakota conducted on both the pallid and shovelnose sturgeon, both species were fitted with radio transmitters so researchers could track their swimming habits. Pallid sturgeon were found to prefer wider river channels, midchannel sandbars, and numerous islands, and were most commonly recorded in water depths between 2 and 47 feet (0.61 and 14.33 m). The study also showed that the pallid sturgeon moved as much as 13 miles (21 km) per day and up to 5.7 miles per hour (9.2 km/h). Pallid sturgeon are believed to have preferred the muddy and generally warmer waters that existed prior to Missouri River dam construction. ### Food preferences Pallid sturgeon are generally bottom feeders, skimming the sandy reaches of the various rivers and streams in their habitat. Though little is known about the precise eating habits of the species, they are thought to be opportunistic feeders. One study which examined the contents from the stomachs of juvenile pallid sturgeon revealed that their diets were seasonally dependent. Various insects were consumed during some seasons and various fish species during others. These results support the description of the pallid sturgeon's eating habits as opportunistic. Fish is a more important dietary staple for pallid sturgeon than it is for shovelnose sturgeon. In one study comparing dietary tendencies between adult shovelnose sturgeon and immature pallid sturgeon, the pallid sturgeon was found to consume far greater numbers of small fish such as cyprinids (minnows). In another study conducted in the upper Missouri River region, an examination of the stomach contents of hatchery-reared pallid sturgeon showed that 82% of the wet weight was small fish and the balance was mosquito-like insects, mayflies, and caddis flies and small amounts of detritus and plant material. ## Conservation Though never believed to be common, pallid sturgeon populations rapidly declined during the late 20th century and the species was listed as endangered on September 6, 1990. The U.S. government and most of the states with pallid sturgeon populations have commenced restoration efforts to save the species from extinction. Wild reproduction of pallid sturgeon is rare to nonexistent in most areas; therefore, human intervention is needed to ensure the survival of the species. Pallid sturgeon were previously considered a prized trophy game fish species, until their numbers declined and they were placed on the endangered species list. All captured pallid sturgeon must now be released back to the wild. The species was known for being very palatable and the roe from females was used as caviar. The route and the environmental characteristics of Missouri River in the northern Great Plains states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana have been significantly altered. The resultant changes to the Missouri River in the upper Great Plains from channelization and impoundment prevent upstream migration. The reduced water flow rates and sediment loads have brought an end to the seasonal flooding of the flood plains in the region. Since the construction of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana in 1937, and subsequent damming and channelization, the Missouri River has lost over 90% of its wetland and sandbar ecosystems. More than 2,000 mi (3,200 km) of the Missouri River have been altered and only that stretch of the river above Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana remains relatively unchanged. These alterations of the river have had a detrimental impact on a number of native fish species. In the 13 U.S. states where the pallid sturgeon is found, only a few other fish species are listed as critically endangered. Although substantial efforts are being implemented to ensure the survival of this species, the rarity of self-sustaining populations of pallid sturgeon ensures that it will remain federally protected for many decades. ### Species preservation efforts Two populations of pallid sturgeon in the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers of Montana are both at risk of extinction, and current projections are that wild pallid sturgeon populations in Montana will be extinct by 2018. Though a vigorous stocking effort was implemented in 1996, until pallid sturgeon females reach reproductive maturity sometime after they are 15 years of age, recovery efforts in Montana will not be readily measurable. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been conducting spring pulse water releases from the Tiber Dam every four to five years to try to recreate a semblance of an annual spring flood to restore and rejuvenate downstream floodplains. These pulse releases are done in an effort to restore suitable habitat for numerous fish species. In Nebraska, a small number of pallid sturgeon have been captured along the lower reaches of the Platte River. Unlike most rivers in the Mississippi-Missouri River System, the Platte River has only a few dams and they are well upstream from its confluence with the Missouri River. The lower Platte River is shallow with numerous sand bars and small islands. Though pallid sturgeon prefer more turbulent and deeper rivers than the Platte, between 1979 and 2003, over a dozen pallid sturgeon, including some from hatcheries, have been captured from the Platte River. A number of these pallid sturgeon have been fitted with radio transmitters which track their return to the Platte River when water levels and turbidity conditions are favorable. Coinciding with the majority of the pallid sturgeon that have been captured, the period that is generally most favorable is during the spring and early summer. By midsummer, a reduction in water levels and turbidity on the Platte River encourages pallid sturgeon to return to the Missouri River. The lower reaches of the Platte River, a more than 30-mile (48 km) stretch from the Elkhorn River to its confluence with the Missouri River, has suitable spawning habitat for pallid sturgeon, although no conclusive evidence has been found that spawning is occurring in this region. Along with the lower Yellowstone River, the lower Platte River was identified as one of the best of the remaining regions with the potential for the natural spawning. In Missouri, at the Lisbon Bottoms section of the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, wild pallid sturgeon larvae were collected in 1998. These nonhatchery-raised larvae were the first recovered on the lower Missouri River in the previous 50 years. The recovery was made along a side channel of the Missouri River that had been developed to provide suitable habitat for pallid sturgeon and other fish spawning. The side channel was apparently being used by the larva pallid sturgeon for protection from the swifter currents of the Missouri River. In 2007, the USFWS concluded that hatchery-based reproduction efforts should be continued, along with monitoring of any population changes, to determine the effectiveness of human intervention. The 2007 findings also emphasized the need to determine the most likely areas of spawning, to identify any parasite or disease that may be impacting the reproductive capabilities of pallid sturgeon, and to examine engineering possibilities that may permit recreation of suitable habitats without reducing the USFWS's ability to protect people from harmful and destructive flooding, and to maintain its ability to provide adequate water impoundment for irrigation and recreation purposes.
19,612,185	Michael Tritter	1,165,545,223	Fictional detective on the TV series House	[ "Fictional American police detectives", "Fictional characters from New Jersey", "House (TV series) characters", "Television characters introduced in 2006" ]	Michael Tritter is a recurring fictional character in the medical drama series House, portrayed by David Morse. He is the main antagonist of the third season, which ran between 2006 and 2007. Tritter is a police detective, who tries to get Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) to apologize for leaving him in an examination room with a thermometer in his rectum. After House refuses to apologize, Tritter researches House's background and discovers his Vicodin addiction. Tritter turns people close to House against him and forces House to go to rehab. When the case ultimately comes to court, the judge sentences House to one night in jail, for contempt of court, and to finish his rehabilitation, telling Tritter that she believes House is not the drug addict he tried to make him out to be. The character was created as somebody who could go "toe-to-toe" with House. Morse, who had never seen the show before, was unsure if he could portray the character, and was not impressed after familiarizing himself with the show. The excited reaction of his friends to the opportunity convinced him to take the role. Initial critical responses to the character were mostly positive, but critics later felt that the six-episode Tritter story arc became "boring". Morse, though, was praised for his portrayal and received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his appearance in the episode "Finding Judas". Morse stated in a 2006 TV Guide interview that, although he had discussed it with writers of the show, bringing the character back on the show would be "practically impossible". ## Storyline Tritter first appears in the episode "Fools for Love". His character is a police detective who suffers from a severe irritation in the area of his groin, which he believes to be caused by a sexually transmitted disease, and who becomes a patient of the walk-in clinic. Although House diagnoses Tritter with dry skin, a common side effect of the nicotine gum that Tritter is chewing, Tritter requests that a sample be tested. House declines on the grounds that he has already met this month's quota for indulging "stubborn idiots". After Tritter causes House to trip, the doctor feigns acquiescence, but insists he has to take Tritter's temperature rectally due to the nicotine gum. After inserting the thermometer, House leaves the room, with no intention of returning. Tritter later complains about his treatment to House's boss, Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), saying that he would rather "beat the crap out of" House than sue him; however, House refuses to apologize. Later that night, Tritter pulls House over for a traffic violation and arrests him after finding Vicodin pills in his pocket. In the next episode, "Que Sera Sera", Tritter searches House's apartment and finds a large quantity of Vicodin pills and two apparently forged prescriptions that bear the name of House's friend James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). During "Son of Coma Guy" and "Whac-A-Mole", Tritter pressures Wilson and members of House's diagnostic team to testify against him, but they all refuse. In "Finding Judas", Cuddy finds Tritter spending his day off looking through the hospital's log for evidence against House. She accuses him of not having a life and "personalizing every slight". Tritter responds that "nobody [at the hospital] is innocent", as everyone allows House to treat patients despite knowing of his Vicodin addiction and that it takes a police detective to uncover what the doctors are deliberately hiding. At the end of the episode, Wilson visits Tritter and indicates his willingness to testify. In "Merry Little Christmas", Tritter and Wilson work out a deal to allow House to continue practicing medicine if he pleads guilty and spends two months in rehab. Meanwhile, House uses a dead patient's name to obtain Oxycodone pills as a Vicodin replacement drug, but nearly overdoses on the drug as he is unaccustomed to its effects. When he visits Tritter early the next morning to agree to the deal, Tritter says the deal is off, after going through the pharmacy's log and reading that House signed for a dead man's drugs. In the final days leading up to House's court case, House realizes the severity of the situation and finally apologizes to Tritter (episode "Words and Deeds"). When Tritter refuses to accept the apology, House goes into rehab, putting on a show for Tritter and the judge, but Tritter cites his experiences with addicts as evidence House has not changed. The judge tells Tritter that she does not believe House to be the drug dealer that Tritter tried to show him to be and orders Tritter to move on after House is exonerated due to Cuddy committing perjury. Just before the bailiff escorts House out of the courtroom, Tritter tells him: "Good luck. I hope I'm wrong about you." ## Personality The main antagonist of the third season, Tritter is a "stubborn", "vengeful", and extremely determined police detective. According to David Morse, the offensive thermometer incident in "Fools for Love" made it easy for Tritter to stand up to House; as House's equal, Tritter "gets who House is on all levels and can really shake his foundation". Tritter's experiences with drug addicts color his view of House, and he becomes so obsessed with House that, according to executive producer Katie Jacobs, the story arc turns into "a battle of egos" between them. The character shows a manipulative streak when he forms a plan to coerce each member of House's team to testify separately in "Finding Judas". Robert Bianco of USA Today described Tritter as an initially "legitimately, if belligerently, aggrieved adversary" character who later morphs into "some kind of insane supercop, tearing his way through the hospital and the Constitution at will". ## Creation and casting The Tritter character was created as someone to go "toe-to-toe" with House. The producers envisioned a character with an inner strength, intelligence, and single-mindedness to match that of House. In 2006, House creator David Shore contacted actor David Morse, with whom he had previously worked on Hack, for a guest-starring episode arc on the show. According to Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News, Morse's earlier portrayals of "scary" cops (in 16 Blocks and Hack) helped him clinch the role. Morse was unfamiliar with the show. After watching several House episodes, he was surprised that the show had a strong audience with "[such] a total jerk" as the lead character. It was not until Morse told a few long-time friends about the job offer that their enthusiastic reaction convinced him to take the role. Katie Jacobs, executive producer of House, was impressed by Morse's performance. In a 2006 TV Guide interview, Morse said that, although he discussed the possibility with House writers, it would be "practically impossible" to get the character to return in any later seasons. ## Reception Initial responses to the character were mostly positive. Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune declared Tritter the best male villain of the fall of 2006. Lisa Edelstein, who portrays Lisa Cuddy on House, named David Morse as one of her favorite House guest stars, saying that he did a great job portraying the character. Barbara Barnett from Blog Critics Magazine and Charles McGrath of The New York Times compared Tritter to Inspector Javert of Les Misérables, and Alynda Wheat from Entertainment Weekly stated that Tritter annoyed House more than any other character, surpassing other antagonists such as Amber Volakis (Anne Dudek), Stacy Warner (Sela Ward), and Lucas Douglas (Michael Weston). Variety's Stuart Levine considered Tritter a "worthy foe" for House. However, the continued character arc increasingly bored critics. Staci Krause of IGN found the first few episodes of Season 3, in which House recovers from being shot, more interesting. In a review of "Que Sera Sera", Entertainment Weekly's Michelle Kung noted that while David Morse is a fine actor, "his cop is so ridiculously one-note and revenge-bent that his scenes are often just excruciating to sit through." In a review for "Fools for Love", Sara Morrison of Television Without Pity doubted that Tritter's revenge on House was worth his time and aggravation, and later called the Tritter arc an "insane quest for ass-thermometer justice". The Star-Ledger's Alan Sepinwall stated that "pitting House against a comedy-impaired cop was both dull and not a fair fight". The show's fans had shown dislike for other antagonists with multi-episode guest-starring arcs, and critics suspected that Tritter's character would receive similar disdain. The conclusion of the storyline, and Tritter's departure from the show, were described by USA Today critic Robert Bianco as a Christmas gift for fans of the show. Morse jokingly stated after his departure that various fans had told him of their hate for Tritter after what the character had done to Dr. House. Morse, however, gained mainly positive responses to his portrayal of Tritter. The Star-Ledger's Alan Sepinwall called Morse a "superb actor", and Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune stated that Morse's "understated performance" made Tritter all the more scary. Zap2it's Daniel Fienberg regarded Morse as "one of our very best character actors". Cynthia Littleton of Variety, who already considered Morse's work in St. Elsewhere Emmy-worthy, was glad that Morse's submission of the episode "Finding Judas" for a 2007 Emmy Awards consideration was accepted in the category of "Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series". The award eventually went to John Goodman for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
66,870,723	2021 Tour Championship	1,172,084,137	Professional ranking snooker tournament, March 2021	[ "2021 in Welsh sport", "2021 in snooker", "March 2021 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Players Series", "Snooker competitions in Wales", "Sport in Newport, Wales", "Tour Championship (snooker)" ]	The 2021 Tour Championship (officially the 2021 Cazoo Tour Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 22 to 28 March 2021 at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales. Organised by the World Snooker Tour, it was the third edition of the Tour Championship and the third and final event of the third season of the Cazoo Cup. It was the 14th and penultimate ranking event of the 2020–21 snooker season, following the conclusion of the WST Pro Series and preceding the World Championship. The draw for the Tour Championship comprised the top eight players based on the single year ranking list. The event was contested as a single-elimination tournament, each match being played over two . The winner of the tournament received £150,000 out of a total prize fund of £380,000. The event was sponsored by car retailer Cazoo. The defending champion was Stephen Maguire, but as a result of reduced earnings during the season he was unable to qualify and defend the title. In a repeat of the 2019 final Australian Neil Robertson played Englishman Ronnie O'Sullivan. Robertson won the event defeating O'Sullivan 10–4 in the final. There were 26 century breaks made during the event, Barry Hawkins making the highest , a 138. ## Overview The 2021 Tour Championship (officially named 2021 Cazoo Tour Championship) was the third and final event in the 2020–21 Cazoo Cup series, first introduced in the 2018–19 snooker season, the first two being the World Grand Prix and the Players Championship. It was the 14th and penultimate ranking event of the 2020–21 snooker season, organised by the World Snooker Tour. The players qualified for the series by virtue of their placement on the one-year ranking list (the ranking points won over the course of the 2019–20 season), rather than by their world ranking positions. The Tour Championship featured the top eight players from the one-year ranking list taking part in a single-elimination tournament. All matches were played as the best of 19 . The event took place at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, South Wales, between 22 and 28 March 2021. The tournament was domestically broadcast by ITV4 in the United Kingdom. It also aired on: Sky Sport in New Zealand; NowTV in Hong Kong; Superstars Online in China; and DAZN across the Americas, Germany, Italy and Spain. The event was sponsored by car retailer Cazoo. ### Prize fund The event had a prize fund of £380,000, the winner receiving £150,000. The breakdown of prize money for the event is shown below: - Winner: £150,000 - Runner-up: £60,000 - Semi-final: £40,000 - Quarter-final: £20,000 (Prize money received at this stage does not count towards prize money rankings) - Highest break: £10,000 - Total: £380,000 ### Qualification The participants were determined on the basis of the one-year ranking list beginning from the first event, the 2020 European Masters, up to and including the 2021 WST Pro Series. Jordan Brown was the ninth ranked player, acting as the first travelling reserve for the event. ## Summary ### Quarter-finals The first round of the event was the quarter-finals, held from 22 to 25 March 2021. The first match was held between Ronnie O'Sullivan and John Higgins, who had contested the final of the 2021 Players Championship, Higgins winning 10–3. O'Sullivan had won 37 of the 68 matches the pair had competed in since they turned professional in 1992. Higgins won the opening frame with a of 72, before O'Sullivan won the next two frames to lead 2–1. Higgins made the first century break of the event in frame four, and the pair remained tied at 3–3. O'Sullivan won the final two frames of the to lead 5–3. After the match, O'Sullivan commented that he had almost pulled out of the event due to his cue stick being in poor condition, and had sent it for repairs twice. O'Sullivan pulled ahead by three frames to 8–5 later in the match, making a break of 112, before Higgins made a 70 break in frame 15 to be one behind 7–8. O'Sullivan then made a break of 101, the 1,100th century break of his career. In frame 17 after O'Sullivan suffered a , he whacked his cue stick on the table in frustration, Higgins winning the frame. O'Sullivan won the match in frame 18, after Higgins missed a on the . Australian Neil Robertson met Jack Lisowski in the second quarter-final. Robertson won the opening frame, but Lisowski took the second, and later tied the match at 2–2. Lisowski only scored 39 more points over the next four frames, Robertson making two century breaks, and lead 6–2 between sessions. In the evening session, Lisowski won the first two frames, but Robertson won the next three to lead 9–4. In frame 14, Lisowski made a break of 129, before Robertson won the match 10–5 in frame 15. Robertson claimed that Lisowski would need a "killer instinct" to improve his game going forward. The third quarter-final was held between English players Kyren Wilson and Mark Selby. Wilson won the opening frame before Selby made a break of 109 in the second. Selby also won the next two frames with breaks of 81 and 54. Wilson won frame five with a break of 83, but Selby won the remaining three frames of the first session, despite a break of 50 by Wilson in frame seven. Leading 6–2 after the first session, Selby made a of 84 in frame nine, Wilson winning frame 10. Selby won the next frame with a break of 75, and won the match 10–3 with a break of 88 in frame 13. The match was the seventh time the two players had met in a professional match, Selby winning all of them. Barring the Snooker Shoot Out, a one-frame tournament, this was the only event in the season Wilson had not scored a single century break. Judd Trump met Barry Hawkins in the last quarter-final. Hawkins won the first two frames with breaks of 70 and 90 before Trump equalled the score at 2–2, making a break of 119 in frame four. The next three frames were won by Hawkins, before Trump took frame eight to trail 3–5. Returning for the second session, Hawkins made a break of 121 in frame nine and won frame 10 to lead 7–3. Trump returned with breaks of 64 and 86 before the , and won frame 13 with a break of 86, to trail by a single frame. Hawkins won the next two frames including a break of 61 to lead 9–6. Hawkins had the first chance in frame 16, but his break of 45, where he misjudged the path of a and was bested by a break of 94 by Trump. In a nervy 17th frame, Hawkins won the match 10–7 after potting a long . Hawkins later suggested that his loss to Trump at the 2021 German Masters, where he led 5–1, but lost 5–6 played on his mind: "I didn't throw the match away against Judd [Trump] (at the German Masters), but I nearly did the same thing tonight. If it goes 9–8 then I'm starting to feel it again." ### Semi-finals The semi-finals were played on 26 and 27 March. Robertson played Selby in the first and took the first two frames including a break of 114. In the third frame, Selby made a series of errors allowing Robertson to take the frame, and led 4–0 after a break of 77 in the next frame. Selby won two successive frames with breaks of 80 and 93. Robertson took the final two frames of the session to lead 6–2 after being left a in frame eight. On the resumption, Robertson made a break of 136, before making breaks of 84 and 103 to lead 9–2. Selby won the next frame, but Roberston took frame 13 to complete a 10–3 victory. Robertson commented "My safety was fantastic, my long game was excellent – probably as good as it has been. I created a lot of opportunities", and cited his form was helped by not competing in some preceding events. The second semi-final was played between O'Sullivan and Hawkins. O'Sullivan had won 15 of the 17 prior professional matches they had contested. Hawkins led the match 3–0, with breaks of 125 and 138, but O'Sullivan won four straight frames to lead 4–3. Hawkins took the final frame of the first session to tie the match at 4–4 with a break of 65. In the second session, O'Sullivan took frame nine, but Hawkins won the next three with breaks of 74, 50 and 103. O'Sullivan won frame 13 to trail 6–7 with a break of 78. Hawkins won the next two frames with breaks of 56 and 73 to lead 9–6. In frame 16, Hawkins led with a break of 46, but O'Sullivan won the frame with a break of 71, and took the next with a break of 90 to trail 8–9. O'Sullivan also won the next frame after Hawkins missed a to send the match to a . O'Sullivan led the final frame 48–0, but Hawkins missed a meaning he required foul shots to win the match. He was unable to score the foul points, allowing O'Sullivan to win the match 10–9. After the match, O'Sullivan suggested that Hawkins deserved to win the match: "I feel for Barry, he's been grafting at his game, and he's been unlucky in a few results. He deserved that victory. It's a horrible way to lose, but hopefully he can respond from that." ### Final The final was played between Robertson and O'Sullivan on 28 March. O'Sullivan won the opening frame, before a century break by Robertson tied the match 1–1. O'Sullivan made a century break of his own before Robertson tied the scores at 2–2. Robertson then moved into a 4–2 lead before O'Sullivan produced breaks of 68 and 133 to level the scores at 4–4. In the evening session, Robertson made breaks of 93 and 75 to lead 6–4 with O'Sullivan making mistakes in each frame. Robertson then made breaks of 123 and 119 to lead 8–4. In those four frames, he scored 442 points, to O'Sullivan's 16. Robertson won frame 13, before a 114 in frame 14 to win 10–4. The final featured seven century breaks, five by Robertson and two by O'Sullivan. Over the evening session, O'Sullivan accumulated only 26 points to Robertson's 650. The loss was O'Sullivan's fifth loss in a ranking final in the season, having never lost more than three in a row previously. He praised Robertson's play after the match, saying "I’ve never seen anyone play as well as that... I can't compete with that." This was Robertson's 20th ranking event victory, and in winning the event, he was also able to collect the Cazoo Cup. ## Tournament draw The scores from the tournament are shown below. Players in bold denote match winners. ### Final ## Cazoo Cup The Cazoo Cup series features three events: the World Grand Prix, the Players Championship, and the Tour Championship. For all three events, qualification is based on players' rankings on the one-year ranking list. Neil Robertson won the most ranking points during the three events and won the Cazoo Cup. The top eight players in the Cazoo Cup series are shown below. Prizes in bold denote an event win. ## Century breaks There were 23 century breaks made during the tournament. Barry Hawkins made the highest, a 138 in the second frame of his semi-final match with O'Sullivan. - 138, 125, 121, 103 – Barry Hawkins - 136, 133, 123, 121, 119, 114, 114, 112, 106, 103, 103 – Neil Robertson - 133, 128, 112, 101 – Ronnie O'Sullivan - 129 – Jack Lisowski - 119 – Judd Trump - 109 – Mark Selby - 101 – John Higgins
5,662,604	Agharta (album)	1,166,130,271	null	[ "1975 live albums", "Albums produced by Teo Macero", "Albums recorded at Festival Hall, Osaka", "Ambient albums by American artists", "Columbia Records albums", "Live funk rock albums", "Live jazz fusion albums", "Miles Davis live albums", "Sony Music Entertainment Japan albums" ]	Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, the trumpeter performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year. Davis led a septet at the concert; saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, and guitarist Pete Cosey were given space to improvise against a dense backdrop of riffs, electronic effects, cross-beats, and funk grooves from the rhythm section – drummer Al Foster, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and percussionist James Mtume. Davis controlled their rhythmic and musical direction with hand and head gestures, phrases played on his wah-wah processed trumpet, and drones from an accompanying electronic organ. The evolving nature of the performance led to the widespread misunderstanding that it had no compositional basis, while its dark, angry, and somber musical qualities were seen as a reflection of the bandleader's emotional and spiritual state at the time. Agharta was first released in Japan by CBS/Sony in August 1975 just before Davis temporarily retired due to increasingly poor health and exhaustion. At the record label's suggestion, it was titled after the legendary subterranean city. Davis enlisted Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo to design its artwork, which depicted the cityscape of an advanced civilization with elements inspired by Eastern subterranean myths, Afrofuturism, and ufology. An alternate cover was produced for its 1976 release in North America by Columbia Records. A highly divisive record, Agharta further challenged Davis' jazz audience and was widely panned by contemporary critics; reviewers found the music discordant and complained of Cosey's loud guitar sounds and Davis' sparse trumpet playing. It was reevaluated positively in subsequent years, however, as a generation of younger musicians was influenced by the band's abrasive music and cathartic playing, particularly Cosey's effects-laden free improvisations. Agharta has since been viewed as an important jazz-rock record, a dramatically dynamic group performance, and the culmination of Davis' electric period spanning the late 1960s and mid-1970s. ## Background In the early 1970s, Miles Davis continued exploring directions radically different from the jazz music that made him renowned in the 1950s and 1960s. The music from this electric period in his career found him experimenting with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing lineup of musicians who played electric instruments. The trumpeter attracted younger audiences as his fusion music became more radical and abstract while alienating older listeners, musicians, and critics in the jazz scene who accused him of selling out. After recording his 1972 On the Corner album, Davis began to focus more on performing live, working in the studio only sporadically and haphazardly; the 1974 releases Big Fun and Get Up with It compiled recordings he made between 1969 and 1974. By 1973, Davis had established most of his band's line-up, a septet featuring bassist Michael Henderson, guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, and saxophonist Dave Liebman; Liebman left the group the following year and was replaced by Sonny Fortune. Lucas, Foster, and Mtume functioned as the band's rhythm section, while Cosey, Henderson, and Fortune were given space to improvise as soloists. Their concerts – played frequently at rock venues and festivals – became opportunities for Davis and his sidemen to test new musical ideas and ways to exploit electronic equipment. Davis toured relentlessly for two years while tolerating intense physical pain and difficulty walking, caused by joint pain from sickle-cell anaemia, badly damaged ankles after a 1972 car wreck, and osteoporosis in his left hip, which had been operated on a decade earlier. He had also developed nodules on his larynx that often left him short of breath, especially when playing the trumpet. To numb the pain, he became increasingly dependent on self-medicating with painkillers, cocaine, and morphine, which combined with his alcohol and recreational drug use led to mood swings; he would by turns feel vulnerable and hostile. By the end of 1974, a disappointing showing in DownBeat magazine's readers poll reinforced to Davis that his reputation had diminished. Unfazed by detractors and personal troubles, he kept his touring schedule intense. As Henderson recounted: > He was like the general looking at the fort and they had a moat and we were going to get in that fort. That was the attitude of the band. We didn't give a shit what the critics said. People are gonna like what they like, but if you don't like it, respect it. Respect that I have the right to do what I do. Because with or without you, we're going to do it anyway. ### Tour of Japan In 1975, the 48-year old Davis embarked on a three-week tour of Japan. Between January 22 and February 8, he played 14 concerts in large-hall venues to capacity crowds and enthusiastic reviews. Japanese critic Keizo Takada said at the time that Davis is leading his "magnificent and energetic" band just as Duke Ellington had his orchestra: "Miles must be the genius of managing men and bringing out their hidden talent." Throughout the tour, Davis was sick with pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer that grew worse, while his hip occasionally and unpredictably slipped out of its socket. Unable to work his trumpet's volume and effects pedals because of the pain in his legs, he would go down on his knees to press them with his hand during performances. To relieve his pain and perform, he used codeine and morphine, smoked, and drank large quantities of Heineken beer. On several occasions, Davis was able to play two concerts in one day, as he did on February 1 at the Festival Hall in Osaka. The Festival Hall performances were recorded by Japan's CBS/Sony record label under the supervision of Teo Macero, Davis' producer of 15 years. "The Japanese people were very beautiful", Henderson recalled from the concerts. "They came in with their suit and ties on and we proceeded to blow the roof off the suckers with a million amplifiers." ## Composition and performance For the first of the afternoon concert's two sets, the band performed the compositions "Tatu", "Agharta Prelude", and "Maiysha" (from Get Up with It), making up Agharta's first disc of music. The second-set performances of "Right Off" (from Davis' 1971 Jack Johnson album), "Ife" (from Big Fun), and "Wili (= For Dave)" spanned the second disc; between the "Right Off" and "Ife" segments, the band improvised a passage based on "So What" (from the 1959 album Kind of Blue) for 41 seconds after Henderson started to play its ostinato. The pieces were performed in medleys, which were given generic track titles on Agharta, such as "Prelude" and "Interlude". As with his other live releases in the 1970s, Davis refused to have individual compositions specified in the track listing because he felt critics and other listeners often overlooked the music's intrinsic meaning by indulging in abstract musical analysis. "I'm not doing anything, it doesn't need an explanation", he later told Leonard Feather. Music scholars were able to identify the pieces through an examination of what Davis researcher Enrico Merlin called "coded phrases", which Davis played on trumpet or organ to signify the end of one segment and direct the band toward the next section. He first used such cues and modulations when recording "Flamenco Sketches" in 1959, Merlin said. The pieces featured on Agharta were part of a typical set list for the group, but their performances of each sometimes changed almost beyond recognition from concert to concert. This, along with the track names, led to the widespread misunderstanding that the music was mostly or entirely improvised and unstructured. Lucas explained that the band started each performance with a "very defined compositional basis" before developing it further in a highly structured yet "very free way"; the "Right Off" segment, for instance, was improvised from the original recording's E-flat riff. Davis had the band play around a single chord in a piece for several minutes with variations as each member performed in a different time signature; Foster might have been playing in common time and Mtume in compound duple metre or septuple time, while the guitarists would comp in another tempo altogether. "That's a lot of intricate shit we were working off this one chord", Davis remarked. From Lucas' perspective, this kind of "structured improvisation" resulted in significant interplay between the rhythm section and allowed the band to improvise "a lot more than just the notes that were being played in the solos; we were improvising the entire song as we went along." Like Pangaea and Dark Magus – the two other live albums showcasing the septet – Agharta revealed what Amiri Baraka described as Davis' affinity for minimalism. He abandoned melodic and harmonic conventions in favor of riffs, cross-rhythms, and funk grooves as a backdrop for soloists to improvise throughout. Davis had preferred understated compositions throughout his career but by the mid 1970s he showed a deeper embrace of rhythm, inspired by Afrocentric politics. When Mtume and Cosey joined the band, his live music lost most of its "European sensibilities" and "settled down into a deep African thing, a deep African-American groove" emphasizing rhythm and drums rather than individual solos, Davis said, although he did not completely reject melody. "We ain't in Africa, and we don't play just chants. There's some theory under what we do." Categorizing Agharta as a jazz-rock record, Simon Reynolds wrote in The Wire that the music "offered a drastic intensification of rock's three most radical aspects: space, timbre, and groove". In Martha Bayles' opinion, it drew from jazz only in its element of free improvisation and from rock only in its use of electronics and "ear-bleeding volume". The album also showcased Davis' avant-garde impulses and exploration of ambient sounds. According to Greg Tate, the septet created "a pan-ethnic web of avant-garde music", while Sputnikmusic's Hernan M. Campbell said they explored "progressive ambiences" particularly within the record's second half; Phil Alexander from Mojo characterized Agharta as "both ambient yet thrashing, melodic yet coruscating", and suggestive of Karlheinz Stockhausen's electronic experiments. ### Dynamics and effects During the concert, Davis directed approximately 50 stops or breaks to the band, particularly the rhythm section, by gesturing with his head or hand. These stops served as dramatic turning points in the tension-release structure of the performances, changing their tempo and allowing the band to alternate between quiet passages and intense climaxes. He also interjected the performances with drone washes from his Yamaha organ, achieving a "strange, nearly perverse presence" that Mikal Gilmore believed "defined the temper" of the music. Lucas said Davis applied a feel for dynamics he had developed earlier in his career playing jazz, but with a greater array of contrasts, including atonal, dissonant chords, and his own bebop trumpet playing set against the group's funk rhythms. "Extreme textures and extreme volume", Lucas explained, "were as much part of the palette as the contrasting chord and rhythmic structures. Being equipped like a full rock band, we sometimes literally blew the walls out." During the "Tatu" and "Agharta Prelude" segments, Davis abruptly stopped and started the septet several times to shift tempos by playing a dissonant, cacophonous organ figure, giving Cosey space to generate eccentric, psychedelic figures and effects. The main theme for "Tatu" had been played at a slower tempo when Cosey first joined the band, but they played it faster as their rapport grew, especially by the time of the Japanese tour. Cosey credited Davis with having the ability to "transmit thoughts and ideas" to the soloists with his playing. According to John Szwed, the "Prelude" theme was played here with more pronounced riffs and tonality than in past performances of the piece. The rhythmic direction of the music was occasionally interrupted by densely layered percussive and electronic effects, including repeated whirring and grinding sounds. Cosey generated these sounds by running his guitar through a ring modulator and an EMS Synthi A. The latter device was an early synthesizer with knobs and buttons but no keyboard, making it useful for producing abstract noises rather than exact pitches and melodies. While serving as an effects unit for his improvisations, it was also used by Cosey to suggest a certain soundscape during each performance. "Whether we were in space, or underwater or a group of Africans playing – just different soundscapes", he later explained. Onstage, Cosey also had a table set up holding a mbira, claves, agogo bells, and several other hand percussion instruments, which he played or struck with a mallet to indicate a different break or stop. "I would hit them just like they do at [boxing] fights!", Cosey recalled. His synthesizer sometimes interacted with the experimental sounds Mtume was able to generate from his drum machine, as during the "Ife" segment. Davis gave the instrument to Mtume after receiving it from Yamaha, the Japanese tour's sponsor, and told him "see what you can do with it." Rather than use it to create rhythms, Mtume processed the drum machine through several different pedals and phase shifters such as the Mu-Tron Bi-Phase, creating a sound he said was "total tapestry". "I'm also using a volume pedal, so I'm bringing the sounds in and out", Mtume recalled. "Unless you were told, you'd have no idea that you heard a rhythm machine." ### Soloists Unlike Davis' previous recordings, the cadenzas throughout Agharta were mostly played by Fortune and Cosey. Fortune alternated between soprano and alto saxophones and the flute, performing with a "substance and structure" Gilmore believed was very much indebted to John Coltrane during his A Love Supreme (1965) period. In his estimation of Fortune's solos on the album, Gilmore said the saxophonist "floats over formidable rhythmic density, taking long and graceful breaks that wing off into a private reverie". Fortune performed his longest alto saxophone solo on "Right Off", which opened the record's second disc in a "propulsive" segment Gilmore said "flies by like a train ride in a dream, where scenes flash past the window in a fascinating and illusive dream". Cosey played a Guild S-100 electric guitar and heavily employed chromaticism, dissonance, and feedback in his improvisations on Agharta. He alternated between several effects pedals set up underneath his table of percussion instruments, including a fuzzbox for distorting guitar sounds and two different wah-wah pedals he used during solos or when playing more mellow tones. Cosey often arranged his guitar strings in different places on the fretboard and never played in standard tuning, using at least 36 different tuning systems, each of which altered the style and sound of his playing. According to Tzvi Gluckin from Premier Guitar, his experimental guitar playing was rooted in the blues and displayed a sense of phrasing that was aggressive and "blistering" yet "somehow also restrained", particularly in his control of feedback. Davis had enlisted Cosey to provide his music with sounds from the electric blues and Jimi Hendrix, whose use of distortion and the E-flat tuning was shared by Cosey. According to Charles Shaar Murray, he evoked the guitarist's echoic, free jazz-inspired solos while Lucas performed in the manner of Hendrix's more lyrical rhythm and blues songs; Cosey's guitar was separated to the left channel and Lucas' to the right on Agharta. Jazz scholar Stuart Nicholson wrote that Davis utilized his guitarists in a way which realized the "waves of harmonic distortion" Hendrix had explored in his own music. In Murray's view, the album invoked his influence on the trumpeter more explicitly than any other of his records; Nicholson considered it to be the "closest approximation" to the music they could have recorded together. ### Davis on trumpet Davis veered from succinct and expressive solos to unsentimental wails during the concert, which suggested he was still mourning Hendrix's 1970 death, Murray surmised. That year, Davis had started playing with a wah-wah pedal affixed to his trumpet in order to emulate the register Hendrix achieved on his guitar. The pedal created what The Penguin Guide to Jazz (2006) described as "surges and ebbs in a harmonically static line, allowing Miles to build huge melismatic variations on a single note". Davis eventually developed what Philip Freeman called "a new tone, the wiggly, shimmering ribbons of sound that are heard on Agharta", where his wah-wah processed solos often sounded frantic and melancholic, like "twisted streams of raw pain". Davis played his trumpet sparsely throughout the concert, often sounding obscured by the rhythm section. His presence on Agharta reflected what Szwed called "the feel and shape of a musician's late work, an egoless music that precedes its creator's death". Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno's commentary of Ludwig van Beethoven's late works, Szwed said "the disappearance of the musician into the work is a bow to mortality. It was as if Miles were [sic] testifying to all that he had been witness to for the past thirty years, both terrifying and joyful." According to Richard Cook, Davis' final trumpet passage from the "Wili (= For Dave)" segment typified a "sense of gloom, even exhaustion", that colored many interpretations of Agharta's "dark" music. After Lucas' first and only solo of the show climaxed the "Ife" segment, Davis introduced "Wili (= For Dave)" with a few organ chords, culminating in Cosey's final solo and a trumpet passage by Davis, which Paul Tingen characterized as plaintive and introspective. According to him, live music shows typically developed toward reaching a final climax, but Davis' concerts "often dissolved into entropy". On Agharta, Tingen observed a "deep sadness" hanging over the music as the energy of the "Wili (= For Dave)" piece "slowly drained away" to the record's fade out. ## Title and packaging Agharta's title was proposed by CBS/Sony as a reference to the subterranean utopian city. The city's legend was one of several Eastern versions of the Hollow Earth theory, which proposed that an ancient high culture originally lived on the Earth's surface but was forced to flee below because of some political or geological crisis. The myth depicted the city as a divine source of power, claiming that its inhabitants were highly spiritual, advanced beings who would save the Earth from materialism and destructive technology after a cataclysmic event. It was first conceived by 19th-century French thinker Louis Jacolliot as a land ruled by an Ethiopian ruler; Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre later described it as "drowning in celestial radiances all visible distinctions of race in a single chromatic of light and sound, singularly removed from the usual notions of perspective and acoustics." The album's artwork was designed by Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo, who had been creating silkscreen prints on themes of Agharta and the mythical kingdom of Shambhala the year before the Festival Hall concert; his design for Santana's Lotus (1974) featured such themes. In the early 1970s, Yokoo had found his growing popularity in Japan distracting and moved to the United States, where he was able to get more of his work published. After returning to Japan, he received a phone call from Davis, who had seen his art and wanted him to create a cover for Agharta. Before designing the cover, Yokoo listened to a preliminary tape of the concert, meditated, and reflected on his reading of Raymond W. Bernard's 1969 book The Hollow Earth. Bernard had written that the city existed in a large cavern in the center of the Earth where displaced inhabitants of Atlantis had taken refuge following its destruction, using mythological aircraft known as vimanas as transport, although Yokoo said he believed "Agharta could be down there under the sea like Atlantis or even hidden in the jungle like the lost city of El Dorado." Yokoo also drew on elements from other Eastern subterranean myths and Afrofuturism in his design. Critics who eventually saw the album's packaging thought he had been inspired instead by the psychedelic drugs popular at the time. The front cover depicted an advanced civilization with a vast landscape of skyscrapers and red, sunburst-like flames rising out of the cityscape as representations of Agharta's power. Yokoo used a combination of collage, airbrushing, and painting techniques as he had with his previous work, along with postcards collected from his trips to Tahiti and New York City; the cityscape on the front cover was taken from one of his postcards. The back cover showed the city submerged in water, embedded in coral reefs, and hovered over by a diver, fish, and a squid ascending from the city. According to graphic designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, Yokoo depicted groups of jellyfish, coral reefs, and brightly colored fish to suggest an association between Agharta and Atlantis. The foreground of the back cover's illustration featured a reptilian creature. Cultural studies researcher Dagmar Buchwald interpreted this image as an allusion to similar ideas about Lemuria; this mythological continent supposedly existed during the Earth's prehistory and was inhabited by an advanced civilization, later forced under the Earth's surface after its homeland was destroyed by a great flood. A UFO was depicted on the back cover, flying in a spotlight over Agharta, while the album's inside packaging featured images of winged superhuman beings known as the Agharta supermen, who guarded the city's entrances and secret tunnels. An inscription in the LP's gatefold sleeve explained the connection between the UFO and the Agharta supermen: > During various periods in history the supermen of Agharta came to the surface of Earth to teach the human race how to live together in peace and save us from wars, catastrophe, and destruction. The apparent sighting of several flying saucers soon after the bombing of Hiroshima may represent one visitation. Agharta's North American release had different artwork designed by John Berg, the art director from Davis' U.S. label, Columbia Records. In its liner notes, an inscription said the record should be listened to at the highest possible volume, and the arrangements were credited to Davis. After it was released, Macero received a complaint from Columbia's accounting department about the trumpeter being compensated \$2,500 per arrangement, arguing that none of the music sounded as if it had been arranged. ## Release In preparing the Festival Hall recordings for release, Macero abstained from editing and splicing them with pre-recorded parts, a departure from his usual approach to Davis' electric-era albums. As the producer later explained to Musician magazine, "the Japanese specifically wanted me to leave in the spacy things." They were released as two double albums – Agharta, featuring the afternoon concert, was first released in Japan in August 1975 and later in North America in 1976; the evening show was issued exclusively in Japan as Pangaea in 1976. Agharta was reissued several times. In January 1991, Columbia re-released it in the U.S. on CD, featuring a remaster Tingen deemed inferior to the original LP in sound and mix quality. "Had the CD been my first introduction, I might never have liked the album much", he said. Sony later remastered Agharta again as part of their Davis reissue campaign and Master Sound series in Japan, with improved sound using Super Bit Mapping. This 1996 Japanese CD edition restored nine additional minutes of atmospheric feedback, percussion, and synthesizer sounds to the end of the final track. Another remaster of the album was engineered by Mark Wilder and Maria Triana at New York's Battery Studios. It was made available in the U.S. in 2009, when Agharta was one of 52 albums re-issued in mini-LP replica sleeves as a part of Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, a box set commissioned by Sony Legacy. According to Tingen, this edition sounded "like a woolen blanket has been lifted from the previous CD", clarifying especially Cosey, who had sounded muted in the mix. He still found it somewhat low on bass, which he attributed to the original master tapes: "The LP version also didn't have a lot of bass, but I always assumed this was due to the LP cut: with long album lengths the grooves can hold less bass information." ## Reception The Festival Hall concert itself had been received enthusiastically by the Osaka audience. "I had no idea what [they] were going to do", Henderson recalled. "They gave us a standing ovation that was almost as long as the concert." The music translated poorly to the commercial marketplace, however, as Agharta was ill-suited for "FM airplay, dancing, or passive listening", in Nicholson's words. The LP's only appearance on a popular music chart was in April 1976 on the American Billboard chart, where it spent five weeks and reached a peak position of 168. ### Critical reviews Agharta was also largely unsuccessful with professional critics. According to Robert Christgau, it proved the most widely panned of Davis' double albums in the 1970s. The Stranger's Dave Segal claims it was one of the most divisive records ever, challenging both critics and the artist's core audience much in the same way Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album had in 1975. Reviewing for The New York Times in April 1976, Robert Palmer said Agharta is marred by long stretches of "sloppy, one-chord jams", disjointed sounds, and a banal quality clearly rendered by the impeccable Japanese engineering. He complained that Davis' use of the wah-wah pedal inhibits his ability to phrase notes and that the septet sounds poor "by rock standards", particularly Cosey, whose overamplified guitar "whines and rumbles like a noisy machine shop" and relegates Lucas to background riffs. Jazz Forum reviewer Andrzej Trzaskowski wrote that Fortune seems to be the only jazz musician on the record, finding his solos often flawless, while disparaging the performances of Davis, Lucas, and Cosey, whose guitar and synthesizer effects he found pointlessly brutal. In Trzaskowski's opinion, the individual segments do not cohere as a whole and are further hampered by the clichéd "rock phraseology" of the guitarists, who he said lack wit, harmony, and taste. Jazz critic Ian Carr thought the album "suffers from a monotony of sound" that he attributed mostly to Lucas and Cosey's relentlessly eruptive guitar playing. Alongside the band's intense rhythms, Davis' trumpet sounds fatigued, dejected, and out of place to Carr. In general, he deemed the music "too non-Western in the sense of too much rhythm and not enough structure". Gary Giddins penned an angrily dismissive review of Agharta in The Village Voice, in which he charged Davis with failing to assert his musical presence on what he said is not "just a bad record" but also "a sad one". In Giddins' mind, the trumpeter "doesn't exploit the backbeat, he succumbs to it, and the worst consequence is not the ensuing monotony, which theoretically a soloist could turn to his advantage." A few days after his review was published, he was sent a package full of large cotton swabs, industrial-strength scouring pads, and a card that read, "The next time you review Miles Davis clean out your head." Agharta received some positive contemporary commentary. Nathan Cobb from The Boston Globe appraised the record favorably in 1976, calling it "a kind of firestorm for the '70s" with a "positively cosmic" rhythmic foundation. In conclusion, he regarded Davis as "the one who leads the others through the unknown waters of electronic jazz rock". In DownBeat, Gilmore said the band sounds best on the breakneck segments opening each of the two discs, where Cosey's ferocious improvisations "achieve a staggering emotional dimension" lacking on the slower passages, which he felt are still redeemed by Davis' elegiac trumpet playing. He rated the album four stars, out of a possible five. Lester Bangs found Agharta too difficult to definitively assess but nonetheless more fascinating than most other music being released at the time. He wrote in Phonograph Record that Davis' new music is the product of his heart's once luminous "emotional capacities" having been shattered by "great, perhaps unbearable suffering". He went on to write: > In Patti Smith's words, his music now to me is "a branch of cold flame," and I think that, crushed as that heart is, the soul beyond it has not been and cannot ever be destroyed. Like Graham Greene's "burnt-out case" (and he was not referring to drugs), perhaps that is all that is left. But in a curious way that almost glows uniquely brighter in its own dark coldness; and that, that which is all that is left, is merely the universe. ## Aftermath and legacy By the time of the second Osaka concert (captured on Pangaea), the band's level of energy had diminished significantly, and Davis sounded particularly absent. As Mtume recounted, "he became ill in the evening, and you can hear the difference in the energy." Upon returning from Japan, the trumpeter fell ill again and was hospitalized for three months. He held a few more shows and studio sessions with the band, but his health worsened; their last show on September 5, 1975, in Central Park ended abruptly when Davis left the stage and began to cry in pain. Davis retired soon after – citing physical, spiritual, and creative exhaustion – and lived as a recluse for the next several years, often struggling with bouts of depression and further medical treatment. After resuming his recording career in 1980, he abandoned the direction he had pursued in the 1970s, instead playing a style of fusion far more melodic and accessible to audiences, until his death in 1991. The day after he died, Prague's Wenceslas Square saw the opening of the AghaRTA Jazz Centrum, a small jazz club named after the album, hosting nightly performances and an annual festival played by local and international acts. ### Reappraisal Agharta underwent positive critical reassessment, beginning in 1980 when Davis returned to the jazz scene. Of the albums documenting his 1973–75 band, it was considered by many critics to be the best, in retrospect. For Giddins, it had become one of his favorite albums from the trumpeter's electric period, as he reevaluated its elements of drama, relentless tension, and what he considered the best performances of Fortune and Cosey's careers. "There really is not a moment when the music fails to reflect the ministrations of the sorcerer himself", he later said. In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Christgau saw Agharta as Davis' finest music since Jack Johnson. He called it an "angry, dissociated, funky" record built on the septet's virtuosic performance, particularly Foster's "guileless show of chops" and Fortune's performance, which he deemed the best woodwind playing on a Davis album from this decade. Reflecting on the trumpeter's 1970s concert recordings in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992), J. D. Considine contended that Agharta's "alternately audacious, poetic, hypnotic, and abrasive" music had endured the passage of time best. Davis biographer Jack Chambers believed it proved far better than most of his other electric albums, and that the "Maiysha" and "Jack Johnson" segments in particular "magically brought into focus the musical forces over which many thought Davis had lost control". Although Davis' use of wah-wah was frequently dismissed in the past as a failed experiment, Richard Cook and Brian Morton believed the effects pedal had in fact helped Davis achieve remarkably adventurous playing on Agharta. Cook named it among Davis' best works and the culmination of the music he had begun to explore on Bitches Brew (1970). While possessing an "epic" sound and scope, Agharta is also "a great band record", in his opinion: "Even though Davis contributed only telling details, he still cued exceptional performances from his men." In Tingen's mind, it represents the "high plateau" of Davis' electric explorations. He said that, because Davis gave the band leeway for constant interplay, the music exhibits an "organic and fluid quality" as well as a greater variety of textures, rhythms, timbres, and moods than Dark Magus. Henry Kaiser called it the best ensemble performance of jazz's electric era, and Steve Holtje, writing in MusicHound Jazz (1998), credited Davis with conducting the album's "heroes" to sculpt "moments of shattering beauty and soul-rending vehemence". In the All Music Guide to Jazz (2002), Thom Jurek considered the album inarguably the "greatest electric funk-rock jazz record ever" and declared, "there is simply nothing like Agharta in the canon of recorded music." ### Influence Despite being one of Davis' lesser-known records, Agharta belonged to a period in his career that influenced artists in British jazz, new wave, and punk rock, including guitarists Robert Quine and Tom Verlaine. It inspired a generation of musicians to focus on cathartic playing rather than precise instrumentation and composition. Quine was particularly fascinated by Cosey's electric guitar sounds; Bangs, who attended Quine's performance with the Voidoids in 1977, claimed "he steals from Agharta! And makes it work!" Writers have since lauded the quality and originality of Cosey's playing on the album, viewing it as a standard for guitar mastery and contrast. Jazz critic Bill Milkowski credited his excursive style for "spawning an entire school of 'sick' guitar playing" and said the combination of Fortune's acerbic sax lines atop Foster, Henderson, and Lucas' syncopated grooves were 10 years ahead of Steve Coleman and Greg Osby's M-Base experiments. Tingen found Cosey's solos amazingly revealing and advanced when heard decades later: "Sometimes growling, scurrying around all corners like a caged tiger, sometimes soaring like a bird, sometimes deliriously abstract, sometimes elegantly melodic and tender, his electric guitar concept is one of the most original to have been devised on the instrument." In Christgau's opinion, the noises he produced on the first track's second half "comprise some of the greatest free improvisations ever heard in a 'jazz'-'rock' context." According to Nicholson, Agharta and other jazz-rock recordings such as Emergency! (1970) by the Tony Williams Lifetime suggested the genre was progressing toward "a whole new musical language ... a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before". This development dwindled with the commercialism of jazz in the 1980s, although Agharta remained a pivotal and influential record through the 1990s, especially on artists in the experimental rock genre. It became one of the favorite albums for English musician Richard H. Kirk, who recalled playing it often while working at Chris Watson's loft during their early years in the band Cabaret Voltaire. "I can see how this album might have annoyed people but for me it was really nice grooves with improvisation and would open out and become more minimal", Kirk later told The Quietus. Along with On the Corner, it was also a major influence on the Beastie Boys' 1994 album Ill Communication. In 1998, composer and bandleader David Sanford completed his dissertation on Agharta as a doctoral student in composition at Princeton University. In it, he argued that the album demonstrated how jazz has utilized a variety of external influences "to evolve or modernize itself". In an interview several years later, Sanford said it was an important work that had gone to the "fringes of jazz" and a place most other music has not explored since. Visual artist Arthur Jafa, among the generation of fans originally attracted to Agharta, later drew on the album as a predominant influence behind his digitally animated film AGHDRA (2021), an abstract meditation on trauma in the African-American experience expressed through visuals of an eruptive sea and a soundtrack recalling Davis' experimental sounds and arrangements. ## Track listing Information is taken from the liner notes for each edition. ### 1975 vinyl LP ### Track notes - All tracks were credited to Miles Davis as the composer. - According to Paul Tingen, track one of disc one from the Master Sound edition contains the following compositions performed at the noted times: "Tatu" (0:00) and "Agharta Prelude" (22:01); track one of disc two contains "Right Off" (0:00), "So What" (16:42), "Ife" (17:23), and "Wili (= For Dave)" (43:11). - According to Brian Priestley's discography, appended to Ian Carr's Miles Davis: A Biography (1982), the track titles "Interlude" and "Theme from Jack Johnson" were reversed on the disc label's track listing and liner notes for all editions of Agharta; "Theme from Jack Johnson" was meant to refer to side A, and "Interlude" to side B, of record two. ## Personnel Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes. Musicians - Miles Davis – organ, trumpet - Sonny Fortune – alto saxophone, flute, soprano saxophone - Pete Cosey – guitar, percussion, synthesizer - Reggie Lucas – guitar - Michael Henderson – bass - Al Foster – drums - James Mtume – congas, percussion, rhythm box, water drum Production - Takaaki Amano – assistant engineering - Mitsuru Kasai – assistant engineering - Teo Macero – production - Keiichi Nakamura – album direction - Tamoo Suzuki – engineering Packaging - Shigeo Anzai – photography - John Berg – artwork (North American release) - Kiyoshia Koyama – liner notes - Yoshihiro Kumagai – liner notes - Tadayuki Naitoh – photography - Tadanori Yokoo – artwork ## Charts ## See also - 1970s in jazz - Black Beauty: Miles Davis at Fillmore West - Miles Ahead (film)
2,102,207	Victoria Cross (Canada)	1,159,345,838	Military decoration of Canada	[ "1993 establishments in Canada", "Awards established in 1993", "Courage awards", "Military awards and decorations of Canada", "Victoria Cross" ]	The Victoria Cross (VC; French: Croix de Victoria) was created in 1993, perpetuating the lineage of the British Victoria Cross, while serving as the highest award within the Canadian honours system, taking precedence over all other orders, decorations, and medals. It is awarded by either the Canadian monarch or his or her viceregal representative, the Governor General of Canada, to any member of the Canadian Armed Forces or allies serving under or with Canadian military command for extraordinary valour and devotion to duty while facing hostile forces. The British Victoria Cross was recommended prior to the creation of the Canadian medal. The previous Victoria Cross remains the highest award of the United Kingdom honours system and was also awarded in other Commonwealth countries; although most, including Canada, later established their own honours systems and no longer recommended British honours. Whereas in many other Commonwealth countries the relevant version of the Victoria Cross can only be awarded for actions against the enemy in a wartime setting, the Canadian government has a broader definition of the term enemy. In Canada, the Victoria Cross can be awarded for action against armed mutineers, pirates, or other such hostile forces without war being officially declared. Recipients are entitled to use the post-nominal letters VC (for both English and French) and also to receive an annuity of The decoration has not been awarded since its inception. ## Origin The original Victoria Cross was created by a Royal Warrant issued on 29 January 1856 with the royal sign-manual of Queen Victoria, and was intended to recognize demonstrations of gallantry during the Crimean War, regardless of either a man's social status or his record of service. Initially, the Victoria Cross could not be conferred on colonial troops, until Major Charles Heaphy received the medal for his actions while serving with a New Zealand militia unit in 1864. After this, the Victoria Cross was made available to all "local forces under imperial command." The cross could not be awarded posthumously but the policy was reversed in 1907. Until 1972, 81 members of the Canadian military (including those from Newfoundland) and 13 Canadians serving in British units had been awarded the Victoria Cross. After that date, however, the Canadian honours system was overhauled, and the Victoria Cross was eliminated from the official list of honours, instigating a decades-long debate on whether or not to reinstate the decoration. The prime minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau, regularly dodged questions about the Victoria Cross, stating only that Canadians should receive Canadian decorations. In 1987, prime minister Brian Mulroney set up a committee to look into the creation of a Canadian Victoria Cross as part of a new series of military honours. Although the committee did not recommend the Victoria Cross—names such as the Canada Cross and the Cross of Military Valour were put forward—the creation of a Victoria Cross for Australia in 1991 and pressure from The Globe and Mail and advocacy groups, such as the Monarchist League of Canada and the Royal Canadian Legion, forced the plans to be amended. In 1991 a private member's bill received all-party support in the House of Commons, following which the Victoria Cross, along with other Canadian military valour decorations, were on 31 December 1992 formally requested by Mulroney. The request was approved with the issue of letters patent by Queen Elizabeth II on 2 February of the following year, thereby ceasing Canadian dependence on the British honours system. ## Criteria The Victoria Cross is awarded for "the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy" at any point after 1 January 1993. It may be presented posthumously, and, like its British counterpart, can not be revoked. The main distinction between the Victoria Cross and the Cross of Valour is the specific reference to "the enemy", which the Canadian government has defined as a force hostile towards the Canadian Crown, including armed mutineers, rebels, rioters, and pirates. This means that the King-in-Council does not officially have to declare war to give acknowledgement of the existence of a hostile force that fits the official description. Thus, a Canadian serving as part of a peacekeeping operation is eligible to be awarded the Victoria Cross if the service member fulfils the above criteria. In the case of a gallant and daring act having been performed by a squadron, ship's company, or detached body of individuals (such as a security detachment) in which all persons were deemed equally brave and deserving of the Victoria Cross, a ballot is to be drawn; the commissioned and non-commissioned officers each select one of their own, and the private soldiers or seamen select from amongst themselves two individuals. This provision with modification is included in the current warrant but has not been used since the First World War. The process of awarding the Victoria Cross may take place in two ways: One is through a recommendation by the Decorations and Commendations Advisory Committee, which is a part of the Department of National Defence and has six members, one appointed by the governor general and the rest by the chief of the Defence Staff. Alternatively, a field commander can submit a name for consideration, though permission must be obtained from the governor general before the award can be presented. Recipients are entitled to receive an annuity from the federal Canadian Crown; per the Canadian gallantry awards order issued in January 2005, members of the Canadian Armed Forces or those who joined the British forces while domiciled in Canada or Newfoundland prior to 31 March 1949, after receiving the Victoria Cross, be granted each year. Previously, Canadians who were posthumously awarded the British Victoria Cross were given special headstones at their burial sites in Commonwealth War Graves and other cemeteries. To date, no Canadian Victoria Cross has been conferred; Smokey Smith, who died in 2005, was the last living Canadian recipient of the imperial Victoria Cross, personally receiving it from King George VI at Buckingham Palace in December 1944. The last action that resulted in a Canadian being awarded the Victoria Cross was to Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray for gallantry on 9 August 1945, at Onagawa Bay, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The award was posthumously gazetted on 13 November 1945 although in the following five months, three additional awards to Canadians were gazetted for actions in 1941, 1942 and February 1945. Prior to Queen Elizabeth II's re-dedication of the Vimy Memorial on 7 April 2007, there was speculation she would present a Canadian Victoria Cross to her then-prime minister, Stephen Harper, offering it in recognition of the gallantry of the Unknown Soldier, as representative of all Canada's casualties of combat. The proposal was met with a mixed response from members of the Royal Canadian Legion and Canadian Armed Forces, detractors feeling that the Unknown Soldier should not be elevated above his other comrades killed in war. It had also been agreed at the time of the Unknown Soldier's repatriation that no award or decoration would be bestowed on the remains. No decision was taken about the awarding of the Victoria Cross to the Unknown Soldier. Near the end of Canada's role in the Afghanistan War, concerns were raised about the stringency of the criteria that needed to be met to receive the Victoria Cross. Other countries with a Victoria Cross had awarded it numerous times since the end of the Second World War, some members of the Australian, New Zealand, and British armed forces receiving the decoration for their actions during the Afghan and Iraq wars of the 2000s. Members of the Canadian Armed Forces questioned why some actions by Canadians were deemed worthy only of the Star of Military Valour; citations for individuals who had received the imperial Victoria Cross during the First World War were very similar to those for Canadians who were presented with the Star of Military Valour during the war in Afghanistan. This led then Chief of the Defence Staff, Walter Natynczyk, to create a special committee to review the matter. The Department of National Defence's Directorate of Honours and Recognition explained concepts of war had changed since the mid-20th century and Canada had also developed a more elaborate honours system. ## Appearance and display The design of the Canadian medal is derived from that of the British original, which was the creation of Albert, Prince Consort, royal consort to Queen Victoria. Canada's Victoria Cross is thus a cross pattée with straight arms, 38 millimetres (1.5 in) across in each direction, and made out of bronze coloured alloy, the obverse bearing a lion crowned and statant guardant, similar to that which forms the crest of the Royal Arms of Canada, standing upon a representation of St. Edward's Crown, which itself rests above a semi-circular scroll. On the reverse is a raised circle for engraving the date of the act of gallantry along with the name, rank, and unit of the recipient. The medal is suspended from a link forming the letter V attached to a bar adorned on the front with laurel leaves, and on the reverse with the name, rank, and unit of the medal's recipient, all cast in the same metal as the medal. The ribbon, also 38 mm wide, is solid crimson in colour. Cathy Bursey-Sabourin, Fraser Herald of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, and Bruce W. Beatty, however, made certain modifications for the Canadian Victoria Cross, the most notable being the inclusion of Canadian flora as decoration and the alteration of the inscription on the scroll from FOR VALOUR to the Latin translation, PRO VALORE, so as to accommodate Canada's two official languages. In 2008, Citizens for a Canadian Republic's leader, Tom Freda, publicly objected to the decoration's name and appearance, with what he saw as its "objectionable colonial symbolism," royal iconography, and a shape offensive to Muslims and Jews. With Canada at war for the first time since its version of the Victoria Cross was created, preparations for a physical cast of the medal were initiated in 2006, when a committee called the Victoria Cross Production Planning Group was formed under the leadership of the Chancellery of Honours at Rideau Hall. It originally consisted of representatives from the Department of National Defence, Veterans Affairs Canada, and the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General of Canada, and the group later expanded to include individuals from the Department of Canadian Heritage, Natural Resources Canada, and the Royal Canadian Mint, with assistance provided by the Queen and the British Ministry of Defence. Following their research and deliberations, the first Victoria Cross decoration was struck in 2007, as confirmed by Deputy Herald Chancellor Emmanuelle Sajous, and the medal was officially released to the public on 16 May 2008 by Governor General Michaëlle Jean at Rideau Hall. It was one of 20 cast, each of which is composed of three groupings of metals: that of a Russian cannon captured at the siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855), donated by Queen Elizabeth II; a Confederation Medal, created to mark Canada's confederation in 1867; and a selection of metals from each of Canada's regions. These were cast, rather than struck, continuing the tradition started in the United Kingdom when it was found the metal alloy was too brittle for striking, and finished at the Royal Canadian Mint. The first two were sent to Buckingham Palace for addition to the British Royal Collection and other specimens were kept as part of the Crown Collection at Rideau Hall, as well as at the Department of National Defence, Library and Archives Canada, and the Canadian War Museum. As the apex of the Canadian system of honours, the Victoria Cross is to be worn before all other Canadian decorations and insignia of orders, including the Order of Merit and the Order of Canada. It is worn as a medal, suspended from a medal bar on the left chest, unless protocol calls for a ribbon bar, which consists of a crimson ribbon with a miniature bronze Victoria Cross at its centre. Should an individual receive multiple awards of the Victoria Cross, additional bronze medal bars are added to the ribbon and further miniatures are placed evenly on the ribbon bar, reflecting the number of crosses the wearer has earned.
1,837,721	Short-beaked echidna	1,168,261,836	Spiny furred egg-laying mammal from Australia	[ "Articles containing video clips", "Mammals described in 1792", "Mammals of New South Wales", "Mammals of Papua New Guinea", "Mammals of Queensland", "Mammals of South Australia", "Mammals of Tasmania", "Mammals of Victoria (state)", "Mammals of Western Australia", "Mammals of Western New Guinea", "Mammals of the Northern Territory", "Monotremes of New Guinea", "Myrmecophagous mammals", "Taxa named by George Shaw" ]	The short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), also called the short-nosed echidna, is one of four living species of echidna and the only member of the genus Tachyglossus. It is covered in fur and spines and has a distinctive snout and a specialised tongue, which it uses to catch its insect prey at a great speed. Like the other extant monotremes, the short-beaked echidna lays eggs; the monotremes are the only living group of mammals to do so. The short-beaked echidna has extremely strong front limbs and claws, which allow it to burrow quickly with great power. As it needs to be able to survive underground, it has a significant tolerance to high levels of carbon dioxide and low levels of oxygen. It has no weapons or fighting ability but deters predators by curling into a ball and deterring them with its spines. It lacks the ability to sweat and cannot deal with heat well, so it tends to avoid daytime activity in hot weather. It can swim if needed. The snout has mechanoreceptors and electroreceptors that help the echidna to detect its surroundings. During the Australian winter, it goes into deep torpor and hibernation, reducing its metabolism to save energy. As the temperature increases, it emerges to mate. Female echidnas lay one egg a year and the mating period is the only time the otherwise solitary animals meet one another; the male has no further contact with the female or his offspring after mating. A newborn echidna is the size of a grape but grows rapidly on its mother's milk, which is very rich in nutrients. Baby echidnas eventually grow too large and spiky to stay in the pouch and, around seven weeks after hatching, are expelled from the pouch into the mother's burrow. At around six months of age, they leave the burrow and have no more contact with their mothers. The species is found throughout Australia, where it is the most widespread native mammal, and in coastal and highland regions of eastern New Guinea, where it is known as the mungwe in the Daribi and Chimbu languages. It is not threatened with extinction, but human activities, such as hunting, habitat destruction, and the introduction of foreign predatory species and parasites, have reduced its abundance in Australia. ## Taxonomy and naming The short-beaked echidna was first described by George Shaw in 1792. He named the species Myrmecophaga aculeata, thinking that it might be related to the giant anteater. Since Shaw first described the species, its name has undergone four revisions: from M. aculeata to Ornithorhynchus hystrix, Echidna hystrix, Echidna aculeata and finally, Tachyglossus aculeatus. The name Tachyglossus means 'quick tongue', in reference to the speed with which the echidna uses its tongue to catch ants and termites, and aculeatus means 'spiny' or 'equipped with spines'. The short-beaked echidna is the only member of its genus, sharing the family Tachyglossidae with the extant species of the genus Zaglossus that occur in New Guinea. Zaglossus species, which include the western long-beaked, Sir David's long-beaked and eastern long-beaked echidnas, are all significantly larger than T. aculeatus, and their diets consist mostly of worms and grubs rather than ants and termites. Species of the Tachyglossidae are egg-laying mammals; together with the related family Ornithorhynchidae, they are the only extant monotremes in the world. The five subspecies of the short-beaked echidna are each found in different geographical locations. The subspecies also differ from one another in their hairiness, spine length and width, and the size of the grooming claws on their hind feet. - T. a. acanthion is found in Northern Territory and Western Australia. - T. a. aculeatus is found in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. - T. a. lawesii is found in coastal regions and the highlands of New Guinea, and possibly in the rainforests of Northeast Queensland. - T. a. multiaculeatus is found on Kangaroo Island. - T. a. setosus is found on Tasmania and some islands in Bass Strait. The earliest fossils of the short-beaked echidna date back around 15 million years ago to the Miocene epoch, and the oldest specimens were found in caves in South Australia, often with fossils of the long-beaked echidna from the same period. The ancient short-beaked echidnas are considered to be identical to their contemporary descendants except the ancestors are around 10% smaller. This "post-Pleistocene dwarfing" affects many Australian mammals. Part of the last radiation of monotreme mammals, echidnas are believed to have evolutionally diverged from the platypus around 66 million years ago, between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. However, the echidna's pre-Pleistocene heritage has not been traced yet, and the lack of teeth on the fossils found thus far have made it impossible to use dental evidence. The short-beaked echidna was commonly called the spiny anteater in older books, though this term has fallen out of fashion since the echidna is only very distantly related to the true anteaters. It has a variety of names in the indigenous languages of the regions where it is found. The Noongar people from southwestern Western Australia call it the nyingarn. In Central Australia southwest of Alice Springs, the Pitjantjatjara term is tjilkamata or tjirili, from the word tjiri for spike of porcupine grass (Triodia irritans). The word can also mean 'slowpoke'. In the Wiradjuri language of Central NSW, it is called wandhayala. In central Cape York Peninsula, it is called (minha) kekoywa in Pakanh, where minha is a qualifier meaning 'meat' or 'animal', (inh-)ekorak in Uw Oykangand and (inh-)egorag in Uw Olkola, where inh- is a qualifier meaning 'meat' or 'animal'. In the highland regions of southwestern New Guinea, it is known as the mungwe in the Daribi and Chimbu languages. The short-beaked echidna is called miɣu in the Motu language of Papua New Guinea. ## Description Short-beaked echidnas are typically 30 to 45 cm (12 to 18 in) in length, with 75 mm (3 in) of snout, and weigh between 2 and 7 kg (4.4 and 15.4 lb). However, the Tasmanian subspecies, T. a. setosus, is smaller than its Australian mainland counterparts. Because the neck is not externally visible, the head and body appear to merge. The earholes are on either side of the head, with no external pinnae. The eyes are small, about 9 mm (0.4 in) in diameter and at the base of the wedge-shaped snout. The nostrils and the mouth are at the distal end of the snout; the mouth cannot open wider than 5 mm (0.2 in). The body of the short-beaked echidna is, with the exception of the underside, face and legs, covered with cream-coloured spines. The spines, which may be up to 50 mm (2 in) long, are modified hairs, mostly made of keratin. Insulation is provided by fur between the spines, which ranges in colour from honey to a dark reddish-brown and even black; the underside and short tail are also covered in fur. The echidna's fur may be infested with what is said to be one of the world's largest fleas, Bradiopsylla echidnae, which is about 4 mm (0.16 in) long. The limbs of the short-beaked echidna are adapted for rapid digging; they are short and have strong claws. Their strong and stout limbs allow it to tear apart large logs and move paving stones, and one has been recorded moving a 13.5 kg (30 lb) stone; a scientist also reported that a captive echidna moved a refrigerator around the room in his home. The power of the limbs is based on strong musculature, particularly around the shoulder and torso areas. The mechanical advantage of its arm is greater than that of humans, as its biceps connects the shoulder to the forearm at a point further down than for humans, and the chunky humerus allows more muscle to form. The claws on the hind feet are elongated and curved backward to enable cleaning and grooming between the spines. Like the platypus, the echidna has a low body temperature—between 30–32 °C (86–90 °F)—but, unlike the platypus, which shows no evidence of torpor or hibernation, the body temperature of the echidna may fall as low as 5 °C (41 °F). The echidna does not pant or sweat and normally seeks shelter in hot conditions. Despite their inability to sweat, echidnas still lose water as they exhale. The snout is believed to be crucial in restricting this loss to sustainable levels, through a bony labyrinth that has a refrigerator effect and helps to condense water vapour in the breath. The echidna does not have highly concentrated urine, and around half of the estimated daily water loss of 120 g (4.2 oz) occurs in this manner, while most of the rest is through the skin and respiratory system. Most of this is replenished by its substantial eating of termites—one laboratory study reported ingestion of around 147 g (5.2 oz) a day, most of which was water. This can be supplemented by drinking water, if available, or licking morning dew from flora. In the Australian autumn and winter, the echidna enters periods of torpor or deep hibernation. Because of its low body temperature, it becomes sluggish in very hot and very cold weather. Like all monotremes, it has one orifice, the cloaca, for the passage of faeces, urine and reproductive products. The male has internal testes, no external scrotum and a highly unusual penis with four knobs on the tip, which is nearly a quarter of his body length when erect. The gestating female develops a pouch on her underside, where she raises her young. The musculature of the short-beaked echidna has a number of unusual aspects. The panniculus carnosus, an enormous muscle just beneath the skin, covers the entire body. By contraction of various parts of the panniculus carnosus, the short-beaked echidna can change shape, the most characteristic shape change being achieved by rolling itself into a ball when threatened, so protecting its belly and presenting a defensive array of sharp spines. It has one of the shortest spinal cords of any mammal, extending only as far as the thorax. Whereas the human spinal cord ends at the first or second lumbar vertebra, for the echidna it occurs at the seventh thoracic vertebra. The shorter spinal cord is thought to allow flexibility to enable wrapping into a ball. The musculature of the face, jaw and tongue is specialised for feeding. The tongue is the animal's sole means of catching prey, and can protrude up to 180 mm (7 in) outside the snout. The snout's shape, resembling a double wedge, gives it a significant mechanical advantage in generating a large moment, so makes it efficient for digging to reach prey or to build a shelter. The tongue is sticky because of the presence of glycoprotein-rich mucus, which both lubricates movement in and out of the snout and helps to catch ants and termites, which adhere to it. The tongue is protruded by contracting circular muscles that change the shape of the tongue and force it forwards and contracting two genioglossal muscles attached to the caudal end of the tongue and to the mandible. The protruded tongue is stiffened by a rapid flow of blood, which allows it to penetrate wood and soil. Retraction requires the contraction of two internal longitudinal muscles, known as the sternoglossi. When the tongue is retracted, the prey is caught on backward-facing keratinous "teeth", located along the roof of the buccal cavity, allowing the animal both to capture and grind food. The tongue moves with great speed, and has been measured to move in and out of the snout 100 times a minute. This is partly achieved through the elasticity of the tongue and the conversion of elastic potential energy into kinetic energy. The tongue is very flexible, particularly at the end, allowing it to bend in U-turns and catch insects attempting to flee in their labyrinthine nests or mounds. The tongue also has an ability to avoid picking up splinters while foraging in logs; the factors behind this ability are unknown. It can eat quickly; a specimen of around 3 kg (6.6 lb) can ingest 200 g (7.1 oz) of termites in 10 minutes. The echidna's stomach is quite different from other mammals. It is devoid of secretory glands and has a cornified stratified epithelium, which resembles horny skin. Unlike other mammals, which typically have highly acidic stomachs, the echidna has low levels of acidity, almost neutral, with pH in the 6.2–7.4 range. The stomach is elastic, and gastric peristalsis grinds soil particulates and shredded insects together. Digestion occurs in the small intestine, which is around 3.4 m (11 ft) in length. Insect exoskeletons and soil are not digested, being ejected in the waste. Numerous physiological adaptations aid the lifestyle of the short-beaked echidna. Because the animal burrows, it must tolerate very high levels of carbon dioxide in inspired air, and will voluntarily remain in situations where carbon dioxide concentrations are high. It can dig up to a metre into the ground to retrieve ants or evade predators, and can survive with low oxygen when the area is engulfed by bushfires. The echidna can also dive underwater, which can help it to survive sudden floods. During these situations, the heart rate drops to around 12 beats per minute, around one-fifth of the rate at rest. This process is believed to save oxygen for the heart and brain, which are the most sensitive organs to such a shortage; laboratory testing has revealed the echidna's cardiovascular system is similar to that of the seal. Following the devastation of a bushfire, echidnas can compensate for the lack of food by reducing their daytime body temperature and activity through use of torpor, for a period of up to three weeks. The echidna's optical system is an uncommon hybrid of both mammalian and reptilian characteristics. The cartilaginous layer beneath the sclera of the eyeball is similar to that of reptiles and avians. The small corneal surface is keratinised and hardened, possibly to protect it from chemicals secreted by prey insects or self-impalement when it rolls itself up, which has been observed. The echidna has the flattest lens of any animal, giving it the longest focal length. This similarity to primates and humans allows it to see distant objects clearly. Unlike placental mammals, including humans, the echidna does not have a ciliary muscle to distort the geometry of the lens and thereby change the focal length and allow objects at different distances to be viewed clearly; the whole eye is believed to distort, so the distance between the lens and retina instead changes to allow focusing. The visual ability of an echidna is not great, and it is not known whether it can perceive colour; however, it can distinguish between black and white, and horizontal and vertical stripes. Eyesight is not a crucial factor in the animal's ability to survive, as blind echidnas are able to live healthily. Its ears are sensitive to low-frequency sound, which may be ideal for detecting sounds emitted by termites and ants underground. The pinnae are obscured and covered by hair, predators therefore cannot grab them in an attack, and prey or foreign material cannot enter, although ticks are known to reside there. The macula of the ear is very large compared to other animals, and is used as a gravity sensor to orient the echidna. The large size may be important for burrowing downwards. The leathery snout is keratinised and covered in mechano- and thermoreceptors, which provide information about the surrounding environment. These nerves protrude through microscopic holes at the end of the snout, which also has mucus glands on the end that act as electroreceptors. Echidnas can detect electric fields of 1.8 mV/cm—1000 times more sensitive than humans—and dig up buried batteries. A series of push rods protrude from the snout. These are columns of flattened, spinous cells, with roughly an average diameter of 50 micrometres (0.0020 in) and a length of 300 micrometres (0.012 in). The number of push rods per square millimetre of skin is estimated to be 30 to 40. Longitudinal waves are believed to be picked up and transmitted through the rods, acting as mechanical sensors, to allow prey detection. A well-developed olfactory system may be used to detect mates and prey. A highly sensitive optic nerve has been shown to have visual discrimination and spatial memory comparable to those of a rat. The brain and central nervous system have been extensively studied for evolutionary comparison with placental mammals, particularly with its fellow monotreme, the platypus. The average brain volume is 25 ml (0.88 imp fl oz; 0.85 US fl oz), similar to a cat of approximately the same size; while the platypus has a largely smooth brain, the echidna has a heavily folded and fissured, gyrencephalic brain similar to humans, which is seen as a sign of a highly neurologically advanced animal. The cerebral cortex is thinner, and the brain cells are larger and more densely packed and organised in the echidna than the platypus, suggesting evolutionary divergence must have occurred long ago. Almost half of the sensory area in the brain is devoted to the snout and tongue, and the part devoted to smell is relatively large compared to other animals. The short-beaked echidna has the largest prefrontal cortex relative to body size of any mammal, taking up 50% of the volume in comparison to 29% for humans. This part of the brain in humans is thought to be used for planning and analytical behaviour, leading to debate as to whether the echidna has reasoning and strategising ability. Experiments in a simple maze and with a test on opening a trap door to access food, and the echidna's ability to remember what it has learnt for over a month, has led scientists to conclude its learning ability is similar to that of a cat or a rat. The echidna shows rapid eye movement during sleep, usually around its thermoneutral temperature of 25 °C (77 °F), and this effect is suppressed at other temperatures. Its brain has been shown to contain a claustrum similar to that of placental mammals, linking this structure to their common ancestor. ## Ecology and behaviour No systematic study of the ecology of the short-beaked echidna has been published, but studies of several aspects of their ecological behaviour have been conducted. They live alone, and, apart from the burrow created for rearing young, they have no fixed shelter or nest site. They do not have a home territory they defend against other echidnas, but range over a wide area. The range area has been observed to be between 21–93 ha (52–230 acres), although one study in Kangaroo Island found the animals there covered an area between 9–192 ha (22–474 acres). Overall, the mean range areas across the various regions of Australia were 40–60 ha (99–148 acres). There was no correlation between sex and range area, but a weak one with size. Echidnas can share home ranges without incident, and sometimes share shelter sites if not enough are available for each animal to have one individually. Short-beaked echidnas are typically active in the daytime, though they are ill-equipped to deal with heat because they have no sweat glands and do not pant. Therefore, in warm weather, they change their patterns of activity, becoming crepuscular or nocturnal. Body temperatures above 34 °C (93 °F) are believed to be fatal, and in addition to avoiding heat, the animal adjusts its circulation to maintain a sustainable temperature by moving blood to and from the skin to increase or lower heat loss. In areas where water is present, they can also swim to keep their body temperatures low. The "thermoneutral zone" for the environment is around 25 °C (77 °F), at which point the metabolism needed to maintain body temperature is minimised. The echidna is endothermic, and can maintain body temperatures of around 32 °C (90 °F). It can also reduce its metabolism and heart rate and body temperature. In addition to brief and light bouts of torpor throughout the year, the echidna enters periods during the Australian winter when it hibernates, both in cold regions and in regions with more temperate climates. During hibernation, the body temperature drops to as low as 4 °C (39 °F). The heart rate falls to four to seven beats per minute—down from 50 to 68 at rest—and the echidna can breathe as infrequently as once every three minutes, 80 to 90% slower than when it is active. Metabolism can drop to one-eighth of the normal rate. Echidnas begin to prepare for hibernation between February and April, when they reduce their consumption and enter brief periods of torpor. Males begin hibernating first, while females that have reproduced start later. During periods of hibernation, the animals average 13 separate bouts of torpor, which are broken up by periods of arousal lasting 1.2 days on average. These interruptions tend to coincide with warmer periods. Males end their hibernation period in mid-June, while reproductive females return to full activity in July and August; nonreproductive females and immature echidnas may not end hibernation until two months later. During euthermia, the body temperature can vary by 4 °C per day. The metabolic rate is around 30% of that of placental mammals, making it the lowest energy-consuming mammal. This figure is similar to that of other animals that eat ants and termites; burrowing animals also tend to have low metabolism generally. Echidnas hibernate even though it is seemingly unnecessary for survival; they begin their hibernation period while the weather is still warm, and food is generally always plentiful. One explanation is that echidnas maximize their foraging productivity by exercising caution with their energy reserves. Another hypothesis is that they are descended from ectothermic ancestors, but have taken to periodic endothermy for reproductive reasons, so that the young can develop more quickly. Supporters of this theory argue that males hibernate earlier than females because they finish their contribution to reproduction first, and they awake earlier to undergo spermatogenesis in preparation for mating, while females and young lag in their annual cycle. During the hibernation period, the animals stay in entirely covered shelter. Short-beaked echidnas can live anywhere with a good supply of food, and regularly feast on ants and termites. They are believed to locate food by smell, using sensors in the tips of their snouts, by shuffling around seemingly arbitrarily, and using their snout in a probing manner. A study of echidnas in New England (New South Wales) has shown that they tend to dig up scarab beetle larvae in spring when the prey are active, but eschew this prey when it is inactive, leading to the conjecture that echidnas detect prey using hearing. Vision is not believed to be significant in hunting, as blind animals have been observed to survive in the wild. Echidnas use their strong claws to pull apart nests and rotting logs to gain access to their prey. They avoid ants and termites that secrete repulsive liquids, and have a preference for the eggs, pupae and winged phases of the insects. Echidnas hunt most vigorously towards the end of the southern winter and early in spring, when their fat reserves have been depleted after hibernation and nursing. At this time, ants have high body fat, and the echidna targets their mounds. The animal also hunts beetles and earthworms, providing they are small enough to fit in a 5 mm (0.20 in) gap. The proportion of ants and termites in their diets depends on the availability of prey, and termites make up a larger part in drier areas where they are more plentiful. However, termites are preferred, if available, as their bodies contain a smaller proportion of indigestible exoskeleton. Termites from the Rhinotermitidae family are avoided due to their chemical defences. Scarab beetle larvae are also a large part of the diet when and where available. In the New England study, 37% of the food intake consisted of beetle larvae, although the echidna had to squash the prey in its snout as it ingested it, due to size. Echidnas are powerful diggers, using their clawed front paws to dig out prey and create burrows for shelter. They may rapidly dig themselves into the ground if they cannot find cover when in danger. They bend their belly together to shield the soft, unprotected part, and can also urinate, giving off a pungent liquid, in an attempt to deter attackers. Males also have single small spurs on each rear leg, believed to be a defensive weapon that has since been lost through evolution. Echidnas typically try to avoid confrontation with predators. Instead, they use the colour of their spines, which is similar to the vegetation of the dry Australian environment, to avoid detection. They have good hearing and tend to become stationary if sound is detected. It is likely that echidnas are keystone species in the ecosystem health in Australia, due to their contribution through bioturbation, the reworking of soils through their digging activity. This is based on the estimation that a single echidna will move up to 204 m<sup>3</sup> (7,200 cu ft) of soil a year, that it is the most widespread of any terrestrial Australian species, is relatively common, and that other bioturbators have been heavily impacted by human settlement. In Australia, they are most common in forested areas with abundant, termite-filled, fallen logs. In agricultural areas, they are most likely to be found in uncleared scrub; they may be found in grassland, arid areas, and in the outer suburbs of the capital cities. Little is known about their distribution in New Guinea. They have been found in southern New Guinea between Merauke in the west and the Kelp Welsh River, east of Port Moresby, in the east, where they may be found in open woodland. Echidnas have the ability to swim, and have been seen cooling off near dams during high temperatures. They have also been seen crossing streams and swimming for brief periods in seas off Kangaroo Island. They swim with only the snout above water, using it as a snorkel. ### Reproduction The solitary short-beaked echidna looks for a mate between May and September; the precise timing of the mating season varies with geographic location. In the months before the mating season, the size of the male's testes increases by a factor of three or more before spermatogenesis occurs. Both males and females give off a strong, musky odour during the mating season, by turning their cloacas inside out and wiping them on the ground, secreting a glossy liquid believed to be an aphrodisiac. During courtship—observed for the first time in 1989—males locate and pursue females. Trains of up to 10 males, often with the youngest and smallest male at the end of the queue, may follow a single female in a courtship ritual that may last for up to four weeks; the duration of the courtship period varies with location. During this time, they forage for food together, and the train often changes composition, as some males leave and other join the pursuit. In cooler parts of their range, such as Tasmania, females may mate within a few hours of arousal from hibernation. Before mating, the male smells the female, paying particular attention to the cloaca. This process can take a few hours, and the female can reject the suitor by rolling herself into a ball. After prodding and sniffing her back, the male is often observed to roll the female onto her side and then assume a similar position himself so the two animals are abdomen to abdomen, having dug a small crater in which to lie. They can lie with heads facing one another, or head to rear. If more than one male is in the vicinity, fighting over the female may occur. Each side of the bilaterally symmetrical, rosette-like, four-headed penis (similar to that of reptiles and 7 centimetres (2.8 in) in length) is used alternately, with the other half being shut down between ejaculations. Sperm bundles of around 100 each appear to confer increased sperm motility, which may provide the potential for sperm competition between males. This process takes between a half and three hours. Each mating results in the production of a single egg, and females are known to mate only once during the breeding season; each mating is successful. Fertilisation occurs in the oviduct. Gestation takes between 21 and 28 days after copulation, during which time the female constructs a nursery burrow. Following the gestation period, a single, rubbery-skinned egg between 13 and 17 mm (0.5 and 0.7 in) in diameter and 1.5 and 2.0 g (0.053 and 0.071 oz) in weight is laid from her cloaca directly into a small, backward-facing pouch that has developed on her abdomen. The egg is ovoid, leathery, soft, and cream-coloured. Between laying and hatching, some females continue to forage for food, while others dig burrows and rest there until hatching. Ten days after it is laid, the egg hatches within the pouch. The embryo develops an egg tooth during incubation, which it uses to tear open the egg; the tooth disappears soon after hatching. Hatchlings are about 1.5 centimetres (0.6 in) long and weigh between 0.3 and 0.4 grams (0.011 and 0.014 oz). After hatching, young echidnas are known as "puggles". Although newborns are still semitranslucent and still surrounded by the remains of the egg yolk, and the eyes are still barely developed, they already have well-defined front limbs and digits that allow them to climb on their mothers' bodies. Hatchlings attach themselves to their mothers' milk areolae, specialised patches on the skin that secrete milk—monotremes lack nipples—through about 100–150 pores. The puggles were thought to have imbibed the milk by licking the mother's skin, but they are now thought to feed by sucking the areolae. They have been observed ingesting large amounts during each feeding period, and mothers may leave them unattended in the burrow for between five and ten days to find food. Studies of captives have shown they can ingest milk once every two or three days and then increase their mass by 20% in one milk-drinking session lasting between one and two hours. Around 40% of the milk weight is converted into body mass, and as such, a high proportion of milk is converted into growth; a correlation with the growth of the puggle and its mother's size has been observed. By the time the puggle is around 200 g (7.1 oz), it is left in the burrow while the mother forages for food, and it reaches around 400 g (14 oz) after around two months. Juveniles are eventually ejected from the pouch at around two to three months of age, because of the continuing growth in the length of their spines. During this period, the young are left in covered burrows while the mothers forage, and the young are often preyed upon. Suckling gradually decreases until juveniles are weaned at about six months of age. The duration of lactation is about 200 days, and the young leave the burrow after 180 to 205 days, usually in January or February, at which time they weigh around 800 and 1,300 g (28 and 46 oz). There is no contact between the mother and young after this point. The composition of the milk secreted by the mother changes over time. At the moment of birth, the solution is dilute and contains 1.25% fat, 7.85% protein, and 2.85% carbohydrates and minerals. Mature milk has much more concentrated nutrients, with 31.0, 12.4 and 2.8% of the aforementioned nutrients, respectively. Near weaning, the protein level continues to increase; this may be due to the need for keratin synthesis for hair and spines, to provide defences against the cold weather and predators. The principal carbohydrate components of the milk are fucosyllactose and saialyllactose; it has a high iron content, which gives it a pink colour. The high iron content and low levels of free lactose differ from eutherian mammals. Lactose production is believed to proceed along the same lines as in the platypus. The age of sexual maturity is uncertain, but may be four to five years. A 12-year field study found the short-beaked echidna reaches sexual maturity between five and 12 years of age, and the frequency of reproduction varies from once every two years to once every six years. In the wild, the short-beaked echidna has an average lifespan of 10 years, though they can live as long as 40. The longest-lived specimen reached 49 years of age in a zoo in Philadelphia. In contrast to other mammals, echidna rates of reproduction and metabolism are lower, and they live longer, as though in slow motion, something caused, at least in part, by their low body temperature, which rarely exceeds 33 °C (91 °F), even when they are not hibernating. Like its fellow monotreme the platypus, the short-beaked echidna has a system of multiple sex chromosomes, in which males have four Y chromosomes and five X chromosomes. Males appear to be X<sub>1</sub>Y<sub>1</sub>X<sub>2</sub>Y<sub>2</sub>X<sub>3</sub>Y<sub>3</sub>X<sub>4</sub>Y<sub>4</sub>X<sub>5</sub>, while females are X<sub>1</sub>X<sub>1</sub>X<sub>2</sub>X<sub>2</sub>X<sub>3</sub>X<sub>3</sub>X<sub>4</sub>X<sub>4</sub>X<sub>5</sub>X<sub>5</sub>. Weak identity between chromosomes results in meiotic pairing that yields only two possible genotypes of sperm, X<sub>1</sub>X<sub>2</sub>X<sub>3</sub>X<sub>4</sub>X<sub>5</sub> or Y<sub>1</sub>Y<sub>2</sub>Y<sub>3</sub>Y<sub>4</sub>, thus preserving this complex system. ## Conservation status The short-beaked echidna is common throughout most of temperate Australia and lowland New Guinea, and is not listed as endangered. In Australia, it remains widespread across a wide range of conditions, including urban outskirts, coastal forests and dry inland areas, and is especially widespread in Tasmania and on Kangaroo Island. The most common threats to the animal in Australia are motor vehicles and habitat destruction, which have led to localised extinctions. In Australia, the number of short-beaked echidnas has been less affected by land clearance than have some other species, since they do not require a specialised habitat beyond a good supply of ants and termites. As a result, they can survive in cleared land if the cut-down wood is left in the area, as the logs can be used as shelters and sources of insects. However, areas where the land has been completely cleared for single crops that can be mechanically harvested, such as wheat fields, have seen extinctions. Over a decade-long period, around one-third of echidna deaths reported to wildlife authorities in Victoria were due to motor vehicles, and the majority of wounded animals handed in were traffic accident victims. Studies have shown they often choose to traverse drainage culverts under roads, so this is seen as a viable means of reducing deaths on busy roads in rural areas or national parks where the animals are more common. Despite their spines, they are preyed on by birds of prey, the Tasmanian devil, dingoes, snakes, lizards, goannas, cats, and foxes, although almost all victims are young. Goannas are known for their digging abilities and strong sense of smell, and are believed to have been the main predators of the echidna before the introduction of eutherian mammals. Dingoes are known to kill echidnas by rolling them over onto their backs and attacking their underbellies. A tracking study of a small number of echidnas on Kangaroo Island concluded that goannas and cats were the main predators, although foxes—absent in Kangaroo Island—would be expected to be a major threat. They were eaten by indigenous Australians and the early European settlers of Australia. Hunting and eating of the echidna in New Guinea has increased over time and caused a decline in the population and distribution areas; it is now believed to have disappeared from highland areas. The killing of echidnas was a taboo in traditional culture, but since the tribespeople have become increasingly Westernised, hunting has increased, and the animals have been more easily tracked down due to the use of dogs. Infection with the introduced parasitic tapeworm Spirometra erinaceieuropaei is considered fatal for the echidna. This waterborne infection is contracted through sharing drinking areas with infected dogs, foxes, cats, and dingos, which do not die from the parasite. The infection is seen as being more dangerous in drier areas, where more animals are sharing fewer bodies of water, increasing the chance of transmission. The Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland runs an Australia-wide survey, called Echidna Watch, to monitor the species. Echidnas are also known to be affected by other tapeworms, protozoans and herpes-like viral infections, but little is known of how the infections affect the health of the animals or the populations. Although it is considered easy to keep echidnas healthy in captivity, breeding is difficult, partly due to the relatively infrequent cycle. In 2009, Perth Zoo managed to breed some captive short-beaked echidnas, and in 2015 the first zoo-born echidnas were successfully bred there. Until 2006, only five zoos have managed to breed short-beaked echidnas, but no captive-bred young have survived to maturity. Of these five institutions, only one in Australia—Sydney's Taronga Zoo—managed to breed echidnas, in 1977. The other four cases occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, two in the United States and the others in western Europe. In these cases, breeding occurred six months out of phase compared to Australia, after the animals had adapted to Northern Hemisphere seasons. The failure of captive breeding programs has conservation implications for the endangered species of echidna from the genus Zaglossus, and to a lesser extent for the short-beaked echidna. ## Cultural references Short-beaked echidnas feature in the animistic culture of indigenous Australians, including their visual arts and stories. The species was a totem for some groups, including the Noongar people from Western Australia. Many groups have myths about the animal; one myth explains it was created when a group of hungry young men went hunting at night and stumbled across a wombat. They threw spears at the wombat, but lost sight of it in the darkness. The wombat adapted the spears for its own defence and turned into an echidna. The fictional character Knuckles the Echidna from Sonic the Hedgehog is a red short beaked echidna who possesses superhuman strength. The short-beaked echidna is an iconic animal in contemporary Australia, notably appearing on the five-cent coin (the smallest denomination), and on a \$200 commemorative coin released in 1992. The anthropomorphic echidna Millie was a mascot for the 2000 Summer Olympics. ## See also - Echidna - Fauna of Australia - List of monotremes and marsupials ## Cited references ## General references
57,101	Anne of Denmark	1,173,919,747	Queen of Scotland (1589–1619); Queen of England and Ireland (1603–25)	[ "1574 births", "1619 deaths", "16th-century Danish people", "16th-century Danish women", "16th-century English women", "16th-century Norwegian people", "16th-century Norwegian women", "16th-century Scottish people", "16th-century Scottish women", "17th-century Danish people", "17th-century Danish women", "17th-century English women", "17th-century Norwegian people", "17th-century Norwegian women", "17th-century Scottish people", "17th-century Scottish women", "17th-century philanthropists", "17th-century women philanthropists", "Anne of Denmark", "Burials at Westminster Abbey", "Children of Frederick II of Denmark", "Danish expatriates in England", "Danish patrons of the arts", "Danish philanthropists", "Danish princesses", "Danish women philanthropists", "Daughters of kings", "Deaths from edema", "English patrons of the arts", "English royal consorts", "English women philanthropists", "Irish royal consorts", "James VI and I", "Norwegian patrons of the arts", "Norwegian philanthropists", "Norwegian princesses", "People from Skanderborg Municipality", "Scottish patrons of the arts", "Scottish philanthropists", "Scottish royal consorts", "Women who experienced pregnancy loss" ]	Anne of Denmark (Danish: Anna; 12 December 1574 – 2 March 1619) was the wife of King James VI and I; as such, she was Queen of Scotland from their marriage on 20 August 1589 and Queen of England and Ireland from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on 24 March 1603 until her death in 1619. The second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, Anne married James at age 14. They had three children who survived infancy: Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who predeceased his parents; Princess Elizabeth, who became Queen of Bohemia; and James's future successor, Charles I. Anne demonstrated an independent streak and a willingness to use factional Scottish politics in her conflicts with James over the custody of Prince Henry and his treatment of her friend Beatrix Ruthven. Anne appears to have loved James at first, but the couple gradually drifted and eventually lived apart, though mutual respect and a degree of affection survived. In England, Anne shifted her energies from factional politics to patronage of the arts and constructed her own magnificent court, hosting one of the richest cultural salons in Europe. After 1612, she had sustained bouts of ill health and gradually withdrew from the centre of court life. Though she was reported to have been a Protestant at the time of her death, she may have converted to Catholicism at some point in her life. Some historians have dismissed Anne as a lightweight queen, frivolous and self-indulgent. However, 18th-century writers including Thomas Birch and William Guthrie considered her a woman of "boundless intrigue". Recent reappraisals acknowledge Anne's assertive independence and, in particular, her dynamic significance as a patron of the arts during the Jacobean age. ## Early life Anne was born on 12 December 1574 at the castle of Skanderborg on the Jutland Peninsula in the Kingdom of Denmark to Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow and King Frederick II of Denmark. In need of a male heir the King had been hoping for a son, and Sophie gave birth to a son, Christian IV of Denmark, three years later. With her older sister, Elizabeth, Anne was sent to be raised at Güstrow by her maternal grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Mecklenburg. Christian was also sent to be brought up at Güstrow but two years later, in 1579, his father the King wrote to his parents-in-law, to request the return of his sons, Christian and Ulrich, (probably, at the urging of the Rigsråd, the Danish Privy Council), and Anne and Elizabeth returned with him. Anne enjoyed a close, happy family upbringing in Denmark, thanks largely to Queen Sophie, who nursed the children through their illnesses herself. Suitors from all over Europe sought the hands of Anne and Elizabeth in marriage, including James VI of Scotland, who favoured Denmark as a kingdom reformed in religion and a profitable trading partner. James's other serious possibility, though eight years his senior, was Catherine, sister of the Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre (future Henry IV of France), who was favoured by Elizabeth I of England. Scottish ambassadors in Denmark first concentrated their suit on the oldest daughter, but Frederick betrothed Elizabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, promising the Scots instead that "for the second [daughter] Anna, if the King did like her, he should have her." ### Betrothal and proxy marriage The constitutional position of Sophie, Anne's mother, became difficult after Frederick's death in 1588, when she found herself in a power struggle with the Rigsraad for control of her son King Christian. As a matchmaker, however, Sophie proved more diligent than Frederick and, overcoming sticking points on the amount of the dowry and the status of Orkney, she sealed the agreement by July 1589. Anne herself seems to have been thrilled with the match. On 28 July 1589, the English spy Thomas Fowler reported that Anne was "so far in love with the King's Majesty as it were death to her to have it broken off and hath made good proof divers ways of her affection which his Majestie is apt enough to requite." Fowler's insinuation, that James preferred men to women, would have been hidden from the fourteen-year-old Anne, who devotedly embroidered shirts for her fiancé while 300 tailors worked on her wedding dress. Whatever the truth of the rumours, James required a royal match to preserve the Stuart line. "God is my witness", he explained, "I could have abstained longer than the weal of my country could have permitted, [had not] my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy of my inability, as if I were a barren stock." On 20 August 1589, Anne was married by proxy to James at Kronborg Castle, the ceremony ending with James's representative, George Keith, 5th Earl Marischal, sitting next to Anne on the bridal bed. ### Marriage Anne set sail for Scotland within 10 days, but her fleet under the command of Admiral Peder Munk was beset by a series of misadventures, finally being forced back to the coast of Norway, from where she travelled by land to Oslo for refuge, accompanied by the Earl Marischal and others of the Scottish and Danish embassies. On 12 September, Lord Dingwall had landed at Leith, reporting that "he had come in company with the Queen's fleet three hundred miles, and was separated from them by a great storm: it was feared that the Queen was in danger upon the seas." Alarmed, James called for national fasting and public prayers, and kept watch on the Firth of Forth for Anne's arrival from Seton Palace, the home of his friend Lord Seton. He wrote several songs, one comparing the situation to the plight of Hero and Leander, and sent a search party out for Anne, carrying a letter he had written to her in French: "Only to one who knows me as well as his own reflection in a glass could I express, my dearest love, the fears which I have experienced because of the contrary winds and violent storms since you embarked ...". Anne's letters arrived in October explaining that she had abandoned the crossing. She wrote, in French; > we have already put out to sea four or five times but have always been driven back to the harbours from which we sailed, thanks to contrary winds and other problems that arose at sea, which is the cause why, now Winter is hastening down on us, and fearing greater danger, all this company is forced to our regret, and to the regret and high displeasure of your men, to make no further attempt at present, but to defer the voyage until the Spring. In what Willson calls "the one romantic episode of his life", James sailed from Leith with a three-hundred-strong retinue to fetch his wife personally. He arrived in Oslo on 19 November after travelling by land from Flekkefjord via Tønsberg. According to a Scottish account, he presented himself to Anne, "with boots and all", and, disarming her protests, gave her a kiss, in the Scottish fashion. Anne and James were formally married in hall of the Old Bishop's Palace in Oslo, then the house of Christen Mule, on 23 November 1589, "with all the splendour possible at that time and place." So that both bride and groom could understand, Leith minister David Lindsay conducted the ceremony in French, describing Anne as "a Princess both godly and beautiful ... she giveth great contentment to his Majesty." A month of celebrations followed; and on 22 December, cutting his entourage to 50, James visited his new relations at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, where the newlyweds were greeted by Queen Sophie, 12 year-old King Christian IV, and Christian's four regents. The couple moved on to Copenhagen on 7 March and attended the wedding of Anne's older sister Elizabeth to Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick on 19 April, sailing two days later for Scotland in a patched up "Gideon". They arrived in the Water of Leith on 1 May. After a welcoming speech in French by James Elphinstone, Anne stayed in the King's Wark and James went alone to hear a sermon by Patrick Galloway in the Parish Church. Five days later, Anne made her state entry into Edinburgh in a solid silver coach brought over from Denmark, James riding alongside on horseback. ### Coronation Anne was crowned on 17 May 1590 in the Abbey Church at Holyrood, the first Protestant coronation in Scotland. During the seven-hour ceremony, her gown was opened by the Countess of Mar for presiding minister Robert Bruce to pour "a bonny quantity of oil" on "parts of her breast and arm", so anointing her as queen. (Kirk ministers had objected vehemently to this element of the ceremony as a pagan and Jewish ritual, but James insisted that it dated from the Old Testament.) The king handed the crown to Chancellor Maitland, who placed it on Anne's head. She then affirmed an oath to defend the true religion and worship of God and to "withstand and despise all papistical superstitions, and whatsoever ceremonies and rites contrary to the word of God". ### Household in Scotland Anne brought servants and courtiers from Denmark, including the ladies-in-waiting and chamberers Katrine Skinkel, Anna Kaas, and Margaret Vinstarr, the preacher Johannes Sering, a page William Belo, and artisans such as goldsmith Jacob Kroger, the carpenter Frederick, her cooks Hans Poppilman and Marion, and her tailors. Her Danish secretary Calixtus Schein had two Scottish colleagues, William Fowler and John Geddie. The head of her first household was Wilhelm von der Wense. Servants from her home country provided familiarity and bridged a cultural divide. At first, observers like William Dundas thought the queen led a solitary life, with few Scottish companions. Later in 1590 more Scottish noblewomen were appointed to serve her, including Marie Stewart, a daughter of Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox, Margaret Wood, and members of the Ochiltree Stewart family. James invited Scottish lairds including Robert Mure of Caldwell to send gifts of hackney horses for the queen's ladies to ride. Anne bought her ladies and maidens of honour matching clothes and riding outfits, made by her Danish tailor Pål Rei and furrier Henrie Koss, and the Scottish tailors Peter Sanderson and Peter Rannald supervised by her master of Wardrobe, Søren Johnson. She had an African servant, noted in the accounts only as the "Moir", who was probably a "page of the equerry", attending her horse. He was dressed in orange velvet and Spanish taffeta. When he died at Falkland Palace in July 1591, James paid for his funeral. Two Danish favourites, Katrine Skinkel and Sofie Kass wore velvet hats with feathers to match the queen's, made by an older gentlewoman in the household, Elizabeth Gibb, the wife of the king's tutor Peter Young. Anne gave her ladies wedding gowns and trousseaux when they married, and even arranged a loan for the dowry of Jean, Lady Kennedy. When, in December 1592 the widower John Erskine, Earl of Mar married Marie Stewart, James VI and Anne of Denmark attended the celebrations at Alloa and there was a masque in costume in which Anne of Denmark performed. From 1594, the German physician Martin Schöner attended her when she was ill or in childbed. Her court musician in Scotland was John Norlie an English lutenist. In 1593, Anne told the English ambassador Robert Bowes that she would like to meet Queen Elizabeth, and wanted to have a young English gentleman or maiden of "good parentage" join her household. Bowes passed this request to Cecil to consider. She made another ouverture of friendship to Elizabeth I in May 1595, asking for her portrait. There was no response and Bowes had to reiterate her request. Finally, in February 1596 Elizabeth condescended to grant Anne's "earnest desire" and send her a picture. ## Relationship with James By all accounts, James was at first entranced by his bride, but his infatuation evaporated quickly and the couple often found themselves at loggerheads, though in the early years of their marriage James seems always to have treated Anne with patience and affection. James Melville of Halhill, a gentleman of her bedchamber, wrote that in Scotland Anne would intercede with James on behalf of honest courtiers, if she heard that he was stirred up against them by "wrong information" or slander. In their first years of marriage, James VI and Anne of Denmark personally dressed in costume and took part in masques at the weddings of courtiers. These performances typically involved music, dance, and disguise. Between 1593 and 1595, James was romantically linked with Anne Murray, later Lady Glamis. He addressed her in verse as "my mistress and my love". Anne of Denmark herself was also occasionally the subject of scandalous rumours. In the Basilikon Doron, written 1597–1598, James described marriage as "the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie, that can come to a man". From the first moment of the marriage, Anne was under pressure to provide James and Scotland with an heir, but the passing of 1591 and 1592 with no sign of a pregnancy provoked renewed Presbyterian libels on the theme of James's fondness for male company and whispers against Anne "for that she proves not with child". When it was thought that she was pregnant, James tried to prevent her going horseriding but she refused. There was great public relief when on 19 February 1594 Anne gave birth to her first child, Henry Frederick. ### Custody of Prince Henry Anne soon learned that she would have no say in her son's care. James appointed as head of the nursery his former nurse Helen Little, who installed Henry in James's own oak cradle. Most distressingly for Anne, James insisted on placing Prince Henry in the custody of John Erskine, Earl of Mar at Stirling Castle, in keeping with Scottish royal tradition. In late 1594, she began a furious campaign for custody of Henry, recruiting a faction of supporters to her cause, including the chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane. Nervous of the lengths to which Anne might go, James formally charged Mar in writing never to surrender Henry to anyone except on orders from his own mouth, "because in the surety of my son consists my surety", nor to yield Henry to the Queen even in the event of his own death. Anne demanded the matter be referred to the Council, but James would not hear of it. The issue remained unresolved and James went north after the Battle of Glenlivet. He wrote to Anne inviting her to join him as he tried to discover the whereabouts of rebel lords. She did not make the journey. The controversy over the prince continued, with public scenes in which James reduced her to rage and tears over the issue. Anne became so bitterly upset that in July 1595 she suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she outwardly abandoned her campaign, but it was thought permanent damage had been done to the marriage. In August 1595, John Colville wrote: "There is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation betwixt the King and the Queen, each intending by slight to overcome the other." Despite these differences, Anne and James visited the Prince at Stirling in December 1595 and returned to Holyrood Palace to celebrate her 21st birthday. They had six more children. It was said, in May 1597, that Anne was "careful of no other thing, but to dance and sport". Anne extended and rebuilt Dunfermline Palace, in 1601 preparing a lodging for her daughter Princess Elizabeth, but the princess remained at Linlithgow Palace on the king's orders. Her younger sons Charles and Robert were allowed to stay with her at Dunfermline and Dalkeith Palace. In February 1603, the French ambassador in London, Christophe de Harlay, Count of Beaumont, reported a rumour spread by James's friends that Anne was cruel and ambitious, hoping to rule Scotland as Regent or Governor for her son after her husband's death. Anne saw a belated opportunity to gain custody of Henry in 1603 when James left for London with the Earl of Mar to assume the English throne following the death of Elizabeth I. Pregnant at the time, Anne descended on Stirling with a force of "well-supported" nobles, intent on removing the nine-year-old Henry, whom she had hardly seen for five years; but Mar's wife and his young son would allow her to bring no more than two attendants with her into the castle. The obduracy of Henry's keepers sent Anne into such a fury that she suffered another miscarriage: according to David Calderwood, she "went to bed in anger and parted with child the tenth of May." When the Earl of Mar returned with James's instructions that Anne join him in the Kingdom of England, she informed James by letter that she refused to do so unless allowed custody of Henry. This "forceful maternal action", as historian Pauline Croft describes it, obliged James to climb down at last, though he reproved Anne for "froward womanly apprehensions" and described her behaviour in a letter to Mar as "wilfulness". James wrote to Anne that he had not received accusations from Mar's supporters that her actions at Stirling were motivated by religious factionalism or "Spanish courses". He reminded her that she was "a king's daughter" but "whether ye a king's or a cook's daughter, ye must be all alike to me, being once my wife", and so she should have respected the confidence he, her husband, had placed in Mar. The French ambassador in London, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, heard that Anne would bring and exhibit her embalmed still-born male child in England in order to dispel false rumours about a plot. ### Stirling to Windsor Castle After a brief convalescence from the miscarriage, Anne travelled from Stirling to Edinburgh, where several English ladies had gathered, hoping to join her court, including Lucy, Countess of Bedford and Frances Howard, Countess of Kildare. Anne ordered a new gown of figured taffeta and had her white satin gown refashioned. New clothes were bought for her entourage, and her jester Tom Durie was given a green coat. Marmaduke Darrell was sent from London with money for the expenses of her journey and the group of ladies sent by the Privy Council to attend her. Anne duly travelled south with Prince Henry, their progress causing a sensation in England. Princess Elizabeth followed two days later and soon caught up, but Prince Charles was left at Dunfermline, being sickly. She was met at York on 11 June by Thomas Cecil, Lord Burghley. He wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, "she will prove, if I be not deceived, a magnifical prince, a kind wife and a constant mistress". Her large crowd of followers was disorderly and there were quarrels between the Earl of Argyll and the Earl of Sussex, and between Thomas Somerset and William Murray who argued about the role of Master of Horse. The Duke of Lennox and the Earls of Shrewsbury and Cumberland made a proclamation at Worksop Manor that her followers should put aside any private quarrels, and hangers-on without formal roles should leave. Courtiers and gentry made efforts to meet her on her journey. Lady Anne Clifford recorded that she and her mother killed three horses in their haste to see the Queen at Dingley. In the great hall at Windsor Castle, "there was such an infinite number of lords and ladies and so great a Court as I think I shall never see the like again." Anne and James were crowned at Westminster Abbey on 25 July 1603. The coronation prayers for Anne alluded to Esther, the Wise Virgins, and other Biblical heroines. ### An English estate and income for the Queen A council was appointed in 1593 by the Parliament of Scotland to look after her landed estates and income. At the end of December 1595, the Queen's council, re-appointed as a financial administration known as the Octavians, gave Anne of Denmark a purse of gold which she then presented to the king as a New Year's Day gift. Anne's financial position changed in England when she was awarded a new jointure estate based on lands, manors, and parks which had previously been given to Catherine of Aragon. Administrators, led by Sir Robert Cecil, were appointed in November 1603, while the court was at Wilton House. The yearly income would be £6,376 according to a summary sent by King James to Anne's brother Christian IV for approval in December 1603. Anne wrote to Christian IV, pleased by the comparison with Catherine of Aragon, who was also a king's daughter. The estate included Somerset House, the Honour of Hatfield, Pontefract Castle, Nonsuch Palace, and the old palace at Havering-atte-Bower. Robert Cecil had considered other royal dowries, including those of Cecily of York, Mary Tudor, and Mary of France. Thomas Edmondes heard the settlement was "as much, or rather more, than has been granted to any former King's wife". The English jointure income was to be spent on Anne's clothes and her household wages and rewards. King James would pay the other costs of her household, stable, and food. The Venetian diplomat Scaramelli heard she had received a gift of valuable jewels from James, Nonsuch Palace, and a yearly income of 40,000 crowns. If she became a widow she would be independent of her son, Prince Henry. An advisory committee was appointed to manage the property and income in England. Anne would continue to draw an income from her Scottish jointure properties. A similar commission for her Scottish properties had been appointed in April 1603 under the leadership of Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie. Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie was chamberlain of the Scottish lands, comprising the Lordship of Dunfermline, the Earldom of Ross, and Lordships of Ardmannoch and Etrrick Forest, and compiled accounts of the queen's revenue. On 13 February 1610, John Chamberlain wrote that Anne "hath been somewhat melancholy of late about her jointure, that was not fully to her liking" and King James had promised additional funds. In the autumn of 1617, King James changed the settlement, giving Anne an additional £20,000, to make £50,0000 yearly, from which she would pay for her household diet and stable if he died before her. ### Marital frictions Observers regularly noted incidents of marital discord between Anne and James. The so-called Gowrie conspiracy of 1600, in which the young Earl of Gowrie, John Ruthven, and his brother Alexander Ruthven were killed by James's attendants for a supposed assault on the King, triggered the dismissal of their sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven as ladies-in-waiting to Anne, with whom they were "in chiefest credit." The Queen, who was five months pregnant, refused to get out of bed unless they were reinstated and stayed there for two days, also refusing to eat. When James tried to command her, she warned him to take care how he treated her because she was not the Earl of Gowrie. James placated her for the moment by paying a famous acrobat to entertain her, but she never gave up, and her stubborn support for the Ruthvens over the next three years was taken seriously enough by the government to be regarded as a security issue. In 1602, after discovering that Anne had smuggled Beatrix Ruthven into Holyrood, James carried out a cross-examination of the entire household; in 1603, he finally decided to grant Beatrix Ruthven a pension of £200. In 1603, James fought with Anne over the proposed composition of her English household, sending her a message that "his Majesty took her continued perversity very heinously." In turn, Anne took exception to James's drinking: in 1604 she confided to the French ambassador Beaumont that "the King drinks so much, and conducts himself so ill in every respect, that I expect an early and evil result." A briefer confrontation occurred in 1613 when Anne shot and killed James's favourite dog during a hunting session at Theobalds. After his initial rage, James smoothed things over by giving her a £2,000 diamond in memory of the dog, whose name was Jewel. ### Separate life Anne enjoyed living in London, while James preferred to escape the capital, most often at his hunting lodge in Royston. Anne's chaplain, Godfrey Goodman, later summed up the royal relationship: "The King himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together." Anne moved into Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House, which she renamed Denmark House. After 1607, she and James rarely lived together, by which time she had borne seven children and suffered at least three miscarriages. After narrowly surviving the birth and death of her last baby, Sophia, in 1607, Anne's decision to have no more children may have widened the gulf between her and James. ### A funeral and a wedding The death of their son Henry in November 1612 at the age of eighteen, probably from typhoid and the departure of their daughter Elizabeth further weakened the family ties binding Anne and James. Henry's death hit Anne particularly hard; the Venetian ambassador Foscarini was advised not to offer condolences to her "because she cannot bear to have it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs". At first, Anne had objected to her daughter's match with Frederick V of the Palatinate, regarding it as beneath the royal family's dignity. She did not come to a betrothal ceremony at Whitehall, due to an attack with gout. However, she had warmed to Frederick, and attended the wedding itself on 14 February 1613. She was saddened by the tournaments on the following day, which reminded her of Henry. The couple left England for Heidelberg in April. From this time forward, Anne's health deteriorated, and she withdrew from the centre of cultural and political activities, staging her last known masque in 1614, and no longer maintaining a royal court. Her influence over James visibly waned as he became openly dependent on powerful favourites. ### Reaction to favourites Although James had always adopted male favourites among his courtiers, he now encouraged them to play a role in the government. Anne reacted very differently to the two powerful favourites who dominated the second half of her husband's English reign, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham. She detested Carr, but she encouraged the rise of Villiers, whom James knighted in her bedchamber; and she developed friendly relations with him, calling him her "dog". Even so, Anne found herself increasingly ignored after Buckingham's rise and became a lonely figure towards the end of her life. ## Religion A further source of difference between Anne and James was the issue of religion; for example, she abstained from the Anglican communion at her English coronation. Anne had been brought up a Lutheran, and had a Lutheran chaplain Hans Sering in her household, but she may have discreetly converted to Catholicism at some point, a politically embarrassing scenario which alarmed ministers of the Scottish Kirk and caused suspicion in Anglican England. Queen Elizabeth had certainly been worried about the possibility and sent messages to Anne warning her not to listen to papist counsellors and requesting the names of anyone who had tried to convert her; Anne had replied that there was no need to name names because any such efforts had failed. Anne drew criticism from the Kirk for keeping Henrietta Gordon, wife of the exiled Catholic George Gordon, 1st Marquess of Huntly, as a confidante; after Huntly's return in 1596, the St Andrews minister David Black called Anne an atheist and remarked in a sermon that "the Queen of Scotland was a woman for whom, for fashion's sake, the clergy might pray but from whom no good could be hoped." When former intelligencer Sir Anthony Standen was discovered bringing Anne a rosary from Pope Clement VIII in 1603, James imprisoned him in the Tower for ten months. Anne protested her annoyance at the gift, but eventually secured Standen's release. Like James, Anne later supported a Catholic match for both their sons, and her correspondence with the potential bride, the Spanish Infanta, Maria Anna, included a request that two friars be sent to Jerusalem to pray for her and the King. The papacy itself was never quite sure where Anne stood; in 1612, Pope Paul V advised a nuncio: "Not considering the inconstancy of that Queen and the many changes she had made in religious matters and that even if it might be true that she might be a Catholic, one should not take on oneself any judgement." ## Court and politics In Scotland, Anne sometimes exploited court factionalism for her own ends, in particular by supporting the enemies of the Earl of Mar. As a result, James did not trust her with secrets of state. Henry Howard, active in the highly secret diplomacy concerning the English succession, subtly reminded James that though Anne possessed every virtue, Eve was corrupted by the serpent. Another of James's secret correspondents, Robert Cecil, believed that "the Queen was weak and a tool in the hands of clever and unscrupulous persons." In practice, Anne seems to have been little interested in high politics unless they touched on the fate of her children or friends, and later told Secretary of State Robert Cecil that "she was more contented with her pictures than he with his great employments." However, in November 1600 Robert Cecil had been anxious to find out about correspondence she had with Archduke Albert, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In England, Anne largely turned from political to social and artistic activities. Though she participated fully in the life of James's court and maintained a court of her own, often attracting those not welcomed by James, she rarely took political sides against her husband. Whatever her private difficulties with James, she proved a diplomatic asset to him in England, conducting herself with discretion and graciousness in public. Anne played a crucial role, for example, in conveying to ambassadors and foreign visitors the prestige of the Stuart dynasty and its Danish connections. The Venetian envoy, Nicolò Molin, wrote this description of Anne in 1606: > She is intelligent and prudent; and knows the disorders of the government, in which she has no part, though many hold that as the King is most devoted to her, she might play as large a role as she wished. But she is young and averse to trouble; she sees that those who govern desire to be left alone, and so she professes indifference. All she ever does is to beg a favour for someone. She is full of kindness for those who support her, but on the other hand she is terrible, proud, unendurable to those she dislikes. Anne's comments did attract attention and were reported by diplomats. In May 1612 the Duke of Bouillon came to London as the ambassador of Marie de' Medici, dowager of France. According to the Venetian ambassador, Antonio Foscarini, his instructions included a proposal of marriage between Princess Christine, the second Princess of France, and Prince Henry. Anne told one of his senior companions that she would prefer Prince Henry married a French princess without a dowry than a Florentine princess with any amount of gold. ### Reputation Anne has traditionally been regarded with condescension by historians, who have emphasised her triviality and extravagance. Along with James, she tended to be dismissed by a historical tradition, beginning with the anti-Stuart historians of the mid-17th century, which saw in the self-indulgence and vanity of the Jacobean court the origins of the English civil war. Historian David Harris Willson, in his 1956 biography of James, delivered this damning verdict: "Anne had little influence over her husband. She could not share his intellectual interests, and she confirmed the foolish contempt with which he regarded women. Alas! The king had married a stupid wife." The 19th-century biographer Agnes Strickland condemned Anne's actions to regain custody of Prince Henry as irresponsible: "It must lower the character of Anne of Denmark in the eyes of everyone, both as a woman and queen, that she ... preferred to indulge the mere instincts of maternity at the risk of involving her husband, her infant, and their kingdom, in the strife and misery of unnatural warfare." However, the reassessment of James in the past two decades, as an able ruler who extended royal power in Scotland and preserved his kingdoms from war throughout his reign, has been accompanied by a re-evaluation of Anne as an influential political figure and assertive mother, at least for as long as the royal marriage remained a reality. John Leeds Barroll argues in his cultural biography of Anne that her political interventions in Scotland were more significant, and certainly more troublesome, than previously noticed; and Clare McManus, among other cultural historians, has highlighted Anne's influential role in the Jacobean cultural flowering, not only as a patron of writers and artists but as a performer herself. ## Patron of the arts Anne shared with James the fault of extravagance, though it took her several years to exhaust her considerable dowry. She loved dancing and pageants, activities often frowned upon in Presbyterian Scotland, but for which she found a vibrant outlet in Jacobean London, where she created a "rich and hospitable" cultural climate at the royal court, became an enthusiastic playgoer, and sponsored lavish masques. Sir Walter Cope, asked by Robert Cecil to select a play for the Queen during her brother Ulrik of Holstein's visit, wrote, "Burbage is come and says there is no new play the Queen has not seen but they have revived an old one called Love's Labour's Lost which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly." Anne's masques, scaling unprecedented heights of dramatic staging and spectacle, were avidly attended by foreign ambassadors and dignitaries and functioned as a potent demonstration of the English crown's European significance. Zorzi Giustinian, the Venetian ambassador, wrote of the Christmas 1604 masque that "in everyone's opinion no other Court could have displayed such pomp and riches". Anne's masques were responsible for almost all the courtly female performance in the first two decades of the 17th-century and are regarded as crucial to the history of women's performance. Anne sometimes performed with her ladies in the masques herself, occasionally offending members of the audience. In The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses of 1604, she played Pallas Athena, wearing a tunic that some observers regarded as too short; in The Masque of Blackness of 1605, Anne performed while six months pregnant, she and her ladies causing scandal by appearing with their skin painted as "blackamores". Letter writer Dudley Carleton reported that when the Queen afterwards danced with the Spanish ambassador, he kissed her hand "though there was danger it would have left a mark upon his lips". Anne commissioned the leading talents of the day to create these masques, including Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Jones, a gifted architect steeped in the latest European taste, also designed the Queen's House at Greenwich for Anne, one of the first true Palladian buildings in England. He designed ornamental gateways for her gardens and vineyard at Oatlands. The Sergeant Painter John de Critz decorated a fireplace in her "tiring chamber", her dressing room at Somerset House with various colours of marbling and imitation stone, and painted black and white marble in the chapel at Oatlands. In 1618 a passage at Somerset House was decorated with Renaissance style grotesque work, recorded as "crotesque". The diplomat Ralph Winwood obtained special greyhounds for her hunting from Jacob van den Eynde, Governor of Woerden. The Dutch inventor Salomon de Caus laid out her gardens at Greenwich and Somerset House. She had a barge for her journeys on the Thames, with glass windows. Anne particularly loved music and patronised the lutenist and composer John Dowland, previously employed at her brother's court in Denmark, as well as "more than a good many" French musicians. Between 1607 and her death in 1619 she also employed the Irish harper Daniel Duff O'Cahill. Anne also commissioned artists such as Paul van Somer, Isaac Oliver, and Daniel Mytens, who led English taste in visual arts for a generation. Under Anne, the Royal Collection began once more to expand, a policy continued by Anne's son, Charles. With some irony, Anne's servant Jean Drummond compared the queen's reputation to be content among "harmless pictures in a paltry gallery" with the Earl of Salisbury's "great employments in fair rooms". Drummond's remark contrasts the smaller and more private spaces housing the queen's collection with the halls and presence chambers where statecraft was enacted. She was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to found a college or university at Ripon in Yorkshire in 1604. The scheme was promoted by Cecily Sandys, the widow of the Bishop Edwin Sandys and other supporters including Bess of Hardwick and Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury. Historian Alan Stewart suggests that many of the phenomena now seen as peculiarly Jacobean can be identified more closely with Anne's patronage than with James, who "fell asleep during some of England's most celebrated plays". ## Later years and illness The royal physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne left extensive Latin notes describing his treatment of Anne of Denmark from 10 April 1612 to her death. From September 1614 Anne was troubled by pain in her feet, as described in the letters of her chamberlain Viscount Lisle and the countesses of Bedford and Roxburghe. Lisle first noted "the Queen hath been a little lame" as early as October 1611. She was ill in March 1615, suspected to have dropsy. In August an attack of gout forced her to stay an extra week in Bath, her second visit to the spa town for its medicinal waters. Although she danced at a Christmas masque, said to be "a good sign of her convalescence", in January 1616 she moved from Whitehall Palace to Somerset House suffering from gout. King James planned to visit Scotland, and it was said that she dreamed of ruling England as regent in his absence. The Earl of Dunfermline noted in February that "her majesty looks very well, but yet I think is not perfectly well, she infrequently dresses, and keeps her bedchamber and a solitary life most times." James went to Scotland, while Anne stayed at Greenwich Palace and moved to Oatlands in June. She was well enough to go hunting in August 1617. By late 1617, Anne's bouts of illness had become debilitating; the letter writer John Chamberlain recorded: "The Queen continues still ill disposed and though she would fain lay all her infirmities upon the gout yet most of her physicians fear a further inconvenience of an ill habit or disposition through her whole body." In December 1617 the Venetian ambassador Piero Contarini had to wait a few days to get an audience with her because of illness. He described her appearance at Somerset House. She was seated under a canopy of gold brocade. Her costume was pink and gold, low cut at the front in an oval shape, and her farthingale was four feet wide. Her hair was dressed with diamonds and other jewels and extended in rays, or like the petals of a sunflower, with artificial hair. She had two little dogs who barked at the ambassador. Contarini had a second audience with Anne in December and was led through private corridors in the palace by a richly dressed lady in waiting carrying a candle. On 9 April 1618 she was well enough to make a shopping trip incognito to the Royal Exchange, and was discovered, drawing a crowd of onlookers. She had a nosebleed at Oatlands in September 1618 that confined her to bed and disrupted her travel plans. Lucy, Countess of Bedford, thought it had weakened her, and she appeared "dangerously ill". In November, a comet was interpreted as a portent of her death, but she was reported to be in good health and had watched a fox hunt from her bedroom window. ## Death and funeral Anne moved to Hampton Court and was attended by Mayerne and Henry Atkins. In January 1619 Mayerne instructed Anne to saw wood to improve her blood flow, but the exertion served to make her worse. Mayerne attributed the queen's ill-health to her cold and northerly upbringing, and wrote in his notes that as a child she had been carried around by her nurses until the age of nine, rather than allowed to walk. James visited Anne only three times during her last illness, though their son Charles often slept in the adjoining bedroom at Hampton Court Palace and was at her bedside during her last hours, when she had lost her sight. With her until the end was her personal maid, Anna Kaas, who had arrived with her from Denmark in 1590. Queen Anne died aged 44 on 2 March 1619, of dropsy. Despite his neglect of Anne, James was emotionally affected by her death. He did not visit her during her dying days or attend her funeral, being himself sick, the symptoms, according to Sir Theodore de Mayerne, including "fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness ...". The inquest discovered Anne to be "much wasted within, specially her liver". After a prolonged delay, she was buried in King Henry's Chapel, Westminster Abbey, on 13 May 1619. The catafalque placed over her grave, designed by Maximilian Colt, was destroyed during the civil war. Inigo Jones had provided an alternative design for the catalfaque with more complex sculptural symbolism than Colt's. As he had done before he ever met her, King James turned to verse to pay his respects: > > So did my Queen from hence her court remove And left off earth to be enthroned above. She's changed, not dead, for sure no good prince dies, But, as the sun, sets, only for to rise. Lionel Cranfield, as Master of Great Wardrobe, spent £20,000 on the funeral. After the funeral, her French servant Piero Hugon, and Anna, a Danish maiden of honour, were arrested and accused of stealing jewels worth £30,000. Another servant, Margaret Hartsyde, had faced similar charges a decade earlier. ## Issue Anne gave birth to seven children who survived beyond childbirth, four of whom died in infancy or early childhood. She also suffered at least three miscarriages. The physician Martin Schöner attended her pregnancies. Her second son succeeded James as King Charles I. Her daughter Elizabeth was the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia and the grandmother of King George I of Great Britain. 1. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (19 February 1594 – 6 November 1612). Died, probably of typhoid fever, aged 18. 2. miscarriage (July 1595). 3. Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (19 August 1596 – 13 February 1662). Married 1613, Frederick V, Elector Palatine. Died aged 65. 4. Margaret (24 December 1598 Dalkeith Palace – March 1600 Linlithgow Palace). Died aged fifteen months. Buried at Holyrood Abbey. 5. Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649). Married 1625, Henrietta Maria of France. Executed aged 48. 6. Robert, Duke of Kintyre (18 January 1602 – 27 May 1602). Died aged four months. 7. miscarriage (10 May 1603). 8. Mary (8 April 1605 Greenwich Palace – 16 December 1607 Stanwell, Surrey). Died aged two. 9. Sophia (22 June 1606 – 23 June 1606). Born and died at Greenwich Palace. ## Ancestry ## See also - Cape Ann, Massachusetts - Sign of Hertoghe - Letter from Queen Anne to the Duke of Buckingham, Folger Shakespeare Library.
1,045,094	E. W. Hornung	1,166,626,474	British writer	[ "1866 births", "1921 deaths", "19th-century English writers", "20th-century English novelists", "British Army personnel of World War I", "English people of Hungarian descent", "People educated at St Ninian's School, Moffat", "People educated at Uppingham School", "People from Middlesbrough", "Victorian writers" ]	Ernest William Hornung (7 June 1866 – 22 March 1921) was an English author and poet known for writing the A. J. Raffles series of stories about a gentleman thief in late 19th-century London. Hornung was educated at Uppingham School; as a result of poor health he left the school in December 1883 to travel to Sydney, where he stayed for two years. He drew on his Australian experiences as a background when he began writing, initially short stories and later novels. In 1898 he wrote "In the Chains of Crime", which introduced Raffles and his sidekick, Bunny Manders; the characters were based partly on his friends Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and also on the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, created by his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle. The series of Raffles short stories were collected for sale in book form in 1899, and two further books of Raffles short stories followed, as well as a poorly received novel. Aside from his Raffles stories, Hornung was a prodigious writer of fiction, publishing numerous books from 1890, with A Bride from the Bush to his 1914 novel The Crime Doctor. The First World War brought an end to Hornung's fictional output. His son, Oscar, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in July 1915. Hornung joined the YMCA, initially in England, then in France, where he helped run a canteen and library. He published two collections of poetry during the war, and then, afterwards, one further volume of verse and an account of his time spent in France, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front. Hornung's fragile constitution was further weakened by the stress of his war work. To aid his recuperation, he and his wife visited the south of France in 1921. He fell ill from influenza on the journey, and died on 22 March 1921, aged 54. Although much of Hornung's work has fallen into obscurity, his Raffles stories continued to be popular, and have formed numerous film and television adaptations. Hornung's stories dealt with a wider range of themes than crime: he examined scientific and medical developments, guilt, class and the unequal role played by women in society. Two threads that run through a sizeable proportion of his books are Australia and cricket; the latter was also a lifelong passion. ## Biography ### Early life: 1866–86 Hornung was born Ernest William Hornung on 7 June 1866 at Cleveland Villas, Marton, Middlesbrough; he was nicknamed Willie from an early age. He was the third son, and youngest of eight children, of John Peter Hornung (1821–86) and his wife Harriet née Armstrong (1824–96). John was christened Johan Petrus Hornung in the Transylvania region of Hungary and, after working in Hamburg for a shipping firm, had moved to Britain in the 1840s as a coal and iron merchant. John married Harriet in March 1848, by which time he had anglicised his name. At the age of 13 Hornung joined St Ninian's Preparatory School in Moffat, Dumfriesshire, before enrolling at Uppingham School in 1880. Hornung was well liked at school, and developed a lifelong love of cricket despite limited skills at the game, which were further worsened by bad eyesight, asthma and, according to his biographer Peter Rowland, a permanent state of generally poor health. When Hornung was 17 his health worsened; he left Uppingham and travelled to Australia, where it was hoped by his family that the climate would be beneficial. On his arrival he was employed as a tutor to the Parsons family in Mossgiel in the Riverina, south-western New South Wales. In addition to teaching, he spent time working in remote sheep stations in the outback and contributing material to the weekly magazine The Bulletin; he also began writing what was to become his first novel. Although he spent only two years in Australia, the experience was "the making of him and ... the making of his career as a writer", according to Rowland. Another biographer, Mark Valentine, wrote that Hornung "seems to have regarded this period as one of the most satisfying of his life". ### Return to England: 1886–98 Hornung returned to England in February 1886, before the death of his father in November. From a position of relative prosperity, John's coal and iron business had encountered difficulties and he was in financially straitened circumstances by the time of his death. Hornung found work in London as a journalist and story writer, often publishing his work under a pseudonym, although in 1887 he published his first story under his own name, "Stroke of Five", which appeared in Belgravia magazine. His work as a journalist was during the period of Jack the Ripper and the series of five murders, which were undertaken against a background of rising urban crime in London; it was around this time that Hornung developed an interest in criminal behaviour. Hornung had worked on the novel manuscript he brought back from Australia and, between July and November 1890, the story, "A Bride from the Bush", was published in five parts in The Cornhill Magazine. It was also released that year as a book—his first. The story—described by Rowland as an "assured, graceful comedy of manners"—used Hornung's knowledge of Australia as a backdrop, and the device of an Australian bride to examine British social behaviour; the novel was well received by critics. In 1891 Hornung became a member of two cricket clubs: the Idlers, whose members included Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Barr and Jerome K. Jerome, and the Strand club. Hornung knew Doyle's sister, Constance ("Connie") Aimée Monica Doyle (1868–1924), whom he had met when he visited Portugal. Connie was described by Doyle's biographer, Andrew Lycett, as being attractive, "with pre-Raphaelite looks ... the most sought-after of the Doyle daughters". By December 1892, when Hornung, Doyle and Jerome visited the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, Hornung and Connie were engaged, and in 1893 Hornung dedicated his second novel, Tiny Luttrell, "to C.A.M.D." They were married on 27 September 1893, although Doyle was not at the wedding and relations between the two writers were sometimes strained. The Hornungs had a son, Arthur Oscar, in 1895; while his first name was from Doyle, who was also Arthur's godfather, the boy's middle name was probably after Doyle and Hornung's mutual friend Oscar Wilde and it was by his second name that he was known. In 1894 Doyle and Hornung began work on a play for Henry Irving, on the subject of boxing during the Regency; Doyle was initially eager and paid Hornung £50 as a down payment before he withdrew after the first act had been written: the work was never completed. Like Hornung's first novel, Tiny Luttrell had Australia as a backdrop and also used the plot device of an Australian woman in a culturally alien environment. The Australian theme was present in his next four novels: The Boss of Taroomba (1894), The Unbidden Guest (1894), Irralie's Bushranger (1896) and The Rogue's March (1896). In the last of these Hornung wrote of the Australian convict transport system, and showed evidence of a "growing fascination with the motivation behind criminal behaviour and a deliberate sympathy for the criminal hero as a victim of events", while Irralie's Bushranger introduced the character Stingaree, an Oxford-educated, Australian gentleman thief, in a novel that "casts doubt on conventional responses" to a positive criminal character, according to Hornung's biographer, Stephen Knight. ### Introducing Raffles: 1898–1914 In 1898 Hornung's mother died, aged 72 and he dedicated his next book, a series of short stories titled Some Persons Unknown, to her memory. Later that year Hornung and his wife visited Italy for six months, staying in Posillipo; his account of the location appeared in an article of the May 1899 edition of The Cornhill Magazine. The Hornungs returned to London in early 1899, to a house in Pitt Street, West Kensington, where they lived for the next six years. The fictional character Stingaree proved to be a prototype of a character Hornung used in a series of six short stories published in 1898 in Cassell's Magazine, A. J. Raffles. The character was modelled on George Cecil Ives, a Cambridge-educated criminologist and talented cricketer who, like Raffles, was a resident of the Albany, a gentlemen's only residence in Mayfair. The first tale of the series "In the Chains of Crime" was published in June that year, titled "The Ides of March". The stories were collected into one volume—with two additional tales—under the name The Amateur Cracksman, which was published the following year. Hornung used a narrative form similar to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, with Raffles and his partner-in-crime (and former school fag) Bunny Manders being the criminal counterparts to Holmes and Dr. Watson—although Rowland writes that Raffles and Manders "were also fictionalized versions of Wilde and Bosie" (Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas).—and he dedicated the stories to his brother-in-law: "To A.C.D. This form of flattery". Doyle had warned against writing the stories, and reflected in his memoirs that "there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal the hero". The book was a popular and financial success, although some critics also echoed Doyle's fears. The reviewer in The Spectator wrote that "stern moralists" would consider the book's premise "as a new, ingenious, artistic, but most reprehensible application of the crude principles involved in the old-fashioned hero-worship of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin". The book ends with Manders imprisoned and Raffles apparently dead, something that left The Spectator reviewer "expressing [their] satisfaction that this audaciously entertaining volume is not issued in a cheap form. It is emphatically a feat of virtuosity rather than a tribute to virtue." After publishing two novels, Dead Men Tell No Tales in 1899 and Peccavi in 1900, Hornung published a second collection of Raffles stories, The Black Mask, in 1901. The nearly broke Manders is told to apply for the post of a nurse to an elderly invalid, who then reveals himself to be Raffles, who, as Manders describes, had "aged twenty years; he looked fifty at the very least. His hair was white; there was no trick about that; and his face was another white. The lines about the corners of the eyes and mouth were both many and deep". In the final story of the collection, "The Knees of the Gods", Raffles and Manders enlist in the army to fight in the Second Boer War; the story closes with Manders wounded and Raffles killed. The critics again complained about the criminal aspect; The Spectator declared "this sort of book presents crime in a form too entertaining and attractive to be moral", while the reviewer for The Illustrated London News thought that Hornung's "invention has obviously flagged ... It is laughable, in a sense which the author never intended, to hear these burglars rant about the honour of Old England. It is a pity that the man who wrote Peccavi should stoop to this". In 1903 Hornung collaborated with Eugène Presbrey to write a four-act play, Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman, which was based on two previously published short stories, "Gentlemen and Players" and "The Return Match". The play was first performed at the Princess Theatre, New York, on 27 October 1903 with Kyrle Bellew as Raffles, and ran for 168 performances. In 1905, after publishing four other books in the interim, Hornung brought back the character Stingaree, previously seen in Irralie's Bushranger. Later that year he responded to public demand and produced a third series of short Raffles stories in A Thief in the Night, in which Manders relates some of his and Raffles's earlier adventures. The reviewer for the Boston Herald thought that "the sentimental side of the story has never before been shown so dramatically and romantically", and described the book as "thrilling and exciting". Hornung's next book was published in 1909 and was the final Raffles story, the full-length novel Mr. Justice Raffles; the book was poorly received, with the reviewer for The Observer asking if "Hornung is perhaps a little tired of Raffles", and stating that "it has not the magic or the 'go' of the first Raffles, and there is no good in pretending that it has". During the course of the year he collaborated with Charles Sansom to write a play A Visit From Raffles, which was performed in November that year at the Brixton Empress Theatre, London. Hornung turned away from Raffles thereafter, and in February 1911 published The Camera Fiend, a thriller whose narrator is an asthmatic cricket enthusiast with an ironmaster father, much as Hornung was himself. The story concerned the attempts of a scientist to photograph the soul as it left the body. Hornung followed this up with Fathers of Men (1912) and The Thousandth Woman (1913) before Witching Hill (1913), a collection of eight short stories in which he introduced the characters Uvo Delavoye and the narrator Gillon, whom Rowland considers to be "reincarnations of Raffles and Bunny". Hornung's next work, The Crime Doctor (1914) marked the end of his fictional output. ### First World War and aftermath Oscar Hornung left Eton College in 1914, intending to enter King's College, Cambridge, later that year. When Britain entered the war against Germany, he volunteered, and was commissioned into the Essex Regiment. He was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres on 6 July 1915, aged 20. Although heartbroken by the loss, Hornung was adamant that some good would come of it and he edited a privately issued collection of Oscar's letters home under the title Trusty and Well Beloved, released in 1916. Around this time he joined an anti-aircraft unit. In either 1916 or 1917 he joined the YMCA and did volunteer work in England for soldiers on leave; in March 1917 he visited France, writing a poem about his experience afterwards—something he had been doing more frequently since Oscar's death—and a collection of his war poetry, Ballad of Ensign Joy, was published later that year. In July 1917 Hornung's poem, "Wooden Crosses", was published in The Times, and in September, "Bond and Free" appeared. Towards the end of the year, he was accepted as a volunteer in a YMCA canteen and library "a short distance behind the Front Line". During his service in Arras, in February 1918 he borrowed a staff car from a friend and visited his son's grave near Ypres, before returning to the library in Arras. Hornung was concerned about support for pacifism among troops, and wrote to his wife about it. When she spoke to Doyle about the matter, rather than discussing it with Hornung he informed the military authorities. Hornung was angered by Doyle's action, and "told him there was no need for him to 'butt in' except for his own 'satisfaction'." Relations between the two men were strained as a result. Hornung continued to work at the library until the German spring offensive in March overran the British positions and he was forced to retreat, firstly to Amiens and then, in April, back to England. He stayed in England until November 1918, when he again took up his YMCA duties, establishing a rest hut and library in Cologne. In 1919 Hornung's account of his time spent in France, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, was published. Doyle later wrote of the book that "there are parts of it which are brilliant in their vivid portrayal", while Hornung's biographer, Alison Cox, described the book as "one of the best records of the war as experienced on the front lines". That year Hornung also published his third and final volume of poetry, The Young Guard. ### Death and legacy Hornung finished his work with the YMCA and returned to England probably in early 1919, according to Rowland. He worked on a new novel but was hampered by poor health. His wife's health was of even greater concern, so in February 1921 they took a holiday in the south of France to recuperate. He fell ill on the train with a chill that turned into influenza and pneumonia from which he died on 22 March 1921, aged 54. He was buried in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the south of France, in a grave adjacent to that of George Gissing. Doyle, returning from a spiritualist lecture tour of Australia, received the news in Paris and travelled south in time for the funeral. When Hornung had still been courting Doyle's sister, Doyle wrote that "I like young Willie Hornung very much ... he is one of the sweetest-natured and most delicate-minded men I ever knew". Honouring him after his death, Doyle wrote that he "was a Dr. [Samuel] Johnson without the learning but with a finer wit. No one could say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain". His obituarist in The Times described him as "a man of large and generous nature, a delightful companion and conversationalist". Much of Hornung's work fell out of favour as time passed; Rowland observed that "all of Hornung's other works have been forgotten, with the possible exception of Stingaree, but the cricketing Cracksman continues to enthral". The idea of a criminal as a positive character was one of Hornung's legacies, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism states that "critics have also interpreted Raffles as a prototype of the antihero in modern crime fiction". The academic Frank Wadleigh Chandler, describing Raffles's death, writes that "all his creator's attempts to portray him as a hero, rather than an anti-hero, deservedly fail." Valentine highlights one aspect of the stories was the mix of "devilry and daring" demonstrated by Raffles; in this respect he was a literary "forerunner of The Saint, James Bond and other insouciant types". The writer Colin Watson agrees, and called Hornung "a precursor of [Ian] Fleming". The character continued in book form: the writer Philip Atkey, under the pseudonym Barry Perowne, obtained permission from the Hornung estate to continue the Raffles stories, and seven more novels followed between 1933 and 1940, with Raffles transformed from a gentleman thief to a tough adventurer. Perowne continued the series in 1950, and 14 of his stories were published in the 1974 volume Raffles Revisited. Hornung's original stories have undergone a number of reprints, and when all the short stories were published in a single volume, Graham Greene considered it "a splendid idea". In 1975 Greene had written a play based on the Raffles stories, The Return of A. J. Raffles, which premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Denholm Elliott as Raffles. There were several Raffles films made during Hornung's lifetime, Further films followed in the years after his death, including Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1925), with House Peters Sr.; Raffles (1930), featuring Ronald Colman; The Return of Raffles (1933), with George Barraud; and Raffles (1939), starring David Niven; the last of these was a Samuel Goldwyn Productions remake of their own 1930 film, which the academic Victor E. Neuburg called the "most memorable portrayal" of the character. The BBC has dramatised some of Hornung's Raffles stories for radio, first in the 1940s and again from 1985 to 1993 in the radio series Raffles. Nigel Havers narrated some of the stories on BBC radio in 1995. In 1977 Anthony Valentine played the thief, and Christopher Strauli his partner, in a Yorkshire Television series. A 2001 television film, Gentleman Thief, adapted the stories for a contemporary audience, with Havers playing the lead. ## Writing ### Style and technique Hornung's prose is widely admired for its lucid, simple style. Oliver Edwards, writing in The Times, considered that "not the least attractive part of the Raffles books is the simple, plain, unaffected language in which each one of them is written". The obituarist in the same newspaper agrees, and thinks Hornung had "a power of good and clear description and a talent for mystery and surprise". Colin Watson also considers the point, and observes that in Hornung's writing, "superfluous description has been avoided and account of action is to the point", while Doyle admired his "sudden use of the right adjective and the right phrase", something the writer and journalist Jeremy Lewis sees as a "flamboyant, Kiplingesque taste for the vivid". Critics have observed that Hornung's stories and novels are well-structured. George Orwell wrote that Hornung was "a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work". Watson states that Hornung's "writing has pace. The stories, however ridiculous, carry the readers along briskly". According to Cox, "Hornung's work showed steady maturation" during his career, a point that Doyle also agreed with, although Edwards disagrees, and thinks The Crime Doctor to be one of Hornung's weaker books. Hornung's approach to characters differed from other contemporary authors. Cox notes that Hornung "frequently chose to write from the perspective of the criminal", and while many of Hornung's novels contained criminal activity as a major element of the plot, the critic for Contemporary Authors states that the works do not "belong to the crime-fiction genre". Hornung's works included elements from more general fiction, "such as false identities, disguises, and disowned heiresses". ### Major themes The academic Nick Rance identifies three categories of Raffles stories: "the rise of the New Woman", in which Raffles either escapes from romantic entanglements, or uses the infatuations of a woman in order to achieve his aims; "the rise of the plutocracy", in which Raffles steals from the nouveau riche as much as the upper classes; and those stories that seek "to reaffirm or re-establish a sense of middle-class identity". The last category is based on Raffles not being a member of "Society", only being accepted because of his cricketing ability and associated fame. From this point, Raffles's stealing from the rich is a "rearguard action on behalf of the puritan values" which was perceived as making up middle-class values, although Rance also states that those values are obscured because of the changing boundaries between the classes. Gariepy makes the same point, and considers that "Raffles's daring exploits and fantastic adventures symbolized the growing rebellion against Victorian sensibility at the turn of the century". Hornung kept abreast of scientific and medical developments, and was keen to incorporate them into his stories which, the critic for Contemporary Authors states, shows Hornung had "a streak of modernity and decided interest in new ideas". The Camera Fiend uses the modern technology of the camera as an instrument central to the plot, while the protagonist of The Crime Doctor uses psychology to identify criminals. Throughout the Raffles stories patriotism runs as an intermittent theme—to such an extent that the writer William Vivian Butler describes him as a "super-patriot". In the course of the short story "A Jubilee Present" Raffles, celebrating Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, steals a gold cup from the British Museum and sends it to the queen, telling Manders that "we have been ruled over for sixty years by infinitely the finest monarch in the world". In "The Knees of the Gods", Raffles volunteers for service in the Second Boer War, changing his name and hair colour—he jokes to Manders that he is prepared to "dye for his country"—and he later confesses his true identity to his superiors in order to unmask a spy. Some of Hornung's novels, including The Shadow of the Rope, No Hero and The Thousandth Woman, are notable for "portraying women in a rather modern, favorable light", according to the critic for Contemporary Authors, showing concern for their unequal position in society. Cox identifies a theme of guilt running through a number of works. Among these is Peccavi, in which a clergyman lives his life trying to atone for an earlier crime; Shadow of the Rope, in which a woman is accused of her husband's murder; and The Thousandth Woman, in which a woman stands by her lover after he is accused of murder. Although Hornung's Australian experience was brief, it influenced most of his literary work from A Bride from the Bush published in 1899, to Old Offenders and a Few Old Scores, which was published after his death. According to Chandler, "nearly two-thirds of [Hornung's] books refer in varying degrees to Australian incidents and experiences", with "even Raffles" starting his criminal career in Australia. Some of Horning's works—such as A Bride from the Bush—were praised for their accuracy of detail in depicting the Australian environment, although the detail could overwhelm the storyline, as in The Rogue's March. Cricket was one of Hornung's lifelong passions, and he was delighted to become a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1907. The sport also permeated his stories, with Raffles playing for the Gentlemen of England. Rance observes that Raffles compares law-breaking and cricket: "crime is reckoned as another and better sport". Raffles does on occasion disparage his game, commenting to Manders in "Gentlemen and Players", "where's the satisfaction of taking a man's wicket when you want his spoons?" Valentine also considers the point, and sees Raffles's cricket as a front for his criminal activities, citing Raffles's praise for cricket for "the glorious protection it affords a person of my proclivities". Watson examines Raffles's actions within the broader context of sportsmanship, with Raffles acting within his own moral code "of what is 'done' and 'not done'." Orwell, in his essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish", observes that when Raffles feels remorse, it "is almost purely social; he has disgraced 'the old school', he has lost his right to enter 'decent society', he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad".
183,580	Red-throated loon	1,170,123,305	Migratory aquatic bird found in the northern hemisphere	[ "Birds described in 1763", "Diving animals", "Gaviiformes", "Holarctic birds", "Taxa named by Erik Pontoppidan" ]	The red-throated loon (North America) or red-throated diver (Britain and Ireland) (Gavia stellata) is a migratory aquatic bird found in the northern hemisphere. The most widely distributed member of the loon or diver family, it breeds primarily in Arctic regions, and winters in northern coastal waters. Ranging from 55 to 67 centimetres (22 to 26 in) in length, the red-throated loon is the smallest and lightest of the world's loons. In winter, it is a nondescript bird, greyish above fading to white below. During the breeding season, it acquires the distinctive reddish throat patch which is the basis for its common name. Fish form the bulk of its diet, though amphibians, invertebrates, and plant material are sometimes eaten as well. A monogamous species, red-throated loons form long-term pair bonds. Both members of the pair help to build the nest, incubate the eggs (generally two per clutch), and feed the hatched young. The red-throated loon has a large global population and a significant global range, though some populations are declining. Oil spills, habitat degradation, pollution, and fishing nets are among the major threats this species faces. Natural predators—including various gull species, and both red and Arctic foxes, will take eggs and young. The species is protected by international treaties. ## Taxonomy and etymology First described by Danish naturalist Erik Pontoppidan in 1763, the red-throated loon is a monotypic species with no distinctive subspecies despite its large Holarctic range. Pontoppidan initially placed the species in the now-defunct genus Colymbus, which contained grebes as well as loons. By 1788, German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster realized that grebes and loons were different enough to warrant separate genera, and moved the red-throated loon (along with all other loon species) to its present genus. Its relationship to the four other loons is complex; although all belong to the same genus, it differs from the others in terms of morphology, behaviour, ecology and breeding biology and may be the basal lineage of the genus. It is thought to have evolved in the Palearctic, and then to have expanded into the Nearctic. Analysis of molecular data together with the fossil record suggests the lineage of the red-throated loon diverged from that giving rise to the other loon species around 21.4 million years ago in the Miocene, and that it may be most closely related to the fossil Pliocene species Gavia howardae. The genus name Gavia comes from the Latin for "sea mew", as used by ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. The specific epithet stellata is Latin for "set with stars" or "starry", and refers to the bird's speckled back in its non-breeding plumage. Members of the family Gavidae are known as loons in North America and divers in Great Britain and Ireland. The International Ornithological Congress uses the name red-throated loon for this species. "Diver" refers to the family's underwater method of hunting for prey, while "red-throated" is a straightforward reference to the bird's most distinctive breeding plumage feature. The word "loon" is thought to have derived from the Swedish lom, the Old Norse or Icelandic lómr, or the Old Dutch loen, all of which mean "lame" or "clumsy", and is a probable reference to the difficulty that all loons have in moving about on land. A local name from Willapa Harbor, Washington, was Quaker loon. ## Description Like the other members of its genus, the red-throated loon is well adapted to its aquatic environment: its dense bones help it to submerge, its legs—in their set-back position—provide excellent propulsion, and its body is long and streamlined. Even its sharply pointed bill may help its underwater streamlining. Its feet are large, its front three toes are fully webbed, and its tarsus is flattened, which reduces drag and allows the leg to move easily through the water. The red-throated loon is the smallest and lightest of the world's loon species, ranging from 53 to 69 cm (21 to 27 in) in length with a 91–120 cm (36–47 in) wingspan, and weighing 1–2.7 kg (2.2–6.0 lb). Like all loons, it is long-bodied and short-necked, with its legs set far back on its body. The sexes are similar in appearance, although males tend to be slightly larger and heavier than females. In breeding plumage, the adult has a dark grey head and neck (with narrow black and white stripes on the back of the neck), a triangular red throat patch, white underparts, and a dark grey-brown mantle. It is the only loon with an all-dark back in breeding plumage. The non-breeding plumage is drabber with the chin, foreneck, and much of the face white, the top of the head and back of the neck grey, and considerable white speckling on the dark mantle. Its iris is carmine-red to burgundy in color, its legs are black on the outer half and pale on the inner half, and the webs of its feet are pinkish-brown, with darker margins. Its bill is thin, straight, and sharp, and often held at an uptilted angle. One of the bird's North American folk names is pegging-awl loon, a reference to its sharply pointed bill, which resembles a sailmaker's awl (a tool also known as a "pegging awl" in New England). Though the colour of the bill changes from black in summer to pale grey in winter, the timing of the colour change does not necessarily correspond to that of the bird's overall plumage change. The nostrils are narrow slits located near the base of the bill. When it first emerges from its egg, the young red-throated loon is covered with fine soft down feathers. Primarily dark brown to dark grey above, it is slightly paler on the sides of its head and neck, as well as on its throat, chest, and flanks, with a pale grey lower breast and belly. Within weeks, this first down is replaced by a second, paler set of down feathers, which are in turn replaced by developing juvenile feathers. The juvenile's plumage is similar to that of the adult, though with a few distinguishing features. It has a darker forehead and neck, with heavy speckling on the sides of the neck and the throat. Its back is browner and less speckled, and its underparts are tinged with brown. Its eyes are reddish-brown, and its beak is a pale grey. Though some young birds hold this plumage until mid-winter, many quickly become virtually indistinguishable from adults, except for their paler bills. In flight, the red-throated loon has a distinctive profile; its small feet do not project far past the end of its body, its head and neck droop below the horizontal (giving the flying bird a distinctly hunchbacked shape) and its thin wings are angled back. It has a quicker, deeper wingbeat than do other loons. ### Voice The adult red-throated loon has a number of vocalisations, which are used in different circumstances. In flight, when passing conspecifics or circling its own pond, it gives a series of rapid yet rhythmic goose-like cackles—kaa-kaa-kaa or kak-kak-kak, at roughly five calls per second. Its warning call, if disturbed by humans or onshore predators, is a short croaking bark. A low-pitched moaning call, used primarily as a contact call between mates and between parents and young, but also during copulation, is made with the bill closed. The species also has a short wailing call—aarOOao...aarOOao...—which descends slightly in pitch and lasts about a second; due to strong harmonics surrounding the primary pitch, this meowing call is more musical than its other calls. Another call—a harsh, pulsed cooing that rises and falls in pitch, and is typically repeated up to 10 times in a row—is used in territorial encounters and pair-bonding, and by parent birds encouraging their young to move on land between bodies of water. Known as the "long call", it is often given in duet, which is unusual among the loons; the female's contribution is longer and softer than her mate's. Young have a shrill closed-bill call, which they use in begging and to contact their parents. They also have a long call used in response to (and similar to that of) the long call of adults. ### Similar species At medium to close range, an adult red-throated loon in either breeding or non-breeding plumage is usually easily recognised. However, in certain light conditions, at certain times in its moulting cycle, or at greater distances, it may be mistaken for another species—most commonly the black-throated loon, but also occasionally the great crested grebe. It shows more white on the head and neck than does the black-throated loon, and—provided it is not sitting low in the water—tends to show more white on the flanks as well. If it is sitting lower in the water, so that the white on the flanks is reduced to a patch on the rear flank (thus resembling the pattern of the black-throated loon), that patch tends to be less clearly defined than the comparative patch on the black-throated. ## Habitat and distribution `In contrast to other loons its main fishing grounds are not the breeding lake, but larger lakes or the sea. Several nests close to each other may occur in the same breeding lake.` The red-throated loon breeds primarily in the Arctic regions of northern Eurasia and North America (generally north of 50°N latitude), and winters in northern coastal waters, sometimes in groups of considerable size. More than 4,400 spend the winter in a loose concentration on the eastern part of the German Bight, for example. Unlike other loons, it regularly uses very small freshwater lakes as breeding sites. Its small size renders it more versatile, but it is less able to feed on deeper prey. The increase in size and diversity of the remaining species of loons suggests that the benefits of larger size outweigh the limitations. In North America, it winters regularly along both coasts, ranging as far south as the Baja California Peninsula and the Gulf of California in north-western Mexico; it has been recorded as a vagrant in the interior Mexican state of Hidalgo. Some of its folk names in north-eastern North America—including cape race, cape brace, cape drake and cape racer, as well as corruptions such as scapegrace—originated from its abundance around Cape Race, Newfoundland. In Europe, it breeds in Iceland, northern Scotland, north-western Ireland (only a few pairs), Scandinavia and northern Russia, and winters along the coast as far south as parts of Spain; it also regularly occurs along major inland waterways, including the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas, as well as large rivers, lakes and reservoirs. It has occurred as a vagrant as far south as Morocco, Tunisia and the Gambia. In Asia, it breeds in the northern stretches of Siberia, and winters along the Pacific coast as far south as China, Japan and Taiwan. It has occurred as a vagrant in Mongolia. ## Behaviour Because its feet are located so far back on its body, the red-throated loon is quite clumsy walking on land, but it can use its feet to shove itself forward on its breast. Young use this method of covering ground when moving from their breeding pools to larger bodies of water, including rivers and the sea. It is the only species of loon able to take off directly from land. If frightened, it may submerge until only its head or bill shows above the surface of the water. It differs from other loons by nesting in small lakes but feeding in larger lakes or the sea. The nesting lake may host several nests, close to another, with much agonistic behavior among pairs. This territorial behavior is performed pairwise, with vocalisation (long call, plesiosur race). The red-throated loon is a diurnal migrant, which travels singly or in loose groups, often high above the water. In eastern North America (and possibly elsewhere), it tends to migrate near the coast rather than farther offshore; Siberian populations travel for hundreds of miles over land en route to their southern European wintering grounds. It is a strong flier, and has been clocked at speeds between 75 and 78 kilometres per hour (47 and 48 mph). Like all members of its family, the red-throated loon goes through a simultaneous wing moult, losing all its flight feathers at once and becoming flightless for a period of three to four weeks. Unlike other loons—which undergo this moult in late winter—the red-throated loon loses its ability to fly sometime between late summer and late autumn. ### Food and feeding Like all members of its family, the red-throated loon is primarily a fish-eater, though it sometimes feeds on molluscs, crustaceans, frogs, aquatic invertebrates, insects, fish spawn or even plant material. It seizes rather than spears its prey, which is generally captured underwater. Though it normally dives and swims using only its feet for propulsion, it may use its wings as well if it needs to turn or accelerate quickly. Pursuit dives range from 2–9 m (6.6–29.5 ft) in depth, with an average underwater time of about a minute. Its fish diet increases the red-throated loon's vulnerability to persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals, both of which bioaccumulate, thus potentially causing greater problems for long-lived species (such as the loon) at or near the top of the food chain. Its main diet has also led to several of the loon's British folk names, including "sprat borer" and "spratoon". For the first few days after hatching, young red-throated loons are fed aquatic insects and small crustaceans by both parents. After 3–4 days, the parents switch to fish small enough for the young birds to swallow whole. By four weeks of age, the young can eat the same food—of the same size—as their parents do. Young birds may be fed for some time after fledging; adults have been seen feeding fish to juveniles at sea and on inland lakes in the United Kingdom, hundreds of kilometres from any breeding areas. ### Breeding and survival The red-throated loon is a monogamous species which forms long-term pair bonds. Both sexes build the nest, which is a shallow scrape (or occasionally a platform of mud and vegetation) lined with vegetation and sometimes a few feathers, and placed within a half-metre (18 in) of the edge of a small pond. The female lays two eggs (though clutches of one and three have also been recorded); they are incubated for 24–29 days, primarily by the female. The eggs, which are greenish or olive-brownish spotted with black, measure 75 mm × 46 mm (3.0 in × 1.8 in) and have a mass of 83 g (2.9 oz), of which 8% is shell. Incubation is begun as soon as the first egg is laid, so they hatch asynchronously. If a clutch is lost (to predation or flooding, for example) before the young hatch, the red-throated loon usually lays a second clutch, generally in a new nest. The young birds are precocial: upon hatching, they are downy and mobile, with open eyes. Both parents feed them small aquatic invertebrates initially, then small fish for 38–48 days. Parents will perform distraction displays to lure predators away from the nest and young. Ornithologists disagree as to whether adults carry young on their backs while swimming with some maintaining that they do and others the opposite. In the wild, the oldest known red-throated loon lived for more than two decades. It was found, oiled and dead, on a beach in Sweden 23 years and 7 months after it had been ringed (banded). ## Conservation status and threats Although the red-throated loon is not a globally threatened species, as it has a large population and a significant range, there are populations which appear to be declining. Numbers counted in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service surveys in Alaska show a 53% population decline between 1971 and 1993, for example, and survey count numbers have dropped in continental Europe as well. In Scotland, on the other hand, the population increased by some 16% between 1994 and 2006, according to surveys done by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Scottish Natural Heritage. In 2002, Wetlands International estimated a global population of 490,000 to 1,500,000 individuals; global population trends have not been quantified. The red-throated loon is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies; in the Americas, it is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Oil spills, habitat degradation, and fishing nets are among the main threats this species faces. Because it tends to migrate close to shore—generally within 20 kilometres (12 mi) of land—it may be detrimentally affected by the construction of near-shore wind farms; studies indicate a high level of avoidance of wind farm areas, though deaths due to direct strikes with the turbines appear to be uncommon. High levels of mercury in the environment have led to reproductive failures in some areas, including parts of Sweden. Studies in Sweden have also shown that they may be adversely impacted by the acidification of lakes, as the fish on which they prey are susceptible to low pH. On the breeding grounds, Arctic and red foxes are major predators of eggs, while great skuas, Arctic skuas and various species of Larus gulls (including great black-backed gulls and glaucous gulls) are predators of both eggs and young. The species is known to serve as host for at least 51 species of parasites, most of which are roundworms (nematodes), flatworms (digeneans) and tapeworms (cestodes) carried internally; a single species of louse is its only known external parasite. It is also known to sometimes carry significant populations of diatoms (microscopic phytoplankton) on its contour feathers. The red-throated loon is susceptible to avian influenza and Type E botulism, and is regularly killed by the ingestion of neurotoxins produced by "red tide" algal blooms. During a 2007 bloom, large numbers of the birds also died of hypothermia, after their plumages became matted by a protein byproduct of the algae, which reduced the insulating properties of their feathers. ## In human culture Used as a food source since prehistoric times, the red-throated loon is still hunted by indigenous peoples in some parts of the world today. Eggs as well as birds are taken, sometimes in significant numbers; during one study on northern Canada's Igloolik Island, 73% of all red-throated loon eggs laid within the 10 km<sup>2</sup> (3.9 mi<sup>2</sup>) study site over two breeding seasons were collected by indigenous inhabitants of the island. In some parts of Russia, red-throated loon skins were traditionally used to make caps and various clothing decorations, including collars. The species was also central to the creation mythologies of indigenous groups throughout the Holarctic. According to the myth—which varies only slightly between versions, despite the sometimes-vast distances that separated the groups who believed it—the loon was asked by a great shaman to bring up earth from the bottom of the sea. That earth was then used to build the world's dry land. As recently as the 1800s, the behaviour of the red-throated loon was used to forecast the weather; according to the conventional wisdom of the time, birds flying inland or giving short cries predicted good weather, while those flying out to sea or giving long, wailing cries predicted rain. In the Orkney and Shetland islands of Scotland, the species is still known as the "rain goose" in deference to its supposed weather-predicting capabilities. The people of the Faroe Islands believed that if the red-throated loon miaowed like a cat, then rain was imminent, while a call of gaa-gaa-gaa or turkatrae-turkatrae predicted fine weather. Bhutan, Japan, Åland (an autonomous region of Finland), and the Union of the Comoros have issued stamps featuring the red-throated loon.
151,116	Frederick III, German Emperor	1,173,711,998	German Emperor and King of Prussia in 1888	[ "1831 births", "1888 deaths", "19th-century German people", "19th-century kings of Prussia", "19th-century monarchs in Europe", "Crown Princes of Prussia", "Deaths from cancer in Germany", "Deaths from laryngeal cancer", "Extra Knights Companion of the Garter", "Field marshals of Prussia", "Field marshals of Russia", "Field marshals of the German Empire", "Frederick III, German Emperor", "German Calvinist and Reformed Christians", "German Freemasons", "German Protestants", "German emperors", "German military personnel of the Franco-Prussian War", "Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour", "Grand Crosses of the Military Order of Max Joseph", "Grand Crosses of the Order of Aviz", "Grand Crosses of the Order of Christ (Portugal)", "Grand Crosses of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary", "Grand Crosses of the Order of the Star of Romania", "Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath", "House of Hohenzollern", "Kings of Prussia", "Knights Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa", "Knights Grand Cross of the Military Order of Savoy", "Knights Grand Cross of the Military Order of William", "Knights of the Golden Fleece of Spain", "Knights of the Holy Sepulchre", "Knights of the Order of Charles XIII", "Military personnel from Potsdam", "Protestant monarchs", "Prussian princes", "Recipients of the Gold Imtiyaz Medal", "Recipients of the Gold Medal of Military Valor", "Recipients of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross", "Recipients of the Military Merit Cross (Mecklenburg-Schwerin), 1st class", "Recipients of the Order of St. George of the Second Degree", "Recipients of the Order of the Cross of Takovo", "Recipients of the Order of the Netherlands Lion", "Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (military class)", "Sons of emperors", "University of Bonn alumni" ]	Frederick III or Friedrich III (German: Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Karl; 18 October 1831 – 15 June 1888) was German emperor and King of Prussia for 99 days between March and June 1888, during the Year of the Three Emperors. Known informally as "Fritz", he was the only son of Emperor Wilhelm I and was raised in his family's tradition of military service. Although celebrated as a young man for his leadership and successes during the Second Schleswig, Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, he nevertheless professed a hatred of warfare and was praised by friends and enemies alike for his humane conduct. Following the unification of Germany in 1871 his father, then King of Prussia, became German Emperor. Upon Wilhelm's death at the age of ninety on 9 March 1888, the thrones passed to Frederick, who had been German Crown Prince for seventeen years and Crown Prince of Prussia for twenty-seven years. Frederick was suffering from cancer of the larynx when he died, aged fifty-six, following unsuccessful medical treatments for his condition. Frederick married Victoria, Princess Royal, oldest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. The couple were well-matched; their shared liberal ideology led them to seek greater representation for commoners in the government. Despite his conservative militaristic family background, Frederick had developed liberal tendencies as a result of his ties with Britain and his studies at the University of Bonn. As crown prince, he often opposed the conservative German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, particularly in speaking out against Bismarck's policy of uniting Germany through force, and in urging that the power of the chancellorship be curbed. Liberals in both Germany and Britain hoped that as emperor, Frederick would move to liberalise the German Empire. Frederick and Victoria were great admirers of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband. They planned to rule as co-monarchs, like Princess Victoria's parents, and to reform what they saw as flaws in the executive branch that Bismarck had created for himself. The office of chancellor, responsible to the emperor, would be replaced with a British-style cabinet, with ministers instead responsible to the Reichstag. Government policy would be based on the consensus of the cabinet. Frederick "described the Imperial Constitution as ingeniously contrived chaos." According to Michael Balfour: > The Crown Prince and Princess shared the outlook of the Progressive Party, and Bismarck was haunted by the fear that should the old Emperor die—and he was now in his seventies—they would call on one of the Progressive leaders to become Chancellor. He sought to guard against such a turn by keeping the Crown Prince from a position of any influence and by using foul means as well as fair to make him unpopular. However, Frederick's illness prevented him from effectively establishing policies and measures to achieve this, and such moves as he was able to make were later abandoned by his son and successor, Wilhelm II. The timing of Frederick's death and the brevity of his reign are important topics among historians. His premature demise is considered a potential turning point in German history; and whether or not he would have made the Empire more liberal if he had lived longer is still a popular discussion among historians. ## Personal life ### Early life and education Frederick William was born in the New Palace at Potsdam in Prussia on 18 October 1831. He was a scion of the House of Hohenzollern, rulers of Prussia, then the most powerful of the German states. Frederick's father, Prince William, was the second son of King Frederick William III and, having been raised in the military traditions of the Hohenzollerns, developed into a strict disciplinarian. William fell in love with his cousin Elisa Radziwill, a princess of the Polish nobility, but the court felt Elisa's rank was not suitable for the bride of a Prussian prince and forced a more suitable match. The woman selected to be his wife, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, had been raised in the more intellectual and artistic atmosphere of Weimar, which gave its citizens greater participation in politics and limited the powers of its rulers through a constitution; Augusta was well known across Europe for her liberal views. Because of their differences, the couple did not have a happy marriage and, as a result, Frederick grew up in a troubled household, which left him with memories of a lonely childhood. He had one sister, Louise (later Grand Duchess of Baden), who was seven years his junior and very close to him. Frederick also had a very good relationship with his uncle, the future King Frederick William IV, who has been called "the romantic on the throne". Frederick grew up during a tumultuous political period as the concept of liberalism in Germany, which evolved during the 1840s, was gaining widespread and enthusiastic support. The liberals sought a unified Germany and were constitutional monarchists who desired a constitution to ensure equal protection under the law, the protection of property, and the safeguarding of basic civil rights. Overall, the liberals desired a government ruled by popular representation. When Frederick was 17, these emergent nationalistic and liberal sentiments sparked a series of political uprisings across the German states and elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, their goal was to protect freedoms, such as the freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, and to create a German parliament and constitution. Although the uprisings ultimately brought about no lasting changes, liberal sentiments remained an influential force in German politics throughout Frederick's life. Despite the value placed by the Hohenzollern family on a traditional military education, Augusta insisted that her son also receive a classical education. Accordingly, Frederick was thoroughly tutored in both military traditions and the liberal arts. His private tutor was Ernst Curtius, a famous archaeologist. Frederick was a talented student, particularly good at foreign languages, becoming fluent in English and French, and studying Latin. He also studied history, geography, physics, music and religion, and excelled at gymnastics; as required of a Prussian prince, he became a very good rider. Hohenzollern princes were made familiar with the military traditions of their dynasty at an early age; Frederick was ten when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the First Infantry Regiment of Guards. As he grew older, he was expected to maintain an active involvement in military affairs. However, at the age of 18, he broke with family tradition and entered the University of Bonn where he studied history, law and governance, and public policy. During his time at Bonn (1850–1852), his teachers included Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann. His time spent at the university, coupled with the influence of less conservative family members, were instrumental in his embrace of liberal beliefs. In 1853, Frederick was initiated into Freemasonry by his father, then Prince William of Prussia, and would later become Master of the Order of the Grand Landlodge of the Freemasons of Germany. During his brief reign, he would serve as the patron of the German Freemasons. ### Marriage and family Royal marriages of the 19th century were arranged to secure alliances and to maintain blood ties among the European nations. As early as 1851, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and her German-born husband, Prince Albert, were making plans to marry their eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, to Frederick. The royal dynasty in Britain was predominantly German; there was little British blood in Queen Victoria, and none in her husband. They desired to maintain their family's blood ties to Germany, and Prince Albert further hoped that the marriage would lead to the liberalization and modernization of Prussia. King Leopold I of Belgium, uncle of both Victoria and Albert, also favoured this pairing; he had long treasured Baron Stockmar's idea of a marriage alliance between Britain and Prussia. Frederick's father, Prince William, had no interest in the arrangement, hoping instead for a Russian grand duchess as his daughter-in-law. However, Princess Augusta was greatly in favour of a match for her son that would bring closer connections with Britain. In 1851, his mother sent Frederick to England, ostensibly to visit the Great Exhibition but in truth, she hoped that the cradle of liberalism and home of the industrial revolution would have a positive influence on her son. Prince Albert took Frederick under his wing during his stay but it was Albert's daughter, only eleven at the time, who guided the German prince around the Exhibition. Frederick only knew a few words of English, while Victoria could converse fluently in German. He was impressed by her mix of innocence, intellectual curiosity and simplicity, and their meeting proved to be a success. A regular exchange of letters between Victoria and Frederick followed. Frederick proposed to Victoria in 1855, when she was 14 years old. The betrothal of the young couple was announced on May 19, 1857, at Buckingham Palace and the Prussian Court, and their marriage took place on 25 January 1858 in the Chapel Royal of St. James's Palace, London. To mark the occasion, Frederick was promoted to major-general in the Prussian army. Although it was an arranged marriage, the newlyweds were compatible from the start and their marriage was a loving one; Victoria too had received a liberal education and shared her husband's views. Of the two, Victoria was the dominant one in the relationship. The couple often resided at the Crown Prince's Palace and had eight children: Wilhelm in 1859, Charlotte in 1860, Henry in 1862, Sigismund in 1864, Victoria in 1866, Waldemar in 1868, Sophia in 1870 and Margaret in 1872. Sigismund died at the age of 2 and Waldemar at age 11, and their eldest son, Wilhelm, suffered from a withered arm—probably Erb's Palsy due to his difficult and dangerous breech birth, although it could have also resulted from a mild case of cerebral palsy. Wilhelm, who became emperor after Frederick's death, shared none of his parents' liberal ideas; his mother viewed him as a "complete Prussian". This difference in ideology created a rift between Wilhelm and his parents (which was exacerbated by Bismarck's interference), and relations between them were strained throughout their lives. ### Religion Emperor Frederick III was a Lutheran member of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. It was a United Protestant denomination, bringing together Reformed and Lutheran believers. ## Crown Prince of Prussia When his father succeeded to the Prussian throne as King William I on 2 January 1861, Frederick became the Crown Prince. Already twenty-nine years old, he would be Crown Prince for a further twenty-seven years. The new king was initially considered politically neutral; Frederick and Prussia's liberal elements hoped that he would usher in a new era of liberal policies. The liberals managed to greatly increase their majority in the Prussian Diet (Landtag), but William soon showed that he preferred the conservative ways. On the other hand, Frederick declared himself in complete agreement with the "essential liberal policy for internal and foreign affairs". As Crown Prince, he had conflicts with Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor whom his father had appointed. Because William was a dogmatic soldier and unlikely to change his ideas at the age of sixty-four, he regularly clashed with the Diet over policies. In September 1862, one such disagreement almost led to Frederick being crowned and replacing his father as king; William threatened to abdicate when the Diet refused to fund his plans for the army's reorganization. Frederick was appalled by this action, and said that an abdication would "constitute a threat to the dynasty, country and Crown". William reconsidered, and instead on the advice of Minister of War Albrecht von Roon appointed Otto von Bismarck, who had offered to push through the military reform even against the majority of the Diet, as Minister-President. The appointment of Bismarck, an authoritarian who would often ignore or overrule the Diet, set Frederick on a collision course with his father and led to his exclusion from affairs of state for the rest of William's reign. Frederick insisted on bloodless "moral conquests", unifying Germany by liberal and peaceful means, but it was Bismarck's policy of blood and iron that prevailed. His protests against William's rule peaked at Danzig on 4 June 1863, where at an official reception in the city he loudly denounced Bismarck's restrictions on freedom of the press. He thereby made Bismarck his enemy and his father extremely angry. Consequently, Frederick was excluded from positions of political power throughout his father's reign. Retaining his military portfolio, he continued to represent Germany and its Emperor at ceremonies, weddings, and celebrations such as Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. Frederick would spend a large portion of time in Britain, where Queen Victoria frequently allowed him to represent her at ceremonies and social functions. Frederick fought in the wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Although he had opposed military action in each case, once war had started he supported the Prussian military wholeheartedly and took positions of command. Since he had no political influence at all, these were opportunities to prove himself. Frederick experienced his first combat in the Second Schleswig War. Appointed to supervise the supreme German Confederation commander Field Marshal Wrangel and his staff, the Crown Prince tactfully managed disputes between Wrangel and the other officers. The Prussians and their Austrian allies defeated the Danes and conquered the southern part of Jutland, but after the war, they spent two years politicking to assume leadership of the German states. This culminated in the Austro-Prussian War. Frederick "was the only member of the Prussian Crown Council to uphold the rights of the Duke of Augustenberg and oppose the idea of a war with Austria which he described as fratricide." Although he supported unification and the restoration of the medieval empire, "Fritz could not accept that war was the right way to unite Germany." However, when war with Austria broke out, he accepted command of one of Prussia's three armies. He commanded the Second Army, with General Leonhard Graf von Blumenthal as his chief of staff. At first, Second Army defeated the Austrian Army in the Battle of Trautenau on 27 June 1866. However, next day, Frederick ordered his divisions to attack the Austrian X Corps from early in the morning, which brought Prussia's victory. His plan was successful, leading the victory of Battle of Burkersdorf. On that day, when the two battles (Battle of Burkersdorf, and Battle of Skalitz) were fought by his Second Army, he was at Kosteletz in order to reach the battlefield easily. On 29 June, Frederick ordered his army to advance. He established his headquarters in Kaile. Now he reached the Elbe. On June 30, Helmuth von Moltke ordered him to station his army in the Elbe. As Moltke's command, he didn't order the advance but, from 8 o'clock on July 3, his troops started the advance. The timely arrival of his army was crucial to the Prussian victory in 1866 at the decisive Battle of Königgrätz, which won the war for Prussia. Nevertheless, the bloodshed caused him great dismay. A few days before Königgrätz, Frederick had written to his wife, expressing his hope that this would be the last war he would have to fight. On the third day of the battle he wrote to her again: "Who knows whether we may not have to wage a third war in order to keep what we have now won?" Four years later Frederick was in action again, this time during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which he was once more paired with Blumenthal and commanded the Third Army, consisting of troops from the southern German states by some political reasons. He was praised for his leadership after defeating the French at the battles of Wissembourg and Wörth, and met with further successes at the Battle of Sedan and during the siege of Paris. Frederick was promoted to field marshal on 28 October 1870. Frederick's humane treatment of his country's foes earned him their respect and the plaudits of neutral observers. After the Battle of Wörth, a London journalist witnessed the Crown Prince's many visits to wounded Prussian soldiers and lauded his deeds, extolling the love and respect the soldiers held for Frederick. Following his victory, Frederick had remarked to two Paris journalists, "I do not like war gentlemen. If I should reign I would never make it." One French journalist remarked that "the Crown Prince has left countless traits of kindness and humanity in the land that he fought against." For his behaviour and accomplishments, The Times wrote a tribute to Frederick in July 1871, stating that "the Prince has won as much honour for his gentleness as for his prowess in the war". After the war, Frederick was awarded with Grand Cross of the Iron Cross. ## Crown Prince of the German Empire In 1871, following Prussia's victories, the German states were united into the German Empire, with William as the Emperor and Frederick as heir-apparent to the new German monarchy. Although William thought the day when he became Emperor the saddest of his life, Frederick was excited to be witness to a great day in German history. Bismarck, now Chancellor, disliked Frederick and distrusted the liberal attitudes of the Crown Prince and Princess. Often at odds with his father's and Bismarck's policies and actions, Frederick sided with the country's liberals in their opposition to the expansion of the empire's army. The Crown Prince also became involved in many public works projects, such as the establishment of schools and churches in the area of Bornstedt near Potsdam. To assist his father's effort to turn Berlin, the capital city, into a great cultural centre, he was appointed Protector of Public Museums; it was largely due to Frederick that considerable artistic collections were acquired, housed in Berlin's new Kaiser Friedrich Museum (later known as the Bode Museum) after his death. In 1878, when his father was incapacitated by injury from an assassination attempt, Frederick briefly took over his tasks but was soon relegated to the sidelines once again. His lack of influence affected him deeply, even causing him to contemplate suicide. During an effort led, between 1879 and 1881, by the völkisch historian Heinrich von Treitschke and the court chaplain, Adolf Stoecker, to dis-emancipate German Jews, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess were in opposition, Victoria writing that she saw "Treitschke and his supporters as lunatics of the most dangerous sort", and opining that Pastor Stoecker properly belonged in an insane asylum. She went on to write that she felt ashamed of her adopted country because people like Treitschke and Stoecker "behave so hatefully towards people of a different faith and another race who become an integral part (and by no means the worst) of our nation!". Clad in the uniform of a Prussian field marshal, Frederick, together with Victoria, attended a synagogue service in Berlin in 1880 to show support for tolerance in contrast to what Victoria called Treitschke's "disgraceful attacks". Shortly afterward, Frederick gave a speech denouncing the anti-Semitic movement in Germany as "a shameful blot on our time", adding that "We are ashamed of the Judenhetze [agitation against Jews] which has broken all bounds of decency in Berlin, but which seems to flourish under the protection of the Court clerics." In 1881, Frederick and Victoria again attended a synagogue service, this time in Wiesbaden "to demonstrate as clearly as we can what our convictions are". Frederick followed this up by giving a speech in which he spoke out for "poor, ill-treated Jews" of Europe. Frederick's mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, wrote to thank him for his speech, saying she was proud that her daughter had married someone like him, but within Junker circles, Frederick was widely criticised for his actions in support of the Jews. Prominent among the Crown Prince's critics was his eldest son, Wilhelm, who called his father a weak, cowardly man controlled by his British wife and the Jews. Beyond Wilhelm, many of the "reactionary and 'chauvinistic' circles in Germany" had, in the words of the British historian John C. G. Röhl, come to the "conviction that the Crown Prince and his liberal English wife were an alien, un-German force that must not be allowed to accede to the throne". ## Illness and decline Frederick had been a heavy smoker for many years. At a ball held by William on 31 January 1887, a guest reported the Crown Prince "was so hoarse that he could hardly say a word." His hoarseness continued through February, and was diagnosed as a thickening of the mucous membrane over the vocal cords, caused by "a chronic laryngeal catarrh." On 7 February, Frederick consulted a doctor, Karl Gerhardt, who scraped a wire across the membrane for 10 days in an attempt to remove thickened tissue. After the procedure proved unsuccessful, Gerhardt cauterised the left vocal cord with an electric wire on 15 March in an attempt to remove what was then thought to be a vocal fold nodule. Due to Frederick's highly inflamed throat, Gerhardt was unable to remove the entire growth. After several cauterisations, and with no signs of improvement, Frederick and his wife went to the spa of Bad Ems, where he drank the mineral waters and underwent a regimen of gargles and inhaling fresh air, with no effect. On 17 May, Gerhardt and other doctors, including Ernst von Bergmann, diagnosed the growth as laryngeal cancer. Bergmann recommended consulting a leading British cancer specialist, Morell Mackenzie; he also recommended a thyrotomy to gain better access to the inside of the larynx, followed by the complete removal of the larynx – a total laryngectomy – if the situation proved serious. While Victoria was informed of the need for an immediate operation, Frederick was not told. Despite the tentative diagnosis of cancer, the doctors hoped the growth would prove to be a benign epithelioma. A room on the top floor of the Crown Prince's palace was then equipped as an operating theatre, but Bergmann elected to put the operation on hold until Mackenzie could provide his assessment. Mackenzie arrived in Berlin on 20 May, but after examining Frederick recommended a biopsy of the growth to determine whether or not it was malignant. He conducted the biopsy the following morning, after which he sent tissue samples to the distinguished pathologist Rudolf Virchow for microscopic examination. When Virchow was unable to detect any cancerous cells despite several separate analyses, Mackenzie declared his opposition to a laryngectomy being performed, as he felt it would be invariably fatal, and said he would assume charge of the case. He gave his assurance that Frederick would fully recover "in a few months." While Gerhardt and Physician-General August Wegner concurred with Mackenzie, Bergmann and his colleague Adalbert Tobold held to their original diagnosis of cancer. In addition to Mackenzie's opinion, Bismarck strongly opposed any major operation on Frederick's throat, and pressed the Kaiser to veto it. On 9 June, Mackenzie again biopsied the growth and sent the samples to Virchow, who reported the following day that he was again unable to detect any signs of cancer. On 13 June, the Crown Prince left Potsdam for London to attend his mother-in-law's Golden Jubilee and to consult Mackenzie. He never saw his father alive again. He was accompanied by Victoria and their three younger daughters, along with Gerhardt; on 29 June, Mackenzie reported that he had successfully operated at his Harley Street clinic, and had removed "nearly the entire growth." Frederick spent July with his family at Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight. However, when Frederick visited Mackenzie's office on 2 August for a follow-up examination, the growth had reappeared, necessitating its cauterisation the same day, and again on 8 August – an ominous indication that it was indeed malignant. Felix Semon, a distinguished German throat specialist with a practice in England, and who had been closely following Frederick's case, submitted a report to the German Foreign Secretary in which he strongly criticised Mackenzie's cauterisations, and gave his opinion that the growth, if not malignant, was suspect, and should continue to be biopsied and examined. On 9 August, Frederick travelled to Braemar in the Scottish Highlands with Dr. Mark Hovell, a senior surgeon at the Throat Hospital in London. Although a further examination by Mackenzie on 20 August revealed no sign of a recurrent growth, Frederick said he had the "constant feeling" of something "not right inside"; nonetheless, he asked Queen Victoria to knight Mackenzie, who duly received a knighthood in September. Despite the operations on his throat and having taken the sea air at Cowes, Frederick remained hoarse and was advised by Mackenzie to spend the coming winter on the Italian Riviera. In August, following reports that his father was gravely ill, he considered returning to Germany, but was dissuaded by his wife, and went to Toblach in South Tyrol with his family, where Victoria had rented a house. He arrived in Toblach on 7 September, exhausted and hoarse. Concerned by Frederick's lack of visible improvement after a brief meeting with Frederick in Munich, Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, consulted the distinguished laryngologist Max Joseph Oertel, who urged a drastic and thorough operation on Frederick's throat, and said he suspected a benign tumour which could soon become malignant. By this time, Mackenzie's treatment of Frederick was generating strong criticism. After a fortnight in Toblach, Mackenzie arrived to reexamine Frederick, who had continued to suffer from colds and hoarseness; in public, however, the doctor remained largely unconcerned, and attributed the hoarseness to a "momentary chill." However, he recommended that Frederick should leave Toblach for Venice, to be followed by Victoria. The weather soon turned cold, and Frederick's throat caused him pain, for which he received cocaine injections. Upon arriving in Venice, Frederick again caught cold; privately, Mackenzie was growing seriously concerned, having observed a continued tendency for Frederick's throat and larynx to swell. He forbade Frederick from speaking at any length, noting that if the Crown Prince insisted on speaking and contracted further colds, he could give him no more than three months to live. At the beginning of October, Victoria noted that "Fritz's throat is giving no cause for fresh anxiety & he really does take a little more care and speaks a little less." On 6 October, Frederick, his family and Mackenzie left for a villa at Baveno on the shore of Lake Maggiore, with Mackenzie leaving Baveno on 8 October, after predicting Frederick's recovery "in 3 or 4 months," wrote Victoria. Their elder son Wilhelm joined them at Baveno on 17 October for Frederick's 56th birthday the following day. At the end of October, Frederick's condition abruptly worsened, with Victoria writing to her mother on 2 November that Frederick's throat was again inflamed, but not due to any cold, and that he was "very hoarse again" and easily became depressed about his health. General Alfred von Waldersee observed that Frederick's health had grave implications as if William died soon and his son succeeded, "a new Kaiser who is not allowed to speak is a virtual impossibility, quite apart from the fact that we desperately need a highly energetic one." His son Wilhelm reported to Albert, King of Saxony that his father was frequently short-tempered and melancholic, though his voice appeared to have slightly improved, and that Frederick's throat was being treated by "blowing in a powder twice a day to soothe the larynx." On 3 November, Frederick and his entourage departed for San Remo. At San Remo two days later, on 5 November, Frederick entirely lost his voice and experienced severe pain throughout his throat. Upon examination, Dr. Hovell discovered a new growth under the left vocal cord; when the news reached William and the German government, it caused great consternation. The following day, Mackenzie issued a bulletin stating that while there was no immediate danger to the Crown Prince, his illness had "unfortunately taken an unfavourable turn," and that he had requested advice from other specialists, including the Austrian professor of laryngology Leopold Schrötter and Dr. Hermann Krause of Berlin. On 9 November, Schrötter and Krause diagnosed the new growth as malignant, and said it was unlikely Frederick could live another year. All the doctors in attendance, including Mackenzie, now concluded that Frederick's disease was indeed laryngeal cancer, as new lesions had appeared on the right side of the larynx, and that an immediate and total laryngectomy was required to save his life; Moritz Schmidt, one of the doctors, subsequently said that the earlier growths found in May had also been cancerous. Frederick was devastated by the news, bursting into tears upon being informed by Mackenzie and crying, "To think I should have such a horrid disgusting illness ... I had so hoped to have been of use to my country. Why is Heaven so cruel to me? What have I done to be thus stricken and condemned?" Even at this stage, however, Frederick, in a private discussion with his wife, decided against the laryngectomy as it was itself highly risky. He sent his doctors a written statement that he would remain in Italy and would only submit to a tracheotomy if he was at risk of suffocating due to his condition. The news was greeted with shock in Berlin and generated further hatred against Victoria, now seen as a domineering "foreigner" who was manipulating her husband. Some politicians suggested that Frederick be made to relinquish his position in the line of succession in favour of his son Wilhelm, but Bismarck firmly stated that Frederick would succeed his ailing father "whether he is ill or not, [and] whether the K[aiser] is then unable permanently to perform his duties," would then be determined per the relevant provisions of the Prussian Constitution. Despite the renewed diagnosis of cancer, Frederick's condition appeared to improve after 5 November, and he became more optimistic; through January 1888 there remained some hope that the diagnosis was incorrect. Both Frederick and Victoria retained their faith in Mackenzie, who re-examined Frederick's throat several times in December and gave a good prognosis, again doubting whether the growths had been cancerous. On 26 December 1887, Frederick wrote that his "chronic catarrh" appeared to be taking "a turn for the better", and that "a further bond has been forged between our people and myself; may God preserve it by giving me, when I resume my duties, the capacity to prove myself worthy of the great trust that has been shown me!" A week later, however, on 5 January 1888, his hoarseness and the swelling under his left vocal cord returned, with the previously unaffected right side of his throat becoming inflamed. He ran high fevers and began coughing violently, with his breathing becoming more laboured. The doctors diagnosed perichondritis, an infection of the throat membrane. Frederick again became unable to speak, and suffered violent headaches and insomnia. On 29 January, Mackenzie returned to San Remo from a trip to Spain, and after examining his patient recommended an immediate tracheotomy. The operation was conducted at 4 p.m. on 8 February, by which time Frederick was continually suffering from insomnia and "embarrassing bouts of suffocation". A tracheal tube was fitted to allow Frederick to breathe; for the remainder of his life he was unable to speak and often communicated through writing. During the operation, Bergmann almost killed Frederick by missing the incision in the trachea and forcing the cannula into the wrong place. Frederick started to cough and bleed, and Bergmann placed his forefinger into the wound to enlarge it. The bleeding subsided after two hours, but Bergmann's actions resulted in an abscess in Frederick's neck, producing pus which would give Frederick discomfort for the remaining months of his life. Later, Frederick would ask "Why did Bergmann put his finger in my throat?" and complain that "Bergmann ill-treated [me]". Even after the tracheotomy, Frederick continued to run high fevers and suffered from headaches and insomnia. His violent coughing continued, bringing up bloody sputum. Apart from Mackenzie, the other doctors, led by Bergmann, now held the firm opinion that the Crown Prince's disease was cancer and that it had possibly spread to his lungs. The diagnosis of laryngeal cancer was conclusively confirmed on 6 March, when the anatomist Professor Wilhelm Waldeyer, who had come to San Remo, examined Frederick's sputum under a microscope and confirmed the presence of "so-called cancroid bodies...from a cancerous new growth" in the larynx. He further said that there were no signs of any growths in the lungs. Though it finally settled the question, Waldeyer's diagnosis threw all of Mackenzie's treatment of Frederick into doubt. The diagnosis and treatment of Frederick's fatal illness caused some medical controversy well into the next century. ## Brief reign and death Three days after Frederick was confirmed to be suffering from cancer, his father Emperor William I died aged 90 at 8:22 a.m. on 9 March 1888, upon which Frederick became German Emperor and King of Prussia. His son Wilhelm, now Crown Prince, telegraphed the news to his father in Italy. Later the same day, Frederick wrote in his diary that he had received the telegram upon returning from a walk, "...and so I have ascended the throne of my forefathers and of the German Kaiser! God help me fulfill my duties conscientiously and for the weal of my Fatherland, in both the narrower and the wider sense." Germany's progressive elements hoped that William's death, and thus Frederick's succession, would usher the country into a new era governed along liberal lines. Logically, Frederick should have taken as his regnal name either Frederick I (if the Bismarckian empire was considered a new entity) or Frederick IV (if it was considered a continuation of the old Holy Roman Empire, which had had three emperors named Frederick); he himself preferred the latter. However, on the advice of Bismarck that this would create legal problems, he opted to simply keep the same regnal name he had as king of Prussia. The new emperor reached Berlin at 11 p.m. on the night of 11 March; those who saw him were horrified by his "pitiful" appearance. The question now was how much longer the mortally ill emperor could be expected to live, and what, if anything, he could hope to achieve. In spite of his illness, Frederick did his best to fulfill his obligations as emperor. Immediately after the announcement of his accession, he took the ribbon and star of his Order of the Black Eagle from his uniform tunic and pinned it on the dress of his wife; he was determined to honor her position as empress. Too ill to march in his father's funeral procession, he was represented by Wilhelm, the new Crown Prince, while he watched, weeping, from his rooms in the Charlottenburg Palace. As the German Emperor, he officially received Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (his mother-in-law) and King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway, and attended the wedding of his son Prince Henry to his niece Princess Irene. However, Frederick reigned for only 99 days, and was unable to bring about much lasting change. The majority of the German ruling elite viewed Frederick III's reign as merely a brief interim period before the accession of his son Wilhelm II to the throne. An edict he penned before he ascended to the throne that would limit the powers of the chancellor and monarch under the constitution was never put into effect, although he did force Robert von Puttkamer to resign as Prussian Minister of the Interior on 8 June, when evidence indicated that Puttkamer had interfered in the Reichstag elections. Dr. Mackenzie wrote that the emperor had "an almost overwhelming sense of the duties of his position". In a letter to Lord Napier, Empress Victoria wrote "The Emperor is able to attend to his business, and do a great deal, but not being able to speak is, of course, most trying." Frederick had the fervour but not the time to accomplish his desires, lamenting in May 1888, "I cannot die ... What would happen to Germany?" From April 1888, Frederick became so weak he was unable to walk, and was largely confined to his bed; his continual coughing brought up large quantities of pus. In early June, the cancer spread to and perforated his esophagus, preventing him from eating. He suffered from bouts of vomiting and ran high fevers, but remained alert enough to write a last diary entry on 11 June: "What's happening to me? I must get well again; I have so much to do!" Frederick III died in Potsdam at 11:30 a.m. on 15 June 1888, and was succeeded by his 29-year-old son Wilhelm II. Frederick III is buried in a mausoleum attached to the Friedenskirche in Potsdam. After his death, William Ewart Gladstone described him as the "Barbarossa of German liberalism". Empress Victoria went on to continue spreading Frederick's thoughts and ideals throughout Germany, but no longer had power within the government. ## Legacy Frederick believed a state should not act against the popular opinion of its inhabitants. He had a long history of liberalism, and had discussed his ideas and intentions with Victoria and others before his reign. Admiring Prince Albert and the British parliamentary system, Frederick and his wife planned to rule as co-monarchs and liberalize Germany through the appointment of more liberal ministers. They intended to severely limit the office of Chancellor, and reorganize Germany to include many elements of British liberalism. Many historians, including William Harbutt Dawson and Erich Eyck, consider that Frederick's early death put an end to the development of liberalism within the German Empire. They believe that, given a longer reign and better health, Frederick might indeed have transformed Germany into a more liberal democratic country, and prevented its militaristic path toward war. Dr. J. McCullough claims that Frederick would have averted World War I—and by extension the resulting Weimar Republic—while other historians such as Michael Balfour go even further by postulating that, as the end of World War I directly affected the state of the world's development, the liberal German Emperor might also have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler and by extent, preventing the outbreak of World War II. Author Michael Freund states outright that both world wars would have been averted had Frederick lived longer. Frederick's life inspired historian Frank Tipton to speculate: "What would have happened had his father died sooner or if he himself had lived longer?" Other historians, including Wilhelm Mommsen and Arthur Rosenberg, oppose the idea that Frederick could have, or would have, liberalized Germany. They believe that he would not have dared to oppose both his father's legacy and Bismarck to change Germany's course. A natural soldier, he was steeped in his family's strong military tradition, and had happily reported to his father since he joined the army at the age of ten. Andreas Dorpalen notes that Frederick had complied with most of William's and Bismarck's policies early in his life, and would have been unlikely to change his behaviour. According to Arthur Rosenberg, despite his liberal tendencies Frederick still firmly believed in Bismarck and his system, with Dorpalen adding that in any case Frederick had too weak and ineffectual a character to have brought about real change, regardless of how long he reigned. James J. Sheehan states that the political climate and party system of Germany during that period were too steeped in the old ways for Frederick to overcome with liberalization. Dorpalen also observes that Frederick's liberal persona may have been exaggerated after his death, to keep the liberal movement strong in Germany, and he points out that the many mistakes made by Wilhelm II helped to paint his father in a more favorable light. Frederick's children—Wilhelm in particular—held various political positions and greatly influenced Europe. Unlike his father, Wilhelm had not personally experienced the horrors of war, and he enthusiastically embraced his family's military heritage, coming under Bismarck's tutelage. The Chancellor, who disapproved of Frederick's and Victoria's liberal ways, felt bound to increase the tensions between Wilhelm and his parents. Wilhelm grew up full of disdain for their opinions on government; shortly after his father's death he proclaimed that he would follow the path of his grandfather, William I, and made no reference to Frederick III. Wilhelm II abandoned all of his father's policies and ideas, and eventually led Germany into World War I. Bismarck's plan of undermining Frederick and Victoria, and of using Wilhelm II as a tool for retaining his own power, led to his own downfall. As it turned out, Wilhelm did share his father's conviction that the position of the chancellor was too strong and should be modified in favour of a more powerful Emperor. Bismarck only realized this when Wilhelm II was about to dismiss him: > All Bismarck's resources were deployed; he even asked Empress Victoria to use her influence with her son on his behalf. But the wizard had lost his magic; his spells were powerless because they were exerted on people who did not respect them, and he who had so signally disregarded Kant's command to use people as ends in themselves had too small a stock of loyalty to draw on. As Lord Salisbury told Queen Victoria: 'The very qualities which Bismarck fostered in the Emperor in order to strengthen himself when the Emperor Frederick should come to the throne have been the qualities by which he has been overthrown.' The Empress, with what must have been a mixture of pity and triumph, told him that her influence with her son could not save him for he himself had destroyed it. Churches honouring Frederick include the Kaiser-Friedrich-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin and the former Kalthof Church in Königsberg (Kaliningrad, Russia). Mount Frederick William in the Jervis Inlet area of the British Columbia Coast in Canada is named in his honour. ## Titles, styles and honours ### Titles and styles - 18 October 1831 – 2 January 1861: His Royal Highness Prince Frederick William of Prussia - 2 January 1861 – 18 January 1871: His Royal Highness The Crown Prince of Prussia - 18 January 1871 – 9 March 1888: His Imperial and Royal Highness The German Crown Prince, Crown Prince of Prussia - 9 March 1888 – 15 June 1888: His Majesty The German Emperor, King of Prussia ### Honours German decorations Foreign decorations ## Issue ## Ancestry ## See also - "A Legend of Old Egypt"—an 1888 short story by Bolesław Prus, inspired by Frederick III's tragic premature death.
2,316,077	1 Line (Sound Transit)	1,173,865,079	Light rail line serving Seattle, Washington	[ "1500 V DC railway electrification", "2009 establishments in Washington (state)", "Airport rail links in the United States", "Link light rail", "Naming controversies", "Railway lines opened in 2009", "Transportation in King County, Washington", "Transportation in Seattle" ]	The 1 Line, formerly Central Link, is a light rail line in Seattle, Washington, United States, and part of Sound Transit's Link light rail system. It serves 19 stations in the cities of Seattle, SeaTac, and Tukwila, traveling nearly 25 miles (40 km) between Northgate and Angle Lake stations. The line connects the University District, Downtown Seattle, the Rainier Valley, and Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. The 1 Line carried over 25 million total passengers in 2019, with an average of nearly 80,000 daily passengers on weekdays. It runs for 20 hours per day on weekdays and Saturdays, with headways of up to six minutes during peak hours, and reduced 18-hour service on Sundays and holidays. Trains are composed of two or more cars that each can carry 194 passengers, including 74 in seats, along with wheelchairs and bicycles. Fares are calculated based on distance traveled and are paid through the regional ORCA card, paper tickets, or a mobile app. Sound Transit uses proof-of-payment to verify passenger fares, employing fare ambassadors and transit police to conduct random inspections. All stations have ticket vending machines, public art, bicycle parking, and bus connections, while several also have park-and-ride lots. Voters approved Central Link in a 1996 ballot measure and construction began in 2003, after the project was reorganized under a new budget and truncated route in response to higher than expected costs. The light rail line, which followed decades of failed transit plans for the Seattle region, opened on July 18, 2009, terminating at Westlake in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel and Tukwila International Boulevard near Sea–Tac Airport. It was extended south to SeaTac/Airport in December 2009, north to the University of Washington in March 2016, and south to Angle Lake in September 2016. The line was temporarily renamed the Red Line until its designation was changed to the 1 Line in 2021, coinciding with an extension to Northgate. Further extensions to Lynnwood and Federal Way are planned to open in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The 2 Line will open in 2023, connecting Seattle to the Eastside suburbs and forming a multi-line network via its connection with the 1 Line. Further expansion under Sound Transit 3 will divide the current corridor between two lines, the 1 Line from Ballard to Tacoma and the 3 Line from Everett to West Seattle. ## History ### Background and early transit proposals Public transit service within Seattle began in 1884, with the introduction of the city's first horse-drawn streetcar line. The system had been replaced with a network of electric streetcars and cable cars by the end of the decade, which spurred the development of new streetcar suburbs across modern-day Seattle. Interurban railways to Everett, Tacoma, and the Rainier Valley were established after the turn of the century, giving the region an intercity passenger rail system to feed the streetcar lines. The interurban system failed to compete with the increasing popularity of automobile travel, capped by the completion of U.S. Route 99 in the late 1920s, and was shut down. By 1941, the streetcars had also been acquired by the municipal government and replaced with a trolleybus network. Various proposals for a rapid transit system in Seattle, to replace the streetcar—and later bus—networks, were presented in the 20th century and rejected by city officials or voters due to their cost or other factors. In 1911, urban planner Virgil Bogue proposed a 41-mile (66 km) system of subway tunnels and elevated railways as the centerpiece to a comprehensive plan for the city, which was rejected by voters. The Seattle Center Monorail, originally built for the 1962 World's Fair, has been the subject of several unsuccessful expansion proposals backed by Governor Albert Rosellini in the 1960s and Seattle voters in the early 2000s. The Forward Thrust Committee of the late 1960s proposed a 47-mile (76 km) rapid transit system, to connect Downtown Seattle to Ballard, the University District, Lake City, Capitol Hill, Bellevue, and Renton. The federal government offered to fund two-thirds of the rail system's capital costs, approximately \$770 million (equivalent to \$ in dollars), if \$385 million (equivalent to \$ in dollars) in local property taxes were approved by voters. The rapid transit initiative was placed on the ballot in February 1968, but fell short of supermajority needed to pass. A second attempt in May 1970, with \$440 million (equivalent to \$ in dollars) in local funding and \$870 million (equivalent to \$ in dollars) in federal funding, failed amid a local economic downturn caused by layoffs at Boeing. The federal funding earmarked towards the rapid transit system was granted to Atlanta, Georgia, forming the initial funding for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority's rail system. ### Light rail planning Following the failed Forward Thrust initiatives, Metro Transit was created in 1972 to oversee a countywide bus network, and plan for a future rail system. In the early 1980s, Metro Transit and the Puget Sound Council of Governments (PSCOG) explored light rail and busway concepts to serve the region, ultimately choosing to build a downtown transit tunnel that would be convertible from buses to light rail at a later date. The PSCOG formally endorsed a light rail plan in 1986, recommending a system be built by 2020, and include a line between Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport, with routing alternatives that served the Rainier Valley. A 1988 advisory measure on light rail planning was passed in King County, encouraging Metro Transit to accelerate the plan's timeline to open by 2000. In 1990, the state legislature endorsed the creation of a regional transit board composed of politicians from King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, with the goal of implementing the regional transit plan. Several members of the Seattle City Council endorsed the rail plan on the condition that it pass through the Rainier Valley, by then an economically disadvantaged and majority-minority neighborhood. The Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority, later renamed Sound Transit, was created in 1993 to write and present a regional transit plan for voter approval. The agency proposed a 70-mile (110 km) light rail network as the centerpiece of a \$6.7 billion transit ballot measure, with a surface line through the Rainier Valley and tunnels between Downtown Seattle, Capitol Hill, and the University District. The ballot measure failed to pass on March 14, 1995, and the light rail line was shortened to 25 miles (40 km), between the University District and Sea-Tac Airport. Voters approved the \$3.9 billion package on November 5, 1996, along with increases to sales taxes and motor vehicle excise taxes across the regional transit district. Sound Transit considered several routing options during a series of public hearings and studies early into the project's environmental impact study, which adopted the name "Central Link". In 1999, Sound Transit selected the alignment for the light rail project, consisting of a line between the University District and Sea-Tac Airport, with surface segments passing through Tukwila, the Rainier Valley, and SoDo, and tunnels under Beacon Hill, First Hill, Capitol Hill, and Portage Bay. ### Budget issues and delays The Central Link project was originally planned to open in 2006 and projected to cost \$1.9 billion (equivalent to \$ in dollars), but the estimates were found to be unrealistic by auditors in November 2000. New executives, hired by Sound Transit to replace previous program directors, presented a revised plan with an opening date pushed back three years to 2009 and a \$3.8 billion (equivalent to \$ in dollars) cost estimate. Planning of the Portage Bay tunnel between Capitol Hill and the University District was suspended due to higher than expected contractor bids, attributed to difficult soil conditions. Sound Transit adopted the revised budget and schedule in January 2001, including provisions to re-study routing options between Downtown Seattle and the University District, along with a \$500 million federal grant agreement to fund the construction of an "initial segment" for the project. The initial segment identified and approved by Sound Transit later that year shortened the line to 14 miles (23 km), between Downtown Seattle and a southern Tukwila station near Sea-Tac Airport. The remaining routes to the airport and University District were sent back to the planning stage, and re-organized into separate light rail projects. In November 2001, Sound Transit approved construction of the shortened Central Link light rail project, calling for a summer 2002 groundbreaking. Property acquisition in the Rainier Valley began in March 2002, but two legal battles delayed the start of construction. In November 2002, the King County Superior Court ruled in favor of Sound Transit in a lawsuit filed by light rail opponents, alleging that it lacked the authority to shorten a voter-approved line. The approval of Tim Eyman's Initiative 776 threatened to repeal motor vehicle excise taxes needed to fund Sound Transit's budget, but was declared unconstitutional in February 2003. Another routing change requested by the City of Tukwila, placing light rail tracks along freeways in lieu of International Boulevard, was approved by Sound Transit and the Federal Transit Administration in 2002, moving the project closer to construction. ### Construction and testing Sound Transit received its \$500 million federal grant agreement in October 2003, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held in SoDo on November 8, 2003. Construction contracts for various segments were awarded in 2004 and 2005, coming six percent under Sound Transit's estimates, and work began along all parts of the system. The first rails were installed on August 18, 2005, in the SoDo area; a month later, the downtown transit tunnel closed for a two-year renovation to accommodate light rail service. Excavation of the Beacon Hill tunnel and station began in 2005, and two tunnel boring machines were launched in early 2006 to bore the twin tunnels between SoDo and the Rainier Valley. The SODO and Stadium stations were completed in May 2006, and light rail testing in the SoDo area began the following March. Testing was extended to the re-opened downtown transit tunnel in September 2007, initially limited to weekends without bus service, and further to the Rainier Valley after the completion of the Beacon Hill tunnel in 2008. The elevated guideway in Tukwila, including crossings over major freeways and the Duwamish River, was completed in 2007 after the installation of 2,457 precast concrete segments and balanced cantilever bridges. During construction in the Rainier Valley, Sound Transit and the City of Seattle offered \$50 million in mitigation funds and development opportunities to affected businesses. Construction of light rail along Martin Luther King Jr. Way South also resulted in utility lines being moved underground, improved sidewalks, street crossings, and landscaping. ### Opening and first extensions Central Link was opened on July 18, 2009, with a community celebration that attracted more than 92,000 riders over the first weekend of free service. Trains began operating on the 13.9-mile (22.4 km) segment between Westlake and Tukwila International Boulevard stations, along with a bus shuttle to serve Sea-Tac Airport from Tukwila. The 1.7-mile (2.7 km) extension to SeaTac/Airport station opened on December 19, 2009, replacing the shuttle and other bus services to the airport. Sound Transit added lubrication equipment and rubber mats to segments in Tukwila and the Rainier Valley in 2010 to reduce noise levels that had reached up to 83 decibels, surpassing federal safety standards and triggering noise complaints from nearby residents. A contract dispute with the Rainier Valley construction contractor was settled in 2011, bringing the project's total price to \$117 million below the \$2.44 billion budget. The opening of light rail service to the Rainier Valley spurred new transit-oriented development, which had initially stalled during the Great Recession but recovered in the mid-2010s. Central Link train service was increased to a frequency of 6 minutes during peak hours, from 7.5 minutes, in 2015 to prepare for the opening of the University Link extension. The line was extended north to University of Washington station, via Capitol Hill station, on March 19, 2016, via a \$1.8 billion, 3.15-mile (5.07 km) tunnel. The extension opened six months ahead of its scheduled date, and the opening celebrations drew 67,000 people during the first day of service. Sound Transit deployed additional three-car light rail trains to cope with higher ridership after the extension opened. The line was extended 1.6 miles (2.6 km) south from Sea-Tac Airport to Angle Lake station on September 24, 2016, including the opening of a 1,120-stall park and ride. The escalators at Capitol Hill and University of Washington stations experienced several major failures and shutdowns in the two years since the University Link extension was opened. These failures were attributed to the installation of standard commercial escalators instead of stronger escalators designed for transit stations. A new escalator contractor was selected to provide preventative maintenance in lieu of a proposed replacement plan; new stairways and connecting passageways were also opened to allow for alternative access. The Tukwila section of the line was shut down over one weekend in October 2018 for major repairs after cracks were discovered in the rails on the 1,200-foot (370 m) bridge crossing Interstate 5. ### Renaming and Northgate extension Central Link was renamed to the "Red Line" as part of a systemwide rebranding in September 2019 by Sound Transit to prepare for the arrival of East Link (the Blue Line). Two months later, the agency announced that it would consider a new name after complaints due to the similarity of the "Red Line" with redlining, which historically affected residents of the Rainier Valley. A new designation, the 1 Line (colored green), was announced in April 2020 and took effect in September 2021. In January 2020, Sound Transit began a ten-week construction project called "Connect 2020" that required trains to single-track in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. The closure of tracks for work on the East Link Extension where it meets the existing tracks at International District/Chinatown necessitated the construction of a temporary center platform at Pioneer Square for use by through-riding passengers. Sound Transit deployed four-car trains running every 13–15 minutes and implemented restrictions on carrying bicyclists on trains through downtown. The project was completed in late March after a week-long delay in testing, but the frequency restrictions remained due to the coronavirus pandemic and local shutdowns. Service was reduced to every 30 minutes in April and partially restored in September to every 8 minutes during peak hours and 15 minutes during most other hours. The first of the new "Series 2" light rail vehicles, based on the Siemens S700, entered service in May 2021. The third expansion of the 1 Line, a 4.3-mile (6.9 km) northern extension from University of Washington station to the Northgate neighborhood of Seattle, was funded by the Sound Transit 2 ballot measure in 2008 and began construction in 2012. The 3.5-mile (5.6 km) tunnel was excavated between July 2014 and September 2016 using two tunnel boring machines, creating a pair of bores between the extension's three stations. The southernmost section of the extension passes under the University of Washington campus and required several mitigation measures to reduce electromagnetic interference for laboratory equipment, including rubber dampeners on floating slabs of track and the relocation of sensitive equipment at four facilities. The Northgate extension opened on October 2, 2021, adding three stations to the line's north end. ## Route The northern terminus of the 1 Line is Northgate station, located adjacent to the Northgate Mall along Interstate 5 in North Seattle. The line heads south along an elevated guideway that dives into the Northgate Link tunnel in the Maple Leaf neighborhood. The 3.4-mile (5.5 km) tunnel travels southeast through Roosevelt, serving a station near Northeast 65th Street, and south to U District station before reaching the University of Washington campus. The tunnel travels southeast under the campus to University of Washington station, located near Husky Stadium, from which it heads south in the University Link tunnel, crossing under the Montlake Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and State Route 520 before taking a turn to the southwest. The tunnel climbs Capitol Hill and passes under Interlaken Park and Volunteer Park before turning due south to enter Capitol Hill station on the east side of Broadway. The tunnel makes a gradual turn to the west, dipping as far south as East Union Street, and crosses under Interstate 5 at Pine Street. It merges into the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel within the Pine Street Stub Tunnel, where it formerly merged with buses from Convention Place station. The downtown transit tunnel, formerly shared between light rail trains and buses, travels west under Pine Street through Westlake station and south on 3rd Avenue through University Street and Pioneer Square stations in Downtown Seattle. The tunnel ends at International District/Chinatown station, adjacent to King Street Station (served by Amtrak and Sounder commuter rail), and the 1 Line travels south through SoDo along the east side of the SODO Busway. The SoDo section has two stations, Stadium and SODO, and includes several gated crossings. From SODO station, the track ascends to an elevated guideway traveling east along South Forest Street, passing the line's railyard and maintenance facility. The elevated trackway passes over Airport Way and comes to rest on an embankment under Interstate 5, entering the Beacon Hill tunnel. The Beacon Hill tunnel travels approximately one mile (1.6 km) under Beacon Hill, serving a station at Beacon Avenue South. Trains exit the tunnel on the east side of the hill, turning southeast and approaching the elevated Mount Baker station at the intersection of Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. Light rail trains descend from Mount Baker station onto the median of Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, running at-grade with signal priority at 28 street crossings. The 1 Line passes through the Rainier Valley and serves three at-grade stations, Columbia City, Othello, and Rainier Beach, before leaving Seattle. The line enters Tukwila and crosses west over Interstate 5 and a mainline railroad at Boeing Access Road, near Boeing Field, before making a southward turn over East Marginal Way South. The 1 Line continues south over the Duwamish River, traveling non-stop through Tukwila on a 4.7-mile (7.6 km) elevated guideway. The guideway runs along the west sides of State Route 599 and Interstate 5 towards Southcenter Mall, where it turns west along State Route 518. The line passes through Tukwila International Boulevard station, home to a 600-stall park and ride facility, and turns south into the median of the Airport Expressway towards SeaTac. Light rail trains continue along the east side of Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, stopping at SeaTac/Airport station near the airport's terminals, before reaching Angle Lake station, where it terminates. The 1 Line, while officially a "light rail" line, has also been described as a "light metro" hybrid by transit experts due to its grade separated sections and use of longer trainsets than typical American light rail systems. Approximately 6.4 miles (10.3 km) of the 20.35-mile (32.75 km) line is at-grade, including segments along freeways that are separated from intersecting roads. ### Stations Stations on the 1 Line are spaced approximately one mile (1.6 km) apart in most areas and are built with 380-foot-long (120 m) platforms to accommodate four-car train sets. Some stations are grade separated, with underground or elevated platforms connected to surface entrances by stairs, escalators, and elevators, while others were built at street level. The line's sixteen stations include bus connections, ticket vending machines, real-time arrivals information signs, public art, and bicycle parking. Stations are also designed with clear sight lines on platforms, emergency phones and lights, and are monitored with surveillance cameras. All stations are connected to local bus routes, including parallel King County Metro services that stop at multiple Link stations. Since 2019, a set of five stations in the Rainier Valley and Tukwila have had on-demand ride-hail shuttle service that accepts Metro fares and is operated by private contractor Via with subsidies from the city government. As of 2021, there are only three stations that have public park and ride facilities (Angle Lake, Northgate, and Tukwila International Boulevard); for other stations, Sound Transit and local governments encourage alternative means of transportation to and from stations, including bus riding, walking, or bicycling. ## Service 1 Line trains run 20 hours per day from Monday to Saturday, from 5:00 am to 1:00 am, and 18 hours on Sundays and federal holidays, from 6:00 am to midnight. Trains operate most frequently during weekday peak periods, running every eight minutes from 6:00 am to 9:30 am and from 3:00 pm to 6:30 pm. Trains run every 10 minutes during midday and evening hours on weekdays and all day on weekends. Train frequency is reduced to every 15 minutes during the early morning and late night hours of all days. End-to-end travel from Northgate to Angle Lake stations takes 57 minutes, while trips between SeaTac/Airport station and Downtown Seattle take 38 minutes. The SeaTac–Westlake corridor was formerly served by King County Metro bus route 194, which took 32 minutes to travel between the two areas, and used bus stops that were closer to the terminal. The bus route ran at less frequent intervals, was subject to traffic delays, and had shorter hours of operation. ### Ridership 1 Line trains carried over 25 million total passengers in 2019, averaging 79,674 riders on weekdays. Ridership is measured by on-board infrared passenger counters that automatically record the number of people entering and leaving the train. Approximately 32 percent of Series 1 vehicles have automatic passenger counters, while all Series 2 vehicles include them. Ridership on the 1 Line has risen significantly from the beginning of service in 2009, when it averaged 15,500 per weekday. In 2010, ridership fell below projected levels due to an economic downturn, with only 21,611 daily riders on the line. Ridership increased significantly in the following years, surpassing 25,000 daily riders in 2012, 30,000 in 2014, and 35,000 in 2015. The opening of the University Link extension in March 2016 increased daily ridership by 66 percent in its first month of operation, and averaged 66,203 daily riders during the last quarter of the year. A single-day ridership record of 82,361 estimated boardings was set on April 8, 2016, credited to a Seattle Mariners home opener and the Emerald City Comic Con. The record was surpassed five months later on September 30, estimated at 101,000 riders, due in part to home games for the Washington Huskies football team and Seattle Mariners. Ridership fell to 9.7 million total passengers in 2020, a decline of 61 percent from 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other service reductions. Link ridership grew following the 2021 opening of the Northgate Link Extension and reopening of offices, which allowed it to exceed pre-pandemic levels. The line set a single-day record of 115,600 boardings on July 11, 2023, during the Major League Baseball All-Star Game at T-Mobile Park. This record was surpassed twice by the end of the month due to several simultaneous weekend events, including Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour concerts at Lumen Field, Mariners games at T-Mobile Park, and the Capitol Hill Block Party. A new record of 136,800 boardings was set on July 23 and became the 12th day in July 2023 with more than 100,000 boardings. ### Fares The 1 Line uses a proof-of-payment system, requiring valid payment before boarding and lacking a turnstile barrier at stations. Fares can be purchased as paper tickets at ticket vending machines at stations, credit or passes loaded on an ORCA card, or through a mobile ticketing app. Fare ambassadors check for valid fares while aboard trains or in the fare-paid zone of stations; passengers who do not present a valid ticket or validated ORCA card are offered educational materials and warnings. Until 2021, fare inspectors and transit police officers checked fares and issued warnings or a \$124 citation to passengers who did not present a valid form of payment. Following the dismissal of fare inspectors, an estimated 42 percent of passengers in January 2022 did not pay their fare. A new program led by fare ambassadors was approved in September 2022, enacting a multi-step system with monetary penalties beginning with the third violation and a \$124 infraction for a fifth violation. Fares are calculated based on distance traveled, ranging from \$2.25 to \$3.50 for adults. ORCA card users are required to tap a reader before and after riding a train to calculate the fare. Reduced fares are available to elderly passengers, persons with disabilities, and low-income passengers enrolled in ORCA Lift. Transfers from other modes, including buses, water taxis, and streetcars, are only accepted using ORCA cards. Since September 2022, fares for passengers under the age of 19 have been free as part of a statewide transit grant. ## Rolling stock and equipment The original "Series 1" fleet used on the 1 Line consisted of 62 low-floor light rail vehicles manufactured in Japan by Kinkisharyo. The Kinkisharyo vehicles, built through a joint venture with Mitsui & Co., have 74 seats and can carry 194 seated and standing passengers at standard capacity; a maximum "crush load" of 252 passengers per car can be carried by Link trains for short distances. Individual railcars are 95 feet (29.0 m) long and 8.7 feet (2.7 m) wide, sporting dual cabs that allow cars to travel in either direction. The interior is 70 percent low-floor, while the remaining 30 percent is raised above the floor and accessed via stairs. Railcars include four doors on each side, fold-up seating areas for wheelchairs, and two bicycle hooks above luggage storage areas. 1 Line trains are typically arranged into four-car sets, but until 2021 all trains were two or three cars long. The trains have a top speed of 58 miles per hour (93 km/h), but typically operate at 35 mph (56 km/h) on surface sections and 55 mph (89 km/h) on elevated and tunneled sections. Link uses a form of positive train control to prevent trains from exceeding the set speed limit for a given area. Trains are supplied electricity through an overhead catenary that is energized at and converted to three-phase alternating current through on-board inverters. While other North American light rail systems use technology, Sound Transit chose to use 1,500 V DC to reduce the number of electrical substations, which are spaced approximately one mile (1.6 km) apart. Sound Transit placed its initial order of 31 light rail vehicles in 2003, and added four more vehicles in 2005 for the extension to SeaTac/Airport station. The cars were assembled in Everett, to comply with Buy America requirements, and delivered from 2006 to 2008. Another 27 vehicles were ordered for the University Link extension in 2009 and were delivered from 2010 to 2011. The 1 Line fleet is stored and maintained at a 26-acre (10.5 ha) operating base in SoDo, between SODO and Beacon Hill stations. It opened in 2007, at a cost of \$74 million to construct, and has a capacity of 105 light rail vehicles, including nine bays inside the 162,000-square-foot (15,100 m<sup>2</sup>) maintenance building that can hold 16 vehicles. 1 Line trains are operated and maintained by King County Metro under a contract with Sound Transit that was renewed in 2019 and is set to expire at the end of 2023. In September 2016, Sound Transit approved a \$554 million order to Siemens Mobility for 122 S700 "Series 2" light rail vehicles that will serve planned extensions to Northgate, Lynnwood, the Eastside, and Federal Way. Another 30 vehicles were added to the order in April 2017, bringing the total to 152 vehicles. The first Series 2 car arrived at Sound Transit's maintenance facility in June 2019, featuring the same seating capacity but a wider central walkway and other new features. The first Siemens cars entered service on May 14, 2021. A satellite maintenance facility in Bellevue was opened in 2021 to accommodate 96 more vehicles, including part of the new fleet and older Series 1 vehicles undergoing retrofit work. A third facility is planned to be built near Federal Way to support future system expansion. ## Future plans Sound Transit's expansion ballot measures, passed as Sound Transit 2 in 2008 and Sound Transit 3 in 2016, enabled the planning of future Link light rail extensions, scheduled to open in stages between 2021 and 2040. The Northgate Link extension opened on October 2, 2021, and extended the 1 Line by three stations to the north end of Seattle. It is set to be followed by the 2 Line in 2024, creating a new line to Bellevue and Redmond that will be extended west to Seattle in 2025. During construction related to the 2 Line (then called East Link) in early 2020, trains within the downtown transit tunnel were temporarily limited to single-track operations and divided into two lines at Pioneer Square station. As part of the Sound Transit 2 program, the 1 Line will be extended north to Lynnwood and south to Federal Way by 2025. The line would have trains every eight minutes at peak and ten minutes mid-day and on weekends, with a combined frequency of four minutes at peak and five minutes off-peak between International District/Chinatown and Lynnwood City Center stations. In 2032, the 3 Line to West Seattle will begin service, temporarily operating between Alaska Junction and SODO station. The opening of an extension to Ballard by 2039, traveling via a new tunnel through Downtown Seattle, will split the corridor between two lines: the 1 Line, operating from Ballard to Tacoma via the Rainier Valley and Sea-Tac Airport; and the 3 Line, operating from Lynnwood (and later Everett) to West Seattle. Two infill stations along the current route of the 1 Line are planned to open in 2031 at South Graham Street in the Rainier Valley and Boeing Access Road in northern Tukwila.
54,256,011	John Richard Clark Hall	1,153,499,499	Scholar of Old English (1855–1931)	[ "1855 births", "1931 deaths", "Anglo-Saxon studies scholars", "English barristers", "English lexicographers", "English translators" ]	John Richard Clark Hall (1855 – 6 August 1931) was a British scholar of Old English, and a barrister. In his professional life, Hall worked as a clerk at the Local Government Board in Whitehall. Admitted to Gray's Inn in 1881 and called to the bar in 1896, Hall became principal clerk two years later. Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary became a widely used work upon its 1894 publication, and after multiple revisions remains in print as of 2021. His 1901 prose translation of Beowulf—the tenth in English, known simply as "Clark Hall"—became "the standard trot to Beowulf ", and was still the canonical introduction to the poem into the 1960s; several of the later editions included a prefatory essay by J. R. R. Tolkien. Hall's other work on Beowulf included a metrical translation in 1914, and the translation and collection of Knut Stjerna's Swedish papers on the poem into the 1912 work Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf. In the final decade of his life, Hall's writings took to a Christian theme. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published two of his works in this time: Herbert Tingle, and Especially his Boyhood, a memoir to Hall's lifelong friend that highlighted his early methods of self-education, and Birth-Control and Self-Control, a pamphlet on the ethics of birth control. Hall also wrote Is Our Christianity a Failure?, a 1928 book described by The Spectator as a "layman's attempt to express and defend his religion". ## Early life John Richard Clark Hall was born in 1855 in Peckham, outside London. He was the only son of James John Hall, the principal clerk in the Custom House, City of London. Previously, his father had worked in the Tea and East India Department of HM Customs. An uncle, Joseph Hall, lived in Golcar Hill. John Hall later described having been "brought up in an atmosphere of old-fashioned Toryism and Churchmanship". He spent parts of his childhood on the outskirts of Peckham, where he met his lifelong friend Herbert Tingle. Among other amusements, Hall and Tingle devised a "brick world" from blocks, with, as Tingle wrote, "railways and parliamentary elections, obstructionists, and lectures on science, and examinations, and all the complicated apparatus of a modern country in full blast"; by 1919, Hall still possessed nearly 200 documents outlining the world's structure, including newspapers, results of general elections, postage stamps, a shipping company's lists of sailings, a theatre programme, and railway timetables. The two also obtained a toy printing press. The results were good enough that at least three pamphlets with the "Tingle & Hall" imprint were acquired by the British Library, and a fourth by the Rakow Research Library at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. Hall himself discovered one of the former when older, and wondered much how it had reached there. Hall had what he later termed an "education on more or less orthodox classical lines, with the inevitable examinations". He was educated at the Collegiate School in Peckham, and at St Olave's Grammar School, in Southwark. In May 1871, when aged around 16, he won the second prize for the best essay on "the duty of kindness to animals", a competition opened to students of about 120 London schools by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. By age 18 he had obtained certificates at both the Cambridge and Oxford Junior Local Examinations, along with a senior certificate from the latter, earning him the title Associate in Arts at Oxford. In 1872 and 1873 Hall passed the Civil Service examinations, coming first out of more than 170 candidates for clerkships. Hall was placed in the Local Government Board. According to a local newspaper, he was "specially prepared" for the examination by a Mr. Braginton. On 16 May 1881, Hall was admitted to Gray's Inn. In 1889 he received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of London, and in 1891 a Master of Arts in English and French from the same school. By 1894, he had also attained a PhD. Hall was finally called to the bar in 1896, having studied both Roman law, and constitutional law and legal history. Upon the retirement of a Mr. R. B. Allen in November 1898, Hall became the principal clerk in the Local Government Board. ## Writing career Beginning shortly before he became a barrister, and continuing until shortly before his death, Hall wrote seven books alongside several shorter works. The first two, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg: A Translation into Modern English Prose, quickly became authoritative works that went through four editions each. Hall's third book, a translation of Swedish essays on Beowulf by Knut Stjerna, was similarly influential. Hall's later works were Christian themed, including two published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ### A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Hall's dictionary of Old English, subtitled For the Use of Students, quickly became a widely used work upon its publication in 1894. The work, issued four years before the final volume of An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller, filled the need of a complete Old English dictionary. "At last", wrote The Guardian, "we have a complete Anglo-Saxon dictionary, complete from A to the very end of the alphabet." Two years later, the publication of Henry Sweet's A Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon provided a second modern compact dictionary. After Bosworth–Toller was completed in 1898, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary continued to serve prominently as an introductory, if smaller, resource; Hall, Bosworth–Toller, and Sweet were all eventually superseded by The Dictionary of Old English, issued by the University of Toronto starting in 1986. The first edition of the dictionary attempted to ease access by ordering entries by the words as they were actually spelt in common editions of Old English texts, and critics noted that this introduced its own share of confusion. Hall eliminated this approach in a 1916 second edition, acknowledging that this "was admittedly an unscientific [approach], and opened the door to a good many errors and inconsistencies". Thenceforth he adopted the conventional method of using "normalised" entry words. Hall also began indicating words found only in poetical texts and providing the source of words recorded only once, and added cross-references to corresponding entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, then underway. The edition was "markedly superior to the first edition" according to a reviewer for Modern Philology, and according to Frederick Klaeber, its "outward make-up is almost an ideal one". In Journal of Education, a reviewer termed it "the most modern treatment of the most ancient usage of our language". A third and significantly expanded edition of the dictionary followed in 1931; according to Francis Peabody Magoun, it was "to all intents and purposes [a] completely new edition", and "a notable monument to the memory of its author", who died the year of publication. A fourth edition—a reprinting with a supplement by the philologist Herbert Dean Meritt—came in 1960. This was reprinted by the University of Toronto Press starting in 1984, and is still in print as of 2021. ### Beowulf In 1901, after publication of the first edition of his dictionary, Hall published a literal translation of Beowulf. It was the tenth English translation of the work, and became "the standard trot to Beowulf ". It was largely praised at its outset, including by The Manchester Guardian for containing a "decidedly better" translation than any in current use, and by Chauncey Brewster Tinker for providing "a useful compendium of Beowulf material", although The Athenæum wrote that in striving to be too literal, it did not "go very far towards supplying the desideratum" of an "adequate prose version" of the poem. The first edition was followed by a corrected second in 1911. Such revision was "welcome", wrote the English philologist Allen Mawer, "for it is probably the best working translation that we have". The Athenæum, for its part, wrote that the work was "unaltered in general character", but "with considerable improvements". Posthumous third and fourth editions were edited by Charles Leslie Wrenn and published in 1940 and 1950, respectively. These contained an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien, "Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of 'Beowulf'", which was later restyled "On Translating Beowulf ]]" for the compilation The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. Hall's translation—known simply as "Clark Hall"—was "still the 'crib of choice' in Oxford in the 1960s", according to Marijane Osborn, an Old English scholar and Beowulf translator who compiled a list of more than 300 translations and adaptations of the poem. A 2011 survey of Beowulf translations termed it "one of the most enduringly popular of all translations of the poem". In 1910 Hall published a note on lines 1142–1145 of the poem in Modern Language Notes, and two years later he translated various papers by Stjerna into the work Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf. "It is the great value of these essays", wrote Hall, "that in them Stjerna has collected all the material bearing on the poem of Beowulf which archæological research has yielded in the three Scandinavian countries up to the present time." Previously written in Swedish and published in a medley of obscure journals and Festschrifts before Stjerna's early death, Hall's translation gave them much a much broader audience—which English museum curator E. Thurlow Leeds called "a great service"—and added what Klaeber termed "the function of a conscientious and skilful editor besides". Although the chief reader would be "the Old English student", The Observer wrote, "the helmets and swords in Beowulf and the funeral obsequies of Beowulf and of Scyld ... should serve to send many readers to the poem which has been translated by Dr. Clark Hall in an excellent prose version". Hall followed up his literal Beowulf translation with a metrical translation in 1914. Writing for The Modern Language Review, professor of English and fellow Beowulf translator W. G. Sedgefield suggested that by "attempting to make a metrical version of the Beowulf in modern English, Dr Clark Hall has undertaken one of the most difficult tasks possible for a translator, and we intend no reflection on his ability and scholarship when we say that in our opinion he has not succeeded". Noting the difficulties of translating the poem, and what he termed "arbitrar[y]" choices by Hall, Sedgefield concluded that "Dr Hall would have done well not to try to improve on his excellent prose version of the poem." The metrical translation did not see a second edition, although it was republished in 2014. ### Christianity Hall's obituary termed him a "protestant reformer", and several of his writings touched on the subject of Christianity. In 1919 and 1923, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published two of his works. The former, Herbert Tingle, and Especially His Boyhood, served as a memoir to Hall's lifelong friend, who had died the year before,, and included an introduction by Bishop of Oxford Hubert Burge, The book was also marketed as a "book for educationists"; described how Tingle had only one year of formal schooling but devised methods of educating himself with self-made toys and games. In the journal School, a reviewer wrote that "Herbert Tingle apparently had never heard of Froebel or Montessori ... yet his available knowledge made him a delightful companion his friend writes, and his independence of education so called would delight the soul of Henry Adams. Let all educators read this piece of Herbert Tingle's life and ponder on the essentials to be taught the young!" Writing for Journal of Education, another reviewer added that while Tingle seemed to be of no special account, and while "for the life of me I do not quite see why I read it, [but] we are glad there were two boys like Tingle and Hall and that after one of them passed on at the age of sixty-five the other has taken time to write about their boyhood days and ways." Later works were more overtly Christian. Hall's 1923 pamphlet by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Birth-Control and Self-Control, criticised the ethics of birth control.[^1] Five years later Hall published a book titled Is Our Christianity a Failure? The Contemporary Review called it an "earnest, fair-minded book, written with judicial weight of mind", while The Spectator termed it a "layman's attempt to express and defend his religion". ## Works ### Books : : : : : : : \* Republished in 2014 as ### Articles ### Other ### Tingle & Hall ## Personal life Hall married Mary Ann Elizabeth Symes, of Kingston Russell, Dorset, on 29 November 1883; the ceremony was held in the adjacent village Long Bredy, with the rector Henry Pigou presiding. The two had four children, three of whom survived: Cecil Symes (born 20 September 1886), Irene Clark (born c. 1886), and the entomologist Wilfrid John (born 13 December 1892). Hall was a member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, joining in 1910. Having spent time in Peckham as a child, he disparaged the "straphanger", or weekday commuter, which he blamed with divesting the suburb of its "mild air of suburban gentility" and turning it into "weekly property". Hall was in Switzerland during the outbreak of the First World War, and unable to move or communicate with friends for more than a fortnight. In 1925 he wrote to Notes and Queries to ascertain the origin of "an old broadside ... purporting to be 'A True Copy of a Letter written by Jesus Christ'" and to be "a charm against evil spirits, miscarriage, etc.", which Hall said had been passed down by Yorkshire ancestors, and "looks like the kind of thing a pedlar might try to sell to ignorant folks". Among those who answered, Robert Priebsch identified it as "a late—though by no means the latest—offshoot of an interesting fiction ... which, in my opinion, originated in Southern Gaul or Northern Spain towards the close of the sixth century, and which has enjoyed a tremendous spread all over Europe". Hall died on 6 August 1931, at a nursing home in Eastbourne, East Sussex. His obituary noted that he had formerly been on the Local Government Board in Whitehall, and that he had left a £16,762 estate (). [^1]: [[#CITEREFThe_Servant_of_India1924\\|The Servant of India 1924. sfn error: no target: CITEREFThe_Servant_of_India1924 (help)
75,847	Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov	1,173,037,281	Russian composer (1844–1908)	[ "1844 births", "1908 deaths", "19th-century classical composers", "19th-century male musicians", "19th-century musicologists", "20th-century Russian male musicians", "20th-century classical composers", "Academic staff of Saint Petersburg Conservatory", "Burials at Tikhvin Cemetery", "Composers for piano", "Imperial Russian Navy personnel", "Male opera composers", "Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov", "People from Tikhvin", "People from Tikhvinsky Uyezd", "Russian Romantic composers", "Russian atheists", "Russian male classical composers", "Russian music educators", "Russian music theorists", "Russian nobility", "Russian opera composers", "The Five (composers)" ]	Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (18 March 1844 – 21 June 1908) was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects. Rimsky-Korsakov believed in developing a nationalistic style of classical music, as did his fellow composer Mily Balakirev and the critic Vladimir Stasov. This style employed Russian folk song and lore along with exotic harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements in a practice known as musical orientalism, and eschewed traditional Western compositional methods. Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated Western musical techniques after he became a professor of musical composition, harmony, and orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. He undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education and became a master of Western methods, incorporating them alongside the influences of Mikhail Glinka and fellow members of The Five. Rimsky-Korsakov's techniques of composition and orchestration were further enriched by his exposure to the works of Richard Wagner. For much of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov combined his composition and teaching with a career in the Russian armed forces—first as an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy, then as the civilian Inspector of Naval Bands. He wrote that he developed a passion for the ocean in childhood from reading books and hearing of his older brother's exploits in the navy. This love of the sea may have influenced him to write two of his best-known orchestral works, the musical tableau Sadko (not to be confused with his later opera of the same name) and Scheherazade. As Inspector of Naval Bands, Rimsky-Korsakov expanded his knowledge of woodwind and brass playing, which enhanced his abilities in orchestration. He passed this knowledge to his students, and also posthumously through a textbook on orchestration that was completed by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg. Rimsky-Korsakov left a considerable body of original Russian nationalist compositions. He prepared works by The Five for performance, which brought them into the active classical repertoire (although there is controversy over his editing of the works of Modest Mussorgsky), and shaped a generation of younger composers and musicians during his decades as an educator. Rimsky-Korsakov is therefore considered "the main architect" of what the classical-music public considers the "Russian style". His influence on younger composers was especially important, as he served as a transitional figure between the autodidactism exemplified by Glinka and The Five, and professionally trained composers, who became the norm in Russia by the closing years of the 19th century. While Rimsky-Korsakov's style was based on those of Glinka, Balakirev, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt and, for a brief period, Wagner, he "transmitted this style directly to two generations of Russian composers" and influenced non-Russian composers including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, and Ottorino Respighi. ## Biography ### Early years Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Saint Petersburg, into a Russian noble family. Tikhvin was a town of Novgorod Governorate at that time. Throughout history, members of the family served in Russian government and took various positions as governors and war generals. Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov was famously a lover of Catherine the Great. By a Tsar's decree on May 15, 1677, 18 representatives of the Korsakov family acquired the right to be called the Rimsky-Korsakov family (the Russian adjective 'Rimsky' means 'Roman') since the family "had a beginning within the Roman borders", i.e. Czech lands, which used to be a part of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1390, Wenceslaus Korsak moved to the Grand Prince Vasily I of Moscow from the Duchy of Lithuania. The father of the composer, Andrei Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov (1784–1862), was one of the six illegitimate sons of Avdotya Yakovlevna, daughter of an Orthodox priest from Pskov, and lieutenant general Peter Voinovich Rimsky-Korsakov, who had to officially adopt his own children as he couldn't marry their mother because of her lower social status. Using his friendship with Aleksey Arakcheyev, he managed to grant them all the privileges of the noble family. Andrei went on to serve in the Interior Ministry of the Russian Empire, as vice-governor of Novgorod, and in the Volhynian Governorate. The composer's mother, Sofya Vasilievna Rimskaya-Korsakova (1802–1890), was also born as an illegitimate daughter of a peasant serf and Vasily Fedorovich Skaryatin, a wealthy landlord who belonged to the noble Russian family that originated during the 16th century. Her father raised her in full comfort, yet under an improvised surname, Vasilieva, and with no legal status. By the time Andrei Petrovich met her, he was already a widower: his first wife, knyazna Ekaterina Meshcherskaya, died just nine months after their marriage. Since Skaryatin found him unsuitable for his daughter, Andrei secretly "stole" his bride from the father's house and brought her to Saint Petersburg, where they married. The Rimsky-Korsakov family had a long line of military and naval service. Nikolai's older brother Voin, 22 years his senior, became a well-known navigator and explorer and had a powerful influence on Nikolai's life. He later recalled that his mother played the piano a little, and his father could play a few songs on the piano by ear. Beginning at six, he took piano lessons from local teachers and showed a talent for aural skills, but he showed a lack of interest, playing, as he later wrote, "badly, carelessly, ... poor at keeping time". Although he started composing by age 10, Rimsky-Korsakov preferred literature to music. He later wrote that from his reading, and tales of his brother's exploits, he developed a poetic love for the sea "without ever having seen it". This love, with subtle prompting from Voin, encouraged the 12-year-old to join the Imperial Russian Navy. He studied at the School for Mathematical and Navigational Sciences in Saint Petersburg and at 18 took his final examination in April 1862. While at school, Rimsky-Korsakov took piano lessons from a man named Ulikh. Voin, now director of the school, sanctioned these lessons because he hoped they would help Nikolai develop social skills and overcome his shyness. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that, while "indifferent" to lessons, he developed a love for music, fostered by visits to the opera and, later, orchestral concerts. Ulikh perceived Rimsky-Korsakov's musical talent and recommended another teacher, Feodor A. Kanille (Théodore Canillé). Beginning in late 1859, Rimsky-Korsakov took lessons in piano and composition from Kanille, whom he later credited as the inspiration for devoting his life to composition. Through Kanille, he was exposed to a great deal of new music, including Mikhail Glinka and Robert Schumann. Voin cancelled his brother Nikolai's musical lessons when the latter reached age 17, feeling they no longer served a practical purpose. Kanille told Rimsky-Korsakov to continue coming to him every Sunday, not for formal lessons but to play duets and discuss music. In November 1861, Kanille introduced the 18-year-old Nikolai to Mily Balakirev. Balakirev in turn introduced him to César Cui and Modest Mussorgsky; all three were known as composers, despite only being in their 20s. Rimsky-Korsakov later wrote, "With what delight I listened to real business discussions [Rimsky-Korsakov's emphasis] of instrumentation, part writing, etc! And besides, how much talking there was about current musical matters! All at once I had been plunged into a new world, unknown to me, formerly only heard of in the society of my dilettante friends. That was truly a strong impression." Balakirev encouraged Rimsky-Korsakov to compose and taught him the rudiments when he was not at sea. Balakirev prompted him to enrich himself in history, literature and criticism. When he showed Balakirev the beginning of a symphony in E-flat minor that he had written, Balakirev insisted he continue working on it despite his lack of formal musical training. By the time Rimsky-Korsakov sailed on a two-year-and-eight-month cruise aboard the clipper Almaz in late 1862, he had completed and orchestrated three movements of the symphony. He composed the slow movement during a stop in England and mailed the score to Balakirev before going back to sea. At first, his work on the symphony kept Rimsky-Korsakov occupied during his cruise. He purchased scores at every port of call, along with a piano on which to play them, and filled his idle hours studying Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation. He found time to read the works of Homer, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; he saw London, Niagara Falls, and Rio de Janeiro during his stops in port. Eventually, the lack of outside musical stimuli dulled the young midshipman's hunger to learn. He wrote to Balakirev that after two years at sea he had neglected his musical lessons for months. "Thoughts of becoming a musician and composer gradually left me altogether", he later recalled; "distant lands began to allure me, somehow, although, properly speaking, naval service never pleased me much and hardly suited my character at all." ### Mentored by Balakirev; time with The Five Once back in Saint Petersburg in May 1865, Rimsky-Korsakov's onshore duties consisted of a couple of hours of clerical duty each day, but he recalled that his desire to compose "had been stifled ... I did not concern myself with music at all." He wrote that contact with Balakirev in September 1865 encouraged him "to get accustomed to music and later to plunge into it". At Balakirev's suggestion, he wrote a trio to the scherzo of the E-flat minor symphony, which it had lacked up to that point, and reorchestrated the entire symphony. Its first performance came in December of that year under Balakirev's direction in Saint Petersburg. A second performance followed in March 1866 under the direction of Konstantin Lyadov (father of composer Anatoly Lyadov). Correspondence between Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev clearly shows that some ideas for the symphony originated with Balakirev, who seldom stopped at merely correcting a piece of music, and would often recompose it at the piano. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled, > A pupil like myself had to submit to Balakirev a proposed composition in its embryo, say, even the first four or eight bars. Balakirev would immediately make corrections, indicating how to recast such an embryo; he would criticize it, would praise and extol the first two bars, but would censure the next two, ridicule them, and try hard to make the author disgusted with them. Vivacity of composition and fertility were not at all in favor, frequent recasting was demanded, and the composition was extended over a long period of time under the cold control of self-criticism. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that "Balakirev had no difficulty in getting along with me. At his suggestion I most readily rewrote the symphonic movements composed by me and brought them to completion with the help of his advice and improvisations". Though Rimsky-Korsakov later found Balakirev's influence stifling, and broke free from it, this did not stop him in his memoirs from extolling the older composer's talents as a critic and improviser. Under Balakirev's mentoring, Rimsky-Korsakov turned to other compositions. He began a symphony in B minor, but felt it too closely followed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and abandoned it. He completed an Overture on Three Russian Themes, based on Balakirev's folksong overtures, as well as a Fantasia on Serbian Themes that was performed at a concert given for the delegates of the Slavonic Congress in 1867. In his review of this concert, nationalist critic Vladimir Stasov coined the phrase Moguchaya kuchka for the Balakirev circle (Moguchaya kuchka is usually translated as "The Mighty Handful" or "The Five"). Rimsky-Korsakov also composed the initial versions of Sadko and Antar, which cemented his reputation as a writer of orchestral works. Rimsky-Korsakov socialized and discussed music with the other members of The Five; they critiqued one another's works in progress and collaborated on new pieces. He became friends with Alexander Borodin, whose music "astonished" him. He spent an increasing amount of time with Mussorgsky. Balakirev and Mussorgsky played piano four-hand music, Mussorgsky would sing, and they frequently discussed other composers' works, with preferred tastes running "toward Glinka, Schumann and Beethoven's late quartets". Mendelssohn was not thought of highly, Mozart and Haydn "were considered out of date and naïve", and J.S. Bach merely mathematical and unfeeling. Berlioz "was highly esteemed", Liszt "crippled and perverted from a musical point of view ... even a caricature", and Wagner discussed little. Rimsky-Korsakov "listened to these opinions with avidity and absorbed the tastes of Balakirev, Cui and Mussorgsky without reasoning or examination". Often, the musical works in question "were played before me only in fragments, and I had no idea of the whole work". This, he wrote, did not stop him from accepting these judgments at face value and repeating them "as if I were thoroughly convinced of their truth". Rimsky-Korsakov became especially appreciated within The Five, and among those who visited the circle, for his talents as an orchestrator. He was asked by Balakirev to orchestrate a Schubert march for a concert in May 1868, by Cui to orchestrate the opening chorus of his opera William Ratcliff and by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, whose works were greatly appreciated by The Five and who was close to death, to orchestrate his opera The Stone Guest. In late 1871, Rimsky-Korsakov moved into Voin's former apartment, and invited Mussorgsky to be his roommate. The working arrangement they agreed upon was that Mussorgsky used the piano in the mornings while Rimsky-Korsakov worked on copying or orchestration. When Mussorgsky left for his civil service job at noon, Rimsky-Korsakov then used the piano. Time in the evenings was allotted by mutual agreement. "That autumn and winter the two of us accomplished a good deal", Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, "with constant exchange of ideas and plans. Mussorgsky composed and orchestrated the Polish act of Boris Godunov and the folk scene 'Near Kromy.' I orchestrated and finished my Maid of Pskov." ### Professorship, marriage, inspector of bands In 1871, the 27-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov became Professor of Practical Composition and Instrumentation (orchestration) at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, as well as leader of the Orchestra Class. He retained his position in active naval service, and taught his classes in uniform (military officers in Russia were required to wear their uniforms every day, as they were considered to be always on duty). Rimsky-Korsakov explained in his memoirs that Mikhaíl Azanchevsky had taken over that year as director of the Conservatory, and wanting new blood to freshen up teaching in those subjects, had offered to pay generously for Rimsky-Korsakov's services. Biographer Mikhail Tsetlin (aka Mikhail Zetlin) suggests that Azanchevsky's motives might have been twofold. First, Rimsky-Korsakov was the member of the Five least criticized by its opponents, and inviting him to teach at the Conservatory may have been considered a safe way to show that all serious musicians were welcome there. Second, the offer may have been calculated to expose him to an academic climate in which he would write in a more conservative, Western-based style. Balakirev had opposed academic training in music with tremendous vigor, but encouraged him to accept the post to convince others to join the nationalist musical cause. Rimsky-Korsakov's reputation at this time was as a master of orchestration, based on Sadko and Antar. He had written these works mainly by intuition. His knowledge of musical theory was elemental; he had never written any counterpoint, could not harmonize a simple chorale, nor knew the names or intervals of musical chords. He had never conducted an orchestra, and had been discouraged from doing so by the navy, which did not approve of his appearing on the podium in uniform. Aware of his technical shortcomings, Rimsky-Korsakov consulted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with whom he and the others in The Five had been in occasional contact. Tchaikovsky, unlike The Five, had received academic training in composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, and was serving as Professor of Music Theory at the Moscow Conservatory. Tchaikovsky advised him to study. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that while teaching at the Conservatory he soon became "possibly its very best pupil [Rimsky-Korsakov's emphasis], judging by the quantity and value of the information it gave me!" To prepare himself, and to stay at least one step ahead of his students, he took a three-year sabbatical from composing original works, and assiduously studied at home while he lectured at the Conservatory. He taught himself from textbooks, and followed a strict regimen of composing contrapuntal exercises, fugues, chorales and a cappella choruses. Rimsky-Korsakov eventually became an excellent teacher and a fervent believer in academic training. He revised everything he had composed prior to 1874, even acclaimed works such as Sadko and Antar, in a search for perfection that would remain with him throughout the rest of his life. Assigned to rehearse the Orchestra Class, he mastered the art of conducting. Dealing with orchestral textures as a conductor, and making suitable arrangements of musical works for the Orchestra Class, led to an increased interest in the art of orchestration, an area into which he would further indulge his studies as Inspector of Navy Bands. The score of his Third Symphony, written just after he had completed his three-year program of self-improvement, reflects his hands-on experience with the orchestra. Professorship brought Rimsky-Korsakov financial security, which encouraged him to settle down and to start a family. In December 1871 he proposed to Nadezhda Purgold, with whom he had developed a close relationship over weekly gatherings of The Five at the Purgold household. They married in July 1872, with Mussorgsky serving as best man. The Rimsky-Korsakovs had seven children. Their first son, Mikhail, became an entomologist while another son, Andrei, became a musicologist, married the composer Yuliya Veysberg and wrote a multi-volume study of his father's life and work. Nadezhda became a musical as well as domestic partner with her husband, much as Clara Schumann had been with her own husband Robert. She was beautiful, capable, strong-willed, and far better trained musically than her husband at the time they married—she had attended the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in the mid-1860s, studying piano with Anton Gerke (one of whose private students was Mussorgsky) and music theory with Nikolai Zaremba, who also taught Tchaikovsky. Nadezhda proved a fine and most demanding critic of her husband's work; her influence over him in musical matters was strong enough for Balakirev and Stasov to wonder whether she was leading him astray from their musical preferences. Musicologist Lyle Neff wrote that while Nadezhda gave up her own compositional career when she married Rimsky-Korsakov, she "had a considerable influence on the creation of [Rimsky-Korsakov's] first three operas. She travelled with her husband, attended rehearsals and arranged compositions by him and others" for piano four hands, which she played with her husband. "Her last years were dedicated to issuing her husband's posthumous literary and musical legacy, maintaining standards for performance of his works ... and preparing material for a museum in his name." In early 1873, the navy created the civilian post of Inspector of Naval Bands, with a rank of Collegiate Assessor, and appointed Rimsky-Korsakov. This kept him on the navy payroll and listed on the roster of the Chancellery of the Navy Department but allowed him to resign his commission. The composer commented, "I parted with delight with both my military status and my officer's uniform", he later wrote. "Henceforth I was a musician officially and incontestably." As Inspector, Rimsky-Korsakov applied himself with zeal to his duties. He visited naval bands throughout Russia, supervised the bandmasters and their appointments, reviewed the bands' repertoire, and inspected the quality of their instruments. He wrote a study program for a complement of music students who held navy fellowships at the Conservatory, and acted as an intermediary between the Conservatory and the navy. He also indulged in a long-standing desire to familiarize himself with the construction and playing technique of orchestral instruments. These studies prompted him to write a textbook on orchestration. He used the privileges of rank to exercise and expand upon his knowledge. He discussed arrangements of musical works for military band with bandmasters, encouraged and reviewed their efforts, held concerts at which he could hear these pieces, and orchestrated original works, and works by other composers, for military bands. In March 1884, an Imperial Order abolished the navy office of Inspector of Bands, and Rimsky-Korsakov was relieved of his duties. He worked under Balakirev in the Court Chapel as a deputy until 1894,[^1] which allowed him to study Russian Orthodox church music. He also taught classes at the chapel, and wrote his textbook on harmony for use there and at the Conservatory. ### Backlash and May Night Rimsky-Korsakov's studies and his change in attitude regarding music education brought him the scorn of his fellow nationalists, who thought he was throwing away his Russian heritage to compose fugues and sonatas. After he strove "to crowd in as much counterpoint as possible" into his Third Symphony, he wrote chamber works adhering strictly to classical models, including a string sextet, a string quartet in F major (Op. 12) and a quintet for flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano in B-flat. About the quartet and the symphony, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that they "were filled with a host of clever things but ... [were] imbued with a dryly pedantic character". Borodin commented that when he heard the symphony, he kept "feeling that this is the work of a German Herr Professor who has put on his glasses and is about to write Eine grosse Symphonie in C". According to Rimsky-Korsakov, the other members of the Five showed little enthusiasm for the symphony, and less still for the quartet. Nor was his public debut as a conductor, at an 1874 charity concert where he led the orchestra in the new symphony, considered favorably by his compatriots. He later wrote that "they began, indeed, to look down upon me as one on the downward path". Worse still to Rimsky-Korsakov was the faint praise given by Anton Rubinstein, a composer opposed to the nationalists' music and philosophy. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that after Rubinstein heard the quartet, he commented that now Rimsky-Korsakov "might amount to something" as a composer. He wrote that Tchaikovsky continued to support him morally, telling him that he fully applauded what Rimsky-Korsakov was doing and admired both his artistic modesty and his strength of character. Privately, Tchaikovsky confided to Nadezhda von Meck, "Apparently [Rimsky-Korsakov] is now passing through this crisis, and how it will end will be difficult to predict. Either a great master will come out of him, or he will finally become bogged down in contrapuntal tricks". Two projects helped Rimsky-Korsakov focus on less academic music-making. The first was the creation of two folk song collections in 1874. Rimsky-Korsakov transcribed 40 Russian songs for voice and piano from performances by folk singer Tvorty Filippov, who approached him at Balakirev's suggestion. This collection was followed by a second containing 100 songs, supplied by friends and servants, or taken from rare and out-of-print collections. Rimsky-Korsakov later credited this work as a great influence on him as a composer; it also supplied a vast amount of musical material from which he could draw for future projects, either by direct quotation or as models for composing fakeloric passages. The second project was the editing of orchestral scores by pioneer Russian composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) in collaboration with Balakirev and Anatoly Lyadov. Glinka's sister, Lyudmila Ivanovna Shestakova, wanted to preserve her brother's musical legacy in print, and paid the costs of the project from her own pocket. No similar project had been attempted before in Russian music, and guidelines for scholarly musical editing had to be established and agreed. While Balakirev favored making changes in Glinka's music to "correct" what he saw as compositional flaws, Rimsky-Korsakov favored a less intrusive approach. Eventually, Rimsky-Korsakov prevailed. "Work on Glinka's scores was an unexpected schooling for me", he later wrote. "Even before this I had known and worshipped his operas; but as editor of the scores in print I had to go through Glinka's style and instrumentation to their last little note ... And this was a beneficent discipline for me, leading me as it did to the path of modern music, after my vicissitudes with counterpoint and strict style". In mid-1877, Rimsky-Korsakov thought increasingly about the short story May Night by Nikolai Gogol. The story had long been a favorite of his, and his wife Nadezhda had encouraged him to write an opera based on it from the day of their betrothal, when they had read it together. While musical ideas for such a work predated 1877, now they came with greater persistence. By early 1878 the project took an increasing amount of his attention; in February he started writing in earnest, and he finished the opera by early November. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that May Night was of great importance because, despite the opera's containing a good deal of contrapuntal music, he nevertheless "cast off the shackles of counterpoint [emphasis Rimsky-Korsakov]". He wrote the opera in a folk-like melodic idiom, and scored it in a transparent manner much in the style of Glinka. Nevertheless, despite the ease of writing this opera and the next, The Snow Maiden, from time to time he suffered from creative paralysis between 1881 and 1888. He kept busy during this time by editing Mussorgsky's works and completing Borodin's Prince Igor (Mussorgsky died in 1881, Borodin in 1887). ### Belyayev circle Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that he became acquainted with budding music patron Mitrofan Belyayev (M. P. Belaieff) in Moscow in 1882. Belyayev was one of a growing coterie of Russian nouveau-riche industrialists who became patrons of the arts in mid- to late-19th century Russia; their number included railway magnate Savva Mamontov and textile manufacturer Pavel Tretyakov. Belyayev, Mamontov and Tretyakov "wanted to contribute conspicuously to public life". They had worked their way into wealth, and being Slavophiles in their national outlook believed in the greater glory of Russia. Owing to this belief, they were more likely than the aristocracy to support native talent, and were more inclined to support nationalist artists over cosmopolitan ones. This preference paralleled a general upsurge in nationalism and Russophilia that became prevalent in mainstream Russian art and society. By 1883 Rimsky-Korsakov had become a regular visitor to the weekly "quartet Fridays" ("Les Vendredis") held at Belyayev's home in Saint Petersburg. Belyayev, who had already taken a keen interest in the musical future of the teenage Alexander Glazunov, rented a hall and hired an orchestra in 1884 to play Glazunov's First Symphony plus an orchestral suite Glazunov had just composed. This concert and a rehearsal the previous year gave Rimsky-Korsakov the idea of offering concerts featuring Russian compositions, a prospect to which Belyayev was amenable. The Russian Symphony Concerts were inaugurated during the 1886–87 season, with Rimsky-Korsakov sharing conducting duties with Anatoly Lyadov. He finished his revision of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and conducted it at the opening concert. The concerts also coaxed him out of his creative drought; he wrote Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Overture specifically for them. He noted that these three works "show a considerable falling off in the use of contrapuntal devices ... [replaced] by a strong and virtuoso development of every kind of figuration which sustains the technical interest of my compositions". Rimsky-Korsakov was asked for advice and guidance not just on the Russian Symphony Concerts, but on other projects through which Belyayev aided Russian composers. "By force of matters purely musical I turned out to be the head of the Belyayev circle", he wrote. "As the head Belyayev, too, considered me, consulting me about everything and referring everyone to me as chief". In 1884 Belyayev set up an annual Glinka prize, and in 1885 he founded his own music publishing firm, through which he published works by Borodin, Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov at his own expense. To select which composers to assist with money, publication or performances from the many who now appealed for help, Belyayev set up an advisory council made up of Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov. They would look through the compositions and appeals submitted and suggest which composers were deserving of patronage and public attention. The group of composers who now congregated with Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov became known as the Belyayev circle, named after their financial benefactor. These composers were nationalistic in their musical outlook, as The Five before them had been. Like The Five, they believed in a uniquely Russian style of classical music that utilized folk music and exotic melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, as exemplified by the music of Balakirev, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Unlike The Five, these composers also believed in the necessity of an academic, Western-based background in composition—which Rimsky-Korsakov had instilled in his years at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Compared to the "revolutionary" composers in Balakirev's circle, Rimsky-Korsakov found those in the Belyayev circle to be "progressive ... attaching as it did great importance to technical perfection, but ... also broke new paths, though more securely, even if less speedily ..." ### Increased contact with Tchaikovsky In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived in Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts. One of them included the first complete performance of his First Symphony, subtitled Winter Daydreams, in its final version. Another concert featured the premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov's Third Symphony in its revised version. Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky corresponded considerably before the visit and spent a lot of time together, along with Glazunov and Lyadov. Though Tchaikovsky had been a regular visitor to the Rimsky-Korsakov home since 1876, and had at one point offered to arrange Rimsky-Korsakov's appointment as director of the Moscow Conservatory, this was the beginning of closer relations between the two. Within a couple of years, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, Tchaikovsky's visits became more frequent. During these visits and especially in public, Rimsky-Korsakov wore a mask of geniality. Privately, he found the situation emotionally complex, and confessed his fears to his friend, the Moscow critic Semyon Kruglikov. Memories persisted of the tension between Tchaikovsky and The Five over the differences in their musical philosophies—tension acute enough for Tchaikovsky's brother Modest to liken their relations at that time to "those between two friendly neighboring states ... cautiously prepared to meet on common ground, but jealously guarding their separate interests". Rimsky-Korsakov observed, not without annoyance, how Tchaikovsky became increasingly popular among Rimsky-Korsakov's followers. This personal jealousy was compounded by a professional one, as Tchaikovsky's music became increasingly popular among the composers of the Belyayev circle, and remained on the whole more famous than his own. Even so, when Tchaikovsky attended Rimsky-Korsakov's nameday party in May 1893, Rimsky-Korsakov asked Tchaikovsky personally if he would conduct four concerts of the Russian Musical Society in Saint Petersburg the following season. After hesitation, Tchaikovsky agreed. While his sudden death in late 1893 prevented him from fulfilling this commitment in its entirety, the list of works he had planned to conduct included Rimsky-Korsakov's Third Symphony. ### Increasing conservatism; second creative drought In March 1889, Angelo Neumann's traveling "Richard Wagner Theater" visited Saint Petersburg, giving four cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen there under the direction of Karl Muck. The Five had ignored Wagner's music, but The Ring impressed Rimsky-Korsakov: he was astonished with Wagner's mastery of orchestration. He attended the rehearsals with Glazunov, and followed the score. After hearing these performances, Rimsky-Korsakov devoted himself almost exclusively to composing operas for the rest of his creative life. Wagner's use of the orchestra influenced Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration, beginning with the arrangement of the polonaise from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that he made for concert use in 1889. Toward music more adventurous than Wagner's, especially that of Richard Strauss and later Claude Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov's mind remained closed. He would fume for days afterwards when he heard pianist Felix Blumenfeld play Debussy's Estampes and write in his diary about them, "Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique, even less imagination." This was part of an increasing musical conservatism on his part (his "musical conscience", as he put it), under which he now scrutinized his music and that of others as well. Compositions by his former compatriots in The Five were not immune. While working on his first revision of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, in 1895 he would tell his amanuensis, Vasily Yastrebtsev, "It's incredible that I ever could have liked this music and yet it seems there was such a time." By 1901 he would write of growing "indignant at all [of Wagner's] blunders of the ear"—this about the same music which caught his attention in 1889. In 1892, Rimsky-Korsakov suffered a second creative drought, brought on by bouts of depression and alarming physical symptoms. Rushes of blood to the head, confusion, memory loss and unpleasant obsessions led to a medical diagnosis of neurasthenia. Crises in the Rimsky-Korsakov household may have been a factor—the serious illnesses of his wife and one of his sons from diphtheria in 1890, the deaths of his mother and youngest child, as well as the onset of the prolonged, ultimately fatal illness of his second youngest child. He resigned from the Russian Symphony Concerts and the Court Chapel and considered giving up composition permanently. After making third versions of the musical tableau Sadko and the opera The Maid of Pskov, he closed his musical account with the past; he had left none of his major works before May Night in their original form. Another death brought about a creative renewal. The passing of Tchaikovsky presented a twofold opportunity—to write for the Imperial Theaters and to compose an opera based on Nikolai Gogol's short story Christmas Eve, a work on which Tchaikovsky had based his opera Vakula the Smith. The success of Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve encouraged him to complete an opera approximately every 18 months between 1893 and 1908 — a total of 11 during this period. He also started and abandoned another draft of his treatise on orchestration, but made a third attempt and almost finished it in the last four years of his life. (His son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg completed the book in 1912.) Rimsky-Korsakov's scientific treatment of orchestration, illustrated with more than 300 examples from his work, set a new standard for texts of its kind. ### 1905 Revolution In 1905, demonstrations took place in the St. Petersburg Conservatory as part of the 1905 Revolution; these, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, were triggered by similar disturbances at St. Petersburg State University, in which students demanded political reforms and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Russia. "I was chosen a member of the committee for adjusting differences with agitated pupils", he recalled; almost as soon as the committee had been formed, "[a]ll sorts of measures were recommended to expel the ringleaders, to quarter the police in the Conservatory, to close the Conservatory entirely". A lifelong liberal politically, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that he felt someone had to protect the rights of the students to demonstrate, especially as disputes and wrangling between students and authorities were becoming increasingly violent. In an open letter, he sided with the students against what he saw as unwarranted interference by Conservatory leadership and the Russian Musical Society. A second letter, this time signed by a number of faculty including Rimsky-Korsakov, demanded the resignation of the head of the Conservatory. Partly as a result of these two letters he wrote, approximately 100 Conservatory students were expelled and he was removed from his professorship. Just before the dismissal was enacted, Rimsky-Korsakov received a letter from one of the members of the school directorate, suggesting that he take up the directorship in the interest of calming student unrest. "Probably the member of the Directorate held a minority opinion, but signed the resolution nevertheless," he wrote. "I sent a negative reply." Partly in defiance of his dismissal, Rimsky-Korsakov continued teaching his students from his home. Not long after Rimsky-Korsakov's dismissal, a student production of his opera Kashchey the Immortal was followed not with the scheduled concert but with a political demonstration, which led to a police ban on Rimsky-Korsakov's work. Due in part to widespread press coverage of these events, an immediate wave of outrage against the ban arose throughout Russia and abroad; liberals and intellectuals deluged the composer's residence with letters of sympathy, and even peasants who had not heard a note of Rimsky-Korsakov's music sent small monetary donations. Several faculty members of the St. Petersburg Conservatory resigned in protest, including Glazunov and Lyadov. Eventually, over 300 students walked out of the Conservatory in solidarity with Rimsky-Korsakov. By December he had been reinstated under a new director, Glazunov. Rimsky-Korsakov retired from the Conservatory in 1906. The political controversy continued with his opera The Golden Cockerel. Its implied criticism of monarchy, Russian imperialism and the Russo-Japanese War gave it little chance of passing the censors. The premiere was delayed until 1909, after Rimsky-Korsakov's death, and even then it was performed in an adapted version. In April 1907, Rimsky-Korsakov conducted a pair of concerts in Paris, hosted by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, which featured music of the Russian nationalist school. The concerts were hugely successful in popularizing Russian classical music of this kind in Europe, Rimsky-Korsakov's in particular. The following year, his opera Sadko was produced at the Paris Opéra and The Snow Maiden at the Opéra-Comique. He also had the opportunity to hear more recent music by European composers. He hissed unabashedly when he heard Richard Strauss's opera Salome, and told Diaghilev after hearing Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande, "Don't make me listen to all these horrors or I shall end up liking them!" Hearing these works led him to appreciate his place in the world of classical music. He admitted that he was a "convinced kuchkist" (after kuchka, the shortened Russian term for The Five) and that his works belonged to an era that musical trends had left behind. ### Death Beginning around 1890, Rimsky-Korsakov suffered from angina. While this ailment initially wore him down gradually, the stresses concurrent with the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath greatly accelerated its progress. After December 1907, his illness became severe, and he could not work. In 1908, he died at his Lubensk estate near Luga (modern day Plyussky District of Pskov Oblast), and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg, next to Borodin, Glinka, Mussorgsky and Stasov. ## Compositions Rimsky-Korsakov followed the musical ideals espoused by The Five. He employed Orthodox liturgical themes in the Russian Easter Festival Overture, folk song in Capriccio Espagnol and orientalism in Scheherazade, possibly his best known work. He proved a prolific composer but also a perpetually self-critical one. He revised every orchestral work up to and including his Third Symphony—some, like Antar and Sadko, more than once. These revisions range from minor changes of tempo, phrasing and instrumental detail to wholesale transposition and complete recomposition. Rimsky-Korsakov was open about the influences in his music, telling Vasily Yastrebtsev, "Study Liszt and Balakirev more closely, and you'll see that a great deal in me is not mine". He followed Balakirev in his use of the whole tone scale, treatment of folk songs and musical orientalism and Liszt for harmonic adventurousness. (The violin melody used to portray Scheherazade is very closely related to its counterpart in Balakirev's symphonic poem Tamara, while the Russian Easter Overtures follows the design and plan of Balakirev's Second Overture on Russian Themes.) Nevertheless, while he took Glinka and Liszt as his harmonic models, his use of whole tone and octatonic scales do demonstrate his originality. He developed both these compositional devices for the "fantastic" sections of his operas, which depicted magical or supernatural characters and events. Rimsky-Korsakov maintained an interest in harmonic experiments and continued exploring new idioms throughout his career. He tempered this interest with an abhorrence of excess and kept his tendency to experiment under constant control. The more radical his harmonies became, the more he attempted to control them with strict rules—applying his "musical conscience", as he called it. In this sense, he was both a progressive and a conservative composer. The whole tone and octatonic scales were both considered adventurous in the Western classical tradition, and Rimsky-Korsakov's use of them made his harmonies seem radical. Conversely, his care about how or when in a composition he used these scales made him seem conservative compared with later composers like Igor Stravinsky, though they were often building on Rimsky-Korsakov's work. ### Operas While Rimsky-Korsakov is best known in the West for his orchestral works, his operas are more complex, offering a wider variety of orchestral effects than in his instrumental works and fine vocal writing. Excerpts and suites from them have proved as popular in the West as the purely orchestral works. The best-known of these excerpts is probably "Flight of the Bumblebee" from The Tale of Tsar Saltan, which has often been heard by itself in orchestral programs, and in countless arrangements and transcriptions, most famously in a piano version made by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Other selections familiar to listeners in the West are "Dance of the Tumblers" from The Snow Maiden, "Procession of the Nobles" from Mlada, and "Song of the Indian Guest" (or, less accurately, "Song of India") from Sadko, as well as suites from The Golden Cockerel and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya. The Operas fall into three categories: - Historical drama: The Maid of Pskov, and its prologue The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga, Mozart and Salieri, The Tsar's Bride, Pan Voyevoda, Servilya - Folk operas: May Night, Christmas Eve - Fairy tales and legends: The Snow Maiden, Mlada, Sadko, Kashchey the Deathless, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, and The Golden Cockerel. Of this range, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in 1902, "In every new work of mine I am trying to do something that is new for me. On the one hand, I am pushed on by the thought that in this way, [my music] will retain freshness and interest, but at the same time I am prompted by my pride to think that many facets, devices, moods and styles, if not all, should be within my reach." American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote that the operas "open up a delightful new world, the world of the Russian East, the world of supernaturalism and the exotic, the world of Slavic pantheism and vanished races. Genuine poetry suffuses them, and they are scored with brilliance and resource." According to some critics Rimsky-Korsakov's music in these works lacks dramatic power, a seemingly fatal flaw in an operatic composer. This may have been conscious, as he repeatedly stated in his writing that he felt operas were first and foremost musical works rather than mainly dramatic ones. Ironically, the operas succeed dramatically in most cases by being deliberately non-theatrical. ### Orchestral works The purely orchestral works fall into two categories. The best-known ones in the West, and perhaps the finest in overall quality, are mainly programmatic in nature — in other words, the musical content and how it is handled in the piece is determined by the plot or characters in a story, the action in a painting or events reported through another non-musical source. The second category of works is more academic, such as his First and Third Symphonies and his Sinfonietta. In these, Rimsky-Korsakov still employed folk themes but subjected them to abstract rules of musical composition. Program music came naturally to Rimsky-Korsakov. To him, "even a folk theme has a program of sorts." He composed the majority of his orchestral works in this genre at two periods of his career—at the beginning, with Sadko and Antar (also known as his Second Symphony, Op. 9), and in the 1880s, with Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Overture. Despite the gap between these two periods, the composer's overall approach and the way he used his musical themes remained consistent. Both Antar and Scheherazade use a robust "Russian" theme to portray the male protagonists (the title character in Antar; the sultan in Scheherazade) and a more sinuous "Eastern" theme for the female ones (the peri Gul-Nazar in Antar and the title character in Scheherazade). Where Rimsky-Korsakov changed between these two sets of works was in orchestration. While his pieces were always celebrated for their imaginative use of instrumental forces, the sparser textures of Sadko and Antar pale compared to the luxuriance of the more popular works of the 1880s. While a principle of highlighting "primary hues" of instrumental color remained in place, it was augmented in the later works by a sophisticated cachet of orchestral effects, some gleaned from other composers including Wagner, but many invented by himself. As a result, these works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups. The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion. Rimsky-Korsakov's non-program music, though well-crafted, does not rise to the same level of inspiration as his programmatic works; he needed fantasy to bring out the best in him. The First Symphony follows the outlines of Schumann's Fourth extremely closely, and is slighter in its thematic material than his later compositions. The Third Symphony and Sinfonietta each contain a series of variations on less-than-the-best music that can lead to tedium. ### Smaller-scale works Rimsky-Korsakov composed dozens of art songs, arrangements of folk songs, chamber and piano music. While the piano music is relatively unimportant, many of the art songs possess a delicate beauty. While they yield in overt lyricism to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, otherwise they reserve their place in the standard repertory of Russian singers. Rimsky-Korsakov also wrote a body of choral works, both secular and for Russian Orthodox Church service. The latter include settings of portions of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (despite his own atheism). ## Legacy ### Transitional figure The critic Vladimir Stasov, who along with Balakirev had founded The Five, wrote in 1882, "Beginning with Glinka, all the best Russian musicians have been very skeptical of book learning and have never approached it with the servility and the superstitious reverence with which it is approached to this day in many parts of Europe." This statement was not true for Glinka, who studied Western music theory assiduously with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin before he composed his opera A Life for the Tsar. It was true for Balakirev, who "opposed academicism with tremendous vigor," and it was true initially for Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been imbued by Balakirev and Stasov with the same attitude. One point Stasov omitted purposely, which would have disproved his statement completely, was that at the time he wrote it, Rimsky-Korsakov had been pouring his "book learning" into students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory for over a decade. Beginning with his three years of self-imposed study, Rimsky-Korsakov had drawn closer to Tchaikovsky and further away from the rest of The Five, while the rest of The Five had drawn back from him and Stasov had branded him a "renegade". Richard Taruskin wrote, "The older he became, the greater was the irony with which Rimsky-Korsakov looked back on his kuchkist days." When the young Semyon Kruglikov was considering a future in composition, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the future critic, > About a talent for composition ... I can say nothing as yet. You have tried your powers too little ... Yes, one can study on one's own. Sometimes one needs advice, but one must study ... All of us, that is, I myself and Borodin, and Balakirev, and especially Cui and Mussorgsky, did disdain these things. I consider myself lucky that I bethought myself in time and forced myself to work. As for Balakirev, owing to his insufficient technique he writes little; Borodin, with difficulty; Cui, carelessly; and Mussorgsky, sloppily and often incoherently. Taruskin points out this statement, which Rimsky-Korsakov wrote while Borodin and Mussorgsky were still alive, as proof of his estrangement from the rest of The Five and an indication of the kind of teacher he eventually became. By the time he instructed Liadov and Glazunov, "their training hardly differed from [Tchaikovsky's]. An ideal of the strictest professionalism was instilled in them from the beginning." By the time Borodin died in 1887, the era of autodidactism for Russian composers had effectively ended. Every Russian who aspired to write classical music attended a conservatory and received the same formal education. "There was no more 'Moscow', no 'St. Petersburg'." Taruskin writes; "at last all Russia was one. Moreover, by century's end, the theory and composition faculties of Rubinstein's Conservatory were entirely in the hands of representatives of the New Russian School. Viewed against the background of Stasov's predictions, there could scarcely be any greater irony." ### Students Rimsky-Korsakov taught theory and composition to 250 students over his 35-year tenure at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, "enough to people a whole 'school' of composers". This does not include pupils at the two other schools where he taught, including Glazunov, or those he taught privately at his home, such as Igor Stravinsky. Apart from Glazunov and Stravinsky, students who later found fame included Anatoly Lyadov, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Alexander Spendiaryan, Sergei Prokofiev, Ottorino Respighi, Witold Maliszewski, Mykola Lysenko, Artur Kapp, and Konstanty Gorski. Other students included the music critic and musicologist Alexander Ossovsky, and the composer Lazare Saminsky. Rimsky-Korsakov felt talented students needed little formal dictated instruction. His teaching method included distinct steps: show the students everything needed in harmony and counterpoint; direct them in understanding the forms of composition; give them a year or two of systematic study in the development of technique, exercises in free composition and orchestration; instill a good knowledge of the piano. Once these were properly completed, studies would be over. He carried this attitude into his conservatory classes. Conductor Nikolai Malko remembered that Rimsky-Korsakov began the first class of the term by saying, "I will speak, and you will listen. Then I will speak less, and you will start to work. And finally I will not speak at all, and you will work." Malko added that his class followed exactly this pattern. "Rimsky-Korsakov explained everything so clearly and simply that all we had to do was to do our work well." ### Editing the work of The Five Rimsky-Korsakov's editing of works by The Five is significant. It was a practical extension of the collaborative atmosphere of The Five during the 1860s and 1870s, when they heard each other's compositions in progress and worked on them together, and was an effort to save works that would otherwise either have languished unheard or become lost entirely. This work included the completion of Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor, which Rimsky-Korsakov undertook with the help of Glazunov after Borodin's death, and the orchestration of passages from César Cui's William Ratcliff for its first production in 1869. He also completely orchestrated the opera The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky three times—in 1869–70, 1892 and 1902. While not a member of The Five himself, Dargomyzhsky was closely associated with the group and shared their musical philosophy. Musicologist Francis Maes wrote that while Rimsky-Korsakov's efforts are laudable, they are also controversial. It was generally assumed that with Prince Igor, Rimsky-Korsakov edited and orchestrated the existing fragments of the opera while Glazunov composed and added missing parts, including most of the third act and the overture. This was exactly what Rimsky-Korsakov stated in his memoirs. Both Maes and Richard Taruskin cite an analysis of Borodin's manuscripts by musicologist Pavel Lamm, which showed that Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov discarded nearly 20 percent of Borodin's score. According to Maes, the result is more a collaborative effort by all three composers than a true representation of Borodin's intent. Lamm stated that because of the extremely chaotic state of Borodin's manuscripts, a modern alternative to Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov's edition would be extremely difficult to complete. More debatable, according to Maes, is Rimsky-Korsakov's editing of Mussorgsky's works. After Mussorgsky's death in 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov revised and completed several of Mussorgsky's works for publication and performance, helping to spread Mussorgsky's works throughout Russia and to the West. Maes, in reviewing Mussorgsky's scores, wrote that Rimsky-Korsakov allowed his "musical conscience" to dictate his editing, and he changed or removed what he considered musical over-experimentation or poor form. Because of this, Rimsky-Korsakov has been accused of pedantry in "correcting", among other things, matters of harmony. Rimsky-Korsakov may have foreseen questions over his efforts when he wrote, > If Mussorgsky's compositions are destined to live unfaded for fifty years after their author's death (when all his works will become the property of any and every publisher), such an archeologically accurate edition will always be possible, as the manuscripts went to the Public Library on leaving me. For the present, though, there was need of an edition for performances, for practical artistic purposes, for making his colossal talent known, and not for the mere studying of his personality and artistic sins. Maes stated that time proved Rimsky-Korsakov correct when it came to posterity's re-evaluation of Mussorgsky's work. Mussorgsky's musical style, once considered unpolished, is now admired for its originality. While Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangement of Night on Bald Mountain is still the version generally performed, Rimsky-Korsakov's other revisions, like his version of Boris Godunov, have been replaced by Mussorgsky's original. ## Folklore and pantheism Rimsky-Korsakov may have saved the most personal side of his creativity for his approach to Russian folklore. Folklorism as practiced by Balakirev and the other members of The Five had been based largely on the protyazhnaya dance song. Protyazhnaya literally meant "drawn-out song", or melismatically elaborated lyric song. The characteristics of this song exhibit extreme rhythmic flexibility, an asymmetrical phrase structure and tonal ambiguity. After composing May Night, Rimsky-Korsakov was increasingly drawn to "calendar songs", which were written for specific ritual occasions. The ties to folk culture was what interested him most in folk music, even in his days with The Five; these songs formed a part of rural customs, echoed old Slavic paganism and the pantheistic world of folk rites. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that his interest in these songs was heightened by his study of them while compiling his folk song collections. He wrote that he "was captivated by the poetic side of the cult of sun-worship, and sought its survivals and echoes in both the tunes and the words of the songs. The pictures of the ancient pagan period and spirit loomed before me, as it then seemed, with great clarity, luring me on with the charm of antiquity. These occupations subsequently had a great influence in the direction of my own activity as a composer". Rimsky-Korsakov's interest in pantheism was whetted by the folkloristic studies of Alexander Afanasyev. That author's standard work, The Poetic Outlook on Nature by the Slavs, became Rimsky-Korsakov's pantheistic bible. The composer first applied Afanasyev's ideas in May Night, in which he helped fill out Gogol's story by using folk dances and calendar songs. He went further down this path in The Snow Maiden, where he made extensive use of seasonal calendar songs and khorovodi (ceremonial dances) in the folk tradition. Musicologists and Slavicists have long recognized that Rimsky-Korsakov was an ecumenical artist whose folklore-inspired operas take up such issues as the relationship between paganism and Christianity and the seventeenth-century schism in the Orthodox Church. ## In film - The Soviet 1953 film Rimsky-Korsakov presents the last twenty years of his life. He is played by Grigori Belov. His earlier years with The Five were portrayed by Andrei Popov in the 1950 film from the same studio titled Mussorgsky. ## Publications Rimsky-Korsakov's autobiography and his books on harmony and orchestration have been translated into English and published. Two books he started in 1892 but left unfinished were a comprehensive text on Russian music and a manuscript, now lost, on an unknown subject. - My Musical Life. [Летопись моей музыкальной жизни – literally, Chronicle of My Musical Life.] Trans. from the 5th rev. Russian ed. by Judah A. Joffe; ed. with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. London: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd, 1974. - Practical Manual of Harmony. [Практический учебник гармонии.] First published, in Russian, in 1885. First English edition published by Carl Fischer in 1930, trans. from the 12th Russian ed. by Joseph Achron. Current English ed. by Nicholas Hopkins, New York, New York: C. Fischer, 2005. - Principles of Orchestration. [Основы оркестровки''.] Begun in 1873 and completed posthumously by Maximilian Steinberg in 1912, first published, in Russian, in 1922 ed. by Maximilian Steinberg. English trans. by Edward Agate; New York: Dover Publications, 1964 ("unabridged and corrected republication of the work first published by Edition russe de musique in 1922"). [^1]: Frolova-Walker, New Grove (2001), 8:404; Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, p. 335
54,741,680	The Boat Race 2018	1,148,517,572	2018 boat races between Oxford and Cambridge universities	[ "2018 in British women's sport", "2018 in rowing", "2018 in women's rowing", "2018 sports events in London", "March 2018 sports events in the United Kingdom", "The Boat Race", "Women's Boat Race" ]	The Boat Race 2018 (also known as The Cancer Research UK Boat Race for the purposes of sponsorship) took place on 24 March 2018. Held annually, The Boat Race is a side-by-side rowing race between crews from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge along a 4.2-mile (6.8 km) tidal stretch of the River Thames in south-west London. For the third time in the history of the event, the men's, women's and both reserves' races were all held on the Tideway on the same day. The women's race was the first event of the day, and saw Cambridge lead from the start, eventually winning by a considerable margin to record their second consecutive victory, and taking the overall record in the Women's Boat Race to 43–30 in their favour. The men's race was the final event of the day and completed a whitewash as Cambridge won, their second victory in three years, and taking the overall record to 83–80 in their favour. In the women's reserve race, Cambridge's Blondie defeated Oxford's Osiris by nine lengths, their third consecutive victory. The men's reserve race was won by Cambridge's Goldie who defeated Oxford's Isis by a margin of four lengths. The races were watched by around a quarter of a million spectators live, and were broadcast around the world by a variety of broadcasters. The two main races were also available for the second time as a live stream using YouTube. ## Background The Boat Race is a side-by-side rowing competition between the University of Oxford (sometimes referred to as the "Dark Blues") and the University of Cambridge (sometimes referred to as the "Light Blues"). First held in 1829, the race takes place on the 4.2-mile (6.8 km) Championship Course, between Putney and Mortlake on the River Thames in south-west London. The rivalry is a major point of honour between the two universities; it is followed throughout the United Kingdom and broadcast worldwide. Oxford went into the race as champions, having won the 2017 race by a margin of one and a quarter lengths, with Cambridge leading overall with 82 victories to Oxford's 80 (excluding the 1877 race, officially a dead heat though claimed as a victory by the Oxford crew). It was the third time in the history of The Boat Race that all four senior races – the men's, women's, men's reserves' and women's reserves' – were held on the same day and on the same course along the Tideway. Prior to 2015, the women's race, which first took place in 1927, was usually held at the Henley Boat Races along the 2,000-metre (2,200 yd) course. However, on at least two occasions in the interwar period, the women competed on the Thames between Chiswick and Kew. Cambridge's women went into the race as reigning champions, having won the 2017 race by 11 lengths, and led 42–30 overall. For the sixth year, the men's race was sponsored by BNY Mellon while the women's race had BNY Mellon's subsidiary Newton Investment Management as sponsors. In January 2016, it was announced that the sponsors would be donating the title sponsorship to Cancer Research UK and that the 2016 event onwards would be retitled "The Cancer Research UK Boat Races". There is no monetary award for winning the race, as the journalist Roger Alton notes: "It's the last great amateur event: seven months of pain for no prize money". The autumn reception was held at the Guildhall in London on 10 November 2017. As Cambridge's women had won the previous year's race, it was Oxford's responsibility to offer the traditional challenge to the Cambridge University Women's Boat Club (CUWBC). To that end, Katherine Erickson, President of Oxford University Women's Boat Club (OUWBC), challenged Daphne Martschenko, her Cambridge counterpart. Oxford's victory in the men's race meant that Hugo Ramambason, President of Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC), challenged Iain Mandale, President of Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC). The men's race was umpired by the former Light Blue rower John Garrett who represented Great Britain at the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Summer Olympics. He umpired men's race twice previously, in 2008 and 2012. He rowed for Lady Margaret Boat Club in The Boat Race in 1984 and 1985. The 73rd women's race was umpired by the multiple Olympic gold-medallist Matthew Pinsent. As well as rowing for Oxford in the 1990, 1991 and 1993 races, he was assistant umpire in the 2012 race before umpiring the 2013 race. The women's reserve race was presided over by former Dark Blue, Matt Smith, who rowed for Oxford in the 2001, 2002 and 2003 races. Richard Phelps, who rowed for Cambridge in the 1993, 1994 and 1995 races oversaw the men's reserve race. The event was broadcast live in the United Kingdom on the BBC. Numerous broadcasters worldwide also showed the main races, including SuperSport across Africa and the EBU across Europe. It was also streamed live on BBC Online. For the second time, the men's and women's races were streamed live on YouTube. ## Coaches The Cambridge men's crew coaching team was led by their chief coach Steve Trapmore, a gold medal-winning member of the men's eight at the 2000 Summer Olympics, who was appointed to the post in 2010. He was assisted by Richard Chambers, silver medallist in the men's lightweight coxless four at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Donald Legget, who rowed for the Light Blues in the 1963 and 1964 races acted as a supporting coach, along with coxing coach Henry Fieldman (who steered Cambridge in the 2013 race) and the medical officer Simon Owens. Sean Bowden was chief coach for Oxford, having been responsible for the senior men's crew since 1997, winning 12 from 18 races. He is a former Great Britain Olympic coach and coached the Light Blues in the 1993 and 1994 Boat Races. OUWBC's chief coach was the former OUBC assistant coach Andy Nelder who previously worked with Bowden for eleven years. He was assisted by Jamie Kirkwood. Cambridge's women were coached by former Goldie coach Rob Baker who was assisted by Paddy Ryan. ## Trials Dates for the trials, where crews are able to simulate the race proper on the Championship Course, were announced on 17 November 2017. ### Women Cambridge's women's trial took place on the Championship Course on 5 December, between the Harry Potter-themed boats Expecto Patronum and Wingardium Leviosa. The CUWBC president Daphne Martschenko was unavailable through illness to participate in the race, which was umpired by Matthew Pinsent. Wingardium Leviosa took the early lead but the crews were level by Barn Elms boathouse, before Leviosa pulled half a length ahead by Craven Cottage. Level once again as the crews passed Harrods Furniture Depository, Expecto Patronum made a push at Hammersmith Bridge, handling the rough conditions better than their opponents. With a clear water advantage by Chiswick Eyot, Expecto Patronum passed the finish line two lengths ahead. Oxford's trial race was conducted on 21 January 2018, delayed from December through ill health of the rowers. The race was held in windy and wet conditions on the Tideway between Great Typhoon and Coursing River umpired by Pinsent. Coursing River made the better start from the Surrey station before Great Typhoon drew level, before taking advantage of the curve of the river and pulling ahead. An oar clash followed but a series of pushes from Great Typhoon saw them take the lead and push away under Barnes Bridge, to win by half a length. ### Men Cambridge's men's trial took place on the Championship Course on 5 December, between the boats Goblins and Goons. Goblins, starting from the Surrey station, took an early lead which they held until Goons drew level, and then began to pull away, as the crews passed below Hammersmith Bridge. Goblins responded, restored parity and then took the lead at the Bandstand. Despite each crew making a series of pushes, Goblins held a half-length lead under Barnes Bridge and maintained the advantage to the finish line. The Oxford trial boats were named Strong and Stable, in reference to the Tory manifesto for the 2017 general election. They raced against one another along the Championship Course on 6 December 2017, umpired by John Garrett. Strong, starting from the Middlesex station, took an early lead and held a half-length advantage by the time the crews passed Craven Cottage. Garrett repeatedly warned both crews as they each infringed the racing line, and Strong capitalised on the advantage of the bend to be almost a length ahead. Stable fought back and were nearly level by the time they passed Harrods. Strong reacted to pull half a length ahead by Chiswick Eyot, extending to clear water by the Bandstand, and a final push at Barnes Bridge ensured them a two-length victory. ## Build-up ### Women CUWBC faced a crew from University of London Boat Club (ULBC) in two races on the Tideway umpired by Judith Packer on 17 February 2018. The first segment, from Putney Bridge to Hammersmith Bridge, was an easy victory for the Light Blues, winning by around five lengths. The second segment, from Chiswick Steps to the finish line, saw Cambridge quickly overcome their starting one-length deficit to take a clear water advantage under Barnes Bridge before ending as "clear winners". OUWBC went up against Oxford Brookes University Boat Club (OBUBC) in a two-piece race on the Championship Course on 24 February 2018. Despite a strong start from OBUBC in the first segment, OUWBC held a lead of around a length by Craven Cottage and continued to pull away to a three-length victory at Chiswick Eyot. In the second segment, OUWBC took a slight early lead but OBUBC remained in contention, taking advantage of Middlesex bend, but could not catch the Dark Blues who passed the finish line with a lead of a couple of seats. On 4 March 2018, OUWBC took on a crew from Molesey Boat Club in a race along a section of the Championship Course from the start to Chiswick Steps, umpired by Sarah Winckless. The Dark Blues held a three-seat advantage by the time the crews had passed the boathouses, and despite under-rating Molesey, continued to pull away to hold a clear water advantage and a three-length lead by Hammersmith Bridge which they extended to a five-length lead by Chiswick Steps. ### Men CUBC faced a ULBC crew in a three-piece race along the Tideway umpired by Rob Clegg on 18 February 2018. The first section of the race was strongly contested with clashes in the early stages, with ULBC taking the lead, only for the Light Blues to draw level and then lead past Craven Cottage. The race concluded as Cambridge passed Harrods with a three length lead. The second segment from Harrods to the Bandstand saw Cambridge lead all the way, to win by several lengths. The final section of the race from Chiswick Eyot to the finish line, saw further oar clashes, but Cambridge controlled the situation, winning by more than two lengths. On 4 March 2018, CUBC took part in a two-piece race against OBUBC. The first section, from the start line to Chiswick Steps, was won by one length by CUBC who led from the start. The second race, from Chiswick Eyot to the finishing line, was more robustly contested. CUBC took an early lead in difficult conditions, only to be overhauled by OBUBC who took a lead of a length from Barnes Bridge to the finish. OUBC took on an OBUBC crew in two stages along the Championship Course on 24 February 2018, umpired by John Garrett. OBUBC made the better start in the first section, but OUBC drew level at the Town Buoy. Oxford Brookes started to pull away and held a length's advantage as the crews passed the Mile Post and into the headwind. OUBC coped with the conditions well and were just ahead by Hammersmith Bridge but Oxford Brookes took advantage of the stream to win by a length as the crews passed St Paul's School. The second section of the race saw early clashes from which OBUBC emerged with a length advantage. Although OUBC pushed to close the gap, OBUBC responded and pulled away to win by just over one length. On 3 March 2018, OUBC faced a ULBC crew along a section of the Championship Course from the start line to Chiswick Steps, in a race umpired by Richard Phelps. Starting from the Middlesex station, the Dark Blues took an early lead and held a length's advantage by the time the crews passed Harrods. In an early attempt to claim the racing line, OUBC moved into ULBC's water and both crews were warned by Clegg to return to their station. Despite this, OUBC extended their lead and were several lengths clear by Hammersmith Bridge and were able to take advantage of clear water, winning the race by at least four lengths. ## Crews The official weigh-in for the crews took place at City Hall, London, on 26 February 2018. ### Women The Cambridge crew weighed an average of 73.0 kilograms (160.9 lb), 2.1 kilograms (4.6 lb) per rower more than their opponents. The Light Blues averaged in height, 4 centimetres (1.6 in) more than Oxford. The Dark Blues featured one returning crew member, number four Alice Roberts, who rowed in the unsuccessful 2017 Oxford boat. The Cambridge crew included some experienced Boat Race rowers: Thea Zabell, Imogen Grant, Alice White and Myriam Goudet-Boukhatmi all rowed in the previous year's race. The Light Blues also featured the 2015 World Rowing Championships quad sculls gold medallist Olivia Coffey. ### Men The Cambridge crew weighed an average of 89.8 kilograms (198 lb), 4.2 kilograms (9.3 lb) per rower more than their opponents, and averaged in height, 6 centimetres (2.4 in) taller than Oxford. The Light Blue's number four, James Letten, at , was the tallest individual ever to have competed in The Boat Race. One member of the Oxford crew has previous Boat Race experience: stroke Vassilis Ragoussis featured in the successful 2017 Dark Blue boat. On 20 March 2018, it was announced that as a result of illness, number six Joshua Bugajski would withdraw from the race and be replaced by Isis rower Benedict Aldous. It was later revealed that Bugajski's departure was also related to disagreements with the Dark Blue coach Sean Bowden. Claas Mertens, the Oxford bow man, won gold at the 2015 World Rowing Championships with the German lightweight men's eight. Cambridge's crew contains four individuals who have featured in the Boat Race: Hugo Ramambason, Freddie Davidson and Letten participated in 2017, while Charles Fisher rowed in the 2016 race. ## Pre-race Two days before the race, both the Blues boats and the reserve boats practised their starts from the stakeboats on the Championship Course. On the same day, two BBC television cameras located on Putney Bridge and Barnes Bridge were targeted by thieves; their attempts at Putney were thwarted by an off-duty policeman and a Royal National Lifeboat Institution crew, but the gang escaped with one of the cameras on Barnes Bridge. Cambridge were pre-race favourites to win both the men's and women's senior races. The Queen's barge Gloriana led a procession of traditional craft along the course. These included the waterman's cutters used for the Oxbridge Waterman's Challenge. ## Races The races were held on 24 March 2018. Weather was overcast with light winds. ### Reserves Blondie won the women's reserve boat race which was held after the conclusion of the Women's Boat Race by nine lengths in a time of 19 minutes 45 seconds. Already six seconds ahead at the Mile Post, Blondie continued to pull away to be twelve seconds ahead by Hammersmith Bridge before passing the finishing post in 19 minutes 45 seconds, 27 seconds ahead of Osiris. It was Blondie's third consecutive victory, and took the overall tally (since 1968) to 24–20 in Cambridge's favour. Goldie won the men's reserve race, which was held after the women's reserve race and before the men's race. Five seconds ahead at the Mile Post, the Light Blue reserves were warned after a clash of oars, and Isis reduced the gap to three seconds by Hammersmith Bridge. Goldie were clear of Isis by Barnes Bridge with a seven-second lead, and maintained that advantage as they crossed the finish line in a time of 18 minutes 12 seconds. It was Goldie's first victory since 2010 and took the overall tally in the event to 30–24 in their favour. ### Women's The women's race started at 4:31 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). CUWBC won the toss and elected to start from the Surrey side of the river, handing the Middlesex side to Oxford. Cambridge made the better start taking an early lead and were around a half of a length ahead after the first minute of the race. By Craven Cottage, and in spite of Oxford having the advantage of the bend in the river, the Light Blues were ahead by a length. At the Mile Post, Cambridge held a clear water advantage, two lengths ahead. The Light Blues passed under Hammersmith Bridge with a three-length lead. At Chiswick Steps, Oxford were fifteen seconds behind, and a further five down at Barnes Bridge. Cambridge passed the finishing post in a time of 19 minutes 6 seconds, around seven lengths ahead of Oxford. It was Cambridge's second consecutive victory but only their third win in eleven years, and took the overall record in the event to 43–30 in their favour. ### Men's The men's race started at 5.33 pm. GMT in very "gloomy conditions". The Light Blues won the toss and elected to start from the Surrey side of the river. Oxford made the better start and were quickly a canvas ahead, but Cambridge restored parity within 40 seconds, going on to take a third of a length lead themselves. Cambridge received several warnings from the umpire John Garrett for encroaching into Oxford's water, forcing them to move back towards their station, but were still over a length ahead by Craven Cottage. The Light Blues passed the Mile Post five seconds ahead, and shot Hammersmith Bridge with a lead of four lengths. They maintained their lead of 12 seconds as they passed Chiswick Steps. The Dark Blues reduced the Cambridge lead to eleven seconds by Barnes Bridge, but Cambridge passed the finishing line in 17 minutes 51 seconds, three lengths ahead of Oxford. It was Cambridge's second victory in the last three years, and took the overall record in the event to 83–80 in their favour. ## Reactions CUWBC's cox Sophie Shapter said "We just knew we had to go out there and do a job" while OUWBC's president Katherine Erickson explained that she was proud of her crew, many of whom had learnt to row at Oxford. James Letten remarked that his Cambridge crew were "on the money" and had "stepped up and delivered". In CUBC's Steve Trapmore's final Boat Race before moving to Team GB Olympic Rowing as a high performance coach, he admitted that "the boys really stepped up and delivered". As the men's senior crews passed below Hammersmith Bridge, a banner was unfurled by the Cambridge Zero Carbon Society and smoke flares were let off, to protest against investment in fossil fuel companies by the two universities. Although the banner was not clear to viewers during the live race coverage on the BBC, commentator Andrew Cotter remarked "flares at the boat race, whatever next?"
15,449,396	D-Day naval deceptions	1,121,779,185	Operations Taxable, Glimmer and Big Drum were tactical military deceptions conducted on 6 June 1944	[ "Naval operations and battles", "Operation Bodyguard", "Operation Overlord", "World War II aerial operations and battles of the Western European Theatre", "World War II deception operations" ]	Operations Taxable, Glimmer and Big Drum were tactical military deceptions conducted on 6 June 1944 in support of the Allied landings in Normandy. The operations formed the naval component of Operation Bodyguard, a wider series of tactical and strategic deceptions surrounding the invasion. Small boats, along with aircraft from RAF Bomber Command, simulated invasion fleets approaching Cap d'Antifer, Pas-de-Calais and Normandy. Glimmer and Taxable played on the German belief, amplified by Allied deception efforts over the preceding months, that the main invasion force would land in the Calais region. Big Drum was positioned on the western flank of the real invasion force to try to confuse German forces about the scale of the landings. These operations complemented Operation Titanic, which was intended to confuse the Germans about the D-Day airborne forces. It is unclear whether the operations were successful, due to the complexity of their execution, poor weather, and lack of response from German forces. It is possible that they contributed to the overall confusion of D-Day as part of the wider Bodyguard plan. ## Background Glimmer, Taxable and Big Drum were World War II deception operations. They were conducted as part of Operation Bodyguard, a broad strategic military deception intended to support the Allied invasion of German-occupied France in June 1944. Bodyguard was designed to confuse the Axis high command as to Allied intentions during the lead-up to the invasion. The London Controlling Section (LCS) had spent some time convincing German commanders that the fictional First United States Army Group (FUSAG) represented the bulk of the Allied invasion force. FUSAG's existence was fabricated through Operation Fortitude South. The Allied story for FUSAG was that the army group, based in south-east England, would invade the Pas-de-Calais region several weeks after a smaller diversionary landing in Normandy. In reality, the main invasion force would land in Normandy on D-Day. As D-Day approached, the LCS moved on to planning tactical deceptions to help cover the progress of the real invasion forces. As well as naval operations, the LCS also planned operations involving paratroopers and ground deceptions. The latter would come into effect once landings were made but the former (involving naval, air and special forces units) were used to cover the approach of the true invasion fleet. In preparation for the coming landings, Allied scientists had worked on techniques for obscuring the size and disposition of an invasion force. The German defences relied on the Seetakt radar system. Scientists from the Telecommunications Research Establishment discovered that the resolution of the Seetakt was about 520 yards (480 m). To deceive the radar system they proposed dropping clouds of aluminium foil (chaff, then code-named Window) at two mile intervals. The clouds would appear as a continuous blip, similar to one created by an approaching fleet, on German screens. The Allies also repurposed radio equipment, code named Moonshine, to jam the Seetakt signal. Allied command decided that, rather than mask the approaching fleet, these measures would serve to alert German defences. So it was decided to combine these techniques with small groups of boats to simulate an entire invasion fleet aimed at the Calais region. Allied planners proposed that small boats, towing large radar reflecting balloons (code named Filbert) and carrying both Moonshine jamming and standard wireless equipment (for transmitting fake traffic), would advance toward the French coast under a cloud of Window. The chaff and other countermeasures would hide the small size of the naval force while wireless traffic would play on the FUSAG story to mislead the Germans into expecting a major landing. A third deceptive force, Operation Big Drum, would use radar countermeasures on the western flank of the true invasion fleet. This operation was intended to lend confusion as to the extent of the landings in Normandy. ## Glimmer and Taxable Glimmer and Taxable were very similar operations. They were executed in the early hours of 6 June 1944 while the invasion fleet was approaching Normandy. Taxable simulated an invasion force approaching Cap d'Antifer (about 80 km from the actual D-Day landings) and Glimmer spoofed an invasion at Pas-de-Calais (far from Normandy). By dropping chaff in progressive patterns, Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers for both operations were able to create the illusion of a large fleet on coastal radar screens. Beneath the chaff, small boats towed radar reflector balloons and simulated the radio traffic expected of a large fleet. Once German forces were drawn to the coast, it was planned that the RAF would attempt to contain them in this region, and away from the actual invasion site, by bombing bridges and roads. The operations required precise flying in elongated circuits with replacement aircraft having to merge in seamlessly to avoid tell-tale gaps. The bombers were staged at 2-mile (3.2 km) intervals parallel to the French coast. Once in position they would spend two and a half minutes flying toward the coast, dropping chaff at fifteen-second intervals. Then the aircraft would turn and head away from the coast for two minutes and ten seconds. By repeating this circuit, the wide cloud of chaff edged toward the coast just like a real sea-borne fleet. The aircraft had to be modified by cutting a hole in the nose to allow the large quantities of chaff to be dropped. The larger of the two operations, Taxable, was carried out by 18 small boats, a mix of Harbour Defence Motor Launches (HDML) and RAF Pinnaces, designated Special Task Force A. Chaff was dropped by Lancaster bombers from the No. 617 "Dam Busters" Squadron. Each aircraft carried an expanded crew of up to 14. The squadron began training for the operation on 7 May, but were not aware of their final target. Task Force A left port in the evening of 5 June, but struggled in bad seas which affected their equipment and ability to converge at their meeting point. By 00:37 on 6 June the lead boats were on schedule and had reached the muster point. Between 02:00 and 04:00 the ships operated radar and radio equipment as they headed toward a point 7 miles (11 km) offshore. From there the task force simulated a landing attempt; by running fast to within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the beach before returning to the 7-mile marker under cover of smoke. During this time only a small German response was observed including searchlights and intermittent gunfire. Shortly after 05:00 the operation ended and the task force laid mines before heading toward Newhaven, reaching port by midday. The air operations for Glimmer were conducted by No. 218 "Gold Coast" Squadron under Wing Commander R. M. Fenwick-Wilson. The squadron flew six Short Stirling bombers on the operation, with two additional airborne reserve aircraft. Each aircraft carried two pilots who rotated flying duties. The naval contingent, Special Task Force B under the command of Lieutenant Commander W. M. Rankin, consisted of 12 HDMLs equipped with jamming gear, radios and radar-reflecting balloons. The task force began jamming operations at approximately 01:00 followed by radio chatter around an hour later. Glimmer elicited more response from German forces than Taxable including reconnaissance planes sent to investigate the "fleet". After completing their assignment (which, unlike Taxable, did not include laying mines) the ships returned to port, reaching their berths by 13:00 on D-Day. ## Big Drum Big Drum was similar to the other D-Day naval deceptions, but without an airborne component. Task Force C consisted of four HDMLs, whose job was to operate as a distraction on the western flank of the invasion. The plan originally called for the task force, which was attached to Force U (the westernmost convoy of the invasion fleet), to operate radar jamming equipment as it approached the French coast, holding 2 miles (3.2 km) off shore until first light. After the Germans failed to respond, the ships moved to within 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of the coast. No response, either in the air or on the shore, was observed, and the convoy returned safely to Newhaven. ## Impact Taxable, Glimmer and Big Drum were complicated in execution, requiring coordination of air and naval forces. Launched in poor weather conditions, Taxable did not appear to have the desired effect and failed to elicit any significant response from the Germans. The reaction to Glimmer was more encouraging. The attacks on the bomber squadrons indicated, at least to the satisfaction of RAF Bomber Command, that the Germans believed a genuine threat existed. There is no evidence that Big Drum elicited any specific response from the shore. According to historian Mary Barbier, the adverse conditions and complexity of the operations contributed to the limited enemy response. From intelligence intercepts it appears that German forces in the Pas de Calais region reported an invasion fleet. In addition, there are reports of the decoys being fired on by shore batteries in that area. In an 11 June report on the operations, Lieutenant Commander Ian Cox (who was in charge of deception units) indicated that German forces had been convinced by the fake radio traffic. Intercepted dispatches from Hiroshi Ōshima, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, made reference to the naval deceptions. An 8 June dispatch referred to the Calais region and stated "an enemy squadron that had been operating there has now withdrawn". Although disappointed not to have seen any action during the night of D-Day, and still unsure of their actual impact, the bomber crews felt proud of the operations. Squadron Leader Les Munro of No. 617 Squadron wrote, "I have always considered the operation in one sense to be the most important the squadron carried out in my time – not because [of] bad weather, nor because of any threat of enemy action and not measured by any visible results, but because of the very exacting requirements to which we had to fly and navigate".
38,270,197	Boeing C-17 Globemaster III in Australian service	1,076,845,934	History of the C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft used by Australia	[ "Aircraft in Royal Australian Air Force service", "Boeing military aircraft" ]	The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) operates eight Boeing C-17 Globemaster III large transport aircraft. Four C-17s were ordered in mid-2006 to improve the ability of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to operate outside Australia and its region. The aircraft entered service between November 2006 and January 2008, the second pair being delivered ahead of schedule. Two more Globemasters were ordered in 2011, the sixth being delivered to the RAAF in November 2012. Another two C-17s were ordered in October 2014, with the final aircraft being delivered in November 2015. The Globemasters are built to the same specifications as those operated by the United States Air Force (USAF), and the Australian aircraft are maintained through an international contract with Boeing. All of the RAAF's Globemasters are assigned to No. 36 Squadron and are based at RAAF Base Amberley in Queensland. The aircraft have supported ADF operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and other locations in the Middle East, as well as training exercises in Australia and the United States. They have also transported supplies and personnel as part of relief efforts following natural disasters in Australia, Japan, New Zealand and several other countries. The C-17s are highly regarded throughout the Australian military for their ability to carry large amounts of cargo across long distances, and the process through which they were acquired has been identified as an example of good practice in defence procurement. ## Acquisition ### Selection The RAAF began considering options for heavy transport aircraft to provide a strategic airlift capability during the early 2000s. This investigation was initiated after the ADF deployment to East Timor in 1999 and operations in the Middle East from 2001 revealed shortcomings in the RAAF's ability to transport the increasingly large and heavy vehicles and other items of equipment used by the Australian Army. To support these operations, the ADF found that it needed long-range aircraft capable of carrying larger loads than could be accommodated in the RAAF's force of Lockheed C-130 Hercules transports. As a result of this capability gap, the ADF needed to use USAF transports and chartered Russian-built commercial heavy lift aircraft to move supplies and equipment from Australia to its forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East. This experience proved frustrating, as both categories of aircraft were often not available and the commercial transports were expensive to lease. The crash of a civil-chartered Ilyushin Il-76 in East Timor in 2003 also raised concerns within the ADF about the safety of the Russian transport aircraft. Following advocacy from the military, the Australian Government announced as part of an update to its national security strategy in December 2005 that it would consider acquiring heavy lift aircraft to supplement the RAAF's Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules transports. This initiative was one of several measures announced in the government's Defence Update 2005 paper, which sought to better prepare the ADF to operate in locations distant from Australia. In early 2006 a project office was established within the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) to evaluate the options for acquiring heavy lift aircraft. The office considered the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, which was in service with the USAF at the time, as well as the Airbus A400M Atlas, which was yet to make its first flight. Boeing aggressively marketed the C-17 to the Australian Government during this period. Though unstated, commonality with the USAF and the United Kingdom's RAF was also considered advantageous. In March 2006, Minister for Defence Brendan Nelson announced that the government had decided to purchase three C-17s and take out an option for a fourth. Nelson also announced that the C-17s would be operated by No. 36 Squadron RAAF, which was to transfer its C-130H Hercules to No. 37 Squadron and relocate from RAAF Base Richmond in New South Wales to RAAF Base Amberley in Queensland. Amberley was selected over Richmond as the base for the Globemasters as its runways and engineering facilities were better able to support large aircraft. The government exercised the option to purchase a fourth C-17 between the time this announcement was made and the signing of the final contract on 31 July 2006. The total cost of the four aircraft was \$A821 million, and Boeing also received an A\$85 million contract to allow Australia to join the "virtual fleet" global C-17 sustainment program. Additional funding was allocated to build headquarters and maintenance facilities at Amberley as well as to upgrade the air movements facilities at RAAF Bases Darwin, Edinburgh, Townsville, and Pearce. The package of funding needed to purchase and introduce the Globemasters into service was provided as a supplement to the government's long-term defence funding program, so the ADF did not have to forgo any other planned capabilities. The C-17s were acquired through the United States Government's Foreign Military Sales program, meaning that they were first delivered to the USAF and then transferred to the RAAF. The USAF provided some of the C-17 delivery "slots" it had purchased to the RAAF to enable the type to rapidly enter Australian service, making them identical to American C-17 even in paint scheme, the only difference being the national markings. This allowed delivery to commence within nine months of commitment to the program. ### Delivery and sustainment The RAAF received its first four C-17s between late 2006 and early 2008. The initial aircraft, which was allocated the serial number A41-206, was completed in October 2006 and arrived in Australia on 4 December that year. A welcome ceremony attended by Prime Minister John Howard, Nelson and other dignitaries was held at Defence Establishment Fairbairn in Canberra. The second aircraft, A41-207, was delivered on 11 May 2007. A41-208 was handed over to the RAAF on 18 December 2007, and A41-209 was accepted on 18 January 2008. The first two aircraft were delivered in accordance with the expected schedule, and the third and fourth were each delivered two months early. The RAAF also acquired a C-17 flight simulator, which entered service in January 2010. In the 2012–2013 edition of its annual Major Projects Report, the Australian National Audit Office judged that a lesson for the Australian Government from the successful procurement of the first four Globemasters was that purchasing major equipment on an "off-the-shelf" basis allows "considerable acceleration of the standard acquisition cycle". Similarly, Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Mark Thomson wrote in 2008 that "the breakneck speed with which the C-17 acquisition was executed (and the good outcomes of the acquisition) provides an example of what can be achieved" through off-the-shelf purchasing, and that such projects generally deliver better outcomes for the ADF than attempts to develop equipment tailored to Australia's needs. The Australian Government ordered a further two C-17s during 2011 and 2012. In February 2011 Minister for Defence Stephen Smith announced that another C-17 would be purchased for a cost of \$A130 million. This aircraft was ordered to prevent a shortfall of airlift capacity while the original four C-17s underwent scheduled heavy maintenance. The decision to purchase this aircraft also supplanted an earlier plan to acquire two more C-130Js. As the deadline for A41-206 to be temporarily taken out of service for maintenance was rapidly approaching, the USAF agreed to transfer a C-17 airframe that was nearing completion to the RAAF. This aircraft was delivered on 14 September 2011 and arrived in Australia nine days later. At the ceremony held to welcome A41-210, Smith announced that the government intended to order another C-17. The \$A160 million contract for this aircraft was signed in March 2012, and it was delivered to the RAAF on 1 November that year. Funding for these two aircraft was obtained through a combination of supplements to the Defence budget and reallocating unspent funds from ADF projects running behind schedule. Owing to budget constraints and the scheduled closure of Boeing's Globemaster production line in 2015, it was considered unlikely in 2012 that the RAAF would acquire more Globemasters. However, in August 2014 Minister for Defence David Johnston stated that the Government was likely to purchase a further one or two C-17s. The Government announced that it would purchase two Globemasters in October 2014, and requested information on the pricing and availability for a further pair of aircraft. In November 2014 Australia lodged a formal request with the United States Defense Security Cooperation Agency for four C-17s and associated equipment, for a total cost of \$A1.85 billion. An order for the RAAF's seventh and eighth Globemasters was formally announced by Prime Minister Tony Abbott on 10 April 2015. The first of the new C-17s arrived in Australia on 29 July 2015, and the second on 4 November that year. These two aircraft were among the last C-17s to have been built before the production line was closed, and it is not expected that the RAAF will acquire more Globemasters. It was reported in December 2014 that the New Zealand Government was considering purchasing between two and four Globemasters, and Australian Aviation journalist Andrew McLaughlin suggested that any such acquisition would build on Australia's C-17 support infrastructure. The New Zealand Government ultimately decided to not purchase any Globemasters. Maintenance of the Australian Globemasters is undertaken by both the RAAF and Boeing. As part of Australia's membership of the Globemaster III Sustainment Partnership, Air Force technicians are responsible for routine servicing, and Boeing handles major maintenance tasks. Boeing also provides technical support for RAAF Globemasters during deployments outside of Australia, and the company is paid in return for achieving contractually mandated aircraft availability targets. Due to the economies of scale arising from a large international maintenance program, the contract with Boeing is considered to be cheaper than attempting to support the aircraft through unique Australian contracts. It is expected that the RAAF's Globemasters will remain in service for 30 years. The ADF and defence commentators have judged that the Globemaster acquisition has significantly increased the RAAF's airlift capabilities. The aircraft have a maximum range of 10,389 kilometres (6,455 mi) and are capable of operating from short and unsealed airstrips. Each Globemaster can carry up to 77,519 kilograms (170,900 lb) of cargo, and the large size of the aircraft means that it can accommodate outsize items. Maximum loads include 102 passengers, 36 personnel on stretchers, an M1 Abrams tank, three Eurocopter Tiger helicopters or five Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles. These are much larger loads than can be transported by the Air Force's C-130 Hercules transports, and the RAAF website states that each C-17 can carry three times as much cargo as a C-130. Flown with a joystick and fly-by-wire controls, the C-17 is also highly manoeuvrable and responsive considering its size. Ian McPhedran, the defence correspondent for News Corp Australia, judged that the C-17s have "changed the game" for the RAAF by allowing the force to rapidly transport large amounts of cargo into combat zones. According to aviation journalist Nigel Pittaway, the Globemaster's capabilities have made it a highly regarded asset throughout the Australian Defence Organisation. ## Operational service ### Training and combat operations Ahead of the delivery of Australia's first C-17s, RAAF personnel received training on the aircraft in the United States. From May 2006 a group of pilots and loadmasters led by Wing Commander Linda Corbould, the commanding officer designate of No. 36 Squadron, undertook conversion training with the USAF's C-17 units at Altus Air Force Base and Charleston Air Force Base. A group of 48 technical personnel also received training at Charleston and McChord Air Force Base from September that year. No. 36 Squadron began a period of intensive training once Corbould delivered A41-206 to Amberley on 7 December 2006, and the unit achieved initial operating capability status in September 2007. Also in 2007, the RAAF's No. 1 Air Operations Support Squadron was expanded by 80 personnel to provide air load teams to support the Globemasters. A project to acquire the equipment needed to allow the RAAF's C-17s to be used in the aeromedical evacuation role and develop associated crew procedures began in late 2007. The first Globemaster aeromedical evacuation sortie was flown on 5 September 2008, the day after the type was certified to operate in this role. On 8 December 2008, Corbould led the RAAF's first all-female aircrew during a training flight over South East Queensland to mark the second anniversary of the entry of the Globemaster into service; the squadron did not have another all-female aircrew until 2020. A team of USAF trainers was posted to Amberley until the RAAF had sufficient C-17 pilots who were qualified to instruct others. The RAAF began training new C-17 pilots in early 2010 after the flight simulator was delivered, and the first Australian-trained pilots graduated in early May that year. No. 36 Squadron achieved final operating capability status in December 2011. The components for a simulated C-17 cargo compartment were delivered to Amberley in early 2013, and this facility was commissioned in November that year. The simulator is used to train air movements and medical staff as well as to develop and trial new cargo carrying techniques for the C-17s. The first Australian-trained Globemaster loadmasters graduated in mid-2014. The final element of C-17 aircrew training to be routinely conducted in the United States was the course to qualify co-pilots as aircraft captains. This course was relocated to Australia in mid-2017. The RAAF's Globemasters have supported Australian military deployments worldwide. The Air Mobility Control Centre manages the tasking of the Globemasters, and tries to allocate them to missions for which they are the most cost-effective option. As of September 2008, No. 36 Squadron was conducting fortnightly flights to transport supplies from Australia to bases in the Middle East; at this time the supplies were moved into the combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan using C-130 transports. Direct C-17 flights into the major Australian base at Tarin Kot in Afghanistan began in July 2009. As No. 36 Squadron's structure does not enable it to permanently station Globemasters in the Middle East, the usual practice has been for one of the types to carry a load of cargo from Australia and then conduct missions in the region for several days before returning to Amberley. In a speech delivered in early 2013, Smith stated that during the previous year the Globemasters had supported operations in the Middle East by flying "60 missions, about 330 hours of flight time, during which the C-17As moved 190 vehicles, 1,800 passengers and over 3,600 tonnes of cargo and conducted 20 aeromedical evacuations". In late 2013 a detachment of two Globemasters, three aircrews and many other personnel from No. 36 Squadron was established at Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. This detachment was the first time that Australian C-17s had been deployed away from Amberley for more than two weeks and was established to transport ADF equipment out of Afghanistan as part of the reduction of the Australian force in the country. Overall, around 100 Globemaster sorties were conducted to fly equipment out of Tarin Kot between November 2012 and the end of 2013. All Australian C-17s that fly into Afghanistan are fitted with a Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures system for protection against missiles. In December 2013 one of the Globemasters which was deployed to the Middle East was, along with a RAAF Hercules, tasked with flying peacekeepers into South Sudan to reinforce the United Nations force there following an outbreak of fighting. This airlift was completed in mid-January, by which time the Australian C-17 had made eight flights into South Sudan from Brindisi in Italy and Djibouti. During September and December 2014, RAAF Globemasters flew five sorties into Iraq to deliver weapons and ammunition destined for Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Following the deployment of Australian fighter aircraft in late 2014 to attack ISIL forces as part of Operation Okra, C-17s also conducted regular flights from Australia to the Middle East carrying munitions and specialised equipment. Two Australian Globemasters took part in the August 2021 Kabul airlift. These aircraft, operating alongside RAAF Hercules, contributed to the international efforts to transport Afghans out of the city after its capture by the Taliban. In March 2022 RAAF C-17s transported military equipment destined for Ukraine to Rzeszow in Poland in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. C-17s have also supported ADF training. In this role they have moved helicopters and other equipment between Australian bases, and supported training deployments to the United States. In April 2010, members of the Australian Army's No. 176 (Air Dispatch) Squadron became the first paratroopers to jump from a non-American Globemaster; the type was first used to support training by the Army's Parachute Training School in June that year. A C-17 transported an Army M1 Abrams tank for the first time during a training exercise conducted on 11 May 2012. To mark the arrival of the RAAF's final Globemaster, four of the aircraft flew over Brisbane together on 22 November 2012. Each of the C-17s involved in the flight carried a different type of cargo to showcase the type's capabilities; A41-211 was configured for aeromedical evacuation tasks, another C-17 embarked an Abrams tank, one carried two Tiger helicopters and the fourth was loaded with several Bushmasters. Despite the wide range of tasks which have been assigned to the aircraft, the RAAF is currently not operating its Globemasters in all the roles of which the type is capable. For instance, in February 2013 the Air Force was reported to be investigating using C-17s to drop special forces boats as well as supplies to warships. Trials to develop the capacity to refuel RAAF Globemasters in flight from the force's Airbus KC-30A Multi Role Tanker Transports began in May 2016. ### Humanitarian tasks In addition to their military tasks, the C-17s have formed part of the Australian Government's response to natural disasters. In November 2007 a C-17 delivered 27 tonnes of supplies to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea following heavy flooding caused by Cyclone Guba. At the conclusion of the ADF response to this disaster, another C-17 mission was conducted to return Army Sikorsky S-70A-9 Black Hawks to their base at Townsville. During May 2008 a C-17 flew 31 tonnes of emergency equipment from Australia to Yangon in Burma following Cyclone Nargis. Later in the month a RAAF Globemaster transported two Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma helicopters from South Africa to Thailand, from where the helicopters flew into Burma. On 1 October 2009, C-17s transported supplies and ADF evacuation teams from RAAF Base Richmond to Samoa following the earthquake there. Two days later another C-17 sortie delivered medical personnel and other specialists to Padang in Indonesia after the Sumatra earthquakes. In August 2010, two C-17s were dispatched to deliver emergency supplies to Pakistan following widespread flooding there. No. 36 Squadron was particularly active during 2011. In January that year the squadron had to evacuate two C-17s from Amberley to Richmond when the base was threatened by rising floodwaters during the Queensland floods; of the other two Globemasters, one was in the Middle East and the other was undergoing maintenance and could not be flown. The aircraft stranded at Amberley was moved onto high ground during the crisis at the base and escaped without damage. The two Richmond-based C-17s subsequently flew over 227 tonnes of supplies to flood-affected regions of Queensland. When flooding also took place in Victoria during January, No. 36 Squadron transported 100,000 sandbags to Melbourne and flew Royal Australian Navy personnel and vehicles into the state from HMAS Albatross in New South Wales. No. 36 Squadron returned to Amberley after the flood waters dropped in mid-February. In early February the north Queensland city of Cairns was threatened by Cyclone Yasi, and the RAAF conducted two C-17 sorties and two C-130 sorties to evacuate patients from Cairns Base Hospital on the night of 1/2 February. After the cyclone passed over the Queensland coast, C-17s flew 200 tonnes of groceries into Cairns over a two-day period as part of Operation Yasi Assist. No. 36 Squadron also contributed aircraft to the Australian response to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in late February, the C-17s flying urban search and rescue teams into the city from the 23rd of the month and evacuating Australian citizens on their return flights. Three Australian C-17s were deployed to Japan as part of Operation Pacific Assist following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March. The first aircraft departed Australia two days after the disaster carrying 75 emergency response personnel, most of whom were members of Fire and Rescue NSW. After delivering the personnel to Yokota Air Base, the C-17 remained in Japan to provide additional airlift to the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). In this role, the C-17 moved elements of the Japanese 15th Brigade from Okinawa to Honshu, and also transported supplies from a JSDF base in Hokkaido. On 21/22 March, two other C-17s (including one temporarily brought back from the Middle East) flew a large water cannon system from RAAF Base Pearce in Western Australia to Yokota; owned by the Bechtel corporation, the water cannon formed part of the efforts to bring the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant under control. With the arrival of these aircraft, all three of the available Australian C-17s were in Japan (the fourth was still undergoing maintenance at Amberley). The RAAF maintained a C-17, two flight crews and support personnel in Japan until 25 March. By the end of this deployment the Australian aircraft had conducted 31 sorties and delivered 450 tonnes of cargo. No. 36 Squadron maintained a C-17 in the Middle East over most of this period. Also in March 2011, Smith stated that the Australian Government would probably provide C-17s to transport humanitarian supplies to Libya if the United Nations requested assistance. The RAAF's C-17s responded to several other natural disasters between late 2011 and 2013. In October 2011 a Globemaster flew a water purification plant to Samoa, from where it was transported by Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft to Tuvalu. C-17s also transported supplies to Fiji and Samoa in December 2012 following Cyclone Evan. In January 2013 two Globemasters flew power generators and transformers from Amberley to Hobart following the Tasmanian bushfires. Later that month C-17s were used to transport aviation fuel and other supplies into the Queensland town of Bundaberg after it was affected by heavy flooding. In November 2013 a Globemaster flew a civilian medical team and its equipment from Australia to Cebu in the Philippines as part of the relief effort following Typhoon Haiyan; an RAAF C-130 subsequently transported the medical team from Cebu to Tacloban in the disaster zone. In July 2014, two Globemasters, several aircrews and maintenance personnel were deployed to Eindhoven Air Base in the Netherlands as part of the response to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Ukraine. In conjunction with Royal Netherlands Air Force C-130s, the two aircraft ferried international police officers and their equipment between the Netherlands and Kharkiv in the Ukraine. They also flew the bodies of victims of the incident to the Netherlands. A third C-17 flew aircrew and equipment from Australia to the Netherlands. This deployment was completed on 20 August 2014. The first flight by an RAAF C-17 to Antarctica was conducted in November 2015. The aircraft transported supplies for the Australian Antarctic Division from Hobart to Wilkins Runway, and its crew practised evacuating casualties from Wilkins after the cargo was unloaded. This flight was reported to have been the first time the RAAF had flown missions to the Australian Antarctic Territory since the Antarctic Flight was withdrawn in 1963. Since 2016 Globemasters have made up to six flights to Antarctica each southern summer to support the Australian Antarctic Division. A trial winter airdrop was conducted at Casey Station in June 2016. In September 2017 air-to-air refuelling was used to enable a Globemaster to drop supplies at Davis Station.
2,403,543	Ōkami	1,172,125,419	2006 video game	[ "2006 video games", "Action-adventure games", "BAFTA winners (video games)", "Capcom franchises", "Capcom games", "Clover Studio games", "Fantasy video games", "HexaDrive games", "Nintendo Switch games", "PlayStation 2 games", "PlayStation 3 games", "PlayStation 4 games", "PlayStation Move-compatible games", "PlayStation Network games", "Ready at Dawn games", "Single-player video games", "Video games about demons", "Video games about time travel", "Video games about wolves", "Video games based on Japanese mythology", "Video games developed in Japan", "Video games developed in the United States", "Video games directed by Hideki Kamiya", "Video games featuring female protagonists", "Video games scored by Akari Kaida", "Video games set in feudal Japan", "Video games with cel-shaded animation", "Wii games", "Windows games", "Xbox One games", "Ōkami" ]	Ōkami (Japanese: 大神, lit. "great god" or "great spirit"; also 狼, "wolf") is an action-adventure video game developed by Clover Studio and published by Capcom. It was released for PlayStation 2 in 2006 in Japan and North America, and in 2007 in Europe and Australia. After the closure of Clover Studio a few months after the release, a port for Wii was developed by Ready at Dawn, Tose, and Capcom, and released in 2008. Set in classical Japan, Ōkami combines Japanese mythology and folklore to tell the story of how the land was saved from darkness by the Shinto sun goddess, named Amaterasu, who took the form of a white wolf. It features a sumi-e-inspired cel-shaded visual style and the Celestial Brush, a gesture-system to perform miracles. The game was planned to use more traditional realistic rendering, but this had put a strain on the graphics processing of the PlayStation 2. Clover Studio switched to a cel-shaded style to reduce the processing, which led to the Celestial Brush concept. The gameplay is modeled on The Legend of Zelda, one of director Hideki Kamiya's favorite series. The game's name is a pun, as "ōkami" can mean either "great god" (大神) or "wolf" (狼) in Japanese. Ōkami was one of the last PlayStation 2 games released prior to the release of the PlayStation 3. Although it suffered from poor sales, the game received critical acclaim, earning IGN's 2006 Game of the Year. The Wii version earned similar praise, though the motion control scheme received mixed reviews. A high-definition port, remastered by Capcom and HexaDrive, was released on the PlayStation 3 via the PlayStation Network in October 2012 and for retail in Japan in November, supporting the use of the PlayStation Move motion controller. The port was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in December 2017 worldwide, for the Nintendo Switch in August 2018, and for Amazon Luna in April 2022. Mainstream adoption of the game has improved with the release of these remasters, and Ōkami is considered to be one of the best video games ever made, as well as an example of video games as an art form, aided by the improved art details and graphics resolutions. A spiritual successor on the Nintendo DS, Ōkamiden, was released in Japan in September 2010, followed by North America and Europe in March 2011. ## Gameplay The player controls the main character, Amaterasu, in a woodcut, watercolor style, cel-shaded environment, which looks like an animated Japanese ink-illustration (known as ink wash painting, or sumi-e) and ukiyo-e, along with other styles of art. The gameplay style is a mix of action, platform, and puzzle gaming genres, and has been noted by many reviewers to have numerous similarities in overall gameplay style to The Legend of Zelda series, an inspiration that director Hideki Kamiya, a self-proclaimed Zelda fan, has admitted has influenced his general game design. The main story is primarily linear, directed by Amaterasu's guide Issun, though numerous side quests and optional activities allow for players to explore the game world and take the story at their own pace. By completing quests, side quests, and small additional activities (such as making trees bloom into life or feeding wild animals), Amaterasu earns Praise, which can then be spent to increase various statistics of the character, such as the amount of health and number of ink wells for Celestial Brush techniques. Combat is staged in a ghostly virtual arena, and Amaterasu can fight enemies using a combination of weapons, fighting techniques and Brush methods to dispatch the foes. At the end of combat, money (as yen) is rewarded to Amaterasu, with bonuses for completing a battle quickly and without taking damage. The money can be spent at merchants and dojos across the land, featuring healing goods, better weapons, tools, key items for completing quests, and combat techniques. Rare Demon Fangs can be earned through combat which can be traded for unique items that are beneficial in gameplay but not required to complete the game. Weapons inspired by the Imperial Regalia of Japan (the Reflector, the Rosaries, and the Glaive) can be equipped on Amaterasu as either main or sub-weapons (one each), and used in addition to other melee attacks that the player can have Amaterasu learn through the course of the game. ### Celestial Brush A game mechanic unique to Ōkami is the Celestial Brush. Players can bring the game to a pause and call up a canvas, where the player can draw onto the screen, either using the left analog stick on the DualShock controller, or pointing with the Wii Remote, Joy-Con, touchscreen, or PlayStation Move controller in subsequent ports. This feature is used in combat, puzzles, and as general gameplay. For example, the player can create strong wind by drawing a loop, cut enemies by drawing a line through them, or fix bridges by painting on the broken one. These techniques are learned through the course of the game by completing constellations to release the Celestial Brush gods (inspired by the Chinese zodiac) from their hiding spots. It is possible to upgrade or modify certain Brush powers later in the game; for example, the Celestial Brush power "Inferno" can gain a new power called "Fireburst", which has a different drawing pattern, and allows players to create flames without relying on torches or other related items. The player's ink for drawing is limited by the amount available in special ink wells, preventing the player from solely using Brush techniques to defeat enemies; ink is restored in the wells over time when the Brush is not used. ## Plot Most character names below are the shortened names of the U.S. version. ### Characters The player controls Ōkami Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun, in the form of a white wolf. Amaterasu is referred to in the Japanese and European version of the game as a female, while in the North American version she is genderless although she is referred as the "mother of all". When endowed with ink power, Amaterasu is seen by the player with red markings, cloud-like fur on her shoulders, and weapons on her back. Most of the human characters in the game only see her as a plain white wolf; some believe Amaterasu to be the reincarnation of Shiranui (the white wolf that fought Orochi 100 years prior to the game's present), and do not recognize her spiritual nature. If the player depletes power by overuse of the Celestial Brush, Amaterasu will temporarily revert to this mundane white form. Issun, an arrogant, inch-tall "wandering artist" seeking out the thirteen Celestial Brush techniques for himself, accompanies Amaterasu (whom he calls "Ammy" or "furball"). He serves as a guide, dialogue proxy, and as comic relief. He grows in character along with Ammy throughout the game, becoming her true friend, inspiration, and eventually her savior. At the end of the game, Amaterasu encounters Yami, the main antagonist and final boss of the game who resembles a small fish inside a huge sphere, whose design is altered through the different stages of the battle. Yami is also the ruler of the demons. Before battle, he drains Amaterasu of her powers and leaves her as a plain white wolf. Amaterasu regains her powers throughout the fight, but, after the fourth round, Yami destroys them all again and leaves Amaterasu in a near-dead state. However, when Issun gets everyone to believe in Amaterasu before the fifth and final round, she changes into her most powerful form and battles Yami, vanquishing him forever. In the final battle, Yami has a huge clawed hand, which demonstrates the evil which comes from humans' hands. The word "Yami" means "darkness" in Japanese. Two other characters reappear several times within the quest. Waka appears to Amaterasu several times in the game as a beautiful young flute-playing man in costume resembling a tengu (dressed like a yamabushi). He is aware of the goddess's true identity, foretells her future, and at times battles with her. He leads the Tao Troopers whose members Abe and Kamo are based on the two famous onmyōji Abe no Seimei and Kamo no Yasunori. Waka's dialogue, dropping French affectionate terms at times, conveys a sense of familiarity with Amaterasu, as it turns out that Waka is much older than he appears and has walked with Amaterasu on the Celestial Plain hundreds of years ago. The other is Orochi, the eight-headed demon and a major villain within the game which the player will encounter several times. Orochi repeatedly has threatened Kamiki village, demanding a sacrifice of a young woman. Each of its eight heads is infused with a different elemental magic power, but the entire demon is susceptible to a special brew of sake available only at Kamiki Village, allowing Amaterasu to defeat it while in its stupor. Amaterasu trusts Queen Himiko, the ruler of "Sei-an City", who is killed by one of the demons. Throughout the game, the player encounters several other characters that are inspired from Japanese folklore. ### Story The game is set in Nippon (Japan) and it is based on Japanese folklore, beginning one hundred years in the past. A narrator describes how the white wolf Shiranui and swordsman Nagi fought and sealed the eight-headed demon Orochi at the cave, to save Kamiki Village and Nagi's beloved maiden Nami. In the game's present, Nagi's descendant and self-proclaimed greatest warrior, Susano, refuses to believe in Nagi's legend and frees Orochi, who escapes and curses the lands, sapping the life from Nippon. Sakuya, the wood sprite and guardian of Kamiki Village, summons the long-dormant Amaterasu in the form of a reincarnated Shiranui, and asks her to remove the curse that covers the land. Accompanied by the artist Issun (an inch-high creature known as a Poncle), Amaterasu begins to restore the lands to normal state. Throughout their journey, Amaterasu and Issun encounter Waka, a handsome and strange but powerful individual who seems to have the gift of foresight, and further teases them to his own mysterious ends. Additionally, Amaterasu locates several Celestial Gods hidden in constellations, who bestow upon her their powers of the Celestial Brush to aid in her quest. After regaining some of her power and reviving the land, Amaterasu and a changed Susano defeat Orochi to save Kushi. Orochi's spirit floats northward, leading Amaterasu and Issun embark on a journey across Nippon to follow it. They first arrive at Ryoshima Coast and Sei-an City, the capital of Nippon; there, they work with the beautiful priestess Rao, the legendary submarine Dragon Kingdom, and the reclusive Queen Himiko to rid the coastline and city of Orochi's remaining influence, which includes stopping a demonic plague and retrieving a mystical weapon from a sunken trading ship. However, it is revealed that the real Rao was killed before Amaterasu arrived, and the Rao they had accompanied was the demonic fox god Ninetails, who kills Himiko and returns to her fortress on the elusive Oni Island. Amaterasu and Issun defeat Ninetails, noticing that her spirit, like Orochi's, travels to the icy northern island of Kamui. The two decide to travel northward to find the source of the demons. In Kamui, Amaterasu assists the Oina tribe to defeat two recently revived demons, Lechku and Nechku, who were creating a deadly blizzard that threatened to destroy the island. In addition to this, Amaterasu discovers that Issun ran away from his home of Ponc'tan to escape his responsibility of being a Celestial Envoy—a messenger of the gods—and his grandfather; additionally, the duo learn that Shiranui was in fact Amaterasu in a previous incarnation, who sacrificed herself to kill Orochi with the help of Issun's grandfather. After defeating Lechku and Nechku, Amaterasu discovers the wreckage of a flying ship made of iron: the "Ark of Yamato", trapped in the frozen plains of Kamui. Waka appears and reveals himself to be a member of the Moon Tribe, a long-living race who used the Ark to sail the stars. They helped the Celestials—minor and major gods—escape from the Celestial Plain after Orochi invaded, but the demons snuck onto the Ark beforehand, allowing them to kill the rest of the Celestials before the Ark fell to earth, releasing the demons upon the mortal world. Amaterasu boards the Ark alone, defeating the spirits of the felled demons onboard. Amaterasu finds Waka in battle with Yami, the machine-esque leader of the demons who led the genocide of the gods ages ago; Waka is knocked unconscious and Amaterasu takes his place. After a long battle, Yami drains her power and nearly destroys the Celestial Gods. Before it can do so, Issun accepts his role as a Celestial Envoy, and encourages all those they have helped to send their thoughts and prayers to Amaterasu, who regains her powers and defeats Yami, ridding Nippon of all demons. Amaterasu and Waka take control on the Ark and sail back to the Celestial Plain, determined to rebuild the land of the gods. ## Development Ōkami resulted from the combined ideas of Clover Studio. The game was originally built around "depict[ing] a lot of nature", but had no central concept or theme, according to lead designer Hideki Kamiya. Kamiya created a minute-long demonstration movie showing a wolf running about a forest, with flowers blossoming in its wake, but still lacking any gameplay. Kamiya and other members of the team introduced ideas around the nature aspect and eventually led to the game's initial prototype, which Kamiya admitted was "incredibly boring to play". Kamiya suggested that he allowed so many ideas from the team that resulted in the development moving off-target, including creating more of a simulation. Eventually, they settled onto the gameplay found in the final product. The art in Ōkami is highly inspired by Japanese watercolor and wood carving art of the Ukiyo-e style, such as the work of Hokusai. Ōkami was originally planned to be rendered in a more photorealistic 3D style, but Clover Studio determined that the more colorful sumi-e style allowed them to better convey Amaterasu's association with nature and the task of restoring it. The change was influenced by limitations in the PS2 hardware to render the photorealistic 3D graphics. As a result of the switch to the watercolor style, the idea of the Celestial Brush came about. Atsushi Inaba, CEO of Clover, noted that "once we fixed ourselves on a graphical style and got down to the brushwork, we thought 'Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow get the player involved and participate in this artwork instead of just watching it?' That's how the idea of the Celestial Brush was born". Original concepts for enemies included the use of dinosaurs, but the designs settled onto more demonic characters. Amaterasu's initial designs were aimed to avoid having the character look like "your pet wearing clothing". The developers had considered having Amaterasu metamorphose into a dolphin when in the water and a falcon when jumping off a cliff, but dropped these ideas. Sakuya, designed around a peach motif, was envisioned with what were called "level 2" and "level 3" designs where the character would wear less clothing as the story progressed, but the "level 3" appearance, effectively naked, was vetoed by Inaba. Waka's character was aimed to be a Tatsunoko-like character, with the hood designed to be reminiscent of those worn by the Gatchaman. Orochi in Japanese mythology is a gigantic creature, so lead character designer Sawaki Takeyasu designed the back of the demon to include a garden and palace; this inspired the game designers to include a bell in those structures that would be Orochi's fatal weakness in the game. The localization team had to translate 1500 pages of text to make sure it made sense in a "native check", because of lack of plurals in the Japanese language and the large number of characters and conditional conversations that the player could interact with. The team recognized that certain elements of the game would not be recognized by Western audiences, but left enough text and details to allow the players to look up the information for themselves. Only one puzzle in the game had to be changed as it required knowledge of the steps in drawing a kanji character which would be readily known for Japanese audiences; for the Western release, these steps were demonstrated in the game. The team noted that personalities of characters could be easily conveyed in Japanese text simply by the way sentences were constructed or slurred, a feature that could not directly be applied to localization. Instead, working with Kamiya, the team scripted the localization to either recreate the personality to match the Japanese version, or to create a whole new set of mannerisms for the characters as appropriate. Ōkami was shown at the 2005 E3 Convention, approximately 30% complete, with a planned release in 2006. At this point, the game had much of the core gameplay, including the Celestial Brush and the combat system in place. The game was released a year later, with its release in Japan on 20 April 2006, North America on 19 September 2006, in Europe on 9 February 2007, and in Australia on 14 February. However, just a few weeks following its release in North America to strong critical reception, Capcom announced the closure of Clover Studio. The Ōkami: Official Complete Works art book was published by Udon in May 2008. The game was re-released under Sony's "Greatest Hits" in Japan in August 2008. ### Naming and allusions The title of the game is a pun; the word ōkami (狼) in Japanese means "wolf". The kanji characters (大神), pronounced identically, mean "great deity", so the main character is a great wolf deity. Although pronounced differently, the same characters (大神) are used in the honorific name of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu (天照大神, Amaterasu-ōmikami). The localization team opted to use shorter versions of Japanese names (for example, a boy named "Mushikai" was localized as "Mushi") instead of replacing the names with Western-style ones. Issun's informal name for Amaterasu in the Western translation, "Ammy", was inspired by Kamiya, and is similar in tone with the Japanese informal name, "Ammako". Throughout the game, Ōkami includes several references (in visual effects, animation, or dialogue) to other Capcom games such as Viewtiful Joe, which Clover Studio also developed. For example, Mrs. Orange's technique for making cherry cake parodies Street Fighter's Akuma's Shun Goku Satsu, complete with a kanji word displayed on screen with her back-facing the screen. There are in-jokes regarding the Clover staff. For example, a non-player character aptly named "Animal Lover" lost his rabbit named "Inaba", the last name of the head producer Atsushi Inaba. To further convey the joke, Inaba the rabbit can be seen falling out of a tree directly underneath Atsushi Inaba's name during the closing credits. ### Audio The music in Ōkami was inspired by classical Japanese works. The final song, played over the credit sequence, "Reset", is sung by Ayaka Hirahara. In May 2006, Capcom released a 5-disc soundtrack for Ōkami in Japan. In the North American and European release, the player can unlock a jukebox to hear the in-game music upon completion of the game. Ōkami won the best score award at the 2007 BAFTA Video Games Awards. Suleputer has published another album, a piano arrangement, Ōkami Piano Arrange. It was released on 30 March 2007. Mika Matsura both arranged the 10 songs, and performed it on the piano. With the release of Ōkami HD for the Nintendo Switch, Data Disc prepared a vinyl four-disc compilation of over 60 of the game's musical tracks for release in October 2018. The characters' speech in the game is created by scrambling samples of voice actors' speech, with more emotional lines being created from voice work given in that emotion. ### Wii port The gameplay function of "drawing" or "painting" strokes on the screen led several journalists and gamers alike to believe that Ōkami would be well-suited for the Nintendo DS or Wii, both of which feature controls capable of creating drawing motions freely. After the game's release, industry rumors of the game being ported to either console persisted, though Atsushi Inaba of Clover Studio said that Ōkami's action-based gameplay would not translate well to the console and Capcom stated that there were "no plans for Ōkami on Wii". However, at the 2007 UK Gamers Day, Capcom announced that Ready at Dawn would oversee porting and development of a Wii version of Ōkami originally scheduled for release in March 2008 but subsequently pushed back to April. Christian Svensson, Capcom's Vice-President of Strategic Planning and Business Development, stated that Capcom had received numerous requests from fans for the development of the Wii version, and that the ported game "specifically exists because of that direct communication, especially those we receive on our message boards (even if they're sometimes mean to us)". Ready at Dawn president Didier Malenfant said that, aside from the control scheme, the Wii version will be "an exact port of the PS2 version". The lack of enhancements for the game caused several complaints from gamers, which Svensson addressed, stating this: > ...we're getting the game up and running first. The game is enormous. If after we have every thing working correctly, cleanly and as desired so as not to "break" the amazing experience that is Ōkami, we will worry about potential enhancements. As we are NOT at that point in the process yet, we are loathe [sic] to even mention any potential changes or enhancements for fear of disappointing the fans/media. Svensson reported that the original game assets given to them from Capcom Japan were incomplete, and even after requesting old hard drives and computers to recover more assets, Ready at Dawn was still required to recreate some from scratch. Furthermore, the game had to be recoded to change optimizations that were made for the PlayStation 2 version; Svensson stated that "part of the reason we didn't show it until we started showing it was because, if we showed it in a form that was anything less than near-perfect, people were going to freak out". Ready at Dawn's creative director Ru Weerasuriya later reflected that porting Ōkami to the Wii was a challenging task—"we started with no assets and literally reverse-engineered the whole thing back onto the Wii"—they did out of love for the game, but the level of effort would preclude them from attempting such a port again. In November 2007, Svensson said that the engine had been ported to the Wii, writing that "there are still several systems getting set up properly but there's most definitely a Wii-driven Amaterasu running around Wii-rendered environments as we speak". He confirmed that unlike in the PlayStation 2 version, all of the text will be skipable. A listing posted at Capcom's website for the game in February 2008 revealed that the Wii version would support 480p and widescreen output, and IGN confirmed that the motion sensing of the Wii Remote would be used to perform the Celestial Brush features within the game. IGN's hands-on cited small changes to the game such as additional motion-sensing controls using both the Wii Remote and Nunchuck attachment, and the ability to skip cutscenes, but reported no other changes in content of the game. Svennson noted that Capcom would not use television advertising for Ōkami on the Wii, but would use online marketing, including art contests and a new website with "all sorts of things for fans to use to make stuff". This site was made live on 3 April 2008, featuring wallpapers, character artwork, and fan-created art for the game. Svennson further noted that "if [Ōkami for the Wii] did the numbers that we did on the PS2, I'd be very happy. This doesn't need to be a mainstream success for this to be a success for the company". A paper parchment filter applied to all on-screen elements that is readily apparent in the PlayStation 2 version is in the Wii version, but the effect is much less significant. To help with drawing with the Celestial Brush, two different buttons on the Wii controllers have brush functionality; one button provides free-form strokes, and the other draws a straight line from the starting point. Following a delay, the Wii port of Ōkami was released in North America on 15 April 2008, Australia on 12 June, Europe on 13 June, and Japan on 15 October 2009. The final credits that is in the PlayStation 2 version of the game was removed from the Wii version, much to Kamiya's regret as it removed the omoi, "a combination of thoughts, emotions, and messages": "[The staff roll was] the omoi of everyone who worked on the project, put together in a moment of bliss held out just for those who completed the journey. It was a special staff roll for a special moment. And now it is gone. All of it. ...It's incredibly disappointing and sad". A Capcom representative stated that the credits, a pre-rendered movie, had the Clover Studio logo within it, and they had "no legal right to use the Clover logo in a game they were not involved with directly". Since they lacked the source to the credits, they opted to remove them entirely from the game. Ready at Dawn's co-founder Didier Malenfant claimed that the Wii version of Ōkami took up much more space on the game media than the PlayStation 2 version, and that the movie was cut in order to fit everything on a single game disc. The credit sequence was restored in the Japanese release of the Wii version and revealed that the port was co-developed by Tose, having provided additional planners, designers, programmers, and test players. The images from the credits, although not the credits themselves, are still available as unlockable art. Players have discovered that the cover of the North American Wii version of Ōkami includes a watermark from IGN, and traced the source to an image taken from IGN's site. To make up for the error, Capcom offered for a limited time to replace the cover with one of three high-resolution covers free of charge to users in North America. Because of delays in fulfilling the offer, Capcom shipped copies of all three covers to those that registered. The company has since discontinued the offer, but has made the cover images available worldwide in high-quality PDF files for users to download and print themselves. The European PAL version of the cover has no such error. ### High-definition remaster In 2012, Capcom unveiled a high-definition remastering of the game, Ōkami HD (Ōkami Zekkei-ban; roughly translated, Ōkami Magnificent Version), to be released worldwide for PlayStation 3 on 30 and 31 October the same year; a retail product was released in Japan, while the game is available for download through the PlayStation Network in Europe and North America only. The remastered edition supports the PlayStation Move peripheral, and Trophy support has been added. While the remastered edition restored the ending credits sequence of the original PS2 release, the Clover Studio logo was removed and the ending song, "Reset", was replaced on non-Japanese copies by an instrumental remix of the Ryoshima Coast background music. The remastering was done between Capcom and HexaDrive, who had previously worked on the high-definition remastering of Rez. Capcom later released Ōkami HD for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on 12 December 2017 worldwide, built off the PS3 remaster. This version was developed by Buzz Co., Ltd. and Vingt et un Systems Corporation. The Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One versions include both digital and retail editions, and the Xbox One version was released as a download in Japan. This version supports 4K resolutions, though locked at a 30 frames-per-second framerate, and includes an optional widescreen presentation alongside the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original game. The high-definition remaster was released for the Nintendo Switch on 9 August 2018. This version uses the Switch's touchscreen controls for some features including the Celestial Brush, and supports the Joy-Con's motion controls. The Nintendo Switch port has both a standard physical retail and a limited edition release exclusive to Japan, whilst the game is an eShop-exclusive in other regions. A version of the game was released exclusively in the United States for Amazon Luna on 20 April 2022. ### Sequels Sales of Ōkami were considered somewhat poor for justifying a sequel; in July 2009, in response to users' questions on the possibility of a sequel, Svensson stated that "I think we need a lot more people buying the current version before we seriously consider a sequel". After the appearance of a Japanese trademark by Capcom on the word "Ōkamiden" a few months before the Wii version of Ōkami in Japan, many speculated that a sequel was pending. The September 2009 issue of Famitsu announced that Ōkamiden was indeed a sequel to Ōkami for the Nintendo DS, to be released by Capcom in Japan in 2010, though without the input of the Clover staff. Producer Motohide Eshiro later clarified in an interview that the game is considered a spiritual-successor, rather than a full sequel, to Ōkami. The game takes place nine months after the end of Ōkami, with the player in control of Chibiterasu, a wolf cub with the same powers as Amaterasu, but not yet at his full potential, and features the same style of gameplay, including the Celestial Brush using the DS's touchscreen controls. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016 during an interview with Metro, Kamiya, now at PlatinumGames, said that he had ideas for Ōkami 2 and Bayonetta 3, though did not confirm if either game was in active development. In October 2019, following on financially successful releases of Resident Evil and Monster Hunter games, Capcom indicated that it was looking to revive some of its "dormant" properties. Shortly after this announcement, Kamiya, along with Ikumi Nakamura, who had worked on Ōkami, stated on Twitter that "Ōkami is going to be back". In an interview in June 2020, she stated that she planned to approach Capcom about an Ōkami sequel, with the only insistence she planned to fight for was to make sure Kamiya took the leading role in the development. ## Reception ### Reviews Ōkami received critical acclaim, with a score of 93/100 on Metacritic. GameSpot gave it a 9 out of 10 and selected it as an Editor's Choice, citing that its "visual design instantly stands out, but it turns out to be just one of many inspired aspects of this impressive action adventure game". IGN gave the game a 9.1 out of 10, as being "beautiful, charismatic, engaging and one of the most original games you'll play anytime soon". Electronic Gaming Monthly's three reviewers gave it a 9, 9.5, and 9 out of 10, with one saying: "I'll be surprised if you can find a better game on any system this fall". Newtype USA named Ōkami its Game of the Month for October 2006, heralded the pacing as "nearly flawless" and proclaimed "Ōkami is that rarest of beasts: a game without any obvious flaws. Clover's creativity and attention to detail are on full display here. Shame on any gamer who passes up this divine adventure". Eurogamer scored the game 10/10 saying: "Right from the start it conjures an atmosphere of being something special, but to keep that level of quality up consistently over 60 hours ensures that this will be a game that will be talked about for years to come". In 2007, Ōkami was named eighteenth best PlayStation 2 game of all time in IGN's feature reflecting on the PlayStation 2's long lifespan. Famitsu gave the game a near perfect score of 39 out of 40, the 15th game to date to receive this score from the publication. Conversely, the game was noted to have some flaws. The game was criticized for its uneven difficulty. Reviewers have noted some difficulty in getting the game to recognize the correct Celestial Brush patterns, as well as excessive amounts of dialog, particularly at the introduction, which was hampered by the use of computer-generated voices instead of voice acting. The Wii version of Ōkami has received generally similar praise to the PlayStation 2 version, with GameSpot stating that the support for widescreen and the Wii controls "make it even more relevant today than it was in 2006". The use of the Wii Remote for the Celestial Brush was well received; in GameSpot's review, they noted that the Wii functionality with the Brush "improves the pace of the game". Other aspects to the controls were found to be weaker, particularly in combat. In their review, Nintendo Power recommended the PlayStation 2 version of the game over the Wii, stating that "though you can overcome the drawing and attacking issues with practice (and by sticking to whip-style weapons), it's a hurdle you shouldn't have to leap". The Wii version was given the Game of the Month award from IGN for April 2008. It was a nominee for multiple awards from IGN in its 2008 video game awards, including Best Artistic Design and Best Use of the Wii-Mote. In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked the game 33rd in a list of greatest Nintendo games. The high-definition release on the PlayStation 3 was praised for being the "definitive" version of the game, with the rendering in 1080p helping to make the graphics style of the game stand out. Cam Shae of IGN did express some disappointment that the PlayStation 3 version does not attempt to address the "pop up" of far-off objects due to draw distance, a limitation of the PlayStation 2 version. Oli Welsh of Eurogamer considered that the game remains as relevant as it was when it was first released in 2006, being one of the few video games of the Zelda style. The release of Ōkami HD for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2017 was critically praised, establishing that the decade-old game still remained relevant. Julie Muncy for Wired said that while the game is somewhat long for a single-player experience, the game is "an underrated masterpiece, the kind of beautiful work that's critically acclaimed but forgotten all too quickly". Chris Schilling for PC Gamer also acknowledged that the game could be "languid to the point of lethargy" at times, but that Ōkami remained a "gorgeous and unforgettable adventure". Katherine Byrne for Rock Paper Shotgun similarly said that some aspects of the game were plodding, but the game still remains beautiful with the improved graphics support, and that using a computer mouse for the Celestial Brush powers helps to make the game feel "reborn", giving the player more options to consider in combat. Polygon's Jeff Ramos considered this release the best example of a remaster, praising how well the game's art style and detail are rendered at the higher 4k resolutions. ### Awards Ōkami's initial showing at the 2005 E3 Convention garnered severals awards and recognition, including 1UP's "Best PS2 Game", "Best Game of Show" (second place), and "Best Action Game" (third place); IGN's "Best PS2 Game of Show", and runner-up for "Best of Show" and "Most Innovative Design"; and X-Play's "Most Original Game". GameSpy recognized it as the fifth best game showing for the convention. Upon release, Ōkami appeared as the "Game of the Month" for IGN, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Game Informer. IGN, Edge Magazine and Game Revolution rated it as the best overall game of 2006, while GameTrailers and PSM named it best PS2 game for 2006. IGN further awarded the game the "Best Overall" and "PS2 Adventure Game", the "Best Overall" and "PS2 Artistic Design", the "Overall" and "PS2 Most Innovative Design", and the "Best Overall Story". GameSpot awarded the game for the "Best Artistic Graphics" for 2006. IGN named Ōkami 90th game of all time as of 2017. In 2010, GamePro ranked it as the fifth best game for the PlayStation 2. A 2023 poll conducted by GQ among a team of video game journalists across the industry listed Okami as the 94th best video game of all time. Ōkami has won awards outside the mainstream gaming press. The game earned the "Best Character Design" and only one of three Innovation Awards at the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards. Ōkami won the Grand Prize in the Entertainment Division of the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival. On 13 August 2007, it was also awarded the best "Animation in a Game Engine", "Art Direction in a Game Engine", "Outstanding Original Adventure Game", and "Game of the Year" in the 2006 awards by the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAViGaTR). Ōkami was given an "Award for Excellence" from the Japanese Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association (CESA) at the Japan Game Awards 2007 and was later given 2009 CESA Developers Conference (CEDEC) award for "Visual Arts". The game was awarded the "Best Anthropomorphic Video Game" in the 2006 Ursa Major awards. It also won the 2007 BAFTA awards for "Artistic Achievement" and "Original Score". Ōkami also received Outstanding Platform Action/Adventure Game nominations At the 11th Satellite Awards. The HD version was nominated for "Game, Classic Revival" at the 17th Annual NAViGaTR Awards. ### Sales More than 200,000 copies of Ōkami were sold in North America in 2006, grossing approximately US\$8 million and ranking as the 100th best selling game of the year in the region. By March 2007, the total sales of the PlayStation 2 version were near 270,000. By comparison, 66,000 copies were sold in Japan for 2006. Though it was initially thought that poor sales of Ōkami and God Hand (another Clover game released in the same time frame) were the cause of the closure of Clover Studio, it was later revealed that three key developers within Capcom and Clover Studio, Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil series), Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry series), and Inaba, had left the company, and the studio was dissolved, such that "now all the resources should be used more effectively and more efficiently since they are centralized". The trio formed the video game development company "Seeds Inc", later merging with a company called "ODD" to become "PlatinumGames". On 30 July 2008, Capcom revealed that approximately 280,000 copies of the Wii version of Ōkami had been sold in North America and Europe since its release date. The Wii version debuted in Japan with a modest 24,000 copies sold in its first week in the region. It was recognized as the sixth-bestselling game in Japan on 23 October 2009. Total sales for the game remained under 600,000 total units by March 2009, and was named the "least commercially successful winner of a game of the year award" in the 2010 version of the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition. Subsequently, in 2018, the game was awarded the Guinness World Record for "Most critically acclaimed video game starring an animal character". Ōkami HD on PlayStation 4 yielded 16,536 unit sales within its first week on sale in Japan, placing it at number 18 on the all format sales chart. As of December 31, 2022, Ōkami HD has sold 2 million units on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, while the PC and PlayStation 3 versions had sold 1.065 million units as of 2020, for a combined 3.065 million units sold by December 2022. The Ōkami series has sold 3.8 million units worldwide, as of September 30, 2022. ### Legacy Ben Mattes, producer for the 2008 Prince of Persia video game, cited Ōkami, Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus as influences on the gameplay and artwork for the game. Capcom's Street Fighter IV is stated to have character designs influenced by Ōkami with hand-drawn images and brushstroke-like effects. The Disney video game, Epic Mickey, uses similar drawing aspects as Ōkami, allowing the player to draw and modify parts of levels to proceed. The final boss, Yami, appears as the main antagonist and final boss in the crossover fighting game, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars. Amaterasu appears as a playable character in Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Teppen. After Clover's dissolution and most of its staff's subsequent reformation as PlatinumGames, one of their next games, Bayonetta, contains several references to Ōkami; the most notable of these is when Bayonetta transforms into a panther and, like Amaterasu, a trail of flowers and plant life follows her. For the 2010 San Diego Comic Con, Capcom raffled a limited run of T-shirts designed by Gerald de Jesus and iam8bit that placed Amaterasu, Shiranui, and Chibiterasu (from Ōkamiden) into a homage to the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. In 2009, GamesRadar included Ōkami among the games "with untapped franchise potential", commenting: "Seriously, if Nintendo can make the same Zelda game every few years, then why can't Capcom release Ōkami 2?". In 2015, Amaterasu was featured in Archie Comics' Worlds Unite crossover between its Sonic the Hedgehog comic lines and Mega Man series. An Ōkami costume was included in Monster Hunter Generations. Capcom submitted and got approval to publish an Amaterasu "courier" for Dota 2 just prior to the December 2017 release of Ōkami HD on Steam, with players that had pre-ordered or purchased Ōkami HD within the release period receiving the courier for free. ## See also - List of commercial failures in video gaming
61,239,286	Order of Brothelyngham	1,168,936,228	Fake religious order from 1348	[ "1348 establishments in England", "Anti-clericalism", "History of Exeter" ]	The Order of Brothelyngham was a group of men who, in the mid-14th century, formed themselves into a fake religious order in the city of Exeter, Devon. They may well have been satirising the church, which was commonly perceived as corrupt. Tales of priests and nuns not living according to their religious vows were widespread. The group appears to have named itself after a non-existent place, "Brothelyngham". Such a name would have suggested chaos, wretchedness or some similar context to contemporaries, rather than its modern connotation with a brothel. The men of this fake order dressed as monks, and supposedly elected a madman to rule them as their abbot, possibly from a theatrical stage or throne. The Brothelynghamite Order caused much trouble in Exeter, regularly emerging from their base—which may have been some form of medieval theatre, or other area of public entertainment—and terrorising the citizens. Bearing their "Abbot" aloft before them, on a mockery of a cathedra, they kidnapped locals whom they held for ransom. They also practised extortion. It is possible that, notwithstanding these activities, they saw themselves as theatrical players rather than criminals. The Bishop of Exeter, John Grandisson, in nearby Chudleigh, issued instructions to his agents to investigate and if they deemed it necessary, to condemn and excommunicate the Order, although the end result remains unknown. The bishop clearly expected to find evidence of disobedience and debauchery. As one of the few such gangs known to modern historians, the Order of Brothelyngham is considered historiographically significant for what it suggests of anticlerical activities and attitudes in England during the period. The name is generally considered a play on the Order of Sempringham, which was the target of contemporary gossip and rumour on account of its policy of enclosing both monks and nuns on the same premises. ## Background ### Socio-religious The Church had waged a campaign against theatrical ludi—or popular games—ever since Pope Innocent III's condemnation of "ludi theatrales" in 1207. There he described them as encouraging ludibria, insania, debacctiationes obscoenas ("games, madness [and] obscene debauchery"). The Church was by far the most common target for popular satire; the historian Martha Bayless has calculated that 90 per cent of popular theatrical parodies attacked the Church somehow. The Order of Brothelyngham is considered by historians to have been a pseudo-religious order created in Exeter in 1348 also to satirise the clergy. It was treated by both locals and the establishment with antipathy, even though it appears to have begun life non-violently. Such sociétés joyeuses, or "fool societies", while relatively common in France, were rarer in England, argues the scholar E. K. Chambers, and that of Brothelyngham is one of the few known to modern historians. The medievalist, G. G. Coulton, has noted that "medieval buffoons often parodied ecclesiastical titles". A similar example to the Order is the boy bishop, whereby a young man—"in a deliberate challenge to the social order"—was dressed in the robes of a bishop and gave quasi-ecclesiastic sermons, on various feast days such as the Feasts of Fools and of Asses. Feast days such as these were specifically intended to mock the church—in the case of the Feast of Fools, over a period of four days—both by its practices and rituals and its hierarchy, and by doing so, celebrate the disfranchised. Ecclesiastical parodies were favoured for their societies (such as the Abbey of Cokaygne) which overturned—albeit temporarily—social norms. They were an early expression of what became known later, in France, as Sociétés Joyeuses. They were also known as "abbeys of misrule"—particularly, comments the historian Katja Gvozdeva, with their emphasis on popular "carnivalesque rituals". The comparison between the Church representing officialdom, and the carnivalesque representing the streets and the poorer classes, as expressed through popular parody, was a Continental phenomenon. Such groups and their activities were already known of in Exeter in 1333, when John Grandisson, the Bishop of Exeter, had warned his own vicars against making debacaciones obscenas ("obscene remarks") while wearing masque costumes and hiding their identities. He considered their Holy Innocents' Day plays to be scandalous. Although little is known of the groups, the medievalist Lawrence M. Clopper suggests that while often these may have constituted innocent May games, "there seems to have been another game, shared by the young clerici and lay people, that involved tormentors in tattered garments"—again, emulating ecclesiastical robes—or dressed as monks, playing "'somergames' within sacred precincts". One of these summer games, for example, seems to have involved dressing up as the devil, capturing and tormenting those playing the roles of Christ, Peter and Andrew, following which their tormentors received rewards. The spirit behind these activities has been suggested by scholar Bridget Anne Henisch as "limited, licensed anarchy" during which the Church was often "embarrassed by its minor clergy". Grandisson had also mandated against acting and theatres in 1339; from this, Young argues that, by 1348, there was "a lively tradition of popular entertainment in Exeter which only surfaced in the bishops' registers when it spilled over into sacred time or sacred space or made fun of sacred people or things". Grandisson's principal residence was not his Cathedral City, and indeed, comments the medievalist Kathleen Edwards, "in more than forty years [he] apparently never stayed there for one of the great feasts, although he may have occasionally come in for the cathedral services". Max Harris argues—albeit in discussion of Grandisson's previous trouble in 1337—that it is possible that Grandisson have personally seen the trouble himself or to have encounter his opponents. #### Nationally On a national scale, the Black Death had recently arrived in England, probably through Weymouth, Dorset. In response, in a letter known as Terribilis, King Edward III instructed prayers to be said in churches around the country. His letter is dated 28 September 1348, and Grandisson promulgated the royal instruction via the Dean of Exeter, attaching his own thoughts on what was necessary. According to the medievalist Rosemary Horrox, who translated and transcribed the material, he called upon his priests and vicars, "exhorting them with salutary admonitions that those in priests' orders should celebrate mass devoutly". He also "beseech[ed] and order[ed]" them to "arrange solemn public processions through the said city", and requested that he be informed that this had been done by 1 January 1349. ### Source material The Order of Brothelyngham was brought to the attention of historians in 1897, when Francis Charles Hingeston-Randolph (a 19th-century antiquarian, and prebendary of Exeter Cathedral) published the second volume of his transcriptions of Grandisson's registers; this was part of an ongoing project suggested by his bishop that he should edit the episcopal registers of the diocese. Evidence regarding the Order is scarce, and even worse, clearly biased. Nothing survives from its creators or members, and our sole source of information stems from a single letter of the Bishop—the Order's avowed opponent—to his staff, filed in the registers. The letter was called Litera pro Iniqua Fraternitate de Brothelyngham, and was promulgated on 11 July 1348. Not only is Grandisson's letter a partisan source, but he would only record events that in his eyes breached canon law, so not necessarily all of the Order's activities might have been recorded. Richard Pearse Chope translated Hingeston-Randolph's transcription of the Bishop's full letter and published it in Devon & Cornwall Notes and Queries in 1921 due to, he wrote, "several points [that] have not yet received any adequate explanation", often because of translation or interpretative differences. More recently, portions of Grandisson's registers—including his 1348 letter of complaint—were edited by John M. Wasson as part of the cultural history of Devon of the Records of Early English Drama (REED); the scholar David Grantley, in a review, described the Bishop's "extensive extracts" as being of "enormous significance". Abigail Young provided the translation for Wasson's Latin sources. ## Activities in Exeter ### Name Although the Order claimed to be "of Brothelyngham", this was a fiction; there was no such place. However, the name was not without implication and would have had meaning to contemporaries. They would have understood the word to include the element brethelyng, brethel or brothel, meaning "good for nothing", "chaotic" or "wretched" or "foul", rather than a bawdy house. Hingeston-Randolph, who first edited Grandisson's registers, suggested that perhaps their title was bestowed upon the gang by the Bishop himself. Grandisson was indignant, transcribes Chope, that people so worthless would "guiltily laugh at Holy Religion to scorn", as he put it. Wasson translates this as their being "damnably scornful of sacred religion". Hingeston-Randolph appears also to have seen the Brothelynghamites to be more in the manner of a dissenting sect of the Church than a criminal gang. Either way, Grandisson's language made it clear that the group should be stigmatised by Christians. Hingeston-Randolph commented: > I must confess that I cannot understand this. There was no such Order, and I believe that there was no such place. I have consulted several well-known experts, but in vain: all were puzzled and interested, but none could help me. The outbreak was, probably, purely local; and it is distinctly stated that these troublesome people had secured the use of the Exeter "Theatre," under the pretence that they were performing a "Play." The name Brothelyngham was probably a satirical nod towards Sempringham Priory, suggests Chope. Sempringham contained both monks and nuns under the same roof; the scholar Ian Mortimer argues that, as a result, "sniggering in some secular quarters [was] inevitable". ### Riotousness Henisch surmises that it was the Church's very success against its own clergy and their games that led to the adoption of such practices by the laity, as expressed by those in the Brothelyngham Order. This was comprised, like most monasteries, solely of men. Although they may have been in the nature of a fanatical religious sect, it is more likely they were composed of disaffected locals, with the object of regaining money they felt was owed them by their Church. There may have been a philanthropic aspect also, as this was a major part in the traditional Feast of Fools. On repeated occasions throughout 1348 the gang disturbed the peace of the city. On 11 July that year Grandisson wrote from Chudleigh, his main headquarters outside of the Cathedral, instructing his chief agents in Exeter—the dean, the archdeacon, and the rector of the Cathedral. They were to investigate the Order and its members, whom Grandisson calls "evil persons". The Bishop instructed his men to condemn the Order the following Sunday by means of proclamations in the Cathedral and all other churches and chapels of the city. They were to emphasise that those who disobeyed, and failed to publicly withdraw from the fraternity, would not only be excommunicated but met with physical force. The Bishop could—and stated his intention to—call upon the assistance of the city militia if he required. Grandisson, says Young, believed that "the Order—nay, rather, the horror"—was comparable to "briars and thorns" growing in the field of religion, which needed to be cut away so as to prevent the Church being "dishonoured or disrupted". The historian Audrey Erskine has questioned whether his violent responses to such cults and gangs might reflect something choleric in his character, while Young suggests Grandisson had a Sabbatarian tendency to his approach. His particular focus on the drama as a source of social problems has long been known to historians; as the medievalist John Tydeman argues, Grandisson's "injunctions to his clergy have long constituted a familiar element in histories of medieval drama". However, he also seems to have had an antipathy to any kind of religious innovation in the diocese, opposing both popular religion and the building of new chapels. Grandisson's instructions to his clerics did not mince words. The scholar J. Kestell Floyer describes it as "a withering blast of sarcasm and indignation". The leader of the Order—whom the members idolised as their abbot—was described by the Bishop, in Coulton's translation, as "a certain crazy lunatic", and in Young's as "an insane and mad man". Having been crowned with a Bishop's mitre, the idiota was enthroned and carried around on a mock-episcopal chair. His followers, in a similar vein, wore monks' habits and used horns to fanfare their abbot, who ruled them from a theatrical stage, in imitation of a Bishop's dais. The horn contrasted with traditional holy bells. The Bishop's use of the word theatre—theatrum—needs analysis, says the historian R. P. Chope, as Exeter possessed no such building in this period such as would be understood in the 20th century. Indeed, Chope points out that even London did not gain a dedicated theatre until the mid-16th century. Instead, Chope suggests that theatrum was a generic word for a stage or anything that could act as a stage when required. Local historian Cecily Radford suggests that it was a wrestling ring, called The Pale, built in 1387, while, more broadly, Marshall suggests that other Early English words such as "public square" could be used synonymously with theatrum. Debauched in their behaviour, says Gvozdeva, the Brothelyngham men dressed as monks, paraded their abbot around the streets of Exeter on something akin to a litter, and, with their abbot enthroned above them, proceeded to beat up and rob people they met. To the Church, though, they were a criminal gang who, says Chambers, "beset in a great company the streets and places" of Exeter, many of them on horse. They regularly extorted money and kidnapped people, both the religious and laity, from whom they would demand ransoms; Grandisson suggests they robbed from each others' houses when the opportunity presented itself. The scholar Abigail Young suggests that their processions must have involved a large number of people, although it is impossible now to know whether the movement started in great numbers or attracted a crowd as it progressed over the days. Bayless agrees that "medieval parody rarely offers any sophisticated analysis of its target: even at its most critical its aim is not to direct reform but to humiliate the victim", with violence often a first, rather than a last, resort. Grandisson noted that, although the gang called this a ludus,—"under colour and veil of a game, or rather a farce", he says—in his view, "it was sheer rapine". Wasson proposes, for this passage, that "although these things appear to be tried under the colour and guise of a diversion—nay, a derision—it is nevertheless undoubtedly theft, since something is taken from those who are unwilling, and robbery". They were certainly disobedient, and combined with accusations of theft, either would be sufficient to ensure the Bishop's ire. It is unknown whether they heeded the Bishop's edicts, for despite his earlier threats to excommunicate the Order, no later letter survives suggesting he did so; his letter of 11 July merely places them "in pain of" such punishment should they not obey the ecclesiastical officials. He called the men "a threat to religion, the King and the Church": "not least", comments the scholar Julian Luxford, "to the monks of Cowick and St Nicholas's and the nuns of Polsloe". ## Later events In 1352, Grandisson again wrote to his officials, this time in Totnes and other churches, condemning what he called a group of "disciples of Antichrist". A similar outbreak of anti-clerical fake monasticism in the area, this group of pseudo-monks—describing themselves as an "order of hermits"—occupied Townstal. The men "claimed power by a special papal privilege to hear confession and offer the sacraments" without Grandisson's permission. The same year, Grandisson issued an order, on pain of excommunication, to close down a "harmful" performance—ludum noxium—satirising the city's leather-dressers (or shoemakers), which was causing disturbance. Grandisson condemned the play as being composed "in contumely and opprobrium", or using insulting language and showing scornful contempt. ## Historiography The Order's historiographical significance for modern historians, says Gvozdeva, is not that the gang wanted to be proper monks, have an abbot or be part of a mendicant order, but that they took upon themselves the appearance and, in their eyes, the attitudes of one. The historian Martin Heale has described the extent of ill-feeling felt by the general population towards suspected "abbatial greed and luxurious living", which would be against the Rule of their Order. Luxford, meanwhile, has argued that the significance of the Order is what their own expressed beliefs reveal of their own—and probably others'—views of the priesthood: that, for example, "monks and nuns blindly followed leaders, were idolatrous, avaricious, even luxurious (thus 'Brothelyngham')". A comparison with supposed real-life greedy abbots, says Heale, "is hard to mistake". In her study of French late-medieval theatre, Gvozdeva has suggested that the Order of Brothelyngham "demonstrates particularly well the ambiguous relationship between the play, ritual and theatre", noting the theatrical nature of the Order's activities: the members celebrate the investiture of their abbot (whose character is clearly intended to be a burlesque) on trestles (in theatro) accompanied by the sound of horns. It is one of the only known English examples of popular theatrics performed under the guise of religion, argues the Chaucerian Glending Olsen. ## See also - Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
402,593	Yazid I	1,172,341,366	Second Umayyad caliph (r. 680–683)	[ "646 births", "683 deaths", "7th-century Umayyad caliphs", "7th-century monarchs in Africa", "7th-century monarchs in Asia", "People of the Second Fitna", "Umayyad people of the Arab–Byzantine wars" ]	Yazid ibn Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (Arabic: يزيد بن معاوية بن أبي سفيان, romanized: Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya ibn ʾAbī Sufyān; c. 646 – 11 November 683), commonly known as Yazid I, was the second caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate. He ruled from April 680 until his death in November 683. His appointment was the first hereditary succession to the caliphate in Islamic history. His caliphate was marked by the death of Muhammad's grandson Husayn ibn Ali and the start of the crisis known as the Second Fitna. Yazid's nomination as heir apparent in (56 AH) by his father Mu'awiya I was opposed by several Muslim grandees from the Hejaz region, including Husayn and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr. The two men refused to recognize Yazid following his accession and took sanctuary in Mecca. When Husayn left for Kufa in Iraq to lead a revolt against Yazid, he was killed with his small band of supporters by Yazid's forces in the Battle of Karbala. Husayn's death caused resentment in the Hejaz, where Ibn al-Zubayr called for a consultative assembly to elect a new caliph. The people of Medina, who supported Ibn al-Zubayr, held other grievances toward the Umayyads. After failing to gain the allegiance of Ibn al-Zubayr and the people of the Hejaz through diplomacy, Yazid sent an army to suppress their rebellion. The army defeated the Medinese in the Battle of al-Harra in August 683 and the city was sacked. Afterward, Mecca was besieged for several weeks until the army withdrew as a result of Yazid's death in November 683. The Caliphate fell into a nearly decade-long civil war, ending with the establishment of the Marwanid dynasty (the Umayyad caliph Marwan I and his descendants). Yazid continued Mu'awiya's decentralized model of governance, relying on his provincial governors and the tribal nobility. He abandoned Mu'awiya's ambitious raids against the Byzantine Empire and strengthened Syria's military defences. No new territories were conquered during his reign. Yazid is considered an illegitimate ruler and a tyrant by many Muslims due to his hereditary succession, the death of Husayn, and his attack on Medina. Modern historians take a milder view, and consider him a capable ruler, albeit less successful than his father. ## Early life Yazid was born in Syria. His year of birth is uncertain, placed between 642 and 649. His father was Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, then governor of Syria under Caliph Uthman (r. 644–656). Mu'awiya and Uthman belonged to the wealthy Umayyad clan of the Quraysh tribe, a grouping of Meccan clans to which the Islamic prophet Muhammad and all the preceding caliphs belonged. Yazid's mother, Maysun, was the daughter of Bahdal ibn Unayf, a chieftain of the powerful Bedouin tribe of Banu Kalb. She was a Christian, like most of her tribe. Yazid grew up with his maternal Kalbite kin, spending the springs of his youth in the Syrian Desert; for the remainder of the year he was in the company of the Greek and native Syrian courtiers of his father, who became caliph in 661. During his father's caliphate, Yazid led several campaigns against the Byzantine Empire, which the Caliphate had been trying to conquer, including an attack on the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. Sources give several dates for this between 49 AH (669–70 CE) and 55 AH (674–5 CE). Muslim sources offer few details of his role in the campaigns, possibly downplaying his involvement due to the controversies of his later career. He is portrayed in these sources as having been unwilling to participate in the expedition to the chagrin of Mu'awiya, who then forced him to comply. However, two eighth-century non-Muslim sources from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), the Chronicle of 741 and the Chronicle of 754, both of which likely drew their material from an earlier Arabic work, report that Yazid besieged Constantinople with a 100,000-strong army. Unable to conquer the city, the army captured adjacent towns, acquired considerable loot, and retreated after two years. Yazid also led the hajj (the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca) on several occasions. ## Nomination as caliph The third caliph Uthman drew the ire of the Muslim settlers of the conquered lands as a consequence of his controversial policies, which were seen by many as nepotistic and interfering in provincial affairs. In 656 he was killed by the provincial rebels in Medina, then capital of the Caliphate, after which Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, was recognized as caliph by the Medinese people and the rebels. In the consequent first Islamic civil war (656–661), Mu'awiya opposed Ali from his stronghold in Syria, fighting him to a stalemate at the Battle of Siffin in 657. In January 661 Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite (a faction opposed to Ali and Mu'awiya), after which his son Hasan was recognized as his successor. In August, Mu'awiya, who had already been recognized as caliph by his partisans in Syria, led his army toward Kufa, the capital of Hasan and Ali in Iraq, and gained control over the rest of the Caliphate by securing a peace treaty with Hasan. The terms of the treaty stipulated that Mu'awiya would not nominate a successor. Although the treaty brought a temporary peace, no framework of succession was established. Mu'awiya was determined to install Yazid as his successor. The idea was scandalous to Muslims, as hereditary succession had no precedent in Islamic history—earlier caliphs had been elected either by popular support in Medina or by the consultation of the senior companions of Muhammad—and according to Islamic principles, the position of ruler was not the private property of a ruler to award to his descendants. It was also unacceptable by Arab custom, according to which the rulership should not pass from father to son but within the wider clan. According to the orientalist Bernard Lewis, the "only precedents available to Mu'āwiya from Islamic history were election and civil war. The former was unworkable; the latter had obvious drawbacks." Mu'awiya passed over his eldest son Abd Allah, who was from his Qurayshite wife, perhaps due to the stronger support Yazid had in Syria because of his Kalbite parentage. The Banu Kalb was dominant in southern Syria and led the larger tribal confederation of Quda'a. The Quda'a were established in Syria long before Islam and had acquired significant military experience and familiarity with hierarchical order under the Byzantines, as opposed to the more free-spirited tribesmen of Arabia and Iraq. Northern Syria, on the other hand, was dominated by the tribal confederation of Qays, which had immigrated there during Mu'awiya's reign, and resented the privileged position of the Kalb in the Umayyad court. By appointing Yazid to lead campaigns against the Byzantines, Mu'awiya may have sought to foster support for Yazid from the northern tribesmen. The policy had limited success as the Qays opposed the nomination of Yazid, at least in the beginning, for he was "the son of a Kalbi woman". In the Hejaz (western Arabia, where Medina and Mecca are located and where the old Muslim elite resided), Yazid had support among his Umayyad kinsmen, but there were other members of the Hejazi nobility whose approval was important. By appointing Yazid to lead the hajj rituals there, Mu'awiya may have hoped to enlist support for Yazid's succession and elevate his status as a Muslim leader. According to Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967), Mu'awiya had also employed poets to influence public opinion in favour of Yazid's succession. According to the account of Ibn Athir (d. 1233), Mu'awiya summoned a shura (consultative assembly) of influential men from all of the provinces to his capital, Damascus, in 676 and won their support through flattery, bribes, and threats. He then ordered his Umayyad kinsman Marwan ibn al-Hakam, the governor of Medina, to inform its people of his decision. Marwan faced resistance, especially from Ali's son and Muhammad's grandson Husayn, and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, Abd Allah ibn Umar, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr, all sons of prominent companions of Muhammad, who, by virtue of their descent, could also lay claim to the caliphal office. Mu'awiya went to Medina and pressed the four dissenters to accede, but they fled to Mecca. He followed and threatened some of them with death, but to no avail. Nonetheless, he was successful in convincing the people of Mecca that the four had pledged their allegiance, and received the Meccans' allegiance for Yazid. On his way back to Damascus, he secured allegiance from the people of Medina. General recognition of the nomination thus forced Yazid's opponents into silence. The orientalist Julius Wellhausen doubted the story, holding that the reports of the nomination's rejection by prominent Medinese were a back-projection of the events that followed Mu'awiya's death. A similar opinion is held by the historian Andrew Marsham. According to the account of al-Tabari (d. 923), Mu'awiya announced the nomination in 676 and only received delegations from the Iraqi garrison town of Basra, which pledged allegiance to Yazid in Damascus in 679 or 680. According to Ya'qubi (d. 898), Mu'awiya demanded allegiance for Yazid on the occasion of the hajj. All, except the four prominent Muslims mentioned above, complied. No force was used against them. In any case, Mu'awiya arranged a general recognition for Yazid's succession before his death. ## Reign Mu'awiya died in April 680. According to al-Tabari, Yazid was at his residence in Huwwarin, located between Damascus and Palmyra, at the time of his father's death. According to verses of Yazid preserved in Isfahani's Kitab al-Aghani, a collection of Arabic poetry, Yazid was away on a summertime expedition against the Byzantines when he received the news of Mu'awiya's final illness. Based on this and the fact that Yazid arrived in Damascus only after Mu'awiya's death, the historian Henri Lammens has rejected the reports of Yazid being in Huwwarin. Mu'awiya entrusted supervision of the government to his most loyal associates, Dahhak ibn Qays al-Fihri and Muslim ibn Uqba al-Murri, until Yazid's return. He left a will for Yazid, instructing him on matters of governing the Caliphate. He was advised to beware Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr, for they could challenge his rule, and instructed to defeat them if they did. Yazid was further advised to treat Husayn with caution and not to spill his blood, since he was the grandson of Muhammad. Ibn al-Zubayr, on the other hand, was to be treated harshly, unless he came to terms. ### Oaths of allegiance Upon his accession, Yazid requested and received oaths of allegiance from the governors of the provinces. He wrote to the governor of Medina, his cousin Walid ibn Utba ibn Abi Sufyan, informing him of Mu'awiya's death and instructing him to secure allegiance from Husayn, Ibn al-Zubayr, and Ibn Umar. The instructions contained in the letter were: > Seize Husayn, Abdullah ibn Umar, and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr to give the oath of allegiance. Act so fiercely that they have no chance to do anything before giving the oath of allegiance. Walid sought the advice of Marwan, who suggested that Ibn al-Zubayr and Husayn be forced to pay allegiance as they were dangerous, while Ibn Umar should be left alone as he posed no threat. Husayn answered Walid's summon, meeting Walid and Marwan in a semi-private meeting where he was informed of Mu'awiya's death and Yazid's accession. When asked for his oath of allegiance, Husayn responded that giving his allegiance in private would be insufficient and suggested the oath be made in public. Walid agreed, but Marwan insisted that Husayn be detained until he proffered allegiance. Husayn scolded Marwan and left to join his armed retinue, who were waiting nearby in case the authorities attempted to apprehend him. Immediately following Husayn's exit, Marwan admonished Walid, who in turn justified his refusal to harm Husayn by dint of the latter's close relation to Muhammad. Ibn al-Zubayr did not answer the summons and left for Mecca. Walid sent eighty horsemen after him, but he escaped. Husayn too left for Mecca shortly after, without having sworn allegiance to Yazid. Dissatisfied with this failure, Yazid replaced Walid with his distant Umayyad kinsman Amr ibn Sa'id. Unlike Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr, Ibn Umar, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr, and Abd Allah ibn Abbas, who had also previously denounced Mu'awiya's nomination of Yazid, paid allegiance to him. ### Battle of Karbala In Mecca Husayn received letters from pro-Alid Kufans, inviting him to lead them in revolt against Yazid. Husayn subsequently sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil to assess the situation in the city. He also sent letters to Basra, but his messenger was handed over to the governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad and killed. Ibn Aqil informed Husayn of the large-scale support he found in Kufa, signalling that the latter should enter the city. Informed by some Kufan tribal chiefs (ashraf) of the goings-on, Yazid replaced the governor of Kufa, Nu'man ibn Bashir al-Ansari, who had been unwilling to take action against pro-Alid activity, with Ibn Ziyad, whom he ordered to execute or imprison Ibn Aqil. As a result of Ibn Ziyad's suppression and political maneuvering, Ibn Aqil's following began to dissipate and he was forced to declare the revolt prematurely. It was suppressed and Ibn Aqil was executed. Encouraged by Ibn Aqil's letter, Husayn left for Kufa, ignoring warnings from Ibn Umar and Ibn Abbas. The latter reminded him, to no avail, of the Kufans' previous abandonment of his father Ali and his brother Hasan. On the way to the city, he received news of Ibn Aqil's death. Nonetheless, he continued his march towards Kufa. Ibn Ziyad's 4,000-strong army blocked his entry into the city and forced him to camp in the desert of Karbala. Ibn Ziyad would not let Husayn pass without submitting, which Husayn refused to do. Week-long negotiations failed, and in the ensuing hostilities on 10 October 680, Husayn and 72 of his male companions were slain, while his family was taken prisoner. The captives and Husayn's severed head were sent to Yazid. According to the accounts of Abu Mikhnaf (d. 774) and Ammar al-Duhni (d. 750–51), Yazid poked Husayn's head with his staff, although others ascribe this action to Ibn Ziyad. Yazid treated the captives well and sent them back to Medina after a few days. ### Revolt of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr Following Husayn's death, Yazid faced increased opposition to his rule from Ibn al-Zubayr who declared him deposed. Although publicly he called for a shura to elect a new caliph, in secret Ibn al-Zubayr let his partisans pay allegiance to him. At first, Yazid attempted to placate him by sending gifts and delegations in an attempt to reach a settlement. After Ibn al-Zubayr's refusal to recognize him, Yazid sent a force led by Ibn al-Zubayr's estranged brother Amr to arrest him. The force was defeated and Amr was taken captive and executed. As well as Ibn al-Zubayr's growing influence in Medina, the city's inhabitants were disillusioned with Umayyad rule and Mu'awiya's agricultural projects, which included the confiscation of their lands to boost government revenue. Yazid invited the notables of Medina to Damascus and tried to win them over with gifts. They were unpersuaded and on their return to Medina narrated tales of Yazid's lavish lifestyle. Accusations included Yazid drinking wine, hunting with hounds, and his love for music. The Medinese, under the leadership of Abd Allah ibn Hanzala, renounced their allegiance to Yazid and expelled the governor, Yazid's cousin Uthman ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Sufyan, and the Umayyads residing in the city. Yazid dispatched a 12,000-strong army under the command of Muslim ibn Uqba to reconquer the Hejaz. After failed negotiations, the Medinese were defeated in the Battle of al-Harra. According to the accounts of Abu Mikhnaf and al-Samhudi (d. 1533), the city was sacked, whereas per the account of Awana (d. 764) only the ringleaders of the rebellion were executed. Having forced the rebels to renew their allegiance, Yazid's army headed for Mecca to subdue Ibn al-Zubayr. Ibn Uqba died on the way to Mecca and command passed to Husayn ibn Numayr al-Sakuni, who besieged Mecca in September 683. The siege lasted for several weeks, during which the Ka'ba, the sacred Muslim shrine at the center of the Mecca Mosque, caught fire. Yazid's sudden death in November 683 ended the campaign and Ibn Numayr retreated to Syria with his army. ### Domestic affairs and foreign campaigns The style of Yazid's governance was, by and large, a continuation of the model developed by Mu'awiya. He continued to rely on the governors of the provinces and ashraf, as Mu'awiya had, instead of relatives. He retained several of Mu'awiya's officials, including Ibn Ziyad, who was Mu'awiya's governor of Basra, and Sarjun ibn Mansur, a native Syrian Christian, who had served as the head of the fiscal administration under Mu'awiya. Like Mu'awiya, Yazid received delegations of tribal notables (wufud) from the provinces to win their support, which would also involve distributing gifts and bribes. The structure of the caliphal administration and military remained decentralised as in Mu'awiya's time. Provinces retained much of their tax revenue and forwarded a small portion to the Caliph. The military units in the provinces were derived from local tribes whose command also fell to the ashraf. Yazid approved a decrease in taxes on the Arab Christian tribe of Najran upon their request, but abolished the special tax exemption of the ethno-religious community of Samaritans, which had been granted to them by previous caliphs as a reward for their aid to the Muslim conquerors. He improved the irrigation system of the fertile lands of the Ghouta near Damascus by digging a canal that became known as Nahr Yazid. Toward the end of his reign, Mu'awiya reached a thirty-year peace agreement with the Byzantines, obliging the Caliphate to pay an annual tribute of 3,000 gold coins, 50 horses, and 50 slaves, and to withdraw Muslim troops from the forward bases they had occupied on the island of Rhodes and the Anatolian coast. Under Yazid, Muslim bases along the Sea of Marmara were abandoned. In contrast to the far-reaching raids against the Byzantine Empire launched under his father, Yazid focused on stabilizing the border with Byzantium. In order to improve Syria's military defences and prevent Byzantine incursions, Yazid established the northern Syrian frontier district of Qinnasrin from what had been a part of Hims, and garrisoned it. Yazid reappointed Uqba ibn Nafi, the conqueror of the central North African region of Ifriqiya whom Mu'awiya had deposed, as governor of Ifriqiya. In 681, Uqba launched a large-scale expedition into western North Africa. Defeating the Berbers and the Byzantines, Uqba reached the Atlantic coast and captured Tangier and Volubilis. He was unable to establish permanent control in these territories. On his return to Ifriqiya, he was ambushed and killed by a Berber–Byzantine force at the Battle of Vescera, resulting in the loss of the conquered territories. In 681 Yazid appointed Ibn Ziyad's brother Salm ibn Ziyad as the governor of the northeastern border province of Khurasan. Salm led several campaigns in Transoxiana (Central Asia) and raided Samarqand and Khwarazm, but without gaining a permanent foothold in any of them. Yazid's death in 683 and the subsequent chaos in the east ended the campaigns. ## Death and succession Yazid died on 11 November 683 in the central Syrian desert town of Huwwarin, his favourite residence, aged between 35 and 43, and was buried there. Early annalists like Abu Ma'shar al-Madani (d. 778) and al-Waqidi (d. 823) do not give any details about his death. This lack of information seems to have inspired fabrication of accounts by authors with anti-Umayyad leanings, which detail several causes of death, including a horse fall, excessive drinking, pleurisy, and burning. According to the verses by a contemporary poet Ibn Arada, who at the time resided in Khurasan, Yazid died in his bed with a wine cup by his side. Ibn al-Zubayr subsequently declared himself caliph and Iraq and Egypt came under his rule. In Syria, Yazid's son Mu'awiya II, whom he had nominated, became caliph. His control was limited to parts of Syria as most of the Syrian districts (Hims, Qinnasrin, and Palestine) were controlled by allies of Ibn al-Zubayr. Mu'awiya II died after a few months from an unknown illness. Several early sources state that he abdicated before his death. Following his death, Yazid's maternal Kalbite tribesmen, seeking to maintain their privileges, sought to install Yazid's son Khalid on the throne, but he was considered too young for the post by the non-Kalbites in the pro-Umayyad coalition. Consequently, Marwan ibn al-Hakam was acknowledged as caliph in a shura of pro-Umayyad tribes in June 684. Shortly after, Marwan and the Kalb routed the pro-Zubayrid forces in Syria led by Dahhak at the Battle of Marj Rahit. Although the pro-Umayyad shura stipulated that Khalid would succeed Marwan, the latter nominated his son Abd al-Malik as his heir. Thus the Sufyanid house, named after Mu'awiya I's father Abu Sufyan, was replaced by the Marwanid house of the Umayyad dynasty. By 692 Abd al-Malik had defeated Ibn al-Zubayr and restored Umayyad authority across the Caliphate. ## Legacy The killing of Muhammad's grandson Husayn caused widespread outcry among Muslims and the image of Yazid suffered greatly. It also helped crystallize opposition to Yazid into an anti-Umayyad movement based on Alid aspirations, and contributed to the development of Shi'a identity, whereby the party of Alid partisans was transformed into a religious sect with distinct rituals and memory. After the Battle of Karbala, Shi'a imams from Husayn's line adopted the policy of political quietism. ### Traditional Muslim view Yazid is considered an evil figure by many Muslims to the present day, not only by the Shi'a, who hold that the ruling position rightly belonged to Husayn's father Ali and his descendants, including Husayn, whom Yazid killed to strip him of his right, but also by many Sunnis, to whom he was an affront to Islamic values. For the Shi'a, Yazid is an epitome of evil. He is annually reviled in the Ashura processions and passion plays, and rulers considered tyrannical and oppressive are often equated with him. Before the Iranian Revolution, the Shah of Iran was called the "Yazid of his time" by the Iranian cleric Rouhollah Khomeini, as was the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi Shi'a during the Iran–Iraq War for his ban on pilgrimages to the holy sites of Shi'a Islam. Among the Sunnis, the Hanafi school allows cursing of Yazid, whereas the Hanbali school and many in the Shafi'i school maintain that no judgment should be passed on Yazid, rather tyrants in general should be cursed. However, the Hanbali scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) encouraged the cursing. According to al-Ghazali (d. 1111), cursing Yazid is prohibited, for he was a Muslim and his role in the killing of Husayn is unverified. Yazid was the first person in the history of the Caliphate to be nominated as heir based on a blood relationship, and this became a tradition afterwards. As such, his accession is considered by the Muslim historical tradition as the corruption of the caliphate into a kingship. He is depicted as a tyrant who was responsible for three major crimes during his caliphate: the death of Husayn and his followers at Karbala, considered a massacre; the aftermath of the Battle of al-Harra, in which Yazid's troops sacked Medina; and the burning of the Ka'ba during the siege of Mecca, which is blamed on Yazid's commander Husayn ibn Numayr. The tradition stresses his habits of drinking, dancing, hunting, and keeping pet animals such as dogs and monkeys, portraying him as impious and unworthy of leading the Muslim community. Extant contemporary Muslim histories describe Yazid as "a sinner in respect of his belly and his private parts", "an arrogant drunken sot", and "motivated by defiance of God, lack of faith in His religion and hostility toward His Messenger". Al-Baladhuri (d. 892) described him as the "commander of the sinners" (amir al-fasiqin), as opposed to the title commander of the faithful (amir al-mu'minin) usually applied to the caliphs. Nevertheless, some historians have argued that there is a tendency in early Muslim sources to exonerate Yazid of blame for Husayn's death, and put the blame squarely on Ibn Ziyad. According to the historian James Lindsay, the Syrian historian Ibn Asakir (d. 1176) attempted to stress Yazid's positive qualities, while accepting the allegations that are generally made against him. Ibn Asakir thus emphasised that Yazid was a transmitter of hadith (the sayings and traditions attributed to Muhammad), a virtuous man "by reason of his connection to the age of the Prophet", and worthy of the ruling position. ### Modern scholarly view Despite his reputation in religious circles, academic historians generally portray a more favourable view of Yazid. According to Wellhausen, Yazid was a mild ruler, who resorted to violence only when necessary, and was not the tyrant that the religious tradition portrays him to be. He further notes that Yazid lacked interest in public affairs as a prince, but as a caliph "he seems to have pulled himself together, although he did not give up his old predilections,—wine, music, the chase and other sport". In the view of the historian Hugh N. Kennedy, despite the disasters of Karbala and al-Harra, Yazid's rule was "not devoid of achievement". His reputation might have improved had he lived longer, but his early death played a part in sticking of the stigma of "the shocks of the early part of his reign". According to the Islamicist G. R. Hawting, Yazid tried to continue the diplomatic policies of his father but, unlike Mu'awiya, he was not successful in winning over the opposition with gifts and bribes. In Hawting's summation, "the image of Muʿāwiya as operating more like a tribal s̲h̲ayk̲h̲ than a traditional Middle Eastern despot ... also seems applicable to Yazīd". In the view of Lewis, Yazid was a capable ruler "with much of the ability of his father" but was overly criticized by later Arab historians. Expressing a viewpoint similar to Wellhausen's, Lammens remarked, "a poet himself, and fond of music, he was a Maecenas of poets and artists". The characterization of Yazid in the Muslim sources has been attributed to the hostility of the Abbasid dynasty, during whose rule the histories were written, toward the Umayyads, whom they toppled in 750. Most reports in the traditional Muslim sources focus on the revolts against Yazid, and usually lack detail on his public life in Syria and his activities other than the suppression of the revolts. Lammens has attributed this to the tendency of the Iraq-based, Abbasid-era chroniclers to portray a caliph, under whom Husayn was killed and the holy cities of Islam were attacked, only as an impious drunkard. In contrast, a Syrian source preserved in the Chronicle of 741 describes the Caliph as "a most pleasant man and deemed highly agreeable by all the peoples subject to his rule. He never, as is the wont of men, sought glory for himself because of his royal rank, but lived as a citizen along with all the common people." ### Yazidism In the Yazidi religion, practiced by the mainly Iraq-based Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious community of Yazidis, Sultan Ezid is a highly revered divine figure. Most modern historians hold that the name Ezid derives from the name of Caliph Yazid. In Yazidi religious lore, there is no trace of any link between Sultan Ezid and the second Umayyad caliph. A pro-Umayyad movement particularly sympathetic towards Yazid existed in the Kurdish mountains before the 12th century, when Shaykh Adi, a Sufi of Umayyad descent venerated by Yazidis to this day, settled there and attracted a following among the adherents of the movement. The name Yazidi seems to have been applied to the group because of his Umayyad origins. ## Coins A Sasanian-style silver coin bearing the mint date as "Year I of Yazid" has been reported. The obverse side shows the portrait of the Sasanian king Khosrow II (r. 590–628) and his name in the Pahlavi script. The reverse has the usual Zoroastrian fire altar surrounded by attendants. The margins, however, contain the inscription that it was minted during the first year of Yazid's reign. An anonymous coin from the Nishapur mint bearing the mint date 60, which is assumed to be the Hijri year, is also thought to be from Yazid's first regnal year. Other coins from his reign usually have only the name of the governor of the province where the coin originated. Coins bearing the name of the counter-caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr have also been found from the provinces of Fars and Kirman, dated between 61 and 63 (681–683 CE), although Ibn al-Zubayr did not publicly claim the caliphate until after the death of Yazid. This may show that as well as the challenges to his rule in Arabia and Iraq, Yazid's authority was also challenged in southern Persia from roughly the time of his accession. The coins were probably minted in the name of Ibn al-Zubayr to lend legitimacy to the challengers of the Umayyads by using a suitable Qurayshite name. ## Wives and children Yazid married three women and had several concubines. The names of two of his wives are known: Umm Khalid Fakhita bint Abi Hisham and Umm Kulthum, a daughter of the veteran commander and statesman Abd Allah ibn Amir. Fakhita and Umm Kulthum both hailed from the Abd Shams, the parent clan of the Umayyads. Yazid had three sons from his wives. His eldest, Mu'awiya II, was between 17 and 23 years old at the time of Yazid's death. The name of Mu'awiya II's mother is unknown, but she was from the Banu Kalb. Ill health prevented him from carrying out the caliphal duties and he rarely left his residence. He survived his father only by a few months and died without leaving any offspring. Yazid's second son, Khalid, was from Fakhita, and was born circa 668. Marwan married Fakhita after becoming caliph, to foster an alliance with the Sufyanid house and neutralize her son Khalid's claim to the caliphate. He remained quiet about being sidelined from the succession, although a legendary report says that he protested to Marwan, who in turn insulted him. He had friendly relations with Abd al-Malik, whose daughter he married. Several legendary accounts report Khalid being interested in alchemy and having ordered the translation of Greek works on alchemy, astronomy, and medicine into Arabic. Yazid's daughter Atika was the favourite wife of Abd al-Malik. They had several children, including the future Caliph Yazid II (r. 720–724). Yazid's son Abd Allah, from Umm Kulthum, was a famed archer and horseman. Yazid had several other sons from slave women.
40,176	Joseph Priestley	1,171,819,411	English chemist, theologian, educator, and political theorist (1733–1804)	[ "1733 births", "1804 deaths", "18th-century American writers", "18th-century British philosophers", "18th-century English Christian theologians", "18th-century English chemists", "18th-century English male writers", "18th-century English non-fiction writers", "18th-century Unitarian clergy", "19th-century American male writers", "19th-century British philosophers", "19th-century English writers", "American Unitarians", "American abolitionists", "American male non-fiction writers", "British emigrants to the Thirteen Colonies", "British liberal theorists", "Christian abolitionists", "Christian universalist theologians", "Denial of the virgin birth of Jesus", "Discoverers of chemical elements", "Educators from Pennsylvania", "English Christian theologians", "English Christian universalists", "English Dissenters", "English Unitarians", "English abolitionists", "English pamphleteers", "English philosophers", "English political philosophers", "Enlightenment philosophers", "Enlightenment scientists", "Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", "Fellows of the Royal Society", "Industrial gases", "Leeds Blue Plaques", "Linguists of English", "Members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham", "Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences", "People associated with the University of Edinburgh", "People from Birstall, West Yorkshire", "People from Hackney Central", "People from Northumberland, Pennsylvania", "People of the Industrial Revolution", "Priestley family", "Protestant philosophers", "Recipients of the Copley Medal", "Religious leaders from Pennsylvania" ]	Joseph Priestley FRS (/ˈpriːstli/; 24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in electricity and other areas of science. He was a close friend of, and worked in close association with Benjamin Franklin involving electricity experiments. Priestley is credited with his independent discovery of oxygen by the thermal decomposition of mercuric oxide, having isolated it in 1774. During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of carbonated water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community. Priestley's science was integral to his theology, and he consistently tried to fuse Enlightenment rationalism with Christian theism. In his metaphysical texts, Priestley attempted to combine theism, materialism, and determinism, a project that has been called "audacious and original". He believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress and eventually bring about the Christian millennium. Priestley, who strongly believed in the free and open exchange of ideas, advocated toleration and equal rights for religious Dissenters, which also led him to help found Unitarianism in England. The controversial nature of Priestley's publications, combined with his outspoken support of the American Revolution and later the French Revolution, aroused public and governmental contempt; eventually forcing him to flee in 1791, first to London and then to the United States, after a mob burned down his Birmingham home and church. He spent his last ten years in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. A scholar and teacher throughout his life, Priestley made significant contributions to pedagogy, including the publication of a seminal work on English grammar and books on history; he prepared some of the most influential early timelines. The educational writings were among Priestley's most popular works. Arguably his metaphysical works, however, had the most lasting influence, as now considered primary sources for utilitarianism by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. ## Early life and education (1733–1755) Priestley was born in Birstall (near Batley) in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to an established English Dissenting family who did not conform to the Church of England. He was the oldest of six children born to Mary Swift and Jonas Priestley, a finisher of cloth. Priestley was sent to live with his grandfather around the age of one. He returned home five years later, after his mother died. When his father remarried in 1741, Priestley went to live with his aunt and uncle, the wealthy and childless Sarah (d. 1764) and John Keighley, 3 miles (4.8 km) from Fieldhead. Priestley was a precocious child – at the age of four, he could flawlessly recite all 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism – and his aunt sought the best education for him, intending him to enter ministry. During his youth, Priestley attended local schools, where he learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Around 1749, Priestley became seriously ill and believed he was dying. Raised as a devout Calvinist, he believed a conversion experience was necessary for salvation, but doubted he had had one. This emotional distress eventually led him to question his theological upbringing, causing him to reject election and to accept universal salvation. As a result, the elders of his home church, the Independent Upper Chapel of Heckmondwike, refused him admission as a full member. Priestley's illness left him with a permanent stutter and he gave up any thoughts of entering the ministry at that time. In preparation for joining a relative in trade in Lisbon, he studied French, Italian, and German in addition to Aramaic, and Arabic. He was tutored by the Reverend George Haggerstone, who first introduced him to higher mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics through the works of Isaac Watts, Willem 's Gravesande, and John Locke. ### Daventry Academy Priestley eventually decided to return to his theological studies and, in 1752, matriculated at Daventry, a Dissenting academy. Because he was already widely read, Priestley was allowed to omit the first two years of coursework. He continued his intense study; this, together with the liberal atmosphere of the school, shifted his theology further leftward and he became a Rational Dissenter. Abhorring dogma and religious mysticism, Rational Dissenters emphasised rational analysis of the natural world and the Bible. Priestley later wrote that the book that influenced him the most, save the Bible, was David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749). Hartley's psychological, philosophical, and theological treatise postulated a material theory of mind. Hartley aimed to construct a Christian philosophy in which both religious and moral "facts" could be scientifically proven, a goal that would occupy Priestley for his entire life. In his third year at Daventry, Priestley committed himself to the ministry, which he described as "the noblest of all professions". ## Needham Market and Nantwich (1755–1761) Robert Schofield, Priestley's major modern biographer, describes his first "call" in 1755 to the Dissenting parish in Needham Market, Suffolk, as a "mistake" for both Priestley and the congregation. Priestley yearned for urban life and theological debate, whereas Needham Market was a small, rural town with a congregation wedded to tradition. Attendance and donations dropped sharply when they discovered the extent of his heterodoxy. Although Priestley's aunt had promised her support if he became a minister, she refused any further assistance when she realised he was no longer a Calvinist. To earn extra money, Priestley proposed opening a school, but local families informed him that they would refuse to send their children. He also presented a series of scientific lectures titled "Use of the Globes" that was more successful. Priestley's Daventry friends helped him obtain another position and in 1758 he moved to Nantwich, Cheshire, living at Sweetbriar Hall in the town's Hospital Street; his time there was happier. The congregation cared less about Priestley's heterodoxy and he successfully established a school. Unlike many schoolmasters of the time, Priestley taught his students natural philosophy and even bought scientific instruments for them. Appalled at the quality of the available English grammar books, Priestley wrote his own: The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761). His innovations in the description of English grammar, particularly his efforts to dissociate it from Latin grammar, led 20th-century scholars to describe him as "one of the great grammarians of his time". After the publication of Rudiments and the success of Priestley's school, Warrington Academy offered him a teaching position in 1761. ## Warrington Academy (1761–1767) In 1761, Priestley moved to Warrington in Cheshire and assumed the post of tutor of modern languages and rhetoric at the town's Dissenting academy, although he would have preferred to teach mathematics and natural philosophy. He fitted in well at Warrington, and made friends quickly. These included the doctor and writer John Aikin, his sister the children's author Anna Laetitia Aikin, and the potter and businessman Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood met Priestley in 1762, after a fall from his horse. Wedgwood and Priestley met rarely, but exchanged letters, advice on chemistry, and laboratory equipment. Wedgwood eventually created a medallion of Priestley in cream-on-blue jasperware. On 23 June 1762, Priestley married Mary Wilkinson of Wrexham. Of his marriage, Priestley wrote: > This proved a very suitable and happy connexion, my wife being a woman of an excellent understanding, much improved by reading, of great fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree affectionate and generous; feeling strongly for others, and little for herself. Also, greatly excelling in every thing relating to household affairs, she entirely relieved me of all concern of that kind, which allowed me to give all my time to the prosecution of my studies, and the other duties of my station. On 17 April 1763, they had a daughter, whom they named Sarah after Priestley's aunt. ### Educator and historian All of the books Priestley published while at Warrington emphasised the study of history; Priestley considered it essential for worldly success as well as religious growth. He wrote histories of science and Christianity in an effort to reveal the progress of humanity and, paradoxically, the loss of a pure, "primitive Christianity". In his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765), Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), and other works, Priestley argued that the education of the young should anticipate their future practical needs. This principle of utility guided his unconventional curricular choices for Warrington's aspiring middle-class students. He recommended modern languages instead of classical languages and modern rather than ancient history. Priestley's lectures on history were particularly revolutionary; he narrated a providentialist and naturalist account of history, arguing that the study of history furthered the comprehension of God's natural laws. Furthermore, his millennial perspective was closely tied to his optimism regarding scientific progress and the improvement of humanity. He believed that each age would improve upon the previous and that the study of history allowed people to perceive and to advance this progress. Since the study of history was a moral imperative for Priestley, he also promoted the education of middle-class women, which was unusual at the time. Some scholars of education have described Priestley as the most important English writer on education between the 17th-century John Locke and the 19th-century Herbert Spencer. Lectures on History was well received and was employed by many educational institutions, such as New College at Hackney, Brown, Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge. Priestley designed two Charts to serve as visual study aids for his Lectures. These charts are in fact timelines; they have been described as the most influential timelines published in the 18th century. Both were popular for decades, and the trustees of Warrington were so impressed with Priestley's lectures and charts that they arranged for the University of Edinburgh to grant him a Doctor of Law degree in 1764. During this period Priestley also regularly delivered lectures on rhetoric that were later published in 1777 as A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism. #### History of electricity The intellectually stimulating atmosphere of Warrington, often called the "Athens of the North" (of England) during the 18th century, encouraged Priestley's growing interest in natural philosophy. He gave lectures on anatomy and performed experiments regarding temperature with another tutor at Warrington, his friend John Seddon. Despite Priestley's busy teaching schedule, he decided to write a history of electricity. Friends introduced him to the major experimenters in the field in Britain—John Canton, William Watson, Timothy Lane, and the visiting Benjamin Franklin who encouraged Priestley to perform the experiments he wanted to include in his history. Priestley also consulted with Franklin during the latter's kite experiments. In the process of replicating others' experiments, Priestley became intrigued by unanswered questions and was prompted to undertake experiments of his own design. (Impressed with his Charts and the manuscript of his history of electricity, Canton, Franklin, Watson, and Richard Price nominated Priestley for a fellowship in the Royal Society; he was accepted in 1766.) In 1767, the 700-page The History and Present State of Electricity was published to positive reviews. The first half of the text is a history of the study of electricity to 1766; the second and more influential half is a description of contemporary theories about electricity and suggestions for future research. The volume also contains extensive comments on Priestley's views that scientific inquiries be presented with all reasoning in one's discovery path, including false leads and mistakes. He contrasted his narrative approach with Newton's analytical proof-like approach which did not facilitate future researchers to continue the inquiry. Priestley reported some of his own discoveries in the second section, such as the conductivity of charcoal and other substances and the continuum between conductors and non-conductors. This discovery overturned what he described as "one of the earliest and universally received maxims of electricity", that only water and metals could conduct electricity. This and other experiments on the electrical properties of materials and on the electrical effects of chemical transformations demonstrated Priestley's early and ongoing interest in the relationship between chemical substances and electricity. Based on experiments with charged spheres, Priestley was among the first to propose that electrical force followed an inverse-square law, similar to Newton's law of universal gravitation. He did not generalise or elaborate on this, and the general law was enunciated by French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb in the 1780s. Priestley's strength as a natural philosopher was qualitative rather than quantitative and his observation of "a current of real air" between two electrified points would later interest Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell as they investigated electromagnetism. Priestley's text became the standard history of electricity for over a century; Alessandro Volta (who later invented the battery), William Herschel (who discovered infrared radiation), and Henry Cavendish (who discovered hydrogen) all relied upon it. Priestley wrote a popular version of the History of Electricity for the general public titled A Familiar Introduction to the Study of Electricity (1768). He marketed the book with his brother Timothy, but unsuccessfully. ## Leeds (1767–1773) Perhaps prompted by Mary Priestley's ill health, or financial problems, or a desire to prove himself to the community that had rejected him in his childhood, Priestley moved with his family from Warrington to Leeds in 1767, and he became Mill Hill Chapel's minister. Two sons were born to the Priestleys in Leeds: Joseph junior on 24 July 1768 and William three years later. Theophilus Lindsey, a rector at Catterick, Yorkshire, became one of Priestley's few friends in Leeds, of whom he wrote: "I never chose to publish any thing of moment relating to theology, without consulting him." Although Priestley had extended family living around Leeds, it does not appear that they communicated. Schofield conjectures that they considered him a heretic. Each year Priestley travelled to London to consult with his close friend and publisher, Joseph Johnson, and to attend meetings of the Royal Society. ### Minister of Mill Hill Chapel When Priestley became its minister, Mill Hill Chapel was one of the oldest and most respected Dissenting congregations in England; however, during the early 18th century the congregation had fractured along doctrinal lines, and was losing members to the charismatic Methodist movement. Priestley believed that by educating the young, he could strengthen the bonds of the congregation. In his three-volume Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74), Priestley outlined his theories of religious instruction. More importantly, he laid out his belief in Socinianism. The doctrines he explicated would become the standards for Unitarians in Britain. This work marked a change in Priestley's theological thinking that is critical to understanding his later writings—it paved the way for his materialism and necessitarianism (the belief that a divine being acts in accordance with necessary metaphysical laws). Priestley's major argument in the Institutes was that the only revealed religious truths that could be accepted were those that matched one's experience of the natural world. Because his views of religion were deeply tied to his understanding of nature, the text's theism rested on the argument from design. The Institutes shocked and appalled many readers, primarily because it challenged basic Christian orthodoxies, such as the divinity of Christ and the miracle of the Virgin Birth. Methodists in Leeds penned a hymn asking God to "the Unitarian fiend expel / And chase his doctrine back to Hell." Priestley wanted to return Christianity to its "primitive" or "pure" form by eliminating the "corruptions" which had accumulated over the centuries. The fourth part of the Institutes, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, became so long that he was forced to issue it separately in 1782. Priestley believed that the Corruptions was "the most valuable" work he ever published. In demanding that his readers apply the logic of the emerging sciences and comparative history to the Bible and Christianity, he alienated religious and scientific readers alike—scientific readers did not appreciate seeing science used in the defence of religion and religious readers dismissed the application of science to religion. ### Religious controversialist Priestley engaged in numerous political and religious pamphlet wars. According to Schofield, "he entered each controversy with a cheerful conviction that he was right, while most of his opponents were convinced, from the outset, that he was willfully and maliciously wrong. He was able, then, to contrast his sweet reasonableness to their personal rancor", but as Schofield points out Priestley rarely altered his opinion as a result of these debates. While at Leeds he wrote controversial pamphlets on the Lord's Supper and on Calvinist doctrine; thousands of copies were published, making them some of Priestley's most widely read works. Priestley founded the Theological Repository in 1768, a journal committed to the open and rational inquiry of theological questions. Although he promised to print any contribution, only like-minded authors submitted articles. He was therefore obliged to provide much of the journal's content himself (this material became the basis for many of his later theological and metaphysical works). After only a few years, due to a lack of funds, he was forced to cease publishing the journal. He revived it in 1784 with similar results. ### Defender of Dissenters and political philosopher Many of Priestley's political writings supported the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which restricted the rights of Dissenters. They could not hold political office, serve in the armed forces, or attend Oxford and Cambridge unless they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Dissenters repeatedly petitioned Parliament to repeal the Acts, arguing that they were being treated as second-class citizens. Priestley's friends, particularly other Rational Dissenters, urged him to publish a work on the injustices experienced by Dissenters; the result was his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768). An early work of modern liberal political theory and Priestley's most thorough treatment of the subject, it—unusually for the time—distinguished political rights from civil rights with precision and argued for expansive civil rights. Priestley identified separate private and public spheres, contending that the government should have control only over the public sphere. Education and religion, in particular, he maintained, were matters of private conscience and should not be administered by the state. Priestley's later radicalism emerged from his belief that the British government was infringing upon these individual freedoms. Priestley also defended the rights of Dissenters against the attacks of William Blackstone, an eminent legal theorist, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) had become the standard legal guide. Blackstone's book stated that dissent from the Church of England was a crime and that Dissenters could not be loyal subjects. Furious, Priestley lashed out with his Remarks on Dr. Blackstone's Commentaries (1769), correcting Blackstone's interpretation of the law, his grammar (a highly politicised subject at the time), and history. Blackstone, chastened, altered subsequent editions of his Commentaries: he rephrased the offending passages and removed the sections claiming that Dissenters could not be loyal subjects, but he retained his description of Dissent as a crime. ### Natural philosopher: electricity, Optics, and carbonated water Although Priestley claimed that natural philosophy was only a hobby, he took it seriously. In his History of Electricity, he described the scientist as promoting the "security and happiness of mankind". Priestley's science was eminently practical and he rarely concerned himself with theoretical questions; his model was his close friend, Benjamin Franklin. When he moved to Leeds, Priestley continued his electrical and chemical experiments (the latter aided by a steady supply of carbon dioxide from a neighbouring brewery). Between 1767 and 1770, he presented five papers to the Royal Society from these initial experiments; the first four papers explored coronal discharges and other phenomena related to electrical discharge, while the fifth reported on the conductivity of charcoals from different sources. His subsequent experimental work focused on chemistry and pneumatics. Priestley published the first volume of his projected history of experimental philosophy, The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours (referred to as his Optics), in 1772. He paid careful attention to the history of optics and presented excellent explanations of early optics experiments, but his mathematical deficiencies caused him to dismiss several important contemporary theories. He followed the (corpuscular) particle theory of light, influenced by the works of Reverend John Rowning and others. Furthermore, he did not include any of the practical sections that had made his History of Electricity so useful to practising natural philosophers. Unlike his History of Electricity, it was not popular and had only one edition, although it was the only English book on the topic for 150 years. The hastily written text sold poorly; the cost of researching, writing, and publishing the Optics convinced Priestley to abandon his history of experimental philosophy. Priestley was considered for the position of astronomer on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas, but was not chosen. Still, he contributed in a small way to the voyage: he provided the crew with a method for making carbonated water, which he erroneously speculated might be a cure for scurvy. He then published a pamphlet with Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air (1772). Priestley did not exploit the commercial potential of carbonated water, but others such as J. J. Schweppe made fortunes from it. For his discovery of carbonated water Priestley has been labelled "the father of the soft drink", with the beverage company Schweppes regarding him as "the father of our industry". In 1773, the Royal Society recognised Priestley's achievements in natural philosophy by awarding him the Copley Medal. Priestley's friends wanted to find him a more financially secure position. In 1772, prompted by Richard Price and Benjamin Franklin, Lord Shelburne wrote to Priestley asking him to direct the education of his children and to act as his general assistant. Although Priestley was reluctant to sacrifice his ministry, he accepted the position, resigning from Mill Hill Chapel on 20 December 1772, and preaching his last sermon on 16 May 1773. ## Calne (1773–1780) In 1773, the Priestleys moved to Calne in Wiltshire, and a year later Lord Shelburne and Priestley took a tour of Europe. According to Priestley's close friend Theophilus Lindsey, Priestley was "much improved by this view of mankind at large". Upon their return, Priestley easily fulfilled his duties as librarian and tutor. The workload was intentionally light, allowing him time to pursue his scientific investigations and theological interests. Priestley also became a political adviser to Shelburne, gathering information on parliamentary issues and serving as a liaison between Shelburne and the Dissenting and American interests. When the Priestleys' third son was born on 24 May 1777, they named him Henry at the lord's request. ### Materialist philosopher Priestley wrote his most important philosophical works during his years with Lord Shelburne. In a series of major metaphysical texts published between 1774 and 1780—An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind (1774), Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775), Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), and Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780)—he argues for a philosophy that incorporates four concepts: determinism, materialism, causation, and necessitarianism. By studying the natural world, he argued, people would learn how to become more compassionate, happy, and prosperous. Priestley strongly suggested that there is no mind-body duality, and put forth a materialist philosophy in these works; that is, one founded on the principle that everything in the universe is made of matter that we can perceive. He also contended that discussing the soul is impossible because it is made of a divine substance, and humanity cannot perceive the divine. Despite his separation of the divine from the mortal, this position shocked and angered many of his readers, who believed that such a duality was necessary for the soul to exist. Responding to Baron d'Holbach's Système de la Nature (1770) and David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) as well as the works of the French philosophers, Priestley maintained that materialism and determinism could be reconciled with a belief in God. He criticised those whose faith was shaped by books and fashion, drawing an analogy between the scepticism of educated men and the credulity of the masses. Maintaining that humans had no free will, Priestley argued that what he called "philosophical necessity" (akin to absolute determinism) is consonant with Christianity, a position based on his understanding of the natural world. Like the rest of nature, man's mind is subject to the laws of causation, Priestley contended, but because a benevolent God created these laws, the world and the people in it will eventually be perfected. Evil is therefore only an imperfect understanding of the world. Although Priestley's philosophical work has been characterised as "audacious and original", it partakes of older philosophical traditions on the problems of free will, determinism, and materialism. For example, the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued for absolute determinism and absolute materialism. Like Spinoza and Priestley, Leibniz argued that human will was completely determined by natural laws; unlike them, Leibniz argued for a "parallel universe" of immaterial objects (such as human souls) so arranged by God that its outcomes agree exactly with those of the material universe. Leibniz and Priestley share an optimism that God has chosen the chain of events benevolently; however, Priestley believed that the events were leading to a glorious millennial conclusion, whereas for Leibniz the entire chain of events was optimal in and of itself, as compared with other conceivable chains of events. ### Founder of British Unitarianism When Priestley's friend Theophilus Lindsey decided to found a new Christian denomination that would not restrict its members' beliefs, Priestley and others hurried to his aid. On 17 April 1774, Lindsey held the first Unitarian service in Britain, at the newly formed Essex Street Chapel in London; he had even designed his own liturgy, of which many were critical. Priestley defended his friend in the pamphlet Letter to a Layman, on the Subject of the Rev. Mr. Lindsey's Proposal for a Reformed English Church (1774), claiming that only the form of worship had been altered, not its substance, and attacking those who followed religion as a fashion. Priestley attended Lindsey's church regularly in the 1770s and occasionally preached there. He continued to support institutionalised Unitarianism for the rest of his life, writing several Defenses of Unitarianism and encouraging the foundation of new Unitarian chapels throughout Britain and the United States. ### Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air Priestley's years in Calne were the only ones in his life dominated by scientific investigations; they were also the most scientifically fruitful. His experiments were almost entirely confined to "airs", and out of this work emerged his most important scientific texts: the six volumes of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–86). These experiments helped repudiate the last vestiges of the theory of four elements, which Priestley attempted to replace with his own variation of phlogiston theory. According to that 18th-century theory, the combustion or oxidation of a substance corresponded to the release of a material substance, phlogiston. Priestley's work on "airs" is not easily classified. As historian of science Simon Schaffer writes, it "has been seen as a branch of physics, or chemistry, or natural philosophy, or some highly idiosyncratic version of Priestley's own invention". Furthermore, the volumes were both a scientific and a political enterprise for Priestley, in which he argues that science could destroy "undue and usurped authority" and that government has "reason to tremble even at an air pump or an electrical machine". Volume I of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air outlined several discoveries: "nitrous air" (nitric oxide, NO); "vapor of spirit of salt", later called "acid air" or "marine acid air" (anhydrous hydrochloric acid, HCl); "alkaline air" (ammonia, NH<sub>3</sub>); "diminished" or "dephlogisticated nitrous air" (nitrous oxide, N<sub>2</sub>O); and, most famously, "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen, O<sub>2</sub>) as well as experimental findings that showed plants revitalised enclosed volumes of air, a discovery that would eventually lead to the discovery of photosynthesis. Priestley also developed a "nitrous air test" to determine the "goodness of air". Using a pneumatic trough, he would mix nitrous air with a test sample, over water or mercury, and measure the decrease in volume—the principle of eudiometry. After a small history of the study of airs, he explained his own experiments in an open and sincere style. As an early biographer writes, "whatever he knows or thinks he tells: doubts, perplexities, blunders are set down with the most refreshing candour." Priestley also described his cheap and easy-to-assemble experimental apparatus; his colleagues therefore believed that they could easily reproduce his experiments. Faced with inconsistent experimental results, Priestley employed phlogiston theory. This led him to conclude that there were only three types of "air": "fixed", "alkaline", and "acid". Priestley dismissed the burgeoning chemistry of his day. Instead, he focused on gases and "changes in their sensible properties", as had natural philosophers before him. He isolated carbon monoxide (CO), but apparently did not realise that it was a separate "air". #### Discovery of oxygen In August 1774 he isolated an "air" that appeared to be completely new, but he did not have an opportunity to pursue the matter because he was about to tour Europe with Shelburne. While in Paris, Priestley replicated the experiment for others, including French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. After returning to Britain in January 1775, he continued his experiments and discovered "vitriolic acid air" (sulphur dioxide, SO<sub>2</sub>). In March he wrote to several people regarding the new "air" that he had discovered in August. One of these letters was read aloud to the Royal Society, and a paper outlining the discovery, titled "An Account of further Discoveries in Air", was published in the Society's journal Philosophical Transactions. Priestley called the new substance "dephlogisticated air", which he made in the famous experiment by focusing the sun's rays on a sample of mercuric oxide. He first tested it on mice, who surprised him by surviving quite a while entrapped with the air, and then on himself, writing that it was "five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air". He had discovered oxygen gas (O<sub>2</sub>). Priestley assembled his oxygen paper and several others into a second volume of Experiments and Observations on Air, published in 1776. He did not emphasise his discovery of "dephlogisticated air" (leaving it to Part III of the volume) but instead argued in the preface how important such discoveries were to rational religion. His paper narrated the discovery chronologically, relating the long delays between experiments and his initial puzzlements; thus, it is difficult to determine when exactly Priestley "discovered" oxygen. Such dating is significant as both Lavoisier and Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele have strong claims to the discovery of oxygen as well, Scheele having been the first to isolate the gas (although he published after Priestley) and Lavoisier having been the first to describe it as purified "air itself entire without alteration" (that is, the first to explain oxygen without phlogiston theory). In his paper "Observations on Respiration and the Use of the Blood", Priestley was the first to suggest a connection between blood and air, although he did so using phlogiston theory. In typical Priestley fashion, he prefaced the paper with a history of the study of respiration. A year later, clearly influenced by Priestley, Lavoisier was also discussing respiration at the Académie des sciences. Lavoisier's work began the long train of discovery that produced papers on oxygen respiration and culminated in the overthrow of phlogiston theory and the establishment of modern chemistry. Around 1779 Priestley and Shelburne – soon to be the 1st Marquess of Landsdowne – had a rupture, the precise reasons for which remain unclear. Shelburne blamed Priestley's health, while Priestley claimed Shelburne had no further use for him. Some contemporaries speculated that Priestley's outspokenness had hurt Shelburne's political career. Schofield argues that the most likely reason was Shelburne's recent marriage to Louisa Fitzpatrick—apparently, she did not like the Priestleys. Although Priestley considered moving to America, he eventually accepted Birmingham New Meeting's offer to be their minister. Both Priestley and Shelburne's families upheld their Unitarian faith for generations. In December 2013, it was reported that Sir Christopher Bullock – a direct descendant of Shelburne's brother, Thomas Fitzmaurice (MP) – had married his wife, Lady Bullock, née Barbara May Lupton, at London's Unitarian Essex Church in 1917. Barbara Lupton was the second cousin of Olive Middleton, née Lupton, the great-grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. In 1914, Olive and Noel Middleton had married at Leeds' Mill Hill Chapel, which Priestley, as its minister, had once guided towards Unitarianism. ## Birmingham (1780–1791) In 1780 the Priestleys moved to Birmingham and spent a happy decade surrounded by old friends, until they were forced to flee in 1791 by religiously motivated mob violence in what became known as the Priestley Riots. Priestley accepted the ministerial position at New Meeting on the condition that he be required to preach and teach only on Sundays, so that he would have time for his writing and scientific experiments. As in Leeds, Priestley established classes for the youth of his parish and by 1781, he was teaching 150 students. Because Priestley's New Meeting salary was only 100 guineas, friends and patrons donated money and goods to help continue his investigations. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1782. ### Chemical Revolution Many of the friends that Priestley made in Birmingham were members of the Lunar Society, a group of manufacturers, inventors, and natural philosophers who assembled monthly to discuss their work. The core of the group included men such as the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, the chemist and geologist James Keir, the inventor and engineer James Watt, and the botanist, chemist, and geologist William Withering. Priestley was asked to join this unique society and contributed much to the work of its members. As a result of this stimulating intellectual environment, he published several important scientific papers, including "Experiments relating to Phlogiston, and the seeming Conversion of Water into Air" (1783). The first part attempts to refute Lavoisier's challenges to his work on oxygen; the second part describes how steam is "converted" into air. After several variations of the experiment, with different substances as fuel and several different collecting apparatuses (which produced different results), he concluded that air could travel through more substances than previously surmised, a conclusion "contrary to all the known principles of hydrostatics". This discovery, along with his earlier work on what would later be recognised as gaseous diffusion, would eventually lead John Dalton and Thomas Graham to formulate the kinetic theory of gases. In 1777, Antoine Lavoisier had written Mémoire sur la combustion en général, the first of what proved to be a series of attacks on phlogiston theory; it was against these attacks that Priestley responded in 1783. While Priestley accepted parts of Lavoisier's theory, he was unprepared to assent to the major revolutions Lavoisier proposed: the overthrow of phlogiston, a chemistry based conceptually on elements and compounds, and a new chemical nomenclature. Priestley's original experiments on "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen), combustion, and water provided Lavoisier with the data he needed to construct much of his system; yet Priestley never accepted Lavoisier's new theories and continued to defend phlogiston theory for the rest of his life. Lavoisier's system was based largely on the quantitative concept that mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions (i.e., the conservation of mass). By contrast, Priestley preferred to observe qualitative changes in heat, color, and particularly volume. His experiments tested "airs" for "their solubility in water, their power of supporting or extinguishing flame, whether they were respirable, how they behaved with acid and alkaline air, and with nitric oxide and inflammable air, and lastly how they were affected by the electric spark." By 1789, when Lavoisier published his Traité Élémentaire de Chimie and founded the Annales de Chimie, the new chemistry had come into its own. Priestley published several more scientific papers in Birmingham, the majority attempting to refute Lavoisier. Priestley and other Lunar Society members argued that the new French system was too expensive, too difficult to test, and unnecessarily complex. Priestley in particular rejected its "establishment" aura. In the end, Lavoisier's view prevailed: his new chemistry introduced many of the principles on which modern chemistry is founded. Priestley's refusal to accept Lavoisier's "new chemistry"—such as the conservation of mass—and his determination to adhere to a less satisfactory theory has perplexed many scholars. Schofield explains it thus: "Priestley was never a chemist; in a modern, and even a Lavoisierian, sense, he was never a scientist. He was a natural philosopher, concerned with the economy of nature and obsessed with an idea of unity, in theology and in nature." Historian of science John McEvoy largely agrees, writing that Priestley's view of nature as coextensive with God and thus infinite, which encouraged him to focus on facts over hypotheses and theories, prompted him to reject Lavoisier's system. McEvoy argues that "Priestley's isolated and lonely opposition to the oxygen theory was a measure of his passionate concern for the principles of intellectual freedom, epistemic equality and critical inquiry." Priestley himself claimed in the last volume of Experiments and Observations that his most valuable works were his theological ones because they were "superior [in] dignity and importance". ### Defender of English Dissenters and French revolutionaries Although Priestley was busy defending phlogiston theory from the "new chemists", most of what he published in Birmingham was theological. In 1782 he published the fourth volume of his Institutes, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, describing how he thought the teachings of the early Christian church had been "corrupted" or distorted. Schofield describes the work as "derivative, disorganized, wordy, and repetitive, detailed, exhaustive, and devastatingly argued". The text addresses issues ranging from the divinity of Christ to the proper form for the Lord's Supper. Priestley followed up in 1786 with the provocatively titled book, An History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ, compiled from Original Writers, proving that the Christian Church was at first Unitarian. Thomas Jefferson would later write of the profound effect that these two books had on him: "I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them ... as the basis of my own faith. These writings have never been answered." Although a few readers such as Jefferson and other Rational Dissenters approved of the work, it was harshly reviewed because of its extreme theological positions, particularly its rejection of the Trinity. In 1785, while Priestley was engaged in a pamphlet war over Corruptions, he also published The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry, claiming that the Reformation had not really reformed the church. In words that would boil over into a national debate, he challenged his readers to enact change: > Let us not, therefore, be discouraged, though, for the present, we should see no great number of churches professedly unitarian .... We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again .... Although discouraged by friends from using such inflammatory language, Priestley refused to back down from his opinions in print and he included it, forever branding himself as "Gunpowder Joe". After the publication of this seeming call for revolution in the midst of the French Revolution, pamphleteers stepped up their attacks on Priestley and he and his church were even threatened with legal action. In 1787, 1789, and 1790, Dissenters again tried to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. Although initially it looked as if they might succeed, by 1790, with the fears of revolution looming in Parliament, few were swayed by appeals to equal rights. Political cartoons, one of the most effective and popular media of the time, skewered the Dissenters and Priestley. In Parliament, William Pitt and Edmund Burke argued against the repeal, a betrayal that angered Priestley and his friends, who had expected the two men's support. Priestley wrote a series of Letters to William Pitt and Letters to Burke in an attempt to persuade them otherwise, but these publications only further inflamed the populace against him. Dissenters such as Priestley who supported the French Revolution came under increasing suspicion as scepticism regarding the revolution grew. In its propaganda against "radicals", Pitt's administration used the "gunpowder" statement to argue that Priestley and other Dissenters wanted to overthrow the government. Burke, in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), tied natural philosophers, and specifically Priestley, to the French Revolution, writing that radicals who supported science in Britain "considered man in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump". Burke also associated republican principles with alchemy and insubstantial air, mocking the scientific work done by both Priestley and French chemists. He made much in his later writings of the connections between "Gunpowder Joe", science, and Lavoisier—who was improving gunpowder for the French in their war against Britain. Paradoxically, a secular statesman, Burke, argued against science and maintained that religion should be the basis of civil society, whereas a Dissenting minister, Priestley, argued that religion could not provide the basis for civil society and should be restricted to one's private life. Priestley also supported the campaign to abolish the British slave trade, and published a sermon in 1788 in which he declared that nobody treated enslaved people "with so much cruelty as the English". ### Birmingham riots of 1791 The animus that had been building against Dissenters and supporters of the American and French Revolutions exploded in July 1791. Priestley and several other Dissenters had arranged to have a celebratory dinner on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, a provocative action in a country where many disapproved of the French Revolution and feared that it might spread to Britain. Amid fears of violence, Priestley was convinced by his friends not to attend. Rioters gathered outside the hotel during the banquet and attacked the attendees as they left. The rioters moved on to the New Meeting and Old Meeting churches—and burned both to the ground. Priestley and his wife fled from their home; although their son William and others stayed behind to protect their property, the mob overcame them and torched Priestley's house "Fairhill" at Sparkbrook, destroying his valuable laboratory and all of the family's belongings. Twenty-six other Dissenters' homes and three more churches were burned in the three-day riot. Priestley spent several days hiding with friends until he was able to travel safely to London. The carefully executed attacks of the "mob" and the farcical trials of only a handful of the "leaders" convinced many at the time—and modern historians later—that the attacks were planned and condoned by local Birmingham magistrates. When George III was eventually forced to send troops to the area, he said: "I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light." ## Hackney (1791–1794) Unable to return to Birmingham, the Priestleys eventually settled in Lower Clapton, a district in Hackney, Middlesex where he gave a series of lectures on history and natural philosophy at the Dissenting academy, the New College at Hackney. Friends helped the couple rebuild their lives, contributing money, books, and laboratory equipment. Priestley tried to obtain restitution from the government for the destruction of his Birmingham property, but he was never fully reimbursed. He also published An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (1791), which indicted the people of Birmingham for allowing the riots to occur and for "violating the principles of English government". The couple's friends urged them to leave Britain and emigrate to either France or the new United States, even though Priestley had received an appointment to preach for the Gravel Pit Meeting congregation. Priestley was minister between 1793 and 1794 and the sermons he preached there, particularly the two Fast Sermons, reflect his growing millenarianism, his belief that the end of the world was fast approaching. After comparing Biblical prophecies to recent history, Priestley concluded that the French Revolution was a harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ. Priestley's works had always had a millennial cast, but after the beginning of the French Revolution, this strain increased. He wrote to a younger friend that while he himself would not see the Second Coming, his friend "may probably live to see it ... It cannot, I think be more than twenty years [away]." Daily life became more difficult for the family: Priestley was burned in effigy along with Thomas Paine; vicious political cartoons continued to be published about him; letters were sent to him from across the country, comparing him to the devil and Guy Fawkes; tradespeople feared the family's business; and Priestley's Royal Academy friends distanced themselves. As the penalties became harsher for those who spoke out against the government, Priestley examined options for removing himself and his family from England. Joseph Priestley's son William was presented to the French Assembly and granted letters of naturalisation on 8 June 1792. Priestley learned about it from the Morning Chronicle. A decree of 26 August 1792 by the French National Assembly conferred French citizenship on Joseph Priestley and others who had "served the cause of liberty" by their writings. Priestley accepted French citizenship, considering it "the greatest of honours". In the French National Convention election on 5 September 1792, Joseph Priestley was elected to the French National Convention by at least two departments, (Orne and Rhône-et-Loire). He declined the honour, on the grounds that he was not fluent in French. As relations between England and France worsened, a removal to France became impracticable. Following the declaration of war of February 1793, and the Aliens Bill of March 1793, which forbade correspondence or travel between England and France, William Priestley left France for America. Joseph Priestley's sons Harry and Joseph chose to leave England for America in August 1793. Finally Priestley himself followed with his wife, boarding the Sansom at Gravesend on 7 April 1794. Five weeks after Priestley left, William Pitt's administration began arresting radicals for seditious libel, resulting in the famous 1794 Treason Trials. ## Pennsylvania (1794–1804) The Priestleys arrived in New York City on 4 June 1794, where they were fêted by various political factions vying for Priestley's endorsement. Priestley declined their entreaties, hoping to avoid political discord in his new country. Before travelling to a new home in the backwoods of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, at Point township (now the Borough of Northumberland), Priestley and his wife lodged in Philadelphia, where he gave a series of sermons which led to the founding of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. Priestley turned down an opportunity to teach chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Priestley's son Joseph Priestley Jr. was a leading member of a consortium that had purchased 300,000 acres (120,000 ha) of virgin woodland between the forks of Loyalsock Creek. This they intended to lease or sell in 400-acre (160 ha) plots, with payment deferred to seven annual instalments, with interest. His brothers, William and Henry, bought a 284-acre (115 ha) plot of woodland which they attempted to transform into a farm, later called "Fairhill", felling and uprooting trees, and making lime to sweeten the soil by building their own lime kilns. Henry Priestley died 11 December 1795, possibly of malaria which he may have contracted after landing at New York. Mary Priestley's health, already poor, deteriorated further; although William's wife, Margaret Foulke-Priestley, moved in with the couple to nurse Mary 24 hours a day, Mary Priestley died 17 September 1796. Priestley then moved in with his elder son, Joseph Jr., and his wife Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley. Thomas Cooper, whose son, Thomas Jr., was living with the Priestleys, was a frequent visitor. Since his arrival in America, Priestley had continued to defend his Christian Unitarian beliefs; now, falling increasingly under the influence of Thomas Cooper and Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley, he was unable to avoid becoming embroiled in political controversy. In 1798, when, in response to the Pinckney affair, a belligerent President Adams sought to enlarge the navy and mobilise the militia into what Priestley and Cooper saw as a 'standing army', Priestley published an anonymous newspaper article: Maxims of political arithmetic, which attacked Adams, defended free trade, and advocated a form of Jeffersonian isolationism. In the same year, a small package, addressed vaguely: "Dr Priestley in America," was seized by the Royal Navy on board a neutral Danish boat. It was found to contain three letters, one of which was signed by the radical printer John Hurford Stone. These intercepted letters were published in London, and copied in numerous papers in America. One of the letters was addressed to "MBP", with a note: "I inclose a note for our friend MBP—but, as ignorant of the name he bears at present among you, I must beg you to seal and address it." This gave the intercepted letters a tinge of intrigue. Fearful lest they be taken as evidence of him being a 'spy in the interest of France', Priestley sent a clumsy letter to numerous newspaper editors, in which he naively named "MBP" (Member of the British Parliament) as Mr. Benjamin Vaughan, who "like me, thought it necessary to leave England, and for some time is said to have assumed a feigned name." William Cobbett, in his Porcupine's Gazette, 20 August 1798, added that Priestley "has told us who Mr MBP is, and has confirmed me in the opinion of their both being spies in the interest of France." Joseph Priestley Jr. left on a visit to England at Christmas 1798, not returning until August 1800. In his absence, his wife Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley and Thomas Cooper became increasing close, collaborating in numerous political essays. Priestley allowed himself to fall too heavily under Elizabeth and Cooper's influences, even helping hawk a seditious handbill Cooper had printed, around Point township, and across the Susquehanna at Sunbury. In September 1799, William Cobbett printed extracts from this handbill, asserting that: "Dr Priestley has taken great pains to circulate this address, has travelled through the country for the purpose, and is in fact the patron of it." He challenged Priestley to "clear himself of the accusation" or face prosecution." Barely a month later, in November and December 1799, Priestley stepped forward in his own defence, with his Letters to the inhabitants of Northumberland. Priestley's son, William, now living in Philadelphia, was increasingly embarrassed by his father's actions. He confronted his father, expressing John and Benjamin Vaughan's unease, his own wife's concerns about Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley's dietary care, and his own concerns at the closeness of Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley and Thomas Cooper's relationship, and their adverse influence on Dr Priestley; but this only led to a further estrangement between William and his sister-in-law. When, a while later, Priestley's household suffered a bout of food poisoning, perhaps from milk sickness or a bacterial infection, Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley, falsely accused William of having poisoned the family's flour. Although this allegation has attracted the attention of some modern historians, it is believed to be without foundation. Priestley continued the educational projects that had always been important to him, helping to establish the "Northumberland Academy" and donating his library to the fledgling institution. He exchanged letters regarding the proper structure of a university with Thomas Jefferson, who used this advice when founding the University of Virginia. Jefferson and Priestley became close, and when the latter had completed his General History of the Christian Church, he dedicated it to President Jefferson, writing that "it is now only that I can say I see nothing to fear from the hand of power, the government under which I live being for the first time truly favourable to me." Priestley tried to continue his scientific investigations in America with the support of the American Philosophical Society, to which he had been previously elected a member in 1785. He was hampered by lack of news from Europe; unaware of the latest scientific developments, Priestley was no longer on the forefront of discovery. Although the majority of his publications focused on defending phlogiston theory, he also did some original work on spontaneous generation and dreams. Despite Priestley's reduced scientific output, his presence stimulated American interest in chemistry. By 1801, Priestley had become so ill that he could no longer write or experiment. He died on the morning of 6 February 1804, aged seventy and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Priestley's epitaph reads: > > Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. I will lay me down in peace and sleep till I awake in the morning of the resurrection. ## Legacy By the time he died in 1804, Priestley had been made a member of every major scientific society in the Western world and he had discovered numerous substances. The 19th-century French naturalist George Cuvier, in his eulogy of Priestley, praised his discoveries while at the same time lamenting his refusal to abandon phlogiston theory, calling him "the father of modern chemistry [who] never acknowledged his daughter". Priestley published more than 150 works on topics ranging from political philosophy to education to theology to natural philosophy. He led and inspired British radicals during the 1790s, paved the way for utilitarianism, and helped found Unitarianism. A wide variety of philosophers, scientists, and poets became associationists as a result of his redaction of David Hartley's Observations on Man, including Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer. Immanuel Kant praised Priestley in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), writing that he "knew how to combine his paradoxical teaching with the interests of religion". Indeed, it was Priestley's aim to "put the most 'advanced' Enlightenment ideas into the service of a rationalized though heterodox Christianity, under the guidance of the basic principles of scientific method". Considering the extent of Priestley's influence, relatively little scholarship has been devoted to him. In the early 20th century, Priestley was most often described as a conservative and dogmatic scientist who was nevertheless a political and religious reformer. In a historiographic review essay, historian of science Simon Schaffer describes the two dominant portraits of Priestley: the first depicts him as "a playful innocent" who stumbled across his discoveries; the second portrays him as innocent as well as "warped" for not understanding their implications better. Assessing Priestley's works as a whole has been difficult for scholars because of his wide-ranging interests. His scientific discoveries have usually been divorced from his theological and metaphysical publications to make an analysis of his life and writings easier, but this approach has been challenged recently by scholars such as John McEvoy and Robert Schofield. Although early Priestley scholarship claimed that his theological and metaphysical works were "distractions" and "obstacles" to his scientific work, scholarship published in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s maintained that Priestley's works constituted a unified theory. However, as Schaffer explains, no convincing synthesis of his work has yet been expounded. More recently, in 2001, historian of science Dan Eshet has argued that efforts to create a "synoptic view" have resulted only in a rationalisation of the contradictions in Priestley's thought, because they have been "organized around philosophical categories" and have "separate[d] the producers of scientific ideas from any social conflict". Priestley has been remembered by the towns in which he served as a reforming educator and minister and by the scientific organisations he influenced. Two educational institutions have been named in his honour—Priestley College in Warrington and Joseph Priestley College in Leeds (now part of Leeds City College)—and an asteroid, 5577 Priestley, discovered in 1986 by Duncan Waldron. In Birstall, the Leeds City Square, and in Birmingham, he is memorialised through statues, and plaques commemorating him have been posted in Birmingham, Calne and Warrington. The main undergraduate chemistry laboratories at the University of Leeds were refurbished as part of a £4m refurbishment plan in 2006 and renamed as the Priestley Laboratories in his honour as a prominent chemist from Leeds. In 2016 the University of Huddersfield renamed the building housing its Applied Sciences department as the Joseph Priestley Building, as part of an effort to rename all campus buildings after prominent local figures. Since 1952 Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, has presented the Priestley Award to a "distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity". Priestley's work is recognised by a National Historic Chemical Landmark designation for his discovery of oxygen, made on 1 August 1994, at the Priestley House in Northumberland, Penn., by the American Chemical Society. Similar recognition was made on 7 August 2000, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, England. The ACS also awards their highest honour, the Priestley Medal, in his name. Several of his descendants became physicians, including the noted American surgeon James Taggart Priestley II of the Mayo Clinic. ## Archives Papers of Joseph Priestley are held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. ## Selected works - The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761) - A Chart of Biography (1765) - Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765) - The History and Present State of Electricity (1767) - Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) - A New Chart of History (1769) - Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74) - Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–77) - Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) - The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777) - Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780) - An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) - Lectures on History and General Policy (1788) - Theological Repository (1770–73, 1784–88) ## See also - List of independent discoveries - List of liberal theorists - Timeline of hydrogen technologies - Bibliography of Benjamin Franklin — Many works on Franklin make reference to Priestley
25,245,866	The Whistleblower	1,173,362,022	2010 Canadian-German thriller film directed by Larysa Kondracki	[ "2010 biographical drama films", "2010 crime drama films", "2010 directorial debut films", "2010 films", "2010 thriller films", "2010s Canadian films", "2010s English-language films", "2010s feminist films", "Canadian biographical drama films", "Canadian crime drama films", "Canadian thriller films", "Crime films based on actual events", "Drama films based on actual events", "English-language Canadian films", "English-language German films", "English-language biographical drama films", "Films about human trafficking", "Films about the United Nations", "Films about whistleblowing", "Films set in Sarajevo", "Films shot in Romania", "Human trafficking in Bosnia and Herzegovina", "Thriller films based on actual events", "Voltage Pictures films" ]	The Whistleblower is a 2010 Canadian biographical drama film directed by Larysa Kondracki and starring Rachel Weisz. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan wrote the screenplay, which was inspired by the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who was recruited as a United Nations peacekeeper for DynCorp International in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999. While there, she discovered a Bosnian sex trafficking ring serving and facilitated by DynCorp employees, with international peacekeepers looking the other way. Bolkovac was fired and forced out of the country after attempting to shut down the ring. She took the story to BBC News in the UK and won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against DynCorp. Kondracki wanted her debut film to concern human trafficking, and she encountered Bolkovac's story in college. She and Kirwan struggled to obtain financial support for the project. Eight years after Kondracki decided to produce the film, she secured funding and cast Weisz in the lead role. The Whistleblower— a co-production of Canada, Germany, and the United States— was filmed in Romania from October to December 2009. The Whistleblower premiered on 13 September 2010 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Samuel Goldwyn Films distributed the film in theaters in the United States. The film was advertised as a fictionalization of events occurring during the late 1990s. Kondracki said that the facts are broadly accurate, but some details were omitted for the film; for example, a three-week "breaking-in" period for trafficking victims was not shown. The film received mixed reviews. The performances by Weisz and her co-stars were praised, but the intense violence depicted in several scenes was debated by critics, with some calling it exploitative. Kondracki and Weisz responded that what happened in Bosnia had been toned down for the film. The Whistleblower received several awards and nominations, including three nominations at the 2012 Genie Awards. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosted a screening of the film and promised action would be taken to prevent further instances of human trafficking. The Guardian reported that other UN officials attempted to downplay the events depicted and that initiatives against trafficking in Bosnia were aborted. ## Plot Kathryn Bolkovac is a police officer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who accepts an offer to work with the United Nations International Police in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina for a private contractor called Democra Security (a thinly-veiled allusion to DynCorp International). After successfully advocating for a Muslim woman who experienced domestic abuse, Kathryn is appointed head of the department of gender affairs. Raya, a young Ukrainian woman, and her friend Luba are sold to a Bosnian sex-trafficking ring by a relative. Raya escapes with Irka, another girl forced into prostitution, and they are sent to a women's shelter for victims of human trafficking. While investigating their case, Kathryn uncovers a large-scale sexual slavery ring utilized by international personnel (including Americans). Kathryn persuades Raya and Irka to testify against their traffickers in court, guaranteeing their safety; however, an indifferent UN official drops Irka at the border between Bosnia and Serbia when she cannot produce a passport. Although rescued from the woods by Kathryn, Irka is too afraid to proceed with the trial. Meanwhile, Raya is recaptured by the traffickers after a corrupt peacekeeper tips them off. To deter other girls from running away and talking to the authorities, the traffickers make an example out of Raya by brutally raping her with a metal pipe in front of them. When she brings the scandal to the attention of the UN, Kathryn discovers that it has been covered up to protect lucrative defense and security contracts. However, she finds allies in her investigation: Madeleine Rees, head of the Human Rights Commission, and internal-affairs specialist Peter Ward. As her investigation continues, Kathryn is met with threats on her answering machine and dead ends when highers-up override and close all the Internal Affairs cases. Still, she continues to try to find Raya, and finally locates her on a raid, but Raya refuses to come with her. A few days later, Raya is found dead, having been shot in the head by one of the traffickers, Ivan. Kathryn sends an email to fifty senior mission personnel detailing her findings; she is then fired from her job. One night, Kathryn enters DynCorp to gather evidence of the sex trafficking but is cornered by Ward and another employee. She is forced to hand the evidence to Ward, but it turns out to be a distraction planned by both him and Kathryn. They succeed in escaping before Kathryn is deported from the country where she brings her evidence to BBC News in the United Kingdom. The final credits note that after Kathryn's departure, a number of peacekeepers were sent home (although none faced criminal charges because of immunity laws), and the U.S. continues doing business with private contractors like Democra Security (including billion-dollar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan). ## Cast - Rachel Weisz as Kathryn Bolkovac - David Strathairn as Peter Ward - Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Jan van der Velde - Anna Anissimova as Zoe - Roxana Condurache as Raya - Monica Bellucci as Laura Leviani - Vanessa Redgrave as Madeleine Rees - Paula Schramm as Luba - Alexandru Potocean as Viko - William Hope as Blakely - Rayisa Kondracki as Irka - Jeanette Hain as Halyna - Benedict Cumberbatch as Nick Kaufman - David Hewlett as Fred Murray - Coca Bloos as Milena - Luke Treadaway as Jim Higgins - Liam Cunningham as Bill Hynes - Pilou Asbæk as Bas ## Production ### Writing The Whistleblower is based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, an American police officer who in 1999 was assigned to serve as a peacekeeper with the United Nations in post-war Bosnia. While there, she reportedly discovered a sex-trafficking ring which served and was facilitated by other peacekeepers. Bolkovac was fired after trying to investigate the ring, but later won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. Director Larysa Kondracki and co-screenwriter Eilis Kirwan learned of Bolkovac's story while attending Columbia University, eight years before the film's production. Kondracki subsequently devoted significant time to research human trafficking and the sex trade. After Bolkovac sold her the film rights for \$100, she resolved to adapt the story for the screen. Financing for the project was initially difficult to secure, although the situation improved after Rachel Weisz was cast as Bolkovac. "I was young and naïve," Kondracki said of her initial attempts to secure funding. "I thought: 'Of course they're going to make my film. It's brilliant!'" The Whistleblower was described as a "fictionalized dramatic presentation" of a late-1990s scandal. The producers based it on Bolkovac's experiences, rather than on her memoir. Vanessa Redgrave played Madeleine Rees, a UN human-rights official ("one of the film's few heroic characters") who helps Bolkovac uncover the sex trade. Raya (Roxana Condurache) and Luba (Paula Schramm), two Ukrainian young women who are trafficked into Bosnia, are the primary representations of the trafficking victims encountered by Bolkovac. Neither is based on a particular person; they are composites of young women forced to work in Bosnian brothels. Kondracki's younger sister, Rayisa, also played a trafficking victim. For legal reasons the pseudonym "Democra Security" was used for DynCorp International, the organization whose employees reportedly sexually enslaved the women. Although the producers kept the film factual, they debated how much to include. Details on the bureaucracy were removed. Kondracki said, "It was too much information and, frankly, people were bored." Another concern was how much violence against the sex-trafficking victims should be depicted in the film. Kondracki chose to bluntly portray the inhumane treatment of the young women, which she described as accurate representations of what happened. This included a graphic scene in which Raya is raped with a metal pipe after her escape and recapture. Weisz thought the reality had been toned down, "In real life there were girls doing this as young as 8 years old." Kondracki agreed, saying that she had lightened the events depicted out of fear that viewers would "tune it out": > We show what is just about permissible to show. We couldn't possibly include the three-week desensitisation period, when they burn the girls in particular places. We couldn't really capture the hopelessness of life these women are subjected to. Kondracki said that her goal for The Whistleblower was "information and exposure" on human trafficking. She said, "No one is putting pressure on governments to stop it, and there is no accountability. It's laziness." ### Filming The Whistleblower is a Canadian–German co-production. Weisz received the script from producer Amy Kaufman in 2007. Since she was pregnant with her son at the time, she initially turned down the offer. She said the story haunted her, and she later contacted Kaufman to ask if the project was still available. She signed on in August 2009, and shooting began in October 2009. Bolkovac visited the set in Bucharest, Romania, where most of the movie was filmed. Weisz said that she made a point to spend "every waking moment" with her to accurately portray her. Weisz and Bolkovac are dissimilar in appearance: the former is dark-haired and slight, and the latter is "blond and much more voluptuous" and "much taller". As a result, the actress focused on emulating Bolkovac's accent and determination. Bolkovac later said she commended the choice to portray her and appreciated Weisz's efforts to be accurate. Filming took around six weeks, relatively short for a thriller; Weisz said most take about three months to complete. Producers used hand-held cameras and had a lower budget than usual for the genre. Location filming took place in Eastern Europe, predominantly Romania. Scenes set in UN buildings were filmed in Toronto. Most outdoor scenes are set at night; daytime shots often appear bleak, gray and overcast. This, coupled with a grainy texture, helped create a documentary feel. Weisz had to separate herself emotionally from the atrocities depicted in the film. "It's something you learn," she said. "It's true between 'action' and 'cut,' and after 'cut' it's just not true anymore." Bolkovac echoed Weisz's sentiments, adding that distancing oneself emotionally is a necessity when working on a police force. However, the producers wanted the audience to be affected by scenes depicting brutal treatment of the women forced into prostitution, and the character of Raya was created to give a human face to the victims. Much of the rape scene was cut after its brutality caused a viewer to faint during the film's first screening in Toronto. Weisz responded: > I completely understand. It would be just too harrowing for people to watch. What actually happened was so much worse. I mean the stories I could tell you from the first person who encountered these young women. That was the "light" version if you can believe that. But it isn't a documentary, you don't want to destroy people. You just want to illuminate something that actually happened that was a hundred times worse. ## Themes The Whistleblower focuses on sexual slavery, human trafficking, and corruption. Kondracki wanted her first project to concern sex trafficking but was unsure how to create a moving, original plot. Her mother was born in Ukraine, and she was aware of what she described as the country's "epidemic" of trafficking. Victor Malarek's book The Natashas inspired her to produce a film on the subject. She said of her initiative being a challenge, "No one wants to watch a film of an enslaved girl being raped for two hours." Bolkovac's experiences gave Kondracki a framework for the film and added the themes of corruption and wide-scale cover-ups. Film critic Rex Reed said that the abuse of power featured prominently in The Whistleblower; a number of government officials participate in the sex trade or turn a blind eye to it (including peacekeepers, UN members and mercenaries). Wallace Baine of the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote that these aspects' portrayal made the movie "slippery and true-to-life". She said, "There are clear and vivid monsters in this film, but there are also those existing in the shades-of-gray middle, nice-enough guys tolerating crimes of unspeakable barbarity." Justice, another prominent theme, does not materialize by the end. The sex trafficking victim Raya is killed, and none of the peacekeepers who participated in the trafficking are prosecuted (although several are sent home). According to Baine, viewers are left with the impression that "the worst violence in Bolkovac's story was the violence done to justice". Bolkovac is portrayed as imperfect—a "noble but screwed up" individual. In the film (which roughly mirrors her real life), her personal life is in disarray. She has lost custody of her children to her ex-husband and goes to Bosnia to earn money to move closer to them. While there, she has an affair with a fellow peacekeeper. Kondracki wanted to promote the idea of an average protagonist who acted against injustice while her peers looked the other way. Her flaws are offset by her determination to fight the sex trade, and reviewers found these aspects instrumental in making her a three-dimensional character. Weisz compared Bolkovac's story of "one lone woman fighting injustice" to that of David and Goliath, her favorite film genre. In the film, as in real life, Bolkovac begins by investigating a case of a kidnapped girl. As the story unfolds, she discovers a wide-ranging web of corruption and faces growing obstacles. The sex trade is facilitated by a large, influential organization. When she tries to report her findings to the UN and local officials, she receives threats and is "shunned by coworkers and thwarted by higher-ups". Weisz explained that she liked the idea of an ordinary person doing something extraordinary. She said, "I love that kind of thriller, the ordinary person who, because of their character, it's their character that leads them." ## Release The Whistleblower premiered on 13 September 2010, at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. Screenings were also held at film festivals in North America, including the 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York. A screening was held for The Whistleblower in Bosnia-Herzegovina for the first time in March 2014. The film was shown in Sarajevo and Mostar, with Kathryn Bolkovac being invited to speak to the Bosnian audience. ### Box office Samuel Goldwyn Films purchased rights to distribute the film in the United States. The film had a limited release starting on 5 August 2011. It initially screened in seven theaters and expanded to a maximum of 70 theaters before drawing down. Its theatrical run lasted 12 weeks, during which it grossed \$1.1 million. ### Critical response At the time of its theatrical release, The Whistleblower received mixed reviews. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 75% based on 120 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10; the website's critics consensus reads: "Rachel Weisz puts on a compelling smoldering act though the film suffers from a literal-minded approach to the material." Another aggregator, Metacritic, surveyed 31 critics and assessed 17 reviews as positive, 10 as mixed, and four as negative. Based on the reviews, it gave the film a score of 59 out of 100, which it said indicated "mixed or average reviews". The Guardian's Ed Vulliamy called The Whistleblower "the most searing drama-documentary of recent years", and The Huffington Post'''s Marshall Fine said the story was "dark, grim, and harrowing". Doris Toumarkine of Film Journal International called the movie a "well-told but troubling story impressively wrapped for audiences who show up in theatres for do-good cinema of a high order". Leigh Paatsch of News.com.au said, "it is Bolkovac's ferocious will to right so many wrongs (expertly channelled by Weisz) that keeps you glued to the screen". Stephenie Foster of The Huffington Post gave the film a highly-favorable review: > It's a compelling and maddening story, and reflects the complexity of how international institutions function and interact and the difficulty of accountability in a situation where people have immunity for their actions. But, it's also a story of gutsy people in tough and compromising situations making decisions that aren't in their personal best interest. An equally-positive review appeared in The Balkan Chronicle: > Kondracki shows great promise with her direction. Pacing is tight for the most part, and the film feels well polished...The film is unsatisfying only in its conclusion. This is not the fault of the filmmakers who choose to stay true to Bolkovac's story. No one was ever brought to justice. A few of men were fired and sent home, but everyone had diplomatic immunity so no one ever faced criminal charges. Two million people worldwide are still being trafficked. Allison Willmore of The A.V. Club gave The Whistleblower a negative review, criticizing the producers for making its antagonists one-dimensional: "There's no hint of the erosion of morality that led to this point." Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor called the film's pace "frustratingly uneven", but commended the actors' performances: Condurache "makes Raya's fears tremblingly palpable". Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that the film "tells a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief. Its conclusion—that in the moral quagmire of war and its aftermath, human trafficking and corruption are collateral damage—is unutterably depressing." He praised Weisz's performance as "the strongest element" of the production. The actors' performances received overall praise from reviewers. Camerin Courtney of Christianity Today was dismayed that the main character engaged in a sexual relationship with a married man, but Weisz "is wonderful as Bolkovac, a no-nonsense civil servant who is stunned at what she walks into" while "Vanessa Redgrave is a needed touch of strength and warmth as her mentor Madeleine, and David Strathairn is at his government thriller best as Peter Ward, an Internal Affairs agent. Raya is heart-breaking as the young victim." Steve Rea of The Post and Courier praised Redgrave's acting in the supporting role of Madeleine Rees as "forceful, elegant, precise". Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Weisz gives a psychologically astute performance as a woman who can't leave things alone." Rex Reed of The Observer called her "superb" in the lead role. Kondracki's graphic depiction of violence was controversial. Bob Mondello of NPR called it "sobering", but felt the scenes detracted from the film and should have been more subtle. Ryan Rojas of Tonight at the Movies described the film as "gritty and merciless", and cautioned that certain scenes might offend some viewers: "While the scenes do work as reinforcing the horror of the events, it really just made it obvious that the way that the director was going to win over fans was to simply shock them into numbness, as scenes showing rape, mutilation, and murder are shown in very disturbing fashion." Christian Hamaker of Crosswalk.com wrote: > The film is almost unremittingly grim, which may seem appropriate for such a horrifying subject, but the effect on the viewer is that of being struck repeatedly with a sledgehammer. Sex trafficking is bad. Really bad! Did you get that, or do you need to watch a few more scenes of physical and sexual brutality? Don't worry: The Whistleblower has those aplenty. It takes brutality into the realm of gratuitousness, all in the name of showing the horrors of the issue it's addressing. A review in The Balkan Chronicle, an Internet-based newspaper reporting from the Balkans, disagreed with the opinion that the violence was unnecessarily explicit or sensationalized: "Sugarcoating it would do no one any good. Grisly authenticity is one of the film's greatest aspects." Later, when Bolkovac spoke at a screening of the film in Bosnia, it was reported that her message was well-received and discussion about the events that occurred in the late 1990s "did not fail to engage and provoke". ### Home media 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD on 15 January 2012. The movie was reportedly more successful on Blu-ray Disc than in theatres, and film critic Lynette Porter said that the subject's serious nature made it better suited for television. ### Accolades ## Aftermath Consistent with Bolkovac's account, The Whistleblower portrays DynCorp International employees as participants in the postwar Bosnian sex trade with the UN turning a blind eye. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosted a screening of the film and promised action would be taken to prevent further instances of human trafficking. Bolkovac responded, "Unfortunately, the widespread horror is already there. This is not going to be simple or a quick fix." Kondracki added that while she wanted to be optimistic and hoped that the screening would "lead to genuine discussion and thought about the UN's involvement in sex trafficking and other crimes", she worried that it might not have the desired lasting impact: "I know we are going to hear a lot about what has been done since the time depicted in this film, but rhetoric only goes so far. The situation has escalated." Following the theatrical release of The Whistleblower, The Guardian'' reported that other UN officials attempted to downplay the events depicted and that initiatives against trafficking in Bosnia were aborted. DynCorp International spokesperson Ashley Burke said: > I haven't seen the movie so I can't comment on its content, but I can tell you that, when we contacted the film's distributor to learn more about the movie, we were informed that the film 'is a fictionalized dramatic presentation' that while inspired by Ms. Bolkovac's experiences, is not based on her book. There was no threatened legal action taken to ensure they did not use the company's name in the film.
1,774	Apollo 9	1,172,327,693	3rd crewed mission of the Apollo space program	[ "1969 in the United States", "Apollo 9", "Apollo program missions", "David Scott", "Extravehicular activity", "Human spaceflights", "James McDivitt", "March 1969 events", "Rusty Schweickart", "Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets", "Spacecraft launched in 1969", "Spacecraft which reentered in 1969" ]	Apollo 9 (March 3–13, 1969) was the third human spaceflight in NASA's Apollo program. Flown in low Earth orbit, it was the second crewed Apollo mission that the United States launched via a Saturn V rocket, and was the first flight of the full Apollo spacecraft: the command and service module (CSM) with the Lunar Module (LM). The mission was flown to qualify the LM for lunar orbit operations in preparation for the first Moon landing by demonstrating its descent and ascent propulsion systems, showing that its crew could fly it independently, then rendezvous and dock with the CSM again, as would be required for the first crewed lunar landing. Other objectives of the flight included firing the LM descent engine to propel the spacecraft stack as a backup mode (as would be required on the Apollo 13 mission), and use of the portable life support system backpack outside the LM cabin. The three-man crew consisted of Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart. During the ten-day mission, they tested systems and procedures critical to landing on the Moon, including the LM engines, backpack life support systems, navigation systems and docking maneuvers. After launching on March 3, 1969, the crew performed the first crewed flight of a lunar module, the first docking and extraction of the same, one two-person spacewalk (EVA), and the second docking of two crewed spacecraft—two months after the Soviets performed a spacewalk crew transfer between Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5. The mission concluded on March 13 and was a complete success. It proved the LM worthy of crewed spaceflight, setting the stage for the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, Apollo 10, before the ultimate goal, landing on the Moon. ## Mission background In April 1966, McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart were selected by Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton as the second Apollo crew. Their initial job was as backup to the first Apollo crew to be chosen, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, for the first crewed Earth orbital test flight of the block I command and service module, designated AS-204. Delays in the block I CSM development pushed AS-204 into 1967. The revised plan had the McDivitt crew scheduled for the second crewed CSM, which was to rendezvous in Earth orbit with an uncrewed LM, launched separately. The third crewed mission, to be commanded by Frank Borman, was to be the first launch of a Saturn V with a crew. On January 27, 1967, Grissom's crew was conducting a launch-pad test for their planned February 21 mission, which they named Apollo 1, when a fire broke out in the cabin, killing all three men. A complete safety review of the Apollo program followed. During this time Apollo 5 took place, an uncrewed launch to test the first lunar module (LM-1). Under the new schedule, the first Apollo crewed mission to go into space would be Apollo 7, planned for October 1968. This mission, which was to test the block II command module, did not include a lunar module. In 1967, NASA had adopted a series of lettered missions leading up to the crewed lunar landing, the "G mission", completion of one being a prerequisite to the next. Apollo 7 would be the "C mission", but the "D mission" required testing of the crewed lunar module, which was running behind schedule and endangering John F. Kennedy's goal of Americans walking on the Moon and returning safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s. McDivitt's crew had been announced by NASA in November 1967 as prime crew for the D mission, lengthy testing of the command and lunar modules in Earth orbit. Seeking to keep Kennedy's goal on schedule, in August 1968, Apollo Program Manager George M. Low proposed that if Apollo 7 in October went well, Apollo 8 would go to lunar orbit without a LM. Until then, Apollo 8 was the D mission with Apollo 9 the "E mission", testing in medium Earth orbit. After NASA approved sending Apollo 8 to the Moon, while making Apollo 9 the D mission, Slayton offered McDivitt the opportunity to stay with Apollo 8 and thus go to lunar orbit. McDivitt turned it down on behalf of his crew, preferring to stay with the D mission, now Apollo 9. Apollo 7 went well, and the crews were switched. The crew swap also affected who would be the first astronauts to land on the Moon, for when the crews for Apollo 8 and 9 were swapped, so were the backup crews. Since the rule of thumb was for backup crews to fly as prime crew three missions later, this put Neil Armstrong's crew (Borman's backup) in position to make the first landing attempt on Apollo 11 instead of Pete Conrad's crew, who made the second landing on Apollo 12. ## Framework ### Crew and key Mission Control personnel McDivitt was in the Air Force; selected as a member of the second group of astronauts in 1962, he was command pilot of Gemini 4 (1965). Scott, also Air Force, was selected in the third astronaut group in 1963 and flew alongside Neil Armstrong in Gemini 8, on which the first spacecraft docking was performed. Schweickart, a civilian who had served in the Air Force and Massachusetts Air National Guard, was selected as a Group 3 astronaut but was not assigned to a Gemini mission and had no spaceflight experience. The backup crew consisted of Pete Conrad as commander, Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon Jr., and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean. This crew flew as prime on Apollo 12 in November 1969. The support crew for Apollo 9 consisted of Stuart A. Roosa, Jack R. Lousma, Edgar D. Mitchell and Alfred M. Worden. Lousma was not an original member of the Apollo 9 support crew, but was assigned after Fred W. Haise Jr. was moved to the position of backup lunar module pilot on Apollo 8—several astronauts were shifted in the wake of Michael Collins being removed from the Apollo 8 prime crew because of treatment for bone spurs. The flight directors were Gene Kranz, first shift, Gerry Griffin, second shift and Pete Frank, third shift. Capsule communicators were Conrad, Gordon, Bean, Worden, Roosa and Ronald Evans. ### Mission insignia The circular patch shows a drawing of a Saturn V rocket with the letters USA on it. To its right, an Apollo CSM is shown next to a LM, with the CSM's nose pointed at the "front door" of the LM rather than at its top docking port. The CSM is trailing rocket fire in a circle. The crew's names are along the top edge of the circle, with APOLLO IX at the bottom. The "D" in McDivitt's name is filled with red to mark that this was the "D mission" in the alphabetic sequence of Apollo missions. The patch was designed by Allen Stevens of Rockwell International. ## Planning and training Apollo 9's main purpose was to qualify the LM for crewed lunar flight, demonstrating, among other things, that it could perform the maneuvers in space that would be needed for a lunar landing, including docking with the CSM. Colin Burgess and Francis French, in their book about the Apollo Program, deemed McDivitt's crew among the best trained ever—they had worked together since January 1966, at first as backups for Apollo 1, and they always had the assignment of being the first to fly the LM. Flight Director Gene Kranz deemed the Apollo 9 crew the best prepared for their mission, and felt Scott was an extremely knowledgeable CMP. Crew members underwent some 1,800 hours of mission-specific training, about seven hours for every hour they would spend in flight. Their training even started on the day before the Apollo 1 fire, in the very first Block II spacecraft in which they were originally intended to fly. They took part in the vehicle checkouts for the CSM at North American Rockwell's facility in Downey, California, and for the LM at Grumman's plant in Bethpage, New York. They also participated in testing of the modules at the launch site. Among the types of the training which the crew underwent were simulations of zero-G, both underwater and in the Vomit Comet. During these exercises, they practiced for the planned extravehicular activities (EVAs). They traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for training on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) at MIT. The crew studied the sky at the Morehead Planetarium and at the Griffith Planetarium, especially focusing on the 37 stars used by the AGC. They each spent more than 300 hours in the CM and LM simulators at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and at Houston, some involving live participation by Mission Control. Additional time was spent in simulators in other locations. The first mission to use the CSM, the LM and a Saturn V, Apollo 9 allowed the launch preparations team at KSC its first opportunity to simulate the launch of a lunar landing mission. The LM arrived from Grumman in June 1968 and was subjected to extensive testing including in the altitude chamber, simulating space conditions. As this occurred, other technicians assembled the Saturn V inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). The CM and SM arrived in October, but even the experienced KSC team from North American had trouble joining them together. When the lander was done with the altitude chamber, the CSM took its place, letting the LM be available for installation of equipment such as rendezvous radar and antennas. There were no lengthy delays, and on January 3, 1969, the launch vehicle was taken out of the VAB and moved to Launch Complex 39A by crawler. Flight readiness reviews for the CM, the LM, and the Saturn V were held and passed in the following weeks. ## Hardware ### Launch vehicle The Saturn V (AS-504) used on Apollo 9 was the fourth to be flown, the second to carry astronauts to space, and the first to bear a lunar module. Although similar in configuration to the Saturn V used on Apollo 8, several changes were made. The inner core of the F-1 engine chamber in the first (S-IC) stage was removed, thus saving weight and allowing for a slight increase in specific impulse. Weight was also saved by replacing the skins of the liquid oxygen tanks with lighter ones, and by providing lighter versions of other components. Efficiency was increased in the S-II second stage with uprated J-2 engines, and through a closed-loop propellant utilization system rather than Apollo 8's open-loop system. Of the 3,250 pounds (1,470 kg) weight reduction in the second stage, about half came from a 16 percent reduction in the thickness of the tank side walls. ### Spacecraft, equipment and call signs Apollo 9 used CSM-104, the third Block II CSM to be flown with astronauts aboard. Apollo 8, lacking a lunar module, did not have docking equipment; Apollo 9 flew the probe-and-drogue assembly used for docking along with other equipment added near the forward hatch of the CM; this allowed for rigid docking of the two craft, and for internal transfer between CM and LM. Had the switch in missions between Apollo 8 and 9 not occurred, the Earth-orbit mission would have flown CSM-103, which flew on Apollo 8. The Earth-orbit mission was originally supposed to use LM-2 as its lunar module, but the crew found numerous flaws in it, many associated with it being the first flight-ready lunar module off Grumman's production line. The delay occasioned by the switch in missions allowed LM-3 to be available, a machine the crew found far superior. Neither LM-2 nor LM-3 could have been sent to the Moon as both were too heavy; Grumman's weight reduction program for the LMs only became fully effective with LM-5, designated for Apollo 11. Small cracks in LM-3's aluminum alloy structure due to stresses such as the insertion of a rivet proved an ongoing issue; Grumman's engineers continued working to fix them until the LM had to be mounted on the Saturn V in December 1968, where it was housed inside the Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter, numbered as SLA-11A. LM-2 never flew in space and is in the National Air and Space Museum. The Apollo astronauts were provided with early versions of the Sony Walkman, portable cassette recorders intended to allow them to make observations during the mission. The Apollo 9 crew was the first to be allowed to bring music mixtapes, one each, that could be played in that device. McDivitt and Scott preferred easy listening and country music; Schweickart's cassette tape of classical music went missing until the ninth day of the ten-day mission, when it was presented to him by Scott. After the Gemini 3 craft was dubbed Molly Brown by Grissom, NASA forbade naming spacecraft. The fact that during the Apollo 9 mission, the CSM and LM would separate and need different call signs caused the Apollo 9 astronauts to push for a change. In simulations, they began to refer to the CSM as "Gumdrop", a name inspired by the CM's appearance while in the blue protective wrapping in which it was transported from the manufacturer, and the LM as "Spider", inspired by the LM's appearance with landing legs deployed. Personnel in NASA public relations thought the names were too informal, but the call signs ultimately gained official sanction. NASA required more formal call signs for future missions, starting with Apollo 11. ### Life Support System backpack The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) backpack flew for the first time on Apollo 9, used by Schweickart during his EVA. This included the Portable Life Support System (PLSS), providing oxygen to the astronaut and water for the Liquid Cooling Garment (LCG), which helped prevent overheating during extravehicular activity. Also present was the Oxygen Purge System (OPS), the "bedroll" atop the backpack, which could provide oxygen for up to roughly an hour if the PLSS failed. A more advanced version of the EMU was used for the lunar landing on Apollo 11. During his stand-up EVA, Scott did not wear a PLSS, but was connected to the CM's life support systems through an umbilical, utilizing a Pressure Control Valve (PCV). This device had been created in 1967 to allow for stand-up EVAs from the hatches of the LM or CM, or for brief ventures outside. It was later used by Scott for his lunar surface stand-up EVA on Apollo 15, and for the deep-space EVAs by the command module pilots of the final three Apollo flights. ## Mission highlights ### First through fifth days (March 3–7) Originally scheduled to launch on February 28, 1969, the liftoff of Apollo 9 was postponed because all three astronauts had colds, and NASA did not want to risk that the mission might be affected. Around-the-clock labor shifts were required to keep the spacecraft in readiness; the delay cost \$500,000. The rocket launched from KSC at 11:00:00 EST (16:00:00 GMT) on March 3. This was well within the launch window, which would have remained open for another three and a quarter hours. Present in the firing control room was Vice President Spiro Agnew on behalf of the new Nixon administration. McDivitt reported a smooth ride during the launch, although there was some vibration and the astronauts were surprised to be pushed forward when the Saturn V's first stage stopped firing, before its second stage took over, when they were pushed back into their couches. Each of the first two stages slightly underperformed; a deficiency made up, more or less, by the S-IVB third stage. Once the third stage cut out at 00:11:04.7 into the mission, Apollo 9 had entered a parking orbit of 102.3 by 103.9 miles (164.6 by 167.2 km). The crew began their first major orbital task with the separation of the CSM from the S-IVB at 02:41:16 into the mission, seeking to turn around and then dock with the LM, which was on the end of the S-IVB, after which the combined spacecraft would separate from the rocket. If it was not possible to make such a docking, the lunar landing could not take place. It was Scott's responsibility to fly the CSM, which he did to a successful docking, as the probe-and-drogue docking assembly worked properly. After McDivitt and Schweickart inspected the tunnel connecting the CM and LM, the assembled spacecraft separated from the S-IVB. The next task was to demonstrate that two docked spacecraft could be maneuvered by one engine. The five-second burn took place at 05:59.01.1 into the mission, accomplished with the SM's Service Propulsion System (SPS), after which Scott excitedly reported the LM was still in place. Thereafter, the S-IVB was fired again, and the stage was sent into solar orbit. From 09:00:00 to 19:30:00, a sleep period was scheduled. The astronauts slept well, but complained of being woken by non-English transmissions. Scott theorized that they were possibly in Chinese. The highlight of the second day in orbit (March 4) was three SPS burns. The initial burn, at 22:12:04.1, lasted 110 seconds, and including swiveling or "gimbaling" the engine to test whether the autopilot could dampen the induced oscillations, which it did within five seconds. Two more SPS burns followed, lightening the SM's fuel load. The spacecraft and engine passed every test, sometimes proving more robust than expected. The performance of the CSM in remaining stable while the engine was being gimbaled would in 1972 help cause McDivitt, by then manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program, to approve the continuation of Apollo 16 when its CSM was experiencing an unstable gimbal after separation from its LM in lunar orbit. The flight plan for the third day in space was to have the commander and lunar module pilot enter the LM to check out its systems and use its descent engine to move the entire spacecraft. The descent engine was the backup to the SPS; the ability to use it in this manner would prove critical on Apollo 13. The flight plan was thrown into question when Schweickart, suffering from space adaptation sickness, vomited, while McDivitt felt queasy as well. They had been avoiding sudden physical motions, but the contortion-like maneuvers to don their space suits for the LM checkout caused them to feel ill. The experience would teach the doctors enough about the sickness to have the astronauts avoid it on the lunar landings, but at the time Schweickart feared his vomiting might endanger Kennedy's goal. They were well enough to continue with the day's plan, and entered the LM, thus transferring between vehicles for the first time in the US space program, and making the first ever transfer without needing to spacewalk, as Soviet cosmonauts had. The hatches were then closed, though the modules remained docked, showing that Spider's communications and life support systems would work in isolation from those of Gumdrop. On command, the landing legs sprang into the position they would assume for landing on the Moon. In the LM, Schweickart vomited again, causing McDivitt to request a private channel to the doctors in Houston. The first episode had not been reported to the ground because of its brief nature, and when the media learned what had happened to Schweickart, there were "repercussions and a spate of unfriendly stories". They finished the LM checkout, including the successful firing of the descent engine, and returned to Scott in Gumdrop. The burn lasted 367 seconds and simulated the throttle pattern to be used during the landing on the Moon. After they returned, a fifth firing of the SPS was made, designed to circularize Apollo 9's orbit in preparation for the rendezvous. This took place at 54:26:12.3, raising the craft's orbit to 142 by 149 miles (229 by 240 km). The fourth day's program (March 6) was for Schweickart to exit the hatch on the LM and make his way along the outside of the spacecraft to the CM's hatch, where Scott would stand by to assist, demonstrating that this could be done in the event of an emergency. Schweickart was to wear the life support backpack, or PLSS, to be worn on the lunar surface EVAs. This was the only EVA scheduled before the lunar landing, and thus the only opportunity to test the PLSS in space. McDivitt initially canceled the EVA due to Schweickart's condition, but with the lunar module pilot feeling better, decided to allow him to exit the LM, and once he was there, to move around the LM's exterior using handholds. Scott stood in the CM's hatch; both men photographed each other and retrieved experiments from the exterior of their vehicles. Schweickart found moving around easier than it had been in simulations; both he and Scott were confident that Schweickart could have completed the exterior transfer if called upon to do so, but considered it unnecessary. During the EVA, Schweickart used the call sign "Red Rover", a nod to the color of his hair. On March 7, the fifth day, came "the key event of the entire mission: the separation and rendezvous of the lunar module and the command module". The lunar module lacked the capability to return the astronauts to Earth; this was the first time space travelers had flown in a vehicle that could not take them home. McDivitt and Schweickart entered the LM early, having obtained permission to do so without wearing their helmets and gloves, making it easier to set up the LM. When Scott in Gumdrop pushed the button to release the LM, it initially hung on the latches at the end of the docking probe, but he hit the button again and Spider was released. After spending about 45 minutes near Gumdrop, Spider went into a slightly higher orbit, meaning that over time, the two craft would separate, with Gumdrop ahead. Over the next hours, McDivitt fired the LM's descent engine at several throttle settings; by the end of the day the LM was thoroughly test-flown. At a distance of 115 miles (185 km), Spider fired to lower its orbit and thus begin to catch up with Gumdrop, a process that would take over two hours, and the descent stage was jettisoned. The approach and rendezvous were conducted as near as possible to what was planned for the lunar missions. To demonstrate that rendezvous could be performed by either craft, Spider was the active party during the maneuver. McDivitt brought Spider close to Gumdrop, then maneuvered the LM to show each side to Scott, allowing him to inspect for any damage. Then, McDivitt docked the craft. Due to glare from the Sun, he had trouble doing this and Scott guided him in. During the later missions, the job of docking the two spacecraft in lunar orbit would fall to the command module pilot. After McDivitt and Schweickart returned to Gumdrop, Spider was jettisoned, its engine fired to fuel depletion remotely by Mission Control as part of further testing of the engine, simulating an ascent stage's climb from the lunar surface. This raised Spider to an orbit with apogee of over 3,700 nautical miles (6,900 km; 4,300 mi). The only major lunar module system not fully tested was the landing radar, as this could not be done in Earth orbit. ### Sixth through eleventh days (March 8–13) Apollo 9 was to remain in space for about ten days to check how the CSM would perform over the period of time required for a lunar mission. Most major events had been scheduled for the first days so that they would be accomplished if the flight needed to be ended early. The remaining days in orbit were to be conducted at a more leisurely pace. With the main goals of the mission accomplished, the hatch window was used for special photography of Earth, using four identical Hasselblad cameras, coupled together and using film sensitive to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Such photography allowed different features of the Earth's surface to appear, for example, tracking of water pollution as it exits mouths of rivers into the sea, and the highlighting of agricultural areas using infrared. The camera system was a prototype, and would pave the way for the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, predecessor to the Landsat series. The photography was successful, as the ample time in orbit meant the crew could wait to allow cloud cover to pass, and would inform Skylab's mission planning. Scott used a sextant to track landmarks on the Earth, and turned the instrument to the skies to observe the planet Jupiter, practicing navigation techniques that were to be used on later missions. The crew was able to track the Pegasus 3 satellite (launched in 1965) as well as the ascent stage of Spider. The sixth burn of the SPS engine took place on the sixth day, though it was postponed one orbit as the reaction control system (RCS) thruster burn needed to settle the reactants in their tanks was not properly programmed. The SPS burn lowered the perigee of Apollo 9's orbit, allowing for improved RCS thruster deorbit capability as a backup to the SPS. Considerable testing of the CSM took place, but this was principally Scott's responsibility, allowing McDivitt and Schweickart leisure to observe the Earth; they alerted Scott if anything particularly noteworthy was upcoming, letting him leave his work for a moment to look at Earth too. The seventh burn of the SPS system took place on the eighth day, March 10; its purpose was again to aid RCS deorbit capability, as well as extending Gumdrop's orbital lifetime. It shifted the apogee of the orbit to the Southern Hemisphere, allowing for a longer free-fall time to entry when Apollo 9 returned to Earth. The burn was extended to allow for testing of the propellent gaging system, which had been behaving anomalously during earlier SPS burns. Once it was accomplished, Apollo 9's RCS thrusters could have returned it to Earth and still allowed it to land in the primary recovery zone had the SPS engine failed. The eighth and final SPS burn, to return the vehicle to Earth, was accomplished on March 13, less than an hour after the ten-day mark of the mission, after which the service module was jettisoned. The landing was delayed one orbit because of unfavorable weather in the primary landing zone some 220 nautical miles (410 km; 250 mi) ESE of Bermuda. Instead, Apollo 9 splashed down 160 nautical miles (300 km; 180 mi) east of the Bahamas, about 3 miles (4.8 km) from the recovery carrier, the USS Guadalcanal, after a mission lasting 10 days, 1 hour, 54 seconds. Apollo 9 was the last spacecraft to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean for a half century, until the Crew Dragon Demo-1 mission in 2019, and last crewed splashdown in the Atlantic until Inspiration4 in 2021. ## Hardware disposition The Apollo 9 Command Module Gumdrop (1969-018A) is on display at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. Gumdrop was formerly displayed at the Michigan Space and Science Center, Jackson, Michigan, until April 2004, when the center closed. The service module, jettisoned shortly after the deorbit burn, reentered the atmosphere and disintegrated. The ascent stage of LM-3 Spider (1969-018C) reentered on October 23, 1981. The descent stage of LM-3 Spider (1969-018D) reentered on March 22, 1969, landing in the Indian Ocean near North Africa. The S-IVB (1969-018B) was sent into solar orbit, with initial aphelion of 80,093,617 miles (128,898,182 km), perihelion of 44,832,845 miles (72,151,470 km) and orbital period of 245 days. It remains in solar orbit . ## Appraisal and aftermath As NASA Associate Administrator George Mueller put it, "Apollo 9 was as successful a flight as any of us could ever wish for, as well as being as successful as any of us have ever seen." Gene Kranz called Apollo 9 "sheer exhilaration". Apollo Program Director Samuel C. Phillips stated, "in every way, it has exceeded even our most optimistic expectations." Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stood in Mission Control as Spider and Gumdrop docked after their separate flights, and with the docking, according to Andrew Chaikin, "Apollo 9 had fulfilled all its major objectives. At that moment, Aldrin knew Apollo 10 would also succeed, and that he and Armstrong would attempt to land on the Moon. On March 24, NASA made it official." Although he might have been offered command of an Apollo lunar landing mission, McDivitt chose to leave the Astronaut Corps after Apollo 9, becoming manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program later in 1969. Scott was soon given another spaceflight assignment as backup commander of Apollo 12, and then was made mission commander of Apollo 15, landing on the Moon in 1971. Schweickart volunteered for medical investigation of his spacesickness, but was unable to shake its stigma, and was never again assigned to a prime crew. He took a leave of absence from NASA in 1977 that eventually became permanent. Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, stated that when it came to understanding spacesickness, Schweickart "paid the price for them all". Following the success of Apollo 9, NASA did not conduct the "E mission" (further testing in medium Earth orbit), and even considered skipping the "F mission", the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, going straight to the landing attempt. As the spacecraft designated for the first landing attempt were still being assembled, this was not done. NASA officials also felt that given the past difficulties with the LM, there was a need for a further test flight before the actual landing attempt, and that orbiting the Moon would give them the opportunity to study mass concentrations there, which had affected Apollo 8's orbit. According to French and Burgess in their study of the Apollo Program, "In any event, ... Apollo 9's success had ensured that the next Apollo mission would go back to the moon." ## See also - List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
17,364,564	Creatures of Impulse	1,146,605,223	Play with songs written by W. S. Gilbert	[ "1871 plays", "Plays by W. S. Gilbert", "Works originally published in The Graphic" ]	Creatures of Impulse is a stage play by the English dramatist W. S. Gilbert, with music by the composer-conductor Alberto Randegger, which Gilbert adapted from his own short story. Both the play and the short story concern an unwanted and ill-tempered old fairy who enchants people to behave in a manner opposite to their natures, with farcical results. The short story was written for The Graphic's Christmas number of 1870, and the play was first produced at the Court Theatre on 2 April 1871. It originally included six songs, but three were eventually cut, and some productions dispensed with the music entirely. While the lyrics survive, the music was never published and is lost. Reviews of the play were mostly positive, though it was criticised for the lack of a significant plot or superstructure to support its comic premise. Nonetheless, reviewers found it enjoyable, and it was a modest success, running for 91 performances and enjoying revivals into the early part of the 20th century. Gilbert had already written a considerable body of stories, plays, poems, criticism and other works before writing Creatures of Impulse. He later wrote the libretti to the famous series of Savoy operas (composed by Arthur Sullivan) between 1871 and 1896. ## Background ### Writer and composer From the mid-1860s to the early 1870s, W. S. Gilbert was extremely productive, writing a large quantity of comic verse, theatre reviews and other journalistic pieces, short stories, and dozens of plays and comic operas. His output in 1870 included dozens of his popular comic Bab Ballads; two blank verse comedies, The Princess and The Palace of Truth; two comic operas, Our Island Home and The Gentleman in Black; and various other short stories, comic pieces, and reviews appearing in various periodicals and newspapers. In 1871 he was even busier, producing seven plays and operas. Gilbert's dramatic writing during this time was evolving from his early musical burlesques to a more restrained style, as exemplified in his string of blank-verse fairy comedies. The first of these was The Palace of Truth, which opened in 1870 to widespread acclaim. He was also developing his unique style of absurdist humour, described as "Topsy-Turvy", made up of "a combination of wit, irony, topsyturvydom, parody, observation, theatrical technique, and profound intelligence". The story and play Creatures of Impulse date from the middle of this period, when Gilbert was trying different styles and working towards the mature style of his later work, including the famous series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Gilbert described the play as a "musical fairytale". Italian-born Alberto Randegger was better known as a conductor and professor of singing than as a composer, although he composed several full-length works and numerous vocal pieces in England in the 1860s and 1870s. He is also remembered for his important 1879 textbook entitled Singing. His music for Creatures of Impulse was criticised as "extremely undramatic", though others found it "pretty". The score has been lost. ### Genesis of story and play Gilbert first published Creatures of Impulse as a short story, under the title "A Strange Old Lady", in the 1870 Christmas number of The Graphic, an illustrated weekly newspaper. He later selected it for inclusion in the only collection of his short stories published during his lifetime, Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales (1890), at which point he renamed it to match the theatrical adaptation. Gilbert did not originally intend for the story to be turned into a play; nonetheless, a few months later it was on stage. He adapted the story into a play for Marie Litton's Royal Court Theatre. Litton took over the proprietorship of the New Chelsea Theatre in 1871 and renamed it the Royal Court. Its opening attraction was the première of Gilbert's Randall's Thumb, and when that play proved successful, it was no surprise, as the London Echo pointed out, that she followed it with another work by Gilbert. He often used his previous prose work as the basis of later plays, and "The Strange Old Lady" was no exception. Under the new title of Creatures of Impulse, it opened on 2 April 1871 as a companion piece for Randall's Thumb. Successful, it lasted through 91 performances and acted as a companion piece to five different plays. Litton continued to commission works from Gilbert, including Gilbert's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in 1871, Broken Hearts in 1875, various translations of French works, and The Happy Land in 1873, which portrayed members of the British Government on stage and caused such a scandal that it had an unusually long run. ### Subsequent productions and publications The play was revived in 1872 at the Court Theatre, in 1873 at the Queen's Theatre, and in 1874 at the Vaudeville Theatre (running for over 100 performances), all in London. It appears to have gone through several changes during these revivals, the first of which was described on its playbill as a "shortened version", and the last as an "altered" one. Various versions continued to be produced into the 20th century by amateurs as well as occasional professional groups, such as Ben Greet's Elizabethan Stage Society of England. An acting edition was published by T. H. Lacy around 1871. T. H. Lacy was acquired by Samuel French, and the libretto continued to be printed until about 1970. The piece, still occasionally produced, was part of the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in 2006. Substantial cuts were made in the text by the time the play was collected for Original Plays, Fourth Series (1911), the last volume of the only large-scale collection of Gilbert's stage work. Victorian plays had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain for decency before they were performed, and the version submitted was then archived, providing a more-or-less complete collection of Victorian theatrical output, now part of the British Library. Comparison of the "licensing copy" of Creatures of Impulse from this archive with that printed in Original Plays reveals lyrics for three additional songs and a second verse to the opening chorus and finale. ## Synopsis Note: The short story takes place at an inn on the road from London to Norwich, but the play calls for Alsatian costumery. Otherwise, the plots of the short story and play are nearly identical. The summary below uses the names from the play and notes significant changes in plot between the play and short story. There are also various small changes to the order of events, not described. At "The Three Pigeons" inn, it is a good day for some: the miser Boomblehardt has been out collecting rents from his tenants, and Sergeant Klooque, hero of Johannesburg, has just arrived at the inn on leave and may now flirt with any lady he chooses, without the need to pretend they are his relatives to get around his tyrannical Colonel. However, it is not a good day for Martha, the landlady of the inn: staying there is a strange old lady, a mischievous fairy, who refuses to pay or to leave, and who needs neither food nor water. This is substantially cutting into Martha's profits. She enlists Boomblehardt and Klooque, the cowardly farmer Peter, and her extremely shy niece, Pipette, to help solve this problem. Peter, not cowardly enough to fear an old woman, nor superstitious enough to believe in her power, threatens the old fairy, trying to chase her away. Unfortunately, she does indeed have fairy powers and casts a spell that forces Peter to threaten anyone he encounters or, if alone, to fight imaginary enemies. Peter flees before he can get himself into trouble by threatening anyone bigger than him, calling out challenges as he goes. Sergeant Klooque approaches the old woman next and tries to use his military charm to win her over. It turns out that she hates soldiers, and she strikes out with her stick, making him duck and dodge. She then casts a spell to make his cringing, dodging and ducking permanent, intending that he lose his reputation and be branded a coward. Pipette arrives and watches his behaviour in astonishment. "He's showing you how he fought the enemy at Johannesburg," exclaims the old lady, but he replies "No, my dear!" I'm showing you how the enemy fought us. This is the way they retreated". He leaves, cringing and pleading for imaginary attackers to stop as he goes. Pipette then tries to coax the old lady into leaving, kissing and hugging her, and appealing to her (hoped for) good nature. The old lady sees through her attempt, and in punishment for her "telling stories" compels her to kiss and cuddle all she meets. She cries out in protest that she's too shy for such behaviour, but the old lady assures her that she'll "get over [her] shyness after a year or two of that sort of thing". Boomblehardt approaches next, and Pipette flings herself on him, crying "Kiss me!". He obliges. She responds, "How dare you take such a liberty! You insolent old man! Kiss me". And so he does. She boxes his ears, much to his confusion, and then retreats into the inn in tears. Boomblehardt then meets with the old woman. The miser has heard that the strange old lady does not need to eat and offers to help her stay at the inn if she will teach him her secret of how to avoid wasting money on food. He offers her a golden guinea. The fairy decides that someone that miserly must be punished and compels him to continue passing out guineas to all he meets. Soon complications arise from these curses. Boomblehardt finds Sergeant Klooque's curse hilarious and decides that if he must give out money, the sergeant is as good as any other. The shy Pipette throws herself at Sergeant, who unwillingly ducks and dodges, trying to avoid her. When Peter arrives, he is forced to get into a fight with the sergeant over her, at which, to his surprise, the brave sergeant cowers, dodges, and ducks. Boomblehardt continues passing out guineas, his fortune dribbling away. Then Martha chases her customers out of the inn with a broom: She too has been cursed. Everyone has fallen under the fairy's ironic curses, forced to behave in a manner contrary to his or her intrinsic nature. Now the old lady makes her crucial mistake: She heads downstairs to check on her mischief, and the cursed group all run up to her to beg her to relent. They all behave as compelled by their curses: Peter threatens her, Pipette tries to kiss her, the sergeant ducks away from her, the miser offers her money, and the landlady keeps trying to chase her out with a broom. The chaos is overwhelming: "In short, the Old Lady, who was much more than a match for each of them taken singly, was overpowered by numbers". She is left with no choice but to relent, release the spells and leave, vanquished and embarrassed. The short story continues a bit further, making explicit some elements that are only hinted at in the play: > The really curious part of this story is that, after everything had been explained, and all had been restored to their normal courses of action, none of the personages involved in it married each other. They were all so annoyed at having made such fools of themselves that they walked out of the inn in different directions, and were never seen or heard of again. > > Except Peter, who, seeing nothing to be ashamed of in showing such undaunted courage, remained and kept the "Three Pigeons," and prospered remarkably to the end of his days. That no one marries at the end of the play was a daring innovation for Victorian theatre, and the reviewer from Era mentioned his surprise at this. Synopsis notes: In the short story, Peter is instead her nephew. This has no effect on the plot. In the story, Boomblehardt's equivalent, Verditter, is instead courting the landlady, as her inn is profitable and she has some fine silver; therefore, he tries to bribe the fairy to leave in order that he may make money elsewhere. ## Characters and original cast As was common in Victorian drama, a woman (Maggie Brennan) played a young man (Peter). The play's script assigns dialogue to three numbered villagers in the opening scene. The named character of Jacques has no more lines than any of these and disappears after the first page of the script. Righton, who first played Boomblehardt, portrayed him as a Jewish caricature. Gilbert's script did not use a Jewish dialect, and historian Jane Stedman suggests that Righton's increasingly broad portrayal and interpolations show that Gilbert had little control of Righton's portrayal of the part. ## Songs The number of songs varied from production to production. The version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain had six songs, and an early review in The Times wrote that it was "overweighted with a quantity of extremely undramatic music", though the London Echo thought the music was "pretty". Nonetheless, the version printed in Gilbert's Original Plays (1911) cut these six songs to three, and some productions omitted the songs entirely. The list of songs in the licence copy is: 1. "Did you ever know a lady so particularly shady" – Jacques and villagers 2. "Some people love Spring" – Boomblehardt 3. "At home at last all danger past" – Sergeant Klooque 4. "A soldier in the King's Hussars" – Sergeant Klooque, Pipette, and Peter 5. "With furious blow" – Peter, Pipette, Sergeant Klooque, and Martha 6. "Finale: Go away, ma'am, go away, ma'am" – ensemble While the lyrics survive, none of the music was ever published, and it has been lost. The version in Original Plays omits the second verse of Nos. 1 and 6 and cuts Nos. 2, 3, and 5. ## Critical reception Reviews for the play were generally favourable, but it was criticised for its loose structure and lack of a substantial plot. Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle opined: "Amusing, simple, and ingenious, 'Creatures of Impulse' is another, though a slight, addition to the successes of its author". The London Echo compared the piece to a "burletta of the stamp that was in vogue a hundred years ago, resembling Midas, perhaps, more nearly than that of any modern burlesque", and wrote that it "contains pretty music, and smart if not witty dialogue, a semi-moral and a semi-plot". The Graphic concluded that "Although it occupies only an hour in performance, the story is well told and the piece is exceedingly amusing" and praised the acting. Righton received special praise for his portrayal of Boomblehardt: "No character on stage perhaps ever made audiences laugh more in so short a time". In an 1882 assessment of the piece for amateur theatre societies, M. E. James noted that "The singing is a great addition. It is altogether an amusing bit of nonsense, and very original". The Times review was less positive than most, saying that although the play was good, more was expected of Gilbert: > As noblesse oblige, so does great success become liable to a certain penalty. Had the little piece we have just described been the work of some unknown hand we might have accepted it as an agreeable trifle, displaying more than common ingenuity in its invention, and, with the aid of picturesque costumes, lively setting, and a pretty decoration, gracefully concluding the evening's entertainment, although overweighted with a quantity of extremely undramatic music. But with the remembrance of The Palace of Truth fresh in our minds, we cannot help a feeling of disappointment when we find the author of that really poetical work coming forward as the writer of another "fairy tale," so immeasurably inferior.... [T]he fairy only enchants her victims to disenchant them at pleasure, without arriving at any result, and we have a good foundation with scarcely any superstructure whatsoever.
1,507,839	Calgary Hitmen	1,169,404,182	Western Hockey League team in Calgary, Alberta	[ "1995 establishments in Alberta", "Bret Hart", "Calgary Flames minor league affiliates", "Calgary Sports and Entertainment", "Ice hockey clubs established in 1995", "Ice hockey teams in Alberta", "Ice hockey teams in Calgary", "Western Hockey League teams" ]	The Calgary Hitmen are a major junior ice hockey team based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The Hitmen play in the Central Division of the Western Hockey League (WHL). They play their home games at the Scotiabank Saddledome. Bret "Hitman" Hart, a local-born professional wrestler, was a founding owner as well as the inspiration for the team's name. Established in 1994, the team has been owned by the Calgary Flames hockey club since 1997. They are the third WHL team to represent Calgary, preceded by the Centennials and Wranglers. The Hitmen have finished with the best record in the WHL four times, and qualified for the playoffs for thirteen consecutive seasons between 1998 and 2010. In 1999, they became the first Calgary team to win the President's Cup as league champions, and the first to represent the city in the Memorial Cup since the Calgary Canadians won the national junior title in 1926. The Hitmen hold numerous WHL attendance records, and in 2004–05 became the first team in Canadian Hockey League history to average 10,000 fans per game. Thirty-nine former Hitmen players have gone on to play in the National Hockey League. ## Franchise history Graham James left his position as coach and general manager of the Swift Current Broncos to found the Hitmen in 1994. He organized a group of eighteen investors in the club, including star National Hockey League players Theoren Fleury and Joe Sakic, along with Bret Hart, famous for his exploits in the World Wrestling Federation. The Calgary Flames, who had just assumed control of the then Saddledome and were looking to fill extra dates in the building, were receptive to the new team. Calgary had been without a WHL team since the Wranglers moved south to become the Lethbridge Hurricanes in 1987. The league's expansion into Calgary was met with scepticism, as the league had previously failed in Western Canada's largest markets of Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg, when in competition with the NHL. The Stampede Corral has served as a second home for the odd home game when the Saddledome is unavailable. They used the Corral for regular season home games in 1995–1996 and playoff games in 1998 and 2016. ### Controversial beginnings The club selected its name and logo as an homage to Bret "Hitman" Hart. The team's distinctive pink, grey and black jerseys were also modelled after Hart's ring attire. The logo proved immensely popular and Hitmen merchandise sold well at many local retailers. However, the name and logo were also subject to heavy criticism from segments of the public and the business community, who panned both as negative stereotypes of violence within the sport. Among the chief critics of the new logo was the Flames organization. They had received calls from concerned business people over theme and shared that sentiment. Struggling to attract corporate sponsors, the Hitmen chose to scrap the "Jason Voorhees"-style logo in favour of an alternate "starburst" logo just two months after it was unveiled. The club went back to the original logo in 1996. The Hitmen entered their first season playing in the newly formed Central Division, and were predicted to finish as high as third in the five-team division. Instead, they finished as the second-worst regular season team in the league, posting an 18–51–3 record. The Hitmen lost CAD\$250,000 in their first season and saw their season ticket base halved to 700 for the 1996–97 season. The losses led to questions about the viability of the club. Citing personal reasons, James stunned the organization when he resigned as coach and general manager on September 5, 1996. Two days later, the Calgary Police Service revealed that James was being investigated on allegations he sexually abused two former players while he was with the Swift Current Broncos. James was charged, and in January 1997 pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault. Upon James' conviction, and sentencing to 31⁄2 years in prison, the Hitmen attempted to distance themselves from their former coach. The Hitmen struggled on the ice as well, again missing the playoffs after falling to a record of 15–53–4. The spectre of the Graham James scandal hurt the franchise. The original investors, many of whom played for or were otherwise associated with James, sold the team to the Flames for approximately \$1.5 million in June 1997. It was widely speculated that the new owners would change the team name, possibly to the Junior Flames, however they chose to retain the name although they adopted a new colour scheme and updated the logo. ### First championship Dean Clark took over as head coach shortly after James' resignation, and led the 1997–98 Hitmen to a remarkable turnaround. The team improved to a 40–28–4 record and first-place finish in the Central Division, qualifying for the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. They defeated the Saskatoon Blades and Swift Current Broncos to reach the Eastern Conference final before falling to the Brandon Wheat Kings. Clark was awarded the Dunc McCallum Memorial Trophy as the WHL's top coach, and also won the Canadian Hockey League's Brian Kilrea Coach of the Year Award. Calgary improved to 51–13–8 in 1998–99, finishing one point ahead of the Kamloops Blazers for the regular season title. Led by Brad Moran, Pavel Brendl and goaltender Alexandre Fomitchev, the Hitmen lost just five games in the playoffs en route to their first league championship. They won the title at home before a WHL playoff record crowd of 17,139. They became the first Calgary-based team to qualify for the Memorial Cup since the Calgary Canadians won the 1926 title. In the 1999 Memorial Cup, the Hitmen opened their tournament with a 5–3 victory over the Ontario Hockey League's Belleville Bulls, followed by a 4–3 loss to the host Ottawa 67's. They followed with a 3–1 win over the Acadie-Bathurst Titan of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Finishing atop the round robin standings, the Hitmen earned a bye into the championship game, and a rematch against the 67's. The championship game was a back-and-forth affair. Ottawa held 4–1 and 6–5 leads, while Calgary led 5–4 at one point and tied the game late to send it to overtime. The Hitmen fell short of winning the title however, as Ottawa's Matt Zultek scored the winning goal 1:58 into overtime. Brendl and Matt Kinch were named to the Memorial Cup All-Star team. The Hitmen entered the 1999–2000 season with a strong squad, along with expectations at making another run to the Memorial Cup. The club finished the regular season with a record of 58–12–2–2, once again winning the regular season title. The team set franchise records for victories (58) and points (120), which stood until the 2008–09 year. After sweeping the Moose Jaw Warriors and Saskatoon Blades, the Hitmen were upset by the Kootenay Ice in the Eastern Conference final, falling four games to one. ### 2000s The Hitmen went through a rebuilding period and finished third or fourth in the Central Division between 2001 and 2004, winning only one playoff series during that time. The Hitmen acquired goaltender Justin Pogge from the Prince George Cougars during the 2004–05 season. Pogge's goaltending, along with the offensive leadership of forward Andrew Ladd, saw the Hitmen win their first playoff series in four years. They could not follow up on their victory over the Lethbridge Hurricanes, however, losing their second round series against the Brandon Wheat Kings in seven games. The Hitmen were heavily marketed by the Flames during the National Hockey League's 2004–05 lock-out. As a result, the Hitmen averaged 10,062 fans per game and set a new league attendance record. The season total of 362,227 fans smashed the old record by over 45,000. The Hitmen became the first Canadian Hockey League team to average over 10,000 fans per game, having the highest average attendance of any hockey team—junior or professional—in North America that year. The 2005–06 Hitmen battled the Medicine Hat Tigers for the top spot in the Western Hockey League for most of the season. Calgary finished with 101 points, their best total since 1999–2000, however, finishing two points behind Medicine Hat for the best record in the league. The team again disappointed in the playoffs, falling to the Moose Jaw Warriors in the Eastern Conference semi-final. Pogge's performance during the season earned him honours as both the WHL player of the year and CHL goaltender of the year. Calgary fell to third in the Central Division in 2006–07. In the playoffs, they upset the Kootenay Ice, who finished 19-points ahead of Calgary in the regular season. The Hitmen then defeated the East Division champion Brandon Wheat Kings to reach the Eastern Conference final for the fourth time in franchise history, where they were subsequently defeated by the Tigers. The Hitmen entered the 2007–08 season with expectations of being strong contenders, voted the pre-season pick to finish atop the Eastern Conference by the league's coaches and general managers. The team lived up to expectations, winning the Central Division, and finishing with the best record in the East for the first time since 2000. During a late season game, Calgary broke the league's single-game attendance record, as an announced crowd of 19,305 watched Calgary defeat Kootenay by a score of 6 goals to 1. In the playoffs, the Hitmen defeated the Moose Jaw Warriors and Swift Current Broncos in six games apiece, advancing to the Eastern Conference finals for the second consecutive season. ### Second championship Following the graduation of several players, including Karl Alzner, who was named both WHL player of the year and CHL defenceman of the year, the 2008–09 Hitmen were expected to enter a rebuilding period. Instead, they captured the franchise's third Scotty Munro Memorial Trophy as the regular season champion, earning the top seed in the playoffs. The team tied or broke 21 franchise records during the regular season, including wins (59), points (122) and goals for (330). Joel Broda led the league with 53 goals, while Brandon Kozun and Brett Sonne finished second and third in league scoring with 108 and 100 points respectively; it was only the second time in franchise history that two players topped the 100-point mark in the same season. In the playoffs, the Hitmen won 12 straight games, sweeping the Edmonton Oil Kings, Lethbridge Hurricanes and Brandon Wheat Kings to reach the WHL finals for the first time since 1999. In the finals, they were stunned by the Kelowna Rockets, losing the first three games of the series before winning the next two to extend the series to a sixth game. The Hitmen lost game six in overtime, and the series 4–2, to end their season. Sonne was named WHL Player of the Year, while General Manager Kelly Kisio was named Executive of the Year for the second time in recognition of the Hitmen's season. Calgary again finished with the best record in the regular season with 107 points on the strength of Kozun's CHL leading 107 points and the goaltending of Martin Jones, who was named goaltender of the year in the WHL. The Hitmen's playoffs nearly ended quickly as they lost three of the first four games in their opening round playoff series against the Warriors before winning three consecutive games to take the series in seven. They then beat the Tigers and Wheat Kings in six and five games respectively to reach the WHL championship series for the second consecutive year. Entering the final against the Tri-City Americans, the 11 players who returned from the 2009 finals lost vowed not to suffer a repeat of their disappointing finish to the previous season. Named the playoff MVP, Jones allowed only seven goals against in the final as the Hitmen defeated the Americans in five games to win their second Ed Chynoweth Cup in franchise history. The victory, in front of a home crowd of over 15,000 fans, earned the Hitmen a berth in the 2010 Memorial Cup tournament. At the tournament, Calgary posted a 2–1 record in the round robin, defeating the QMJHL's Moncton Wildcats and the host Brandon Wheat Kings, but lost the semi-final in overtime, also against Brandon. Following the graduation of many of the team's top scorers, the Hitmen fell to last place the WHL in 2010–11, at one point tying a franchise record with 12 consecutive losses. As part of the 2011 Heritage Classic, the Hitmen hosted the Regina Pats in an outdoor game at McMahon Stadium on February 21, 2011. Regina won 3–2 before 20,888 fans, setting new WHL and CHL attendance records, and proving the highest attended junior game of all-time. In 2019, the Hitmen hosted the Corral Series, a three-game series paying tribute to former teams that used to play in the Corral. ## Community impact The Hitmen are active within the community, supporting numerous programs and charities. They host an annual teddy bear toss each December. The 13th annual Petro Canada Teddy Bear Toss, held on December 2, 2007, saw what the Hitmen claim to be a world record 26,919 bears tossed on to the ice by 17,341 fans. The bears are donated to charities throughout the Calgary area. A few of the bears are personally delivered by the players to the Alberta Children's Hospital, an event highly anticipated by patients attending the hospital. The Hitmen are also partners with the Calgary Board of Education and their Read On! Literacy for Life program. Red Deer, Alberta author Sigmund Brouwer has released numerous young adult-oriented mystery novels about the team and fictitious Hitmen players. The ninth book in the series, titled Hitmen Star, was published in 2008. Copies of the books are distributed to sixth grade students throughout Calgary and southern Alberta schools; with Hitmen and former National Hockey League players helping to encourage students to take an active interest in reading. ## Current roster Updated August 8, 2023 ## Season-by-season record Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, OTL = Overtime losses, SOL = Shootout losses, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against ## NHL alumni Thirty-eight players have been selected from the Hitmen roster at the National Hockey League's entry drafts. Of those, nine players were selected in the first round. The highest drafted players in club history were Pavel Brendl (1999) and Andrew Ladd (2004). Both players were selected fourth overall. Forty-four former Hitmen players have gone on to play in the National Hockey League. The first was Ryan Bast, who played two games with the Philadelphia Flyers in 1998–99. Andrew Ladd has gone on to win two Stanley Cup championships since graduating: with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and the Chicago Blackhawks in 2010. His former Hitmen teammate, Ryan Getzlaf won the Cup with the Anaheim Ducks in 2007, and former New York Islanders teammate Johnny Boychuk has one as a member of the 2011 Boston Bruins. ## Head coaches Dean Clark has thus far been the most successful coach for the Calgary Hitmen. He led the team between 1996 and 2001, and in that time won more WHL games than any other coach. He was named coach of the year in both the WHL and CHL in 1998. Clark led the Hitmen to three division titles, two regular season titles, one league championship, and coached the Hitmen to their first Memorial Cup final. Kelly Kisio is the team's former head coach from the 2004–05 season to the end of the 2007–08 season, a role he shared with Dean Evason in his first year at the helm of the Hitmen. Kisio stepped down as coach in 2008, naming former assistant Dave Lowry, as head coach for the 2008–09 season. Lowry was promoted to an assistant with the Calgary Flames after leading the Hitmen to a 122-point season in his rookie year. He was replaced by Mike Williamson, who led the team to a WHL championship in 2010 but left the team in 2014. He was followed by Mark French. ## Individual records Season - Most goals, 73, Pavel Brendl, 1998–99 - Most assists, 72, Brad Moran, 1999–2000 - Most points, 134, Pavel Brendl, 1998–99 - Most penalty minutes: 302, Ryan Andres, 1997–98 - Best goals against average, 1.72, Justin Pogge, 2005–06 - Most shutouts, 11, Justin Pogge, 2005–06 - Most games played, goaltender: 60, Alexandre Fomitchev, 1997–98 - Most saves, goaltender: 1,481, Alexandre Fomitchev, 1997–98 Career - Most goals: 204, Brad Moran, 1995–00 - Most assists: 246, Brad Moran, 1995–00 - Most points: 450, Brad Moran, 1995–00 - Most penalty minutes: 704, Mike Egener, 2000–04 - Most games played, individual: 357, Brad Moran, 1995–2000 - Best goals against average: 1.92, Justin Pogge, 2004–06 - Most shutouts: 16, Martin Jones, 2006–10 - Most games played, goaltender: 179, Dan Spence, 2004–08 - Most saves, goaltender: 3390, Chris Driedger, 2011–14 ## Team records ## Awards and honours The Calgary Hitmen have captured numerous awards during the franchise's tenure. Hitmen players have been named the WHL's most outstanding player four times. Defenceman Karl Alzner won the Four Broncos Memorial Trophy in 2007–08, also named the defenceman of the year, and Brett Sonne won the trophy in 2008–09. Goaltender Martin Jones captured numerous awards in Calgary's championship season of 2009–10, including being named the top goaltender of the Memorial Cup, and Brandon Kozun led the entire Canadian Hockey League in scoring. As a whole, the Hitmen have won the Central Division six times, and four times have been the regular season champions. Brad Moran, the franchise's all-time leading scorer, had his number 20 retired in 2005, the first player to be so honoured. Following the lead of the Calgary Flames, the team introduced a new program in 2015 to honour former players. Called "Forever a Hitmen", the team named Ryan Getzlaf the first inductee. ## See also - List of ice hockey teams in Alberta - Ice hockey in Calgary
155,851	John de Gray	1,156,471,266	13th-century English royal official and bishop	[ "1214 deaths", "12th-century births", "13th-century English Roman Catholic archbishops", "13th-century English Roman Catholic bishops", "Archbishops of Canterbury", "Archdeacons of Cleveland", "Archdeacons of Gloucester", "Bishops of Norwich", "Burials at Norwich Cathedral", "Grey family", "Lords Lieutenant of Ireland", "People from Rotherfield Greys", "Year of birth unknown" ]	John de Gray or de Grey (died 18 October 1214) was an English prelate who served as Bishop of Norwich, and was elected but unconfirmed Archbishop of Canterbury. He was employed in the service of Prince John even before John became king, for which he was rewarded with a number of ecclesiastical offices, culminating in his pro forma election to Norwich in 1200. De Gray continued in royal service after his elevation to the episcopate, lending the King money and undertaking diplomatic missions on his behalf. In 1205 King John attempted to further reward de Gray with a translation to the archbishopric of Canterbury, but a disputed election process led to de Gray's selection being quashed by Pope Innocent III in 1206. Innocent consecrated Stephen Langton as archbishop against John's wishes, triggering a long dispute between the papacy and the King. The pope imposed various sanctions on England and John; at one point de Gray was one of only two bishops still legitimately holding office in England. In 1209 he became governor of Ireland for John, and spent until 1213 attempting to impose a royal government on the Anglo-Norman barons and the native Irish in that country. Recalled to England to help defend against a threatened invasion by the French, de Gray then travelled to Rome to secure a papal pardon after the final settlement of John and Innocent's dispute over the bishop's abortive elevation to Canterbury. After securing his pardon de Gray was appointed Bishop of Durham, but he died on his way back to England. De Gray built a palace in his diocese and several castles in Ireland. Although he was reviled by one contemporary writer as an "evil counsellor" to the King, modern historians have been more forgiving; one praised his intelligence and others stated that de Gray was one of the few men King John trusted throughout his life. De Gray's nephew, Walter de Gray, secured the office of Lord Chancellor with his uncle's help in 1205. ## Early life Some describe de Gray as a native of Norfolk; he was likely descended from the Norman knight Anchetil de Greye. De Gray was the uncle of Walter de Gray, later Archbishop of York. The elder de Gray was instrumental in securing the selection of his nephew as Lord Chancellor, as he was a surety for Walter's payment of a fine of 5000 marks to acquire the position. By 1196, de Gray was in the service of King Richard I's brother John, and was keeper of John's seal by 1198. John ascended the throne of England in 1199, with de Gray becoming Archdeacon of Cleveland in March 1200, and Archdeacon of Gloucester before April that year. He also served as John's secretary, and frequently as a deputy for the Lord Chancellor, Hubert Walter. Shortly after John became king, de Gray began travelling between England and the continent on royal business, and for the first two years of John's reign was active in the royal chancery, sealing royal charters. De Gray was elected Bishop of Norwich on about 7 September 1200, although the election was purely pro forma, as acknowledged by a contemporary writer Roger of Howden, who stated that the new bishop "succeeded to the bishopric of Norwich by the gift of King John". De Gray was consecrated on 24 September. His consecration took place together with that of the new Bishop of Hereford Giles de Braose at Westminster, at the conclusion of a provincial church council held by Archbishop Walter, which de Gray had been attending. Walter performed the ceremony in a chapel of Westminster Abbey. ## Bishop of Norwich While bishop, de Gray often lent the king money, and on one occasion held the royal regalia as security for the repayment of a loan; he also served as a royal justice. In 1203 de Gray accompanied Archbishop Hubert Walter and several papal legates on an unsuccessful diplomatic mission to King Philip II of France. Philip had demanded that John's niece Eleanor of Brittany or his nephew Arthur of Brittany be surrendered to him together with all of John's lands on the continent, none of which John was prepared to concede. Philip invaded Normandy after the bishops returned to England. In 1203 some of de Gray's knights were part of the garrison at the castle of Vaudreuil in Normandy, serving under the command of Robert FitzWalter. Although they had provisions and John was moving in support of the troops, in the summer of 1203 the garrison surrendered to Philip, shortly after a siege had begun. When John abandoned Normandy in late 1203, effectively relinquishing control of the duchy to Philip, de Gray was one of his companions on the journey to the port of Barfleur, and went on to England with the king. ## Archbishop-elect John's attempt to impose de Gray's election as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1205 was the beginning of the king's long quarrel with Pope Innocent III. After Hubert Walter's death in July 1205, the selection of a successor was hindered by doubts about what the proper procedure should be, something that commonly happened with elections to Canterbury. John postponed a decision while delegations from the bishops of England and the monks of the cathedral chapter went to Rome to seek guidance from the pope. The bishops of the province of Canterbury claimed the right to a say in who was elected, as whoever was chosen would be their superior, but according to canon law the monks of the cathedral chapter had the right to elect the new archbishop. The king also had a say in the election, as the archbishop was a major tenant-in-chief and was traditionally one of the principal royal advisers. While the delegations from the various parties were in Rome, the monks of Canterbury secretly elected one of their own, Reginald, as archbishop, and subsequently sent him to Rome to join the delegation. When John discovered that Reginald had been elected without any royal input he forced the monks to elect de Gray as archbishop. Some stories have Reginald's election taking place before the despatch of the first delegation to the papal curia. Another source, Gervase of Canterbury, has the king telling the chapter they could choose their own nominee after six months, while the king secretly sent envoys to Rome to secure de Gray's election. A further story, from Roger of Wendover, states that the monks elected Reginald before Walter was even buried and that only a few members of the cathedral chapter – the younger ones – participated in the election. Wendover wrote in the 1230s and was not a monk of Canterbury, therefore it is unlikely he has recorded a true account. De Gray was postulated or nominated, to Canterbury on 11 December 1205, which presented Innocent with two candidates for the office. In an effort to reach a compromise, the pope quashed both nominations on about 30 March 1206; Innocent's reason for invalidating de Gray's candidacy was that any election was invalid if an earlier one was still under appeal to the papacy. The monks then elected Stephen Langton, with Innocent's approval. John did not accept Langton's candidacy, however, and Innocent's consecration of Langton in 1207 led to an eight-year struggle between John and the pope over the rights of the king to secure the election of his choice as archbishop. John refused to allow Langton to enter England and exiled the Canterbury monks. Innocent placed an interdict on England in 1208, which John countered by confiscating the income and estates of any clergy who enforced it. Innocent went on to excommunicate John in 1209, in a dispute that led to the exile of many of the English clergy and John's imposition of heavy financial demands on the church in England; by 1209 de Gray and Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, were the only living English bishops not in exile. But it was not until 1213, when Innocent began to support John's deposition, that the king became concerned and reached a settlement with the papacy. ## In Ireland By 1209 de Gray was in Ireland serving as the king's governor, an office sometimes referred to as justiciar for Ireland. One possible reason for his appointment was to save him from being accused of ignoring the interdict on England. As a bishop, it was de Gray's ecclesiastical duty to enforce the interdict, but by going to Ireland, which was not under interdict, he could continue to serve the king without provoking the papacy. De Gray's chief policy in Ireland was to extend English rule, to which end he was involved in battles on the River Shannon and in Fermanagh. He also replaced the Irish coinage with English, and attempted unsuccessfully to make English laws applicable in Ireland. De Gray's term of office in Ireland coincided with a time of change in Irish governmental practices. During John's persecution of William de Braose in 1209, William Marshal gave de Braose shelter on his Irish lands. De Gray demanded that Marshal surrender de Braose to him as a traitor, but Marshal refused, claiming that since he held some lands from de Braose, it would be an act of treason to surrender his lord to an outside authority. Marshal's refusal does not seem to have embittered de Gray, however, as three years later the bishop was praising him in a letter to John. John led an expedition to Ireland in 1210 in an effort to bring the Anglo-Norman barons under control. He opened talks with the native Irish kings, and some accounts state that his negotiations were so successful that the native Irish submitted to him. In contrast, the historian Seán Duffy has argued that the native Irish nobility were just as resistant to John as the Anglo-Norman barons. After John's return to England he ordered de Gray to build three new castles in Connacht, one of them at Athlone. Associated with the castle building were two military invasions of Connacht by the royal government – one from Meath and Leinster and the other from Munster. De Gray left Ireland in 1211 to lead a military campaign against the Welsh, leaving his deputy Richard de Tuit in charge of the country. De Gray also faced resistance from the northern Irish. In 1212 he led a campaign against Áed Méith, in the promotion of which he constructed castles at Cáel Uisce, Belleek, and Clones, bases for raids against the Ua Néill territory in the north. A naval campaign was also launched but to no avail. De Gray suffered a defeat at the hands of Cormac O'Melaghlin in 1212 at Fircal, Offaly, and left Ireland the following year. He continued to hold the office of governor for a time, but by July 1213 he had been replaced by Henry de Loundres, the Archbishop of Dublin. One of de Gray's final acts as justiciar was to take a force of Irish knights to England to help repel a threatened invasion by the French king Philip II. ## Episcopal affairs and later career As bishop, de Gray settled a long-running dispute between the monks of his cathedral chapter and his predecessors as bishop. He also allowed the monks of his cathedral chapter the right to appoint and replace the clergy of the dependent churches of the cathedral. De Gray received a 1203 missive from Innocent III decrying the marriages of some secular clergy, in contravention of canon law. In more secular matters, he granted the town of Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) the right to hold a weekly market and two fairs per year. He also built a palace at Gaywood. De Gray's ability to raise money made him useful to John. In 1213 de Gray mustered 500 knights during a period when Philip II was threatening to invade England, bringing this force over from Ireland along with mounted men-at-arms to support the king in England. In May 1213, John and Innocent finally resolved the dispute over Langton's election to Canterbury, and part of the settlement was that John gave Ireland and England to Innocent and received them back from the pope, making John a papal vassal. The settlement was sealed with a treaty, to which de Gray was one of the witnesses. After John settled with the papacy, de Gray was not included in the general pardon and had to go to Rome to be pardoned. While in that city the bishop was named as one of the guarantors of a new financial arrangement between the king and the pope dealing with feudal payments from England, which lowered the lump sum that had to be paid before Innocent would lift the interdict. After Innocent pardoned de Gray, the pope recommended his election as Bishop of Durham in 1213; but de Gray died during his journey back to England on 18 October 1214, at Saint-Jean-d'Angély in Poitou. He was buried in Norwich Cathedral, but his tomb has not survived. As well as encouraging his nephew's career, de Gray took into his household two of Hubert Walter's household clerks: David, and Robert of Ruddeby. Another clerk employed by de Gray, Robert de Bingham, was in the bishop's household during the papal interdict on England; he went on to become a tutor in theology at Oxford, and Bishop of Salisbury in 1228. De Gray remained close to John for most of the bishop's life, and one of the King's chief fundraisers. Sidney Painter, a historian and biographer of John, said of de Gray that he was "probably the only man whom John trusted absolutely and without reservation for the whole period of their association". The medievalist Ralph Turner called de Gray "one of John's greatest favourites", and another of John's biographers, W. L. Warren, described de Gray as "one of the best brains of the royal administration". Matthew Paris, a medieval writer, called him an "evil counsellor", and blamed many of the difficulties of John's later reign on de Gray's failed election to Canterbury.
398,028	Night (memoir)	1,170,858,303	1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel	[ "1955 books", "1958 books", "1960 non-fiction books", "Books by Elie Wiesel", "Holocaust literature", "Personal accounts of the Holocaust", "Sighetu Marmației" ]	Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent-child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver. His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating due to dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945. After the war, Wiesel moved to Paris and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night. Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Wiesel called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art. Night is the first in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." ## Background Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania (now Romania), to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah (née Feig). The family lived in a community of 10,000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Northern Transylvania had been annexed by Hungary in 1940, and restrictions on Jews were already in place, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1941–1943, was a relatively calm one for the Jewish population. That changed at midnight on Saturday, 18 March 1944, with the invasion of Hungary by Nazi Germany, and the arrival in Budapest of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann to oversee the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. From 5 April, Jews over the age of six had to wear a 10 x 10 cm (3.8 x 3.8 in) yellow badge on the upper-left side of their coats or jackets. Jews had to declare the value of their property, and were forbidden from moving home, travelling, owning cars or radios, listening to foreign radio stations, or using the telephone. Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, and Jewish civil servants, journalists and lawyers were sacked. As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe, the mass deportations began at a rate of four trains a day from Hungary to Auschwitz, each train carrying around 3,000 people. Between 15 May and 8 July 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews are recorded as having been sent there on 147 trains, most gassed on arrival. The transports comprised most of the Jewish population outside Budapest, the Hungarian capital. Between 16 May and 27 June, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania. Wiesel, his parents and sisters—older sisters Hilda and Beatrice and seven-year-old Tzipora—were among them. On arrival Jews were "selected" for the death or forced labour; to be sent to the left meant work, to the right, the gas chamber. Sarah and Tzipora were sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and Chlomo managed to stay together, surviving forced labour and a death march to another concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Weimar. Chlomo died there in January 1945, three months before the 6th Armored Division of the United States Army arrived to liberate the camp. ## Synopsis ### Moshe the Beadle Night opens in Sighet in 1941. The book's narrator is Eliezer, an Orthodox Jewish teenager who studies the Talmud by day, and by night "weep[s] over the destruction of the Temple". To the disapproval of his father, Eliezer spends time discussing the Kabbalah with Moshe the Beadle, caretaker of the Hasidic shtiebel (house of prayer). In June 1941 the Hungarian government expelled Jews unable to prove their citizenship. Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. He manages to escape, saved by God, he believes, so that he might save the Jews of Sighet. He returns to the village to tell what he calls the "story of his own death", running from one house to the next: "Jews, listen to me! It's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!" When the train crossed into Poland, he tells them, it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to trucks, then driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomay, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. He tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen, making Moshe Night's first unheeded witness. ### Sighet ghettos The Germans arrived in Sighet around 21 March 1944, and shortly after Passover (8–14 April that year) arrested the community leaders. Jews had to hand over their valuables, were not allowed to visit restaurants or leave home after six in the evening, and had to wear the yellow star at all times. Eliezer's father makes light of it: > The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it ... > > (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?) The SS transfer the Jews to one of two ghettos, each with its own council or Judenrat, which appoints Jewish police; there is also an office for social assistance, a labor committee, and a hygiene department. Eliezer's house, on a corner of Serpent Street, is in the larger ghetto in the town centre, so his family can stay in their home, although the windows on the non-ghetto side have to be boarded up. He is happy at first: "We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. ... The general opinion was that we were going to remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Then everything would be as before. It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto—it was illusion." In May 1944 the Judenrat is told the ghettos will be closed with immediate effect and the residents deported. Eliezer's family is moved at first to the smaller ghetto, but they are not told their final destination, only that they may each take a few personal belongings. The Hungarian police, wielding truncheons and rifle butts, march Eliezer's neighbours through the streets. "It was from that moment that I began to hate them, and my hate is still the only link between us today." > Here came the Rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved ... His mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some story book ... One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs. ### Auschwitz Eliezer and his family are among the 80 people crammed into a closed cattle wagon. On the third night one woman, Madame Schächter—Night's second unheeded witness—starts screaming that she can see flames, until the others beat her. Men and women are separated on arrival at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp within the Auschwitz complex. Eliezer and his father are "selected" to go to the left, which meant forced labour; his mother, Hilda, Beatrice and Tzipora to the right, the gas chamber. (Hilda and Beatrice managed to survive.) > Men to the left! Women to the right! > > Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. ... For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ...and I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. The remainder of Night describes Eliezer's efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and guilt, because his father's existence threatens his own. The stronger Eliezer's need to survive, the weaker the bonds that tie him to other people. His loss of faith in human relationships is mirrored in his loss of faith in God. During the first night, as he and his father wait in line, he watches a lorry deliver its load of children's bodies into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead—Wiesel writes that in the long history of the Jews, he does not know whether people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves—Eliezer considers throwing himself against the electric fence. At that moment he and his father are ordered to go to their barracks. But Eliezer is already destroyed. "[T]he student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me." There follows a passage that Ellen Fine writes contains the main themes of Night—the death of God and innocence, and the défaite du moi (dissolution of self), a recurring motif in Holocaust literature: > Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. > > Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. > > Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. With the loss of self goes Eliezer's sense of time: "I glanced at my father. How he had changed! ... So much had happened within such a few hours that I had lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night – one single night?" ### Buna In or around August 1944 Eliezer and his father are transferred from Birkenau to the work camp at Monowitz (known as Buna or Auschwitz III), their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the search for food. Their only joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. God is not lost to Eliezer entirely. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear. > Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? > > And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. Fine writes that this is the central event in Night, a religious sacrifice—the binding of Isaac and crucifixion of Jesus—described by Alfred Kazin as the literal death of God. Afterwards the inmates celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, but Eliezer cannot take part: "Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled ... How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused." ### Death march In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans decide to flee, taking 60,000 inmates on a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Eliezer and his father are marched to Gleiwitz to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, a camp near Weimar, Germany, 350 miles (563 km) from Auschwitz. > Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch. > > Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots. Resting in a shed after marching over 40 miles (64 km), Rabbi Eliahou asks if anyone has seen his son. They had stuck together for three years, "always near each other, for suffering, for blows, for the ration of bread, for prayer", but the rabbi had lost sight of him in the crowd and was now scratching through the snow looking for his son's corpse. "I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know." Eliezer does not tell the man that his son had indeed noticed his father limping, and had run faster, letting the distance between them grow: "And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done." The inmates spend two days and nights in Gleiwitz locked inside cramped barracks without food, water or heat, sleeping on top of one another, so that each morning the living wake with the dead underneath them. There is more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof. They travel for ten days and nights, with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 in Eliezer's wagon, 12 survive the journey. The living make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks: > I woke from my apathy just at the moment when two men came up to my father. I threw myself on top of his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hand, crying: > > Father! Father! Wake up. They're trying to throw you out of the carriage ... > > His body remained inert ... > > I set to work to slap him as hard as I could. After a moment, my father's eyelids moved slightly over his glazed eyes. He was breathing weakly. > > You see, I cried. > > The two men moved away. ### Buchenwald, liberation The Germans are waiting with megaphones and orders to head for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow. "I could have wept with rage ... I showed him the corpses all around him; they too had wanted to rest here ... I yelled against the wind ... I felt I was not arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he had already chosen." An alert sounds, the camp lights go out, and Eliezer, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him. > But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever. His father is in another block, sick with dysentery. The other men in his bunk, a Frenchman and a Pole, attack him because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself. Eliezer is unable to protect him. "Another wound to the heart, another hate, another reason for living lost." Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he has lain for a week, Chlomo is beaten on the head with a truncheon by an SS officer for making too much noise. Eliezer lies in the bunk above and does nothing for fear of being beaten too. He hears his father make a rattling noise, "Eliezer". In the morning, 29 January 1945, he finds another man in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken Chlomo to the crematorium. > His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond. > > I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like – free at last! Chlomo missed his freedom by three months. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz 11 days earlier, and the Americans were making their way towards Buchenwald. Eliezer is transferred to the children's block where he stays with 600 others, dreaming of soup. On 5 April 1945 the inmates are told the camp is to be liquidated and they are to be moved—another death march. On 11 April, with 20,000 inmates still inside, a resistance movement inside the camp attacks the remaining SS officers and takes control. At six o'clock that evening, an American tank arrives at the gates, and behind it the Sixth Armored Division of the United States Third Army. Wiesel looks at himself in a mirror for the first time since the ghetto and sees only a corpse. ## Writing and publishing ### Move to France Wiesel wanted to move to Palestine after his release, but because of British immigration restrictions was sent instead by the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) to Belgium, then Normandy. In Normandy he learned that his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, had survived. From 1947 to 1950 he studied the Talmud, philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by the existentialists, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. He also taught Hebrew, and worked as a translator for the Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf. In 1948, when he was 19, he was sent to Israel as a war correspondent by the French newspaper L'arche, and after the Sorbonne became chief foreign correspondent of the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. ### 1954: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign Wiesel wrote in 1979 that he kept his story to himself for ten years. In 1954 he wanted to interview the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, and approached the novelist François Mauriac, a friend of Mendès-France, for an introduction. Wiesel wrote that Mauriac kept mentioning Jesus: "Whatever I would ask – Jesus. Finally, I said, 'What about Mendès-France?' He said that Mendès-France, like Jesus, was suffering ..." > When he said Jesus again I couldn't take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, "Mr. Mauriac", we called him Maître, "ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it." I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. ... And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, "You know, maybe you should talk about it." Wiesel started writing on board a ship to Brazil, where he had been assigned to cover Christian missionaries within Jewish communities, and by the end of the journey had completed an 862-page manuscript. He was introduced on the ship to Yehudit Moretzka, a Yiddish singer travelling with Mark Turkov, a publisher of Yiddish texts. Turkov asked if he could read Wiesel's manuscript. It is unclear who edited the text for publication. Wiesel wrote in All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995) that he handed Turkov his only copy and that it was never returned, but also that he (Wiesel) "cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition." Turkov's Tzentral Varband für Polishe Yidn in Argentina (Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina) published the book in 1956 in Buenos Aires as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign (; "And the World Remained Silent"). It was the 117th book in a 176-volume series of Yiddish memoirs of Poland and the war, Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry, 1946–1966). Ruth Wisse writes that Un di Velt Hot Geshvign stood out from the rest of the series, which survivors wrote as memorials to their dead, as a "highly selective and isolating literary narrative". ### 1958: La Nuit Wiesel translated Un di Velt Hot Geshvign into French and in 1955 sent it to Mauriac. Even with Mauriac's help they had difficulty finding a publisher; Wiesel said they found it too morbid. Jérôme Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit, Samuel Beckett's publisher, agreed to handle it. Lindon edited the text down to 178 pages. Published as La Nuit, a title chosen by Lindon, it had a preface by Mauriac and was dedicated to Chlomo, Sarah and Tzipora. ### 1960: Night Wiesel's New York agent, Georges Borchardt, encountered the same difficulty finding a publisher in the United States. In 1960 Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang in New York—who Wiesel writes "believed in literature as others believe in God"—paid a \$100 pro-forma advance and published that year a 116-page English translation by Stella Rodway as Night. The first 18 months saw 1,046 copies sell at \$3 each, and it took three years to sell the first print run of 3,000 copies, but the book attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow. By 1997 Night was selling 300,000 copies a year in the United States. By 2011 it had sold six million copies in that country, and was available in 30 languages. Sales increased in January 2006 when it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Republished with a new translation by Marion Wiesel, Wiesel's wife, and a new preface by Wiesel, it sat at no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction for 18 months from 13 February 2006, until the newspaper removed it when a significant portion of sales were ascribed to educational usage rather than retail sales. It became the club's third bestseller to date, with over two million sales of the Book Club edition by May 2011. ## Reception Reviewers have had difficulty reading Night as an eyewitness account. According to literary scholar Gary Weissman, it has been categorized as a "novel/autobiography", "autobiographical novel", "non-fictional novel", "semi-fictional memoir", "fictional-autobiographical novel", "fictionalized autobiographical memoir", and "memoir-novel". Ellen Fine described it as témoignage (testimony). Wiesel called it his deposition. Literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that Night's impact stems from its minimalist construction. The 1954 Yiddish manuscript, at 862 pages, was a long and angry historical work. In preparing the Yiddish and then the French editions, Wiesel's editors pruned mercilessly. Franklin argues that the power of the narrative was achieved at the cost of literal truth, and that to insist that the work is purely factual is to ignore its literary sophistication. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer argues similarly that Wiesel evokes, rather than describes: "Wiesel's account is ballasted with the freight of fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic climaxes, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, and especially an ability to arouse the empathy of his readers, which is an elusive ideal of the writer bound by fidelity to fact." Franklin writes that Night is the account of the 15-year-old Eliezer, a "semi-fictional construct", told by the 25-year-old Elie Wiesel. This allows the 15-year-old to tell his story from "the post-Holocaust vantage point" of Night's readers. In a comparative analysis of the Yiddish and French texts, Naomi Seidman, professor of Jewish culture, concludes that there are two survivors in Wiesel's writing, a Yiddish and French. In re-writing rather than simply translating Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, Wiesel replaced an angry survivor who regards "testimony as a refutation of what the Nazis did to the Jews," with one "haunted by death, whose primary complaint is directed against God ..." Night transformed the Holocaust into a religious event. Seidman argues that the Yiddish version was for Jewish readers, who wanted to hear about revenge, but the anger was removed for the largely Christian readership of the French translation. In the Yiddish edition, for example, when Buchenwald was liberated: "Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German shiksas [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled." In the 1958 French and 1960 English editions, this became: "On the following morning, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls [coucher avec des filles]. But of revenge, not a sign." Oprah Winfrey's promotion of Night came at a difficult time for the genre of memoir, Franklin writes, after a previous book-club author, James Frey, was found to have fabricated parts of his autobiography, A Million Little Pieces (2003). She argues that Winfrey's choice of Night may have been intended to restore the book club's credibility. Wiesel wrote in 1967 about a visit to a rebbe (a Hasidic rabbi) who he had not seen for 20 years. The rebbe is upset to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. "Stories," Wiesel tells him, " ... true stories": > About people you knew? "Yes, about people I might have known." About things that happened? "Yes, about things that happened or could have happened." But they did not? "No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end." The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: That means you are writing lies! I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred."
64,156,823	4th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Confederate)	1,108,534,162	Infantry regiment of the Confederate States Army	[ "1862 disestablishments in Mississippi", "1862 establishments in Tennessee", "Military units and formations disestablished in 1862", "Military units and formations established in 1862", "Units and formations of the Confederate States Army from Missouri" ]	The 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment was formed on April 28, 1862, and served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. The infantry regiment did not see action at the Battle of Farmington on May 9, and the Battle of Iuka on September 19 despite being part of the Confederate force present at those battles. As part of Brigadier General Martin E. Green's brigade, the regiment participated in three charges against Union lines on October 3, 1862, during the Second Battle of Corinth. The following day, the regiment, along with the rest of Green's brigade, attacked the new Union lines. Despite initial success, the attack was repulsed by a Union counterattack. The regiment ceased to exist as a separate unit when it was combined with the 1st Missouri Infantry Regiment on November 7, 1862, to form the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Consolidated). The combined unit served in the Vicksburg campaign in 1863, before surrendering at the end of the siege of Vicksburg. After undergoing a prisoner exchange, the men rejoined the Confederate Army and served in the Atlanta Campaign and the Battle of Franklin in 1864, still as part of the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Consolidated). On May 9, 1865, near the end of the war, the consolidated regiment surrendered during the Battle of Fort Blakely, ending the unit's existence. The 4th Missouri Infantry's battle flag is displayed at the American Civil War Museum. ## Background and organization When the American Civil War began in 1861, the state of Missouri was politically divided between those supporting secession and those wishing to remain in the Union. The Governor of Missouri, Claiborne Fox Jackson, was a secessionist and supported the Confederate States of America; he created a pro-secession militia unit known as the Missouri State Guard (MSG) in May. The MSG, under the command of Major General Sterling Price, had initial success, including a victory against the Union Army in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, but were confined to southwestern Missouri by the end of the year. In the Battle of Pea Ridge, fought on March 7 and 8, 1862, in northwestern Arkansas, Price and the MSG suffered another defeat while serving under Major General Earl Van Dorn. After Pea Ridge, Van Dorn's army was transferred east of the Mississippi River. Eventually, many of the men of the MSG joined Confederate Army units. The 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment was formed on April 28, 1862, in Memphis, Tennessee. Two previously existing battalions, commanded by Archibald A. MacFarlane and Waldo P. Johnson, were combined with a small element of the MSG; many of MacFarlane and Johnson's men were MSG veterans. MacFarlane was appointed the regiment's first colonel, Johnson was the first lieutenant colonel, and Stephen W. Wood was the regiment's first major. On April 28, the regiment contained ten companies, all Missouri-raised; they were designated with the letters A–I and K. Almost all of the regiment's soldiers were of Anglo-Saxon descent. ## Service history After formation, the regiment was transferred by railroad to Corinth, Mississippi, as part of the Army of the West. An accounting of the regiment's troops during a May 5, 1862 muster listed 547 men in the regiment. On May 9, the 4th Missouri Infantry was near the action at the Battle of Farmington and deployed, but did not enter the fray. After the Confederates evacuated Corinth because of Union pressure, the regiment trained in several locations in northern Mississippi. Price was in command of the Army of the West, which he had stationed at Iuka, Mississippi; Van Dorn had troops further to the south. The Confederates were conducting an offensive into Kentucky, and Price and Van Dorn were expected to move into Tennessee to support it. Major General Ulysses S. Grant, who was the Union commander in the region, attempted to trap Price before he could join Van Dorn, but the Confederates were able to escape after fighting the Battle of Iuka. At this time, the 4th Missouri Infantry was in Brigadier General Martin E. Green's brigade, which was held in reserve and did not fight at Iuka. After escaping, Price joined Van Dorn, who commanded the combined force. Together, the Confederates moved against Corinth, which was strategically important to Union plans in the region. On October 2, Union Major General William S. Rosecrans occupied Corinth with 23,000 men; that same day, he learned of Van Dorn's approach. After arriving near the city, the Confederates deployed in an arc northwest of the Union defenses with 22,000 men. At 10:00 a.m. on October 3, Van Dorn attacked, beginning the Second Battle of Corinth. At Corinth, the 4th Missouri Infantry was still part of Green's brigade, which was in Brigadier General Louis Hébert's division; Hébert's formation was, in turn, part of Price's corps within the Army of West Tennessee. The 4th Missouri Infantry and the rest of Green's brigade (except for the artillery) attacked an outer Union position held by Brigadier General Thomas A. Davies's division. The initial attack was repulsed, but Green ordered a second charge, which was again repulsed, this time by a Union counterattack led by the 2nd Iowa Infantry. Later in the afternoon, Green's brigade made another charge against Davies's line; this attack was supported by elements of Colonel Elijah Gates's and Brigadier General Charles W. Phifer's brigades. After heavy fighting, the Union line was broken. Despite an opportunity to attack the inner Union line, Price decided not to press the attack as only 30 minutes of daylight remained; instead, he waited for the morning of the 4th to resume the battle. After Hébert fell ill, Green was promoted to divisional command on October 4. Command of Green's brigade then fell to Colonel William H. Moore, who led a charge against the inner Union line, to capture a fortification known as Battery Powell. The Union line was defended by men of Davies's division, who were quickly routed by the Confederate charge. After breaking through Davies's line, Moore's brigade aimed for the town of Corinth itself. Along with elements of Phifer's brigade and the brigade of Brigadier General John C. Moore, it entered Corinth and penetrated as far as the Tishomingo Hotel. A Union counterattack drove the Confederates out of Corinth. At Second Corinth, the 4th Missouri lost 129 men: 15 killed, 87 wounded, and 27 missing. MacFarlane suffered a serious head wound during the battle. ## Legacy On November 7, in the vicinity of Wyatt, Mississippi, the regiment consolidated with the 1st Missouri Infantry, due to losses in both units. The combination of the two regiments formed the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Consolidated). Companies B, C, E, H, and I of the new regiment were composed of men from the 4th Missouri Infantry; Companies A, D, F, G, and K were composed of men from the 1st Missouri Infantry. MacFarlane and Colonel Amos C. Riley of the 1st Missouri Infantry came to an agreement whereby McFarlane became colonel of the unit and Riley lieutenant colonel; the latter commanded the unit while MacFarlane recovered from his wounds. As a result of the consolidation, about 40 officers were deemed superfluous and were sent back across the Mississippi River to recruit new soldiers. In 1863, the new regiment fought at the Battle of Grand Gulf, the Battle of Champion Hill, the Battle of Big Black River Bridge, and the siege of Vicksburg, where the regiment was captured as part of a Confederate surrender. The men of the regiment then underwent a prisoner exchange and rejoined the Confederate army, still under the designation of the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Consolidated). In 1864, the regiment was engaged at the Battle of New Hope Church, the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, the siege of Atlanta, the Battle of Allatoona, and the Battle of Franklin. On May 9, 1865, near the end of the war, the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry (Consolidated) surrendered at the Battle of Fort Blakely, ending the unit's existence. As of January 2021, the flag of the 4th Missouri Infantry, a Van Dorn battle flag, is held by the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. ## See also - List of Missouri Confederate Civil War units
9,036,096	Yugoslav destroyer Dubrovnik	1,170,131,244	Yugoslav ship built in 1930–31	[ "1931 ships", "Destroyers of the Kriegsmarine", "Destroyers of the Regia Marina", "Destroyers of the Royal Yugoslav Navy", "History of Dubrovnik", "Maritime incidents in April 1945", "Naval ships of Italy captured by Germany during World War II", "Naval ships of Yugoslavia captured by Italy during World War II", "Scuttled vessels", "Ships built on the River Clyde", "United Kingdom–Yugoslavia relations", "World War II destroyers of Germany", "World War II destroyers of Italy", "World War II destroyers of Yugoslavia" ]	Dubrovnik was a flotilla leader built for the Royal Yugoslav Navy by Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow in 1930 and 1931. She was one of the largest destroyers of her time. Resembling contemporary British designs, Dubrovnik was a fast ship with a main armament of four Czechoslovak-built Škoda 140 mm (5.5 in) guns in single mounts. She was intended to be the first of three flotilla leaders built for Yugoslavia, but was the only one completed. During her service with the Royal Yugoslav Navy, Dubrovnik undertook several peacetime cruises through the Mediterranean, the Turkish Straits and the Black Sea. In October 1934, she conveyed King Alexander to France for a state visit, and carried his body back to Yugoslavia following his assassination in Marseille. During the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Dubrovnik was captured by the Italians. After a refit, which included the replacement of some of her weapons and the shortening of her mainmast and funnels, she was commissioned into the Royal Italian Navy as Premuda. In Italian service she was mainly used as an escort and troop transport. In June 1942, she was part of the Italian force that attacked the Allied Operation Harpoon convoy attempting to relieve the island of Malta. In July 1943, she broke down and was brought to Genoa for repair and a refit. Premuda was the most important and effective Italian war prize ship of World War II. At the time of the Italian surrender to the Allies in September 1943, Premuda was still docked in Genoa, and was seized by Germany. Plans to convert her into a radar picket for night fighters were abandoned. In August 1944, following the replacement of her armament, she was commissioned into the German Navy as a Torpedoboot Ausland (foreign torpedo boat) with the designation TA32. The ship saw action shelling Allied positions on the Italian coast and laying naval mines. In March 1945, she took part in the Battle of the Ligurian Sea against two Royal Navy destroyers, during which she was lightly damaged. She was scuttled the following month as the Germans retreated from Genoa. ## Development Following the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the subsequent creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS), Austria-Hungary transferred the vessels of the former Austro-Hungarian Navy to the new nation. The Kingdom of Italy was unhappy with this, and convinced the Allies to share the Austro-Hungarian ships among the victorious powers. As a result, the only modern sea-going vessels left to the KSCS were 12 torpedo boats, and they had to build their naval forces almost from scratch. During the 1920s, many navies were pursuing the flotilla leader concept, building large destroyers similar to the World War I Royal Navy V and W-class destroyers. In the interwar French Navy, these ships were known as contre-torpilleurs, and were intended to operate with smaller destroyers, or as half-flotillas of three ships. The idea was that such a half-flotilla could defeat an Italian light cruiser of the Condottieri class. The Navy of the KSCS decided to build three such flotilla leaders, ships that would have the ability to reach high speeds and with a long endurance. The long endurance requirement reflected Yugoslav plans to deploy the ships into the central Mediterranean, where they would be able to operate alongside French and British warships. At the time the decision was made, French shipyards were heavily committed to producing vessels for the French Navy. So, despite its intention to develop a French concept, the KSCS engaged Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow, Scotland, to build the ships. Unlike the French, who preferred to install guns of their own manufacture, Yarrow was happy to order the guns from the Czechoslovak firm Škoda. The initial Yarrow design was based on an enlarged version of the British Shakespeare class, with five Skoda 14 cm/56 naval guns. Excessive top weight resulted in the deletion of one of the guns, to be replaced with a seaplane mounting. The final version replaced the seaplane mounting with improved anti-aircraft armament. The intention to build three flotilla leaders was demonstrated by the fact that Yarrow ordered a total of 12 Škoda 140 mm (5.5 in) guns, four per ship. In July or August 1929, the KSCS (which became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October) signed a contract with Yarrow for a destroyer named Dubrovnik. This was the only ship built; the Great Depression prevented the construction of the rest of the planned half-flotilla. ## Description and construction Dubrovnik was similar in many respects to the British destroyers being manufactured at the same time, having a square box-like bridge, a long forecastle, and a sharp raked stem similar to the later British Tribal class. Her rounded stern was adapted for minelaying. She had an overall length of 113.2 metres (371 ft 5 in), with a 10.67 m (35 ft) beam, a mean draught of 3.58 m (11 ft 9 in), and a maximum draught of 4.1 m (13 ft 5 in). Her standard displacement was 1,880 long tons (1,910 t), and 2,400 long tons (2,439 t) at full load. Dubrovnik had two Parsons geared steam turbines, each driving a single propeller shaft. Steam for the turbines was provided by three Yarrow water-tube boilers, located in separate boiler rooms, and the turbines were rated at 48,000 shp (36,000 kW). As designed, the ship had a maximum speed of 37 knots (69 km/h; 43 mph). In 1934, under ideal conditions, she achieved a maximum speed of 40.3 knots (74.6 km/h; 46.4 mph). A separate Curtis turbine, rated at 900 shp (670 kW), was installed for cruising, with which she could achieve a range of 7,000 nautical miles (13,000 km; 8,100 mi) at 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph). She carried 470 tonnes (460 long tons) of fuel oil. The ship's main armament consisted of four Škoda 140 mm (5.5 in) L/56 superfiring guns in single mounts, two forward of the superstructure and two aft. She was also equipped with two triple Brotherhoods 533 mm (21 in) torpedo tubes on her centreline. For air defence, Dubrovnik had twin-mounted Škoda 83.5 mm (3.29 in) L/35 guns located on the centreline between the two sets of torpedo tubes, and six semi-automatic Škoda 40 mm (1.6 in) L/67 anti-aircraft guns, arranged in two twin mounts and two single mounts. The twin mounts were located between the two funnels, with the single mounts on the main deck abreast the aft control station. For anti-submarine work she was equipped with two depth charge throwers and two depth charge rails, and carried ten depth charges. She also carried two Česká zbrojovka 15 mm (0.59 in) machine guns and 40 mines. Her crew comprised 20 officers and 220 ratings. She was laid down on 10 June 1930 and launched on 11 October 1931 by Princess Olga, the consort of the Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul. She was named after the former city-state and Yugoslav port of Dubrovnik. ## Service history ### Dubrovnik Dubrovnik was completed at the Yarrow shipyards in Glasgow in 1932, by which time her main guns and light anti-aircraft guns had been installed. After sailing to the Bay of Kotor in the southern Adriatic, she was fitted with her heavy anti-aircraft guns. She was commissioned with the Royal Yugoslav Navy in May 1932. Her captain was Armin Pavić. In late September 1933, the ship left the Bay of Kotor and sailed through the Turkish Straits to Constanța on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where she embarked King Alexander and Queen Maria of Yugoslavia. She then visited Balcic in Romania and Varna in Bulgaria, before returning via Istanbul and the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea, arriving back at the Bay of Kotor on 8 October. On 6 October 1934, King Alexander left the Bay of Kotor on board Dubrovnik for a state visit to France, arriving in Marseille on 9 October. He was killed the same day by a Bulgarian assassin, and Dubrovnik conveyed his body back to Yugoslavia, escorted by French, Italian and British ships. Soon after, Vladimir Šaškijević replaced Pavić as captain. In August 1935, Dubrovnik visited Corfu and Bizerte in the French protectorate of Tunisia. In August 1937, Dubrovnik visited Istanbul and the Greek ports of Mudros in the northern Aegean Sea and Piraeus near Athens. Despite trying to remain neutral in the early stages of the World War II, Yugoslavia was drawn into the conflict in April 1941, when it was invaded by the German-led Axis powers. At the time, Dubrovnik was still under Šaškijević's command and was assigned as the flagship of the 1st Torpedo Division, along with the smaller Beograd-class destroyers, Beograd and Zagreb. On 6 April, the date the invasion began, Dubrovnik was in the Bay of Kotor. ### Premuda The Italians captured Dubrovnik in the Bay of Kotor on 17 April 1941; she had been damaged by Yugoslav civilians prior to her seizure. Dubrovnik was sailed to Taranto in southern Italy on 21 May, where she underwent repairs and a refit. She was renamed Premuda, after the Dalmatian island near which an Italian motor torpedo boat had sunk the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought Szent István in June 1918. Her aft deckhouse and emergency bridge were removed and replaced with an anti-aircraft platform, and her mainmast and funnels were shortened. Her four single mount Škoda 140 mm (5.5 in) L/56 guns were replaced by four single mount 135 mm L/45 guns and her twin Škoda 83.5 mm (3.29 in) L/55 anti-aircraft guns were replaced by a 120 mm (4.7 in) L/15 howitzer firing star shells for illumination, while the six Škoda 40 mm (1.6 in) L/67 anti-aircraft guns were replaced by four Breda Model 35 20 mm (0.79 in) L/65 machine guns in single mounts, space for the latter being made available by removing her searchlights. A new director was also fitted to her bridge. Later in her Italian service, the 120 mm (4.7 in) howitzer was replaced by a twin Breda 37 mm (1.5 in) L/54 anti-aircraft gun mount. Under the Italian flag, her crew consisted of 13 officers and 191 enlisted ranks. Premuda was commissioned in the Italian Navy (Italian: Regia Marina) in February 1942. Later that month she rescued British prisoners of war who survived the sinking of the SS Ariosto, an Italian ship ferrying them from Tripoli to Sicily. In early June, the Italian submarine Alagi fired on Premuda, mistaking her for a British destroyer owing to her similarities with a British H-class destroyer. The attack missed Premuda and struck the Navigatori-class destroyer Antoniotto Usodimare, sinking her. During 12–16 June 1942, Premuda took part in operations against the Allied Operation Harpoon convoy attempting to reach the beleaguered island of Malta from Gibraltar. As part of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, Premuda supported the Italian 7th Cruiser Squadron, comprising the light cruisers Eugenio di Savoia and Raimondo Montecuccoli. The Allied naval force lost two destroyers and four merchant ships to a combination of naval gunfire, torpedoes, air attacks, and naval mines. The Navigatori-class destroyer Ugolino Vivaldi was hit by a British destroyer, and Premuda was tasked to tow her to safety in the harbour of Pantelleria, an island in the Strait of Sicily, under escort from the destroyer Lanzerotto Malocello. On 6–7 January 1943, Premuda and 13 other Italian destroyers transported troops to the Axis-held port of Tunis in North Africa. They completed two more such missions between 9 February and 22 March. On 17 July, Premuda developed serious engine problems in the Ligurian Sea near La Spezia. She was subsequently brought to Genoa for a major boiler and engine overhaul. It was decided to rebuild her along the lines of the Navigatori-class, including a wider beam to improve her stability. As shells for her Škoda-built main guns were in short supply, the decision was made to replace them with Italian-made 135 mm (5.3 in) /L45 guns in single mounts. The rebuild was also to have included augmented 37 mm and 20 mm armament, probably using space made available by removing her aft torpedo tubes. The rebuild had not been completed when Italy surrendered to the Allies, and Premuda was seized by Germany at Genoa on 8 or 9 September 1943. Premuda was the most important and effective Italian war prize ship of World War II. ### TA32 Premuda's new guns had not been completed when she was captured by the Germans. Their initial plans called for the ship to serve as a radar picket for night fighters, with three 105 mm (4.1 in) L/45 anti-aircraft guns in single mounts, Freya early-warning radar, Würzburg gun-laying radar and a FuMO 21 surface fire-control system. These plans were soon abandoned because the Germans lacked destroyers and torpedo boats in the Mediterranean, and the decision was made to commission her as a Torpedoboot Ausland (foreign torpedo boat) with a DeTe radar instead of the Freya and Würzburg radar sets. Her armament was replaced with four 105 mm (4.1 in) L/45 naval guns, eight 37 mm (1.5 in) anti-aircraft guns and between thirty-two and thirty-six 20 mm (0.79 in) anti-aircraft guns in quadruple and twin mounts. The number of torpedo tubes was reduced from six to three. The number of 37 mm (1.5 in) anti-aircraft guns was later increased to ten, in four twin and two single mounts. In German service, she had a total crew of 220 officers and men. The ship was commissioned in the German Navy (German: Kriegsmarine) on 18 August 1944, as TA32, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Emil Kopka. She served in the Ligurian Sea with the 10th Torpedo Boat Flotilla, and was immediately committed to shelling Allied positions on the Italian coast, then scouting and minelaying tasks in the western Gulf of Genoa. On 2 October 1944, TA32, along with TA24 and TA29, sailed towards Sanremo to lay mines, where they encountered the destroyer USS Gleaves. After exchanging fire, the three ships returned to Genoa without being hit. By mid-March 1945, TA32, TA24 and TA29 were the only ships of the 10th Torpedo Boat Flotilla that remained operational. On the night of 17/18 March 1945, TA32 placed 76 naval mines off Cap Corse, the northern tip of Corsica, in an offensive minelaying operation, along with TA24 and TA29. After being detected by a shore-based radar, the ships were engaged by the destroyers HMS Lookout and HMS Meteor, in what would become known as the Battle of the Ligurian Sea. Outgunned, TA24 and TA29 were sunk, while TA32 managed to escape with light damage to her rudder, after firing a few rounds and making an abortive torpedo attack. TA32 was scuttled at Genoa on 24 April 1945 as the Germans retreated. Her wreck was raised and broken up in 1950. ## See also - List of ships of the Royal Yugoslav Navy
49,279,895	Portrait of Maria Portinari	1,160,872,055	Painting by Hans Memling	[ "1470s paintings", "Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art", "Portraits by Hans Memling", "Portraits of women" ]	Portrait of Maria Portinari is a small c. 1470–72 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. She is about 14 years old, and depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker, Tommaso Portinari. Maria is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century fashion, with a long black hennin with a transparent veil and an elaborate jewel-studded necklace. Her headdress is similar and a necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes's later Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait. The panel is the right wing of a devotional and hinged triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in sixteenth-century inventories as a Virgin and Child, and the left panel depicts Tommaso. The panels were commissioned by Tommaso, a member of a prominent Florentine family. Tommaso was a confidant of Charles the Bold and an ambitious manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici, and a well known and active patron of Flemish art. Tommaso eventually lost his position due to a series of large and risky unsecured loans given to Charles. Maria and Tommaso's portraits hang alongside each other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The central panel is lost; some art historians suggest it may have been his Virgin and Child in the National Gallery, London. ## Commission The portrait was commissioned by the art-loving Tommaso as the right-hand wing of a triptych. She was placed opposite her husband, with a now-lost central Madonna and Child. Their small size and intimacy suggest that the portraits were commissioned for private prayer; some art historians believe, given Tommaso's cultural acumen and preoccupation with his social standing, that they were partially accessible to the public. The triptych may have been intended for the Portinari Chapel, located behind the apse of the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio, Milan, and constructed between 1462 and 1468. Maria would have been around 14 years old at the time the portrait was commissioned, either the year of her marriage in 1470 or shortly after. Tommaso represented the Medici bank in Bruges, but after a promising early career he gave a number of risky and unsecured loans to Charles the Bold which were left unpaid and eventually led to the branch's insolvency. He died young, and when the portrait was first mentioned as part of his collection in 1501, he was no longer alive. Maria is recorded as being alive at the time; she was executor to her husband's will but her fate thereafter is uncertain. The 1501 inventory places both portraits as wings, with a central Virgin and Child panel; "a small, valuable panel painting, with an image of Our Lady in the middle and on the sides painted Tommaso and mona Maria his wife" (una tavoletta dipinta preg[i]ata cum nel mezo una immagine di Nostra Donna e delle bande si è Tommaso e mona Maria sua donna dipinti in deta tavoletta). ## Description The half-length portrait shows Maria Portinari (born Maria Maddalena Baroncelli in 1456) in a three-quarter view turned to the left. She has somewhat Nordic features, and is dressed in the high fashion then found at the apex of Flemish and Italian high society. She is placed against a flat, opaque, dark background, with her hands clasped in prayer. In Memling's early portraits the backgrounds tend to be plain, as was invariably the case in the work of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, and favored within Burgundian court circles. In contrast, Memling's later portraits are set within rich interiors or against landscapes framed by columns, such as in his Portrait of Benedetto Portinari [it], a fact that has assisted in dating his work. Maria's face is idealised and conforms to contemporary ideals of beauty, especially in the raised eyebrows and elongated nose. The art historian Lorne Campbell has noted her facial similarity to the Virgin in Memling's panel at the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon. In this work, Maria's frame is slightly undersized compared to her head, a common characteristic of contemporary northern portraiture, also found in similar works by Rogier van der Weyden and Petrus Christus. Her elbows rest on an unseen parapet that coincides with the lower edge of the painted stone frame, acting as a trompe-l'œil which situates her both in the same reality and in closer proximity to the viewer. Maria wears a relatively modest wedding band lined with rubies and sapphire. Her necklace is colored with mostly red and blue jewels, similar to Hugo van der Goes's portrait of her in the Portinari Altarpiece. The black hennin is long, truncated and relatively plain with a transparent veil which falls around the back of her neck, resting briefly on her shoulder. Probably it was kept relatively unadorned so as not to distract from the necklace. Her costume is mostly black or brown, with a wide but high neckline and white fur lined hems on the sleeves. Portinari has dark eyes, a strong nose, full lips and a pointed chin. Her visible hand, folded in prayer but unrealistically off center, wears what looks like a jeweled ring. The dark sleeves of her dress contain red or rouge velvet-like cloth tightened by a white belt. Her hair is shaved back to achieve the high forehead and sculptural look fashionable at the time. Maria's necklace is gilded and studded with pearls, rubies and sapphires. It contains three open flowers; one white with a ruby jewel, another red with a sapphire, and one gray-blue with a pearl. The upper line contains a row of onyx beads, from which hang, according to the art historian Sophie McConnell "small teardrops" gold and bluish-grey enameled wire. The necklace is very similar to that worn by Margaret of York at her wedding to Charles the Bold in 1468, an occasion the Portinaris attended. A depiction of Charles in a double Portrait with Isabella of Bourbon, now in Ghent, closely resembles that of Thomas in facial features, while Isabella and Maria look very similar. Dirk de Vos believes van der Goes may have seen Memling's panel when he stayed with Tommaso in Bruges c. 1497, and incorporated elements for his own depiction. The panel is in very good condition and among the best preserved of Memling's work. Technical examination using x-radiography shows that the hennin originally contained pearls which formed the letters "T" and "M", standing for Tommaso and Maria. Similar pearl monograms, which would have been intended as a sign of marital connection, can be found in van der Goes's portraits of the couple. Maryan Ainsworth concludes that they were removed from the final composition as they may have been "deemed too conspicuous a show of opulence in the presence of the Virgin and Child, most likely the now lost object of Maria's veneration." Maria's ear was at one stage exposed, but was later covered by the wide frontlet of the hennin, a change of mind also found in the very similar portrait of the female donor in Memling's c. 1470s to early 1480 Donne Triptych. ## Provenance The panel has at various times been attributed to van der Goes and van Eyck, but was recognized as by Memling as early as the time of the seminal 1902 exhibition Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges in Bruges, when it was lent by Léopold Goldschmidt of Paris. In 1916 Max J. Friedländer described it as "without doubt" by Memling, and c. 1475. The art historian Catheline Périer-d'Ieteren, while noting that Memling's portrait faces were rarely underdrawn, wrote that this panel contains "thin yet confident incised lines" which may be preliminary drawings for Maria's face, perhaps made from life. The triptych was recorded in an inventory of Tommaso's holdings upon his death. The New York panels passed through Tommaso's son Francesco. The central panel was described in his 1544 will as "a small tabernacle with three movable wings, in which is depicted the glorious Virgin Mary and the father and mother of the donor" (unum tabernaculettum que clauditur con tribus sportellis, in qua est depicta imago Gloriossime virginis Marie et patris et matris dicti testatoris). Francesco bequeathed the triptych to the convent of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Records indicate a small intact winged altarpiece which stayed in the hospital's possession until around the time of the Napoleonic occupation, when it was probably broken up. Maria's panel was sold as a Dieric Bouts for 6,000 francs in 1870. It later passed through several private collections before arriving in the possession of Elia Volpi [it] of Rome, who briefly returned it to Florence. Thereafter the panels were in London from 1901, from where they were sold to Villeroy Goldschmidt of Paris by for \$426,500 in 1910. They were purchased, also in 1910, by the collector Benjamin Altman of New York on the advice of Max Friedländer, along with works by Albrecht Dürer, Gerard David and Hans Holbein the Younger – paintings whose "grave austerity seems to have been most in tune with his own taste". Altman bequeathed his holdings to the Metropolitan on his death in 1913.
48,579,716	1982 World Snooker Championship	1,149,067,456	Professional snooker tournament	[ "1982 in English sport", "1982 in snooker", "April 1982 sports events in the United Kingdom", "May 1982 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Sports competitions in Sheffield", "World Snooker Championships" ]	The 1982 World Snooker Championship (officially the 1982 Embassy World Snooker Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 30 April and 16 May 1982 at the Crucible Theatre, in Sheffield, England. It was the only event of the 1981–82 snooker season which carried world ranking points. Embassy, a British cigarette company, sponsored the tournament, and the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) governed the organisation of the event. It had a prize fund of £110,000, with the winner receiving £25,000. The defending champion Steve Davis had defeated Doug Mountjoy with a score of 18–12 in the previous year's final. In 1982, Davis lost 1–10 to Tony Knowles in the first round. Alex Higgins won his second world title by defeating Ray Reardon 18–15 in the final. Ten century breaks were made during the tournament, the highest of which was a 143 scored by Willie Thorne. ## Overview The World Snooker Championship is an annual cue sport tournament and is the official world championship of the game of snooker. Snooker was founded in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India. The sport was originated by players from the United Kingdom, and later spread to players from Europe and the Commonwealth. In more modern times, the sport has transferred to being played worldwide, specifically in Southeast Asia, such as in China, Thailand and Hong Kong. Joe Davis won the first World Championship, held in 1927 at Camkin's Hall in Birmingham, England. Since 1977, the tournament has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. The 1982 World Championship was promoted by Mike Watterson and governed by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA). Thirty-two professional players competed in one-on-one single-elimination matches that were played over several . The players were selected for the event using a combination of world snooker rankings and a qualification event. The defending champion was Steve Davis, who defeated Doug Mountjoy 18–12 in the 1981 championship final. There were 67 entrants for the 1982 tournament including the qualifying event, a new record. This was the first world championship to have 32 players in the first round. In 1980, the number of players in the main event had been increased to 24, up from 16 in 1979. In 1980 and 1981, the top eight players received a bye into the second round. It was the only event of the season that carried ranking points. These were only awarded from the last-16 round onwards. British cigarette company Embassy sponsored the tournament. ### Prize fund The breakdown of prize money on offer for 1982 is shown below. The total of £110,000 was a new record for the world championship. - Winner: £25,000 - Runner-up: £12,500 - Semi-final: £7,000 - Quarter-final: £3,500 - Last 16: £2,250 - Last 32: £1,250 - Highest break: £2,500 - Maximum break: £10,000 - Total: £110,000 ## Tournament summary ### First round The contest's first round took place between 30 April and 6 May, each best-of-19 frames match being played over two . Defending champion Steve Davis was the bookmakers' favourite to win the tournament, with odds of 2/5. However, he lost the match 1–10 to Tony Knowles, who won the first and second frames after Davis twice failed to the final . Knowles won the next two frames by more than 60 points, giving him a 4–0 lead during the mid-session interval. Without making a significant , Davis won the fifth frame. Knowles then compiled a break of 67, the highest of the session, to win the sixth frame. Davis's highest break of the first session was 32, and he finished 1–8 behind. In the first frame of the second session, Davis made a foul shot by accidentally lightly the while preparing to play a shot. Knowles won the frame. In the eleventh frame, Knowles took a 53–0 lead before Davis failed to pot the black ball after the last , and Knowles won the frame and match. Knowles said he had been at a nightclub until 2:00 am that day and had slept for only five hours. Graham Miles, who was tied at 5–5 with Dave Martin, won the next five frames to achieve a 10–5 victory. Bill Werbeniuk led John Bear 7–2 after their first session; Bear won the next three frames to reduce the lead to 7–5, but Werbeniuk ultimately won 10–7. Cliff Wilson led Eddie Charlton 5–4 but lost the match 5–10. Wilson, who had been taking medication for a viral infection prior to the first round, was feeling unwell and lost six consecutive frames in the second session. Dennis Taylor had lost one of his contact lenses the previous week and played without eyewear. He trailed Silvino Francisco 2–7 but won five of the next six, bringing the score to 7–8. Francisco then won three successive frames, winning 10–7. Eight-time champion Fred Davis, the event's oldest competitor at the age of 68, lost 7–10 to Dean Reynolds, who at 19 was the youngest participant. After defeat in the first three frames, Davis had led 6–5. Ray Reardon faced Jim Donnelly, the first Scottish player to play at the Crucible, and built a 6–3 lead over him. Reardon lost the subsequent two frames but achieved victory in the next four, allowing him to win 10–5. John Virgo defeated Mike Hallett 10–4 after leading 7–2 in the first session. Terry Griffiths, the bookmakers' next favourite after Steve Davis's elimination, led 4–2 but finished his first session behind 4–5 to Willie Thorne, who had never won a match in his six earlier Crucible appearances. Thorne defeated Griffiths 10–6 and compiled a break of 106, which was the first century break of the 1982 tournament. John Spencer defeated John Dunning 10–4. Alex Higgins, who had said he was having the "worst season of his professional career", became the next bookmakers' favourite. He won his opening-round match against Jim Meadowcroft 10–5. Doug Mountjoy defeated Rex Williams, the reigning world billiards champion, 10–3. David Taylor led Patsy Fagan 6–3 overnight then extended his lead to 7–3 before Fagan levelled at 7–7. Taylor asked Fagan, who was 7–8 behind, to play again after making a shot while failing to escape from a . He failed to pot the and hit the cue ball again as it was still moving, disturbing other balls from their position. The referee could have interpreted this as Fagan conceding the frame but instead replaced the balls. Fagan went on to win the frame. From 9–9, Fagan made the highest break of their match, 78, to win the deciding frame. Perrie Mans won 10–8 over Tony Meo, his first win at the Crucible since the 1978 semi-final. Jimmy White, who started his match against Cliff Thorburn with a break of 102 in the first frame, led 7–2 in the first session and won the match 10–4. Kirk Stevens defeated Jack Fitzmaurice 10–4. In the first round, five of the top eight seeds were eliminated: Steve Davis (seeded 1), Thorburn (2), Griffiths (3), Dennis Taylor (5), and David Taylor (7). This included the previous three world champions, who were also the top three seeds. ### Second round The second round took place between 5 and 10 May; each match was played over three sessions as the best-of-25 frames. Knowles defeated Miles 13–7. Charlton led Werbeniuk 6–1 and 11–4, and won 13–5. Francisco won the first four frames of his match against Reynolds to lead 4–0 and led at 5–3 and 9–5 before winning 13–8. Reardon was 6–2 and later 10–6 against Virgo, winning 13–8. Thorne, after being 5–3 ahead of Spencer after the first session, made a break of 122 during the second and went on to win the match 13–5. Higgins won the first three frames of his match against Mountjoy, two of them on the final black ball after trailing on points in each of them, and finished their first session leading 6–2. Higgins moved to 9–7 ahead and Mountjoy then won three consecutive frames. Higgins then won the next three for 12–10. Mountjoy forced a deciding frame by winning the next two and was nearly 40 points ahead in the decider, but Higgins won the frame to win the match 13–12. Stevens defeated Fagan 13–7, having led 10–6 at the end of their second session. White led Mans 5–3 before winning 13–6. ### Quarter-finals The quarter-finals took place from 9 to 11 May; each match was played over three sessions as the best-of-25 frames. White led Stevens 5–3 in their first session, extending this to 10–6, and winning the match 13–9. Reardon led Francisco 6–2 and 10–6 after their sessions, and won 13–8. Thorne was 3–5 behind Higgins; despite scoring breaks of 143 – the highest of the tournament – in the 9th frame, and 112 in the 16th frame, he still trailed 7–9 at the end of the second session. Higgins won the match 13–10, compiling a 68 break in the last frame. Knowles led Charlton 5–3 after their first session and 10–6 after the second. Knowles then won the first frame of the third session to lead 11–6. Charlton narrowed the lead to 9–11 and won another frame to score 10–11 when Knowles missed a routine green ball. Knowles missed a black ball from its in the 22nd frame, saying he was distracted by a member of the audience rustling paper. Charlton then made a break of 78 to level the match 11–11. Charlton took the following frame as well, then won the match 13–11 with a break of 58, concluding a seven-frame winning streak. ### Semi-finals The semi-finals took place from 12 to 14 May, with both matches played over four sessions as the best-of-31 frames. White, by defeating Stevens in the quarter-finals, had become the youngest-ever player to reach a world championship semi-final. Higgins, his opponent, won the opening frame of the match. White made breaks of 60 and 38, and won the second frame, before Higgins built a 4–1 lead. With breaks of 63, 69 and 44, White drew level at 4–4 by the end of the first session. White won the first four frames of the second session, compiling breaks of 69 in the first and 52 in the second. Higgins had a chance in the second frame but failed to pot the last red ball and conceded the frame. After the mid-session interval, Higgins made a break of 61 and won the 13th frame, and also took the 14th frame after White missed an easy black. After White missed a red ball, Higgins also won the next frame, ending the day one frame behind at 7–8. In the third session, White took three of the first four frames, compiling a break of 89 in the fourth of these to lead 11–8, Higgins then won the next three to level the match at 11–11 by the end of the session. White won the first frame of the fourth session and Higgins a in the following frame, which he went on to win. From 12–12, the next two frames were shared for 13–13. Higgins scored only nine points across two frames as White moved into a 15–13 lead with three frames to play. Higgins narrowed his deficit to one frame with a break of 72. In the 30th frame, White was 59 points ahead when he missed a simple red. Higgins then made a break of 69, showing excellent potting but poor positional play that is described in the book Masters of the Baize (2005) as "arguably the greatest clearance of all time" to take the match to a deciding frame. In the last frame, Higgins made a break of 59 to win the match 16–15. Charlton gained a 3–0 lead over Reardon. Reardon, however, made breaks of 50, 47, 48 and 35 in the next four frames and finished the first session 4–3 ahead. Charlton scored a break of 83 in the first frame of the second session, levelling the score at 4–4. Reardon again moved a frame ahead with a break of 98. Charlton gained a two-frame lead at 7–5 by winning three consecutive frames but lost the 13th frame after snookering himself on the yellow ball. Reardon then equalised the match at 7–7, scoring a break of 59 in the last frame of the session. In the third session, the score went to 8–8 and Reardon then compiled breaks of 94 and 77 to win the next two frames. Charlton again equalised with a 54 break in the 17th frame and by winning the 18th frame on the pink. Reardon took the lead with a 93 clearance at 11–10 but Charlton won the last frame of the session with a break of 64 that started with a fluke. In the fourth session, Reardon had won five successive frames to win the match 16–11, making a 98 break in the fourth frame. ### Final The final between Reardon and Higgins was played on 15 and 16 May as the best-of-35 frames over four sessions. Reardon, a six-time champion, had never lost in the world championship final. It was Higgins's fourth world final following his win in 1972 and his losing appearances in the 1976 and 1980 finals. The 1982 final was a rematch of the 1976 final, which Reardon won 27–16. In the opening session, in which both players made a number of errors, Reardon built a 5–3 lead. Higgins had compiled a break of 118 in the fourth frame to equalise at 2–2. In the second session, Reardon was 6–4 ahead when he failed to pot the pink ball; Higgins won that frame and the next to equalise at 6–6. Reardon won the next frame but Higgins took the lead at 8–7, the first day finishing with Higgins 10–7 up. On the second day, Reardon won the first frame with a break of 95 and also won the next frame. Higgins won the next two frames to gain a 12–9 lead, which Reardon reduced by winning frames 22 and 23, the session ending with Higgins leading 13–12. In the fourth and final session, Higgins won the first frame and took the second after Reardon missed an easy yellow. Now 15–12 ahead, Higgins missed a pot that allowed Reardon to win the frame and narrow Higgins's lead to two frames, 15–13. With Higgins showing signs of nervousness, Reardon won another two frames to level at 15–15, having required Higgins to in the second of these. Higgins then won the 31st frame 79–0, the 32nd 112–0 with breaks of 38 and 73, and then won the match with a clearance of 135. A tearful Higgins summoned his wife and baby daughter from the audience to celebrate with him. The tournament was broadcast on BBC2, with 10.8 million viewers on the second day of the final. Higgins had two ranking points deducted for misconduct in February 1981, which meant that he was second behind Reardon rather than first in the snooker world rankings 1982/1983 after his championship win. Before the tournament, Reardon was ranked fourth and Higgins was eleventh. Thorburn and Steve Davis dropped from first and second to third and fourth respectively. Griffiths, who had been third, dropped to 14th. The day after his 1982 Championship win, he attended a WPBSA disciplinary meeting, which considered incidents including Higgins urinating in a flower display at the Crucible during the event, and an incident at the 1982 Irish Masters where he had told audience members to "shut your traps". The Association fined him £1,000 for bringing the game into disrepute. ## Main draw Shown below are the results for each round. The numbers in brackets are player seeds, whilst those in bold denote match winners. ## Qualifying Qualifying matches took place in April 1982 at Redwood Lodge Country Club, Bristol; Romiley Forum, Stockport; Astra La Reserve Club, Sutton Coldfield; and Sheffield Snooker Centre. Qualifying matches were played over two rounds as the best-of-17 frames. The results are shown below. Players in bold denote match winners. Former world champion John Pulman withdrew from the competition because he had not sufficiently recovered after sustaining a broken leg in October 1981. ## Century breaks There were 10 century breaks at the championship, the highest being 143 by Willie Thorne. On offer was a £5,000 bonus for compiling a break higher than the championship record of 145. - 143, 122, 112, 106 – Willie Thorne - 135, 118 – Alex Higgins - 126, 102 – Jimmy White - 111 – Kirk Stevens - 100 – John Virgo Three century breaks were made in the qualifying competition. - 127 – Dave Martin - 107 – Mike Watterson - 100 – Mike Hallett
21,222,331	2009 New York's 20th congressional district special election	1,161,063,209	null	[ "2009 New York (state) elections", "2009 United States House of Representatives elections", "New York (state) special elections", "Special elections to the 111th United States Congress", "United States House of Representatives elections in New York (state)", "United States House of Representatives special elections" ]	On March 31, 2009, New York held a special election to fill a vacancy in its 20th congressional district. In January, the district's representative, Kirsten Gillibrand, was appointed US senator from New York, replacing Hillary Clinton, who had been appointed Secretary of State in the Obama administration. The two major-party candidates were Scott Murphy, a Democrat and private businessman, and Jim Tedisco, a Republican and the minority leader of the New York State Assembly. A Libertarian candidate, Eric Sundwall, was initially included in the race, but later removed from the ballot. The 20th congressional district has historically been conservative, and early polls favored Tedisco, but by February 2009 the race was considered a toss-up. The Republican Party considered the election to be a referendum on President Obama's economic policy and as such, injected significant funding into Tedisco's campaign, using well-known Republicans such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congressional Minority Leader John Boehner, and former New York governor George Pataki for support. Democrats used Senator Gillibrand, Vice President Joe Biden, and an endorsement from President Obama to support the Murphy campaign. Major issues brought up during the campaign were the candidates' positions on President Obama's stimulus plan, which Tedisco did not take a stance on until late in the race. Murphy supported it while Tedisco eventually opposed it. Tedisco portrayed Murphy's support of the plan as a potential cause of the AIG bonus scandal. Tedisco's campaign also brought up Murphy's failure to pay taxes on a company he founded in the 1990s. A frequent Murphy talking point was that Tedisco's primary residence was not in the Congressional district. The race was so close that one early vote count had the candidates tied at 77,225 votes each. Absentee ballots decided the election; ballots were accepted until April 13. While Tedisco had been ahead in early counts, by April 10 Murphy was leading, and by April 23 Murphy had a 401-vote advantage. Tedisco conceded the race the following day, and Murphy was sworn in on April 29. Democratic electoral successes in November 2008 and Murphy's clear support of the stimulus package were credited for his success. ## Background New York's 20th congressional district in 2009 encompassed all or part of Columbia, Dutchess, Delaware, Essex, Greene, Otsego, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties. Traditionally conservative, it had been considered a safe seat for Republicans until Blue Dog Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand defeated incumbent John E. Sweeney in the 2006 election. In November 2008, the Republican Party held an enrollment advantage of 70,632 registered voters across the district, down from a 93,337-voter advantage when the district lines were drawn by the New York State Legislature in 2002. Although Republican George W. Bush carried the district by an eight-point margin in the 2004 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama won the district in 2008 by a three-point margin, or approximately 10,000 votes of over 330,000 cast. Gillibrand was reelected in 2008 by 24 points, a fourfold increase over her 2006 margin. One of Barack Obama's first decisions as president-elect was to appoint Hillary Clinton, U.S. Senator from New York and former Democratic presidential primary opponent, as Secretary of State; Clinton resigned her Senate seat to take the position. The district's seat became vacant in January 2009 when Governor David Paterson appointed Gillibrand to the United States Senate to replace Clinton. On February 23, 2009, Governor Paterson issued a proclamation setting the date for the special election as March 31, 2009. Under state law, Paterson was not required to issue a proclamation for a special election until July 2010. Both the Rothenberg Political Report and the Cook Political Report listed the race as a toss-up. ## Candidates In lieu of party primaries, the party nominees were chosen by a weighted vote among the county committees. The weight of the vote depended on the population of registered party voters (Republican or Democrat) in a given county. ### Republican Party State Senator Betty Little and former state Assembly minority leader and 2006 Republican gubernatorial candidate John Faso had been in the running for the Republican nomination. Richard Wager, a former aide to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and State Senator Stephen Saland had also been mentioned. Alexander "Sandy" Treadwell, the former New York Secretary of State and 2008 U.S. House challenger, had announced he would not run. On January 24, State Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco received the endorsement of Saratoga County's Republican chairman, while the Greene County GOP endorsed Faso. Jim Tedisco was the eventual Republican nominee, winning the GOP nomination on January 27, 2009. Tedisco represented the 110th Assembly District, which includes a significant portion of Saratoga County. Tedisco's primary residence was not in the congressional district, although he did own a house in Saratoga Springs and much of his assembly district overlapped the congressional district. This issue would become a major talking point during the campaign. ### Democratic Party On January 31, The Post-Star reported that the Democrats had narrowed the field of potential candidates from over two dozen applicants down to six. The Democratic chairpersons met with all six candidates at a diner in Albany on February 1, and selected Scott Murphy of Glens Falls, president of the Upstate Venture Association of New York, as their candidate. Other confirmed candidates included Saratoga County Democratic Chairman Larry Bulman, former New York Rangers goaltender Mike Richter, Coxsackie Town Supervisor Alex Betke, and Tracey Brooks, failed candidate for the nomination for the 21st district election in 2008. ### Third parties New York allows electoral fusion, which is an arrangement allowing two or more qualified parties to list the same candidate on a ballot. The Conservative Party chose to cross-endorse Tedisco on February 9, while the Working Families Party gave its endorsement to Murphy on February 17. On March 1, the Independence Party, the largest third party in the 20th district, gave its endorsement to Murphy. This was the first time the Independence Party had endorsed a Democrat in the district. Eric Sundwall, Chair of the New York Libertarian Party, was the Libertarian candidate for the seat. However, he was removed from the ballot on March 25, after 3,786 of the 6,730 signatures his campaign had collected were ruled invalid. Under state election law, independent congressional candidates must collect at least 3,500 valid signatures to be on the ballot. Two Saratoga County residents challenged over 6,000 of Sundwall's signatures; Sundwall blamed Tedisco for the effort to have him removed from the ballot. The vast majority of the rejected signatures were from voters who put down their mailing address instead of the municipality in which they physically lived. Votes for Sundwall on absentee ballots, which were mailed out before he was removed from the ballot, were voided. On March 27, Sundwall announced that he would vote for Murphy in the election and urged his supporters to join him. ## Campaign The campaigns agreed to hold four debates. The first debate took place on March 2, between Tedisco and Murphy. The second debate, sponsored by WMHT and the Times Union, took place on March 19 between Murphy and Libertarian candidate Eric Sundwall. Jim Tedisco held a town hall meeting rather than attend, claiming the debate was not one of the four originally agreed upon. The third debate took place on March 23 and the final debate was on March 26. Strategists from both parties viewed the outcome of the race as a "referendum on President Obama's handling of the economy". Chairman Michael Steele of the Republican National Committee said the special election was the first of three elections that were "incredibly important" for the Republicans to win. The Republican leadership made this race a top priority, and Chairman Steele, former Governor George Pataki, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich helped Tedisco with fundraising. Steele visited the district twice. On the Democratic side, Senator Gillibrand appeared in commercials and robocalls for Murphy, and Senator Chuck Schumer helped Murphy's campaign with fundraising. Less than a week before the election, President Obama formally endorsed Murphy in a mass email to supporters and urged supporters to organize and vote for Murphy. A radio ad Vice President Joe Biden recorded for Murphy was released on March 25. That same day, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tim Kaine emailed 500 of the party's top donors asking them to contribute to Murphy's campaign. The RNC spent \$100,000 on Tedisco's behalf. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent \$150,000 and the Service Employees International Union spent \$315,000 for Murphy. The New York State United Teachers made an effort to call its members on Murphy's behalf, while the National Right to Life, National Republican Trust and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association organizations paid for ads and mailings supporting Tedisco. Each candidate aimed to discredit the other by pointing out his opponent's flaws or mistakes. Republicans called attention to Murphy's failure to pay taxes on a start-up computer software company he had founded in the 1990s, drawing comparison to three high-profile Obama administration nominees who failed to pay all of their taxes. Tedisco also called attention to Murphy's failure to regularly vote in elections after the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) announced that Murphy had failed to vote in the 2000 presidential election, along with seven other primaries and general elections between 2000 and 2003. Believing the negative ads run by the NRCC were responsible for his drop in the polls, Tedisco announced that he would take control of campaign advertising from the NRCC. Murphy spent the first months of the campaign criticizing Tedisco's early refusal to disclose his position on President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. When Tedisco came out in opposition to the legislation on March 16, Murphy responded by writing "it's just shameful it took well over a month for Assemblyman Tedisco to finally admit that he'd vote 'No'". Murphy's campaign described Tedisco as a career Albany politician. By mid-March, a provision in the stimulus package that grandfathered in bonuses paid to executives at troubled insurance giant AIG and other TARP recipients became a campaign issue. Tedisco, who had been criticized by Murphy for opposing the package, used the outrage over the AIG bonuses to reframe the debate. On March 19, Tedisco called for the resignation of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner over the AIG controversy. Murphy responded by insisting that the stimulus package was necessary for job creation. ### Media Endorsements - March 22, 2009: Declaring "the upcoming special election in the 20th Congressional District nothing less than a referendum on the Obama economic stimulus plan", the Kingston-based Daily Freeman endorsed Murphy for his support of the plan. - March 22, 2009: Expressing a desire for "having candid, dissenting voices in any political body to keep the majority from going astray", the Poughkeepsie Journal endorsed Tedisco. - March 26, 2009: Calling him " ideal... the better candidate", the Glens Falls-based The Chronicle gave Jim Tedisco its endorsement. - March 26, 2009: The New York Post gave its support to Jim Tedisco, calling him "a far better fit for the largely conservative district". - March 29, 2009: While acknowledging Tedisco's role in creating the STAR Program and his vocal support for a property tax cap, The Times Union endorsed Murphy as "a candidate who would work with Mr. Obama to achieve his goals". - March 29, 2009: Citing the need for "an experienced, effective representative in Congress", The Post-Star endorsed Tedisco. - March 29, 2009: Impressed by his "public service, experience and political philosophy", as well has his opposition to a union card check bill, The Saratogian endorsed Tedisco. - March 29, 2009: Claiming that "Tedisco has the track record that will make him a solid check and balance in Washington", the Troy Record endorsed Tedisco. ### Polling ## Election With 100 percent of precincts reporting, initial counts from the election had Murphy leading by about 60 votes out of over 150,000 cast. Columbia County's Board of Elections amended its tally the following day, reducing Murphy's lead to 25 votes. The lead alternated between the two candidates throughout early recanvassing; at one point the New York State Board of Elections had listed the election at a zero-vote margin, with each candidate having exactly 77,225 votes. By April 2, Tedisco was ahead by 12 votes. He resigned the position of Assembly Minority Leader on April 5 in preparation for a transition to Congress, and was replaced by Brian Kolb the following day. On April 7, Tedisco was ahead by 97 votes. The close tally meant that absentee ballots would decide the race. All ballots, absentee ballot envelopes, and voting machines were impounded under a court injunction sought by state Republicans. Under the court order, absentee ballots were counted in central locations rather than individual precincts. Of the 10,000 absentee ballots sent out to voters, 6,000 were returned. Absentee ballots mailed within the United States had to be received by April 7 to be counted. The deadline for overseas (including military) ballots was extended to April 13 after the United States Department of Justice sued the state to ensure they would have a reasonable chance of being counted. Counting of the absentee ballots due by April 7 began on April 8 under a New York State Supreme Court ruling sought by Murphy's campaign. The legality of about 600 absentee ballots were contested during the count, including Senator Gillibrand's ballot. By April 23, Murphy was ahead by 401 votes, and Tedisco conceded the following day. Murphy was sworn in on April 29. The official results came out in May and had Murphy winning the election with 80,833 votes (50.23%) against Tedisco's 80,107 votes (49.77%). ## Aftermath Murphy's victory was credited to a coattail effect from Barack Obama's election in 2008. His support of the stimulus package and Tedisco's failed attempt at clearly explaining his (Tedisco's) opposition to the package also had an impact. Further explanations for the Republican defeat ranged from accusations that Tedisco "dither on the stimulus bill", to intimations that Tedisco only became his party's nominee by manipulating the selection process. In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal contended that being an "Albany careerist" and running confusing campaign ads had hurt Tedisco. Tedisco's loss immediately made him appear vulnerable to Democrats hoping to capture his seat in the Assembly. The day after being sworn in, Murphy hired Todd Schulte, his campaign manager, as his new chief of staff. He also hired one of Governor Paterson's aides, Maggie McKeon, as his communications director. For his district director, Murphy turned to Rob Scholz, a Republican. Scholz had worked on Murphy's campaign and had received praise from Larry Bulman, the chairman of the Saratoga County Democratic Committee. Within a month of being elected, Murphy opened offices in Saratoga Springs and Hudson. Murphy served the remainder of his term, but lost a reelection bid on November 2, 2010, to challenger Chris Gibson, a retired Army colonel. ## See also - Special elections to the 111th United States Congress
1,442,182	A. E. J. Collins	1,127,939,967	English cricketer and soldier (1885–1914)	[ "1885 births", "1914 deaths", "British Army personnel of World War I", "British military personnel killed in World War I", "Cricketers from Jharkhand", "English cricketers of 1890 to 1918", "Graduates of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich", "People educated at Clifton College", "People from Hazaribagh", "Royal Engineers officers", "Schools cricket" ]	Arthur Edward Jeune Collins (18 August 1885 – 11 November 1914) was an English cricketer and soldier. He held, for 116 years, the record of highest score in cricket: as a 13-year-old schoolboy, he scored 628 not out over four afternoons in June 1899. Collins's record-making innings drew a large crowd and increasing media interest; spectators at the Old Cliftonian match being played nearby were drawn away to watch the junior school house cricket match in which Collins was playing. Despite this achievement, Collins never played first-class cricket. Collins's 628 not out stood as the record score until January 2016 when an Indian boy, Pranav Dhanawade, scored 1009 in a single innings. Collins joined the British Army in 1902 and studied at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before becoming an officer in the Royal Engineers. He served in France during the First World War, where he was killed in action in 1914 during the First Battle of Ypres. Collins had been mentioned in despatches and also represented the Royal Military Academy at cricket and rugby union. ## Early life and education Collins was born in Hazaribagh, India, to Arthur Herbert Collins, a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and Mrs Esther Ida Collins. It had been thought that both of his parents had died by the time he began his education at Clifton College, Bristol, where he held a scholarship. However, the 1901 census shows that Arthur's mother was actually still alive. He joined Clifton College in September 1897, becoming a member of Clark's House, although he later moved to North Town House. Clifton had an excellent reputation for sport. W.G. Grace scored 13 first-class centuries on the Close (Clifton's first XI ground), and he sent his sons to the school. Collins played half-back for the rugby XV, and was also in the cricket XI. He won a bronze medal for boxing at the public schools tournament in Aldershot in 1901. Tim Rice, in a 9 June 1999 article for The Telegraph to celebrate the centenary of the score, entitled "On the seventh day AEJ Collins rested", described him thus: > He was an orphan whose guardians lived in Tavistock, Devon. He was a reserved boy, short and stockily built, fair-haired and pale. He was remembered by contemporaries as one who led by example, rather than by inspiration, although paradoxically he was regarded as likely to fall short of the highest standards as a cricketer because of his recklessness at the crease. ## The famous match In 1899, as a 13-year-old schoolboy, Collins scored what was then the highest ever recorded cricket score of 628 not out. This feat took place during a junior school house cricket match between Clarke's House and North Town House. Such matches were timeless, played to a finish however long they took. The match was played on an outfield off Guthrie Road, Bristol, now named Collins Piece. The ground had both a poor surface and a very unusual shape: it was very short (only 60 yards (55 m) long), with a wall only 70 yards (60 m) away forming the boundary on one side, while the other side was a gentle slope falling away towards the school sanatorium in the distance. The pitch occupied the central 22 yards (20 m) of the narrow field, with the boundary only 17 yards (16 m) behind each set of stumps. Hits to the long boundary, down the slope, had to be all-run, but the three short boundaries only counted for two runs. The match commenced on Thursday, 22 June, to take advantage of two half-day holidays while the college team played their annual match against Old Cliftonians nearby. Collins, a right-handed batsman, won the toss for Clarke's House and chose to bat first. Collins hit his first stroke at around 3.30 pm. By the close of play at 6 pm, he had scored 200 runs, having been dropped on 50, 100 and 140. School lessons allowed another two-and-a-half hours' play on Friday, 23 June, and by then news of an exceptional innings had gone round the school. So brilliant was his play that even the crowd watching an Old Cliftonian match being played nearby lost its interest and a large crowd watched Collins's phenomenal performance. Collins's innings almost ended at 400 when an easy catch was dropped by the youngest player on the field, 11-year-old Victor Fuller-Eberle, but at around 5.30 pm, after batting for around five hours, rapturous applause broke out when he passed Andrew Stoddart's world-record score of 485. At the end of the second day, he remained unbeaten on 509 and the team on 680 for 8. His innings was reported as a world record in The Times newspaper on Saturday 24 June; the paper, however, gave Collins's score by the close of play on Friday as 501, his age as 14 and mis-reported his name as "A. E. G. Collins". The match resumed in the lunch hour on Monday, 26 June, at 12:30 pm, with a large crowd. By the end of play, Collins had been dropped again, on 556, to reach 598, but another wicket had fallen, and Collins was running out of partners. On Tuesday, 27 June, the school authorities extended the hours available for play in an attempt to finish the match. The crowds grew and media interest escalated, as The Times again reported on the match on Tuesday, and the disruption to school life was considerable. Collins hit out, with his approach being described as "downright reckless". He was dropped twice more, on 605 and 619. After just 25 minutes' play, Collins lost his final partner, Thomas Redfern, caught by Victor Fuller-Eberle at point for 13, with Collins's score on 628. Collins had played less than seven hours' cricket, carrying his bat through his side's innings. He had scored 1 six, 4 fives, 31 fours, 33 threes, 146 twos and 87 singles. The Times once again ran a report, giving the final figures for Collins's innings in its Wednesday edition of 28 June—once again, however, they misspelled his third initial. North Town House, demoralised, were bowled out for 87 in 90 minutes on Tuesday. The match resumed on Wednesday 28 June, when North Town's second innings went even worse, making 61 in just over an hour, so Clarke House won by an innings and 688 runs. Collins showed ability as an all-rounder, with his right-arm medium pace bowling taking 11 wickets for 63 runs. The scorebook hangs in the pavilion at Clifton to this day. The scorers faced a difficult task in accurately recording the innings. One of them, Edward Peglar, is said to have remarked that Collins's score was "628, plus or minus twenty shall we say". The other scorer for the match was J. W. Hall, whose father in 1868 had batted with Edward Tylecote, who later played Test cricket for England and whose name is on a poem kept with the Ashes urn. Tylecote had earlier set a world-record score of 404 not out in 1868, also at Clifton. Hall later wrote that "The bowling probably deserved all the lordly contempt with which Collins treated it, sending a considerable number of pulls full pitch over the fives courts into the swimming baths to the danger of the occupants." Collins became public property for a long while after the match, forever associated with his great score. "Today all men speak of him", wrote one newspaper, "he has a reputation as great as the most advertised soap: he will be immortalised." After leaving school, he never wanted to be reminded of his famous innings; nevertheless, he has been remembered well beyond his own lifetime. Within two years, 31-year-old Australian Test cricketer Charles Eady came close to breaking the record, when he made 566 for Break-o'-Day against Wellington in Hobart in less than eight hours spread over three weeks in March 1902. This remained, for over a century, the closest challenge to Collins's record: his score was finally beaten in January 2016 by Pranav Dhanawade, a 15-year-old Indian boy who scored 1,009 not out from 327 balls for KC Gandhi School against Arya Gurukul School in Mumbai. Only five other players, Prithvi Shaw (546), Dadabhoy Havewala (515), JC Sharp (505 not out), Malhotra Chamanlal (502 not out), and Brian Lara (501 not out) have ever scored more than 500 runs in one innings in any form of cricket. Lara is the only person to have achieved a score of over 500 runs in first-class cricket. ## Military career Collins chose to follow an army career, passing his entrance exams to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in September 1901 and representing the Royal Military Academy at both football and rugby as well as cricket, scoring a century in a match against the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He joined the British Army the following year, being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 21 December 1904. Despite the limitations on his sport that the military service caused, he played several matches for Old Cliftonians, his regiment, and the army, remaining a free-hitting batsman. He played at Lord's in 1913 for Royal Engineers Cricket Club against Royal Artillery Cricket Club, scoring 58 and 36 runs in the two innings, but he never played first-class cricket. He also joined Clifton Rugby Football Club in February 1905, but never rose above the 2nd XV. He served with the 2nd Sappers and Miners in India, and was promoted to lieutenant on 23 June 1907. Collins married Ethel Slater in the spring of 1914 and was sent to France when the First World War broke out later that year. He was killed in action on 11 November 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres, while serving as a captain with the 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, at the age of 29. He was signalling for more men to protect the flank of his trench when he was wounded; he was dragged back into the trench by Sapper Farnfield (23900) but he died an hour later. The 5th Field Company carried out the burials of its company on 12 November. Due to the continual fighting over this area for the next four years what remained of his grave and remains were never found, but his name is recorded at the Menin Gate Memorial in Belgium. Before his death, he had been mentioned in despatches. His younger brother Herbert (a lieutenant in the 24th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and also an old Cliftonian) was killed in action on 11 February 1917, aged 27. Collins's wife, Ethel, lived as a widow for over fifty years, dying on 1 September 1966 in Haslemere. ## See also - List of cricket terms - History of cricket
26,570,330	Muckaty Station	1,169,160,133	Aboriginal freehold landholding in the Northern Territory of Australia	[ "Stations in the Northern Territory" ]	Muckaty Station, also known as Warlmanpa, is a 2,380-square-kilometre (920 sq mi) Aboriginal freehold landholding in Australia's Northern Territory, 110 kilometres (68 mi) north of Tennant Creek, and approximately 800 kilometres (500 mi) south of Darwin. Originally under traditional Indigenous Australian ownership, the area became a pastoral lease in the late 19th century and for many years operated as a cattle station. It is traversed by the Stuart Highway, built in the 1940s along the route of the service track for the Australian Overland Telegraph Line. It is also crossed by the Amadeus Gas Pipeline built in the mid-1980s, and the Adelaide–Darwin railway, completed in early 2004. Muckaty Station was returned to its Indigenous custodians in 1999. The area comprises semi-arid stony ridges, claypans and a stony plateau, and experiences a sub-tropical climate, with a wet season between January and March. The vegetation is mostly scrubland, including spinifex grasslands. The fauna is generally typical of Australian desert environments, and includes the red kangaroo, the eastern wallaroo, the northern nail-tail wallaby, and the spinifex hopping mouse. A site within Muckaty was being considered for Australia's low-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste storage and disposal facility. Indigenous custodians of Muckaty Station were divided over the proposal, which also met resistance from environmental organisations and the Northern Territory government. The plan was abandoned after a Federal Court of Australia case in 2014. ## History Indigenous Australians have lived in parts of the Northern Territory for around 40,000 years. Pre-European settlement numbers are not known with any precision, although the Indigenous population of the Northern Territory has been estimated at "well over 10,000". The area now known as Muckaty Station (often referred to as just "Muckaty", though the origin of this name and near variants such as "Mucketty" is unknown) was – and is – the responsibility of seven clans of traditional Indigenous owners: Milwayi, Ngapa, Ngarrka, Wirntiku, Kurrakurraja, Walanypirri and Yapayapa. The country is known by the Indigenous name Warlmanpa, which is also the name of a local language. Although there had been several unsuccessful attempts by British or colonial authorities to settle in the Northern Territory, there was no permanent European presence until surveyor George Goyder in 1869 established what is now known as Darwin. The timing was auspicious: in October 1870 the South Australian government decided to construct an overland telegraph line, from Port Augusta on the continent's south coast, to the new settlement just established in the country's tropical north. The line traversed what is now Muckaty Station, with repeater stations built at Powell's Creek to the north and Tennant's Creek to the south. At the same time as the telegraph line was completed in August 1872, a cattle industry was beginning to develop in central and northern Australia. The first pastoral lease in the Northern Territory was granted in 1872, and by 1911 there were at least 250 such leases covering over 180,000 square miles (470,000 km<sup>2</sup>) of the jurisdiction. The Muckaty pastoral lease was created in the late 19th century. Currently the property is surrounded by other leases including Powell Creek to the north, Helen Springs Station to the east with Philip Creek and Banka Banka Stations to the south. In the 1930s, the Australian government was sufficiently concerned about the condition and lack of development of these leases that it held two inquiries between 1932 and 1938. Historian Ted Ling's accounts of those inquiries, however, make no mention of Muckaty, which was not singled out for comment by either investigation. Throughout the history of Australia's pastoral industry, Indigenous Australians were a major part of the workforce. In 1928 for example, 80 per cent of Indigenous people with jobs were employed on the stations, including Muckaty, with many living on and travelling across the pastoral leases. The local language, Warlmanpa, was recognised in some publications from the 1930s onward, while anthropologists and administrators made some records of language and population in the region of Muckaty Station. Only one record from the period lists both Muckaty Station as a location and Warlmanpa as a language. A record of Aboriginal wards of the state, it showed only three Indigenous adults living on Muckaty, compared to almost fifty on Banka Banka Station, to the east. This reflects the fact that, by 1940, "Warlmanpa country had been depopulated". By the 1940s the lessee at Muckaty was Fred Ulyatt. The 1940s also marked a significant change in the region's road infrastructure. A dirt track had been formed to service the telegraph line in the late nineteenth century. This became the Stuart Highway, crossing the eastern part of Muckaty, and it was upgraded to an all-weather road in late 1940, before being bitumenised in 1944. Sources do not say who leased the property between the 1940s and 1982, at which point the lease was held by James and Miriam Hagan. In 1988 it was transferred to Hapford Pty Limited and Kerfield Pty Limited. Between 1985 and 1987 the Amadeus Gas Pipeline was built across the station, carrying gas from Palm Valley Gas Field in the Amadeus Basin to Channel Island near Darwin. In 1991, the cattle station was taken over by the Muckaty Aboriginal Corporation. The Corporation focused on rehabilitating the land, which had been degraded by excessive numbers of cattle, and by late 1993 Muckaty had been destocked of cattle for several seasons. On 20 December 1991, the Northern Land Council lodged a claim over Muckaty on behalf of traditional owners under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976. The claim was made by members of the seven groups that each has responsibility for different sites and dreamings in the area. In 1997, the Aboriginal Land Commissioner recommended that Muckaty Station be handed back to the traditional owners, and in February 1999, title to the land was returned. At the time there were about 400 formal traditional owners, among 1,000 people with traditional attachments to the land; some lived on the station, but others were elsewhere in the region, including in the nearby towns of Tennant Creek and Elliott. As Aboriginal Freehold land it is inalienable communal title, and cannot be bought or sold. The pastoral lease holder and manager of the station since 1997 has been Ray Aylett. The Adelaide–Darwin railway, which passes through the western part of Muckaty Station, was completed in early 2004. ## Geology and geography Muckaty Station covers an area of 2,380 square kilometres (920 sq mi) and lies 110 kilometres (68 mi) north of Tennant Creek, in Australia's Northern Territory. It includes a homestead that lies 8 kilometres (5 mi) west of the Stuart Highway and 60 kilometres (37 mi) east of the railway. The residence has associated cattle yards, an airstrip, and workers' accommodation. It is adjacent to Banka Banka Station to the east, and Powell Creek Station (also referred to as an outstation) to the north. The climate is subtropical, with a wet season between January and March, during which the area receives monthly rainfall of between 50 and 125 millimetres (2.0 and 4.9 in). For the rest of the year there is usually less than 10 millimetres (0.4 in) of rain each month. The station's geology is dominated by the Tomkinson Group, a formation comprising sedimentary rocks of the Paleoproterozoic era that is over 1.6 billion years old. The Tomkinson Group includes layers of coarse sandstones and conglomerates, with some claystone and siltstone, deposited in a fluvial to shallow marine environment. There are also Cambrian basaltic rocks, particularly near the homestead. The eastern parts of the station form a stony plateau within the Ashburton Range. The central parts are flat and include claypans, while to the west are stony ridges. The region is drained by an ephemeral waterway, Tomkinson Creek, and is considered a good candidate to contain manganese deposits, the mineral having been extracted in the 1950s and 1960s at the Mucketty mine just east of Muckaty Station. The region is semi-arid, and the vegetation is generally scrubland. Muckaty Station lies at the boundary of two bioregions, Tanami and Sturt Plateau. The Tanami bioregion is made up primarily of sandplains vegetated with bootlace oak (Hakea lorea), desert bloodwoods (Corymbia species), acacias and grevilleas, together with spinifex grasslands. The Sturt Plateau bioregion also includes spinifex grasslands, but with a canopy of bloodwood trees. Most of the region's fauna is typical of desert environments. Species include the red kangaroo, the eastern wallaroo (also known as the euro), the northern nail-tail wallaby, and the spinifex hopping mouse. The central pebble-mound mouse also occurs in the region, and other mammal species including the Forrest's mouse, desert mouse and short-beaked echidna have been predicted by biologists to occur on the station. The station may lie within the range of the critically endangered night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis). There is relatively high diversity and abundance of reptiles, including the military dragon (Ctenophorus isolepis gularis) and the sand goanna (Varanus gouldii flavirufus). ## Radioactive waste facility The search for a site at which to dispose of or store Australia's low and intermediate-level radioactive wastes commenced in 1980. A formal public process of site selection that had commenced in 1991 finally failed in 2004. On 7 December 2005, the Australian government passed legislation, the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act, to facilitate the siting of a radioactive waste facility in the Northern Territory. Section four of the Act allowed the Australian government to schedule potential sites for a waste facility, and three Northern Territory sites were proposed under the legislation. Following criticisms made by the Northern Land Council, in December 2006 the legislation was revised to also allow Aboriginal Land Councils to nominate potential sites for a facility. In May 2007 the Northern Land Council, on behalf of Ngapa clan traditional owners, nominated a small area within Muckaty Station (for which the Ngapa had traditional responsibility) to be considered as a possible site for the facility. In September 2007, the government accepted the nomination, bringing the total number of possible sites to four. The Government of the Northern Territory opposed the nomination, but could not prevent it. Ngapa clan members volunteered a 4-square-kilometre (1.5 sq mi) area to be considered for the facility, which was expected to require 1 square kilometre of land. A parliamentary inquiry and media reports indicated that the Indigenous traditional owners of Muckaty Station were divided over whether it should host a radioactive waste facility. Some members of the Ngapa clan supported hosting the facility, while other traditional owners of Muckaty opposed it. There were also claims that some members of the Ngapa clan were among those who had signed a petition opposing the facility. Political scientist Rebecca Stringer criticised the federal government's approach to the siting of the waste facility, arguing that it undermined the Indigenous owners' sovereignty and control of their own lands. Environmental organisations and the Australian Greens are opposed to using the site for a dump. In 2009, the Australian government received a consultant's report that examined Muckaty Station as one of four possible sites for a nuclear waste facility in the Northern Territory. The report was released in 2010. In February 2012, the Muckaty Station site was the only one under consideration by the government. ### Legal action In 2010, Mark Lane Jangala and other traditional owners instructed law firms Maurice Blackburn, Surry Partners (a firm that includes human rights lawyer George Newhouse), and lawyer Julian Burnside to commence legal proceedings against the Northern Land Council and the Australian government in the Federal Court of Australia to stop the nomination of Muckaty Station as a nuclear waste storage facility. The Federal Court challenge was due to commence early in 2013 before Justice Tony North, who handled the Tampa affair. According to a June 2012 report in The Age, some indigenous owners would "testify they were never consulted, while others [will] say that they were not properly consulted and never consented to the nomination". The court did not begin hearing the case until 2 June 2014, for what was expected to be a five-week trial. However, on 18 June, the Northern Land Council withdrew the nomination of Muckaty as part of a legal settlement between the parties. The Australian government indicated there would be a three-month period during which the Northern Land Council and traditional owners could determine whether they wished to nominate an alternative site for the dump elsewhere on Muckaty Station. ## See also - List of ranches and stations
9,318,291	Level Mountain	1,170,156,980	Volcanic complex in British Columbia, Canada	[ "Cassiar Country", "Central volcanoes", "Lava plateaus", "Level Mountain", "Miocene shield volcanoes", "Miocene stratovolcanoes", "Plateaus of British Columbia", "Pliocene lava domes", "Polygenetic shield volcanoes", "Quaternary volcanoes", "Shield volcanoes of Canada", "Stratovolcanoes of Canada", "Subglacial volcanoes of Canada", "Two-thousanders of British Columbia" ]	Level Mountain is a large volcanic complex in the Northern Interior of British Columbia, Canada. It is located 50 kilometres (31 miles) north-northwest of Telegraph Creek and 60 kilometres (37 miles) west of Dease Lake on the Nahlin Plateau. With a maximum elevation of 2,164 metres (7,100 feet), it is the second-highest of four large complexes in an extensive north–south trending volcanic region. Much of the mountain is gently-sloping; when measured from its base, Level Mountain is about 1,100 metres (3,600 feet) tall, slightly taller than its neighbour to the northwest, Heart Peaks. The lower, broader half of Level Mountain consists of a shield-like structure while its upper half has a more steep, jagged profile. Its broad summit is dominated by the Level Mountain Range, a small mountain range with prominent peaks cut by deep valleys. These valleys serve as a radial drainage for several small streams that flow from the mountain. Meszah Peak is the only named peak in the Level Mountain Range. The mountain began forming about 15 million years ago and has experienced volcanism up until geologically recent times. There have been four stages of activity throughout the long volcanic history of Level Mountain. The first stage commenced 14.9 million years ago with the eruption of voluminous lava flows; these created a large shield volcano. The second stage began 7.1 million years ago to form a structurally complicated stratovolcano located centrally atop the shield. A series of lava domes was established during the third stage, which began 4.5 million years ago. This was followed by the fourth and final stage with the eruption of lava flows and small volcanic cones in the last 2.5 million years. A wide range of rock types were produced during these stages, namely ankaramites, alkali basalts, trachybasalts, mugearites, hawaiites, phonolites, trachytes and rhyolites. Alkali basalts and ankaramites are the most voluminous and form most of Level Mountain. The remaining rock types are less extensive and are largely restricted to the central region of the volcanic complex. Several types of volcanic eruptions produced these rocks. Level Mountain lies in one of many ecoregions encompassing British Columbia. It can be ecologically divided into three sections: lodgepole pine and white spruce forests at its base, bog birch and subalpine fir forests on its flanks, and an alpine climate at its summit. The extent and flatness of the alpine on Level Mountain have produced many Arctic affinities that are particularly noticeable in the local biota. Several animal species thrive in the area of Level Mountain, caribou being the most abundant. A trading post was established at Level Mountain in the 1890s, followed by geological studies of the mountain from the 1920s onwards. This remote area of Cassiar Land District has a relatively dry environment compared to the Coast Mountains in the west. Due to its remoteness, Level Mountain can only be accessed by air or by trekking great distances on foot. The closest communities are more than 30 kilometres (19 miles) away from the mountain. ## Geology ### Background Level Mountain is part of the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province (NCVP), a broad area of volcanoes extending from northwestern British Columbia northwards through Yukon into easternmost Alaska. Volcanism in this geologic province can be traced as far back as 20 million years ago with the emplacement of alkali basalt in western Yukon. Several types of volcanic eruptions have since created different landforms across the NCVP, including shield volcanoes, lava domes, stratovolcanoes and cinder cones. Other volcanic landforms, notably subglacial volcanoes, take their shape from the environment they formed in regardless of the type of magma they produced. The NCVP contains more than 100 volcanoes and is the most volcanically active area in Canada; eruptions are expected to occur roughly every 100 years. Level Mountain is part of the Stikine Subprovince of the NCVP. This subprovince, confined to the Stikine region of northwestern British Columbia, consists of three other volcanic complexes: Heart Peaks, Hoodoo Mountain and Mount Edziza. All four complexes differ petrologically and/or volumetrically from the rest of the NCVP. Heart Peaks, Level Mountain and Mount Edziza are the largest NCVP centres by volume, the latter two of which have experienced volcanism for a much longer timespan than any other NCVP centre. Level Mountain, Hoodoo Mountain and Mount Edziza are the only NCVP centres that contain volcanic rocks of both mafic and intermediate to felsic composition. The highest of the four complexes is Mount Edziza at 2,786 metres (9,140 feet), followed by Level Mountain at 2,164 metres (7,100 feet), Heart Peaks at 2,012 metres (6,601 feet) and Hoodoo Mountain at 1,850 metres (6,070 feet). Like other NCVP centres, Level Mountain has its origins in rifting of the North American Plate caused by crustal extension. This has resulted from the Pacific Plate sliding northward along the Queen Charlotte Fault, on its way to the Aleutian subduction zone in Alaska. As the continental crust stretches, the near surface rocks fracture along steeply dipping faults parallel to the rift. Mafic magma rises along these fractures to create fluid lava flows, although more viscous felsic magma also makes its way to the surface and can produce explosive eruptions. Two major structural features, the Tintina and Denali–Coast fault systems, run parallel with the NCVP. Both structures have had strike-slip motions since the Cretaceous period, which has resulted in several hundred kilometres of crustal displacement. ### Structure Level Mountain comprises two principal components: a voluminous basal shield volcano and an overlying eroded stratovolcano. The lower but more extensive basal shield volcano rises from an elevation of 900 to 1,400 metres (3,000 to 4,600 feet) above the surrounding forested lowlands much like an inverted dishware plate. It consists of four distinctive stratigraphic units comprising thin mafic lava flows. Individual flows have an average thickness of 2 to 3 metres (6.6 to 9.8 feet) but can range from less than 1 metre (3.3 feet) to more than 10 metres (33 feet) thick. The shield volcano forms a broad, oval-shaped, north–south trending lava plateau on which local streams flow. It measures 70 kilometres (43 miles) long and 45 kilometres (28 miles) wide with a net altitudinal reach of only 750 metres (2,460 feet). The south and west sides of the plateau are marked by a well-defined but dissected escarpment. In contrast, the north and east plateau boundaries are less clear. From an elevation of 1,400 metres (4,600 feet) onwards the overlying stratovolcano is dominant. Ridges and peaks prevail at an elevation of 1,520 metres (4,990 feet) and comprise the Level Mountain Range. These rise more steeply to 1,980 metres (6,500 feet), eventually reaching the highest point of 2,164 metres (7,100 feet) at Meszah Peak. Therefore, when viewed from a distance, Level Mountain appears unusually flat except for a number of black peaks on its summit which have the appearance of enormous volcanic cones. Level Mountain is the largest NCVP centre with respect to both volume and area covered. It has a volume of 860 cubic kilometres (210 cubic miles) and an area of 1,800 square kilometres (690 square miles), although at least one estimate of its areal extent is as much as 3,000 square kilometres (1,200 square miles). Because of Level Mountain's great extent it can be seen from outer space. This, coupled with elevation and snow, helps define the geology of the region. Level Mountain lies on the Nahlin Plateau, a subdivision of the larger Stikine Plateau that is dominated by the complex. The basement of the shield consists largely of felsic igneous rocks comprising northern Stikinia, but sedimentary rocks are also present below the lava plateau escarpment. Two major northwest trending faults straddle Level Mountain, both of which were active during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. The King Salmon Fault forms a geological boundary between island arc rocks of Stikinia and seafloor rocks of the Cache Creek Terrane. Paleozoic to Mesozoic rocks are exposed in the hanging wall of this thrust fault and are intensely cleaved, particularly near the sole of the thrust. The other planar fracture, Nahlin, is an east-dipping thrust fault extending several hundred kilometres from northern British Columbia into southern Yukon. Several rock types with varying chemical compositions make up Level Mountain. Ankaramites and alkali basalts are the main volcanic rocks comprising the basal shield. Alkali basalts form columnar-jointed lava flows, vesicular lava flows, dikes and scoria while ankaramites are present as dark-coloured lava flows with several columnar cooling units. Trachybasalts, phonolites, trachytes, peralkaline trachytes, rhyolites and peralkaline rhyolites (e.g. pantellerites and comendites) form the overlying stratovolcano and domes. They comprise dikes, welded tuffs, pitchstones, volcanic plugs, laccoliths and flows. Trachybasalts are in the form of two textural types: phenocryst-rich lava flows and fragmental flow agglomerates. Phonolites are vesicular and pumiceous in nature, although phonolites with trachytic texture are also present. Trachytes and peralkaline trachytes are the main volcanic rocks in the Level Mountain Range. Rhyolites are in the form of stubby lava flows and domes. Comendites appear to have erupted more fluidly, forming lava tubes. Intense glaciation has taken place at Level Mountain in the last 5.33 million years, as shown by the presence of strongly developed glacial grooves reaching elevations greater than 1,675 metres (5,495 feet). This evidence indicates that much of the mountain was covered by ice during past glacial periods; the latest glacial period ended approximately 12,000 years ago. A series of U-shaped valleys have been carved into Level Mountain by radially directed alpine glaciers. These serve as a radial drainage for at least six small streams: Dudidontu, Kakuchuya, Beatty, Lost, Kaha and Little Tahltan. Those that flow from the Level Mountain Range drain across the lava plateau in a pinwheel-like fashion; Kakuchuya and Dudidontu contain a series of small lakes. The Kakuchuya and Beatty creek valleys have been eroded to a level below that of the plateau surface. Another stream, Matsatu, has cut a large steep-sided gorge into the western escarpment of Level Mountain. Also dissecting the mountain are V-shaped stream canyons along the lava plateau margin, exposing a section of Tertiary basalts along the Grand Canyon of the Stikine. Periglacial processes, such as cryoturbation and stone striping, occur on Level Mountain at elevations greater than 1,250 metres (4,100 feet). Cryoturbation takes place mainly on flat and gently sloping areas while stone striping happens primarily on gently sloping areas adjacent to peaks of the Level Mountain Range. Some of the steeper slopes of the Level Mountain Range are confined to nivation and solifluction. Snow avalanches are limited only to the Level Mountain Range and the steepest slopes. Extensive tectonic uplift occurred at Level Mountain and elsewhere on the Stikine Plateau during the Neogene period. This resulted in dissection of the plateau surface by stream erosion which varies greatly across the region. The youthful V-shaped gorges along the lava plateau margin of Level Mountain are signs of continuing uplift, which may in part be caused by doming of the complex during volcanism. Several outcrops of alkali basalt exist south of Kennicott Lake and the Tahltan River. They are comparable in age to the Level Mountain shield volcano and may represent erosional remnants of this structure. ### Volcanic history Level Mountain has experienced volcanic eruptions sporadically for the last 15 million years, making it the most persistent eruptive centre of the NCVP. It has been the site of volcanic activity throughout much of the existence of the NCVP, correlating with changes in the regional tectonics. Volcanism at Level Mountain initially correlated with net compression across the North American and Pacific plates. However, new active plate motions between the two tectonic plates about 10 million years ago generated extensional stresses across the NCVP, resulting in lithospheric thinning and decompression melting of OIB-like mantle to produce alkaline Neogene magmatism. The main structural evidence for Neogene extension in the NCVP is the Mess Lake fault, which reaches the southwestern extent of Level Mountain. A return to net compression across the North American and Pacific plate boundaries commenced about four million years ago. Magmatism since then has most likely resulted from a continuation of asthenospheric upwelling and local transtension along the two tectonic plates. Evidence for magmatic activity having originated from the upper mantle include the existence of olivine, orthopyroxene and spinel xenocrysts in Level Mountain basalt. More than 20 eruptive centres are present on the summit and flanks of Level Mountain. These have produced mainly felsic and mafic lavas, a chemical composition range typical of bimodal volcanism. Like several other volcanic centres in northern British Columbia, Level Mountain was volcanically active during past glacial periods. Its involvement with glaciation resulted in several interactions between magma and ice, affording multiple examples of glaciovolcanic processes. Evidence for contemporaneous volcanism and glaciation is widespread throughout the mountain. This includes interlayered unconsolidated fluvioglacial and tuffaceous deposits, tills and glacial erratics at the base of tuffs and lava flows, lahars composed of till and agglomerate, tuyas on the uppermost surface of the shield and as outliers, till cemented by siliceous sinter, and the presence of freshwater pillow basalts and volcano-glacial tuff breccias. It is possible that geothermal outputs at Level Mountain had an influence on dynamics of past ice sheets much like the modern Grímsvötn caldera is an important heat source beneath Vatnajökull in Iceland. However, like other large volcanic centres in the NCVP, much of Level Mountain was formed prior to glaciation. Hiatuses of up to a million years or more can be expected between periods of volcanic activity at Level Mountain. Initial volcanism of the NCVP 20 million years ago was sporadic, producing small volumes of material. The eruption rate increased markedly to about 100,000 cubic metres (3,500,000 cubic feet) per year when volcanism began at Level Mountain 14.9 million years ago as part of the shield-building stage. This stage of volcanism ended 6.9 million years ago with completion of the basal shield volcano. A second stage of volcanism occurred at Level Mountain 7.1 to 5.3 million years ago with construction of the overlying stratovolcano. The rate of volcanism in the NCVP during this stage of activity increased again to 300,000 cubic metres (11,000,000 cubic feet) per year. Dome-forming eruptions were dominant during the third eruptive stage 4.5 to 2.5 million years ago, during which time a magmatic lull appears to have been present throughout the NCVP. A fourth and final stage of volcanism at Level Mountain commenced in the last 2.5 million years with the formation of minor volcanic cones and lava flows. The NCVP volcanism rate has since remained relatively constant at 100,000 cubic metres (3,500,000 cubic feet) per year, with volcanism of the final stage having continued possibly in the last 12,000 years. Modern NCVP volcanism rates are much less than those estimated for Hawaii or the Cascade Volcanic Arc of western North America. #### Mafic shield-building stage The mafic shield-building stage began with the eruption of thin mafic lava flows over an erosion surface. Successive eruptions sent lava pouring in all directions from central vents, forming a broad, gently sloping volcano of flat, domical shape, with a profile much like that of a warrior's shield. Alkali basalts and ankaramites were the main lavas produced during this stage of activity which, due to their low silica content, were able to travel great distances away from their source. These lavas also erupted from vents on the flanks of the volcano. Blocky 'a'a and ropy pāhoehoe flows characterized the fluid and effusive nature of volcanism during this stage. Lava flows of the mafic shield-building stage comprise four sub-horizontal units. Initial volcanism produced a 53-metre-thick (174-foot) sequence of columnar-jointed alkali basalt flows and altered grey-green vesicular basalts which form the lowest unit. Subsequent activity deposited the overlying second 107-metre-thick (351-foot) unit. This comprises up to seven 7.6-metre-thick (25-foot) columnar cooling units of alkali basalt separated by buff-weathered vesicular lava flows. Renewed volcanism deposited a 76-metre-thick (249-foot) sequence of massive ankaramite lava flows over the second unit. These lava flows, comprising the third unit, are spheroidally weathered. The mafic shield-building stage culminated with the emplacement of the fourth and highest unit. Eight to ten sequences of columnar-jointed alkali basalt flows comprise this unit and have a total thickness of 122 metres (400 feet). All four sub-horizontal units were deposited over a timespan of six million years. #### Bimodal stratovolcano stage After the basal shield volcano was constructed, several vents produced peralkaline, metaluminous, supersaturated and undersaturated lavas. This tremendous variation in the erupted magmas and influence of adjacent vents gave rise to a high and voluminous bimodal stratovolcano located centrally atop the shield. Mapping indicates that the headwaters of Kakuchuya Creek were the site of this large stratovolcano and that it grew greater than 2,500 metres (8,200 feet) in elevation. Volcanic rocks of felsic composition, notably peralkaline trachyte and comendite, were the main products comprising this structure, forming more than 80% of its volume. Explosive eruptions during this stage of activity deposited basalt agglomerates, ash fall and ash flow tuffs. Peralkaline felsic lava flows reached 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) long and 3 to 8 metres (9.8 to 26.2 feet) thick. The eruptive products of the bimodal stratovolcano stage were deposited over a timespan of 1.8 million years and cover an area roughly 20 kilometres (12 miles) long and 20 kilometres (12 miles) wide. Peralkalinity had remarkable effects on lava morphology and mineralogy during the bimodal stratovolcano stage. A unique characteristic of the peralkaline felsic lava flows produced during this stage of activity is that although they were high in silica content, the flows were overly fluid in nature. This is because the peralkaline content decreased the viscosity of the flows a minimum of 10–30 times over that of calc-alkaline felsic flows. As a result of this fluidity, the peralkaline felsic lava flows were able to form small-scale folds and 1-to-2-metre-diameter (3.3-to-6.6-foot) lava tubes. The liquidus temperatures of these flows were in excess of 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,190 degrees Fahrenheit) with viscosities as low as 100,000 poise. Glaciation and volcanism were contemporaneous during the bimodal stratovolcano stage as shown by the existence of volcano-glacial deposits in the volcanic edifice. #### Felsic dome-forming stage By the Pliocene epoch, radially directed alpine glaciers had eroded away much of the bimodal stratovolcano, leaving behind a series of U-shaped valleys with intervening ridges that comprise the Level Mountain Range. This dissection of the bimodal stratovolcano was followed by the felsic dome-forming stage. Eruptions of felsic magma were predominantly viscous during this stage of activity, resulting in the magma piling up around volcanic vents to create a series of lava domes. Individual domes grew up to 0.094 cubic kilometres (0.023 cubic miles) in the glacially eroded core of the bimodal stratovolcano. The felsic dome-forming stage extended over a timespan of two million years. Meszah Peak, the highest point of both Level Mountain and the Level Mountain Range, formed at the end of this stage 2.5 million years ago. Also emplaced at the end of this stage were comendite flows, ash flow tuffs and lava tubes. #### Quaternary stage The fourth and final stage of volcanism began on the summit of Level Mountain, depositing lava in and adjacent to the Level Mountain Range. This lava is indirectly dated as Pleistocene age, on the basis of the presence of intraglacial deposits. These deposits are in the form of pillow lavas, which were likely extruded into marginal glacial lakes high on the flanks of the mountain. More recent volcanic eruptions have been a topic of debate among scientists. Several small basaltic vents on the broad summit of Level Mountain were considered by T. S. Hamilton and C. M. Scafe (1977) to have formed during the Holocene epoch, although Holocene activity has been regarded as uncertain by B. R. Edwards and J. K. Russell (2000). These younger vents produced spatter cones, agglomerate and volcanic bombs, as well as trachybasalt, mugearite and hawaiite lava flows. This activity was concentrated on and near Meszah Peak and on ridges 14 kilometres (8.7 miles) southeast and 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) south-southwest of Meszah. Exposed on the south side of Level Mountain near Hatchau Lake is a rock outcrop consisting of boulders cemented together by calcareous sinter. This suggests an area of hot spring activity that may be related to volcanism at the mountain. Two 5-to-10-millimetre-thick (0.20-to-0.39-inch) tephra deposits, collectively known as the Finlay tephras, are situated between sand, silt, mud and gravel in the Dease Lake and Finlay River areas. They both range in composition from phonolitic to trachytic and are high in iron(II) oxide, indicating that the tephras were likely extruded from a single volcanic centre. Radiocarbon dating of terrestrial plant macrofossils directly overlying the youngest tephra deposit suggest an early Holocene age for this volcanic material. Because Level Mountain has received little scientific study, it is a possible source for these tephra deposits along with Hoodoo Mountain, Heart Peaks and the Mount Edziza volcanic complex. ### Hazards and monitoring Like other volcanic centres in the NCVP, Level Mountain is not monitored closely enough by the Geological Survey of Canada to ascertain its activity level. The Canadian National Seismograph Network has been established to monitor earthquakes throughout Canada, but it is too far away to provide an accurate indication of activity under the mountain. The seismograph network may sense an increase in seismic activity if Level Mountain becomes highly restless, but this may only provide a warning for a large eruption; the system might detect activity only once the mountain has started erupting. If Level Mountain were to erupt, mechanisms exist to orchestrate relief efforts. The Interagency Volcanic Event Notification Plan was created to outline the notification procedure of some of the main agencies that would respond to an erupting volcano in Canada, an eruption close to the Canada–United States border or any eruption that would affect Canada. The lava plateau margins of Level Mountain are vulnerable to landslides. This is particularly true around the steep south and west plateau boundaries where relatively clay-rich, incompetent layers of agglomerates and tuffs are present between more competent basaltic lava flows. Remnants of a 60,000-cubic-metre (2,100,000-cubic-foot) mudflow are present on the eastern slope of the Little Tahltan canyon. Similar older scars, including those in Beatty Creek, are visible around much of the lava plateau parameter. Past eruptions of Level Mountain may have altered drainage patterns of local streams but their actual effects remain unknown. ## Geography ### Background Level Mountain is situated within the Boreal Mountains and Plateaus Ecoregion, a large ecological region in northwestern British Columbia encompassing high plateaus and rugged mountains with intervening lowlands. Boreal forests of black and white spruce occur in the lowlands and valley bottoms whereas birch, spruce and willow form forests on the mid-slopes. Extensive alpine Altai fescue covers the upper slopes but barren rock is abundant at higher elevations. A cold, dry boreal mountain climate characterizes this ecoregion. The Boreal Mountains and Plateaus Ecoregion is part of the Northern Boreal Mountains Ecoprovince which forms part of the Sub-Arctic Highlands Ecodivision. The Boreal Mountains and Plateaus Ecoregion is subdivided into at least seven ecosections, the Stikine Plateau Ecosection being the main ecosection at Level Mountain. This ecosection consists of a partially dissected upland characterized by rounded ridges and wide valleys. It contains several small lakes, marshes, muskegs and streams, the latter of which drain into the Stikine River, Taku River and Liard River watersheds. Boreal black and white spruce are present in valley bottoms, black spruce being commonly found around wetlands such as muskegs. Level Mountain has been described as the most impressive feature in the Stikine Plateau Ecosection. It is one of the few locations in this ecosection where alpine vegetation can be found. Although alpine vegetation of the Stikine Plateau Ecosection can be lush and grass-rich above the tree line, wetlands and muskegs are the dominant ecosystems on Level Mountain. ### Plants Level Mountain is characterized by three biophysical zones. The first zone, below an elevation of 1,200 metres (3,900 feet), is predominated by vegetation of the Pinaceae and Betulaceae families. Lodgepole pine is associated with communities of kinnikinnick, bog birch, Altai fescue and moss. Mature white spruce and lodgepole pine forests dominate north of Level Mountain where bog birch occurs in river valley bottoms. The second biophysical zone lies between elevations of 1,200 and 1,540 metres (3,940 and 5,050 feet). It is characterized by a harsh climate with wind, cold temperatures, snow and short growing seasons. Bog birch is the dominant vegetation, forming extremely large areas of continuous cover. Mature subalpine fir forests have been extensively burned by large wildfires and are now limited only to the northern flank of Level Mountain. The third biophysical zone consists largely of an alpine tundra above an elevation of 1,540 metres (5,050 feet) on the upper lava plateau. As a result, this region lacks trees because of its high altitude. The most common vegetation is Arctic bluegrass, dwarf willows, louseworts, Altai fescue, boreal mugwort and alpine lichens and mosses. Bog birch less than 1 metre (3.3 feet) in height form at lower elevations of this biophysical zone. Common plants on the sparsely vegetated slopes of the Level Mountain Range are sedges, prickly and alpine brook saxifrages, dwarf willows, moss campion, Arctic bluegrass and alpine lichens and mosses. ### Animals Several animal species inhabit Level Mountain, notably brown bears, wolves, long-tailed jaegers, caribou, mountain goats, ptarmigans, moose, long-tailed ducks and stone sheep. Wolves occupy valleys and use the alpine areas for hunting and denning. Brown bears are common in the alpine and are potential predators of newborn caribou calves. The caribou at Level Mountain form a herd that is part of a larger population extending west of the Dease River and north of the Stikine River into Yukon. More than 400 caribou were identified at Level Mountain in 1978, although the Ministry of Environment and Parks considered the herd to be declining due to poor recruitment. By 1980, the caribou population was estimated to have been roughly 350. Level Mountain caribou is represented in the American Museum of Natural History as part of the Hall of North American Mammals. ### Soils A variety of soil types with differing physical properties are found at Level Mountain. Shallow, coarse, textured and steep to strongly sloping soils dominate peaks of the Level Mountain Range and owe their origin to weathering of volcanic rocks. These well-drained soils are strongly acidic and xeric in nature and show little or no horizon development. The gently undulating alpine portions of Level Mountain have been affected by cryoturbation, resulting in patterned ground in which coarse material has been separated from each other as patches or stripes. Surface horizons are strongly to very strongly acidic, becoming medium to slightly acidic approximately 50 centimetres (20 inches) in depth. At lower elevations, soils develop on fluvioglacial deposits. Many of these fluvioglacial materials contain a high percentage of fine materials while the soils which have developed from them contain a subsurface horizon enriched by clay accumulation. Very poorly-drained organic soils are extensive on the southern portion of the lava plateau. ### Climate The climate of Level Mountain is influenced by the presence of the Coast Mountains to the west, which disrupt the flow of the prevailing westerly winds. This disruption causes the winds to drop most of their moisture onto the western slopes of the Coast Mountains before reaching the Nahlin Plateau, casting a rain shadow over Level Mountain. Because the mountain has a gently sloping and flat profile, it has subtle differences in climate, particularly at the low to upper-mid elevations. Therefore, a relatively homogeneous climate extends over Level Mountain; only gradual temperature and precipitation gradients occur altitudinally. As a result, large mammals do not have a wide diversity of local climates from which to choose. Travel from high to low elevations below 1,700 metres (5,600 feet) in the winter can be difficult for some mammals due to the accumulation of snow. Above 1,700 metres (5,600 feet), exposure to local winds is improved and ridges of snow are cleared on steeper slopes. Wind speeds increase with elevation but the distribution of wind over the area is fairly uniform. Level Mountain experiences relatively light snowfall unlike the Coast Mountains. During the late May and early June calving season, winds predominate from a southerly quadrant. Calm conditions are infrequent and average monthly wind speeds are on the order of 3 to 4 metres (9.8 to 13.1 feet) per second. At an elevation of 1,370 metres (4,490 feet), there is a 15–20% chance that precipitation will occur as snow; that probability increases with altitude. Mixed rain and snow are common at that time of the year. Reduced air drainage, coupled with clear calm nights, lowers minimum temperatures in the summer, reducing the frost-free period. ### Streams Several tributaries of the Hackett, Nahlin, Tahltan and Tuya rivers originate from Level Mountain: ## Human history ### Occupation In 1891–1892, the Hudson's Bay Company constructed a trail from the junction of the Sheslay and Hackett rivers to the southwestern slope of Level Mountain. Here, the company had built a trading post by 1898 named Egnell after its operator Albert Egnell. After spending one winter at the post, Egnell found that there was no trade to be done in the area and the post was subsequently abandoned. Egnell died on June 22, 1900, from an accidental gun shot to his leg by his son, McDonald, five days earlier and was buried at the Liard Post near the mouth of the Dease River. In the early 1900s, the Egnell Post served as a repair station for the 3,100-kilometre-long (1,900-mile) Yukon Telegraph Line, which extended from Ashcroft, British Columbia, to Dawson City, Yukon. A small settlement consisting of a mission house and a number of other buildings had been established on the site by 1944. This settlement, named Sheslay, has since been abandoned. There is no human population within 30 kilometres (19 miles) of Level Mountain but more than 630 people live within 100 kilometres (62 miles). Along the south side of Level Mountain are a number of other localities, including Hyland Ranch, Saloon, Salmon Creek Indian Reserve No. 3, Upper Tahltan Indian Reserve No. 4 and Tahltan Forks Indian Reserve No. 5. The northwestern side of Level Mountain is home to the Callison Ranch, which lies just east of Hatin Lake. Southeast of Level Mountain is the Days Ranch near the junction of the Tahltan and Stikine rivers. It was established by Ira Day in or before 1929 as a stopping place on the road from Dease Lake to Telegraph Creek. Day operated the ranch until he died around 1960, after which it remained abandoned for a time. In 2018, the Days Ranch was destroyed by a 30,000-hectare (74,000-acre) wildfire; more than 30 structures were burned. ### Geological studies The large size and remote location of Level Mountain has limited geological studies at this volcanic complex. Basalt and andesite flows were presented in the 1926 Canada Department of Mines Summary Report, 1925, Part A. The andesites were described as porphyritic rocks with phenocrysts of feldspar of various size in a greyish or greenish matrix. Both hornblende and augite andesites were noted to have been represented under a microscope. The basalts were described as black rocks with basic plagioclase with or without olivine and were noted in many cases to contain a considerable percentage of brownish glass. Although there was not sufficient time available to study these flows in detail, it was revealed at several points that the andesites formed the older and the basalts the younger flows. G. M. Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada was able to demonstrate that on the Stikine River there were at least four flows of basalt. The basalts and andesites were considered to be younger than all the rocks they were observed in contact with, namely granitic intrusives, porphyries and greenstones. More definitive evidence as to their age was obtained by W. A. Johnston and F. A. Kerr of the Geological Survey of Canada who placed them in the Tertiary. Some of the most recent lava flows of the Stikine valley were assigned as probably belonging to the Pleistocene. Level Mountain was demonstrated in the 1920s as a possible source for the extensive lavas in the neighbouring Tuya volcanic field. This field, consisting of flat-topped summits or benches, was considered to have formed as a result of block faulting or by erosion of a formerly much more extensive surface underlain by horizontally bedded volcanic rocks. The possibility of Level Mountain being a source for the Tuya field lavas would deteriorate in the 1940s when Canadian volcanologist Bill Mathews revealed that the flat-topped, steep-sided summits were not products of faulting or erosion but were rather individual volcanoes formed by eruptions of lava into lakes thawed through an ice sheet. Mathews coined the term "tuya" for these subglacial volcanoes after Tuya Butte which is located in the Tuya volcanic field. The recognition of Level Mountain as a long-lived zone of volcanism in contrast to the small Tuya field volcanoes has given it status as a separate volcanic centre. The mountain was identified by the mapping program of Operation Stikine in 1956. This program, masterminded by Canadian volcanologist Jack Souther, was carried out over the Stikine River area using a Bell helicopter. Reconnaissance mapping in 1962 by Jack Souther and Hu Gabrielse identified a sequence of lavas of late Tertiary to Quaternary age. Level Mountain was then studied by T. S. Hamilton in the 1970s who produced a detailed map and the first petrochemical study of the lavas. The andesites described in the 1920s were mapped as early Tertiary age, long before Level Mountain formed. Hamilton recognized the four distinctive stratigraphic units of the lava plateau, as well as the overlying bimodal package of alkali basalt and peralkaline lavas and tuffs. In 1994, Carignnan et al. considered Level Mountain to be underlain by a mantle plume or hotspot due to its proximity to a major continental divide between the Yukon, Arctic and Pacific watersheds. The high <sup>206</sup>Pb/<sup>204</sup>Pb ratios in Level Mountain basalt were used as isotopic evidence to support this theory. However, P-wave studies conducted in 1998 by Frederikson et al. did not detect any geophysical anomalies near the mountain to justify the existence of a mantle plume or hotspot. ### Naming The name of the mountain is a reference to its plateau surface. It was adopted by the Geographical Names Board of Canada on December 21, 1944, as identified in the Canada Department of Mines Summary Report, 1925, Part A. The name appeared on National Topographic System (NTS) map 104/NE but was replaced with the name Level Mountain Range on August 14, 1952, upon production of NTS map 104J. The reason for this name change was that cartographers were uncertain as to what the name Level Mountain referred to. They cited H. S. Bostock's 1948 report Physiography of the Canadian Cordillera, With Special Reference to the Area North of the Fifty-Fifth Parallel in which Bostock stated that Level Mountain was a small prominent mountain range on the Nahlin Plateau. Despite this misinterpretation, Level Mountain is still the local name for the entire volcanic edifice and the name Level Mountain Range for a group of steep peaks centered on the mountain's summit. Although the mountain appears level when viewed from a distance, it attains the shape of a large triangle when examined from the top of some of the high hills west of the bend of the Tuya River. ## Accessibility Level Mountain lies in a remote location with no established road access. The closest route to this major volcanic complex is a graded road from Dease Lake to Telegraph Creek, which extends within 50 kilometres (31 miles) of the mountain. From Telegraph Creek or Days Ranch the mountain may be reached by a 30-kilometre-long (19-mile) hike. Several small low-lying lakes surrounding Level Mountain provide float plane access, including Ketchum Lake, Hatin Lake and Granite Lake. The Yukon Telegraph Trail, a historic pathway built in the 1890s, is still passable through Hatin Lake and provides an overland route to the shield volcano. Alternatively, fixed-wing aircraft landings can be made on a runway at Sheslay. Charter helicopter service in the small community of Dease Lake provides direct access to the Level Mountain Range. The alpine lava plateau of Level Mountain is easily travelled by horse or on foot during the snow-free period from June to September. Much of the area south of Level Mountain is impassable due to poorly-drained fens. ## See also - List of Northern Cordilleran volcanoes - List of volcanoes in Canada - Volcanism of Western Canada
2,268,516	Nuckelavee	1,173,554,243	Horse-like demon from Orcadian mythology	[ "Horses in mythology", "Mythological hybrids", "Mythological monsters", "Orcadian culture", "Orkney", "Scottish folklore", "Scottish legendary creatures", "Water spirits" ]	The nuckelavee ( /nʌklɑːˈviː/) or nuckalavee is a horse-like demon from Orcadian folklore that combines equine and human elements. British folklorist Katharine Briggs called it "the nastiest" of all the demons of Scotland's Northern Isles. The nuckelavee's breath was thought to wilt crops and sicken livestock, and the creature was held responsible for droughts and epidemics on land despite being predominantly a sea-dweller. A graphic description of the nuckelavee as it appears on land was given by an islander who claimed to have had a confrontation with it, but accounts describing the details of the creature's appearance are inconsistent. In common with many other sea-monsters, it is unable to tolerate fresh water, therefore, those it is pursuing have only to cross a river or stream to be rid of it. The nuckelavee is kept in confinement during the summer months by the Mither o' the Sea, an ancient Orcadian spirit, and the only one able to control it. Orcadian folklore had a strong Scandinavian influence, and it may be that the nuckelavee is a composite of a water horse from Celtic mythology and a creature imported by the Norsemen. As with similar malevolent entities such as the kelpie, it possibly offered an explanation for incidents that islanders in ancient times could not otherwise understand. ## Etymology The late 19th century saw an upsurge of interest in transcribing folklore, but the recorders used inconsistent spelling and frequently anglicised words, thus the same entity could be given different names. The term nuckelavee derives from Orcadian knoggelvi, and according to Orkney resident and 19th-century folklorist Walter Traill Dennison means "Devil of the Sea". The same demon is called a mukkelevi in Shetland, where it was considered a nasty sea-trow or sea-devil. Samuel Hibbert, an antiquarian of the early nineteenth century, considered the component nuck of the nuckelavee's name to be cognate with both the Nick in Old Nick, a name sometimes given to the Devil of Christian belief, and with the Latin necare, to kill. ## Folk beliefs ### Description and common attributes Stories of mythical Orcadian demons are recorded in the 16th-century Latin manuscripts of Jo Ben, who may have been referring to the nuckelavee in his description of the Orkney island of Stronsay. Dennison transcribed much of the information available about traditional tales told on Orkney, but to an extent romanticised and systematically altered certain elements of the stories in the process of transforming them into prose. The nuckelavee is a mythical sea-creature that appears as a horse-like demon when it ventures onto land. Writer and folklorist Ernest Marwick considered it very similar to the Norwegian nøkk, the nuggle of Shetland and the kelpie. A unique and solitary creature possessing extensive evil powers, its malevolent behaviour can influence events throughout the islands. Islanders were terrified of the creature and would not speak its name without immediately saying a prayer. It was often found in the vicinity of a beach, but would never come ashore if it was raining. No tales describe what form the nuckelavee takes when in the sea, but its appearance on land has been recounted in graphic detail. An islander, Tammas, claimed to have survived a confrontation with the beast and, after much cajoling from Dennison, reluctantly gave his description of the monster, the only known first-hand account. According to Tammas, the nuckelavee has a man's torso attached to a horse's back as if it were a rider. The male torso has no legs, but its arms can reach the ground from its position on top of the equine body, the legs of which have fin like appendages. The torso has a large head – possibly as much as 3 feet (90 centimetres) in diameter – that rolls back and forth. The monster described by Tammas has two heads; the equine head has an enormous gaping mouth that exudes a pungent, toxic vapour, and a single giant eye like a burning red flame. A particularly gruesome detail is that the nuckelavee has no skin; black blood courses through yellow veins, and the pale sinews and powerful muscles are visible as a pulsating mass. Other reports state that the creature resembles a centaur; narratives are inconsistent in the finer details of the demon's description however. Traill Dennison only describes a man's head with a "mouth projected like that of a pig". Marwick also only mentions one head with a single red eye, and he borrows some of Tammas's characterisation by recording the creature's mouth as "like a whale's". The nuckelavee's breath was thought to wilt crops and sicken livestock, and it was considered responsible for epidemics and drought. Seaweed burning to create what was known at the time as kelp began on Stronsay in 1722. The product – soda ash – was an alkali mainly used to treat acidic soil, although as time went on its commercial importance in soap and glass manufacture increased. The pungent smoke emitted during the process was believed to enrage the nuckelavee, resulting in a wild rampage of plague, the deaths of cattle and the destruction of crops. The nuckelavee was said to have infected horses on Stronsay with the deadly disease known as mortasheen, to demonstrate its fury and exact its revenge against the islanders for burning seaweed; the infection subsequently spread to all the other islands involved in the industry. The creature was also blamed for prolonged periods of abnormally low rainfall, leading to water shortages and poor harvests. ## Confinement The nuckelavee is the most malevolent of the demons in and around the Scottish islands, without any redeeming characteristics. The only entity able to control it is the Mither o' the Sea, an ancient spirit in Orcadian mythology who keeps the nuckelavee confined during the summer months. In common with other mythical sea-monsters, with the possible exception of kelpies and the nuggle of Shetland, it is unable to wade through fresh flowing water, therefore it can be escaped by crossing a stream. Tammas managed to escape from the nuckelavee after he inadvertently splashed it with water from the loch he was alongside; this briefly distracted the monster, allowing Tammas to run over to a nearby channel of fresh water and jump to safety on the opposite bank. ## Origins Malevolent creatures possibly served to provide explanations for incidents that islanders were otherwise unable to account for; many ancient myths were based upon the natural elements of the turbulent and ever changing sea around Orkney. Established Orcadian tales were strongly influenced by Scandinavian mythology with a blending of traditional Celtic stories, so the nuckelavee may have its roots in a mythical creature imported by the Norsemen fused with a traditional Celtic water horse. ## See also - List of fictional horses - Water horse - Hippocampus (mythology) - Kappa (folklore) - Neck (water spirit) - Peg Powler - Selkie - Vodyanoi
1,397,856	Anna Lee Fisher	1,173,391,579	American astronaut and physician	[ "1949 births", "American people of German descent", "Articles containing video clips", "Living people", "NASA civilian astronauts", "Physician astronauts", "San Pedro High School alumni", "Space Shuttle program astronauts", "University of California, Los Angeles alumni", "Women astronauts" ]	Anna Lee Fisher (; born August 24, 1949) is an American chemist, emergency physician and a former NASA astronaut. Formerly married to fellow astronaut Bill Fisher, and the mother of two children, in 1984, she became the first mother to fly in space. During her career at NASA, she was involved with three major programs: the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and the Orion spacecraft. A graduate of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1971, Fisher started graduate school in chemistry, conducting X-ray crystallographic studies of metallocarboranes. The following year she moved to the UCLA School of Medicine, where she received her Doctor of Medicine degree in 1976. She completed her internship at Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California, in 1977, and chose to specialize in emergency medicine. Fisher was selected as an astronaut candidate with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first group of NASA astronauts to include women, in January 1978. She became the Astronaut Office representative for the development and testing of the Canadarm remote manipulator system and the testing of payload bay door contingency spacewalk procedures. For the first four Space Shuttle missions she was assigned to the search and rescue helicopters supporting the flights. For the next four missions, she was involved in the verification of flight software at the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL), and was a "Cape Crusader"—one of the astronauts who supported vehicle integration and payload testing at Kennedy Space Center. She flew in space on the on the STS-51-A mission in November 1984, during which she used the Canadarm to retrieve two satellites that had been placed in incorrect orbits. After a leave of absence to raise her family from 1989 to 1995, Fisher returned to the Astronaut Office, where she worked on procedures and training issues in support of the International Space Station (ISS). She was a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) from January 2011 to August 2013, and the lead CAPCOM for ISS Expedition 33. She was involved in the development of the display for the Orion spacecraft until her retirement from NASA in April 2017. ## Early life and education Anna Lee Sims was born in Albany, New York, on August 24, 1949. Her mother Elfriede was born in Germany in 1918 but emigrated to the United States when she was sixteen years old. She went back to Germany to care for her grandmother, and was unable to return to the United States due to the outbreak of World War II. She served in the German military as a Morse code operator during the war. Afterwards, she worked in Berlin for the U.S. Army, where she met Riley F. Tingle. The two returned to the United States, where they were married in April 1949. Over the years the family moved about frequently, living on bases in the United States and Germany, and Sims grew up as an Army brat. She speaks German fluently. On May 5, 1961, when Sims was in the seventh grade at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, her teacher brought in a transistor radio so the class could listen to the radio broadcast of Alan Shepard becoming the first American in space. For the first time Sims contemplated the notion of becoming an astronaut. It seemed out of reach, as all the Mercury Seven astronauts were military test pilots, a profession women were excluded from at that time, but she figured that by the time she was old enough there would be space stations, which would need doctors. When she was in high school she volunteered at Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California, but did not let go of the dream of flying in space. She graduated from San Pedro High School in 1967. Sims entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), initially studying math. She decided that the job prospects were poor and switched to chemistry, graduating with her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1971. She then spent a year in graduate school, conducting X-ray crystallographic studies of metallocarboranes, and published three articles in Inorganic Chemistry. Noting a lack of employment opportunity for chemists who had earned PhDs, she decided to pursue medicine instead. The following year she moved to the UCLA School of Medicine, where she received her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in 1976. At the time, medicine was considered a "non-traditional" career for women, and there were only about 15 women in the medical school class of 150. She completed her internship at Harbor General Hospital in 1977. At Harbor General she met Bill Fisher, a fellow intern a year ahead of her. He too was a military brat—the son of a United States Air Force officer—and also hoped to one day fly in space. She chose to specialize in emergency medicine and worked in several hospitals in the Los Angeles area, doing eight 24-hour shifts per month. ## NASA astronaut ### Selection Another doctor at Harbor General was Mark Mecikalski, who followed the American space program. At lunch in June 1977 he informed Bill, who was now Sims's fiancé, that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was conducting a selection of a new group of astronauts and recruiting doctors. Bill had Sims paged over the hospital loudspeaker system. They both applied, although they agreed that Sims had the better chance, due to her background in chemistry as well as medicine. They had three weeks to assemble the required documents and submit their applications. Sims posted hers the day before the deadline. NASA received 8,079 applications, and chose 208 for further screening. Sims was invited to come to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, for a week of interviews, evaluations and examinations, commencing on August 29, 1977. This was the week when Bill and Sims had planned to marry. They brought their wedding forward, and were married at Wayfarers Chapel in Paseo Del Mar, San Pedro, California, on August 23. She changed her surname to Fisher. She was part of the third group of twenty applicants to be interviewed, and the first one that included women. Among the eight women in the group were Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Nitza Cintron and Millie Hughes-Wiley. In the interview, Sims was asked if she wanted to have children, and she told them of her intention to have children within the next five years. Bill also received a call from NASA, and in November he was one of the ninth group of applicants to be interviewed. This group included Judith Resnik, who worked for Xerox in nearby El Segundo, California, and Resnik and the Fishers became friends. In January 1978, Fisher received a call from George Abbey informing her that she had been selected as part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, and would commence on July 5. At the same time, he informed Bill that he had not been selected. Bill was the only unsuccessful applicant to be told of his rejection by Abbey; the job of informing unsuccessful candidates was normally delegated. Fisher was interviewed on television by Connie Chung. That night Bill took Fisher and Resnik, who had also been selected, out to dinner to celebrate. Bill and Fisher moved to Houston, where they bought a house in Clear Lake City. The new job involved a considerable pay cut; from earning about \$50,000 per year () as a surgical resident, she dropped down to a government salary of around \$23,000 a year (). "It didn't matter what the pay was", she told People magazine. "To be an astronaut, I was willing to pay them." ### Training Group 8's name for itself was "TFNG". The abbreviation was deliberately ambiguous; for public purposes, it stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys", but within the group itself, it was known to stand for the military phrase, "the fucking new guy", used to denote newcomers to a military unit. Officially, they were astronaut candidates; they would not become fully-fledged astronauts until their training was complete. Much of the first eight months of their training was in the classroom. Because there were so many of them, the TFNGs did not fit easily into the existing classrooms, so they were split into two groups, red and blue, led by Rick Hauck and John Fabian respectively. Fisher was placed in the blue group. Water survival training was conducted with the 3613th Combat Crew Training Squadron at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and parasail training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Astronaut candidate training included learning to fly NASA's T-38 Talon jet aircraft. Mission specialist astronaut candidates like Fisher did not have to qualify as pilots, only ride in the back seat and handle an emergency if the pilot became incapacitated. Fellow TFNGs James Buchli and Dale Gardner, who were naval flight officers, drew up a training syllabus for mission specialist astronaut candidates like Fisher who had no aviation experience. Each was assigned to a pilot astronaut or astronaut candidate as an instructor; Fisher's was astronaut Ken Mattingly. The instructors took pride in the progress of their trainees, and attempted to convey some of their own love of flying. Fisher took private flying lessons, and soloed for the first time in November 1978. On one weekend day each month, she worked in the emergency room at Houston Methodist Clear Lake Hospital or Tampa General Hospital in Florida to keep her medical skills well-honed. To keep in shape she would do a 4-mile (6.4 km) run each day, lifted weights in the gym, and played racquetball. On August 31, 1979, Fisher completed her training and evaluation period, making her eligible for assignment as a mission specialist on Space Shuttle flight crews, had there been any. NASA had already, on August 1, issued a call for another intake of astronaut candidates. Bill applied again. He had earned a Master of Science degree in engineering from the University of Houston and taken flying lessons to make himself more attractive to the program. This time he was accepted, and became part of NASA Astronaut Group 9. This made them the first married couple to be selected for astronaut training. She attended meetings of the astronaut spouses' club so the wives of her fellow astronauts would not feel threatened by her working closely with their husbands. Following the one-year basic training program, Fisher was assigned to assist in the design of spacesuits tailored to fit women (called the extra-small Extravehicular Mobility Unit or EMU). In particular, she assisted with the design of an extra-small Hard Upper Torso (HUT). She was given Pete Conrad's old space suit worn on the Apollo 12 and Skylab 2 missions. Conrad was one of the shortest Apollo astronauts, but the suit was still too large. Fisher made do, and wore the suit when she carried out various activities in a water tank to test tools and procedures for extravehicular activity (EVA). Ultimately, NASA decided that the cost and complexity of designing and producing a small space suit was prohibitive, and that it was simpler and cheaper to limit EVAs to astronauts that fit medium- and large-sized suits, rather than adapt the suits to fit small-sized astronauts. Fisher then worked with William B. Lenoir on the development of techniques for repairing the Space Shuttle tiles. She was the Astronaut Office representative for the development and testing of the Canadarm remote manipulator system and the testing of payload bay door contingency spacewalk procedures. For STS-1, the inaugural orbital spaceflight of the Space Shuttle program and the maiden flight of the , Abbey decided that the five MDs of the 1978 and 1980 astronaut selections—Fisher, Seddon and Norman Thagard from the 1978 group, and Bill Fisher and Jim Bagian from the 1980 group—would be assigned to the search and rescue helicopters supporting the flight. These would be required if the Space Shuttle crashed or the astronauts had to eject. Fisher was based at the White Sands Test Facility, an alternative landing site. She performed this duty again at Edwards Air Force Base for STS-2, at White Sands again for STS-3 and at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for STS-4. For these four missions, Fisher was involved in the verification of flight software at the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). In that capacity, she reviewed test requirements and procedures for ascent, in-orbit, and Canadarm (RMS) software verification. Fisher was a "Cape Crusader"—one of the astronauts who supported vehicle integrated testing and payload testing at KSC—for the STS-5 and STS-6 missions, and the lead Cape Crusader for the June 1983 STS-7 mission. ### STS-51-A Fisher became pregnant in late 1982 while working as a Cape Crusader. She wanted to have children, and there was no certainty as to when she would be assigned to a space flight. She continued to fly to KSC in NASA T-38 jets until she informed Abbey when she was four-and-a-half-months pregnant, and he directed that henceforth she would have to fly on commercial jets, which she found very inconvenient. Four months later, Abbey summoned Fisher and her husband Bill to his office, and informed them that he was assigning her to a flight. This would make her the first mother to fly in space. She gave birth to her daughter, Kristin Anne, on Friday, July 29, 1983, and was back at work at JSC on the following Monday. The public announcement of the selection of Fisher and the other members of the crew of the STS-41-G mission was made on September 21, 1983. The crew was commanded by Hauck, who had piloted the STS-7 mission, and also included David M. Walker as the pilot, Fisher as the flight engineer (MS2), and fellow mission specialists Gardner and Joseph P. Allen. STS-41-G was tentatively scheduled for August 1, 1984. As the flight engineer, Fisher sat in the seat behind the commander and the pilot and assisted them during ascent, descent and landing. Before her flight, Fisher wanted to perform capsule communicator (CAPCOM) duties. Hauck was unenthusiastic about this—he wanted his crew to be focused on training for the upcoming mission—but he relented, and Fisher performed CAPCOM duties for STS-9 in November. She used a breast pump during breaks and hired a nanny to help care for Kristin. The crew went to Seattle to learn about the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) from the manufacturer, Boeing, but on the way back they found that the mission payload had been changed and the IUS would not be used. By November the crew was assigned to the STS-41-H mission. Being in line to become the first mother to fly in space brought Fisher additional fame. In February 1984 she went to New York City to appear on the Today show. While there she heard that the STS-41-B mission had launched two Hughes HS-376 satellites. After the Payload Assist Module (PAM) of the first failed, leaving it in an unusable orbit, they had launched the second one, and its PAM had failed too. Asked specifically whether NASA would attempt to retrieve the two satellites, Fisher replied categorically that it would not. The HS-376 was the size of a small bus, with solar arrays and an apogee kick motor. It was not designed to be retrieved, so there was nothing for the Canadarm to grab on to, and NASA had never done anything like it before. The insurance companies—Lloyd's of London and the International Underwriting Association—convinced NASA to make an attempt to retrieve the two satellites. Hauck's crew was reassigned to this mission, which was designated STS-51-A. The mission would be the fourteenth Space Shuttle flight, and NASA was eager to demonstrate its capability. The crew was enthusiastic about the mission but Hauck was much less so. He thought the mission was dangerous and declared that it would be remarkable if they could retrieve one satellite, and a miracle if they could retrieve two. The method that the NASA engineers and astronauts came up with was to capture the satellites with a device they called an Apogee Kick Motor Capture Device or "stinger". Allen would use the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) to fly over to the satellite and place the stinger inside its rocket nozzle. It would open like an umbrella, and take hold of the satellite. On the other end was a grapple fixture. Fisher would use the Canadarm to grab hold of the fixture and maneuver the satellite into the cargo bay of the . Allen and Gardner would then have to secure the satellite inside the cargo bay. Since the other two mission specialists were preoccupied with the EVAs, Fisher would also assist Hauck and Walker as the mission's flight engineer. Fisher was asked to design the insignia for this mission. Her design had six stars: five for the crew and one representing Kristin. Reporters asked her how she felt about leaving her child behind. She pointed out that men on her flight were also leaving their children behind; Gardner had a son a few months older than Kristin, and all the others had older children. In the weeks and months leading up to the flight, she recorded a series of videos for Kristin so her daughter would know what her mother was like in case she did not come back. STS-51-A was supposed to launch on November 7 but high winds in the upper atmosphere forced a 24-hour postponement. Discovery lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at KSC on November 8, 1984, on its second mission. Once Discovery was in orbit, Fisher performed the checkout of the RMS. Like many astronauts, she felt the effects of space adaptation syndrome and did not feel better until the third day. On the second day the crew deployed Telesat Canada's 1,237-kilogram (2,727 lb) Anik D2, an HS 376 communications satellite, using a spring-ejection mechanism. This was the first time that a Space Shuttle deployed a satellite at night. The following day they deployed the U.S. Navy's Leasat 1 satellite using the Frisbee-style mechanism that had been used to deploy Leasat 2 successfully on the STS-41-D mission. On the fifth day of the mission, Discovery rendezvoused with Palapa B2, the first of the two satellites to be recovered. In the weeks leading up to the mission the satellites' onboard motors had been used to lower their orbit and reduce their spin rate to make it easier for the astronauts to retrieve them. Allen was able to fly out to the satellite using the MMU and grab hold of it. He deployed the stinger, and Fisher grappled it with the Canadarm. But when Gardner went to attach the large clamp, it did not fit; the satellite had not been built exactly according to its specifications. Out of communication with mission control, the crew then came up with another plan. Fisher released the grapple and Allen stood on the footholds on the Canadarm. Fisher maneuvered it so Allen could manhandle the satellite, and Gardner attached the docking clamp to the bottom. The satellite was then successfully retrieved. The next day they repeated the procedure and retrieved the second satellite, the Westar VI. The crew also operated a Radiation Monitoring Equipment (RME) device and the 3M Company’s Diffusive Mixing of Organic Solutions (DMOS) experiment. Discovery touched down at KSC on November 16, 1984, after a flight lasting 7 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes, during which it had completed 127 orbits. Lloyd's of London awarded the crew its silver medal for those who "by extraordinary exertions have contributed to the preservation of property from perils of all kind." It had only been awarded five times since World War II, and this was the first time it had been awarded for a salvage operation that was not at sea. The medals were presented by President Ronald Reagan. Fisher was named "national mother of the year" by the Father's Day/Mother's Day Council, along with Martha Layne Collins, Clara Hale, Louisa Kennedy, Susan Lucci, Sarah Palfrey, Madge Sinclair and Frederica Von Stade. ### Post-Challenger In December 1984, Fisher was assigned to mission STS-61-C, a satellite deployment mission. The mission was scheduled for December 1985 on Columbia and would deploy the Westar 7 communications satellite for Western Union and the Satcom KU-2 communications satellite for RCA. It was commanded by Michael L. Coats. This time John E. Blaha was the pilot and Thagard and Robert C. Springer were fellow mission specialist. Fisher would reprise her role of flight engineer. The launch date slipped and the crew was reassigned to mission STS-61-H, which was scheduled to fly, with a different payload, in June 1986. That mission was canceled in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986. Following the accident, Fisher worked as the Deputy of the Mission Development Branch of the Astronaut Office, and as the astronaut office representative for Flight Data File issues. In that capacity, she served as the crew representative on the Crew Procedures Change Board. She served on the Astronaut Selection Board for NASA Astronaut Group 12 in 1987, and in the Space Station Support Office, where she worked part-time in the Space Station Operations Branch. In this role she was the crew representative supporting space station development in the areas of training, operations concepts, and the health maintenance facility. During an appearance at UCLA, Fisher mentioned that she had completed all the coursework required for a master's degree in chemistry, but students on the PhD track usually bypass their masters. Staff at UCLA checked their records, and Fisher was awarded her Master of Science degree in chemistry in 1987. She was initiated as an alumna into the Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women in 1989, at the San Diego biennial Convention. ### Leave of absence A second daughter, Kara Lynne, was born in 1989. Kara had the rare distinction of being born after both parents had flown in space. From 1989 to 1995, Fisher took an extended leave from NASA to raise her family. There was no intention to take multiple years off; she took a year at a time. The Fishers divorced in 2000. ### Return When Fisher returned to the Astronaut Office in 1995, she was assigned to the Operations Planning Branch to work on the procedures and training issues in support of the International Space Station (ISS). She was chief of the Operations Planning Branch from June 1997 to June 1998, and deputy chief for operations training in the Space Station Branch from June 1998 to June 1999. In these roles, she oversaw Astronaut Office inputs to the space station program regarding operations, procedures and training. She then served as chief of the Space Station Branch. In that capacity, she was involved in issues regarding the design, development, and testing of the ISS hardware. Fisher also served as the Astronaut Office representative on numerous Space Station Program Boards and Multilateral Boards. She was later assigned to the Shuttle Branch and worked on technical assignments within that branch. In 2012, she briefly made news when, during the landing of Discovery at Washington's Dulles Airport, where it was being retired to the Smithsonian Institution, she advised an aspiring astronaut to study Russian. At least one commentator suggested this was a veiled criticism of the US government's lack of funding for the space program. Fisher was a CAPCOM from January 2011 to August 2013, and was the lead CAPCOM for ISS Expedition 33. As a management astronaut, she was involved in the development of the flight instruments display for the Orion project until her retirement in April 2017. ## Public appearances Before and after her flight assignments Fisher performed many public appearances per year; those included both official duties, such as when she spoke to visitors at the September 22, 2012, open house of NASA's Langley Research Center, and semi-official duties, such as when she was a special guest at the 99th Indianapolis 500 on May 24, 2015. Fisher and Bill appeared together with their daughter Kristin on an August 1983 segment of Good Morning America. The September 1982 issue of The Saturday Evening Post featured a cover photo of Fisher. She was also photographed for the back cover of Redbook magazine. ## In popular culture Other than the publicity she does herself, her likeness has been widely shared on the internet and it has been used in various promotions and tribute art. Photographer John Bryson shot a series of photos of Fisher wearing a helmet and space suit. One shot in the series, in which she is turned farthest away from the camera (almost in complete profile), has been frequently posted, shared, and reposted on social media sites including FFFFOUND!, and Reddit. The image has since been used to promote the bands MGMT, Incubus, Arctic Monkeys, Max and Harvey, and The Moth & The Flame. ## Awards and honors - National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Fellowship (1970, 1971) - NASA Space Flight Medal (1984) - NASA Exceptional Service Medal (1988, 1998) - Lloyd's of London Silver Medal for Meritorious Salvage Operations (1985) - Mother of the Year Award (1985) - UCLA Professional Achievement Award (1986) - UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry Alumni Award (2012)
484,799	Shapinsay	1,169,495,339	Island and (until 1975) civil parish in Orkney Islands, Scotland	[ "Islands of the Orkney Islands", "Shapinsay" ]	Shapinsay (/ˈʃæpɪnziː/, Scots: Shapinsee) is one of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of mainland Scotland. There is one village on the island, Balfour, from which roll-on/roll-off car ferries sail to Kirkwall on the Orkney Mainland. Balfour Castle, built in the Scottish Baronial style, is one of the island's most prominent features, a reminder of the Balfour family's domination of Shapinsay during the 18th and 19th centuries; the Balfours transformed life on the island by introducing new agricultural techniques. Other landmarks include a standing stone, an Iron Age broch, a souterrain and a salt-water shower. With an area of 29.5 square kilometres (11.4 sq mi), Shapinsay is the eighth largest island in the Orkney archipelago. It is low-lying and fertile, consequently most of the area is given over to farming. Shapinsay has two nature reserves and is notable for its bird life. At the 2011 census, Shapinsay had a population of 307. The economy of the island is primarily based on agriculture with the exception of a few small businesses that are largely tourism-related. Plans for the construction of a wind turbine are under consideration. ## Etymology Unlike most of the larger Orkney islands, the derivation of the name 'Shapinsay' is not obvious. The final 'ay' is from the Old Norse for island, but the first two syllables are more difficult to interpret. Haswell-Smith (2004) suggests the root may be hjalpandis-øy (helpful island) owing to the presence of a good harbour, although anchorages are plentiful in the archipelago. The first written record dates from 1375 in a reference to Scalpandisay, which may suggest a derivation from Judge's island. Another suggestion is Hyalpandi's island, although no one of that name is known to be associated with Shapinsay. ## History ### Early history Standing stones provide evidence of the island's human occupation since Neolithic times. According to Tacitus, the Roman general Agricola subdued the inhabitants of the Orkney Islands, and a local legend holds that he landed on Shapinsay. During the 18th century, a croft named Grukalty was renamed Agricola (which is also Latin for "farmer"). Roman coins have been found on Shapinsay, but they may have been brought to the island by traders. Shapinsay is briefly mentioned in the Norse sagas. The Saga of Haakon Haakonsson states that Haakon IV of Norway anchored in Elwick Bay before sailing south to eventual defeat at the Battle of Largs. ### 18th century The 18th century saw the beginnings of change to agriculture on Shapinsay, courtesy of the Balfour family. The family owned the estate of Sound, which covered the western part of the island. Sound had passed from the Tulloch family to the Buchanan family in 1627. John Buchanan was a royal servant and his wife Margaret Hartsyde was from a Kirkwall family. In 1674, Arthur Buchanan built the house of Sound, where Balfour Castle now stands. His granddaughter married James Fea, who is best known for his role in the capture of the Orkney Pirate John Gow. Fea was a supporter of the Jacobite rising of 1715, and the house was burned by Hanoverian troops in revenge. The estate was acquired by Andrew Ross, Stewart Depute in Orkney of the Earl of Morton. Ross's heirs, the Lindsay brothers, sold the estate to Thomas Balfour in 1782. Balfour had previously rented the Bu of Burray, a large manor farm on another Orkney island, but had insufficient wealth to acquire the estate even though his wife had inherited a legacy on the death of her aristocratic brother. To raise the necessary funds, Balfour had to sell his military commission and borrow from his brother, John, who was prospering in India with the East India Company. Once installed on the island, he built a new house, Cliffdale, and founded the village of Shoreside, now known as Balfour. He also reformed the local agriculture, enclosing fields and constructing farm buildings. William Irving was born c. 1740 in the small hamlet of Quholm in the northeast of the island. He became a sailor before emigrating to New York in 1763. One of his sons was Washington Irving, author of Rip van Winkle and the first American author to gain international recognition. Marjory Meason, a native of Shapinsay, was the last person to be executed in Orkney, in 1728. She was a young servant, hanged in Kirkwall for the murder of a child. The execution is recorded as requiring 24 armed men, not including officers, and costing £15 8s. During this period, burning kelp was a mainstay of the island economy. More than 3,048 tonnes (3,000 long tons) of burned seaweed were produced per annum to make soda ash, bringing in £20,000 for the inhabitants. Thomas Balfour's income from the kelp industry brought him four times the income that farming did. ### 19th century The 19th century saw more radical change in Shapinsay. Thomas Balfour's grandson, David Balfour, transformed the island after inheriting the family estate, which by 1846 encompassed the whole of Shapinsay. Most of the land was divided into fields of 4 hectares (10 acres), a feature that is still apparent today. Tenants were required to enclose and drain the land or pay for the estate to do it in the form of a surcharge added to their rents. In 1846, 303 hectares (1.17 sq mi) on Shapinsay consisted of arable land. By 1860, that had trebled to more than 890.3 hectares (3.44 sq mi). New crops and breeds of cattle and sheep were also introduced. Balfour's reforms were described as "the fountain and source of Orkney Improvement." Balfour also gave the island its most noticeable landmark when he recruited an Edinburgh architect, David Bryce, to transform Cliffdale House into the Scottish Baronial Balfour Castle. Other buildings he added to the island include the porter's lodge (now a public house called The Gatehouse), a water mill, a school, and a gasworks that remained operational until the 1920s. The gasworks is in the form of a round tower with a corbelled parapet of red brick and carved stones—including one possibly removed from Noltland Castle on Westray, which is inscribed with the year 1725. The structure appears to be fortified, in accordance with Balfour's intention to give the village a medieval appearance. David Balfour was also responsible for the construction of Mill Dam, a wetland which was once the water supply for the mill and is now an RSPB nature reserve. Fishing for herring and cod also grew in importance during the 19th century. Herring fishing was expanding generally in Scotland at that time, with fishing stations being set up in remote areas. Herring fishing began in 1814 on Stronsay and soon spread throughout the Orkney Islands. By the middle of the century, Shapinsay had 50 herring boats. Cod became important largely because the Napoleonic Wars forced English fishing boats to fish further north. Local fishermen, who had been catching fish using lines from small boats for centuries, also began trawling for cod. However, this was largely a part-time venture, unlike in Shetland, where many inhabitants made a living from fishing. A saying originating from this time states, "a Shetlander is a fisherman with a croft, while an Orcadian is a farmer with a boat." Consequently, fishermen from outside the Orkney Islands earned a large share of the profits. Helliar Holm's beaches were used to dry both herring and cod after they had been salted. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which led to cheaper sources of soda ash becoming available from continental Europe, the kelp industry collapsed by 1830. This collapse helped fuel agricultural reform, as crofters accustomed to earning a second income had to now earn more from farming. ### 20th century The Balfour estate sold its farms on Shapinsay between 1924 and 1928. This was a common occurrence in Orkney at the time as wealthy landowners moved to more lucrative forms of investment. Farms were generally sold to the sitting tenant or to their neighbours who wished to expand. The 20th century saw many changes in farming on Shapinsay. Mechanised implements came to the island, particularly after the Second World War. In common with the rest of Orkney, the amount of land given over to growing grass increased. The growing of grain (with the exception of barley) and turnips steadily declined as these were replaced as winter fodder for livestock by silage, usually harvested by mechanical forage harvesters. Orkney was a strategic site during both World Wars, and Shapinsay was no exception. In 1917, during the First World War, the 836-tonne (823-long-ton) Swiftsure was hit by a mine 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) east of Haco's Ness and sank in 19 metres (62 ft) of water with the loss of a single life. The site of the wreck was not discovered until 1997. During the Second World War, gun batteries were built on the island. A twin six pounder emplacement at Galtness Battery on the coast at Salt Ness protected the Wide Firth from German torpedo boats. A Castle Battery was operational from 1941 to 1943, as was an anti-aircraft battery. Mains electricity arrived on Shapinsay in the 1970s, when an underwater cable was laid from Kirkwall. The trend towards more intensive farming began to be partially reversed by the end of the century as more environmentally friendly practices were encouraged by government and European Union grants. For example, Richard Zawadzki, owner of Balfour Mains (the largest farm on the island), ceased to breed livestock (instead keeping animals bred elsewhere) and grew less grain (some barley is still grown on the farm). Instead, some of the land is now managed under a Habitat Creation Scheme, which aims to encourage natural vegetation, wild flowers and nesting birds by limiting grazing and reducing the use of chemical fertilisers. Tourism started to become important in the latter half of the century; the first restaurant to incorporate bed and breakfast facilities opened in 1980. ## Geography With an area of 2,948 hectares (11 sq mi), Shapinsay is the 8th largest Orkney island and the 29th largest Scottish island. The highest point of Ward Hill is 64 metres (210 ft) above sea level. The east coast is composed of low cliffs and has several sea caves, including the picturesque geo at the extreme northern tip known as Geo of Ork. Elwick Bay is a sheltered anchorage on the south coast, facing the Orkney mainland; the island's largest settlement, Balfour, is at the western end of the bay. The island has several ayres, or storm beaches, which form narrow spits of shingle or sand cutting across the landward and seaward ends of shallow bays. They can sometimes cut off a body of water from the sea, forming shallow freshwater lochs known as oyces. Examples include Vasa Loch and Lairo Water. There are several small islands in the vicinity including Broad Shoal, Grass Holm and Skerry of Vasa. Helliar Holm is a tidal islet at the eastern entrance to the main harbour at Balfour; it has a small lighthouse and a ruined broch. The String, a stretch of water that lies between Helliar Holm and the mainland, has strong tidal currents. ## Geology In common with most of the Orkney isles, Shapinsay has a bedrock formed from Old Red Sandstone, which is approximately 400 million years old and was laid down in the Devonian period. These thick deposits accumulated as earlier Silurian rocks, uplifted by the formation of Pangaea, eroded and then deposited into river deltas. The freshwater Lake Orcadie existed on the edges of these eroding mountains, stretching from Shetland to the southern Moray Firth. The composition of Shapinsay is mostly of the Rousay flagstone group from the Lower Middle Devonian, with some Eday flagstone in the southeast formed in wetter conditions during the later Upper Devonian. The latter is regarded as a better quality building material than the former. At Haco's Ness in the south east corner of the island is a small outcrop of amygdaloidal diabase. The island is overlain with a fertile layer of boulder clay formed during the Pleistocene glaciations. ## Flora and fauna The island's bird life is particularly rich in waders such as curlew and redshank, found at The Ouse and Veantro Bay, and gull and tern colonies on the rockier shores and cliffs. Pintail, shovelers and whooper swans are regular summer visitors, and there are also breeding populations of shelducks, hen harriers and Arctic skuas. There is an introduced population of red-legged partridges. Otters can be seen at the Ouse, Lairo Water and Vasa Loch, and at various places around the coast along with common seals and Atlantic grey seals. There are plans to build a hide to allow visitors to observe seals without disturbing them. Shapinsay and Hoy are the only two larger Orkney islands that lack the Orkney vole (Microtus arvalis orcadensis). Wildflowers abound in the summer, and the lichen Melaspilea interjecta, which is endemic to Scotland, is found in only three locations, including Shapinsay. In addition to the RSPB reserve at Mill Dam there is a Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve at East Hill in the southeast. ## Demography The highest recorded population for Shapinsay is 974, in 1881. Since then, the population of the island has steadily declined; less than a third of that number was recorded in the 2001 census. The rate of absolute population loss was lower in the last decades of the 20th century than it had been in the first half of that century. In 2001, Shapinsay had a population of 300, a decline of 6.8% from 322 in 1991. This was greater than the population decline for Orkney overall in the same period, which was 1.9%. However, the loss in population on Shapinsay was less than that experienced by most Orkney islands, most of which experienced declines of more than 10%. The number of persons per hectare on Shapinsay was 0.1, similar to the 0.2 persons per hectare across Orkney. At the time of the 2011 census the usually resident population had increased to 307. During the same period Scottish island populations as a whole grew by 4% to 103,702. Of the island's 300 inhabitants recorded in 2001, 283 were born in the United Kingdom (227 in Scotland and 56 in England). Seventeen were born outside the United Kingdom (four elsewhere in Europe, four in Asia, four in North America, one in South America and four in Oceania). By age group, 85 of the inhabitants were under 30 years of age, 134 were aged between 30 and 59, and 71 were age 60 and over. ## Notable buildings Balfour Castle dominates views of the southwest of the island and can be seen from the tower of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. The castle library features a secret passage hidden behind a false set of bookshelves. The Balfours escaped unwelcome visitors through this passageway, which leads to the conservatory door, enabling the butler to truthfully tell visitors that the Balfours were not in the house. Another feature of the castle is the stags' heads with gaslights at the tips of their antlers, although these are no longer used as working lights. The castle grounds feature deciduous woodland (now rare in Orkney) and 2 acres (8,100 m<sup>2</sup>) of walled gardens. Though built around an older structure that dates at least from the 18th century, the present castle was built in 1847, commissioned by Colonel David Balfour, and designed by Edinburgh architect David Bryce. Other buildings constructed by David Balfour include the Dishan Tower, known locally as The Douche. This is a saltwater shower building with a dovecote on top. A local landmark due to its high visibility when approaching the island by sea, the building is now in a serious state of disrepair, with roofing slates missing and the dovecote in danger of collapsing. A more ancient dwelling on Shapinsay is the Iron Age Broch of Burroughston. Only the interior of this partially buried building has been excavated, allowing visitors to look down into the broch from the surrounding mound. The surviving drystone walls rise to about three metres (10 ft) and are more than four metres (13 ft) thick in some places. The broch shows more evidence of David Balfour's influence on Shapinsay. He arranged for the site to be excavated by the archaeologists George Petrie and Sir William Dryden in 1861. The site was neglected after the excavation, slowly filling up with vegetation and rubble before being cleared in 1994. Shapinsay Heritage Centre is located in Balfour's former smithy, along with a craft shop and a cafe. The castle's former gatehouse is now the village public house. ## Economy In common with the other Orkney islands, Shapinsay is fertile agricultural land, with farms specialising in beef and lamb which export thousands of cattle and sheep annually. Orkney Ferries provides transport for pedestrians and vehicles, proximity to Kirkwall permitting closer contacts with the Orkney Mainland than is possible for most of the other North Isles. There are six crossings per day, the journey lasting about 25 minutes, which allows for a moderate amount of commuting. Between 1893 and 1964, the island was served by the steamer Iona. Since 1964, the Klydon and then the Clytus have operated the service; the current ferry is the . The Orkney Islands Council has considered building a tunnel to the Orkney Mainland. Balfour Castle was run as a hotel by the family of Captain Tadeusz Zawadzki, a Polish cavalry officer, but is now in use as a private house. The Shapinsay development trust is working on the island's community plan, and owns the island's wind turbine, which was completed in August 2011 after the community voted for its construction. According to the development trust, the turbine could earn more than £5 million during its 25-year lifetime. Small businesses on Shapinsay include a jam and chutney manufacturer, which uses traditional methods, and a studio offering residential arts courses such as stained glass crafting. ## Education and culture Shapinsay has a primary school, which in the 2006–7 academic year had 26 pupils. Before 1995, the island also had a secondary school but lost this because of falling enrolment and improved transport links with Kirkwall, to where Shapinsay secondary pupils now travel. The school doubles as a community centre and is host to a learning centre supported by the UHI Millennium Institute. This centre uses the internet, email and video-conferencing to allow students in Shapinsay to study without leaving the island. In December 2006, the pupils staged a joint Christmas show with a school in Grinder, Norway, 875 kilometres (544 mi) from Shapinsay. The schools used the internet to collaborate, supported by BT Group (BT), which upgraded the school's broadband connection. The finale of the show involved the Norwegian pupils singing Away in a Manger in English while the Shapinsay pupils responded with En Stjerne Skinner I Natt in Norwegian. This multilingual collaboration was somewhat easier for the Grinder pupils, who are taught English from the age of six. This collaboration was part of an ongoing relationship between the schools, whose children exchange letters and cards. Shapinsay school's headteacher has visited the Norwegian school, and there are plans for a reciprocal visit in 2008. Shapinsay Community School has gained a Silver Award under the international Eco-Schools programme. School pupils have carried out an energy audit, helped to plant more than 600 trees close to the school and carried out energy saving campaigns. Shapinsay pupils have also won an award from the Scottish Crofters Commission for producing a booklet on crofting on the island. ## Folklore Cubbie Roo, the best known Orcadian giant, has a presence on Shapinsay. He was originally based on the historical figure Kolbein Hrúga, who built Cubbie Roo's Castle in 1150 on the isle of Wyre, which is possibly the oldest castle in Scotland, and was mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga. However, the figure Cubbie Roo has departed far from his historical origins and has become a giant in the fashion that Finn MacCool (legendary builder of the Giant's Causeway) has in parts of Scotland and Ireland. He is said to have lived on the island of Wyre and used Orkney's islands as stepping stones. Many large stones on Orkney islands, including Shapinsay, are said to have been thrown or left there by the giant. Cubbie Roo's Burn is a waterway on Shapinsay that flows through a channel called Trolldgeo. Cubbie Roo's Lade is a pile of stones on the shore near Rothiesholm Head, the westmost point of Stronsay. This is supposedly the beginning of a bridge between the two islands that the giant had failed to complete. The name derives from the Old Norse trolla-hlad, meaning "giant's causeway". In 1905, The Orcadian newspaper reported that a strange creature had been seen off the coast of Shapinsay. It was reportedly the size of a horse, with a spotted body covered in scales. Opinion on the creature's origin was divided, with some islanders believing it to be a sea serpent, while others opined that it was merely a large seal. ## See also - List of islands of Scotland
40,416,723	Operation Mascot	1,129,674,630	1944 British carrier air raid against the German battleship Tirpitz	[ "1944 in Norway", "Aerial operations and battles of World War II involving the United Kingdom", "Alta, Norway", "Conflicts in 1944", "Military operations of World War II involving Germany", "World War II aerial operations and battles of the Western European Theatre" ]	Operation Mascot was an unsuccessful British carrier air raid conducted against the German battleship Tirpitz at her anchorage in Kaafjord, Norway, on 17 July 1944. The attack was one of a series of strikes against the battleship launched from aircraft carriers between April and August 1944, and was initiated after Allied intelligence determined that the damage inflicted during the Operation Tungsten raid on 3 April had been repaired. A force of 44 British dive bombers and 40 fighters took off from three aircraft carriers in the early hours of 17 July. German radar stations detected these aircraft while they were en route to Kaafjord, and Tirpitz was protected by a smoke screen by the time the strike force arrived. Few of the British airmen were able to spot the battleship, and their attacks did not inflict any significant damage. German losses were limited to a patrol craft, and three British aircraft were destroyed or damaged beyond repair by Kaafjord's defenders. A group of German submarines attempted to intercept the carrier force as it returned to base, without success. Two U-boats were sunk near the carriers by British patrol aircraft and several others were damaged. In August 1944, the Royal Navy conducted Operation Goodwood, four more carrier raids against Tirpitz which also failed and the task of sinking the battleship was transferred to the Royal Air Force. ## Background From early 1942 Tirpitz posed a significant threat to the Allied convoys transporting supplies through the Norwegian Sea to the Soviet Union. Operating from fjords on the Norwegian coast, the battleship was capable of overwhelming the close-escort forces assigned to the Arctic convoys or breaking out into the North Atlantic. To counter this threat, the Allies were forced to keep a powerful force of warships with the British Home Fleet, and capital ships accompanied most convoys part of the way to the Soviet Union. Several air and naval attacks were launched against Tirpitz in 1942 and 1943. On 6 March 1942, torpedo bombers flying from the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious attacked the battleship while she was attempting to intercept Convoy PQ 12 but did not achieve any hits. Land-based bombers from the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Soviet Air Forces also attempted to strike Tirpitz in her anchorages on several occasions in 1942 and 1943, but did not inflict any damage. On 23 September 1943, two British X-class midget submarines penetrated defences around the battleship at her main anchorage at Kaafjord in northern Norway during Operation Source, and placed explosive charges in the water beneath her. This attack caused extensive damage to Tirpitz, putting her out of service for six months. As Tirpitz was still considered a major threat to Allied shipping, the British military sought to damage or destroy the battleship before she could re-enter service. Another midget submarine attack was considered impractical due to improvements to Kaafjord's defences, and the commander of the RAF's Bomber Command refused to attempt heavy bomber raids against the battleship as he believed that such operations were unlikely to be successful and would result in heavy casualties. As a result, the Home Fleet's aircraft carriers were considered the best means of attacking Kaafjord, and the Admiralty directed the fleet to begin planning such a raid in late 1943. Following several months of preparations the Home Fleet's first attack on Kaafjord, which was designated Operation Tungsten, was conducted on 3 April 1944 and involved five aircraft carriers. The two strike forces of 20 Fairey Barracuda dive bombers escorted by 40 fighters were not detected during their flights to Kaafjord, and the battleship was hit by 15 bombs. Tirpitz's crew suffered heavy casualties, but the ship was not badly damaged. Nevertheless, the damage inflicted on Tirpitz's superstructure, armament and engines was sufficient to put her out of service for several months while repairs were completed. The commander of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, placed a priority on returning the battleship to service so that she could continue to tie down Allied naval resources. He and other senior German officers recognised at this time that the threat of further air attacks meant that Tirpitz could no longer operate against Allied convoys. British intelligence assessed that Tirpitz could be repaired within six months, and the Admiralty ordered further carrier-borne strikes against the battleship. First Sea Lord Andrew Cunningham did not believe that Barracudas could carry weapons capable of sinking Tirpitz, but he hoped that further attacks would increase the period the battleship was out of service and harm her crew's morale. The commander of the Home Fleet, Vice Admiral Bruce Fraser, initially resisted this order on the grounds that further carrier raids on Kaafjord were unlikely to be successful as Tirpitz's defences would have been reinforced and weather conditions were likely to be worse than those encountered during Operation Tungsten. Following an argument with Cunningham, Fraser eventually agreed to attack Kaafjord again. Despite the decision to make further attacks on Kaafjord, many of the Home Fleet's airmen were posted to other units following Operation Tungsten. This hindered subsequent operations against German forces in Norway as the new aircrew were less experienced than the men they replaced. Three raids against Tirpitz were cancelled after launch due to unfavourable weather during April and May 1944. The first of these attacks, Operation Planet, began when the Home Fleet sailed from its base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands on 21 April. This operation involved the same aircraft carriers as had taken part in Operation Tungsten, aside from the substitution of the escort carrier HMS Fencer with her sister ship Striker. The fleet reached the position where its aircraft were to be flown off three days later, but the raid was cancelled when Allied agents near Kaafjord reported bad weather over the target area. The fleet then sailed south, and attacked a German convoy near Bodø, sinking three merchant ships for the loss of six aircraft. The Home Fleet put to sea to attack Tirpitz again in mid-May in what was designated Operation Brawn. A strike force of 27 Barracudas escorted by Vought F4U Corsair and Supermarine Seafire fighters took off from the carriers HMS Furious and Victorious on the afternoon of 15 May, but encountered heavy cloud over Kaafjord and returned without attacking. The next raid, Operation Tiger Claw, was launched in late May. The planned attack on Kaafjord—which would have also involved aircraft flying from Furious and Victorious—had to be cancelled due to bad weather on 28 May. Instead, the carriers sailed south in search of German convoys. In a raid conducted on 1 June, the carriers' aircraft sank four merchant vessels near Ålesund. No further attacks were attempted during June as the ships of the Home Fleet were needed to support the Normandy landings that month. ## Preparations Despite the lack of success, the Admiralty and Admiral Sir Henry Moore, who had assumed command of the Home Fleet on 14 June 1944, remained committed to attempting further carrier raids against Tirpitz. During June, the Admiralty received a series of intelligence reports indicating that repairs to Tirpitz were generally progressing well and the battleship would soon be ready to put to sea. Late that month Allied spies spotted Tirpitz conducting steaming trials in Kaafjord, and reported that she was capable of sailing at up to 20 knots (37 km/h) and could rotate her main gun turrets. As a result, in late June the Admiralty directed that another aircraft carrier raid be conducted against Kaafjord during mid-July. It was intended that this attack would take place before the resumption of the Arctic convoys, which had been suspended since April 1944 to free up ships for the invasion of France. As detected by the British, repairs to Tirpitz following Operation Tungsten progressed quickly. Work on repairing the battleship began in late April, and 157 shipyard workers and special equipment were transported from Kiel in Germany to Kaafjord to accelerate the project. Assisted by the long hours of daylight at Kaafjord's latitude during summer, three shifts of personnel worked on Tirpitz each day. The battleship was capable of moving under her own power by 2 June, and ready to begin gunnery exercises at the end of that month. The repair works concluded in mid-July, though the battleship's starboard propeller shaft could only be used to drive her forwards. Captain Wolf Junge assumed command of the battleship in May 1944, replacing Captain Hans Meyer who had been wounded during Operation Tungsten. ## Opposing forces As Victorious had been redeployed to the Indian Ocean in June, the carriers selected for Operation Mascot were the recently commissioned HMS Indefatigable as well as the veterans Formidable and Furious. The carriers were escorted by the battleship HMS Duke of York, four cruisers and twelve destroyers. Admiral Moore commanded the force from Duke of York, and the carrier group was led by Rear Admiral Rhoderick McGrigor on board Indefatigable. The composition of the striking force was broadly similar to that used in the earlier operations targeting Tirpitz. Formidable embarked No. 8 Torpedo Bomber Reconnaissance Wing, whose 827 and 830 Naval Air Squadrons each operated 12 Barracudas, as well as 1841 Naval Air Squadron, which was equipped with 18 Corsairs. Indefatigable carried No. 9 Torpedo Bomber Reconnaissance Wing, which was also equipped with 24 Barracudas split between 820 and 826 Naval Air Squadrons, as well as the Seafire-equipped 894 Naval Air Squadron and 1770 Naval Air Squadron's 12 Fairey Firefly fighters. In a change from her role in the previous attacks, Furious did not embark any Barracudas during Operation Mascot, and instead operated 20 Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters from 1840 Naval Air Squadron, three Seafires assigned to 880 Naval Air Squadron and three 842 Flight Fairey Swordfish anti-submarine aircraft. The defences of Kaafjord were improved following Operation Tungsten. Prior to this raid they had comprised eleven batteries of anti-aircraft guns, several anti-aircraft warships and a system of smoke generators capable of hiding Tirpitz from aircraft. After the attack, additional radar stations and observation posts were established and the number of smoke generators located around the battleship was increased. The improved defences in place by the time of Operation Mascot included a cliff-top observation post near Kaafjord, which was capable of directing the battleship's anti-aircraft guns if necessary. Tirpitz's air defences were also strengthened during the period she was under repair by fitting additional 20-millimetre (0.79 in) cannons, modifying the 150 mm guns so they could be used to attack aircraft, and supplying anti-aircraft shells for her 380-millimetre (15 in) main guns. As well as the German forces located near Kaafjord, a patrol line of twelve submarines designated Group Trutz was also established around the island of Jan Mayen and assigned the task of intercepting any British carrier forces that ventured into the Norwegian Sea. The submarines assigned to this force at the time of Operation Mascot were , , , , , , , , , , , and . The German Luftwaffe (air force) had few fighters stationed at bases near Kaafjord, and their operations were constrained by a lack of fuel. ## Attack Rear Admiral McGrigor issued an operational memo to the air units selected for Operation Mascot on 4 July, outlining how the attack would be conducted and providing further orders for the raid eight days later. In accordance with these instructions, the flying squadrons assigned to the three carriers undertook training exercises from their ships and shore bases from 4 July onwards. Intelligence gained from decrypting German radio messages during early July, and photos taken by a RAF aircraft on 12 July, provided further evidence that the battleship was once again fully operational and possibly preparing to put to sea. The airmen were informed on 13 July that they would attack Kaafjord in four days time. The British fleet left Scapa Flow as a single group on 14 July. During the voyage north, the airmen received detailed briefings on the attack plans and terrain around Kaafjord and were also issued with escape kits to use if they were shot down over Norway. Maintenance personnel also worked to ensure that as many aircraft as possible would be ready. The twelve German submarines in the Norwegian Sea did not make contact with the British force as it sailed north. The weather for much of the voyage was foggy, but the skies were clear when the fleet reached its flying off position to the north of Kaafjord in the evening of 16 July. The carriers began launching their aircraft shortly after midnight on 17 July. The main striking force comprised 44 Barracudas, with the plan for the raid specifying that No. 8 Torpedo Bomber Reconnaissance Wing's aircraft would attack before those of No. 9 Torpedo Bomber Reconnaissance Wing. All but two of the dive bombers were armed with powerful 1,600-pound (730 kg) armour-piercing bombs; the other aircraft each carried three 500-pound (230 kg) bombs. 1841 Naval Air Squadron's 18 Corsairs were assigned to provide protection against German fighters, and the 20 Hellcats and 12 Fireflies operated by 1840 and 1770 Naval Air Squadrons respectively were given the task of suppressing anti-aircraft guns. After forming up, the bombers and fighters began their flight to Kaafjord at 01:35. The aircraft flew 50 feet (15 m) above the sea to evade German radar until they reached a point ten minutes flying time from the Norwegian coast, at which time the Barracudas climbed to 9,000 feet (2,700 m) and the fighters to higher altitudes. The weather was fine throughout the flight, but clouds were sighted as the aircraft neared the target area. The British strike force was detected by German radar stations when it reached a point 43 miles (69 km) from Kaafjord at 02:00. It took four minutes to pass a warning to Tirpitz; her protective smoke generators were in action by 02:13 and quickly covered the vessel in an artificial cloud. The battleship and anti-aircraft batteries located on the shore began firing a barrage towards the British aircraft at 02:19. German forces also began jamming the British aircraft's radios once they came within 10 miles (16 km) of the Norwegian coastline. The smokescreen frustrated the British attack, as the crews of only two of the Barracudas and a pair of fighters managed to spot Tirpitz during the raid. The Hellcats and Fireflies were first to attack, and strafed anti-aircraft positions as well as the destroyer Z33 and small patrol craft Vp 6307. The patrol craft was forced aground and later declared a total loss. Due to the thick smoke, the fighter pilots were only able to locate targets by aiming at the sources of tracer gunfire. The Barracudas were targeted by heavy, but inaccurate, anti-aircraft gunfire as they arrived over Kaafjord. Aside from the two aircraft whose pilots sighted Tirpitz, the 35 other dive bombers attempting to attack the ship were forced to aim at her gun flashes. These bombing attacks took 25 minutes to complete; seven near misses were achieved but no damage was inflicted on Tirpitz. One of the other Barracudas attacked an anti-aircraft battery, another attempted to bomb a destroyer and a third scored a near miss on the tanker Nordmark. Three of the remaining four Barracudas did not find any targets and jettisoned their bombs into the sea; the fourth was unable to drop its bombs due to a faulty release mechanism. Although German gunners fired a heavy anti-aircraft barrage throughout the attack, they achieved little success. Only one British aircraft, a Corsair, was shot down near Kaafjord; its pilot survived and was taken prisoner. A damaged Barracuda was also forced to ditch near Indefatigable and its crew were rescued by the destroyer HMS Verulam. Several other Barracudas and five Hellcats were damaged during the raid and returned to their carriers. One of the damaged Hellcats was later written off after being judged beyond repair. A second British raid, which had been scheduled to take off from 08:00 on 17 July, was cancelled two minutes before the aircraft were to begin launching when fog began to build up near the carriers, and the British fleet turned south to return to Scapa Flow. Swordfish and Seafire aircraft flew protective patrols over the Home Fleet throughout the morning's operations. ## Submarine actions While Kaafjord was under attack, the commander of the German submarines in the Norwegian sea ordered Group Trutz to take up new positions to the south-east of Jan Mayen and intercept the British ships as they returned to Scapa Flow. The Admiralty had anticipated this redeployment, and maritime patrol aircraft from No. 18 Group RAF were directed to sweep the Home Fleet's route back to its base. The British patrol aircraft prevented Group Trutz from attacking the Home Fleet. At 21:48 on 17 July, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator assigned to No. 86 Squadron detected and sank U-361; none of the submarine's crew were rescued. Eight minutes later a Consolidated Catalina flying boat of No. 210 Squadron piloted by Flying Officer John Cruickshank spotted U-347 on the surface. The submarine's anti-aircraft guns damaged the Catalina, killing the navigator and wounding Cruickshank as well as three other crewmen, but the pilot continued his attack and sank U-347 with depth charges. The Catalina managed to return to base, and Cruickshank was awarded the Victoria Cross for this action. That night the Home Fleet sailed through the gap in the German patrol line that had been opened by the sinking of the two submarines. Attacks on the German submarines continued for the next six days. On the morning of 18 July a German reconnaissance aircraft spotted the Home Fleet, but German Naval Command Norway assessed that it was heading north-east to launch another attack. Accordingly, Group Trutz was ordered to sail north, and four more submarines sortied from Narvik to guard the approaches to Alten and Vest fjords. In the evening , one of the four boats that had sailed from Narvik, was attacked twice by Liberators; she shot down the first attacker but was damaged by the second and had to return to port. U-716 also suffered severe damage from a Liberator attack at 19:15 on 18 July but managed to return to Hammerfest. At about 23:00 that day U-716 was seriously damaged by a Short Sunderland but also survived. Three other submarines were attacked on 20 July but only one suffered any damage. Following these actions the commander of submarines in the Norway area decided to dissolve Group Trutz as it was too vulnerable to air attack; all but four of the surviving submarines returned to port and the remaining boats were ordered to sail north so that they were out of range of the British aircraft. The final attack on the submarines of the former Group Trutz was made on 23 July when a No. 330 Squadron Sunderland damaged U-992 near Vestfjord. ## Aftermath Following the attack on 17 July, the British learned from intercepted German radio transmissions and reports provided by Secret Intelligence Service agents that Tirpitz had not suffered any significant damage. Admiral Moore blamed the failure of Operation Mascot on the inexperience of the aircrew involved in the attack, and criticised the strike leader for not selecting alternative targets after it became clear that Tirpitz could not be accurately bombed. Moore also judged that further attacks on Kaafjord using Barracudas would be futile, as the dive bombers' slow speed gave the Germans enough time to cover Tirpitz with smoke between the time raids were detected and their arrival over the target area. The Admiralty was hopeful that a strategy of repeatedly striking Kaafjord over a 48-hour period would wear down the defences, and Moore agreed to attempt another attack. Consideration was also given to flying fast and long-ranged de Havilland Mosquito bombers off the carriers in an attempt to achieve surprise, but none of these land-based aircraft could be spared from supporting the Allied bombing of Germany. The next attack on Kaafjord took place in late August. During Operation Goodwood, aircraft flying from three fleet carriers and two escort carriers conducted four raids between 22 and 29 August. The attackers found Tirpitz covered in smoke on each occasion, and only managed to inflict light damage on the battleship. These unsuccessful attacks cost the British 17 aircraft and 40 airmen killed. The frigate HMS Bickerton was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine during the operation; the same submarine also inflicted heavy damage on the escort carrier Nabob before being destroyed by a British aircraft. The Admiralty accepted that Barracudas were too slow to be effective against the Kaafjord area following the failure of Operation Goodwood. As a result, the task of attacking the battleship was transferred to RAF Bomber Command. The first heavy bomber raid against Kaafjord (Operation Paravane) was conducted on 15 September 1944, with the bombers flying from staging bases in northern Russia. This attack inflicted irreparable damage on Tirpitz, and she was transferred south to the Tromsø area to be used as an immobile coastal defence battery. The battleship was sunk there with heavy loss of life by another Bomber Command raid on 12 November.
500,085	U.S. Route 491	1,162,674,804	U.S. Highway in New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah in the United States	[ "Gallup, New Mexico", "Transportation in Dolores County, Colorado", "Transportation in McKinley County, New Mexico", "Transportation in Montezuma County, Colorado", "Transportation in San Juan County, New Mexico", "Transportation in San Juan County, Utah", "U.S. Highways in Colorado", "U.S. Highways in New Mexico", "U.S. Highways in Utah", "U.S. Route 91", "United States Numbered Highway System" ]	U.S. Route 491 (US 491) is a north–south U.S. Highway serving the Four Corners region of the United States. It was created in 2003 as a renumbering of U.S. Route 666 (US 666). With the US 666 designation, the road was nicknamed the "Devil's Highway" because of the significance of the number 666 to many Christian denominations as the Number of the Beast. This Satanic connotation, combined with a high fatality rate along the New Mexico portion, convinced some people the highway was cursed. The problem was compounded by persistent sign theft. These factors led to two efforts to renumber the highway, first by officials in Arizona, then by those in New Mexico. There have been safety improvement projects in recent years, and fatality rates have subsequently decreased. The highway, now a spur route of US 91 via its connection to US 191, runs through New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, as well as the tribal nations of the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. The highway passes by two mountains considered sacred by Native Americans: Ute Mountain and an extinct volcanic core named Shiprock. Other features along the route include Mesa Verde National Park and Dove Creek, Colorado, the self-proclaimed pinto-bean capital of the world. ## Route description US 491 serves the states of New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. Before 1992, US 666 also served Arizona. The Arizona portion was renumbered separately and is now part of US 191. The former US 666 was the only highway to have passed through each of the Four Corners states, even though it never came near the Four Corners Monument, which is accessed via US 160. At several points along US 491, mountain ranges in all of the Four Corners states are visible from a single location. The alignment of the highway is mostly north–south, however the Utah portion was signed east–west. ### New Mexico US 491 begins at Gallup, at a junction with Interstate 40 (I-40), and currently runs north along Muñoz Drive. The routing has changed to bypass the downtown area. The original route used 9th Street, starting at US 66. US 491 leaves Gallup and passes north through the eastern half of the Navajo Nation. Along the way, the road passes through the small tribal communities and trading posts of Tohatchi, Buffalo Springs, Naschitti, Sheep Springs and Newcomb. The Navajo tribal capital at Window Rock, Arizona, is just west of the highway corridor, accessed by State Road 264 (NM 264). The largest city served by US 491 is Shiprock, which takes its name from one of several extinct volcano cores in the area. Shiprock is known as "the winged rock" in the Navajo language, and the mountain is considered sacred by the Navajo people. Shiprock is where the US 491 crosses the San Juan River and is briefly concurrent with US 64. After passing Shiprock, the route continues north to the Colorado state line. The New Mexico portion has been designated the "John Pinto Highway" by the New Mexico state legislature. It is on the Trails of the Ancients Byway, one of the designated New Mexico Scenic Byways. ### Colorado The New Mexico-Colorado state line is where the highway passes from the Navajo Nation to Ute Mountain Ute tribal lands. The highway passes to the east of the tribe's namesake, Ute Mountain, believed to belong to a great warrior god of the Ute People. US 491 proceeds diagonally to the northwest in the extreme southwestern corner of the state. The highway exits tribal lands near Cortez and Mesa Verde National Park. After leaving Cortez, the road gradually rises in elevation while proceeding towards Utah. Here, the route features large pinto bean farming regions including Dove Creek, which bills itself as the "pinto bean capital of the world". Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is located along the ascent, just west of the highway. Along this ascent is an access road for Hovenweep National Monument at the state line. A portion of the road in Colorado has been designated the Trail of the Ancients, a National Scenic Byway, which uses US 491 as an access for these parks and monuments in southwest Colorado. ### Utah Once in Utah, US 491 gradually ascends to the Abajo Mountains. Still visible are large farming regions. Upon reaching an elevation of 7,000 feet (2,100 m), the highway arrives at a weigh station and reaches the town of Monticello. US 491 enters the town on Central Street and terminates near the city park at an intersection with US 191, which runs along Main Street. All highways in Utah are codified into law; US 491 is defined at Utah Code Annotated §72-4-137(11). ## History ### Pre-1926 Before the Mexican–American War, when this area was ceded to the United States, the main trade route through this part of Mexico was the Old Spanish Trail. This trail extended from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Los Angeles. The trail had multiple routes; however, the main route proceeded north towards Moab, Utah, one of the few places where the Colorado River can be crossed without having to traverse steep cliffs. The modern US 491 roughly correlates with the main route of the Old Spanish Trail between Cortez, Colorado and its northern terminus. Before 1926, all of modern US 491 existed as state routes. In New Mexico, US 666 absorbed a portion of State Road 32 (NM 32) from Gallup to Shiprock, and completely replaced NM 121 from Shiprock to the Colorado state line. The portion in Colorado was numbered State Highway 106 (SH 106) from the New Mexico state line to Cortez, and SH 10 from Cortez to Utah. At the time, SH 10 traversed the southern portion of Colorado. While most of this corridor today has as a U.S. Highway designation, a portion of SH 10 still exists. In Utah, the route was originally numbered State Route 9 (SR 9), which also included what is now US 191 from Monticello to Crescent Junction. Utah has since re-used the SR 9 designation for a different road. ### U.S. Route 666 The route was upgraded to a U.S. Highway in 1926, as U.S. Route 666. This number was appropriate and in accordance with the road numbering guidelines for U.S. Highways, being the sixth spur along the highway's parent highway, the famed cross-continental highway U.S. Route 66, from which US 491 breaks around Gallup, New Mexico. This number was assigned by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), a coordinating body that created the U.S. Highway System. At that time, the northern terminus of the route was in Cortez, at an intersection with then US 450 (modern US 160). Over time the route became known as the "Devil's Highway", a reference to the Number of the Beast. This nickname and association made some visitors uncomfortable, as well as making the signs targets for theft. Because of the highway's number, accidents and other phenomena, this became repeated as legend. These legends convinced some people the highway was cursed. One unnamed highway patrol officer was quoted in USA Today as stating a drunk-driving suspect told him, "Triple 6 is evil. Everyone dies on that highway." Skeptics point out that the highway has a lower than average fatality rate in Utah and Colorado; only the New Mexico portion is statistically a dangerous highway. Skeptics further state the high fatality rate in New Mexico can be explained by an inadequate design for the traffic loads at the time. During the renumbering debate, the Albuquerque Journal opined that the planned highway improvements would do more to reduce fatalities than the renumbering itself. The curse of US 666 is briefly discussed in Jonathan D. Rosenblum's book, Copper Crucible, which investigates the Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983. This strike occurred along the highway near Morenci, Arizona. The highway was used as a plot element in films and television, including Route 666, Natural Born Killers, and Repo Man, as well as a two-part episode of the series Married... with Children, titled "Route 666". These pieces are not accurate in portraying the route; for example, one depicts the route in Nevada. ### Extensions into Arizona and Utah On December 4, 1938, the southern terminus of the route was extended from Gallup across the Arizona state line to US 80 in Douglas, near the Mexican border. It ran concurrent with US 66 for 30 miles (48.3 km) before the turn south. Prior to the extension, the route between Douglas and Sanders was designated as SR 81. The Arizona portion of the highway is known as the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway, as it approximated the path of the Spanish explorer, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. This portion is noted for mountainous terrain, with hairpin turns and steep grades, that reaches an altitude of over 9,000 feet (2,700 m). The curves force a speed limit of 10 miles per hour (16 km/h) in spots. In 1970, several U.S. Highways in the Four Corners region were re-aligned. As part of this change, US 160 was rerouted west of Cortez to serve the Four Corners Monument and enter Arizona instead of Utah. US 666 was extended up part of the old route of US 160 to Monticello, Utah, at an intersection with then US 163 (now US 191). In 1985, the Utah Department of Transportation petitioned to extend US 666 northwest to Richfield, but the proposal was rejected. The proposed extension followed SR 95, SR 24, and SR 119. A concurrency with US 191 would have been routed through Blanding and Monticello to connect to the rest of the route. One of the reasons cited for rejecting the proposal was that portions of SR 24 were not built to standards desired for additions to the U.S. Highway System. ### Elimination and renumbering of US 666 In 1985, the US 66 designation was eliminated, leaving US 666 (and other routes) as "orphans". This fact would be used as a supporting factor in later petitions to renumber the highway. In 1992, the part in Arizona was renumbered as an extension of US 191. This truncated US 666 again at Gallup, New Mexico, now at I-40. The route in the other three states became U.S. Route 491 in 2003, mainly through efforts of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. He requested the change due to the "infamy brought by the inopportune naming of the road". While campaigning for governor, Richardson promised to renumber the highway as part of a larger plan to improve the highway and build relations between New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. Although traditional Navajo culture does not share the belief of 666 being an evil number, some Navajos had attempted for years to change the number as a way to raise awareness about the dangerous highway. The highway had largely been ignored, with few improvements made since it was first paved. By 1997, US 666 was named one of the 20 most dangerous highways in the United States. Some Navajo leaders were concerned that efforts to reduce poverty on Navajo lands, via promoting tourism and outside investment, were being hampered by the Christian aversion to the number. In New Mexico's motion to renumber the highway, they selected U.S. Route 393. Since the route came nowhere near US 93, AASHTO instead suggested US 491, noting it as a branch of US 191 at Monticello, Utah. Although the next three-digit child of US 91 would have been U.S. Route 291, both the 291 and 391 designations were already in use as state route numbers in at least one of the affected states. At the news that the motion had passed, a New Mexico spokesperson stated, "The devil's out of here, and we say goodbye and good riddance." Referring to the motion passing with a different number from what New Mexico requested, another spokesperson responded, "As long as it's not 666 and it's nothing satanic, that's OK." US 666 officially ceased to exist on May 31, 2003, although temporary "New 491 – Old 666" signs were posted after the change to aid travelers using old maps. Although sign theft had always been a problem along this highway, thefts reached epidemic proportions when the pending number change was announced. Within days of the announcement, virtually every US 666 sign had been stolen, some for sale on eBay. Officials in Utah reported that five entire sign assemblies had been cut down with a chainsaw and stolen, while New Mexico officials reported that even signs welded to metal posts, as a theft deterrent, had been stolen. Officials speculated from one scene that someone had intentionally crashed a car into the sign post to break the welds. The dedication of the "new" highway was postponed until July 30, 2003, to coincide with the start of construction projects to improve safety on the highway. At the dedication George Blue Horse, a Navajo medicine man, performed a ceremony to remove the curse from the highway. In the Navajo language he stated, "The road itself never ends. It goes on generation to generation. The new number is a good one. The new road will be a medicine." Newspapers and television stations interviewed people along the route about their opinions on the changing of the highway's number. Even some people who believed in the 666 curse disagreed with the change. One went on record as stating highway officials, "are messing with the wrong guy. They're making the devil mad. They should have left the 666 alone." Others were more sarcastic. One Monticello resident stated, "We'll really miss all the potheads stopping and taking pictures of the Route 666 sign." Most residents took pride in living along the Devil's Highway and opposed the change. Some commented that no matter the number they would still call the road the Devil's Highway. ### Post-renumbering Since the renumbering in 2003, portions of US 491 in New Mexico have been upgraded to a four-lane divided highway, with grade separations at the busiest interchanges. The New Mexico Department of Transportation has noted that, as sections are upgraded, fatality rates improve on the four-lane portions, but remain high on the two-lane portions. As construction has proceeded, the most dangerous portions of the highway have moved to points where the four-lane portion ends, and traffic merges to two lanes. This has caused the department to coordinate the phases of the upgrades to minimize the number of two-lane/four-lane transitions. Construction on the final phase was originally scheduled to begin January 2008, however the state applied for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to finish the project and completion was delayed until 2012. ## Major intersections Note: The Utah mileposts are posted in a west-to-east direction, while Colorado's and New Mexico's mileposts are posted in a south-to-north direction. ## See also - Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, fear of the number 666 - List of highways numbered 666 - List of highways numbered 491
214,799	God Hates Us All	1,173,714,526	null	[ "2001 albums", "Albums produced by Matt Hyde", "Albums produced by Rick Rubin", "Albums recorded at The Warehouse Studio", "American Recordings (record label) albums", "Groove metal albums", "Nu metal albums by American artists", "Obscenity controversies in music", "Slayer albums" ]	God Hates Us All is the ninth studio album by American thrash metal band Slayer, released on September 11, 2001 by American Recordings. It was recorded over three months at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, and includes the Grammy Award-nominated song "Disciple". Guitarist Kerry King wrote the majority of its lyrics, taking a different approach from earlier recordings by exploring topics such as religion, murder, revenge, and self-control. Stylistically, the album shows a return to Slayer's classic thrash metal sound, without totally abandoning the experimentation with nu metal that started on Diabolus in Musica. It was the Slayer's last album to feature drummer Paul Bostaph until his return on their 2015 album Repentless. The album's release was delayed due to its explicit cover artwork, which led to alternative slip covers in some retail outlets, difficulties during mixing, and a change of distributor for the band's label. Despite this, God Hates Us All received positive reviews from critics and peaked at number 28 on the Billboard 200. By 2009, it had sold over 319,000 copies in the United States. ## Recording Slayer began writing lyrics for a new album prior to their appearance at the 1999 Ozzfest. However, every three to four months the band was distracted by commitments to Ozzfest, and worldwide "Tattoo the Earth" tour with Slipknot. Guitarist Jeff Hanneman later admitted "that was the last break. Then we got our shit together." The band's longtime producer, Rick Rubin, was too busy to work with Slayer, and felt "burned out"—unable to create intense music. Araya and King had similar feelings about Rubin, and King remarked he "wanted to work with someone into the heavy-music scene, and Rubin's not anymore. I wanted somebody who knows what's hot, knows what's selling, knows the new techniques, and will keep me on my toes." Rubin recommended two producers although the first producer was not going to work out personality-wise with Hanneman. The band was pleased with producer candidate Matt Hyde's work on "Bloodline" and hired him to produce the entire album. God Hates Us All was to be recorded in a Hollywood studio; however, the band relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia due to the availability of cheaper studio time. Hyde recommended a studio to the band—The Warehouse Studio (owned by Bryan Adams) as he had previously worked there. The studio was altered to make it "feel like home" for Slayer. This consisted of adding incense burners, candles, dimmed lights and pornography on the walls. Two banner flags of two middle fingers were also hung up. Vocalist Tom Araya says: "that was basically the attitude of Slayer in the studio. We had a red devil head on one of the speakers. We had a skull on another. That's the kind of shit we put up--spooky stuff that makes you feel at home." Hyde used the digital audio workstation Pro Tools during the engineering, production, and audio mixing stages of the album. Slayer wanted to keep the use of computer effects to a minimum—only to include a small amount of delay and distortion. As with previous recordings, the drum tracks were recorded first. Drummer Paul Bostaph follows a simple rule suggested by Rubin when in the studio: "The perfect take is the one that felt like it was going to fall apart but never did." Seven-string guitars were used on the tracks "Scarstruck" and "Here Comes the Pain," the first time Slayer had done so. Guitarist King decided to borrow a seven string guitar from the B.C. Rich guitar company (manufacturer of his signature model, the KKV.) After writing one song King ordered a seven string with the thought that: "there's no point having one tuning for just one song." So he wrote another, going on to comment: "you don't have to be good to make up a seven-string riff." The album features two songs on seven string guitars, four songs with guitars tuned to Drop-B and all other songs in C# Standard. ## Lyrical themes God Hates Us All explores themes such as religion, murder, revenge, and self-control. King wrote a majority of the lyrics, which he based on "street" subjects which everyone could relate to, rather than "Satan this," "Satan that," and "the usual Dungeons & Dragons shit" from the band's previous records. King told Guitar World: > I definitely wanted to put more realism in it, more depth. God Hates Us All isn't an anti-Christian line as much as it's an idea I think a lot of people can relate to on a daily basis. One day you're living your life, and then you're hit by a car or your dog dies, so you feel like, "God really hates me today." The song "Threshold" is about reaching one's limit with a person in a situation where one is about to break—and are about to blow up as they get "under your skin", while "Cast Down" features a fallen angel who falls into drugs. "God Send Death" and "Deviance" take up the idea of killing people for pleasure. Both songs were written by Hanneman. Having read several books on serial killers, Hanneman came to the conclusion he could only kill someone if they really "pissed him off", and decided he was unable to kill someone he did not know just for power. He later admitted he was trying to get into that person's mind; "why do they get off on it? Without being angry, just killing for the sake of killing and getting off on it. I just wanted to get into that mindset." While other members went to local pubs, Araya spent his free hours reading books about serial killers such Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West. Araya was seeking inspiration and aimed at sounding convincing while singing the lyrics and avoiding sounding gimmicky. Araya sang the lyrics more "over-the-top" than done on previous albums, as King's writing style is more "aggro." This resulted in Kerrang! reviewer Jason Arnopp describing the album's lyrics as "so packed with foul and abusive language that it sounds as if D-12 and the Sopranos family were going head-to-head in a Celebrity Swearathon." ## Cover art and album title God Hates Us All was originally intended to be named Soundtrack to the Apocalypse. However, Araya suggested that the title would be better used for a box set, which the band released in 2003. The phrase God Hates Us All originates from the song "Disciple", during which the line is repeated over the chorus. The lyrics are in reference to God's allowance of acts such as suicide and terrorism while seemingly doing nothing to prevent them. A member of the heavy metal band Pantera suggested using "God Hates Us All" for a shirt design after King played the song for the band. King agreed although he thought the phrase would have more impact as the album title. The original album cover depicts a Bible spiked with nails placed in a pentagram star shape covered in blood with the word "Slayer" burnt across it. The liner notes intersperse the lyrics between passages from the biblical Book of Job, partly crossed out with a black marker. The idea was suggested by the band's record company, although King wanted more time to develop a better cover. King's concept for the cover was to show nails in the shape of a pentagram, and have them miss keywords in Bible verses so it appeared as if it had been created by a sociopath. He later complained that the outcome was: "typical of a record company with absolutely no idea what the fuck they were going to do", and said that the cover "looked like a seventh grader defaced the Bible." A slip insert was placed in front of the covers in major retail outlets. ## Reception God Hates Us All was set for release on July 10. However, concerns regarding audio mixing, the album cover, and the band's label (American Recordings) changing distributor, caused the release date to be delayed until September 11, 2001. The release drew a connection to the September 11 attacks, which was the second time Slayer inadvertently caused controversy towards one of their release. The music video for "Seasons in the Abyss" was filmed in Egypt and released prior to the Gulf War. In its week of release, God Hates Us All debuted at number 28 on the Billboard 200, and sold 51,000 copies. It entered the Canadian Albums Chart at number 9, and debuted at number 18 on the top Internet album chart. As of November 11, 2009, the album has sold 319,000 copies in the United States. God Hates us All received generally positive reviews from music critics. On Metacritic, the album has a score of 80 out of 100 based on 12 reviews. Kerrang!'s Jason Arnopp described the album as: "easily Slayer's most convincing collection since Seasons in the Abyss," awarding the album five out of five. Rolling Stone's Rob Kemp wrote the record was "Slayer's most brutal record since 1986's immortal (or undead) Reign in Blood," describing the music as "galloping double bass-drum salvos which switch on a dime to furious double-time pummeling as ominous power chords and jagged shred solos slice and dice with Formula One precision." Kemp awarded the album three and a half out of five. AllMusic reviewer Jason Birchmeier commented: "nearly 20 years into their evolution, Slayer have abandoned the extravagancies and accessibility of their late-'80s/early-'90s work and returned to perfect the raw approach of their early years. A near flawless album," and that Araya's performance possibly makes "the most exhausting Slayer album yet." Not all critics were impressed with the album. Blabbermouth.net reviewer Borivoj Krgin dismissively labeled the album as "another failure on the band's part to take the initiative and reinvent themselves." Krgin described King as "the weaker and less inventive of the two main songwriters" feeling the album "follows a familiar direction that almost always sounds tired and forced." Krgin also singled out Araya for criticism and called the vocalist: "a hollow shell of his former self, boasting a singing style that is monotonous, devoid of creativity and at times virtually unlistenable." Krgin awarded the record 6 out of 10, and ended the review by observing that: "Slayer's rapidly diminishing record sales is a sign that the band is in dire need of a new lease on life." The Washington Post gave it a mixed review, stating: "Of course, what Slayer says isn't supposed to be nearly as important as how it says it. The riffs are all overdriven and suffocating and that's a conscious decision. In its simplest form, a song like "Exile" could pass for Motorhead pushed through the blades of a lawn mower but that's selling Slayer short. Guitarist Kerry King actively fights the groove that naturally comes from playing heavy rock-and-roll." The song "Disciple" received a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Metal Performance" at the 44th Grammy Awards. This was the band's first nomination. Although they did not expect to win they thought it was "cool" to be nominated. The ceremony took place on February 27, 2002 with Tool winning the award for their song "Schism". ## Bostaph's departure Paul Bostaph sustained a chronic elbow injury that hindered his ability to drum and resulted in his decision to leave the band. His third-to-last performance with Slayer was recorded on War at the Warfield which Bostaph has not viewed the footage of, likening the experience to: "breaking up with a girlfriend," and saying he wants to move on with his life. Having no regrets from his time spent with the band Bostaph described the period as a high point in his career. He eventually rejoined Slayer in 2013 once again replacing Dave Lombardo. Without a drummer and unable to finish their God Hates Us All tour Hanneman contacted original drummer Dave Lombardo and asked him if he would be willing to play for the remainder of the tour. Lombardo accepted the offer and played for the remaining 21 shows. However, he did not take on a permanent position with the band. Following the tour, the band continued their search for a permanent drummer, and sought solicitation via demo tape and snail mail. Interested fans sent video recordings of renditions of the songs "Disciple," "God Send Death," "Stain of Mind," "Angel of Death", "Postmortem/Raining Blood," "South of Heaven," "War Ensemble," and "Seasons in the Abyss"; complete with résumés. The band listened to hundreds of demo tapes and created a "good pile" and "ungood pile" though the "ungood pile" was much larger. Those whose performances the band were pleased with were offered an audition in Dallas, San Francisco or Peoria, Illinois. Many applicants, however, were unable to attend due to flight costs. The band auditioned roughly two to three drummers a day and their top choice was one of Lombardo's recommendations: drummer Kevin Talley. Slayer ultimately returned to Lombardo after deciding that they could not find a drummer who suited the job. He re-joined Slayer and attended music festivals worldwide to promote God Hates Us All and also recorded drums on the 2006 album Christ Illusion. ## Track listing Track listing: ### Bonus Enhanced CD materials - "Darkness of Christ" (DVD Intro video) - "Bloodline" (Video) - "Raining Blood/Hell Awaits" (Live Video) (San Francisco, CA - December 7, 2001) - "Interview/B-Roll Footage ## Personnel Slayer - Tom Araya – bass, vocals - Kerry King – guitars - Jeff Hanneman – guitars - Paul Bostaph – drums Production - Matt Hyde – production, recording engineering - Dean Maher – recording engineer - Sean Beavan – mixing - Paul Forgues – assistant engineer - Eddy Schreyer – mastering - Rick Rubin – executive producer - Louis Marino – photo illustrations, art direction, design - Rick Patrick – creative direction ## Charts
26,035,701	Ganoga Lake	1,149,507,672	Natural lake Pennsylvania	[ "Allegheny Plateau", "Bodies of water of Sullivan County, Pennsylvania", "Glacial lakes of the United States", "Lakes of Pennsylvania" ]	Ganoga Lake is a natural lake in Colley Township in southeastern Sullivan County in Pennsylvania, United States. Known as Robinson's Lake and Long Pond for most of the 19th century, the lake was purchased by the Ricketts family in the early 1850s and became part of R. Bruce Ricketts' extensive holdings in the area after the American Civil War. The lake is one of the highest in Pennsylvania, which led Ricketts to name it Highland Lake by 1874 and rename it Ganoga Lake in 1881; Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew suggested the name Ganoga from the Seneca language word for "water on the mountain". The Ricketts built a stone house on the lake shore by 1852 or 1855; this served as a hunting lodge and tavern. In 1873 a large wooden addition was built north of the stone house, which became a hotel known as the North Mountain House. The hotel had one of the first summer schools in the United States in 1876 and 1877. A branch railroad line to the lake served the hotel and also hauled ice cut from the lake for refrigeration. The hotel closed in 1903, though the house remained the Ricketts family summer home. After the death of R. Bruce Ricketts in 1918, his heirs sold much of his 80,000 acres (32,000 ha) to the state for Pennsylvania State Game Lands and Ricketts Glen State Park. The state tried to purchase the lake in 1957, but was outbid by a group of investors who turned the land around it into a private housing development; as such it is "off limits" to the public. Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau, just north of the Allegheny Front, in sedimentary rocks from the Pocono Formation. The Wisconsin Glaciation some 20,000 years ago changed the drainage patterns of the lake; this diverted its waters to Kitchen Creek and carved the 24 named waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park in the process. Ganoga Lake has a continental climate, with average monthly high temperatures ranging from 33 °F (1 °C) in January to 82 °F (28 °C) in July. Ganoga Lake's drainage basin is heavily forested and it is in an Important Bird Area. The lake and its surroundings have a variety of flora and fauna, although the ecosystem has been damaged by acid rain. ## Description Ganoga Lake is a natural spring-fed lake just west of Pennsylvania Route 487 in southern Colley Township in southeastern Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. It is near the meeting point of Sullivan, Columbia and Luzerne counties, and is less than 0.4 miles (0.6 km) northwest of Ricketts Glen State Park. Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau at an elevation of 2,260 feet (690 m). William Reynolds Ricketts, who owned the lake in the first half of the 20th century, claimed it was the highest lake in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; Petrillo repeats this in his history of the region, Ghost Towns of North Mountain. While the United States Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System identifies Ganoga Lake as the second highest in Pennsylvania (after Siebert Lake in Somerset County, at 2,287 feet (697 m)), the Pennsylvania Audubon Society says Ganoga Lake is "the highest elevation natural lake in Pennsylvania". Ganoga Lake has a long, narrow oval shape, oriented north-northwest to south-southeast. In 1936 William Reynolds Ricketts wrote that the lake has an average width of 700 to 800 feet (210 to 240 m) and is "about one mile long, lacking 600 to 700 ft." or about 0.88 miles (1.42 km) in length. However, according to a 1917 Pennsylvania Water Resources Inventory Report, in its largest dimensions it is 3,720 feet (1,130 m) long (0.705 miles or 1.135 kilometres) by 1,025 feet (312 m) wide. It has an average depth of 10 feet (3.0 m) and a maximum depth of 13 feet (4.0 m). The drainage basin for the lake is an area of 1.5 square miles (3.9 km<sup>2</sup>), and its capacity is 373 acre-feet (460,000 m<sup>3</sup>) (121,500,000 US gallons or 459,900,000 litres or 101,200,000 imperial gallons). A branch of Kitchen Creek flows from the southern end of the lake; 0.4 miles (0.64 km) downstream it enters Lake Jean in Ricketts Glen State Park. From there the water flows through Ganoga Glen and its 10 named waterfalls, then joins the main stem of the creek at Waters Meet; below this it flows over five more named waterfalls. Kitchen Creek is a tributary of Huntington Creek, which flows into Fishing Creek, which is a tributary of the Susquehanna River. ## History ### First inhabitants Ganoga Lake is in the Susquehanna River drainage basin, the earliest recorded inhabitants of which were the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks. Their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, and by 1675 they had died out, moved away, or been assimilated into other tribes. After this, the lands of the Susquehanna valley were under the nominal control of the Iroquois, who encouraged displaced tribes from the east to settle there, including the Shawnee and Lenape (or Delaware). On November 5, 1768, the British acquired land, known in Pennsylvania as the New Purchase, from the Iroquois in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix; this included what is now Ganoga Lake. After the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), Native Americans almost entirely left Pennsylvania. The lake was originally in Northumberland County, then became part of Lycoming County when it was formed in 1795. Sullivan County was formed from Lycoming County in 1847, and two years later Colley Township was formed from Cherry Township. The lake drains into Kitchen Creek, where a Native American pot, decorated in the style of "the peoples of the Susquehanna region", was found under a rock ledge around 1890. A hunter named Robinson, whose cabin was at the lake's northern end about 1800, was the first recorded inhabitant. He gave the lake its earliest known name: Robinson's Lake. However, for most of the 19th century the lake was known as Long Pond, because of its elongated shape. From 1822 to 1827 the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike, which followed the lake's western shore, was built between the Pennsylvania communities of Berwick in the south and Towanda in the north. Beginning in 1827 the northbound daily stagecoach left Berwick in the morning and stopped for lunch at the Long Pond Tavern on the lake about noon. The stage operated until 1851; the road was the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike until 1908, when the modern Pennsylvania Route 487 was built. Route 487 follows the course of the turnpike as it approaches the lake from the south, then passes to the east of the lake instead. While on a hunting trip north of the lake in 1850, brothers Elijah and Clemuel Ricketts were frustrated at having to spend the night on a hotel's parlor floor. In 1851 or 1853 they bought 5,000 acres (2,000 ha), including the lake, as their own hunting preserve, and built a stone house on the lake shore by 1852 or 1855. The stone house served as their lodge and as a tavern; it was known as "Ricketts Folly" for its isolated location in the wilderness. Clemuel died in 1858 and Elijah bought his share of the land and house. ### R. B. Ricketts Elijah's son Robert Bruce Ricketts, for whom Ricketts Glen State Park is named, joined the Union Army as a private at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and rose through the ranks to become a colonel. After the war, R. B. Ricketts returned to Pennsylvania and purchased the stone house, lake, and some of the land around it from his father on September 25, 1869 for \$3,969.81 (approximately \$ in 2023); eventually he controlled or owned more than 80,000 acres (32,000 hectares), including the lake and the park's glens and waterfalls. From 1872 to 1875 Ricketts and his partners operated a sawmill near the lake, 0.5 miles (0.8 km) southeast of his house. In 1872 Ricketts used lumber from the mill to build a three-story wooden addition next to the stone house; this opened as the North Mountain House hotel in 1873, and was run by Ricketts' brother Frank from then until 1898. The hotel hosted many of the Ricketts friends and relations as well as guests from Wilkes-Barre, Philadelphia, New York City, and other places. Many of the guests arrived after school let out in June and stayed all summer until school resumed in September. In 1876 and 1877, Ricketts ran the first summer school in the United States at his house and hotel; one of the teachers was Joseph Rothrock, later known as the "Father of Forestry" in Pennsylvania. Ricketts and the others living in the area were not aware of the waterfalls in what is now the state park until about 1865, when they were discovered by two of the Ricketts' guests who went fishing and wandered down Kitchen Creek. In 1879 Ricketts started the North Mountain Fishing Club, for anglers on the lake and creek. Guests of the hotel paid one dollar to fish as a club member. By 1874 Ricketts had renamed Long Pond as Highland Lake, and by 1875 had named the highest waterfall on Kitchen Creek as Ganoga Falls. In 1881, Ricketts renamed Highland Lake as Ganoga Lake. Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew suggested the name Ganoga, an Iroquoian word which he said meant "water on the mountain" in the Seneca language. Donehoo's A History of the Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania identifies it as a Cayuga language word meaning "place of floating oil" and the name of a Cayuga village in New York. Ganoga Lake is the source of the branch of Kitchen Creek that flows through Ganoga Glen, which has the tallest waterfall. Ricketts was a lumberman who made his fortune clearcutting nearly all his land, but no logging was allowed within 0.5-mile (0.8 km) of the lake, and the glens and their waterfalls in the state park were "saved from the lumberman's axe through the foresight of the Ricketts family". One hemlock tree cut near the lake to clear land for a building in 1893 was 6 feet (1.8 m) in diameter and 532 years old. Ricketts and his business partners built the lumber town of Ricketts about 4 miles (6 km) northeast of the lake starting in 1890; it had up to 800 inhabitants and several saw mills and operated until 1913, when the timber was exhausted. A 3.85-mile (6.20 km) branch line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran from Ricketts to the north end of the lake, opening in 1893. There was daily passenger service to Wilkes-Barre and Towanda on this line, which also served freight trains hauling ice from the lake for use in refrigeration from 1895 on. The ice cutting business on the lake employed 175 men, and had an 80-by-400-foot (24 by 122 m) ice house at the north end of the lake, near the small train station made of logs. The Ganoga Lake Ice Company was incorporated in 1897, and operated until about 1915. Ricketts' son William Reynolds Ricketts was one of five partners in the ice company. Ice skating was also a popular pastime on the lake. In 1913 the lake had a boathouse and was used by rowboats. The North Mountain House was threatened by a forest fire in 1900; the subsequent loss of much of the surrounding old-growth forest led to decreased numbers of hotel guests. In 1903 another large fire on North Mountain threatened the sawmill in the village of Ricketts. The wooden addition to the stone house was torn down in either 1897 or 1903, and the land became a garden. The hotel closed in November 1903, and the fishing club and passenger train service ended with the closure. The stone house remained the Ricketts family's summer home. After the hotel closed, several small cabins were built around the lake for rental to sportsmen. Ricketts proposed moving the highway from his front yard in 1904; the Pennsylvania General Assembly approved this in 1908, after he paid for the construction of the new highway. The house was renovated and added to in 1913, and Ricketts died there during the 1918 flu pandemic. His wife died shortly thereafter, and they are buried in the small Ricketts family cemetery near the north end of the lake. ### Modern era R. B. Ricketts and his wife had three children; their son William Reynolds Ricketts lived in the house after his parents' deaths. Between 1920 and 1924 the Pennsylvania Game Commission bought 48,000 acres (19,000 hectares) from the Ricketts heirs, via the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company. This became most of Pennsylvania State Game Lands Number 13, west of the lake in Sullivan County. These sales left the Ricketts heirs with over 12,000 acres (4,900 hectares) surrounding Ganoga Lake and the glens with their waterfalls. The stone house was listed on the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1936, which gave its name as "Ganoga". The area was approved as a national park site in the 1930s, and the National Park Service operated a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at "Ricketts Glynn" (sic). Budget problems and World War II brought an end to national plans for development. In 1942 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bought 1,261 acres (510 hectares), including the glens and their waterfalls, from the heirs for \$82,000. Ricketts Glen State Park opened in 1944. The state bought a total of 16,000 acres (6,500 hectares) more from the heirs in 1945 and 1950 for \$68,000; the park today has about 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) from the Ricketts family and about 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) acquired from others. After World War II, William Reynolds Ricketts also sold the old-growth timber around Ganoga Lake to help pay property taxes. William Reynolds Ricketts died in 1956 and the lake and surrounding land were sold in October 1957 for \$109,000. The Department of Forests and Waters (predecessor of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources) bid on the 3,140 acres (1,270 ha) including the lake, but were outbid by a group of private investors. They initially planned to sell up to 788 building lots around the lake, but when sales were slower than expected, they instead "formed the Lake Ganoga Association in September 1959 to regulate and preserve the recreation and residential facilities at Lake Ganoga". Thus, private development of houses on the lake only began in the 20th century. The association built 2.5 miles (4.0 km) of roads around the lake; the Air Force paved some of these to provide better access from the Benton Air Force Station in the park to a radio transmitter southwest of the lake. The Ganoga Lake Association also cleared some land at the lake's southern end, and its members built more than 50 houses on the lake shore. The stone house serves as the association's headquarters and clubhouse, and is used for association meetings, weddings, and picnics; in 1983 the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Clemuel Ricketts Mansion. Today the lake is used by kayakers and wind surfers. As a private development, "To all outsiders that have no property around the lake, the lake and grounds are off limits." ## Geology and climate The rocks underlying Ganoga Lake are from the Mississippian Pocono Formation, which is a "light-gray to buff or light-olive-gray, medium-grained, crossbedded sandstone", with some siltstone and conglomerates. The Pocono Formation formed more than 340 million years ago, when the land was part of the coastline of a shallow sea that covered a great portion of what is now North America. The high mountains to the east of the sea gradually eroded, causing a build-up of sediment made up primarily of clay, sand and gravel. Tremendous pressure on the sediment caused the formation of the rocks that are found at the lake and in the drainage basin for Kitchen Creek: sandstone, shale, siltstone, and conglomerates. In 1894 R. Bruce Ricketts planned to mine yellow ocher near the lake. Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau, just north of the Allegheny Front, which is the boundary between the dissected plateau to the north and the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians to the south. Kitchen Creek, which drains the lake, drops approximately 1,000 feet (300 m) in 2.25 miles (3.62 km) as it flows down the steep escarpment of the Allegheny Front. About 300 to 250 million years ago, the Allegheny Plateau, Allegheny Front, and Appalachian Mountains all formed in the Alleghenian orogeny. This happened long after the sedimentary rocks at the lake were deposited, when the part of Gondwana that became Africa collided with what became North America, forming Pangaea. In the years since, up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m) of rock has been eroded away by streams and weather. At least three major glaciations in the past million years have been the final factor in shaping the land around the lake today. Prior to the last ice age, Ganoga Lake drained into Big Run, a tributary of Fishing Creek. This changed when the glaciers retreated to the northeast about 20,000 years ago, and formed glacial lakes. The retreating glaciers also left deposits of debris 20 to 30 feet (6.1 to 9.1 m) thick, which formed a dam blocking water from draining into Big Run. Instead, water from Ganoga Lake and the area that later became Lake Jean was diverted into the Ganoga Glen branch of Kitchen Creek. These diversions added about 7 square miles (18 km<sup>2</sup>) to the Kitchen Creek drainage basin, increasing it by just over 50 percent to 20.1 square miles (52 km<sup>2</sup>). The result was increased water flow in Kitchen Creek, which has been cutting the falls in the glens since. Glacial striations are found on the eastern side of the lake. The lake is in a shallow valley, 13 feet (4.0 m) deep, which is impounded by glacial till up to 30 feet (9.1 m) thick at the southeast end, where Kitchen Creek exits. The Allegheny Plateau has a continental climate, with occasional severe low temperatures in winter and average daily temperature ranges (the difference between the daily high and low) of 20 °F (11 °C) in winter and 26 °F (14 °C) in summer. Ganoga Lake is part of the Huntington Creek watershed, where the mean annual precipitation is 40 to 48 inches (1,016 to 1,219 mm). Weather records are not available for Ganoga Lake, but they are known for the adjoining Ricketts Glen State Park. The highest recorded temperature at the park was 103 °F (39 °C) in 1988, and the record low was −17 °F (−27 °C) in 1984. On average, January is the coldest month, July is the hottest month, and June is the wettest month. ## Ecology Ganoga Lake is the largest tributary of Lake Jean, via a 0.4-mile (0.6 km) branch of Kitchen Creek. While Lake Jean lies entirely within Ricketts Glen State Park, much of its 1,998-acre (809 ha) drainage basin extends beyond the park, and Ganoga Lake's 960-acre (390 ha) watershed accounts for nearly half of the total area. Lake Jean covers 253 acres (102 ha); the remaining 1,745 acres (706 ha) of the Lake Jean watershed are 81.0% hardwood forest, 12.6% pastures, 4.7% other lakes (including Ganoga Lake's 78.8 acres (31.9 ha)), and 1.7% wetlands. The park has more than 80 species of vines, shrubs, and trees; black gum, black spruce, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, eastern larch, red maple, and yellow birch are found in area forests. In the 19th century Ganoga Lake was home to trout, bullhead catfish, pike, pickerel, and black bass. The lake had very few plants in it, but its shore was lined with mountain laurel and, in the east, mountain ash. After the Ganoga Lake Association's 1957 purchase, they drained the lake to kill its fish, then stocked it with "30,000 fingerling brook trout". In 2007 Lake Jean, which is connected to Lake Ganoga via Kitchen Creek, was still home to many of the fish found there in the 19th century: brook trout, brown trout, brown bullhead, yellow bullhead, chain pickerel, and largemouth bass. Although there are no pollution point sources in the drainage basin, acid rain is a major concern. Acidification has altered the ecology of the lakes and region; in Lake Jean low pH has decreased the number and quality of insects and plankton at the base of the food chain. Fish which are acid tolerant are predominant, including fathead minnow, muskellunge, pumpkinseed, walleye, and yellow perch. There are relatively few predators like chain pickerel and largemouth bass, and adult fish "appear to have good growth rates but poor reproductive success". Despite the increased acidity, all of the Kitchen Creek drainage basin, which includes Ganoga Lake, is classified by the state of Pennsylvania as a "High Quality-Cold Water Fishery". Under the Clean Water Act a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) has been established for acidic pollution in the Lake Jean watershed. Ganoga Lake's TMDL for acidity is 4.1 pounds (1.9 kg) per day. Long term exposure to acid rain also damages soil, depleting calcium levels, which may in turn affect insect populations and reproduction in birds. Lake Jean is also "impaired for mercury due to atmospheric deposition", although TMDLs have not yet been established for this. Ganoga Lake and Ricketts Glen State Park are part of the much larger 114,978-acre (46,530 ha) Pennsylvania Important Bird Area (IBA) \#48, which the Audubon Society describes as "the largest extant forest in northeastern Pennsylvania and one of the largest in the Commonwealth". Over 75 species of bird are known to breed in the state park adjoining the lake. Lake Jean is home to bald eagle and Canada goose; aquatic birds found in the IBA include American bittern, American black duck, great blue heron, green-winged teal, hooded merganser, mallard duck, osprey, Virginia rail, and wood duck. Historically, common pheasant were found in the woods around the lake. Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau just north of the Allegheny Front; this region is known locally as North Mountain. Many bird species are found in the forests on North Mountain, including the state's only population of blackpoll warbler; other birds seen there include evening grosbeak, northern goshawk, red crossbill, and Swainson's thrush. Historically North Mountain was home to olive-sided flycatcher, and "was one of the few places one could enjoy the songs of all of Pennsylvania's native thrushes"; today it is home to the state's largest yellow-bellied flycatcher population. Ganoga Lake and its surroundings have a variety of insects and animals. Butterflies in the region are studied by lepidopterists, and the hemlock woolly adelgid threatens many of the hemlock trees. Animals found on North Mountain and in the park include squirrel, black bear, fisher, hoary bat, otter, porcupine, raccoon, and white-tailed deer. In 1912, white-tailed deer around the lake became locally extinct due to loss of habitat from lumbering and overhunting. Pennsylvania imported nearly 1,200 white-tailed deer from Michigan between 1906 and 1925 to re-establish the species, and made it the official state animal in 1959. By 2001, deer populations had increased to the point where it was feared that "Pennsylvania is losing its vegetative diversity from deer over-browsing". ## See also - Lake Jean, a lake slightly further downstream - List of lakes in Pennsylvania
981,085	David A. Johnston	1,171,037,662	American volcanologist (1949–1980)	[ "1949 births", "1980 deaths", "20th-century American geologists", "Accidental deaths in Washington (state)", "American volcanologists", "Deaths in volcanic eruptions", "Natural disaster deaths in Washington (state)", "People from Oak Lawn, Illinois", "Scientists from Chicago", "United States Geological Survey personnel", "University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni", "University of Washington alumni" ]	David Alexander Johnston (December 18, 1949 – May 18, 1980) was an American United States Geological Survey (USGS) volcanologist who was killed by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in the U.S. state of Washington. A principal scientist on the USGS monitoring team, Johnston was killed in the eruption while manning an observation post six miles (10 km) away on the morning of May 18, 1980. He was the first to report the eruption, transmitting "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" before he was swept away by a lateral blast; despite a thorough search, Johnston's body was never found, but state highway workers discovered remnants of his USGS trailer in 1993. Johnston's career took him across the United States, where he studied the Augustine Volcano in Alaska, the San Juan volcanic field in Colorado, and long-extinct volcanoes in Michigan. Johnston was a meticulous and talented scientist, known for his analyses of volcanic gases and their relationship to eruptions. This, along with his enthusiasm and positive attitude, made him liked and respected by many co-workers. After his death, other scientists lauded his character, both verbally and in dedications and letters. Johnston felt scientists must do what is necessary, including taking risks, to help protect the public from natural disasters. His work, and that of fellow USGS scientists, convinced authorities to close Mount St. Helens to the public before the 1980 eruption. They maintained the closure despite heavy pressure to re-open the area; their work saved thousands of lives. His story became intertwined with the popular image of volcanic eruptions and their threat to society, and a part of volcanology's history. To date, Johnston, along with his mentee Harry Glicken, is one of two American volcanologists known to have died in a volcanic eruption. Following his death, Johnston was commemorated in several ways, including a memorial fund established in his name at the University of Washington to fund graduate-level research. Two volcano observatories were established and named after him: one in Vancouver, Washington, and another on the ridge where he died. Johnston's life and death are featured in several documentaries, films, docudramas and books. A biography of his life, A Hero on Mount St. Helens: The Life and Legacy of David A. Johnston, was published 2019. ## Life and career Johnston was born at the University of Chicago Hospital on December 18, 1949, to Thomas and Alice Johnston. They originally lived in Hometown, Illinois, but moved to Oak Lawn shortly after Johnston's birth, where he grew to adulthood. Johnston grew up with one sister. His father worked as an engineer at a local company and his mother as a newspaper editor. Johnston often took photographs for his mother's newspaper and contributed articles to his school's newspaper. He never married. After graduating from Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Johnston attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He planned to study journalism, but became intrigued by an introductory geology class, and changed his major. His first geologic project was a study of the Precambrian rock that forms Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There he investigated the remains of an ancient volcano: a suite of metamorphosed basalts, a gabbroic sill, and volcanic roots in the form of a dioritic and gabbroic intrusion. The experience planted the seed of Johnston's passion for volcanoes. After working hard to learn the subject, he graduated with "Highest Honors and Distinction" in 1971. Johnston spent the summer after college in the San Juan volcanic field of Colorado working with volcanologist Pete Lipman in his study of two extinct calderas. This work became the inspiration for the first phase of his graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, in which he focused on the Oligocene Cimarron andesitic volcanic complex in the western San Juans. Johnston's reconstruction of the eruptive history of the extinct volcanoes prepared him to study active volcanoes. Johnston's first experience with active volcanoes was a geophysical survey of Mount Augustine in Alaska in 1975. When Mount Augustine erupted in 1976, Johnston raced back to Alaska, shunting his former work on the Cimmaron Volcano into a master's thesis, and making Mount Augustine the focus of his Ph.D. work. He graduated in 1978 with his Ph.D., having shown that (1) the emplacement mechanism of the pyroclastic flows had changed over time, as they became less pumaceous, (2) the magmas contained high quantities of volatile water, chlorine, and sulfur, and (3) underground mixing of the felsic (silicic) magmas with less-viscous mafic (basaltic) magmas could have triggered eruptions. Mount Augustine was also the site of an early near-disaster for Johnston, when he became trapped on Augustine Island as the volcano was building toward another eruption. During the summers of 1978 and 1979, Johnston led studies of the ash-flow sheet emplaced in the 1912 eruption of Mount Katmai in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The gas phase is extremely important in propelling volcanic eruptions. Because of this, Johnston mastered the many techniques required to analyze glass-vapor inclusions in phenocrysts embedded in lavas, which provide information about gases present during past eruptions. His work at Mount Katmai and other volcanoes in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes paved the way for his career, and his "agility, nerve, patience, and determination around the jet-like summit fumaroles in the crater of Mt. Mageik" impressed his colleagues. Later in 1978, Johnston joined the United States Geological Survey (USGS), where he monitored volcanic emission levels in the Cascades and Aleutian Arc. There he helped to strengthen the theory that eruptions can be predicted, to some degree, by changes in the makeup of volcanic gases. Fellow volcanologist Wes Hildreth said of Johnston, "I think Dave's dearest hope was that systematic monitoring of fumarolic emissions might permit detection of changes characteristically precursory to eruptions ... Dave wanted to formulate a general model for the behavior of magmatic volatiles prior to explosive outbursts and to develop a corollary rationale for the evaluation of hazards." During this time, Johnston continued to visit Mount Augustine every summer and also assessed the geothermal energy potential of the Azores and Portugal. In the last year of his life, Johnston developed an interest in the health, agricultural, and environmental effects of both volcanic and anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere. Johnston was based at the branch of the USGS in Menlo Park, California, but his work on volcanoes took him all over the Pacific Northwest region. When the first earthquakes shook Mount St. Helens on March 16, 1980, Johnston was nearby at the University of Washington, where he had pursued his doctorate. Intrigued by the possible event of an eruption, Johnston contacted Stephen Malone, a professor of geology at the university. Malone had been his mentor when Johnston had worked at the San Juan complex in Colorado, and Johnston admired his work. Malone stated that he "put him to work" almost instantly, allowing Johnston to escort interested reporters to a place near the volcano. Johnston was the first geologist on the volcano, and soon became a leader within the USGS team, taking charge of monitoring of volcanic gas emissions. ## Eruption ### Precursor activity Since its last eruptive activity in 1857, Mount St. Helens had been largely dormant. Seismographs were not installed until 1972. This period of 123 years of inactivity ended in early 1980. On March 15, a cluster of tiny earthquakes rocked the area around the mountain. For six days, more than 100 earthquakes clustered around Mount St. Helens, an indication that magma was moving. There was initially some doubt as to whether the earthquakes were precursors to an eruption. By March 20, a magnitude 4.2 earthquake shook the wilderness around the volcano. The next day, seismologists installed three seismic recorder stations. By March 24, volcanologists at the USGS—including Johnston—became more confident that the seismic activity was a sign of an impending eruption. After March 25, seismic activity drastically increased. By March 26, more than seven earthquakes over magnitude 4.0 had been recorded, and the next day, hazard warnings were publicly issued. On March 27, a phreatic eruption took place, ejecting a plume of ash nearly 7,000 feet (2,100 m) into the air. Similar activity continued at the volcano over the following weeks, excavating the crater, forming an adjacent caldera, and erupting small amounts of steam, ash, and tephra. With each new eruption, the plumes of steam and ash from the volcano rose, eventually climbing to 20,000 feet (6,000 m). By late March, the volcano was erupting up to 100 times per day. Spectators congregated in the vicinity of the mountain, hoping for a chance to see its eruptions. They were joined by reporters in helicopters, as well as mountain climbers. On April 17, a bulge (or "cryptodome") was discovered on the mountain's north flank, suggesting that Mount St. Helens could produce a lateral blast. Rising magma under Mount St. Helens had veered off to the north flank, creating a growing bulge on the surface. ### Final signs and primary blast Given the increasing seismic and volcanic activity, Johnston and the other volcanologists working for the USGS in its Vancouver branch prepared to observe any impending eruption. Geologist Don Swanson and others placed reflectors on and around the growing domes, and established the Coldwater I and II observation posts to use laser ranging to measure how the distances to these reflectors changed over time as the domes deformed. Coldwater II, where Johnston died, was located just 6 miles (10 km) north of the mountain. To the astonishment of the USGS geologists, the bulge was growing at a rate of 5 to 8 feet (1.5 to 2.4 meters) per day. Tiltmeters installed on the volcano's north side displayed a northwest trending tilt for that side of the mountain, and a southwest trending tilt was observed on the south side. Worried that the amount of pressure on the magma underground was increasing, scientists analyzed gases by the crater, and found high traces of sulfur dioxide. After this discovery, they began to regularly check the fumarolic activity and monitor the volcano for dramatic changes, but none were observed. Disheartened, they instead opted to study the growing bulge and the threat an avalanche could have for humans relatively near the volcano. An evaluation of the threat was carried out, concluding that a landslide or avalanche in the Toutle River could spawn lahars, or mudflows, downstream. At that point, the previously consistent phreatic activity had become intermittent. Between May 10 and 17, the only change occurred on the volcano's north flank, as the bulge increased in size. On May 16 and 17, the mountain stopped its phreatic eruptions completely. The active Mount St. Helens was radically different from its dormant form, now featuring an enormous bulge and several craters. In the week preceding the eruption, cracks formed in the north sector of the volcano's summit, indicating a movement of magma. At 8:32 a.m. local time the next day (May 18), an earthquake measuring magnitude 5.1 rocked the area, triggering the landslide that started the main eruption. In a matter of seconds, vibrations from the earthquake loosened 2.7 cubic kilometers (0.6 cu mi) of rock on the mountain's north face and summit, creating a massive landslide. It was the largest subaerial (on land) landslide in Earth's recorded history. With the loss of the confining pressure of the overlying rock, Mount St. Helens began to rapidly emit steam and other volcanic gases. A few seconds later, it erupted laterally, sending swift pyroclastic flows down its flanks at near supersonic speeds. These flows were later joined by lahars. Before being struck by a series of flows that, at their fastest, would have taken less than a minute to reach his position , Johnston attempted to radio his USGS co-workers with the message: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it! Vancouver, is the transmitter on?" The cloud of the eruption blocked the transmission of his message to Vancouver; his final words were recorded by a HAM radio operator. Seconds later, the signal from the radio went silent, and all contact with the geologist was lost. Initially, there was some debate as to whether Johnston had survived; records soon showed a radio message from fellow eruption victim and amateur radio operator Gerry Martin, located near the Coldwater peak and farther north of Johnston's position, reporting his sighting of the eruption enveloping the Coldwater II observation post. As the blast overwhelmed Johnston's post, Martin declared solemnly: "Gentlemen, the camper and car that’s sitting over to the south of me is covered. It’s going to hit me, too." before his radio too went silent. The extent, speed and direction of the avalanche and pyroclastic flows that overwhelmed Johnston, Martin, and others were later described in detail in a paper titled 'Chronology and Character of the May 18, 1980 Explosive Eruptions of Mount St. Helens', published in 1984 in a collection published by the National Research Council's Geophysics Study Committee. In this paper, the authors examined photographs and satellite images of the eruption to construct a chronology and description of the first few minutes. Included in the paper is figure 10.3, a series of timed photographs taken from Mount Adams, 33 miles (53 km) east of Mount St. Helens. These six photographs, taken sideways on to the lateral blast, vividly show the extent and size of the avalanche and flows as they reached northwards over and beyond Johnston's position. Figure 10.7 from the same paper is an overhead diagram showing the position of the pyroclastic surge front at half-minute intervals, with the positions of Johnston (Coldwater II) and Martin included. The eruption was heard hundreds of miles away, but some of those who survived the eruption declared that the landslide and pyroclastic flows were silent as they raced down the mountain. Kran Kilpatrick, an employee of the United States Forest Service, recalled, "There was no sound to it, not a sound. It was like a silent movie and we were all in it." The reason for this discrepancy is a "quiet zone", created as a result of the motion and temperature of air and, to a lesser extent, upon local topography. Famous for telling reporters that being on the mountain was like "standing next to a dynamite keg and the fuse is lit", Johnston had been among the first volcanologists at the volcano when eruptive signs appeared, and shortly after was named the head of volcanic gas monitoring. He and several other volcanologists prevented people from being near the volcano during the few months of pre-eruptive activity, and successfully fought pressure to re-open the area. Their work kept the death toll at a few tens of individuals, instead of the thousands who possibly could have been killed had the region not been sealed off. ### USGS team and rescue efforts Many USGS scientists worked on the team monitoring the volcano, but it was graduate student Harry Glicken who had been manning the Coldwater II observation post for the two and a half weeks immediately preceding the eruption. The evening before the eruption he was scheduled to be relieved by USGS geologist Don Swanson, but something came up, and Swanson asked Johnston to take his place. Johnston agreed. That Saturday, the day before the eruption took place, Johnston ascended the mountain and went on a patrol of the volcano with geologist Carolyn Driedger. Tremors shook the mountain. Driedger was supposed to camp on one of the ridges overlooking the volcano that night, but Johnston told her to head home and said that he would stay on the volcano alone. While at Coldwater II, Johnston was to observe the volcano for any further signs of an eruption. Just prior to his departure, at 7 p.m. on the evening of May 17, 131⁄2 hours before the eruption, Glicken took the famous photograph of Johnston sitting by the observation-post trailer with a notebook on his lap, smiling. The following morning, May 18, at 8:32 a.m., the volcano erupted. Immediately, rescue workers were dispatched to the area. The official USGS pilot, Lon Stickney, who had been flying the scientists to the mountain, conducted the first rescue attempt. He flew his helicopter over the scarred remains of trees, valleys, and the Coldwater II observation post ridge, where he saw bare rock and uprooted trees. Because he saw no sign of Johnston's trailer, Stickney began to panic, becoming "emotionally distraught". Frantic and guilt-stricken, Harry Glicken convinced three separate helicopter pilots to take him up on flights over the devastated area in a rescue attempt, but the eruption had so changed the landscape that they were unable to locate any sign of the Coldwater II observation post. In 1993, while building a 9-mile (14 km) extension of Washington State Route 504 (also called "Spirit Lake Memorial Highway") to lead to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, construction workers discovered pieces of Johnston's trailer. His body, however, has never been recovered. ### Consequences and response The public was shocked by the extent of the eruption, which had lowered the elevation of the summit by 1,313 feet (400 m), destroyed 230 square miles (600 km<sup>2</sup>) of woodland, and spread ash into other states and Canada. The lateral blast that killed Johnston started at a speed of 220 miles per hour (350 km/h) and accelerated to 670 miles per hour (1,080 km/h). Even USGS scientists were awed. With a Volcanic Explosivity Index value of 5, the eruption was catastrophic. More than 50 people were killed or missing, including Johnston, mountain resident Harry R. Truman, photographer Robert Landsburg, and National Geographic photographer Reid Blackburn. The disaster was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in the history of the United States of America. A total of 57 people are known to have died, and more were left homeless when the ash falls and pyroclastic flows destroyed or buried 200 houses. In addition to the human fatalities, thousands of animals perished. The official estimate from the USGS was 7,000 game animals, 12 million salmon fingerlings, and 40,000 salmon. Two years after the eruption, the United States government set aside 110,000 acres (450 km<sup>2</sup>) of land for the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. This protected area, which includes the Johnston Ridge Observatory and several other research and visitor centers, serves as an area for scientific research, tourism, and education. ## Legacy ### Scientific Johnston was commemorated by both his fellow scientists and by the government. Known for his diligent and particular nature, he was called "an exemplary scientist" by a USGS dedication paper, which also described him as "unaffectedly genuine, with an infectious curiosity and enthusiasm". He was quick to "dissipate cynicism" and believed that "careful evaluation and interpretation" was the best approach to his work. An obituary notice for Johnston stated that at the time of his death he had been "among the leading young volcanologists in the world" and that his "enthusiasm and warmth" would be "missed at least as much as his scientific strength". Following the eruption, Harry Glicken and other geologists at the USGS dedicated their work to Johnston. Because Johnston was believed to be safe at the Coldwater II observation post, the fact that he died shocked his friends and co-workers alike. However, most of his colleagues and family asserted that Johnston died "doing what he wanted to do." His mother stated in an interview shortly after the eruption, "Not many people get to do what they really want to do in this world, but our son did. ... He would tell us he may never get rich but he was doing what he wanted. He wanted to be near if the eruption came. In a phone call on Mother's Day, he told us it's a sight very few geologists get to see." Dr. Stephen Malone agreed that Johnston died doing what he loved, and stated that he "was very good at his work". Johnston's role in the study of the volcano in the weeks leading up to the eruption was acknowledged in 1981 in a chronology of the eruption, published as part of the USGS report titled 'The 1980 Eruptions of Mount St. Helens, Washington': > Among the many contributors of data, none was more essential to the systematic reconstruction of the events of 1980 at Mount St. Helens than David Johnston, to whose memory this report is dedicated. Dave, who was present through all of the activity up to the climactic eruption and who lost his life in that eruption, provided far more than data. His insights and his thoroughly scientific attitude were crucial to the entire effort; they still serve as a model for us all. Since Johnston's death, his field of volcanic eruption prediction has advanced significantly, and volcanologists are now able to predict eruptions based on a number of precursors that become apparent between days and months in advance. Geologists can now identify characteristic patterns in seismic waves that indicate particular magmatic activity. In particular, volcanologists have used deep, long-period earthquakes that indicate that magma is rising through the crust. They can also use carbon dioxide emission as a proxy for magma supply rate. Measurements of surface deformation due to magmatic intrusions, like those that were conducted by Johnston and the other USGS scientists at the Coldwater I and II outposts, have advanced in scale and precision. Ground deformation monitoring networks around volcanoes now consist of InSAR (interferometry), surveys of networks of GPS monuments, microgravity surveys in which scientists measure the change in gravitational potential or acceleration because of the intruding magma and resulting deformation, strain meters, and tiltmeters. Though there is still work to be done, this combination of approaches has greatly improved scientists' abilities to forecast volcanic eruptions. In addition to his work, Johnston himself has become part of the history of volcanic eruptions. With Harry Glicken, he is one of two volcanologists from the United States to die in a volcanic eruption. Glicken was being mentored by Johnston, who relieved Glicken of his watch at the Coldwater II observation post 13 hours before Mount St. Helens erupted. Glicken died in 1991, eleven years later, when a pyroclastic flow overran him and several others at Mount Unzen in Japan. ### Commemoration Early acts of commemoration included two trees that were planted in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the renaming of a community center in Johnston's hometown as the "Johnston Center". These actions were reported in newspapers during the first anniversary of the eruption in May 1981. On the second anniversary of the eruption, the USGS office in Vancouver (which had been permanently established following the 1980 eruption) was renamed the David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in his memory. This volcano observatory is the one most responsible for monitoring Mount St. Helens, and helped to predict all of the volcano's eruptions between 1980 and 1985. In a 2005 open day, the lobby area of the CVO included a display and painting commemorating Johnston. Johnston's connections with the University of Washington (where he had carried out his masters and doctoral research) are remembered by a memorial fund that established an endowed graduate-level fellowship within what is now the department of Earth and Space Sciences. By the time of the first anniversary of his death, the fund had exceeded \$30,000. Known as the 'David A. Johnston Memorial Fellowship for Research Excellence', a number of awards of this fellowship have been made over the years since it was launched. Following the eruption, the area where the Coldwater II observation post had been was sectioned off. Eventually, an observatory was built in the area in Johnston's name, and opened in 1997. Located just over 5 miles (8 km) from the north flank of Mount St. Helens, the Johnston Ridge Observatory (JRO) allows the public to admire the open crater, new activity, and the creations of the 1980 eruption, including an extensive basalt field. Part of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, the JRO was constructed for \$10.5 million, equipped with monitoring equipment. Visited by thousands of tourists annually, it also includes tours, a theater, and an exhibit hall. There are several public memorials where Johnston's name is inscribed in a list of those known to have died in the eruption. These memorials include a large curved granite monument at an outside viewing area at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which opened in 1997, and a plaque at the Hoffstadt Bluffs Visitor Center, which was unveiled in a memorial grove in May 2000. ### Depictions There have been several tellings of Johnston's story in documentaries, films and docudramas about the eruption. In the 1981 HBO television film St. Helens, actor David Huffman starred as David Jackson, a fictional character supposedly based on Johnston, but with almost no representation of his actions in 1980. Johnston's parents objected to the production of the film, arguing that it possessed not "an ounce of David in it" and portrayed "him as a daredevil rather than a careful scientist". Johnston's mother stated that the film had changed many true aspects of the eruption, and depicted her son as "a rebel" with "a history of disciplinary trouble". Prior to the film's premiere on May 18, 1981, the first anniversary of the eruption, 36 scientists who knew Johnston signed a letter of protest. They wrote that, "Dave's life was too meritorious to require fictional embellishments," and that, "Dave was a superbly conscientious and creative scientist." Several documentaries and docudramas have covered the history of the eruption, including archive footage and dramatisations of Johnston's story. These include Up From the Ashes (1990) by KOMO-TV, an episode of the 2005 second series of Seconds From Disaster broadcast by the National Geographic Channel, an episode of the 2006 series Surviving Disaster made by the BBC, and the episode "Rescued From Mount St. Helens" from the 2017 series We'll Meet Again with Ann Curry on PBS. ## Works
503,201	Ring-tailed lemur	1,166,439,656	A large lemur from Madagascar	[ "Articles containing video clips", "Endemic fauna of Madagascar", "Lemurs", "Mammals described in 1758", "National symbols of Madagascar", "Species endangered by the pet trade", "Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus" ]	The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) is a medium- to larger-sized strepsirrhine (wet-nosed) primate, and the most internationally-recognized lemur species, owing to its long, black-and-white, ringed tail. It belongs to Lemuridae, one of five lemur families, and is the only member of the Lemur genus. Like all lemurs, it is endemic to the island of Madagascar, where it is endangered. Known locally in Malagasy as maky (, spelled maki in French) or hira, it ranges from gallery forests to spiny scrub in the southern regions of the island. It is omnivorous, as well as the most adapted to living terrestrially of the extant lemurs. The ring-tailed lemur is highly social, living in groups of up to 30 individuals. It is also a female-dominant species, a commonality among lemurs. To keep warm and reaffirm social bonds, groups will huddle together. Mutual grooming is another vital aspect of lemur socialization (as with all primates), reaffirming social and familial connections, while also helping rid each other of any potential insects. Ring-tailed lemurs are strictly diurnal, being active exclusively during daylight hours. Due to this lifestyle, they also sunbathe; the lemurs can be observed sitting upright on their tails, exposing their soft, white belly fur towards the sun. They will often also have their palms open and eyes gently closed. Like other lemurs, this species relies strongly on their sense of smell, and territorial marking, with scent glands, provides communication signals throughout a group’s home range. The glands are located near the eyes, as well as near the anus. The males perform a unique scent-marking behavior called spur-marking, and will participate in stink fights by dousing their tails with their pheromones and “wafting” it at opponents. Additionally, lemurs of both sexes will scent-mark trees, logs, rocks or other objects by simply rubbing their faces and bodies onto it, not unlike a domestic cat. As one of the most vocal primates, the ring-tailed lemur uses numerous vocalizations, including calling for group cohesion and predator alarm calls. Experiments have shown that the ring-tailed lemur, despite the lack of a large brain (relative to simiiform primates), can organize sequences, understand basic arithmetic operations, and preferentially select tools based on functional qualities. Despite adapting to and breeding easily under captive care (and being the most popular species of lemur in zoos worldwide, with more than 2,000 captive-raised individuals), the wild population of ring-tailed lemur is listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List, due to habitat destruction, local hunting for bushmeat and the exotic pet trade. As of early 2017, the population in the wild is believed to have crashed to as low as 2,000 individuals due to these reasons, making them far more critically endangered. Local Malagasy farmers and logging industries frequently make use of slash and burn deforestation techniques, with smoke being visible on the horizon on most days in Madagascar, in an effort to accommodate livestock and to cultivate larger fields of crops. ## Etymology Although the term "lemur" was first intended for slender lorises, it was soon limited to the endemic Malagasy primates, which have been known as "lemurs" ever since. The name derives from the Latin term lemures, which refers to specters or ghosts that were exorcised during the Lemuria festival of ancient Rome. According to Carl Linnaeus's own explanation, the name was selected because of the nocturnal activity and slow movements of the slender loris. Being familiar with the works of Virgil and Ovid and seeing an analogy that fit with his naming scheme, Linnaeus adapted the term "lemur" for these nocturnal primates. However, it has been commonly and falsely assumed that Linnaeus was referring to the ghost-like appearance, reflective eyes, and ghostly cries of lemurs. It has also been speculated that Linnaeus may also have known that some Malagasy people have held legends that lemurs are the souls of their ancestors, but this is unlikely given that the name was selected for slender lorises from India. The species name, catta, refers to the ring-tailed lemur's cat-like appearance. Its purring vocalization is similar to that of the domestic cat. Following Linnaeus's species description, the common name "ring-tailed maucauco" was first penned in 1771 by Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, who made note of its characteristic long, banded tail. (The term "maucauco" was a very common term for lemurs at this time.) The now universal English name "ring-tailed lemur" was first used by George Shaw in his illustrated scientific publication covering the Leverian collection, which was published between 1792 and 1796. ## Evolutionary history All mammalian fossils from Madagascar come from recent times. Thus, little is known about the evolution of the ring-tailed lemur, let alone the rest of the lemur clade, which comprises the entire endemic primate population of the island. However, chromosomal and molecular evidence suggest that lemurs are more closely related to each other than to other strepsirrhine primates. For this to have happened, it is thought that a very small ancestral population came to Madagascar via a single rafting event between 50 and 80 million years ago. Subsequent evolutionary radiation and speciation has created the diversity of Malagasy lemurs seen today. According to analysis of amino acid sequences, the branching of the family Lemuridae has been dated to 26.1 ±3.3 mya while rRNA sequences of mtDNA place the split at 24.9 ±3.6 mya. The ruffed lemurs are the first genus to split away (most basal) in the family, a view that is further supported by analysis of DNA sequences and karyotypes. Additionally, Molecular data suggests a deep genetic divergence and sister group relationship between the true lemurs (Eulemur) and the other two genera: Lemur and Hapalemur. The ring-tailed lemur is thought to share closer affinities to the bamboo lemurs of the genus Hapalemur than to the other two genera in its family. This has been supported by comparisons in communication, chromosomes, genetics, and several morphological traits, such as scent gland similarities. However, other data concerning immunology and other morphological traits fail to support this close relationship. For example, Hapalemur species have short snouts, while the ring-tailed lemur and the rest of Lemuridae have long snouts. However, differences in the relationship between the orbit (eye socket) and the muzzle suggest that the ring-tailed lemur and the true lemurs evolved their elongated faces independently. The relationship between the ring-tailed lemur and bamboo lemurs is the least understood. Molecular analysis suggests that either the bamboo lemurs diverged from the ring-tailed lemur, making the group monophyletic and supporting the current two-genera taxonomy, or that the ring-tailed lemur is nested in with the bamboo lemurs, requiring Hapalemur simus to be split off into its own genus, Prolemur. The karyotype of the ring-tailed lemur has 56 chromosomes, of which four are metacentric (arms of nearly equal length), four are submetacentric (arms of unequal length), and 46 are acrocentric (the short arm is hardly observable). The X chromosome is metacentric and the Y chromosome is acrocentric. ### Taxonomic classification Linnaeus first used the genus name Lemur to describe "Lemur tardigradus" (the red slender loris, now known as Loris tardigradus) in his 1754 catalog of the Museum of King Adolf Frederick. In 1758, his 10th edition of Systema Naturae listed the genus Lemur with three included species, only one of which is still considered to be a lemur while another is no longer considered to be a primate. These species include: Lemur tardigradus, Lemur catta (the ring-tailed lemur), and Lemur volans (the Philippine colugo, now known as Cynocephalus volans). In 1911, Oldfield Thomas made Lemur catta the type species for the genus, despite the term initially being used to describe lorises. On January 10, 1929, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) formalized this decision in its publication of Opinion 122. The ring-tailed lemur shares many similarities with ruffed lemurs (genus Varecia) and true lemurs (genus Eulemur), and its skeleton is nearly indistinguishable from that of the true lemurs. Consequently, the three genera were once grouped together in the genus Lemur and more recently are sometimes referred to as subfamily Lemurinae (within family Lemuridae). However, ruffed lemurs were reassigned to the genus Varecia in 1962, and due to similarities between the ring-tailed lemur and the bamboo lemurs, particularly in regards to molecular evidence and scent glands similarities, the true lemurs were moved to the genus Eulemur by Yves Rumpler and Elwyn L. Simons (1988) as well as Colin Groves and Robert H. Eaglen (1988). In 1991, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey H. Schwartz reviewed the evidence and came to a different conclusion, instead favoring to return the members of Eulemur and Varecia to the genus Lemur. However, this view was not widely accepted and the genus Lemur remained monotypic, containing only the ring-tailed lemur. Because the differences in molecular data are so minute between the ring-tailed lemur and both genera of bamboo lemurs, it has been suggested that all three genera be merged. Because of the difficulty in discerning the relationships within family Lemuridae, not all authorities agree on the taxonomy, although the majority of the primatological community favors the current classification. In 1996, researchers Steven Goodman and Olivier Langrand suggested that the ring-tailed lemur may demonstrate regional variations, particularly a high mountain population at Andringitra Massif that has a thicker coat, lighter coloration, and variations in its tail rings. In 2001, primatologist Colin Groves concluded that this does not represent a locally occurring subspecies. This decision was later supported by further fieldwork that showed that the differences fell within the normal range of variation for the species. The thicker coat was considered a local adaptation to extreme low temperatures in the region, and the fading of the fur was attributed to increased exposure to solar radiation. Additional genetic studies in 2000 further supported the conclusion that population did not vary significantly from the other ring-tailed lemur populations on the island. ## Anatomy and physiology The ring-tailed lemur is a relatively large lemur. Its average weight is 2.2 kilograms (4.9 lb). Its head–body length ranges between 39 and 46 cm (15 and 18 in), its tail length is 56 and 63 cm (22 and 25 in), and its total length is 95 and 110 cm (37 and 43 in). Other measurements include a hind foot length of 102 and 113 mm (4.0 and 4.4 in), ear length of 40 and 48 mm (1.6 and 1.9 in), and cranium length of 78 and 88 mm (3.1 and 3.5 in). The species has a slender frame and narrow face, fox-like muzzle. The ring-tailed lemur's trademark—a long, bushy tail—is ringed in alternating black and white transverse bands, numbering 12 or 13 white rings and 13 or 14 black rings, and always ending in a black tip. The total number of rings nearly matches the approximate number of caudal vertebrae (\~25). Its tail is longer than its body and is not prehensile. Instead, it is only used for balance, communication, and group cohesion. The pelage (fur) is so dense that it can clog electric clippers. The ventral (chest) coat and throat are white or cream. The dorsal (back) coat varies from gray to rosy-brown, sometimes with a brown pygal patch around the tail region, where the fur grades to pale gray or grayish brown. The dorsal coloration is slightly darker around the neck and crown. The hair on the throat, cheeks, and ears is white or off-white and also less dense, allowing the dark skin underneath to show through. The muzzle is dark grayish and the nose is black, and the eyes are encompassed by black triangular patches. Facial vibrissae (whiskers) are developed and found above the lips (mystacal), on the cheeks (genal), and on the eyebrow (superciliary). Vibrissae are also found slightly above the wrist on the underside of the forearm. The ears are relatively large compared to other lemurs and are covered in hair, which has only small tufts if any. Although slight pattern variations in the facial region may be seen between individuals, there are no obvious differences between the sexes. Unlike most diurnal primates, but like all strepsirrhine primates, the ring-tailed lemur has a tapetum lucidum, or reflective layer behind the retina of the eye, that enhances night vision. The tapetum is highly visible in this species because the pigmentation of the ocular fundus (back surface of the eye), which is present in—but varies between—all lemurs, is very spotty. The ring-tailed lemur also has a rudimentary foveal depression on the retina. Another shared characteristic with the other strepsirrhine primates is the rhinarium, a moist, naked, glandular nose supported by the upper jaw and protruding beyond the chin. The rhinarium continues down where it divides the upper lip. The upper lip is attached to the premaxilla, preventing the lip from protruding and thus requiring the lemur to lap water rather than using suction. The skin of the ring-tailed lemur is dark gray or black in color, even in places where the fur is white. It is exposed on the nose, palms, soles, eyelids, lips, and genitalia. The skin is smooth, but the leathery texture of the hands and feet facilitate terrestrial movement. The anus, located at the joint of the tail, is covered when the tail is lowered. The area around the anus (circumanal area) and the perineum are covered in fur. In males, the scrotum lacks fur, is covered in small, horny spines, and the two sacs of the scrotum are divided. The penis is nearly cylindrical in shape and is covered in small spines, as well as having two pairs of larger spines on both sides. Males have a relatively small baculum (penis bone) compared to their size. The scrotum, penis, and prepuce are usually coated with a foul-smelling secretion. Females have a thick, elongated clitoris that protrudes from the labia of the vulva. The opening of the urethra is closer to the clitoris than the vagina, forming a "drip tip". Females have two pairs of mammary glands (four nipples), but only one pair is functional. The anterior pair (closest to the head) are very close to the axillae (armpit). Furless scent glands are present on both males and females. Both sexes have small, dark antebrachial (forearm) glands measuring 1 cm long and located on the inner surface of the forearm nearly 25 cm (9.8 in) above the wrist joint. (This trait is shared between the Lemur and Hapalemur genera.) The gland is soft and compressible, bears fine dermal ridges (like fingerprints), and is connected to the palm by a fine, 2 mm–high, hairless strip. However, only the male has a horny spur that overlays this scent gland. The spur develops with age through the accumulation of secretions from an underlying gland that may connect through the skin through as many as a thousand minuscule ducts. The males also have brachial (arm) glands on the axillary surface of their shoulders (near the armpit). The brachial gland is larger than the antebrachial gland, covered in short hair around the periphery, and has a naked crescent-shaped orifice near the center. The gland secretes a foul-smelling, brown, sticky substance. The brachial gland is barely developed if present at all in females. Both sexes also have apocrine and sebaceous glands in their genital or perianal regions, which are covered in fur. Its fingers are slender, padded, mostly lacking webbing, and semi-dexterous with flat, human-like nails. The thumb is both short and widely separated from the other fingers. Despite being set at a right angle to the palm, the thumb is not opposable since the ball of the joint is fixed in place. As with all strepsirrhines, the hand is ectaxonic (the axis passes through the fourth digit) rather than mesaxonic (the axis passing through the third digit) as seen in monkeys and apes. The fourth digit is the longest, and only slightly longer than the second digit. Likewise, the fifth digit is only slightly longer than the second. The palms are long and leathery, and like other primates, they have dermal ridges to improve grip. The feet are semi-digitigrade and more specialized than the hands. The big toe is opposable and is smaller than the big toe of other lemurs, which are more arboreal. The second toe is short, has a small terminal pad, and has a toilet-claw (sometimes referred to as a grooming claw) specialized for personal grooming, specifically to rake through fur that is unreachable by the mouth. The toilet-claw is a trait shared among nearly all living strepsirrhine primates. Unlike other lemurs, the ring-tailed lemur's heel is not covered by fur. ### Dentition The ring-tailed lemur has a dentition of , meaning that on each side of the jaw it has two incisors, one canine tooth, three premolars, and three molar teeth. Its deciduous dentition is . The permanent teeth erupt in the following order: m 1/1 (first molars), i 2/2 (first incisors), i 3/3 (second incisors), C1 (upper canines), m 2/2 (second molars), c1 (lower canines), m 3/3 (third molars), p 4/4 (third premolars), p 3/3 (second premolars), p 2/2 (first premolars). Its lower incisors (i1 and i2) are long, narrow, and finely spaced while pointing almost straight forward in the mouth (procumbent). Together with the incisor-shaped (incisiform) lower canines (c1), which are slightly larger and also procumbent, form a structure called a toothcomb, a trait unique to nearly all strepsirrhine primates. The toothcomb is used during oral grooming, which involves licking and tooth-scraping. It may also be used for grasping small fruits, removing leaves from the stem when eating, and possibly scraping sap and gum from tree bark. The toothcomb is kept clean using a sublingual organ—a thin, flat, fibrous plate that covers a large part of the base of the tongue. The first lower premolar (p2) following the toothcomb is shaped like a canine (caniniform) and occludes the upper canine, essentially filling the role of the incisiform lower canine. There is also a diastema (gap) between the second and third premolars (p2 and p3). The upper incisors are small, with the first incisors (I1) space widely from each other, yet closely to the second incisors (I2). Both are compressed buccolingually (between the cheek and the tongue). The upper canines (C1) are long, have a broad base, and curve down and back (recurved). The upper canines exhibit slight sexual dimorphism, with males exhibiting slightly larger canines than females. Both sexes use them in combat by slashing with them. There is a small diastema between the upper canine and the first premolar (P2), which is smaller and more caniniform than the other premolars. Unlike other lemurs, the first two upper molars (M1 and M2) have prominent lingual cingulae, yet do not have a protostyle. ## Ecology The ring-tailed lemur is diurnal and semi-terrestrial. It is the most terrestrial of lemur species, spending as much as 33% of its time on the ground. However it is still considerably arboreal, spending 23% of its time in the mid-level canopy, 25% in the upper-level canopy, 6% in the emergent layer and 13% in small bushes. Troop travel is 70% terrestrial. Troop size, home range, and population density vary by region and food availability. Troops typically range in size from 6 to 25, although troops with over 30 individuals have been recorded. The average troop contains 13 to 15 individuals. Home range size varies between 6 and 35 hectares (15 and 86 acres). Troops of the ring-tailed lemur will maintain a territory, but overlap is often high. When encounters occur, they are agonistic, or hostile in nature. A troop will usually occupy the same part of its range for three or four days before moving. When it does move, the average traveling distance is 1 km (0.62 mi). Population density ranges from 100 individuals per 1 km<sup>2</sup> (0.39 sq mi) in dry forests to 250–600 individuals per km<sup>2</sup> in gallery and secondary forests. The ring-tailed lemur has both native and introduced predators. Native predators include the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), the Madagascar harrier-hawk (Polyboroides radiatus), the Madagascar buzzard (Buteo brachypterus) and the Madagascar ground boa (Acrantophis madagascariensis). Introduced predators include the small Indian civet (Viverricula indica), the domestic cat and the domestic dog. ### Geographic range and habitat Endemic to southern and southwestern Madagascar, the ring-tailed lemur ranges further into highland areas than other lemurs. It inhabits deciduous forests, dry scrub, montane humid forests, and gallery forests (forests along riverbanks). It strongly favors gallery forests, but such forests have now been cleared from much of Madagascar in order to create pasture for livestock. Depending on location, temperatures within its geographic range can vary from −12 °C (10 °F) at Andringitra Massif to 48 °C (118 °F) in the spiny forests of Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve. This species is found as far east as Tôlanaro, inland towards the mountains of Andringitra on the southeastern plateau, among the spiny forests of the southern part of the island, and north along the west coast to the town of Belo sur Mer. Historically, the northern limits of its range in the west extended to the Morondava River near Morondava. It can still be found in Kirindy Mitea National Park, just south of Morondava, though at very low densities. It does not occur in Kirindy Forest Reserve, north of Morondava. Its distribution throughout the rest of its range is very spotty, with population densities varying widely. The ring-tailed lemur can be easily seen in five national parks in Madagascar: Andohahela National Park, Andringitra National Park, Isalo National Park, Tsimanampetsotse National Park, and Zombitse-Vohibasia National Park. It can also be found in Beza-Mahafaly Special Reserve, Kalambatritra Special Reserve, Pic d'Ivohibe Special Reserve, Amboasary Sud, Berenty Private Reserve, Anja Community Reserve, and marginally at Kirindy Mitea National Park. Unprotected forests that the species has been reported in include Ankoba, Ankodida, Anjatsikolo, Anbatotsilongolongo, Mahazoarivo, Masiabiby, and Mikea. Within the protected regions it is known to inhabit, the ring-tailed lemur is sympatric (shares its range) with as many as 24 species of lemur, covering every living genus except Allocebus, Indri, and Varecia. Historically, the species used to be sympatric with the critically endangered southern black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata editorum), which was once found at Andringitra National Park; however, no sightings of the ruffed lemur have been reported in recent years. In western Madagascar, sympatric ring-tailed lemurs and red-fronted lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) have been studied together. Little interaction takes place between the two species. While the diets of the two species overlap, they eat in different proportions since the ring-tailed lemur has a more varied diet and spends more time on the ground. ### Diet The ring-tailed lemur is an opportunistic omnivore primarily eating fruits and leaves, particularly those of the tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica), known natively as kily. When available, tamarind makes up as much as 50% of the diet, especially during the dry, winter season. The ring-tailed lemur eats from as many as three dozen different plant species, and its diet includes flowers, herbs, bark and sap. It has been observed eating decayed wood, earth, spider webs, insect cocoons, arthropods (spiders, caterpillars, cicadas and grasshoppers) and small vertebrates (birds and chameleons). During the dry season it becomes increasingly opportunistic. ## Behavior ### Social systems Troops are classified as multi-male groups, with a matriline as the core group. As with most lemurs, females socially dominate males in all circumstances, including feeding priority. Dominance is enforced by lunging, chasing, cuffing, grabbing and biting. Young females do not always inherit their mother's rank and young males leave the troop between three and five years of age. Both sexes have separate dominance hierarchies; females have a distinct hierarchy while male rank is correlated with age. Each troop has one to three central, high-ranking adult males who interact with females more than other group males and lead the troop procession with high-ranking females. Recently transferred males, old males or young adult males that have not yet left their natal group are often lower ranking. Staying at the periphery of the group they tend to be marginalized from group activity. For males, social structure changes can be seasonal. During the six-month period between December and May a few males migrate between groups. Established males transfer on average every 3.5 years, although young males may transfer approximately every 1.4 years. Group fission occurs when groups get too large and resources become scarce. In the mornings the ring-tailed lemur sunbathes to warm itself. It faces the sun sitting in what is frequently described as a "sun-worshipping" posture or lotus position. However, it sits with its legs extended outward, not cross-legged, and will often support itself on nearby branches. Sunning is often a group activity, particularly during the cold mornings. At night, troops will split into sleeping parties huddling closely together to keep warm. Despite being quadrupedal the ring-tailed lemur can rear up and balance on its hind legs, usually for aggressive displays. When threatened the ring-tailed lemur may jump in the air and strike out with its short nails and sharp upper canine teeth in a behaviour termed jump fighting. This is extremely rare outside of the breeding season when tensions are high and competition for mates is intense. Other aggressive behaviours include a threat-stare, used to intimidate or start a fight, and a submissive gesture known as pulled-back lips. Border disputes with rival troops occur occasionally and it is the dominant female's responsibility to defend the troop's home range. Agonistic encounters include staring, lunging approaches and occasional physical aggression, and conclude with troop members retreating toward the center of the home range. #### Olfactory communication Olfactory communication is critically important for strepsirrhines like the ring-tailed lemur. Males and females scent mark both vertical and horizontal surfaces at the overlaps in their home ranges using their anogenital scent glands. The ring-tailed lemur will perform a handstand to mark vertical surfaces, grasping the highest point with its feet while it applies its scent. Use of scent marking varies by age, sex and social status. Male lemurs use their antebrachial and brachial glands to demarcate territories and maintain intragroup dominance hierarchies. The thorny spur that overlays the antebrachial gland on each wrist is scraped against tree trunks to create grooves anointed with their scent. This is known as spur-marking. In displays of aggression, males engage in a social display behaviour called stink fighting, which involves impregnating their tails with secretions from the antebrachial and brachial glands and waving the scented tail at male rivals. Ring-tailed lemurs have also been shown to mark using urine. Behaviorally, there is a difference between regular urination, where the tail is slightly raised and a stream of urine is produced, and the urine marking behavior, where the tail is held up in display and only a few drops of urine are used. The urine-marking behavior is typically used by females to mark territory, and has been observed primarily at the edges of the troop's territory and in areas where other troops may frequent. The urine marking behavior also is most frequent during the mating season, and may play a role in reproductive communication between groups. #### Auditory communication The ring-tailed lemur is one of the most vocal primates and has a complex array of distinct vocalizations used to maintain group cohesion during foraging and alert group members to the presence of a predator. Calls range from simple to complex. An example of a simple call is the purr (), which expresses contentment. A complex call is the sequence of clicks, close-mouth click series (CMCS), open-mouth click series (OMCS) and yaps () used during predator mobbing. Some calls have variants and undergo transitions between variants, such as an infant "whit" (distress call) transitioning from one variant to another (). The most commonly heard vocalizations are the moan () (low-to-moderate arousal, group cohesion), early-high wail () (moderate-to-high arousal, group cohesion), and clicks () ("location marker" to draw attention). ### Breeding and reproduction The ring-tailed lemur is polygynandrous, although the dominant male in the troop typically breeds with more females than other males. Fighting is most common during the breeding season. A receptive female may initiate mating by presenting her backside, lifting her tail and looking at the desired male over her shoulder. Males may inspect the female's genitals to determine receptiveness. Females typically mate within their troop, but may seek outside males. The breeding season runs from mid-April to mid-May. Estrus lasts 4 to 6 hours, and females mate with multiple males during this period. Within a troop, females stagger their receptivity so that each female comes into season on a different day during the breeding season, reducing competition for male attention. Females lactate during the wet season, from December through April, when resources are readily available. Females gestate during the dry season, from May through September, when resources are low. Females give birth during seasons where resources, such as flowers, are in peak. Gestation lasts for about 135 days, and parturition occurs in September or occasionally October. In the wild, one offspring is the norm, although twins may occur. Ring-tailed lemur infants have a birth weight of 70 g (2.5 oz) and are carried ventrally (on the chest) for the first 1 to 2 weeks, then dorsally (on the back). The young lemurs begin to eat solid food after two months and are fully weaned after five months. Sexual maturity is reached between 2.5 and 3 years. Male involvement in infant rearing is limited, although the entire troop, regardless of age or sex, can be seen caring for the young. Alloparenting between troop females has been reported. Kidnapping by females and infanticide by males also occur occasionally. Due to harsh environmental conditions, predation and accidents such as falls, infant mortality can be as high as 50% within the first year and as few as 30% may reach adulthood. The longest-lived ring-tailed lemur in the wild was a female at the Berenty Reserve who lived for 20 years. In the wild, females rarely live past the age of 16, whereas the life expectancy of males is not known due to their social structure. The longest-lived male was reported to be 15 years old. The maximum lifespan reported in captivity was 27 years. ### Cognitive abilities and tool use Historically, the studies of learning and cognition in non-human primates have focused on simians (monkeys and apes), while strepsirrhine primates, such as the ring-tailed lemur and its allies, have been overlooked and popularly dismissed as unintelligent. A couple of factors stemming from early experiments have played a role in the development of this assumption. First, the experimental design of older tests may have favored the natural behavior and ecology of simians over that of strepsirrhines, making the experimental tasks inappropriate for lemurs. For example, simians are known for their manipulative play with non-food objects, whereas lemurs are only known to manipulate non-food objects in captivity. This behaviour is usually connected with food association. Also, lemurs are known to displace objects with their nose or mouth more so than with their hands. Therefore, an experiment requiring a lemur to manipulate an object without prior training would favor simians over strepsirrhines. Second, individual ring-tailed lemurs accustomed to living in a troop may not respond well to isolation for laboratory testing. Past studies have reported hysterical behaviour in such scenarios. The notion that lemurs are unintelligent has been perpetuated by the view that the neocortex ratio (as a measure of brain size) indicates intelligence. In fact, primatologist Alison Jolly noted early in her academic career that some lemur species, such as the ring-tailed lemur, have evolved a social complexity similar to that of cercopithecine monkeys, but not the corresponding intelligence. After years of observations of wild ring-tailed lemur populations at the Berenty Reserve in Madagascar and as well as baboons in Africa, she more recently concluded that this highly social lemur species does not demonstrate the equivalent social complexity of cercopithecine monkeys, despite general appearances. Regardless, research has continued to illuminate the complexity of the lemur mind, with emphasis on the cognitive abilities of the ring-tailed lemur. As early as the mid-1970s, studies had demonstrated that they could be trained through operant conditioning using standard schedules of reinforcement. The species has been shown to be capable of learning pattern, brightness, and object discrimination, skills common among vertebrates. The ring-tailed lemur has also been shown to learn a variety of complex tasks often equaling, if not exceeding, the performance of simians. More recently, research at the Duke Lemur Center has shown that the ring-tailed lemur can organize sequences in memory and retrieve ordered sequences without language. The experimental design demonstrated that the lemurs were using internal representation of the sequence to guide their responses and not simply following a trained sequence, where one item in the sequence cues the selection of the next. But this is not the limit of the ring-tailed lemur's reasoning skills. Another study, performed at the Myakka City Lemur Reserve, suggests that this species along with several other closely related lemur species understand simple arithmetic operations. Since tool use is considered to be a key feature of primate intelligence, the apparent lack of this behavior in wild lemurs, as well as the lack of non-food object play, has helped reinforce the perception that lemurs are less intelligent than their simian cousins. However, another study at the Myakka City Lemur Reserve examined the representation of tool functionality in both the ring-tailed lemur and the common brown lemur and discovered that, like monkeys, they used tools with functional properties (e.g., tool orientation or ease of use) instead of tools with nonfunctional features (e.g., color or texture). Although the ring-tailed lemur may not use tools in the wild, it can not only be trained to use a tool, but will preferentially select tools based on their functional qualities. Therefore, the conceptual competence to use a tool may have been present in the common primate ancestor, even though the use of tools may not have appeared until much later. ## Conservation status In addition to being listed as endangered in 2014 by the IUCN, the ring-tailed lemur has been listed since 1977 by CITES under Appendix I, which makes trade of wild-caught specimens illegal. Although there are more endangered species of lemur, the ring-tailed lemur is considered a flagship species due to its recognizability. As of 2017, only about 2,000 ring-tailed lemurs are estimated to be left in the wild, making the threat of extinction far more serious for them than previously believed. Three factors threaten ring-tailed lemurs. First and foremost is habitat destruction. Starting nearly 2,000 years ago with the introduction of humans to the island, forests have been cleared to produce pasture and agricultural land. Extraction of hardwoods for fuel and lumber, as well mining and overgrazing, have also taken their toll. Today, it is estimated that 90% of Madagascar's original forest cover has been lost. Rising populations have created even greater demand in the southwest portion of the island for fuel wood, charcoal, and lumber. Fires from the clearing of grasslands, as well as slash-and-burn agriculture destroy forests. Another threat to the species is harvesting either for food (bushmeat), fur clothing or pets. Finally, periodic drought common to southern Madagascar can impact populations already in decline. In 1991 and 1992, for example, a severe drought caused an abnormally high mortality rate among infants and females at the Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve. Two years later, the population had declined by 31% and took nearly four years to start to recover. The ring-tailed lemur resides in several protected areas within its range, each offering varying levels of protection. At the Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, a holistic approach to in-situ conservation has been taken. Not only does field research and resource management involve international students and local people (including school children), livestock management is used at the peripheral zones of the reserve and ecotourism benefits the local people. Outside of its diminishing habitat and other threats, the ring-tailed lemur reproduces readily and has fared well in captivity. For this reason, along with its popularity, it has become the most populous lemur in zoos worldwide, with more than 2500 in captivity as of 2009. It is also the most common of all captive primates. Ex situ facilities actively involved in the conservation of the ring-tailed lemur include the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina, the Lemur Conservation Foundation in Myakka City, Florida, and the Madagascar Fauna Group headquartered at the Saint Louis Zoo. Due to the high success of captive breeding, reintroduction is a possibility if wild populations were to crash. Although experimental releases have met success on St. Catherines Island in Georgia, demonstrating that captive lemurs can readily adapt to their environment and exhibit a full range of natural behaviors, captive release is not currently being considered. Ring-tailed lemur populations can also benefit from drought intervention, due to the availability of watering troughs and introduced fruit trees, as seen at the Berenty Private Reserve in southern Madagascar. However, these interventions are not always seen favorably, since natural population fluctuations are not permitted. The species is thought to have evolved its high fecundity due to its harsh environment. ## Cultural references The ring-tailed lemur is known locally in Malagasy as maky (pronounced , and spelled maki in French) or hira (pronounced or colloquially ). Being the most widely recognized endemic primate on the island, it has been selected as the symbol for Madagascar National Parks (formerly known as ANGAP). The Maki brand, which started by selling T-shirts in Madagascar and now sells clothing across the Indian Ocean islands, is named after this lemur due to its popularity, even though the company's logo portrays the face of a sifaka and its name uses the French spelling. The first mention of the ring-tailed lemur in Western literature came in 1625 when English traveller and writer Samuel Purchas described them as being comparable in size to a monkey and having a fox-like long tail with black and white rings. Charles Catton included the species in his 1788 book Animals Drawn from Nature and Engraved in Aqua-tinta, calling it the "Maucauco" and regarding it as a type of monkey. A Ring-tailed lemur named Dotty regularly appeared with Jonny Morris on the BBC television programme Animal Magic. The species was further popularized by the Animal Planet television series Lemur Street, as well as by the character King Julien in the animated Madagascar film and TV franchise. The ring-tailed lemur was also the focus of the 1996 Nature documentary A Lemur's Tale, which was filmed at the Berenty Reserve and followed a troop of lemurs. The troop included a special infant named Sapphire, who was nearly albino, with white fur, bright blue eyes, and the characteristic ringed tail. A Ring-tailed lemur played a role in the 1997 comedy film Fierce Creatures, starring John Cleese, who has a passion for lemurs. Cleese later hosted the 1998 BBC documentary In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premier of Fierce Creatures.
262,979	History of Sesame Street	1,173,235,844	null	[ "History of children's television programming in the United States", "Sesame Street" ]	The preschool educational television program Sesame Street was first aired on public television stations on November 10, 1969, and reached its 53rd season in 2022. The history of Sesame Street has reflected changing attitudes to developmental psychology, early childhood education, and cultural diversity. Featuring Jim Henson's Muppets, animation, live shorts, humor and celebrity appearances, it was the first television program of its kind to base its content and production values on laboratory and formative research, and the first to include a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes". Initial responses to the show included adulatory reviews, some controversy and high ratings. By its 40th anniversary in 2009, Sesame Street was broadcast in over 120 countries, and 20 independent international versions had been produced. It has won eleven Grammys and over 150 Emmys in its history—more than any other children's show. The show was conceived in 1966 during discussions between television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Corporation vice president Lloyd Morrisett. Their goal was to create a children's television show that would "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them", such as helping young children prepare for school. After two years of research, the newly formed Children's Television Workshop (CTW) received a combined grant of \$8 million from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the U.S. federal government to create and produce a new children's television show. By the show's tenth anniversary in 1979, nine million American children under the age of six were watching Sesame Street daily, and several studies showed it was having a positive educational impact. The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. In 1981, the federal government withdrew its funding, so the CTW turned to other sources, such as its magazine division, book royalties, product licensing and foreign income. During the 1980s, Sesame Street's curriculum expanded to include topics such as relationships, ethics and emotions. Many of the show's storylines were taken from the experiences of its writing staff, cast and crew, most notably the death of Will Lee—who played Mr. Hooper—and the marriage of Luis and Maria. In recent decades, Sesame Street has faced societal and economic challenges, including changes in the viewing habits of young children, more competition from other shows, the development of cable television and a drop in ratings. After the turn of the 21st century, the show made major structural adaptations, including changing its traditional magazine format to a narrative format. Because of the popularity of the Muppet Elmo, the show incorporated a popular segment known as "Elmo's World". In late 2015, in response to "sweeping changes in the media business", HBO began airing first-run episodes of Sesame Street. Episodes became available on PBS stations and websites nine months after they aired on HBO. As of its 50th anniversary in 2019, Sesame Street has produced over 4,500 episodes, 35 TV specials, 200 home videos, and 180 albums. Its YouTube channel had almost 5 million subscribers, and the show had 24 million followers on social media. ## Background In the late 1960s, 97% of all American households owned a television set, and preschool children watched an average of 27 hours of television per week; programs created for them were widely criticized for being too violent and for reflecting commercial values. Producer Joan Ganz Cooney called children's programming a "wasteland", and she was not alone in her criticism. Many children's television programs were produced by local stations, with little regard for educational goals, or cultural diversity. As writer David Borgenicht stated, the use of children's programming as an educational tool was "unproven" and "a revolutionary concept". According to children's media experts Edward Palmer and Shalom M. Fisch, children's television programs of the 1950s and 1960s duplicated "prior media forms". For example, they tended to show simple shots of a camera's-eye view of a location filled with children, or they recreated storybooks with shots of book covers and motionless illustrated pages. The hosts of these programs were "insufferably condescending", though one exception was Captain Kangaroo, created and hosted by Bob Keeshan, which author Michael Davis described as having a "slower pace and idealism" that most other children's shows lacked. Early childhood educational research had shown that when children were prepared to succeed in school, they earned higher grades and learned more effectively. Children from low-income families had fewer resources than children from higher-income families to prepare them for school. Research had shown that children from low-income, minority backgrounds tested "substantially lower" than middle-class children in school-related skills, and that they continued to have educational deficits throughout school. The field of developmental psychology had grown during this period, and scientists were beginning to understand that changes in early childhood education could increase children's cognitive growth. Because of these trends in education, along with the great societal changes occurring in the United States during this era, the time was ripe for the creation of a show like Sesame Street. ## Pre-production (1966–1969) ### Beginnings Since 1962, Cooney had been producing talk shows and documentaries at educational television station WNDT, and in 1966 had won an Emmy for a documentary about poverty in America. In early 1966, Cooney and her husband Tim hosted a dinner party at their apartment in New York; experimental psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, who has been called Sesame Street's "financial godfather", and his wife Mary were among the guests. Cooney's boss, Lewis Freedman, whom Cooney called "the grandfather of Sesame Street", also attended the party, as did their colleague Anne Bower. As a vice-president at the Carnegie Corporation, Morrisett had awarded several million dollars in grants to organizations that educated poor and minority preschool children. Morrisett and the other guests felt that even with limited resources, television could be an effective way to reach millions of children. A few days after the dinner party, Cooney, Freedman, and Morrisett met at the Carnegie Corporation's offices to make plans; they wanted to harness the addictive power of television for their own purposes, but did not yet know how. The following summer, Morrisett hired her to conduct research on childhood development, education and media, and she visited experts in these fields across the United States and Canada. She researched their ideas about the viewing habits of young children and wrote a report on her findings. Cooney's study, titled "The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education", spelled out how television could be used to help young children, especially from low-income families, prepare for school. The focus on the new show was on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but Cooney and the show's creators recognized that in order to achieve the kind of success they wanted, it had to be equally accessible to children of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, they wanted to make the show so appealing to inner-city children that it would help them learn as much as children with more educational opportunities. Cooney proposed that public television, even though it had a poor track record in attracting inner-city audiences, could be used to improve the quality of children's programming. She suggested using the television medium's "most engaging traits", including high production values, sophisticated writing, and quality film and animation, to reach the largest audience possible. In the words of critic Peter Hellman, "If [children] could recite Budweiser jingles from TV, why not give them a program that would teach the ABCs and simple number concepts?" Cooney wanted to create a program that would spread values favoring education to nonviewers—including their parents and older siblings, who tended to control the television set. To this end, she suggested that humor directed toward adults be included, which, as Lesser reported, "may turn out to be a pretty good system in forcing the young child to stretch to understand programs designed for older audiences". By 2019, 80% of parents watched Sesame Street with their children. ### Development As a result of Cooney's proposal, the Carnegie Corporation awarded her a \$1 million grant in 1968 to establish the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) to provide support to the creative staff of the new show. Morrisett, who was responsible for fundraising, procured additional grants from the United States federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Ford Foundation for the CTW's initial budget, which totaled \$8 million; obtaining funding from this combination of government agencies and private foundations protected the CTW from economic pressures experienced by commercial networks. Sesame Street was an expensive program to produce because the creators decided they needed to compete with other programs that invested in professional, high quality production. The producers spent eighteen months preparing the new show, something unprecedented in children's television. The show had a budget of \$28,000 per episode. After being named executive director of the CTW, Cooney began to assemble a team of producers: Jon Stone was responsible for writing, casting, and format; David Connell took over animation and volume; and Samuel Gibbon served as the show's chief liaison between the production staff and the research team. Stone, Connell, and Gibbon had worked on Captain Kangaroo together, but were not involved in children's television when Cooney recruited them. At first, Cooney planned to divide the show's production of five episodes a week among several teams, but she was advised by CBS vice-president Mike Dann to use only one. This production team was led by Connell, who had gained experience producing many episodes in a short period of time, a process called "volume production", during his eleven years working on Captain Kangaroo. The CTW hired Harvard University professor Gerald S. Lesser to design the show's educational objectives and establish and lead a National Board of Advisers. Instead of providing what Lesser called "window dressing", the Board actively participated in the construction of educational goals and creative methods. At the Board's direction, Lesser conducted five three-day curriculum planning seminars in Boston and New York City in summer 1968. The purpose of the seminars was to ascertain which school-preparation skills to emphasize in the new show. The producers gathered professionals with diverse backgrounds to obtain ideas for educational content. They reported that the seminars were "widely successful", and resulted in long and detailed lists of possible topics for inclusion in the Sesame Street curriculum; in fact, the seminars produced more suggested educational objectives than could ever be addressed by one television series. Instead of focusing on the social and emotional aspects of development, the producers decided to follow the suggestions of the seminar participants and emphasize cognitive skills, a decision they felt was warranted by the demands of school and the wishes of parents. The objectives developed during the seminars were condensed into key categories: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, and the physical and social environment. The seminars set forth the new show's policy about race and social issues and provided the show's production and creative team with "a crash course" in psychology, child development, and early childhood education. They also marked the beginning of Jim Henson's involvement in Sesame Street. Cooney met Henson at one of the seminars; Stone, who was familiar with Henson's work, felt that if they could not bring him on board, they should "make do without puppets". The producers and writers decided to build the new show around a brownstone or an inner-city street, a choice Davis called "unprecedented". Stone was convinced that in order for inner-city children to relate to Sesame Street, it needed to be set in a familiar place. Despite its urban setting, the producers decided to avoid depicting more negativity than what was already present in the child's environment. Lesser commented, "[despite] all its raucousness and slapstick humor, Sesame Street became a sweet show, and its staff maintains that there is nothing wrong in that". The new show was called the "Preschool Educational Television Show" in promotional materials; the producers were unable to agree on a name they liked and waited until the last minute to make a decision. In a short, irreverent promotional film shown to public television executives, the producers parodied their "naming dilemma". The producers were reportedly "frantic for a title"; they finally settled on the name that they least disliked: Sesame Street, inspired by Ali Baba's magical phrase, although there were concerns that it would be too difficult for young children to pronounce. Stone was one of the producers who disliked the name, but, he said, "I was outvoted, for which I'm deeply grateful". The responsibility of casting for Sesame Street fell to Jon Stone, who set out to form a cast where white actors were in the minority. He did not begin auditions until spring 1969, several weeks before five test shows were due to be produced. He filmed the auditions, and Palmer took them into the field to test children's reactions. The actors who received the "most enthusiastic thumbs up" were cast. For example, Loretta Long was chosen to play Susan when the children who saw her audition stood up and sang along with her rendition of "I'm a Little Teapot". Stone reported that casting was the only aspect that was "just completely haphazard". Most of the cast and crew found jobs on Sesame Street through personal relationships with Stone and the other producers. Stone hired Bob McGrath (an actor and singer best known at the time for his appearances on Mitch Miller's sing-along show on NBC) to play Bob, Will Lee to play Mr. Hooper, and Garrett Saunders to play Gordon. ### Use of research in production Sesame Street was the first children's television program that used a curriculum with clear and measurable outcomes, and was the first to use research in the creation of the show's design and content. Research in Sesame Street had three functions: to test if the show was appealing to children, to discover what could be done to make the show more appealing, and to report to the public and the investors what impact the show had on its young viewers. Ten to fifteen percent of the show's initial budget of \$8 million was devoted to research, and researchers were always present in the studio during the show's filming. A "Writer's Notebook" was developed to assist writers and producers in translating the research and production goals into televised material; this connected the show's curriculum goals and its script development. The Muppet characters were created to fill specific curriculum needs: Oscar the Grouch, for example, was designed to teach children about their positive and negative emotions. Lesser called the collaboration between researchers and producers, as well as the idea of using television as an educational tool, the "CTW model". Cooney agreed, commenting, "From the beginning, we—the planners of the project—designed the show as an experimental research project with educational advisers, researchers, and television producers collaborating as equal partners". The producers of Sesame Street believed education through television was possible if they captured and sustained children's attention; this meant the show needed a strong appeal. Edward Palmer, the CTW's first Director of Research and the man Cooney credited with building the CTW's foundation of research, was one of the few academics in the late 1960s researching children's television. He was recruited by the CTW to test if the curricula developed in the Boston seminars were reaching their audience effectively. Palmer was also tasked with designing and executing the CTW's in-house research and with working with the Educational Testing Service (ETS). His research was so crucial to Sesame Street that Gladwell asserted, "... without Ed Palmer, the show would have never lasted through the first season". Palmer and his team's approach to researching the show's effectiveness was innovative; it was the first time formative research was conducted in this way. For example, Palmer developed "the distractor", which he used to test if the material shown on Sesame Street captured young viewers' attention. Two children at a time were brought into the laboratory; they were shown an episode on a television monitor and a slide show next to it. The slides would change every seven seconds, and researchers recorded when the children's attention was diverted away from the episode. They were able to record almost every second of Sesame Street this way; if the episode captured the children's interest 80–90% of the time, the producers would air it, but if it only tested 50%, they would reshoot. By the fourth season of the show, the episodes rarely tested below 85%. ### July 1969 test episodes During the production of Sesame Street's first season, producers created five one-hour episodes to test the show's appeal to children and examine their comprehension of the material. Not intended for broadcast, they were presented to preschoolers in 60 homes throughout Philadelphia and in day care centers in New York City in July 1969. The results were "generally very positive"; children learned from the shows, their appeal was high, and their attention was sustained over the full hour. However, the researchers found that although children's attention was high during the Muppet segments, their interest wavered during the "Street" segments, when no Muppets were on screen. This was because the producers had followed the advice of child psychologists who were concerned that children would be confused if human actors and Muppets were shown together. As a result of this decision, the appeal of the test episodes was lower than the target. The Street scenes, as Palmer described them, were "the glue" that "pulled the show together", so producers knew they needed to make significant changes. On the basis of their experience on Captain Kangaroo, Connell, Stone, and Gibbon thought the experts' opinions were "nonsense"; Cooney agreed. Lesser called their decision to defy the recommendations of their advisers "a turning point in the history of Sesame Street". The producers reshot the Street segments; Henson and his coworkers created Muppets that could interact with the human actors, specifically Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird, who became two of the show's most enduring characters. In addition, the producers found Saunders' role as Gordon not to be as likable by children watching the show, resulting in the character being recast by Matt Robinson, who was initially the show's filmed segments producer. These test episodes were directly responsible for what Gladwell called "the essence of Sesame Street—the artful blend of fluffy monsters and earnest adults". ## Premiere and first season (1969–1970) Two days before the show's premiere, a thirty-minute preview entitled This Way to Sesame Street aired on NBC. The show was financed by a \$50,000 grant from Xerox. Written by Stone and produced by CTW publicist Bob Hatch, it was taped the day before it aired. Newsday called the preview "a unique display of cooperation between commercial and noncommercial broadcasters". The first season of Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969. It was widely praised for its originality, and was well received by parents as well as children. The show reached only 67.6% of the nation, but earned a 3.3 Nielsen rating, meaning 1.9 million households and 7 million children watched it each day. In Sesame Street's first season, the ETS reported that children who watched the show scored higher in tests than less-frequent viewers. In November 1970, the cover of Time magazine featured Big Bird, who had received more fan mail than any of the show's human hosts. The magazine declared, "... It is not only the best children's show in TV history, it is one of the best parents' shows as well". An executive at ABC, while recognizing that Sesame Street was not perfect, said the show "opened children's TV to taste and wit and substance" and "made the climate right for improvement". Other reviewers predicted commercial television would be forced to improve its children's programming, something that did not substantially occur until the 1990s. Sesame Street won a Peabody Award, three Emmys, and the Prix Jeunesse award in 1970. President Richard Nixon sent Cooney a congratulatory letter, and Dr. Benjamin Spock predicted the program would result in "better-trained citizens, fewer unemployables in the next generation, fewer people on welfare, and smaller jail populations". Sesame Street was not without its detractors; there was little criticism of the show in the months following its premiere, but it increased at the end of its first season and beginning of the second season. In May 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to not air the show on the state's newly launched public television network, which at the time had only one station in Jackson. A member of the commission leaked the vote to The New York Times, stating that "Mississippi was not yet ready" for the show's integrated cast. A commercial television station in Jackson picked up the show instead. Cooney called the ban "a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi". The state commission reversed its decision three weeks later after the vote made national news. The producers of Sesame Street made a few changes in its second season. Segments that featured children became more spontaneous and allowed more impromptu dialogue, even when it meant cutting other segments. Since federal funds had been used to produce the show, more segments of the population insisted upon being represented on Sesame Street; for example, the show was criticized by Hispanic groups for the lack of Latino characters in the early years of production. A committee of Hispanic activists, commissioned by the CTW in 1970, called Sesame Street "racist" and said the show's bilingual aspects were of "poor quality and patronizing". The CTW responded to these critics by hiring Hispanic actors, production staff, and researchers. By the mid-70s, Morrow reported that "the show included Chicano and Puerto Rican cast members, films about Mexican holidays and foods, and cartoons that taught Spanish words". While New York Magazine reported criticism of the presence of strong single women in the show, organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) expressed concerns that the show needed to be "less male-oriented". For example, members of NOW took exception to the character Susan, who was originally a housewife. They complained about the lack of, as Morrow put it, "credible female Muppets" on the show; Morrow reported that Henson's response was that "women might not be strong enough to hold the puppets over the long hours of taping". The show's producers responded by making Susan a nurse and by hiring a female writer. ## 1970s By the mid-1970s, Sesame Street, according to Davis, had become "an American institution". ETS conducted two "landmark" studies of the show in 1970 and 1971 which demonstrated Sesame Street had a positive educational impact on its viewers. The results of these studies led to the producers securing funding for the show over the next several years, and provided the CTW with additional ways to promote it. By the second season, Sesame Street had become so popular that the design of ETS' experiments to track the show's educational outcomes had to be changed: instead of comparing viewers with a control group of non-viewers, the researchers studied the differences among levels of viewing. They found that children who watched Sesame Street more frequently had a higher comprehension of the material presented. Producer Jon Stone was instrumental in guiding the show during these years. According to Davis, Stone "gave Sesame Street its soul"; without him "there would not have been Sesame Street as we know it". Frank Oz regarded Stone as "the father of Sesame Street", and Cooney considered Stone "the key creative talent on Sesame Street and "probably the most brilliant writer of children's material in America". Stone was able to recognize and mentor talented people for his crew. He actively hired and promoted women during a time when few women earned top production jobs in television. His policies provided the show with a succession of female producers and writers, many of whom went on to lead the boom in children's programming at Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and PBS in the 1990s and 2000s. One of these women was Dulcy Singer, who later became the first female executive producer of Sesame Street. After the show's initial success, its producers began to think about its survival beyond its development and first season and decided to explore other funding sources. The CTW decided to depend upon government agencies and private foundations to develop the show. This would protect it from the financial pressures experienced by commercial networks, but created problems in finding continued support. This era in the show's history was marked by conflicts between the CTW and the federal government; in 1978, the U.S. Department of Education refused to deliver a \$2 million check until the last day of the CTW's fiscal year. As a result, the CTW decided to depend upon licensing arrangements, publishing, and international sales for its funding. Henson owned the trademarks to the Muppet characters: he was reluctant to market them at first, but agreed when the CTW promised that the profits from toys, books, and other products were to be used exclusively to fund the CTW. The producers demanded complete control over all products and product decisions; any product line associated with the show had to be educational, inexpensive, and not advertised during its airings. The CTW approached Random House to establish and manage a non-broadcast materials division. Random House and the CTW named Christopher Cerf to assist the CTW in publishing books and other materials that emphasized the curriculum. In 1980, the CTW began to produce a touring stage production based upon the show, written by Connell and performed by the Ice Follies. Shortly after the premiere of Sesame Street, the CTW was approached by producers, educators, and officials in other nations, requesting that a version of the show be aired in their countries. Former CBS executive Mike Dann left commercial television to become vice-president of the CTW and Cooney's assistant; Dann began what Charlotte Cole, vice president for the CTW's International Research department, called the "globalization" of Sesame Street. A flexible model was developed, based upon the experiences of the creators and producers of the original show. The shows came to be called "co-productions", and they contained original sets, characters, and curriculum goals. Depending upon each country's needs and resources, different versions were produced, including dubbed versions of the original show and independent programs. By 2016, 39 different coproductions have been created and produced, "each with its own local name, its own Muppets..., and its own educational objectives designed to meet the educational needs of local children". By its 50th anniversary in 2019, 150 million children viewed over 150 versions of Sesame Street in 70 languages. The New York Times reported in 2005 that income from the CTW's international co-productions of the show was \$96 million. Sesame Street's cast expanded in the 1970s, better fulfilling the show's original goal of greater diversity in both human and Muppet characters. The cast members who joined the show were Sonia Manzano (Maria), who also wrote for the show, Northern Calloway (David), Alaina Reed (Olivia), Emilio Delgado (Luis), Linda Bove (Linda), and Buffy Sainte-Marie (Buffy). In 1973, Roscoe Orman became the third actor to play Gordon. New Muppet characters were introduced during the 1970s. Count von Count was created and performed by Jerry Nelson, who also voiced Mr. Snuffleupagus, a large Muppet that required two puppeteers to operate. Richard Hunt, who, in Jon Stone's words, joined the Muppets as a "wild-eyed 18-year-old and grew into a master puppeteer and inspired teacher", created Gladys the Cow, Forgetful Jones, Don Music, and the construction worker Sully. Telly Monster was performed by Brian Muehl; Marty Robinson took over the role in 1984. Frank Oz created Cookie Monster. Matt Robinson created the "controversial" (as Davis called him) character Roosevelt Franklin. Fran Brill, the first female puppeteer for the Muppets, joined the Henson organization in 1970, and originated the character Prairie Dawn. In 1975, Henson created The Muppet Show, which was filmed and produced in London; Henson brought many of the Muppet performers with him, so opportunities opened up for new performers and puppets to appear on Sesame Street. The CTW wanted to attract the best composers and lyricists for Sesame Street, so songwriters like Joe Raposo, the show's music director, and writer Jeff Moss were allowed to retain the rights to the songs they wrote. The writers earned lucrative profits, and the show was able to sustain public interest. Raposo's "I Love Trash", written for Oscar the Grouch, was included on the first album of Sesame Street songs, The Sesame Street Book & Record, recorded in 1970. Moss' "Rubber Duckie", sung by Henson for Ernie, remained on the Top-40 Billboard charts for seven weeks that same year. Another Henson song, written by Raposo for Kermit the Frog in 1970, "Bein' Green", which Davis called "Raposo's best-regarded song for Sesame Street", was later recorded by Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles. "Sing", which became a hit for The Carpenters in 1973, and "Somebody Come and Play", were also written by Raposo for Sesame Street. In 1977 the show became the first to have a depiction of breastfeeding on television. In 1978, Stone and Singer produced and wrote the show's first special, the "triumphant" Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, which included an O Henry-inspired storyline in which Bert and Ernie gave up their prized possessions—Ernie his rubber ducky and Bert his paper clip collection—to purchase each other Christmas gifts. Bert and Ernie were played by Frank Oz and Jim Henson, who in real life were, like the puppets they played, colleagues and friends. To Davis, this demonstrated the puppeteers' remarkable ability to play "puppetry's Odd Couple". In Singer's opinion, the special—which Stone also wrote and directed—demonstrated Stone's "soul", and Sonia Manzano called it a good example of what Sesame Street was all about. The special won Emmys for Stone and Singer in 1979, beating, among others, the independently produced A Special Sesame Street Christmas for CBS. By the show's tenth anniversary in 1979, nine million American children under the age of six were watching Sesame Street daily. Four out of five children had watched it over a six-week period, and 90% of children from low-income inner-city homes regularly viewed the show. ## 1980s In 1984, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deregulated commercial restrictions on children's television. Advertising during network children's programs almost doubled, and deregulation resulted in an increase in commercially oriented programming. Sesame Street was successful during this era of deregulation despite the fact that the United States government terminated all federal funding of the CTW in 1981. By 1987, the show was earning \$42 million per year from its magazine division, book royalties, product licensing, and foreign income—enough to cover two-thirds of its expenses. Its remaining budget, plus a \$6 million surplus, was covered by revenue from its PBS broadcasts. According to Davis, Sesame Street's second decade was spent "turning inward, expanding its young viewers' world". The show's curriculum grew to include more "affective" teaching—relationships, ethics, and positive and negative emotions. Many of the show's storylines were taken from the experiences of its writing staff, cast, and crew. In 1982, Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper since the show's premiere, died. For the 1983 season, the show's producers and research staff decided they would explain Mr. Hooper's death to their preschool audience, instead of recasting the role: the writer of that episode, Norman Stiles, said, "We felt we owed something to a man we respected and loved". They convened a group of psychologists, religious leaders, and other experts in the field of grief, loss, and separation. The research team conducted a series of studies before the episode to ascertain if children were able to understand the messages they wanted to convey about Mr. Hooper's death; the research showed most children did understand. Parents' reactions to the episode were, according to the CTW's own reports, "overwhelmingly positive". The episode, which won an Emmy, aired on Thanksgiving Day in 1983 so parents could be home to discuss it with their children. Author David Borgenicht called the episode "poignant"; Davis called it "a landmark broadcast" and "a truly memorable episode, one of the show's best". Caroll Spinney, who played Big Bird and who drew the caricatures prominently used in the episode, reported the cast and crew were moved to tears during filming. In the mid-1980s, Americans were becoming more aware of the prevalence of child abuse, so Sesame Street's researchers and producers decided to "reveal" Mr. Snuffleupagus in 1985. "Snuffy" had never been seen by any of the adults on the show and was considered Big Bird's "imaginary friend". The show's producers were concerned about the message being sent to children; "If children saw that the adults didn't believe what Big Bird said (even though it was true), they would be afraid to talk to adults about dramatic or disturbing things that happened to them". For the 1988 and 1989 seasons, the topics of love, marriage, and childbirth were addressed when the show presented a storyline in which the characters Luis and Maria fall in love, marry, and have a child named Gabi. Sonia Manzano, the actress who played Maria, had married and become pregnant; according to the book Sesame Street Unpaved, published after the show's thirtieth anniversary in 1999, Manzano's real-life experiences gave the show's writers and producers the idea. Before writing began, research was done to gain an understanding of what previous studies had revealed about preschoolers' understanding of love, marriage, and family. The show's staff found that at the time that there was very little relevant research done about children's understanding of these topics, and no books for children had been written about them. Studies done after the episodes about Maria's pregnancy aired showed that as a result of watching these episodes, children's understanding of pregnancy increased. ## 1990s Davis called the 1990s a "time of transition on Sesame Street". Several people involved in the show from its beginnings died during this period: Jim Henson in 1990 at the age of 53 "from a runaway strep infection gone stubbornly, foolishly untreated"; songwriter Joe Raposo from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma fifteen months earlier; long-time cast member Northern Calloway of cardiac arrest in January 1990; puppeteer Richard Hunt of AIDS in early 1992; CTW founder and producer David Connell of bladder cancer in 1995; director Jon Stone of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1997; and writer Jeff Moss of colon cancer in 1998. By the early 1990s, Sesame Street was, as Davis put it, "the undisputed heavyweight champion of preschool television". Parade Magazine reported in 2019 that the show's music had been honored with 11 children's Grammys. The show's dominance however, was challenged for the first time by another PBS television show for preschoolers, Barney & Friends, causing Sesame Street's ratings to decline. The producers of Sesame Street responded, at the show's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1993, by expanding and redesigning the show's set, calling it "Around the Corner". With Michael Loman as the new executive producer of the show, new human and Muppet characters were introduced, including Zoe (performed by Fran Brill), baby Natasha and her parents Ingrid and Humphrey, and Ruthie (played by comedian Ruth Buzzi). The "Around the Corner" set was dismantled in 1998. Zoe, one of the few characters that survived, was created to include another female Muppet on the show, to break stereotypes of girls, and to provide female viewers with a positive role model. According to Davis, she was the first character developed on the show by marketing and product development specialists, who worked with the researchers at the CTW. (The quest for a "break-out" female Muppet character continued into 2006 with the creation of Abby Cadabby, who was created after nine months of research.) In 1998, for the first time in the show's history, Sesame Street pursued funding by accepting corporate sponsorship. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader urged parents to protest the move by boycotting the show. For Sesame Street's 30th anniversary in 1999, its producers researched the reasons for the show's lower ratings. For the first time since the show debuted, the producers and a team of researchers analyzed Sesame Street's content and structure during a series of two-week-long workshops. They also studied how children's viewing habits had changed since the show's premiere. They found that although Sesame Street was produced for three- to five-year-olds, children began watching it at a younger age. Preschool television had become more competitive, and the CTW's research showed the traditional magazine format was not the best way to attract young children's attention. The growth of home videos during the 1980s and the increase of thirty-minute children's shows on cable had demonstrated that children's attention could be sustained for longer periods of time, but the CTW's researchers found that their viewers, especially the younger ones, lost attention in Sesame Street after 40 to 45 minutes. Beginning in 1998, a new 15-minute segment shown at the end of each episode, "Elmo's World", used traditional elements (animation, Muppets, music, and live-action film), but had a more sustained narrative. "Elmo's World" followed the same structure each episode, and depended heavily on repetition. Unlike the realism of the rest of the show, the segment took place in a stylized crayon-drawing universe as conceived by its host. Elmo, who represented the three- to four-year-old child, was chosen as host of the closing segment because he had always tested well with this segment of their audience. He was created in 1980 and originally performed by Brian Muehl, and later Richard Hunt, but did not become what his eventual portrayer, Kevin Clash, called a "phenomenon" until Clash took over the role in 1985. Eventually, Elmo became, as Davis reported, "the embodiment" of Sesame Street, and "the marketing wonder of our age" when five million "Tickle Me Elmo" dolls were sold in 1996. Clash believed the "Tickle Me Elmo" phenomenon made Elmo a household name and led to the "Elmo's World" segment. ## 2000s In 2000, the Children's Television Workshop changed its name to Sesame Workshop to better reflect its entry into non-television and interactive media. In 2002, Sesame Street's producers went further in changing the show to reflect its younger demographic by fundamentally changing the show's structure, which had relied on "Street scenes" interrupted by live-action videos and animation. The target age for Sesame Street shifted downward, from four years to three years, after the show's 33rd season. As co-executive producer Arlene Sherman stated, "We basically deconstructed the show". The producers expanded upon the "Elmo's World" by changing from a magazine format to a narrative format, which made the show easier for young children to navigate. Sherman called the show's new look "startlingly different". Following its tradition of addressing emotionally difficult topics, Sesame Street's producers chose to address the attacks of 9/11 during this season on its premiere episode, which aired February 4, 2002. This episode, as well as a series of four episodes that aired after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, were used in Sesame Workshop's Community Outreach program. In 2006, the United States Department of State called Sesame Street "the most widely viewed children's television show in the world". Over half of the show's international co-productions were made after 2001; according to the 2006 documentary The World According to Sesame Street, the events of 9/11 inspired the producers of these co-productions. In 2003, Takalani Sesame, a South African co-production, elicited criticism in the United States when its producers created Kami, the first HIV-positive Muppet, whose purpose was educating children in South Africa about the epidemic of AIDS. The controversy, which surprised Sesame Workshop, was short-lived and died down after Kofi Annan and Jerry Falwell praised the Workshop's efforts. By 2006, Sesame Street had won more Emmy Awards than any other children's show, including winning the outstanding children's series award for twelve consecutive years—every year the Emmys included the category. By 2009, the show had won 118 Emmys throughout its history, and was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Emmy for its 40 years on the air. The 2008–2009 recession, which led to budget cuts for many nonprofit arts organizations, severely affected Sesame Street; in spring 2009, Sesame Workshop had to lay off 20% of its staff. By the show's 40th anniversary, it was ranked the fifteenth most popular children's show on television. When the show premiered in 1969, 130 episodes a year were produced; starting in 2003, because of rising costs, twenty-six episodes were made. According to the Hollywood Reporter, corporate funding "dried up" and DVD sales "bottomed up". Also by 2009, Sesame Workshop started a new website containing a large library of classic and more recent free video clips, as well as a series of podcasts. Starting in 2009, the producers of Sesame Street took steps to bring back older viewers; it was also successful in increasing its audience viewership among 3- to 5-year-olds by the end of the 40th season. In 2012, the show's 43rd season, Elmo's World was replaced with Elmo the Musical, which was targeted at the program's older viewers. ## 2010s In October 16, 2011, Sesame Street'''s YouTube channel was compromised by hackers that deleted the entire channel's uploaded videos and replaced them with pornographic content. The channel was closed down in less than 30 minutes by YouTube due to "repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines". In 2014, in response to increased online and mobile viewing and to the increase in competition from other preschool programs, Sesame Workshop and PBS began producing, airing, and streaming a half-hour version of the program. The hour-long version continued to air on PBS in the mornings and the new version, which consisted of fewer segments, aired in the afternoons, when more children watched television. PBS also began to stream full-length episodes on its website, mobile app, and Roku channel. Also in 2014, Sesame Workshop began an online streaming subscription service called Sesame Go, which aired both old and new episodes of the show. In late 2015, as part of a five-year programming and development deal, it was announced that premium television service HBO would air first-run episodes of Sesame Street. Episodes became available on PBS stations and websites nine months after they aired on HBO. The move came after "sweeping changes in the media business". Sesame Street was operating at a loss of \$11 million in 2014; according to the Hollywood Reporter in 2019, it was one of the reasons for the move to HBO the following year. The deal allowed Sesame Workshop to produce more episodes, about 35 new episodes per season, compared to the 18 episodes per season it aired previously, and provided the opportunity to create a spinoff series with the Sesame Street Muppets and a new educational series. Steve Youngwood, SW's Chief Operating Officer, called the move "one of the toughest decisions we ever made". According to The New York Times, the move "drew an immediate backlash". Critics claimed that it favored privileged children over less-advantaged children and their families, the original focus of the show. They also criticized choosing to air first-run episodes on HBO, a network with adult dramas and comedies. In 2017, in response to the changing viewing habits of toddlers, the show's producers decreased its length of episodes presented on all platforms from one hour to thirty minutes, focused on fewer characters, reduced the pop culture references "once included as winks for their parents", and focused "on a single backbone topic". In April 2017, Sesame Street introduced Julia, the first Muppet with autism. Her puppeteer, Stacey Gordon, is the mother of an autistic son. The character had already been featured in digital and printed storybooks since 2015. As of its 50th anniversary in 2019, Sesame Street has produced over 4,500 episodes, 35 TV specials, 200 home videos, and 180 albums. Its YouTube channel had almost 5 million subscribers, and the show had 24 million followers on social media. As part of its 50th anniversary PR campaign, Sesame Street conducted a traveling show, featuring some Muppets, between February and December 2019. The "unofficial slogan" of the show's anniversary was "50 Years and Counting", which Underwood called "a nod that we are still going strong". ## 2020s In 2020, CNN had aired a few town hall segments with Sesame Street'' characters to help children understand difficult topics during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.
1,415,027	David Berman (musician)	1,162,877,967	American musician, singer, and poet (1967–2019)	[ "1967 births", "2019 deaths", "2019 suicides", "21st-century American Jews", "21st-century American male writers", "21st-century American poets", "American male singer-songwriters", "Berman family", "Drag City (record label) artists", "Greenhill School alumni", "Jewish American musicians", "Jewish rock musicians", "Musicians from Charlottesville, Virginia", "People from Dallas County, Texas", "People from Park Slope", "Poets from Virginia", "Silver Jews members", "Singer-songwriters from Texas", "Singer-songwriters from Virginia", "Suicides by hanging in New York City", "University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets & Writers alumni", "University of Virginia alumni" ]	David Cloud Berman (born David Craig Berman; January 4, 1967 – August 7, 2019) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and poet. In 1989, he founded the indie rock band Silver Jews with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. He was Silver Jews' only constant member until the band dissolved in 2009. With Malkmus he developed the simple country-rock sound that characterized the early lo-fi recordings of both Pavement and Silver Jews. His creative priority was his abstract and autobiographical lyrics, which he labored over extensively. His only published volume of poetry, Actual Air, appeared in 1999, by which time heroin and crack cocaine addictions loomed large. His struggle with substance abuse, depression and anxiety overcame his career, and he attempted suicide in 2003. Afterward, he underwent rehabilitation, and engaged with Judaism. Alongside his wife Cassie Berman he toured for the first time, though soon dissolved the band. Returning to music following a hiatus, he later adopted the band name Purple Mountains and released an eponymous debut album in July 2019. Although he had planned a tour to pay off a \$100,000 credit card debt, he died by suicide in August 2019. Although Berman believed his work was unappreciated, he cultivated a passionate following and is regarded as a significant and influential indie rock cult figure. ## Biography ### Early life David Craig Berman was born on January 4, 1967, in Williamsburg, Virginia. At that time, his father Richard Berman worked as an attorney practicing labor law for the United States Chamber of Commerce, while his mother was a housewife. He came from a secular Jewish family, who he said had no literary or artistic inclinations. Raised mostly in Texas, he did not personally know or interact with many other Jews. He later said he had identified with Jews because he "felt like an outsider" in his youth. For most of his life Berman identified as "ethnically Jewish" but not religious. His mother had undergone conversion to Judaism without the supervision of an Orthodox rabbi, and for that reason neither she nor he would be considered Jews under certain criteria. Berman's parents divorced when he was seven. Thereafter, he split time between each parent's household until he entered college. His father relocated to Dallas for a position as a lobbyist on behalf of foodservice businesses, while his mother moved back in with her parents in Wooster, Ohio, and became a teacher there. He later described his childhood as "grindingly painful" and said he kept "mostly independent of family things" into his adulthood. While he was an adolescent, his father rose to prominence as a corporate lobbyist representing firearms, alcohol, and other industries. Berman came to dislike his father at an early age. He was compelled to live with his father after 1979, despite his wishes to the contrary, because of concern he was "growing up to be a wimp". He attended high school at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. During his teenage years, his father sent him to see a psychiatrist. Berman suffered from depression throughout his life and later said the condition had become resistant to treatment. By the age of 15, he said he began taking "every drug in every way", and claimed to have smoked PCP on a daily basis during his second year of college. For Berman, the burgeoning new wave scene in Dallas served as an early source of musical inspiration. He took an interest in a friend's rare Fairlight keyboard, and in the music of bands like Art of Noise, Prefab Sprout, X, the Replacements, the Cure, New Order, and Echo and the Bunnymen. In high school, he began experimenting with poetry by writing to girlfriends, considering the line "A cartoon lake. Wolf on skates" to be his first true foray into poetry. Berman hoped that his poetry would resemble the lyrics of punk singers Jello Biafra and Exene Cervenka. He read Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion when he was 14: "It gave me permission to enjoy life". Reading significantly in his life, Berman said, reinforced his empathy, especially for those also troubled; he cited William Faulkner as an influence of his. Berman went to the University of Virginia in 1985. He had been—by his own admission—"too lazy" to apply for college, so his father's secretary completed and submitted applications on his behalf. At university, Berman met fellow students Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, and James McNew. He frequently attended concerts, shared records, and discussed obscure bands with Malkmus and Nastanovich, having first encountered the former in a carpool to a show. The quartet formed the band Ectoslavia. He graduated in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. ### Origin of Silver Jews: 1989–1994 Upon graduation, Berman, Malkmus, and Nastanovich moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they shared an apartment. In 1989, they adopted the band name Silver Jews and recorded discordant tapes in their living room – that same year, Malkmus' band Pavement released their debut extended play (EP), Slay Tracks: 1933–1969. The Whitney Museum of American Art – where Malkmus and Berman worked as security guards – and its contents (such as the art of Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherri Levine and Louise Lawler) was an influence to Berman. He wrote lyrics and poems while working shifts at the museum, occasionally in collaboration with Malkmus, who along with Berman would "get high" at Central Park on their lunch breaks. According to Berman's longtime friend Kevin Guthrie, Malkmus and Berman had a harmonious friendship, and Nastanovich revered both artists' creativity. "It was mostly drinking beer and seeing grunge bands" Malkmus said regarding this time period and recalled that Berman appeared as a somewhat "scary goth" but was kind and enthusiastic, strongly desiring to be involved with Jewish culture. Though Berman sometimes felt irritated by a common view that Silver Jews were merely a side project to Pavement, the connection led to his signing with indie label Drag City, which would later release all of his albums. The band's relation to Pavement was responsible for them amassing a "national audience", a notice great enough that the resulting sales meant Berman did not have to tour. The band's first extended-plays (EPs) Dime Map of the Reef and The Arizona Record were not commercially successful but gained them attention. Kim Gordon was an admirer and Will Oldham said Dime Map of the Reef inspired him to send recordings to Drag City. Following the EPs, Berman began studying for a master's degree in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dubbing this time an "academic exile", Matthew Shaer, in a 2006 Boston Globe article, speculated that Berman's extended time studying may have been an attempt to distance himself from Pavement. Three years earlier, Berman reflected upon his time there: after "meet[ing] grown dignified men who play with fucking words all day," he felt he had "permission to believe that I could try for that life". He tried to get poems published in the American Poetry Review but was rejected, which increased his interest in music, "despite scarcely knowing how to sing or play guitar". As of 2005, Berman's public appearances mostly consisted of poetry readings. By October 1994, Silver Jews had enough material for their debut album Starlite Walker. The release established respect in the indie rock scene, although with some detractors. Malkmus and Nastanovich's involvement with Pavement meant they were unavailable for the next Silver Jews album The Natural Bridge, and only Berman and Peyton Pinkerton continued writing for it. Pavement's success proved difficult for Berman, who became suspicious of fame and resented the people with whom he interacted, deeming them "cruel". He felt somewhat abandoned by Malkmus and Nastanovich, although he understood the circumstances permitted little else. Berman's personal life was affected by the deaths of friends, which would influence his songwriting. A close friendship between Oldham and Berman arose at this time and the two conceptualized a collaborative project, entitled Silver Palace. Silver Jews was part of a "moment in underground music" of songwriters who looked to the 1970s and 1980s for inspiration, and were one of Drag City's seminal groups alongside Smog, Pavement, Royal Trux, and Palace, bands that "made American music frightening again by tapping into its most tangled roots". Berman wished to "distinguish his brand of songwriting from the depressive-narcissistic strain of 1990s rock" and later sought to break away from Drag City's "cryptic and prankish" style. The line-up of Silver Jews constantly changed around Berman, who remained its principal songwriter and "main creative driver" and led the band's creative direction since the start. "Malkmus and Nastanovich [were] there to serve his ideas more than offer their own," said Ian Gormely of Exclaim!. ### Critical acclaim and substance abuse: 1996–2001 The composition of The Natural Bridge (1996) left Berman distraught; he appeared to be "haunted by ghosts" and was hospitalized with sleep deprivation. "When the songs were being recorded, things got darker in my life", he recollected, also noting that "recording was a process of calming myself down"—although doing so was so "searing that I couldn't listen to music". According to Oldham, the album's producer Mark Nevers "had sort of held Berman's hand". Although it received positive reviews in music publications—Berman having now "established himself as a world-class rock lyricist"—he chose not to tour due to a fear of performing. During this time, Berman thought of touring as too significant a commitment and considered the stress to be intolerable. Playing live appeared to him as "like some unnecessary post-invention marketing effort" and had not elicited much "satisfaction" when he had done so. After The Natural Bridge, Berman decided he wanted Malkmus and Nastanovich, both of whom felt betrayed by Berman's hostility toward them, to be involved with all subsequent Silver Jews albums. The pain that Berman felt around The Natural Bridge helped him to formulate a new Silver Jews album with Malkmus, American Water. It was significant to Berman and the band's progression. They had now "stepped out of Pavement's shadow ... This was clearly his project and represented his vision", his songwriting having been at the foreground of the former album. By this point he felt confident in his musical career. Berman's drug use continued, and he was using them during studio sessions. Despite his personal turmoil, Berman wanted the album to be joyous like "other people['s] records" rather than grim. The band intended to tour in late 1998 but plans were ended after a fistfight led to his eardrum rupturing. Actual Air, Berman's first collection of poetry was released in 1999 by Open City Books, which had been founded to publish the collection. Actual Air amassed critical acclaim—Carl Wilson called it "even better than [Berman's] albums". The book's unusually high sales of over 20,000 copies bolstered Berman's musical career. Its marketing was akin to that of an album, which contributed to its success; Drag City and record stores were the avenues from which a "significant portion of those sales" arose. In 2001, he was offered a job as poet-in-residence on a postgraduate course. The prospect thrilled Berman; however, he chose not to apply out of apprehension. Four years later, when asked in an interview if he would accept a lecturing role at university, he expressed uncertainty on genuinely taking an offer: "I should stay away from the rock clubs and the English departments if I can." Although he did publish some poems afterward—his poetry is featured in journals such as The Baffler, Open City and The Believer—and had reported working on a follow-up, Actual Air remained his only book of poetry. In his later years, Berman stopped writing poetry because of diminished motivation and a feeling of partial inadequacy in comparison to younger poets; another collection failed to materialize due to a lack of purpose and innovation. By 2003, his perception of songwriting and poetry as unified was no more, and felt that older age rendered him less capable of working in both mediums. "Poetry can never counter-propaganda. A song might be able to." Around this time, Berman, who no longer "[had] to work", estimated he made \$23,000 a year; by 2001, he earned \$45,000 from his music. That year saw the release of the Silver Jews album Bright Flight, which featured his wife Cassie Berman. Their relationship started two years earlier at a party; Berman awoke in Cassie's house and learned she owned every Silver Jews album. "I was really depressed and had nothing to lose at that time. I was so ugly". Cassie was a source of relief for Berman and she helped him feel young, Berman later considering their relationship the "best thing that ever happened to me". They lived together in Nashville for 19 years, where they moved to aid Berman's music career; later buying a house there alleviated quandaries for Berman; it was a relief to Berman to live in a city where he felt pursuing a career in music was well accepted. Berman began to take hard drugs in 1998, during a period of depression. He began to take heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine, with his use of the latter reaching the point of addiction; he sought existential insight from drugs but eventually his dependency led to reculsion and dejection. Several of Berman's friends died in the years that followed, including Robert Bingham, the founder and editor of Open City, who died in 1999 after a heroin overdose. Berman twice unintentionally overdosed; one incident followed the release party for Bright Flight. That album's darker sound reflected his struggles with substance abuse. ### Attempted suicide, rehabilitation and career progression: 2003–2008 On November 19, 2003, Berman attempted suicide in Nashville by consuming crack cocaine, alcohol and tranquilizers. He wrote a short note to Cassie—the brevity of which Berman would later regret—put on his wedding suit, and went to a "crack house" he frequented. When discovered by Cassie, he verbally lashed out and refused treatment. He was eventually taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, awakening three days later. Around a year later, Berman checked in for drug rehabilitation, which was paid for by his father, and encouraged by his mother and Cassie. Berman said he had relapsed but that by August 2005 he was not using drugs. During his rehabilitation, Berman embraced Judaism, choosing to study the Torah and sought to be a "better person" who was "easier" to Cassie and staff at Drag City; he would soon consider Judaism as an integral aspect of his life, which he intended to continuously labor over. Reading the Torah helped him learn more about poetry; David, described in the Hebrew Bible as a king of the United Monarchy of Israel and Judah, was also an influence of Berman's. He described Judaism as having an affirmative effect on his life. Reflecting upon his suicide attempt, five years later, Berman noted that he was not unprivileged and without career opportunities, although this was not evident to him at the time. He began to excessively take antidepressants, and his sobriety made him more receptive to candidness. In 2005, and by means of "saving [himself]", Silver Jews, with a lineup including Cassie, Malkmus, Nastanovich, Bobby Bare Jr., Paz Lenchantin, and William Tyler, released Tanglewood Numbers. Soon after, the band began to tour, with 100 shows from 2006 to 2009 taking place; to cope with the hectic nature, he became "a daily pot smoker". Before Berman toured, he occasionally made caricatures of fans, considering them more rewarding. By this time, Silver Jews had sold 250,000 records. Berman and Cassie still experienced financial difficulties; Cassie worked an office job and Berman struggled to get medical insurance for the removal of a keratoconus, eventually acquiring it from the Country Music Association. In 2005, Jeremy Blake enlisted Berman for Sodium Fox, a conceptual artwork centered around Berman. Blake's suicide and Berman's eye operation would affect the next Silver Jews album—before the operation Berman reported feeling "less aggressive and less tenacious". Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea was released in 2008 to lukewarm reviews. The album was their most commercially successful. Berman's decision to tour, no longer dependent on drugs, was based upon his greater age, his expanded discography, and a desire to interact with his audience, which resultingly "softened his naturally gruff exterior". Berman found touring with Cassie eased the experience, of which he had mixed feelings. He considered her a necessary component, and noted that if he was alone he would likely act to his detriment. ### Hiatus from music: 2009–2017 On January 22, 2009, Berman disbanded Silver Jews, and their final show was played the following week at Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, Tennessee. "I always said we would stop before we got bad", and during the performance at Cumberland Caverns, claimed that "I always wanted to go out on top, but I much prefer this". According to Nashville Scene's Sean L. Maloney, due to Silver Jews' impact on Nashville's mid-2000s music scene, the final show meant "a chapter in this city's artistic evolution closed". Alongside the news of the band's dissolution, Berman publicly announced, for the first time, that his father was the lobbyist Richard Berman, who he viewed as markedly loathsome and from whom he had been estranged since 2006. Berman reported owing Richard money, and once donated to a supposed investigation of Richard, initiated by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who called upon the Internal Revenue Service's intervention. Upon considering the commercialization of modern musicians, he began to see his and Richard's lives intertwining; Berman's guilt about his father and said consideration were the reasons he retired Silver Jews, saying: > This winter I decided that [Silver Jews] were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused ... Previously I thought through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world, but there is the matter of Justice. And I'll tell you it's not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns. It hurts. There needs to be something more. After Silver Jews disbanded, Berman became a recluse. The "hermit, solitary aspect to the way [Berman] live[d]" predated this time, according to a 2008 interview—and Nastanovich reflected two years earlier that Berman had "gotten more reclusive". In 2005, posed with the question of whether he had chosen between vulgarity or loneliness, Berman said "it's been loneliness up till now but it looks like things are changing for the better/worse". His public perception became intertwined with fiction—significant speculation upon the events of his suicide attempt had reportedly occurred before this time. His seclusion, according to Stephen Hyden of Uproxx, constructed a perceived "mythology". Berman published a 2009 book of surreal, minimalist cartoons called The Portable February to mixed reviews. He would later work with German artist Friedrich Kunath on the book You Owe Me a Feeling (2012), which features paintings and poetry by Kunath and Berman, respectively. Cassie sought a career in pediatric therapy. In 2010, he spoke about his difficulties with writing a book about his father—seeking to become his "nemesis"; HBO nearly adapted the book, but Berman canceled production, saying he did not want to glamorize his father. In an article about Berman, Derek Robertson said that a significant amount of his personal life was an "explicit rebuke" to Richard and an attempt to evade institutional power—Thomas Beller interpreted Berman's disdain as both political and personal. By 2016, Berman had experienced the deaths of both his friend Dave Cloud and his mother, which compelled him to adopt the middle name Cloud and write the song "I Loved Being My Mother's Son", respectively. He was still in contact with Malkmus and maintained a close relationship with Silver Jews drummer Brian Kotzur. According to Nastanovich, at one point Berman intended to write new Silver Jews songs; he ultimately became more interested in a new style. As noted by Jewish Currents' Nathan Goldman, Berman soon "inaugurated...a different artistic phase with a series of songs about the disappointments of expectations unfulfilled", contrasting the "odes to the open field of possibility" that closely proceeded the Silver Jews' conclusion. ### Purple Mountains and death: 2018–2019 In 2018, Berman and Cassie separated. Lacking money and living off royalties from Drag City, from June he lived in a room above the label's Chicago office. According to Berman, they "never had the kind of conflict that results in divorce" but had a "kind of need to live [their] lives without the other one". Berman thought his chronic depression meant he was "unfit to be anyone's husband". He and Cassie maintained a shared bank account and owned a house together, while he considered her an integral part of his family. He briefly lived in Miller Beach and Gary, Indiana. At one point, he asked a friend to give him heroin but was refused, for which he was ultimately grateful, having not used heroin or cocaine since October 2003. He had grown disillusioned with Judaism, saying his belief in God lasted from 2004 to 2010; in 2008 he voiced a disconnect from Judaism, positioning himself as adjacent to Jews. In his withdrawal, he "[fixed] himself in Jewish tradition", said Goldman and Arielle Angel of Jewish Currents, viewing Berman as archetypal of Jews. His once-passion for Judaism made him eager to tour Israel; there he met Yonatan Gat and helped get him signed to Drag City—"[The] shows we played in Israel were pretty much the most amazing experience of my life". In 2018, Berman co-produced Gat's album Universalists. By that year, Berman had conceptualized a more conspicuous return to music: a new moniker, entitled Purple Mountains. Following the release of two singles under his new moniker, an eponymous debut album was released in July 2019. An "instantly mythologized" album, Berman received heightened attention and very positive reviews: "Purple Mountains looked like the start to an unexpected second act for David Berman". Berman worked on Purple Mountains with Woods and Berman's friend Dan Auerbach, with whom he had worked in 2015; Auerbach called Berman "one of [his] heroes". Berman's financial difficulties, the breakdown of his marriage, and encouragement from Drag City's president Dan Koretzky were impetuses for Berman's new music. Berman hoped to resolve the \$100,000 of loan and credit card debt he had amassed as a result of his drug use; in a 2005 interview, he said: "I've got a credit card rotisserie system that would dazzle the ancients". He stated this was the only reason he intended to tour. Berman discussed the idea of a collaborative tour with Bill Callahan and Oldham, which ultimately did not occur. He expressed worries about the tour and notified the accompanying band that his depression may interfere but was excited for his "solitude to end". In June 2019, Berman said: "There were probably 100 nights over the last 10 years where I was sure I wouldn't make it to the morning". Berman died on August 7, 2019, having hanged himself in an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. It is unclear whether Berman's suicide was spontaneous or deliberated upon; according to The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dan DeLuca: "The warning signs were all over Purple Mountains". Will Reisman of SF Weekly reflected that by the time of Purple Mountains' release, Berman appeared as a "grim visage...Tinted sunglasses covered a set of weary, stricken eyes, his neck-length hair was thinning and reedy, and a pursed, lifeless expression graced [his] face". A private funeral attended by "Friends and family, along with the Jewish community" took place on August 16; a memorial, by filmmaker Lance Bangs at New York's Met Breuer Museum, the former location of the Whitney, was held earlier. ## Artistry ### Lyrics Having given up on albums because he was unable to complete the lyrics, Berman spent most of his creative time working on the lyrics, to the point of obsession; Koretzky reportedly saw Berman spend months working on a single line. Berman's process involved considering his audience's understanding; he juxtaposed his abstract lyrics with simple melodies and rhyme schemes. He recalled a disconnect to his audience—"an indie rock crowd"—while writing Bright Flight due to the dysfunctional lives of his associates. Berman deemed all of this a "major problem". He had a didactic approach with Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, wanting to give "instructions" on forgoing depression with the former. Mark Richardson, writing for Pitchfork, and Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times, noted Berman's proficiency for minimalist compression. Berman's songs often use country music tropes and his themes tend to focus on music, nature, beauty, disconnection, drugs, sports, America and god. An influence on his writing, Berman thought highly of America although hoped for a "redemption". His artistic perception of America has been noted as idiosyncratic, narrow and poignant, while forlornness often arose as humor. Religion is a recurring element in Silver Jews albums, while Purple Mountains evokes Jewish mysticism. From Bright Flight onwards, his lyrics became more autobiographical, in a dramatic framework, and he came to view the preceding works as "make-believe"; on Tanglewood Numbers he documented his struggle with substance abuse. Roberts called Purple Mountains "nearly as autobiographical as a memoir". Berman discussed his isolation, divorce—Silver Jews songs about Cassie having been plentiful—and death, which had a particular presence. By this point, his music had less humor, misdirection, irony or embellishment; he was interested in being direct. On the Silver Jews albums, Berman represented his alienation via substitutes, his characters composed of traits originating from either real-life people, fictional characters or archetypes. His fictional narratives often start relatively straightforwardly and then become bizarre; the songs of American Water conjure an "absurdist landscape" and "grow more obtuse in proportion to tunefulness". His stories present a literary aesthetic that is "equal parts rural shack and gothic zen" and his characters often reside in "half-empty country-and-western bars and backwater burgs". Having found a wider audience with Actual Air, Berman's lyrics were held to a higher standard; and he has been praised for diverging from his peers. His lyrics have been credited as being influential for indie rock and other musicians. Pitchfork deemed him one of "the most influential" musicians of the quarter-century following the publication's launch in 1996. ### Sound Silver Jews' early work is defined by an ultra lo-fi aesthetic, starting as ostensibly "avant-gardist" within the framework of "traditional" pop songs. Their work before Starlite Walker is "regarded as the lowest fidelity recordings of the first lo-fi movement". The changing line-up influenced the sound, Berman's musical approach became simplified and the band moved further towards a country sound; Purple Mountains eschewed the previous punk rock strand. Purple Mountains is Berman's most direct, conventional album, said Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic, although all of Berman's discography is relatively conventional. Berman's vocal delivery has been identified as brusque, dry and mostly uninflected—his register was described as baritone and he would concurrently sing and speak. Reviewing Starlite Walker for The Guardian, Jonathan Romney described Berman's approach as "whiny, archetypally slackerish" with "vaguely country inflections"—the early country aspects being mostly humorous. Silver Jews' songs were often sparse, usually with three or four chords, of novice difficulty. Berman understood his musical abilities were limited, the lo-fi sound initially obscuring his abilities. For a while, he wondered as to why he was without natural talent, eventually renouncing his creative insecurity and becoming assertive in his design. Berman spent significant time without playing his guitar and said his process of creating albums began with conceptualization and then daily refinement, typically writing the music first. For the first four Silver Jews albums, Berman wrote all the songs. Malkmus and Berman had differing approaches and were "longtime musical foil[s]". With Tanglewood Numbers, Berman exercised greater care and control—Shaer observed soon after its release that the album "represents Berman's most comprehensive effort to focus his songwriting" with Tom Ridge, writing for The Wire, noting that it showcased distance from similarities between Silver Jews and Pavement. Cassie and Berman "shared a brightening chemistry", the former's calm disposition onstage provided stability to Berman's electric presence. Everett True and Berman concurred that he was a natural performer. Berman also performed in a rigid manner, reading sheet music "like it's a literary reading"; Marc Hirsh of the Boston Globe said Berman used a music stand to create a barrier between himself and the audience. Cassie compared Berman's early showmanship to a child beginning to ride a bicycle. She did recall that their first performance belied his reluctance, as he was talkative to the extensive audience. ### Poetry Berman began to write poems in response to insecurities concerning his musical abilities, the prospect arising from a competitive spirit. With regards to composition, he allocated the same time to both: two or three hours, in a daily manner, poetry being the more vigorous undertaking. His writings all saw extensive and meticulous rewriting, which he was initially averse to. He began to pursue the prospect of publication by age 22—two years before, by his judgement, his "first worthwhile song". Although his lyrics and poetry remain distinct from each other, critics have found they share certain defining characteristics, such as: Unlike his music, Berman's poetry did not feature rhyme and the poems in Actual Air were written in free verse—he composed his poems using written notes and disclosed that he "didn't know anything about form, rhythm or meter", surmising his structure to be accidental or instinctual. Berman has mentioned various poets as influences of his: James Tate—discernible via a similar and blunt approach to surrealism and, in Actual Air, per style and focus upon location and person; Russell Edson, Kenneth Koch, Wallace Stevens, Charles Wright and Emily Dickinson. Berman once expressed dismay that poetry offered too much freedom. Tate, under whom Berman studied, said the poems are "narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions", whereas Berman called them "psychedelic soap operas"; Heidi Julavits noted that Berman often distorted familiar concepts in his poetry. Scott Timberg cites "New York, New York" as an example of how "A typical Berman poem starts with an image almost iconic in its ordinariness, delivered in a flat tone". Written with direct attention on emotions, Actual Air's poems include small-scale scenes and situations Berman extensively explored, the collection compared to a novel by one critic. The world concocted, analogous to that in his songs, is eccentric—with "plausible contexts" quickly altered by "an odd word" and domestic scenes "tinged with gothic weirdness". Using various styles of prose, Berman depicts, among other occurrences, "police officers [who] slowdance with target range silhouettes" and "blue deer [that] speak Fortran in the restroom". Berman's poetry has amassed admiration, including from Dara Wier and Billy Collins—Collins featuring him in an anthology. Rich Smith of The Stranger summarized Berman's poetic output as a "master[y of] the opening line, the surprising image, the lyric narrative, the warm abstraction, and the crucial skill of knowing when to use the Latin word or the German word". Aaron Calvin, writing for Pitchfork, wrote that the intersection of Berman's lyrics and poetry bolsters his legacy. ### Public image and self-perception > Here was a man too brilliant for his own health, held captive by unseen forces. Berman was acutely self-conscious with his public image. After the release of Purple Mountains he feared he would be seen as a depressive, and had earlier wished he could convey a less abrasive persona; on said album, he mused about "the self-created narratives that ha[d] haunted his dark nights of the soul". The cover for Tanglewood Numbers was a "deliberate, self-conscious identification with rock tradition", rather than previous outsiderdom. He kept note of musicians who had mentioned him in interviews and believed his music was unappreciated, having never held his work in esteem, besides his lyrical capability. Berman did not view Silver Jews as a "band that other bands would namedrop", in contrast to the likes of Smog or Will Oldham's bands. Although he once expressed a need for outside validation, he refused to read reviews or articles concerning him. By 2005, hoping to separate his self-perception from others, he had installed an external blocking device on his computer for this very reason. Although he later just considered himself an artist, Berman had been surprised that his songwriting gained more attention than his poetry, thinking of himself as more a poet than a songwriter. He didn't "fully identify as a songwriter" until the time of Tanglewood Numbers' release. Others perceived him as an earnest poet; Rothband considered Berman "synonymous with what he created". In music and poetry, Berman felt his peers saw him as "moonlighting". He once expressed interest in remaining "a stranger" in both fields. Berman was seen as a "cult hero" due in part to his aversion to promotion, and his initial refusal to tour generated a sense of mystique. As of 2005, Silver Jews had only purchased one advertisement in Alternative Press in 1994, for The Arizona Record. He reportedly refused to let Drag City promote his music. Berman relied upon word of mouth and positive reviews, although he dismissed the notion of being critically acclaimed—he felt disregarded by critics; he resented and ruminated upon some who reviewed his work, vexed by reviewers preoccupied with his struggles, and hoped to sabotage their careers. He expressed ambivalence toward his inability to reach a larger audience. Eric Clark of The Gazette and Berman recognized the band's sound as the source of their relative obscurity; Berman further credited his singing and was motivated by such a status. Timothy Michalik of Under The Radar said Berman had a simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow persona to which fans could relate; by 2006, Berman, according to Leon Neyfakh, was "increasingly well-known as an eccentric outsider artist". He had amassed a reputation as "perhaps the finest lyricist of his generation" with his diligence being a frequent point of discussion. By the time of Purple Mountains' release, Raymond Cummings of The Wire wrote that he had "evolve[d] from deadpan riddler to metaphorical savant to inferent sage to bard laid bare." Berman's return to music prompted a jovial and personal response from major publications, with concern for Berman having been identified as instrumental to his fervent fanbase. Reception of Purple Mountains was significantly altered following Berman's suicide: critics wrote "it [is] impossible to hear this album in any other context", and "[n]ow, instead of worrying, you mourn". ## Posthumous tributes Many artists paid tribute to Berman following his suicide. Malkmus and Nastanovich both commented on his death and performed shows in his honor. Drag City released a tribute cover of "The Wild Kindness" sung by Callahan, Oldham, and Cassie. Two months after his death, two cover albums had been released. A number of musicians referenced and/or paid tribute to Berman in albums: The Avalanches and Cassandra Jenkins quoted Berman. Fleet Foxes and Mogwai memorialized Berman on their respective songs "Sunblind" and "Ritchie Sacramento". Callahan described his and Oldham's collaborative album Blind Date Party as "all of Drag City coming together for David". The Mountain Goats dedicated their song "Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review" to Berman. Daniel Blumberg and John Vanderslice dedicated their respective works On&On and I can't believe civilization is still going here in 2021! Congratulations to all of us, Love DCB to Berman. The Tennessee Titans, Berman's favorite football team, displayed the message "Nashville (and the world) will always love David Berman" on its Jumbotron during a home game on November 10, 2019. Major publications: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Slate, Spin and The Washington Post wrote obituaries and tributes. Fans shared lyrics and other tributes on social media; according to Pitchfork's Sam Sodomsky: "In the wake of Berman's death ... His voice never felt louder or more vital". The 62nd Annual Grammy Awards omitted Berman from its in memoriam segment, drawing criticism from some viewers. After his son's death, Richard Berman released the following statement: "Despite his difficulties, he always remained my special son. I will miss him more than he was able to realize." ## Discography - With Silver Jews: - Starlite Walker (1994) - The Natural Bridge (1996) - American Water (1998) - Bright Flight (2001) - Tanglewood Numbers (2005) - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (2008) - With Purple Mountains: - Purple Mountains (2019) ### Other credits ## Books - Actual Air (1999) - The Portable February (2009)
38,472,399	Monroe Doctrine Centennial half dollar	1,119,369,928	US commemorative fifty-cent piece (1923)	[ "1923 in California", "Cultural depictions of James Monroe", "Cultural depictions of John Quincy Adams", "Currencies introduced in 1923", "Early United States commemorative coins", "Fifty-cent coins", "Maps on coins", "Monroe Doctrine", "Plagiarism controversies", "United States silver coins" ]	The Monroe Doctrine Centennial half dollar was a fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint. Bearing portraits of former U.S. Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, the coin was issued in commemoration of the centennial of the Monroe Doctrine and was produced at the San Francisco Mint in 1923. Sculptor Chester Beach is credited with the design, although the reverse closely resembles an earlier work by Raphael Beck. In 1922, the motion picture industry was faced with a number of scandals, including manslaughter charges against star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Although Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, motion picture executives sought ways of getting good publicity for Hollywood. One means was an exposition, to be held in Los Angeles in mid-1923. To induce Congress to issue a commemorative coin as a fundraiser for the fair, organizers associated the exposition with the 100th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, and legislation for a commemorative half dollar for the centennial was passed. The exposition was a financial failure. The coins did not sell well, and the bulk of the mintage of over 270,000 was released into circulation. Beach faced accusations of plagiarism because of the similarity of the reverse design to a work by Beck, though he and fellow sculptor James Earle Fraser denied any impropriety. Many of the pieces that had been sold at a premium and saved were spent during the Depression; most surviving coins show evidence of wear. ## Background In the early 1820s, the United States deemed two matters untoward interference by European powers in its zone of influence. The first was the Russian Ukase of 1821, asserting exclusive territorial and trading rights along much of what is today Canada's Pacific coast. The United States considered this area to be part of the Oregon Country and hoped to eventually gain control of it. The second was possible European threats against the Latin American nations, newly independent from Spain. United States officials feared that a Quadruple Alliance of Prussia, Austria, Russia, and France would restore Spain to power in the Americas. British foreign minister George Canning was concerned that in the event of a Spanish restoration in Latin America, his nation would lose the ability to trade there, which it had gained since the Spanish had been ousted. In 1823, he proposed to the American minister to Great Britain, Richard Rush, that their two nations issue a joint statement against the retaking of the former Spanish colonies by force. Rush asked for instructions from President James Monroe. The President consulted with his predecessors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who favored the joint statement, as an alliance with Britain would protect the United States. Nevertheless, Monroe's Secretary of State, future president John Quincy Adams, felt that if the United States was going to set forth its principles, it should speak for itself and not seem to be following the lead of Britain. Accordingly, Rush was instructed to decline the opportunity to enter into a joint statement, although he was to inform the British that the two nations agreed on most issues. The policy which would, some 30 years later, come to be called the "Monroe Doctrine" was contained in the President's annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. It warned European nations against new colonial ventures in the Americas, and against interference with Western Hemisphere governments. The doctrine had little practical effect at the time, as the United States lacked the ability to enforce it militarily and most European powers ignored it, considering it beneath their dignity even to respond to such a proclamation. When several European powers dispatched men to settle land in the Guianas in the 1830s, the United States did not issue a formal protest. The Mexican–American War of 1846–1848 (and the resulting Mexican Cession) increased Latin American suspicions over the doctrine, as many south of the border felt that the American purpose in warning European powers to keep out was to acquire the land for itself. Nevertheless, the Monroe Doctrine became an important part of United States foreign policy in the second half of the 19th and into the 20th century. ## Inception By 1922, the Hollywood film industry was in serious trouble. Established in the Los Angeles area during the 1910s after moving from such eastern venues as Fort Lee, New Jersey, the industry had been rocked by a number of scandals. These included the mysterious shooting death of film director William Desmond Taylor, and the subsequent evasive testimony concerning it by actress Mabel Normand, which helped destroy her career. Another notorious scandal of the early 1920s was the death of actress Virginia Rappe following an orgy at a San Francisco hotel. Actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was, after three trials, acquitted of manslaughter, but the negative publicity ended his career as well. These scandals, together with the death of romantic lead Wallace Reid from a drug overdose and a number of instances of onscreen sexual explicitness, led to nationwide calls for a boycott of Hollywood films. Film moguls sought means of damage control. They hired former Postmaster General Will H. Hays as censor to the industry; the Hays Code would govern how explicit a motion picture could be for decades to come. Another idea was an exposition and film festival to give good publicity to the industry, with the profits to be used for the making of educational films. Planning for this fair, to be held in Los Angeles in mid-1923, began in 1922. As other fairs, such as the World's Columbian Exposition and the Panama–Pacific Exposition, had procured the issuance of commemorative coins as a fundraiser, organizers sought a piece for the film fair. The city of Los Angeles wanted to use the fair to show it had come of age, as had Chicago for the Columbian Exposition and San Francisco with the Panama-Pacific event. Realizing that Congress might not pass legislation for a coin to commemorate a film industry celebration, the organizers sought a historical event with a major anniversary to occur in 1923, which could be honored both at the fair and on the coin. The obvious candidate was the Boston Tea Party of 1773, but according to numismatists Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen in their volume on U.S. commemorative coins, that episode "could not be tortured into even the vaguest relevance to California, let alone to Los Angeles". On December 18, 1922, California Congressman Walter Franklin Lineberger introduced a bill to strike a half dollar in commemoration of the centennial of the Monroe Doctrine, with the Los Angeles Clearing House (an association of banks) given the exclusive right to purchase the pieces from the government at face value. Lineberger claimed that Monroe's declaration had kept California, then owned by Mexico, out of the hands of European powers. The bill was questioned in the House of Representatives by Michigan Congressman Louis Cramton, and in the Senate by Vermont's Frank Greene, who stated, "it seems to me that the question is not one of selling a coin at a particular value or a particular place. The question is whether the United States government is going to go on from year to year submitting its coinage to this—well—harlotry." Despite these objections, the bill was enacted on January 24, 1923; a mintage of 300,000 pieces was authorized. ## Preparation The fair organizers did not await congressional approval to begin planning the coin. According to Swiatek and Breen, the fair's director general Frank B. Davison came up with the concept for the designs. On December 7, 1922, Commission of Fine Arts chairman Charles Moore wrote to Buffalo nickel designer and sculptor member of the commission James Earle Fraser, "The Los Angeles people are planning to celebrate the Monroe Doctrine Centennial. They are going to have a 50-cent piece and have decided that on the obverse shall be the heads of President Monroe and John Quincy Adams ... On the reverse will be the western continents from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn with some dots for the West Indies and some indication of the Panama Canal ... It strikes me that the designs having been settled upon, the [plaster] models could be worked out quite readily and that a pretty swell thing could be made." Fraser contacted fellow New York sculptor Chester Beach, who agreed to do the work. On December 27, Moore wrote to Davison, informing him of Beach's hiring, and that Fraser and Beach had decided to change the reverse. Moore quoted Beach's description of the revised design: > Map of North and South America. North America is in the form of a draped figure, with the laurel of Peace [an olive branch], reaching to South America, also a draped figure carrying a Horn of Plenty. Their hands to touch at the Panama Canal. The West Indies are indicated. The current of the oceans are lightly shown. Between the dates 1823–1923 are a scroll and a quill pen, symbolizing the "Treaty". Moore informed Davison that the commission had concurred with the revision, and that Beach had been instructed to complete work as quickly as possible so as to have the coins available at an early date. On February 24, 1923, commission secretary Hans Caemmerer showed the completed models to Assistant Director of the Mint Mary Margaret O'Reilly, who was pleased with them. O'Reilly suggested that if Beach was certain there would be no further changes, that he send photographs of the models to the commission's offices, to be forwarded with its endorsement to the Bureau of the Mint in Washington. This was done, and the designs were approved by both Mint Director Frank Edgar Scobey and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon on March 8. Moore was enthusiastic about the designs, writing to Davison on March 21 that "I feel great exultation over the way the model ... has turned out ... I do not know of a memorial [commemorative] coin which for sheer beauty equals this ..." ## Design William E. Pike, in his 2003 article in The Numismatist about the coin, deems the design "uninspired" and complains that the low relief of the coin leaves it without sufficient detail. Coin dealer and numismatic historian Q. David Bowers states that because of the shallow relief, "newly minted coins had an insipid appearance. Few if any observers called them attractive." Art historian Cornelius Vermeule also complained about the relief, stating that it made the allegorical figures on the reverse "seem like mounted cut-outs ... the way the females are contoured to achieve their appearance of continents is a clever tour de force of calligraphic relief but an aesthetic monstrosity, a bad pun in art." He had no more praise for the obverse, "Adams, with his staring eye, is scarcely a portrait, and Monroe would not be recognized even by an expert." The faint lines in the field around the continents represent various ocean currents, with the Gulf Stream to the upper right of the reverse. Swiatek and Breen speculate that the reason ocean currents were shown was to symbolize the trade routes between the continents. They also consider the design to have an Art Deco look, though noting that the lettering has more of an older, Art Nouveau appearance. Beach's monogram, CB made into a circle, is found at lower right of the reverse. On July 23, 1923, Raphael Beck, who had designed the seal for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, wrote to Mint Director Scobey to complain that the reverse design resembled his seal, which he had copyrighted in 1899, and that Beach should be given no further credit for it. The letter was forwarded to the Commission of Fine Arts for comment. In October, Fraser wrote to Beck, stating that he had suggested to Beach that he use figures to represent the continents instead of maps, and that he had never seen the Pan-American seal until Scobey forwarded the letter. According to Bowers, "A comparison of the 1901 and 1923 designs, however, shows that this was highly unlikely." ## Distribution and collecting In May and June 1923, 274,077 of the new half dollars were struck at the San Francisco Mint. Most of these were sent to the Los Angeles Clearing House, though 77 pieces were set aside for transmission to Philadelphia and examination by the 1924 United States Assay Commission. The American Historical Revue and Motion Picture Industry Exposition was open from July 2 to August 4, 1923. The fair was located off of Figueroa Street in Exposition Park, just to the east of the brand-new Los Angeles Coliseum, where every evening a complimentary show for exposition visitors, "Montezuma and the Fall of the Aztecs", was given. Admission to the fair was fifty cents, though fairgoers could purchase a coin for a dollar at the box office and enter without further charge. After the first week, organizers realized the public was not interested in the historical theme, but was there to see favorite movie stars. Exhibitors accordingly greatly expanded the space devoted to movie attractions, but the exposition was a financial failure. Those in charge of the fair had hoped to attract a million visitors; the actual attendance was about 300,000, many of whom were teenagers given complimentary admission in the final two weeks of the fair. With the fair flirting with insolvency throughout its run, officials hoped the planned visit of President Warren Harding on August 6 would increase gate receipts, but Harding fell ill in San Francisco and died on August 2. According to Pike in his article, "its effect on the industry [was] hard to measure. However, if Hollywood owes its current status in any way to the event, then it was quite a success indeed." Approximately 27,000 half dollars were sold at the price of \$1, by mail, at banks, and at the fair. Sales continued after it closed, but by October 1923, they had dropped off to almost nothing, and the banks holding them released the remaining nine-tenths of the mintage into circulation, which accounts for the wear on most surviving specimens. Of those set aside, thousands more were spent during the Depression. The 2015 edition of A Guide Book of United States Coins lists it at \$75 in uncirculated MS-60. Swiatek, in his 2012 volume on commemoratives, notes that many specimens have been treated to make them appear brighter or less worn; these, like other circulated pieces, are worth less. An exceptional specimen, certified in MS-67 condition, sold at auction for \$29,900 in 2009. ## See also - Early United States commemorative coins ## References and bibliography Books Other sources
6,424	Corona Australis	1,173,666,205	Constellation in the southern celestial hemisphere	[ "Constellations", "Constellations listed by Ptolemy", "Corona Australis", "Southern constellations" ]	Corona Australis is a constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. Its Latin name means "southern crown", and it is the southern counterpart of Corona Borealis, the northern crown. It is one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. The Ancient Greeks saw Corona Australis as a wreath rather than a crown and associated it with Sagittarius or Centaurus. Other cultures have likened the pattern to a turtle, ostrich nest, a tent, or even a hut belonging to a rock hyrax. Although fainter than its northern counterpart, the oval- or horseshoe-shaped pattern of its brighter stars renders it distinctive. Alpha and Beta Coronae Australis are the two brightest stars with an apparent magnitude of around 4.1. Epsilon Coronae Australis is the brightest example of a W Ursae Majoris variable in the southern sky. Lying alongside the Milky Way, Corona Australis contains one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System—a dusty dark nebula known as the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, lying about 430 light years away. Within it are stars at the earliest stages of their lifespan. The variable stars R and TY Coronae Australis light up parts of the nebula, which varies in brightness accordingly. ## Name The name of the constellation was entered as "Corona Australis" when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established the 88 modern constellations in 1922. In 1932, the name was instead recorded as "Corona Austrina" when the IAU's commission on notation approved a list of four-letter abbreviations for the constellations. The four-letter abbreviations were repealed in 1955. The IAU presently uses "Corona Australis" exclusively. ## Characteristics Corona Australis is a small constellation bordered by Sagittarius to the north, Scorpius to the west, Telescopium to the south, and Ara to the southwest. The three-letter abbreviation for the constellation, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922, is "CrA". The official constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of four segments (illustrated in infobox). In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between and , while the declination coordinates are between −36.77° and −45.52°. Covering 128 square degrees, Corona Australis culminates at midnight around the 30th of June and ranks 80th in area. Only visible at latitudes south of 53° north, Corona Australis cannot be seen from the British Isles as it lies too far south, but it can be seen from southern Europe and readily from the southern United States. ## Features While not a bright constellation, Corona Australis is nonetheless distinctive due to its easily identifiable pattern of stars, which has been described as horseshoe- or oval-shaped. Though it has no stars brighter than 4th magnitude, it still has 21 stars visible to the unaided eye (brighter than magnitude 5.5). Nicolas Louis de Lacaille used the Greek letters Alpha through to Lambda to label the most prominent eleven stars in the constellation, designating two stars as Eta and omitting Iota altogether. Mu Coronae Australis, a yellow star of spectral type G5.5III and apparent magnitude 5.21, was labelled by Johann Elert Bode and retained by Benjamin Gould, who deemed it bright enough to warrant naming. ### Stars The only star in the constellation to have received a name is Alfecca Meridiana or Alpha CrA. The name combines the Arabic name of the constellation with the Latin for "southern". In Arabic, Alfecca means "break", and refers to the shape of both Corona Australis and Corona Borealis. Also called simply "Meridiana", it is a white main sequence star located 125 light years away from Earth, with an apparent magnitude of 4.10 and spectral type A2Va. A rapidly rotating star, it spins at almost 200 km per second at its equator, making a complete revolution in around 14 hours. Like the star Vega, it has excess infrared radiation, which indicates it may be ringed by a disk of dust. It is currently a main-sequence star, but will eventually evolve into a white dwarf; currently, it has a luminosity 31 times greater, and a radius and mass of 2.3 times that of the Sun. Beta Coronae Australis is an orange giant 474 light years from Earth. Its spectral type is K0II, and it is of apparent magnitude 4.11. Since its formation, it has evolved from a B-type star to a K-type star. Its luminosity class places it as a bright giant; its luminosity is 730 times that of the Sun, designating it one of the highest-luminosity K0-type stars visible to the naked eye. 100 million years old, it has a radius of 43 solar radii () and a mass of between 4.5 and 5 solar masses (). Alpha and Beta are so similar as to be indistinguishable in brightness to the naked eye. Some of the more prominent double stars include Gamma Coronae Australis—a pair of yellowish white stars 58 light years away from Earth, which orbit each other every 122 years. Widening since 1990, the two stars can be seen as separate with a 100 mm aperture telescope; they are separated by 1.3 arcseconds at an angle of 61 degrees. They have a combined visual magnitude of 4.2; each component is an F8V dwarf star with a magnitude of 5.01. Epsilon Coronae Australis is an eclipsing binary belonging to a class of stars known as W Ursae Majoris variables. These star systems are known as contact binaries as the component stars are so close together they touch. Varying by a quarter of a magnitude around an average apparent magnitude of 4.83 every seven hours, the star system lies 98 light years away. Its spectral type is F4VFe-0.8+. At the southern end of the crown asterism are the stars Eta1 and Eta2 Coronae Australis, which form an optical double. Of magnitude 5.1 and 5.5, they are separable with the naked eye and are both white. Kappa Coronae Australis is an easily resolved optical double—the components are of apparent magnitudes 6.3 and 5.6 and are about 1000 and 150 light years away respectively. They appear at an angle of 359 degrees, separated by 21.6 arcseconds. Kappa2 is actually the brighter of the pair and is more bluish white, with a spectral type of B9V, while Kappa1 is of spectral type A0III. Lying 202 light years away, Lambda Coronae Australis is a double splittable in small telescopes. The primary is a white star of spectral type A2Vn and magnitude of 5.1, while the companion star has a magnitude of 9.7. The two components are separated by 29.2 arcseconds at an angle of 214 degrees. Zeta Coronae Australis is a rapidly rotating main sequence star with an apparent magnitude of 4.8, 221.7 light years from Earth. The star has blurred lines in its hydrogen spectrum due to its rotation. Its spectral type is B9V. Theta Coronae Australis lies further to the west, a yellow giant of spectral type G8III and apparent magnitude 4.62. Corona Australis harbours RX J1856.5-3754, an isolated neutron star that is thought to lie 140 (±40) parsecs, or 460 (±130) light years, away, with a diameter of 14 km. It was once suspected to be a strange star, but this has been discounted. ### Corona Australis Molecular Cloud The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud is a dark molecular cloud just north of Beta Coronae Australis. Illuminated by a number of embedded reflection nebulae the cloud fans out from Epsilon Coronae Australis eastward along the constellation border with Sagittarius. It contains , Herbig–Haro objects (protostars) and some very young stars, being one of the closest star-forming regions, 430 light years (130 parsecs) to the Solar System, at the surface of the Local Bubble. The first nebulae of the cloud were recorded in 1865 by Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt. Between Epsilon and Gamma Coronae Australis the cloud consists of the particular dark nebula and star forming region Bernes 157. It is 55 by 18 arcminutes wide and possesses several stars around magnitude 13. These stars are dimmed by up to 8 magnitudes because of the obscuring dust clouds. At the center of the active star-forming region lies the Coronet cluster (also called R CrA Cluster), which is used in studying star and protoplanetary disk formation. R Coronae Australis (R CrA) is an irregular variable star ranging from magnitudes 9.7 to 13.9. Blue-white, it is of spectral type B5IIIpe. A very young star, it is still accumulating interstellar material. It is obscured by, and illuminates, the surrounding nebula, NGC 6729, which brightens and darkens with it. The nebula is often compared to a comet for its appearance in a telescope, as its length is five times its width. Other stars of the cluster include S Coronae Australis, a G-class dwarf and T Tauri star. Nearby north, another young variable star, TY Coronae Australis, illuminates another nebula: reflection nebula NGC 6726/NGC 6727. TY Coronae Australis ranges irregularly between magnitudes 8.7 and 12.4, and the brightness of the nebula varies with it. Blue-white, it is of spectral type B8e. The largest young stars in the region, R, S, T, TY and VV Coronae Australis, are all ejecting jets of material which cause surrounding dust and gas to coalesce and form Herbig–Haro objects, many of which have been identified nearby. Not part of it is the globular cluster known as NGC 6723, which can be seen adjacent to the nebulosity in the neighbouring constellation of Sagittarius, but is much much further away. ### Deep sky objects IC 1297 is a planetary nebula of apparent magnitude 10.7, which appears as a green-hued roundish object in higher-powered amateur instruments. The nebula surrounds the variable star RU Coronae Australis, which has an average apparent magnitude of 12.9 and is a WC class Wolf–Rayet star. IC 1297 is small, at only 7 arcseconds in diameter; it has been described as "a square with rounded edges" in the eyepiece, elongated in the north–south direction. Descriptions of its color encompass blue, blue-tinged green, and green-tinged blue. Corona Australis' location near the Milky Way means that galaxies are uncommonly seen. NGC 6768 is a magnitude 11.2 object 35′ south of IC 1297. It is made up of two galaxies merging, one of which is an elongated elliptical galaxy of classification E4 and the other a lenticular galaxy of classification S0. IC 4808 is a galaxy of apparent magnitude 12.9 located on the border of Corona Australis with the neighbouring constellation of Telescopium and 3.9 degrees west-southwest of Beta Sagittarii. However, amateur telescopes will only show a suggestion of its spiral structure. It is 1.9 arcminutes by 0.8 arcminutes. The central area of the galaxy does appear brighter in an amateur instrument, which shows it to be tilted northeast–southwest. Southeast of Theta and southwest of Eta lies the open cluster ESO 281-SC24, which is composed of the yellow 9th magnitude star GSC 7914 178 1 and five 10th to 11th magnitude stars. Halfway between Theta Coronae Australis and Theta Scorpii is the dense globular cluster NGC 6541. Described as between magnitude 6.3 and magnitude 6.6, it is visible in binoculars and small telescopes. Around 22000 light years away, it is around 100 light years in diameter. It is estimated to be around 14 billion years old. NGC 6541 appears 13.1 arcminutes in diameter and is somewhat resolvable in large amateur instruments; a 12-inch telescope reveals approximately 100 stars but the core remains unresolved. ### Meteor showers The Corona Australids are a meteor shower that takes place between 14 and 18 March each year, peaking around 16 March. This meteor shower does not have a high peak hourly rate. In 1953 and 1956, observers noted a maximum of 6 meteors per hour and 4 meteors per hour respectively; in 1955 the shower was "barely resolved". However, in 1992, astronomers detected a peak rate of 45 meteors per hour. The Corona Australids' rate varies from year to year. At only six days, the shower's duration is particularly short, and its meteoroids are small; the stream is devoid of large meteoroids. The Corona Australids were first seen with the unaided eye in 1935 and first observed with radar in 1955. Corona Australid meteors have an entry velocity of 45 kilometers per second. In 2006, a shower originating near Beta Coronae Australis was designated as the Beta Coronae Australids. They appear in May, the same month as a nearby shower known as the May Microscopids, but the two showers have different trajectories and are unlikely to be related. ## History Corona Australis may have been recorded by ancient Mesopotamians in the MUL.APIN, as a constellation called MA.GUR ("The Bark"). However, this constellation, adjacent to SUHUR.MASH ("The Goat-Fish", modern Capricornus), may instead have been modern Epsilon Sagittarii. As a part of the southern sky, MA.GUR was one of the fifteen "stars of Ea". In the 3rd century BC, the Greek didactic poet Aratus wrote of, but did not name the constellation, instead calling the two crowns Στεφάνοι (Stephanoi). The Greek astronomer Ptolemy described the constellation in the 2nd century AD, though with the inclusion of Alpha Telescopii, since transferred to Telescopium. Ascribing 13 stars to the constellation, he named it Στεφάνος νοτιος (Stephanos notios), "Southern Wreath", while other authors associated it with either Sagittarius (having fallen off his head) or Centaurus; with the former, it was called Corona Sagittarii. Similarly, the Romans called Corona Australis the "Golden Crown of Sagittarius". It was known as Parvum Coelum ("Canopy", "Little Sky") in the 5th century. The 18th-century French astronomer Jérôme Lalande gave it the names Sertum Australe ("Southern Garland") and Orbiculus Capitis, while German poet and author Philippus Caesius called it Corolla ("Little Crown") or Spira Australis ("Southern Coil"), and linked it with the Crown of Eternal Life from the New Testament. Seventeenth-century celestial cartographer Julius Schiller linked it to the Diadem of Solomon. Sometimes, Corona Australis was not the wreath of Sagittarius but arrows held in his hand. Corona Australis has been associated with the myth of Bacchus and Stimula. Jupiter had impregnated Stimula, causing Juno to become jealous. Juno convinced Stimula to ask Jupiter to appear in his full splendor, which the mortal woman could not handle, causing her to burn. After Bacchus, Stimula's unborn child, became an adult and the god of wine, he honored his deceased mother by placing a wreath in the sky. In Chinese astronomy, the stars of Corona Australis are located within the Black Tortoise of the North (北方玄武, Běi Fāng Xuán Wǔ). The constellation itself was known as ti'en pieh ("Heavenly Turtle") and during the Western Zhou period, marked the beginning of winter. However, precession over time has meant that the "Heavenly River" (Milky Way) became the more accurate marker to the ancient Chinese and hence supplanted the turtle in this role. Arabic names for Corona Australis include Al Ķubbah "the Tortoise", Al Ĥibā "the Tent" or Al Udḥā al Na'ām "the Ostrich Nest". It was later given the name Al Iklīl al Janūbiyyah, which the European authors Chilmead, Riccioli and Caesius transliterated as Alachil Elgenubi, Elkleil Elgenubi and Aladil Algenubi respectively. The ǀXam speaking San people of South Africa knew the constellation as ≠nabbe ta !nu "house of branches"—owned originally by the Dassie (rock hyrax), and the star pattern depicting people sitting in a semicircle around a fire. The indigenous Boorong people of northwestern Victoria saw it as Won, a boomerang thrown by Totyarguil (Altair). The Aranda people of Central Australia saw Corona Australis as a coolamon carrying a baby, which was accidentally dropped to earth by a group of sky-women dancing in the Milky Way. The impact of the coolamon created Gosses Bluff crater, 175 km west of Alice Springs. The Torres Strait Islanders saw Corona Australis as part of a larger constellation encompassing part of Sagittarius and the tip of Scorpius's tail; the Pleiades and Orion were also associated. This constellation was Tagai's canoe, crewed by the Pleiades, called the Usiam, and Orion, called the Seg. The myth of Tagai says that he was in charge of this canoe, but his crewmen consumed all of the supplies onboard without asking permission. Enraged, Tagai bound the Usiam with a rope and tied them to the side of the boat, then threw them overboard. Scorpius's tail represents a suckerfish, while Eta Sagittarii and Theta Coronae Australis mark the bottom of the canoe. On the island of Futuna, the figure of Corona Australis was called Tanuma and in the Tuamotus, it was called Na Kaua-ki-Tonga. ## See also - Corona Australis (Chinese astronomy) - Chamaeleon complex
9,907,431	Soultaker (film)	1,161,168,367	1990 horror fantasy film	[ "1990 films", "1990 horror films", "1990s American films", "1990s English-language films", "Action International Pictures films", "American dark fantasy films", "American independent films", "American supernatural horror films", "Films about death", "Films shot in Mobile, Alabama", "Supernatural fantasy films" ]	Soultaker is a 1990 American fantasy horror film written by Vivian Schilling and directed by Michael Rissi. It stars Joe Estevez in the title role, alongside Vivian Schilling, Gregg Thomsen, Chuck Williams, Robert Z'Dar, and David "Shark" Fralick. The film follows a group of young adults who try to flee from the titular "Soultaker" when their souls are ejected from their bodies after a car accident. Inspired by discussions with Action International Pictures producer Eric Parkinson, the script was based on a real-life car accident which Schilling was involved in. The film was shot in five weeks on a \$250,000 budget. Originally planned for a direct-to-video release, it saw limited theatrical screenings, with eight prints distributed in United States. Since its release, the film has received negative reviews, but won the Saturn Award for "Best Genre Video Release" in 1992. A sequel was planned, and actors such as James Earl Jones and Faye Dunaway were named for the cast, but the film was never made and Schilling turned its premise into a novel which was titled Quietus, published in 2002. Soultaker was featured in the tenth-season premiere episode of the comedy television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999. ## Plot During a summer festival, the Angel of Death (Robert Z'Dar) instructs his "Soultaker" subordinate (Joe Estevez) to kill five people: Zack (Gregg Thomsen), Zack's friends Brad (David "Shark" Fralick) and Tommy (Chuck Williams), Brad's girlfriend Candice (Cinda Lou Freeman), and Zack's ex-girlfriend Natalie (Vivian Schilling). After Natalie's friend leaves her behind, Zack offers her a ride home in Brad's car, although Brad is high on cocaine and reluctant to accept her as a passenger. Driving home at high speed, Brad crashes the car to avoid hitting the Soultaker. Candice dies instantly while Natalie, Brad, Zack, and Tommy fall comatose as their souls leave their bodies. The Soultaker then takes Candice's soul and informs the Angel of Death, who orders him to recover the other souls. Thinking they survived the crash, the four return to the car, unaware their bodies were taken to a hospital. There, Soultaker reveals himself and claims Brad's soul; the others, helpless to stop him, flee. They run into a convenience store and attempt to tell the cashier – who cannot see them – that someone is after them. While inside, they see a news report on the crash, which confuses them, and Natalie accuses Zack of knowing Brad had been using drugs. They leave the store and call emergency services, but the operator cannot hear them and hangs up on them. Appearing again, the Soultaker tries to claim Natalie's soul, but her resemblance to his past lover, whom he killed in his former life, stays his hand. Zack rescues her and they flee, leaving Tommy behind. The Angel of Death reprimands his subordinate for failing to take her soul, and the Soultaker then takes Tommy's. Zack and Natalie go to her house, where they tell her mother Anna (Jean Reiner) about the Soultaker. Zack and Natalie reconcile while Anna prepares a bath for her. While she bathes, Anna watches her from behind the bathroom door. Meanwhile, Zack learns from a live television announcement from Natalie's father Mayor Grant (David Fawcett) that their life support systems will be turned off at midnight. During the broadcast, Anna appears onscreen; at the same time, the "Anna" watching Natalie suddenly morphs into the Soultaker. He attempts to make a pact with her, offering her eternal life on the condition that she stays by his side forever. Zack arrives and attempts to attack the Soultaker, but is overpowered. Natalie tries to shoot the Soultaker to no effect. When she tells the Soultaker she wants to be with Zack, the Soultaker throws him out of the window. Zack survives the fall. Hoping to return to their bodies before midnight, Natalie and Zack flee to the hospital. Natalie is captured by the Soultaker on an elevator which leads to the afterlife; he claims he is an angel charged with collecting souls. He convinces her there is nothing left for her in the living realm, that Zack is already dead, and that she can be saved if she stays with him. While searching for her, Zack encounters Brad, who has become a Soultaker, as those who kill someone – even by accident – must pay for it with service as a grim reaper. With Brad's help, he enters the afterlife and rescues Natalie. Brad gives him two empty "soul rings", which can help him and Natalie return to their bodies. They find Natalie's body, and she places herself in the ring but remains comatose. Discovering that her pendant is acting as a barrier between her soul and her body, Zack pulls her soul from her body to reattempt the process when the Soultaker reappears. After a chase around the hospital, Zack escapes by leaping off the roof. The Soultaker is confronted by the Angel of Death, who tells him that he has failed since it is now past midnight. Despite his pleas, the Soultaker is imprisoned into a soul ring by his master. Zack returns to his body and saves Natalie's life; he later visits her when she is discharged from the hospital. ## Cast ## Production Soultaker was written by Vivian Schilling, who was inspired to write the film after discussions with Action International Pictures producer Eric Parkinson. Schilling based her script on a real-life car accident that happened to her and a friend. The script was written in the span of four months. Actor Joe Estevez was asked to play the mayor, Grant McMillan, before being cast as the titular "Soultaker". As well as writing the script for the film, Schilling played the female lead Natalie McMillan. This was Schilling's first starring role in a film. Her previous acting credits included Fred Olen Ray's science fiction film Prison Ship and a nurse in the soap opera General Hospital. > When I was 18, just out of high school, I went to a party with a girlfriend. A guy offered us a ride home, someone we thought we knew pretty well. He didn't look wasted or anything, but when we got in the car he started driving really crazy. We were going very fast and hit a tree; I was in the front seat and was literally buried in the dashboard. It was bad. For a moment as I was sitting there. I thought I was going to die. I always felt lucky to have lived through that, but it also made me wonder. What if I was supposed to die and didn't know it? Soultaker was shot in Mobile, Alabama, in five weeks with a budget of \$250,000. In early 1989, 26-year-old Michael Rissi was hired to direct the film after the previous director left the project. Soultaker was his first main feature; he had previously directed the 1987 short film Snake Eyes, part of the anthology movie Terror Eyes Eric Parkinson and Vivian Schilling were involved with. Originally reluctant to direct, Rissi decided to join after being interested in filming a movie involving parallel universes. Rissi's contributions to the film resulted in its being released as "A Michael Rissi Film" for both the promotional material and film credits. Production wrapped in July 1989. Action International Pictures bought the movie, which became their biggest movie at that time. Problems mounted during production. During the filming of the car-crash scene, the car could not be started, causing the loss of a half-day's production. In an interview with Femme Fatales, Vivian Schilling noted that almost a third of the script had to be re-written because of time and money constraints. Schilling later wrote an article for the magazine about a scene added by investors and the film crew, in which she was asked to appear naked. Despite claims it would increase sales for the film, Schilling avoided appearing nude in the scene. ## Release Soultaker was distributed by Action International Pictures. Originally planned to be released straight to video, it received a limited theatrical release; eight prints of it were distributed in the United States on October 26, 1990. Because Action International Pictures did not have a theatrical distribution division, Eric Parkinson did the process by himself. Vivian Schilling said the movie was successful in theaters except her hometown, Wichita, Kansas. She also mentioned it selling well on VHS and in overseas markets. Soultaker was released on VHS on January 24, 1991. It was also released on DVD by Image Entertainment in 1999 and Hannover House in 2005. ### Reception Critical reception for Soultaker has been mostly negative, with criticism directed at the film's story and special effects. Los Angeles Times writer Mark Chalon Smith unfavorably compared Soultaker to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, both of which were made with a small budget. Smith said having a small budget "doesn't necessarily mean a movie can't be fun and scary", but that Soultaker was not fun. Blockbuster Entertainment gave the film two stars, while VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever by Jim Craddock gave it one and a half stars. TV Guide gave it one star, criticizing the storyline and special effects while describing the acting as "adequate". It would later be on IMDb's "Bottom 100" list. Variety'''s Larry Cohn spoke positively about Soultaker, writing that its portrayal of the afterlife was more consistent than the 1990 Academy Award-winning film Ghost. Time Out called the film a "micro-budget variation on Ghost", criticizing the special effects and Michael Rissi's direction but praising Vivian Schilling for her work. Michael Dare of Billboard directed praise towards the film in his review, calling it a "good looking, low-budget fantasy thriller", though he noted the cast's overacting and the movie's transformation into "several layers of advanced silliness" after the Angel of Death's introduction. In 1992, the film won the "Best Genre Video Release" award during the 18th Saturn Awards. In his 2011 book Horror Films of the 1990s, John Kenneth Muir gave the movie two stars, noting the "apparent egotism" Schilling had being both the screenwriter and lead. Robert Z'Dar and Joe Estevez were both criticized for not being as menacing as they intended to be. He also compared Soultaker to Ghost and Flatliners, all three films released in 1990 and shared the same theme of a universal hierarchy that is not seen. He considered Soultaker's interpretation of the theme to be the "cheesiest" of the three but mentioned that the movie had fewer resources to work with. ## Legacy ### Sequel A sequel was planned for the movie; it went through several name changes, including "Dark Angel" and "Dark World". Producers planned to cast James Earl Jones and Faye Dunaway in one iteration of the production, and Donald Sutherland was also in talks. Robert Z'Dar commented that William Shatner was interested in playing the boss of Z'Dar's character. Director Tibor Takács was due to direct the project, and production was planned for January 1993 in Canada. However, the project fell through due to funding issues. The concept of the unmade script was turned into a novel; Schilling said she "embellished the premise" and added new characters to the story. Titled Quietus, the book was released in January 2002 as her second novel and was published by Hannover House, having taken seven years to write. ### Mystery Science Theater 3000 Soultaker was featured in the tenth-season premiere episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), a comedy television series whose premise is that the character Mike Nelson and his two robot friends Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo are forced to watch bad films as part of an ongoing scientific experiment. Broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel on April 11, 1999, the episode also saw the guest appearances of series creator and original host of MST3K Joel Hodgson as Joel Robinson and Frank Conniff as TV's Frank. Jokes comparing Vivian Schilling to Tonya Harding were made. Schilling did not watch the episode but did not like the comparisons with Harding. John Kenneth Muir cited the movie's appearance in the episode as causing the movie to have a "bad movie" reputation, despite initial positive reviews. The episode was considered one of the best episodes in the series, both by critics and by fans of the show. Erik Adams from The A.V. Club called it one of the most essential episodes, opining that Joel Hodgson's appearing in it was a "stamp of approval" for the show after he left its production. Jim Vorel for Paste ranked it as the 44th best in the entire series, calling the film an "overdramatic vanity project from the starlet/screenwriter" and praising the episode both for its riffing and for its host segments. A fan poll for the top 100 best episodes in the series voted it as eighteenth, the highest for a season ten episode. Elliott Kalan, the head writer for the Netflix era of the series, placed it as one of his favorite episodes in the series. Charles Bramesco for The Dissolve cited both Soultaker and later MST3K "experiment" Future War for increasing the popularity of Robert Z'Dar. In 2009, Shout! Factory released the MST3K episode as part of the "Volume XIV" DVD collection of the series, along with The Mad Monster, Manhunt in Space, and Final Justice. Joe Estevez was interviewed for the DVD. In 2016, Shout! announced it had lost the rights to the Soultaker'' episode, resulting in "Volume XIV" going out of print.
205,013	Ghostbusters	1,173,891,485	1984 film by Ivan Reitman	[ "1980s American films", "1980s English-language films", "1980s fantasy comedy films", "1980s ghost films", "1980s monster movies", "1980s supernatural horror films", "1984 comedy films", "1984 films", "1984 horror films", "American adventure comedy films", "American buddy comedy films", "American comedy horror films", "American fantasy comedy films", "American films with live action and animation", "American ghost films", "American haunted house films", "American monster movies", "American supernatural horror films", "Columbia Pictures films", "Films about spirit possession", "Films adapted into television shows", "Films directed by Ivan Reitman", "Films produced by Ivan Reitman", "Films scored by Elmer Bernstein", "Films set in 1984", "Films set in Columbia University", "Films set in New York City", "Films set in apartment buildings", "Films shot in Los Angeles", "Films shot in New York City", "Films using stop-motion animation", "Films with screenplays by Dan Aykroyd", "Films with screenplays by Harold Ramis", "Ghostbusters films", "Giant monster films", "Halloween adventure films", "Puppet films", "United States National Film Registry films" ]	Ghostbusters is a 1984 American supernatural comedy film directed and produced by Ivan Reitman, and written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. It stars Bill Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis as Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler, three eccentric parapsychologists who start a ghost-catching business in New York City. It also stars Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, and features Annie Potts, Ernie Hudson, and William Atherton in supporting roles. Based on his own fascination with spirituality, Aykroyd conceived Ghostbusters as a project starring himself and John Belushi, in which they would venture through time and space battling supernatural threats. Following Belushi's death in 1982, and with Aykroyd's concept deemed financially impractical, Ramis was hired to help rewrite the script to set it in New York City and make it more realistic. It was the first comedy film to employ expensive special effects, and Columbia Pictures, concerned about its relatively high \$25–30 million budget, had little faith in its box office potential. Filming took place from October 1983 to January 1984, in New York City and Los Angeles. Due to competition for special effects studios among various films in development at the time, Richard Edlund used part of the budget to found Boss Film Studios, which employed a combination of practical effects, miniatures, and puppets to deliver the ghoulish visuals. Ghostbusters was released on June 8, 1984, to critical acclaim and became a cultural phenomenon. It was praised for its blend of comedy, action, and horror, and Murray's performance was often singled out for praise. It earned \$282.2 million during its initial theatrical run, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 1984 in the United States and Canada, and the then-highest-grossing comedy ever. It was the number-one film in theaters for seven consecutive weeks and one of only four films to gross more than \$100 million that year. Further theatrical releases have increased the total gross to around \$295.2 million, making it one of the most successful comedy films of the 1980s. In 2015, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Its theme song, "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker Jr., was also a number-one hit. With its effect on popular culture, and a dedicated fan following, the success of Ghostbusters launched a multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. This included the popular animated television series The Real Ghostbusters (1986), its sequel Extreme Ghostbusters (1997), video games, board games, comic books, clothing, music, and haunted attractions. Ghostbusters was followed in 1989 by Ghostbusters II, which fared less well financially and critically, and attempts to develop a second sequel paused in 2014 following Ramis's death. After a 2016 reboot received mixed reviews and underperformed financially, a second sequel to the 1984 film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, was released on November 19, 2021. ## Plot After Columbia University parapsychology professors Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler experience their first encounter with a ghost at the New York Public Library, the university dean dismisses the credibility of their paranormal-focused research and fires them. The trio responds by establishing "Ghostbusters", a paranormal investigation and elimination service operating out of a disused firehouse. They develop high-tech nuclear-powered equipment to capture and contain ghosts, although business is initially slow. After a paranormal encounter in her apartment, cellist Dana Barrett calls the Ghostbusters. She recounts witnessing a demonic dog-like creature in her refrigerator utter a single word: "Zuul". Ray and Egon research Zuul and details of Dana's building while Peter inspects her apartment and unsuccessfully attempts to seduce her. The Ghostbusters are hired to remove a gluttonous ghost, Slimer, from the Sedgewick Hotel. Having failed to properly test their equipment, Egon warns the group that crossing the energy streams of their proton pack weapons could cause a catastrophic explosion. They capture the ghost and deposit it in an ecto-containment unit under the firehouse. Supernatural activity rapidly increases across the city and the Ghostbusters become famous; they hire a fourth member, Winston Zeddemore, to cope with the growing demand. Suspicious of the Ghostbusters, Environmental Protection Agency inspector Walter Peck asks to evaluate their equipment, but Peter rebuffs him. Egon warns that the containment unit is nearing capacity and supernatural energy is surging across the city. Peter meets with Dana and informs her Zuul was a demigod worshipped as a servant to "Gozer the Gozerian", a shapeshifting god of destruction. Upon returning home, she is possessed by Zuul; a similar entity possesses her neighbor, Louis Tully. Peter arrives and finds the possessed Dana/Zuul claiming to be "the Gatekeeper". Louis is brought to Egon by police officers and claims he is "Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster". The Ghostbusters agree to keep the pair separated. Peck returns with law enforcement and city workers to have the Ghostbusters arrested and their containment unit deactivated, causing an explosion that releases the captured ghosts. Louis/Vinz escapes in the confusion and makes his way to the apartment building to join Dana/Zuul. In jail, Ray and Egon reveal that Ivo Shandor, leader of a Gozer-worshipping cult in the early 20th century, designed Dana's building to function as an antenna to attract and concentrate spiritual energy to summon Gozer and bring about the apocalypse. Faced with supernatural chaos across the city, the Ghostbusters convince the mayor to release them. The Ghostbusters travel to a hidden temple located on top of the building as Dana/Zuul and Louis/Vinz open the gate between dimensions and transform into demonic dogs. Gozer appears as a woman and attacks the Ghostbusters then disappears when they attempt to retaliate. Her disembodied voice demands the Ghostbusters "choose the form of the destructor". Ray inadvertently recalls a beloved corporate mascot from his childhood, and Gozer reappears as a gigantic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that begins destroying the city. Against his earlier advice, Egon instructs the team to cross their proton energy streams at the dimensional gate. The resulting explosion destroys Gozer's avatar, banishing it back to its dimension, and closes the gateway. The Ghostbusters rescue Dana and Louis from the wreckage and are welcomed on the street as heroes. ## Cast - Bill Murray as Peter Venkman - Dan Aykroyd as Ray Stantz - Sigourney Weaver as Dana Barrett - Harold Ramis as Egon Spengler - Rick Moranis as Louis Tully - Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz - William Atherton as Walter Peck - Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddemore In addition to the main cast, Ghostbusters features David Margulies as Lenny Clotch, Mayor of New York, Michael Ensign as the Sedgewick Hotel manager, and Slavitza Jovan as Gozer (voiced by Paddi Edwards). It also features astrologist Ruth Hale Oliver as the Library Ghost, Alice Drummond as the Librarian, Jennifer Runyon and Steven Tash as Peter's psychological test subjects, Timothy Carhart as a violinist, and Reginald VelJohnson as a corrections officer. Playboy Playmate Kymberly Herrin appears as a seductive ghost in Ray's dreams. Roger Grimsby, Larry King, Joe Franklin, and Casey Kasem make cameo appearances as themselves; Kasem in a voice-only role. In addition, Kasem's wife, Jean, appears as the tall guest at Louis' party; along with porn star Ron Jeremy and Debbie Gibson. Director Ivan Reitman provided the voice to Slimer and other miscellaneous ghost voices. ## Production ### Development Ghostbusters was inspired by Dan Aykroyd's fascination with and belief in the paranormal, which he inherited from his father, who later wrote the book A History of Ghosts; his mother, who claimed to have seen ghosts; his grandfather, who experimented with radios to contact the dead; and his great-grandfather, a renowned spiritualist. In 1981, Aykroyd read an article on quantum physics and parapsychology in The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, which gave him the idea of trapping ghosts. He was also drawn to the idea of modernizing the comedic ghost films of the mid-20th century by comics such as Abbott and Costello (Hold That Ghost, 1941), Bob Hope (The Ghost Breakers, 1940) and the Bowery Boys (Ghost Chasers, 1951). Aykroyd wrote the script, intending to star alongside Eddie Murphy and his close friend and fellow Saturday Night Live (SNL) alumnus John Belushi, before Belushi's accidental death in March 1982. Aykroyd recalled writing one of Belushi's lines when producer and talent agent Bernie Brillstein called to inform him of Belushi's death. He turned to another former SNL castmate, Bill Murray, who agreed to join without an explicit agreement, which is how he often worked. Aykroyd pitched his concept to Brillstein as three men who chase ghosts and included a sketch of the Marshmallow Man character he had imagined. He likened the Ghostbusters to pest-control workers, saying that "calling a Ghostbuster was just like getting rats removed". Aykroyd believed Ivan Reitman was the logical choice to direct, based on his successes with films such as Animal House (1978) and Stripes (1981). Reitman was aware of the film's outline while Belushi was still a prospective cast member; this version took place in the future with many groups of intergalactic ghostbusters, and felt it "would have cost something like \$200 million to make". Aykroyd's original 70- to 80-page script treatment was more serious in tone and intended to be scary. Reitman met with Aykroyd at Art's Delicatessen in Studio City, Los Angeles, and explained that his concept would be impossible to make. He suggested that setting it entirely on Earth would make the extraordinary elements funnier, and that focusing on realism from the beginning would make the Marshmallow Man more believable by the end. He also wanted to portray the Ghostbusters' origins before starting their business: "This was beginning of the 1980s—everyone was going into business". After the meeting, they met Harold Ramis at Burbank Studios. Reitman had worked with Ramis on previous films and believed he could better execute the tone he intended for the script than Aykroyd. He also felt Ramis should play a Ghostbuster. After reading the script, Ramis joined the project immediately. Although the script required considerable changes, Reitman pitched the film to Columbia Pictures executive Frank Price in March 1983. Price found the concept funny, but was unsure of the project, as comedies were seen to have limited profitability. He said the film would take a big budget due to its special effects and popular cast. Reitman reportedly said they could work with \$25–30 million; varying figures have been cited. Price agreed, as long as the film could be released by June 1984. Reitman later admitted he made up the figure, basing it on three times the budget for Stripes, which seemed "reasonable". This left 13 months to complete the film, with no finished script, effects studio, or filming start date. Reitman hired his previous collaborators Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross as associate producers. Columbia's CEO Fay Vincent sent his lawyer Dick Gallop to Los Angeles to convince Price not to pursue the film, but Price disagreed. Gallop returned to the head office to report that Price was "out of control". As the title "Ghostbusters" was legally restricted by the 1970s children's show The Ghost Busters, owned by Universal Studios, several alternatives titles were considered, including "Ghoststoppers", "Ghostbreakers", and "Ghostsmashers". Price parted ways with Columbia early in Ghostbusters' production and became head of Universal Pictures, at which point he sold Columbia the title for \$500,000 plus 1% of the film's profits. Given Hollywood's accounting practices—a method used by studios to artificially inflate a film's production costs to limit royalty or tax payouts—the film technically never made a profit for Universal to be owed a payment. ### Writing Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman began reworking the script, first at Reitman's office, then sequestering themselves and their families on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Aykroyd had a home there, and they worked day and night in his basement for about two weeks. Aykroyd was willing to rework his script; he considered himself a "kitchen sink" writer who created the funny situations and paranormal jargon, while Ramis refined the jokes and dialogue. They wrote separately, then rewrote each other's drafts. Many scenes had to be cut, including an asylum haunted by celebrities, and an illegal ghost-storage facility in a New Jersey gas station. Their initial draft was completed when they left the Vineyard in mid-July 1983, and a third and near-final draft was ready by early August. When Murray flew to New York after filming The Razor's Edge (1984) to meet Aykroyd and Ramis, he offered little input on the script or his character. Having written for Murray multiple times, Ramis said he knew "how to handle his character's voice". It was decided early on that Ramis's character would be the brains of the Ghostbusters, Aykroyd's the heart, and Murray's the mouth. Aykroyd drew inspiration from fiction archetypes: "Put Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz, and Egon Spengler together, and you have the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man". His concept called for the Ghostbusters to have a boss and to be directed into situations, but Ramis preferred they be in control "of their own destiny" and make their own choices. This led to the development of more distinct identities for the characters: Peter as the cool, modern salesman; Ray as the honest, enthusiastic technician; and Egon as the factual, stoic intellectual. Reitman thought the most difficult parts of the writing were determining the story's goal, who the villain was and their goal, why ghosts were manifesting, and how a towering Marshmallow Man would appear. The creature was one of many elaborate supernatural entities in Aykroyd's initial treatment, originally intended to emerge from the East River only 20 minutes into the film. It stood out to Reitman but concerned him because of the relatively realistic tone they were taking. Meanwhile, Reitman searched for a special effects studio, eventually recruiting Richard Edlund in the same two-week span. ### Cast and characters Murray was considered essential to Ghostbusters' potential success, but he was known for not committing to projects until late. Price agreed to fund Murray's passion project The Razor's Edge, believing if it failed it would lose little money, and hoping the gesture would secure Murray's commitment to Ghostbusters. Michael Keaton, Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Steve Guttenberg, and Richard Pryor were also considered for the role. Christopher Walken, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Goldblum, and Keaton were considered to portray Egon. Ramis was inspired by the cover of a journal on abstract architecture for Egon's appearance, featuring a man wearing a three-piece tweed suit and wire-rim glasses, his hair standing straight up. He took the character's first name from a Hungarian refugee with whom he attended school, and the surname from German historian Oswald Spengler. Apart from the three main stars, Medjuck was largely responsible for casting the roles. Hudson auditioned five times for the role of Winston Zeddemore. According to him, an earlier version of the script gave Winston a larger role as an Air Force demolitions expert with an elaborate backstory. Excited by the part, he agreed to the job for half his usual salary. The night before shooting began, he received a new script with a greatly reduced role; Reitman told him the studio wanted to expand Murray's part. Aykroyd said Winston was the role intended for Eddie Murphy, although Reitman denied this. Gregory Hines and Reginald VelJohnson were also considered for the part. Daryl Hannah, Denise Crosby, Julia Roberts, and Kelly LeBrock auditioned for the role of Dana Barrett, but Sigourney Weaver attracted the filmmakers' attention. There was resistance to casting her because of the generally serious roles she had played in Alien (1979) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). She revealed her comedic background, developed at the Yale School of Drama, and began walking on all fours and howling like a dog during her audition. It was her suggestion for Dana to become possessed by Zuul; Reitman said this solved problems with the last act by giving the characters personal stakes in the events. Weaver also changed Dana's occupation from a model to a musician, saying that Dana can be somewhat strict, but has a soul because she plays the cello. John Candy was offered the role of Louis Tully. He told Reitman he did not understand the character and suggested portraying Tully with a German accent and multiple German Shepherds, but the filmmakers felt there were already enough dogs in the film. Candy chose not to pursue the role. Reitman had previously worked with Rick Moranis and sent him the script. He accepted the role an hour later. Moranis developed many aspects of his character, including making him an accountant, and ad-libbed the lengthy speech at Tully's party. Sandra Bernhard turned down the role of the Ghostbusters' secretary Janine Melnitz, which went to Annie Potts. When she arrived for her first day of filming, Reitman rushed Potts into the current scene. She quickly changed out of her street clothes and borrowed a pair of glasses worn by the set dresser which her character subsequently wore throughout the film. William Atherton was chosen for the role of Walter Peck after he had appeared in the Broadway play Broadway. Peck was described as akin to Margaret Dumont's role as a comedic foil to the Marx Brothers. Atherton said: "It can't be funny, and I don't find [the Ghostbusters] in the least bit charming. I have to be outraged." The role of the Sumerian god Gozer the Gozerian, envisioned as a business-suited architect, was originally intended for Paul Reubens. When he passed on the idea, Yugoslavian actress Slavitza Jovan was cast and the character changed to one inspired by the androgynous looks of Grace Jones and David Bowie. Paddi Edwards was uncredited as the voice of Gozer, dubbing over Jovan's strong Slavic accent. Reitman's wife and their children, Jason and Catherine, filmed a cameo appearance as a family fleeing Dana's building, but the scene was cut because Jason was too scared by the setup to perform a second take. ### Filming Principal photography began in New York City on October 28, 1983. On the first day, Reitman brought Murray to the set, still unsure if he had read the script. Filming in New York lasted for approximately six weeks, finishing just before Christmas. Reitman was conscious they had to complete the New York phase before they encountered inhospitable December weather. At the time, choosing to shoot in New York City was considered risky. In the early 1980s, many saw the city as synonymous with fiscal disaster and violence, and Los Angeles was seen as the center of the entertainment industry. In a 2014 interview, Reitman said he chose New York because "I wanted the film to be ... my New York movie". As Reitman was working with comedians, he encouraged improvisation, adapting multiple takes and keeping the cast creations that worked, but directing them back to the script. Some guerrilla filmmaking took place, capturing spontaneous scenes at iconic locations around the city, including one shot at Rockefeller Center where the actors were chased off by a real security guard. A scene was shot on Central Park West with extras chanting "Ghostbusters" before the name had been cleared. Medjuck contacted the studio, urging them to secure permission to use the word as the title. The building at 55 Central Park West served as the home of Weaver's character and the setting of the Ghostbusters' climactic battle with Gozer. The art department added extra floors and embellishments using matte paintings, models, and digital effects to create the focal point of ghostly activity. During shooting of the final scene at the building, city officials allowed the closure of the adjacent streets during rush hour, affecting traffic across a large swath of the city. Gross commented that, from the top of the building, they could see traffic queuing all the way to Brooklyn. At various points, a police officer drew his gun on a taxi driver who refused orders; in a similar incident, another officer pulled a driver through his limo window. When angry citizens asked Medjuck what was being filmed, he blamed Francis Ford Coppola filming The Cotton Club (1984). Aykroyd encountered science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, a man he admired, who complained, "You guys are inconveniencing this building, it's just awful; I don't know how they got away with this!" Directly next to 55 Central Park West is the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, which is stepped on by the Marshmallow Man. Other locations included New York City Hall, the New York Public Library main branch, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Columbus Circle, the Irving Trust Bank on Fifth Avenue, and Tavern on the Green. Firehouse, Hook & Ladder Company 8 in the Tribeca neighborhood was used as the Ghostbusters' headquarters. Columbia University allowed its Havemeyer Hall to stand in for the fictional Weaver Hall, on the condition the university not be identified by name. Filming moved to Los Angeles, resuming between Christmas and the New Year. Due to the film's use of practical effects, skilled technicians were needed who resided mainly in the city and soundstages that were non-existent in New York. Despite its setting, most of Ghostbusters was filmed on location in Los Angeles or on sets at Burbank Studios. Location scouts searched for buildings that could replicate the interiors of buildings being filmed in New York. Reitman tried using the interior of Hook & Ladder 8, but was unable to take it over long enough because it was an active fire station. Interior firehouse shots were taken instead at the decommissioned Fire House No. 23 in downtown Los Angeles. The building design, while common in New York, was a rarity in Los Angeles. An archival photograph of an active crew in Fire House No. 23 from 1915 was hung in the background of the Ghostbusters' office. Filming in the main reading room of the New York Public Library was only allowed in the early morning and had to be concluded by 10:00 am. The basement library stacks were represented by the Los Angeles Central Library as Reitman said they were interchangeable. The Millennium Biltmore Hotel stood in for the scenes set at the fictional Sedgewick Hotel. Principal photography concluded at the end of January 1984, after between 55 and 62 days of filming. ### Post-production The short production schedule and looming release date meant Reitman edited the film while it was being shot. There was often only time for a few takes. Reitman sometimes found making an effects-laden movie frustrating, as the special effects had to be storyboarded and filmed in advance; there was no option to go back and produce new scenes. As Gross described it: "[Y]ou storyboard in advance, that's like editing in advance. You've got a scene, they're going to approve that scene, and we're going to spend nine months doing that cut. There's no second takes, no outtakes, there's no coverage. You can cut stuff, but you can't add stuff. It made [Reitman] so confined that it really bothered him". A deleted scene involved a segment at "Fort Detmerring" where Ray has a sexual encounter with a female ghost. The scene was intended to introduce a love interest for Aykroyd. Ramis believed it was extraneous to the fast-moving plot, however, so Reitman used the footage as a dream sequence during the mid-film montage instead. Editor Sheldon Kahn sent Reitman black-and-white reels of sequences during filming. They not only allowed him to make changes, but he considered they also helped him understand how to better pace the film. Kahn completed the first full cut three weeks after filming concluded. The final cut runs for 105 minutes. ### Music The Ghostbusters score was composed by Elmer Bernstein and performed by the 72-person Hollywood Studio Symphony orchestra at The Village in West Los Angeles, California. It was orchestrated by David Spear and Bernstein's son Peter. Elmer Bernstein had previously scored several of Reitman's films and joined the project early on, before all the cast had been signed. Reitman wanted a grounded, realistic score and did not want the music to tell the audience when something was funny. Bernstein used the ondes Martenot (effectively a keyboard equivalent of a theremin) to produce the "eerie" effect. Bernstein had to bring a musician from England to play the instrument because there were so few trained ondists. He also used three Yamaha DX7 synthesizers. In a 1985 interview Bernstein described Ghostbusters as the most difficult score he had written, finding it challenging to balance the varying comedic and serious tones. He created an "antic" theme for the Ghostbusters he described as "cute, without being really way out". He found the latter parts of the film easier to score, aiming to make it sound "awesome and mystical". Early on Reitman and Bernstein discussed the idea that Ghostbusters would feature popular music at specific points to complement Bernstein's original score. This includes "Magic" by Mick Smiley, which plays during the scene when the ghosts are released from the Ghostbusters headquarters. Bernstein's main theme for the Ghostbusters was later replaced by Ray Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters". Bernstein personally disliked the use of these songs, particularly "Magic", but said, "it's very hard to argue with something like ["Ghostbusters"], when it is up in the top ten on the charts". Music was required for a montage in the middle of the film, and "I Want a New Drug" by Huey Lewis and the News was used as a temporary placeholder because of its appropriate tempo. Reitman was later introduced to Parker Jr. who developed "Ghostbusters" with a similar riff to match the montage. There were approximately 50 to 60 different theme songs developed for Ghostbusters by different artists before Parker Jr.'s involvement, though none was deemed suitable. Huey Lewis was approached to compose the film's theme, but was already committed to work on Back to the Future (1985). ## Design During the thirteen-month production, all the major special effects studios were working on other films. Those that remained were too small to work on the approximately 630 individual effects shots needed for Ghostbusters. At the same time, special effects cinematographer Richard Edlund planned to leave Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and start his own business. Reitman convinced Columbia to collaborate with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which also needed an effects studio, to advance Edlund \$5 million to establish his own company, Boss Film Studios. According to Edlund, lawyers used much of the setup time finalizing the contract, leaving only ten months remaining to build the effects studio, shoot the scenes, and composite the images. The Boss Film Studios' team was split to complete work on Ghostbusters and MGM's science-fiction film 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The \$5 million effects came in at \$700,000 over budget. The strict filming schedule meant most of the effects shots were captured in one take. Gross oversaw both the creation of Boss Film Studios, and the hiring of many conceptual designers including comic book artists Tanino Liberatore (whose work went unused) and Bernie Wrightson (who helped conceive several ghost designs), and storyboarder Thom Enriquez, whose designs contributed to the "Onion Head ghost". ### Creature effects Edlund's previous work on the supernatural horror film Poltergeist (1982) served as a reference for the ghost designs in Ghostbusters. Gross said it was difficult to balance making the ghosts a genuine threat while fitting the film's more comedic tone. Special effects artist Steve Johnson sculpted the gluttonous, slimy, green ghost then known as the "Onion Head ghost" on set due to the puppet's unpleasant smell. The creature was given the name "Slimer" in the 1986 animated television series The Real Ghostbusters. The Slimer design took six months and cost approximately \$300,000. After struggling to complete a design due to executive interference, Johnson took at least three grams of cocaine and completed the final design in one night, based in part on Aykroyd's and Ramis's wish for the creature to homage Belushi. The full-size foam rubber puppet was worn by Mark Wilson and filmed against a black background. Puppeteers manipulated the model's movements with cables. Aykroyd tasked his friend, referred to as the Viking, with designing the Marshmallow Man, asking for a combination of the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy in a sailor hat. The Marshmallow Man outfit was built and portrayed by actor and special effects artist Bill Bryan, who modeled his walk on Godzilla. There were eighteen foam suits, each costing between \$25,000 and \$30,000; seventeen of them, worn by stuntman Tommy Cesar, were burned as part of filming. Bryan used a separate air supply due to the foam's toxicity. There were three different heads for the suit, built from foam and fiberglass, with different expressions and movements controlled by cable mechanisms. The costume was filmed against scale models to finish the effect. The effects team was able to find only one model of a police car at the correct scale and bought several, modifying them to represent different vehicles. The water from a burst hydrant hit by a remote-controlled car was actually sand as the water did not scale down. The "marshmallow" raining down on the crowd after it is destroyed was shaving cream. After seeing the intended 150 pounds (68 kg) of shaving cream to be used, Atherton insisted on testing it. The weight knocked a stuntman down, and they ended up using only 75 pounds (34 kg). The cream acted as a skin irritant after hours of filming, giving some of the cast rashes. Johnson also sculpted the Zombie Cab Driver puppet. It was the only puppet shot on location in New York City. Johnson based it on a reanimated corpse puppet he had made for An American Werewolf in London (1981). Johnson and Wilson collaborated on the Library Ghost, creating a puppet operated by up to 20 cables running through the torso that controlled aspects such as moving the head, arms, and pulling rubber skin away from the torso to transform it from a humanoid into a monstrous ghoul. The original Library Ghost puppet was considered too scary for younger audiences and was repurposed for use in Fright Night (1985). The library catalog scene was accomplished live in three takes, with the crew blowing air through copper pipes to force the cards into the air. These had to be collected and reassembled for each take. Reitman used a multi-camera setup to focus on the librarian and the cards flying around her and a wider overall shot. The floating books were hung on strings. Randy Cook was responsible for creating the quarter-scale stop-motion puppets of Gozer's minions Zuul and Vinz, the Terror Dogs, when in motion. The model was heavy and unwieldy, and it took nearly thirty hours to film it moving across a 30-foot (9.1 m) stage for the scene where it pursues Louis Tully across a street. For the scene where Dana is pinned to her chair by demonic hands before a doorway beaming with light, Reitman said he was influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). A rubber door was used to allow distortion as if something was trying to come through it, while grips concealed in a trapdoor beneath the chair, burst through it while wearing demonic dog-leg gloves. Made before the advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI), any non-puppet ghosts had to be animated. It took up to three weeks to create one second of footage. For Gozer, Slavitza Jovan wore red contact lenses that caused her a great deal of pain, and she wore a harness to move around the set. ### Technology and equipment Hardware consultant Stephen Dane was responsible for designing most of the Ghostbusters' iconic equipment, including the "proton packs" used to wrangle ghosts, ghost traps, and their vehicle, the Ectomobile. The equipment had to be designed and built in the six weeks before filming began in September 1983. Inspired by a military issue flamethrower, the "proton packs" consisted of a handheld proton stream firing "neutrino wand" connected by a hose to a backpack said to contain a nuclear accelerator. Dane said he "went home and got foam pieces and just threw a bunch of stuff together to get the look. It was highly machined, but it had to look off-the-shelf and military surplus". Following Reitman's tweaks to the design, on-screen models of the "proton packs" were made from a fiberglass shell with an aluminum backplate bolted to a United States Army backpack frame. Each pack weighed approximately 30 pounds (14 kg) with the batteries for lighting installed, and strained the actors' backs during the long shoots. Two lighter versions were made; a hollow one with surface details for wide shots, and a foam rubber version for action scenes. The fiberglass props were created by special effects supervisor Chuck Gaspar, based on Dane's design. Gaspar used rubber molds to create identical fiberglass shells. The "neutrino wand" had a flashbulb at the tip, giving animators an origin point for the proton streams. Fake walls laced with pyrotechnics were used to practically create the damage of the proton streams. The "Psychokinetic Energy meter" ("PKE meter") prop was built using an Iona SP-1 handheld shoe polisher as a base, to which lights and electronics were affixed. The PKE meter prop was designed and built by John Zabrucky of Modern Props in partnership with an outside fabricator. The technology was designed to not be overly fancy or sleek, emphasizing the characters' scientific backgrounds combined with the homemade nature of their equipment. The Ectomobile was in the first draft of Aykroyd's script, and he and John Daveikis developed some early concepts for the car. Dane developed fully detailed drawings for the interior and exterior and supervised the transformation of the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance conversion into the Ectomobile. According to Aykroyd, the actual vehicle was "an ambulance that we converted to a hearse and then converted to an ambulance". Early concepts featured a black car with purple and white strobe lights giving it a supernatural glow, but this idea was scrapped after cinematographer László Kovács noted that dark paint would not film well at night. The concept also had fantastic features such as the ability to dematerialize and travel inter-dimensionally. Two vehicles were purchased, one for the pre-modification scenes. Dane designed its high-tech roof array with objects including a directional antenna, an air-conditioning unit, storage boxes and a radome. Because of its size, the roof rack was shipped to Manhattan on an airplane, while the car was transported to the East Coast by train. Sound designer Richard Beggs created the siren from a recording of a leopard snarl, cut and played backward. ### Logo and sets In the script, Aykroyd described the Ghostbusters clothing and vehicle as bearing a no symbol with a ghost trapped in it, crediting the Viking with the original concept. The final design fell to Gross, who had volunteered to serve as art director. As the logo would be required for props and sets, it needed to be finalized quickly, and Gross worked with Boss Film artist and creature design consultant Brent Boates who drew the final concept, and R/GA animated the logo for the film's opening. According to Gross, two versions of the logo exist, with one having "ghostbusters" written across the diagonal part of the sign. Gross did not like how it looked and flipped the diagonal bar to read top left to bottom right instead, but they later removed the wording. According to Gross, this is the correct version of the sign that was used throughout Europe. The bottom left to top right version was used in the United States as that was the design of the No symbol there. Medjuck also hired John DeCuir as production designer. The script did not specify where Gozer would appear, and DeCuir painted the top of Dana's building with large, crystal doors that opened as written in the script. The fictional rooftop of 55 Central Park West was constructed at Stage 12 on the Burbank Studios lot. It was one of the largest constructed sets in film history and was surrounded by a 360-degree cyclorama painting. The lighting used throughout the painting consumed so much power that the rest of the studio had to be shut down, and an additional four generators added, when it was in use. Small models such as planes were hung on string to animate the backdrop. The set was built three stories off the ground to allow for filming from low angles. The first three floors and street-front of Dana's building were recreated as sets for filming, including the climactic earthquake scene where hydraulics were used to raise broken parts of the street. Broken pieces of pavement and the road were positioned outside the real location to create a seamless transition between the two shots. DeCuir said: "They had one night to dress the street. When people went home early in the evening everything was normal, and when the little old ladies came out to walk their dogs in the morning, the whole street had erupted. Apparently, people complained to the New York Police Department and their switchboard lit up." For the scene where Dana's apartment explodes outwards, Weaver stood on set as the stunt happened. Similarly, the scene of Weaver rotating in the air was performed on set using a body-cast and mechanical arm concealed in the curtains, a trick Reitman learned working with magician Doug Henning. ## Release ### Test screening and marketing Ghostbusters was screened for test audiences on February 3, 1984, with unfinished effects shots to determine if the comedy worked. Reitman was still concerned audiences would not react well to the Marshmallow Man because of its deviation from the realism of the rest of the film. Reitman recalled that approximately 200 people were recruited off the streets to view the film in a theater on the Burbank lot. It was during the opening library scene Reitman knew the film worked. Audiences reacted with fear, laughs, and applause as the Librarian Ghost transformed into a monster. The fateful Marshmallow scene was met with a similar reaction, and Reitman knew he would not have to perform any re-shoots. The screening for fellow industry members fared less well. Price recalled laughing as the rest of the audience sat deadpan; he rationalized an industry audience wants failure. Murray and Aykroyd's agent Michael Ovitz recalled an executive telling him, "Don't worry: we all make mistakes", while Roberto Goizueta, chairman of Columbia's parent, The Coca-Cola Company, said: "Gee, we're going to lose our shirts". In the months before its debut, a teaser trailer focused on the "No ghosts" logo, helping it become recognizable far in advance, and generating interest in the film without mentioning its title or its stars. A separate theatrical trailer contained a toll-free telephone number with a message by Murray and Aykroyd waiting for the 1,000 callers per hour it received over a six-week period. They also appeared in a video for ShoWest, a theater-owner convention, to promote the film. Columbia spent approximately \$10 million on marketing, including \$2.25 million on prints, \$1 million on promotional materials, and \$7 million on advertising and miscellaneous costs including a \$150,000 premiere for a hospital and the hotel costs for the press. Including the budget and marketing costs, it was estimated the film would have to make at least \$80 million to turn a profit. ### Box office The premiere of Ghostbusters took place on June 7, 1984, at the Avco Cinema in Westwood, Los Angeles, before its wide release the following day across 1,339 theaters in the United States (U.S.) and Canada. During its opening weekend in the U.S. and Canada, the film earned \$13.6 million—an average of \$10,040 per theater. It finished as the number one film of the weekend, ahead of premiering horror-comedy Gremlins (\$12.5 million), and the adventure film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (\$12 million), in its third week of release. The gross increased to \$23.1 million during its first week, becoming the first major success for the studio since Tootsie (1982). The film remained number one for seven consecutive weeks, grossing \$146.5 million, before being ousted by Purple Rain in early August. Ghostbusters regained the number one spot the following week before spending the next five weeks at number two, behind the action film Red Dawn and then the thriller Tightrope. Ghostbusters remained among the top-three grossing films for sixteen straight weeks before beginning a gradual decline and falling from the top-ten by late October. It left cinemas in early January 1985, after thirty weeks. Ghostbusters had quickly become a hit, surpassing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as the top-grossing film of the summer, and earning \$229 million, making it the second highest-grossing film of 1984, approximately \$5 million behind Eddie Murphy's action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop (\$234.8 million) which was released in mid-December. Ghostbusters surpassed Animal House as the highest-grossing comedy film ever, until Beverly Hills Cop surpassed it six months later. Columbia had negotiated 50% of the box-office revenues or 90% of gross after expenses, depending on whichever was higher. Since the latter was the case, the studio received a 73% share of the box office profit, an estimated \$128 million. The main cast members each received percentages of the gross profits or net participation. A 1987 report estimated Murray alone had earned between \$20–30 million from his share. Detailed box office figures are not available for territories outside the U.S. and Canada, but it is estimated to have earned \$53 million, bringing Ghostbusters' worldwide total to \$282.2 million. That year saw the release of several films that would later be considered iconic of the era, including: Gremlins, The Karate Kid, The Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Romancing the Stone, and The NeverEnding Story. It was also the first year in box office history in which four films, including Ghostbusters, grossed over \$100 million. Ghostbusters was re-released in the U.S. and Canada in August 1985, earning a further \$9.4 million over five weeks, raising its theatrical gross to \$238.6 million and surpassing Beverly Hills Cop as the most successful comedy of the 1980s. A restored and remastered version was released in August 2014, at 700 theaters across the U.S. and Canada to celebrate its 30th anniversary. It earned an additional \$3.5 million, bringing the theatrical total to \$242.2 million. The film has also received limited rereleases for special events and anniversaries. Combined with available figures for territories outside of the U.S. and Canada, the film has earned an estimated \$295.2 million worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, the North American box office is equivalent to \$667.9 million in 2020, making it the thirty-seventh highest-grossing film ever. ## Reception ### Critical response Ghostbusters opened to generally positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half out of four, citing it as a rare example of successfully combining a special effects-driven blockbuster with "sly" dialogue. Ebert noted the effects existed to serve the actors' performances and not the reverse, saying it is "an exception to the general rule that big special effects can wreck a comedy". He also cited Ghostbusters as a rare mainstream film with many quotable lines. Writing for Newsday, Joseph Gelmis described the Ghostbusters as an adolescent fantasy, comparing their firehouse base to the Batcave with a fireman's pole and an Ectomobile on the ground floor. Deseret News' Christopher Hicks praised Reitman's improved directing skills, and the crew for avoiding the vulgarity found in their previous films, Caddyshack and Stripes. He felt they reached for more creative humor and genuine thrills instead. He complained about the finale, claiming it lost its sense of fun and was "overblown", but found the film compensated for this since it "has ghosts like you've never seen". Janet Maslin agreed that the apocalyptic finale was out of hand, saying Ghostbusters worked best during the smaller ghost-catching scenes. Dave Kehr wrote that Reitman is adept at improvisational comedy, but lost control of the film as the special effects gradually escalated. Arthur Knight appreciated the relaxed style of comedy saying while the plot is "primitive", it has "far more style and finesse" than would be expected of the creative team behind Meatballs and Animal House. He singled out editors Sheldon Kahn and David Blewitt for creating a sustained pace of comedy and action. Despite "bathroom humor and tacky sight gags", Peter Travers described Ghostbusters favorably as "irresistible nonsense", comparing it to the supernatural horror film The Exorcist, but with the comedy duo Abbott and Costello starring. Time's Richard Schickel described the special effects as somewhat "tacky" but believed this was a deliberate commentary on other ghost films. Ultimately, he believed praise was due to all involved for "thinking on a grandly comic scale". Newsweek's David Ansen enjoyed the film, describing it as a teamwork project where everyone works "toward the same goal of relaxed insanity"; he called it "wonderful summer nonsense". Variety's review described it as a "lavishly produced" film that is only periodically impressive. Reviewers were consistent in their praise for Murray's performance. Gene Siskel wrote that Murray's comedic sensibilities compensated for the "boring special effects". Variety singled out Murray for his "endearing" physical comedy and ad-libbing. Hicks similarly praised Murray, saying he "has never been better than he is here". Schickel considered Murray's character a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop fully his patented comic character". Gelmis appreciated Murray's dismissal of the serious situations to keep them comedic. The interactions between Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis, were also generally well-received. Schickel praised Aykroyd and Ramis for their "grace" in allowing Murray to outshine them. Travers and Gelmis said the three main actors worked well as a collaborative force, and Hicks described Murray, Ramis, and Aykroyd as wanting "to be like the Marx Brothers of the 80s". Conversely, Kehr believed the pair were "curiously underutilized", but appreciated Murray's deadpan line readings. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael had problems with the chemistry among the three leads. She praised Murray, but felt other actors did not have much material to contribute to the story; she concluded, "Murray's lines fall on dead air". Maslin believed Murray's talents were in service to a film lacking wit or coherence. She noted that many of the characters had little to do, leaving their stories unresolved as the plot began to give way to servicing the special effects instead. However, she did praise Weaver's performance as an "excellent foil" for Murray. Variety described it as a mistake to cast top comedians but often have them working alone. Siskel enjoyed the characters interacting with each other, but was critical of Hudson's late addition to the plot and his lack of development, believing it made "him appear as only a token box office lure". ### Accolades Ghostbusters was nominated for two Academy Awards in 1985: Best Original Song for "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker Jr. (losing to Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" from The Woman in Red), and Best Visual Effects for John Bruno, Richard Edlund, Chuck Gaspar and Mark Vargo (losing to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). That year, it was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards: Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (losing to Romancing the Stone), Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Murray (losing to Dudley Moore in Micki & Maude), and Best Original Song for Parker Jr., (losing again to "I Just Called to Say I Love You"). "Ghostbusters" went on to win the BAFTA Award for Best Original Song, and Edlund was nominated for Special Visual Effects (losing again to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). It won Best Fantasy Film at the 12th Saturn Awards. ## Post-release ### Aftermath Ray Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1984 and 21 weeks on the charts altogether. The song is estimated to have added \$20 million to the film's box office. Reitman directed the successful "Ghostbusters" music video that included several celebrity cameos. Shortly after the film's release, Huey Lewis sued Parker Jr., for plagiarizing his 1983 song "I Want a New Drug". The case was settled out of court in 1985. Parker Jr. later sued Lewis for breaching a confidentiality agreement about the case. In 1984, the filmmakers were also sued by Harvey Cartoons, the owner of Casper the Friendly Ghost for \$50 million and the destruction of all copies of the film. Harvey alleged the Ghostbusters logo was based on their character Fatso. The case was decided in Columbia's favor. Murray left acting for four years following the release of Ghostbusters. He described the success as a phenomenon that would forever be his biggest accomplishment and, compounded by the failure of his personal project The Razor's Edge, he felt "radioactive". Murray avoided central roles in films until the 1988 Christmas comedy film Scrooged, which used the tagline that Murray was "back among the ghosts". In a 1989 interview, Reitman said he was upset at the "little respect" he felt Ghostbusters received and his work was not taken seriously, believing many dismissed it as just "another action-comedy". Hudson held mixed feelings about Ghostbusters. He regretted the marginalization of his character from the original script and felt Ghostbusters did not improve his career as he had hoped, or been promised. In a 2014 interview, he said: "I love the character and he's got some great lines, but I felt the guy was just kind of there ... I'm very thankful that fans appreciate the Winston character. But it's always been very frustrating—kind of a love/hate thing, I guess." Atherton said fans would call him "dickless" on the streets into the 1990s, to his ire. ### Home media Ghostbusters was released on VHS in October 1985. Paramount Pictures had scheduled the equally popular Beverly Hills Cop to release the day before Ghostbusters, forcing Columbia to release it a week earlier to avoid direct competition. Priced at \$79.95, Ghostbusters was predicted to sell well but be outperformed by Beverly Hills Cop because of its lower \$29.95 price. The release was supported by a \$1 million advertising campaign. The film was the tenth best-selling VHS during its launch week. Columbia earned approximately \$20 million selling the rights to manufacture and distribute the VHS. A record 410,000 VHS units were ordered (exceeded a few months later by Rambo: First Blood Part II's 425,000 unit order). By February 1986, it was estimated to have sold 400,000 copies and earned \$32 million in revenue, making it the third best-selling VHS of 1985, after Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (425,000 units, \$12.7 million) and Beverly Hills Cop (1.4 million units sold, \$41.9 million). Ghostbusters was released in 1989 on LaserDisc, a format then experiencing a resurgence in popularity. The release offered a one-disc version, and a two-disc special edition version featuring deleted scenes, a split-screen demonstration of the film's effects, the screenplay, and other special features. In a 1999 interview for the DVD release, Reitman admitted he was not involved in the LaserDisc versions and had been embarrassed by the visual changes that "pumped up the light level so much you saw all the matte lines", highlighting flaws in the special effects. Ghostbusters was also the first full-length film to be released on a USB flash drive when PNY Technologies did so in 2008. Blu-ray disc editions were released for the film's 25th, 30th, and 35th anniversaries in 2009, 2014 and 2019. They featured remastered 4K resolution video quality, deleted scenes, alternate takes, fan interviews, and commentaries by crew members and actors including Aykroyd, Ramis, Reitman, and Medjuck. The 35th-anniversary version came in a limited edition steel book cover and contained unseen footage including the deleted "Fort Detmerring" scene. The film was released as part of the 8-disc Ghostbusters: Ultimate Collection Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray boxset in February 2022, also containing its sequels Ghostbusters II (1989) and Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), and the 2016 reboot Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. Presented in a ghost trap-shaped box, the release features a 114-minute preview cut of Ghostbusters including deleted scenes, an edited-for-TV version, recorded auditions for Dana, and a 90-minute documentary, "Ghostbusters: Behind Closed Doors" about the film's production. Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" received special edition vinyl record releases, one as a glow in the dark record—the other a white record presented in a marshmallow-scented jacket. A remaster of Bernstein's score was also released in June 2019, on compact disc, digital, and vinyl formats. It includes four unreleased tracks, and commentary by Bernstein's son Peter. ### Merchandise Developing merchandise for a film was still a relatively new practice at the time of Ghostbusters' release, and it was only following the success of Star Wars merchandise that other studios attempted to duplicate the idea. The unexpected success of Ghostbusters meant Columbia did not have a comprehensive merchandising plan in place to fully capitalize on the film at the peak of its popularity. They were able to generate additional revenue, however, by applying the popular "no ghosts" logo to a variety of products. Much of the merchandising success came from licensing the rights to other companies based on the success of the 1986 animated spin-off The Real Ghostbusters. Merchandise based directly on the film did not initially sell well until The Real Ghostbusters, which on its own helped generate up to \$200 million in revenue in 1988, the same year the Ghostbusters proton pack was the most popular toy in the United Kingdom. A successful Ghostbusters video game was released alongside the film. The film also received two novelizations, Ghostbusters by Larry Milne (released with the film), and Ghostbusters: The Supernatural Spectacular by Richard Mueller (released in 1985). "Making Ghostbusters", an annotated script by Ramis, was released in 1985. In the years since its release, Ghostbusters merchandise has included: soundtrack albums, action figures, books, Halloween costumes, various Lego and Playmobil sets including the Ectomobile and Firehouse, board games, slot machines, pinball machines, bobbleheads, statues, prop replicas, neon signs, ice cube trays, Minimates, coin banks, Funko Pop figures, footwear, lunch boxes, and breakfast cereals. A Slimer-inspired limited-edition citrus-flavored Hi-C's Ecto Cooler drink first released in 1987, was one of the more popular items, and did not cease production until 2001. The Slimer character became iconic and popular, appearing in video games, toys, cartoons, sequels, toothpaste, and juice boxes. There have also been crossover products including comic books and toys that combine the Ghostbusters with existing properties like Men in Black, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, and World Wrestling Entertainment. ## Thematic analysis ### Capitalism and private industry As described by academic Christine Alice Corcos, Ghostbusters is "a satire on academia, intellectuals, city government, yuppies, tax professionals, and apathetic New Yorkers". It has also been analyzed as an era-appropriate example of Republican, libertarian, or neo-liberal ideology, in particular, Reagan-era economics popularized by United States President Ronald Reagan. Reaganomics focused on limited government spending and deregulation in favor of a free market provided by the private sector of entrepreneurship, profit motives, and individual initiative. Analysts point to the premise of a small private business obstructed by an arrogant, incompetent bureaucrat (Walter Peck) from a government agency. Peck's interference compromises the Ghostbusters' ghost containment unit, unleashing spirits upon the city and ushering in Gozer's arrival. When Peck arrives to shutter the Ghostbusters, Egon affirms "this is private property". In this sense, it is Peck, not Gozer, who represents the true villain. Others note that after losing their university jobs, Aykroyd's character is upset because their public sector funding required little of them. He had worked in the private sector where "they expect results". Reitman considered himself a "conservative-slash-libertarian". The Washington Examiner wrote that the private sector arrives to combat the supernatural activity in New York, for a fee, while the government is incapable of doing anything. As Vox notes, the mayor, a government representative, is motivated to release the Ghostbusters after being reminded that their success will save the lives of "millions of registered voters", a cynical view of an official who is motivated by what allows him to retain his position. The mayor's choice is ideological: the privatized free market of the Ghostbusters or the government agency Peck represents. Even the police are forced to take Louis/Vinz to the Ghostbusters because they are incapable of dealing with him. Author Ralph Clare highlights that the Ghostbusters reside in a disused firehouse and drive an old ambulance, each sold off as public services fail. Corcos suggests the Ghostbusters are an example of the American free-thinker, representing vigilantes fighting against government overreach that is worsening the issue. Clare wrote that Ghostbusters embraces the free market in the aftermath of American financial despair in the 1970s, particularly in New York City that led to films set in a gritty, collapsing, crime-ridden, and failed New York, such as Taxi Driver (1976), The Warriors (1979), and Escape from New York (1981). Ghostbusters was created at the beginning of an economic recovery that Clare described as "pure capitalism", focused on the privatization and deregulation to allow the private sector to supplant the government. The necessity of the mayor outsourcing the ghost problem mirrors the real New York government ceding vast areas of real estate to corporations to stimulate renewal. The use of capitalism can be further seen in how Ray, tasked to empty his mind, is incapable of recalling anything but a consumerist mascot; in another example, Dana's refrigerator, which stores consumerist icons, is where she witnesses Zuul. ### Inequality, immigrants, and pollution The ghosts in Ghostbusters have been interpreted as analogs for crime, homelessness, pollution, and faltering infrastructure and public services. Corcos discussed Ghostbusters's negative take on government and environmental regulation. She wrote that the ghosts represent pollutants, remnants of environmental damage, and a reflection of real-life governments refusing to acknowledge environmental problems that affect humanity. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explicitly does not believe in the ghosts or "waste" the Ghostbusters are collecting and, in turn, the Ghostbusters do not believe the EPA deserves obedience or compliance because of its ignorance. Even though the Ghostbusters have condensed a widespread problem into a small area, they have constructed a dangerous containment unit in a heavily populated area while possessing the unique knowledge to understand how much danger it poses. However, Peck's rigid adherence to government regulation results in him turning off the unit and creating a more dangerous situation. Clare identified the ghosts as representative of New York's issues with the homeless and ethnic minorities. The ghosts, which were once human, are not acknowledged as such and are treated as a nuisance that the Ghostbusters transport to less desirable areas, similar to real-world gentrification. The Ghostbusters charge a substantial fee for their services and so generally serve the affluent such as the Sedgewick hotel and Dana Barrett, while poorer Chinese citizens pay for their services in meat. In this way, Clare argues, Ghostbusters promotes the regeneration of New York City but ignores the cost to the poor and disenfranchised to achieve it. Author Zoila Clark noted that concept art of an unused Chinatown ghost bore similarities to a stereotypical Chinese immigrant including long, braided hair and a triangular agricultural hat. ### Immaturity Author Nicole Matthews argued the need to present a film targeted at both adults and children leads to the central characters being infantilized and immature. Critic Vincent Canby said a film's profitability was dependent on addressing children who "can identify with a 40-year-old-man with a mid-life crisis and 40-year-old-men in midlife crises who long to fight pirates with cardboard cutlasses". Ghostbusters presents Venkman's immature comedic sarcasm as a means of disarming situations and furthering the narrative. Author Jim Whalley wrote that this presents a clear tonal shift in the sequel; in Ghostbusters, the characters are hired workers just doing their job, whereas in Ghostbusters II they are noble heroes saving the city. In doing so, Ghostbusters II reimagines Venkman's persona as comedic relief instead of a practical tool. The primarily male audience also results in female characters that are either absent or not important to the overall story. Author Jane Crisp wrote that Dana encountering Zuul in her fridge presents a stereotypical view of women being associated with the home and kitchen. ## Legacy Ghostbusters is considered one of the first blockbusters and is credited with refining the term to effectively create a new genre that mixed comedy, science fiction, horror, and thrills. Ghostbusters also confirmed the merchandising success of Star Wars (1977) was not a fluke. A successful, recognizable brand could be used to launch spin-offs, helping establish a business model in the film industry that has since become the status quo. Once Ghostbusters' popularity was clear, the studio aggressively cultivated its profile, translating it into merchandising and other media such as television, extending its profitable lifetime long after the film had left theaters. Entertainment industry observers credit Ghostbusters and Saturday Night Live with reversing the negative perception of New York City in the early 1980s. Weaver said: "I think it was a love letter to New York and New Yorkers ... the doorman saying, 'Someone brought a cougar to a party'—that's so New York. When we come down covered with marshmallow, and there are these crowds of New Yorkers of all types and descriptions cheering for us ... it was one of the most moving things I can remember". It is similarly credited with helping diminish the divide between television and film actors. Talent agent Michael Ovitz said that before Ghostbusters, television actors were only considered for minor roles in film. Describing Ghostbusters' enduring popularity, Reitman said "kids are all worried about death and... ghost-like things. By watching Ghostbusters, there's a sense that you can control this, that you can mitigate it somehow and it doesn't have to be that frightening. It became this movie that parents liked to bring their kids to—they could appreciate it on different levels but still watch it together". ### Cultural influence Ghostbusters was considered a phenomenon and highly influential. The Ghostbusters' theme song was a hit, and Halloween of 1984 was dominated by children dressed as the titular protagonists. It had a significant effect on popular culture and is credited with inventing the special-effects driven comedy. Its basic premise of a particular genre mixed with comedy, and a team combating an otherworldly threat has been replicated with varying degrees of success in films like Men in Black (1997), Evolution (2001), The Watch (2012), R.I.P.D. (2013), and Pixels (2015). In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected Ghostbusters for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Reitman responded: "It's an honor to know that a movie that begins with a ghost in a library now has a spot on the shelves of the Library of Congress". In 1984, the Ghostbusters phenomenon was referred to across dozens of advertisements for everything from airlines to dentistry and real estate. The "-busters" suffix became a common term used at both local and national stages, being applied to topics like the United States national budget ("budgetbusters"), agriculture ("cropbusters"), B-52s ("nukebusters"), sanitation ("litterbusters"), or Pan American Airlines ("pricebusters"). Similarly, the "no ghosts" logo was modified to protest political candidates like Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale to Mickey Mouse by striking Disney workers. Other contributions to the cultural lexicon included "Who ya gonna call?" from Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters", and Murray's adlib of "this chick is toast" against Gozer to imply she was finished or doomed over the scripted line of "I'm gonna turn this guy into toast". This is thought to be the first historic usage of "toast" as a slang term. Ghostbusters quickly developed a dedicated fan following that has continued to thrive in the years since. Despite its mainstream success, it is considered an example of a cult blockbuster—a popular film with a dedicated fanbase. It is popular globally, inspiring fan clubs, fan-made films, art, and conventions. Fans dressed as Ghostbusters occasionally burst into the main reading room of the New York Public Library. The 2016 crowdfunded documentary Ghostheads follows various fans of the series and details the effect it has had on their lives, interspersed with interviews from crew, including Aykroyd, Reitman, and Weaver. A separate 2020 documentary, Cleanin' Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, details the film production. Memorabilia from the film is popular, with a screen-used proton pack selling for \$169,000 at a 2012 auction. In 2017, a newly discovered ankylosaur fossil was named Zuul crurivastator after Gozer's minion. Ghostbusters was turned into a special-effects laden stage show at Universal Studios Florida, which ran from 1990 to 1996, based mainly on the final battle with Gozer. The 2019 Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Florida hosted a haunted maze attraction featuring locations, characters, and ghosts from the film. The film has also been homaged or explicitly referred to across a variety of media including film, television, and video games. Aykroyd reprised his Ghostbuster character for a cameo in Casper (1995), and the celebratory parade at the film's denouement inspired the ending of the 2012 superhero film The Avengers, showing the world celebrating the eponymous team's victory. ### Critical reassessment Ghostbusters's positive reception has lasted well beyond its release, and it is considered one of the most important comedy films ever made. It is listed in the 2013 film reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. On its 30th anniversary in 2014, The Hollywood Reporter's entertainment industry-voted ranking named it the seventy-seventh best film of all time. That year, Time Out rated Ghostbusters five out of five, describing it as a "cavalcade of pure joy". Empire's reader-voted list of the 100 Greatest Movies placed the film as number 68. In 2014, Rolling Stone readers voted Ghostbusters the ninth-greatest film of the 1980s. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes offers a approval rating from critics, with an average rating of . The site's consensus reads: "An infectiously fun blend of special effects and comedy, with Bill Murray's hilarious deadpan performance leading a cast of great comic turns". The film also has a score of 71 out of 100 on Metacritic based on eight critical reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". In 2001, the American Film Institute ranked Ghostbusters number 28 on its 100 Years...100 Laughs list recognizing the best comedy films. In 2009, National Review ranked Ghostbusters number 10 on its list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years, noting the "regulation-happy" Environmental Protection Agency is portrayed as the villain and it is the private sector that saves the day. In November 2015, the screenplay was listed number 14 on the Writers Guild of America's 101 Funniest Screenplays. In 2017, the BBC polled 253 critics (118 female, 135 male) from across 52 countries on the funniest film made. Ghostbusters came ninety-fifth. Ghostbusters is considered one of the best films of the 1980s, appearing on several lists based on this metric, including: number two by Film.com, number five by Time Out, number six by ShortList, number 15 by Complex, number 31 by Empire, and it appears on Filmsite's non-ranked list. It also appeared on several media outlets' best comedy film lists—ranked number one by Entertainment Weekly, number four by IGN, number 10 by Empire, number 25 by The Daily Telegraph, and number 45 by Rotten Tomatoes, which also listed the film number 71 on its list of 200 essential movies to watch. Others have named it one of the best science-fiction films, best science-fiction comedies, and best summer blockbusters. Murray's Peter Venkman appeared at number 44 on Empire's 2006 list of its "100 Greatest Movie Characters". ## Sequels and adaptations The film's success spawned the Ghostbusters franchise, comprising animated television shows, film sequels, and reboot. Ghostbusters was followed by the 1986 animated television series The Real Ghostbusters. It ran for 140 episodes over seven seasons across six years, and itself spawned a spin-off Slimer-centric sub-series, comic books, and merchandise. It was followed by a sequel series, 1997's Extreme Ghostbusters. A film sequel, Ghostbusters II, was released in 1989. Despite breaking box office records and attracting an estimated two million more people to its opening than Ghostbusters, the sequel earned less than the original and received a less enthusiastic response. Even so, the popularity of the actors and characters led to discussion of a third film. The concept failed to progress for many years because Murray was reluctant to participate. In a 2009 interview, he said: > We did [Ghostbusters II] and it was sort of rather unsatisfying for me, because the first one to me was ... the real thing. And the sequel ... They’d written a whole different movie than the one [initially discussed] ... so there's never been an interest in a third Ghostbusters, because the second one was disappointing ... for me, anyway. Aykroyd pursued a sequel through to the early 2010s. Ghostbusters: The Video Game was released in 2009, featuring narrative contributions from Ramis and Aykroyd, and voice acting by Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Hudson, Potts, and Atherton. Set two years after Ghostbusters II, the story follows the Ghostbusters training a recruit (the player) to combat a ghostly threat related to Gozer. The game was well-received, earning award nominations for its storytelling. Aykroyd has referred to the game as being "essentially the third movie". Ghostbusters: The Return (2004) was the first in a planned series of sequel novels before the publisher went out of business. Several Ghostbusters comic books have continued the original group's adventures across the globe and other dimensions. Following Ramis's death in 2014, Reitman determined the creative control shared by himself, Ramis, Aykroyd, and Murray was holding the franchise back and negotiated a deal to sell the rights to Columbia; he spent two weeks convincing Murray. Reitman refused to detail the deal but said "the creators would be enriched for the rest of our lives, and for the rest of our children's lives". He and Aykroyd founded Ghost Corps, a production company dedicated to expanding the franchise, starting with the 2016 female-led reboot Ghostbusters (later retitled Ghostbusters: Answer the Call). Before its release, the reboot was beset by controversies. After its release, it was considered a box-office bomb with mixed reviews. A second sequel to the 1984 film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Reitman's son Jason, was released in November 2021.
39,425,314	Air Mata Iboe	1,171,861,798	1941 film by Njoo Cheong Seng	[ "Dutch East Indies films", "Films directed by Njoo Cheong Seng", "Indonesian black-and-white films", "Lost Indonesian films" ]	Air Mata Iboe (Perfected spelling: Air Mata Ibu; Malay for A Mother's Tears) is a 1941 drama film from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) directed and written by Njoo Cheong Seng. Starring Fifi Young, Rd Ismail, Ali Sarosa, and Ali Joego, it followed a mother who raises her children lovingly but is ultimately betrayed by her eldest sons when she falls upon hard times. The film, billed as a "musical extravaganza," featured a soundtrack by R. Koesbini, and an eponymous title song written by Njoo. Air Mata Iboe was the last production completed by Fred Young's Majestic Film Company. The film was filmed throughout June to December 1941, and was released that month as well, prior to the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. It is now possibly lost, although it still might be hidden somewhere. A titular remake was later produced in 1957. ## Plot Soegiati is the mother of four children: sons Achmad, Idris, and Soemadi, and a daughter named Soepinah. She loves them all, but Soemadi receives the most of her attention because he receives little from his father, the merchant Soebagio. As the children grow, they marry and move away, and eventually only Soemadi is left. Although he begins a relationship with a young woman named Noormala, he does not marry her as his income is not enough to support them. On the night of Eid al-Fitr, the family gathers for the holiday. Unbeknownst to the family, Soebagio is leading a double life as a robber, and that evening the police come to arrest him. To protect his father, Soemadi declares himself the culprit, and he is exiled. Feeling guilty for his sins, Soebagio falls ill and dies soon afterwards. Because of their debts, their home and belongings are repossessed, leaving Soegiati to fend for herself. Though wealthy, Achmad and Idris refuse to take Soegiati in, fearing their respective wives Moedjenah and Mariam. Soepinah and her husband Bakar are willing to take her in, but they live in poverty. Unwilling to burden them, ultimately Soegiati decides to leave and find her own way, depending on the kindness of strangers. Years pass, and Soemadi returns from exile. Encountering his mother, who now lives in poverty, he decides to take revenge on his brothers. ## Cast - Fifi Young as Soegiati - Rd Ismail as Achmad - S. Poniman as Idris - Ali Sarosa as Soemadi - Soelami as Soepinah - Ali Joego as Soebagio - Soerip as Noermala - Titing as Moedjenah - Ning-Nong as Mariam - Koesbini as Bakar ## Production The Malang-based Majestic Film Company announced Air Mata Iboe in June 1941 together with two other films, Boedi Terbenam (Hidden Wisdom) and Bachtera Karam (Wrecked Ark). Production began soon afterwards and, by early December 1941, over 55 reels had been shot, as well as 60 sound reels. Air Mata Iboe was written and directed by Njoo Cheong Seng under his penname M. d'Amour; he had previously directed Djantoeng Hati (Heart and Soul; 1941), which also had a tragic ending. The film was produced by the company's owner, Fred Young. It starred Njoo's wife Fifi Young (no relation to Fred), Rd Ismail, Ali Sarosa, and Ali Joego. Other roles were held by established singers of keroncong (traditional music with Portuguese influences), including Soerip, Titing, Soelami, Ning Nong, and S. Poniman. The film, which used make-up to make Fifi Young age into an old woman over the course of its plot, was the actress' first for Majestic; she had been ill during the production of her husband's debut for the company. The black-and-white film featured eleven keroncong songs written by music director R. Koesbini, who also had a role in the film. Backing music was provided by Koesbini's troupe, the Krontjong Syncopaters, while songs were performed by the cast. Notes and lyrics for the film's title song, "Air Mata Iboe", were published in the December 1941 edition of the magazine Pertjatoeran Doenia dan Film. ## Release and legacy Air Mata Iboe, which was rated for all ages, was distributed by Columbia Pictures and premiered at Sampoerna Theatre in Surabaya on 24 December 1941. Also advertised under the Dutch title Tranen Eener Moeder (a literal translation from Malay), the film was promoted as a "musical extravaganza"; other advertisements emphasised the size of the cast. An anonymous review in De Indische Courant noted the extensive use of keroncong and praised the acting and singing, suggesting that native audiences would flock to see the film. Air Mata Iboe was the last film produced by Majestic Film Company, which closed following the Japanese occupation. During the occupation Njoo, Fifi Young, and Fred Young established their own travelling theatrical troupe, Pantjawarna, though all returned to cinema in the 1950s. Joego likewise returned to film after spending the occupation in theater. Poniman, Sarosa, Ismail, and Soerip all returned to cinema, the men in the 1950s and Soerip in 1973. Soelami is not recorded as acting in any further productions. A remake of Air Mata Iboe, titled Air Mata Ibu, was produced in 1957, after Indonesia obtained its independence. Directed by Fred Young, the film had Fifi Young retake her role as Soegiati, while Rd Ismail took the role of Soebagio. The remake's other cast members had not appeared in the original film. The sons Achmad, Idris, and Soemadi were portrayed by Sukarno M. Noor, Boes Boestami, and Kamsul, respectively. The couple's daughter, renamed Atikah, was played by Farida Arriany. Air Mata Iboe may be lost. As elsewhere at the time, films in the Dutch East Indies were shot on highly unstable nitrate film, and after a fire destroyed much of Produksi Film Negara's warehouse in 1952, earlier films shot on nitrate were deliberately destroyed. Thus, the American visual anthropologist Karl G. Heider wrote that all Indonesian films made before 1950 are lost. However, JB Kristanto's Katalog Film Indonesia (Indonesian Film Catalogue) records several as having survived at Sinematek Indonesia's archives. ## Explanatory notes
2,635,192	Title TK	1,147,288,728	2002 alternative rock album by The Breeders	[ "2002 albums", "4AD albums", "Albums produced by Steve Albini", "Elektra Records albums", "The Breeders albums" ]	Title TK is the third studio album by American alternative rock band the Breeders, released on May 20 and 21, 2002 by 4AD in the United Kingdom and Elektra Records in the United States, and on May 10 by P-Vine Records in Japan. The album—whose name means "title to come" in journalistic shorthand—generated three singles: "Off You", "Huffer", and "Son of Three". Title TK reached the top 100 in France, Germany, the UK, and Australia, and number 130 in the US. Following multiple changes in personnel after the release of Last Splash (1993), singer and songwriter Kim Deal was the only remaining constant member of the Breeders by 1996. The next year, she returned to the studio in an attempt to record a follow-up album, but her behavior—including drug use and demanding expectations—alienated many of the musicians and engineers with whom she worked. In 1999, joined by her sister Kelley, Deal began recording sessions with engineer Steve Albini in Chicago. Fear members Mando Lopez and Richard Presley, and drummer Jose Medeles, joined the line-up. The group continued recording with Albini in 2001. Title TK was compiled from the output of these sessions and supplemented with two tracks recorded in Los Angeles with engineers Andrew Alekel and Mark Arnold. Of the twelve songs on the album, ten are credited solely to Kim Deal; the other two were written by all five band members. Commentary on the album has included discussion of its minimal instrumentation and the interjection of unexpected sounds. Reviewers have described the lyrics on the songs as unconventional and dark, and noted the prominence of vocal harmonies between the Deal sisters. The reception of Title TK has been generally positive; appraisal has included commendation for Albini's contributions to the sound of the album, and for how the recordings isolate individual instruments. ## Background and initial recording attempts From the formation of the Breeders in 1989 until the mid-1990s, the line-up changed several times. Vocalist and songwriter Kim Deal was the band's sole consistent member. The line-up that recorded the group's debut Pod (released in 1990) included guitarist Tanya Donelly and drummer Britt Walford; they were replaced by Deal's sister Kelley and Jim Macpherson by the time the band's 1993 album Last Splash was recorded. Kelley Deal and original bassist Josephine Wiggs left in 1995. Kim Deal formed the Amps that year, but reformed the Breeders in 1996—initially using the Amps' line-up: Deal (vocals), Macpherson (drums), Luis Lerma (bass), and Nate Farley (guitar). Throughout 1997, Deal attempted to record tracks for a forthcoming album. Engineers and musicians on the project found that Deal's behavior and demanding musical standards created a difficult working environment. Deal's actions and the unenjoyable atmosphere of the recording sessions at the time caused Macpherson and Farley to leave the group. Several other musicians recruited throughout the year left for similar reasons. The 1997 sessions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars through the use of four New York studios, the expense of moving equipment between them, and hotel costs. Three recording engineers parted ways with Deal in 1997. The first engineer she hired—Mark Freegard, who had co-produced Last Splash—has remarked that Deal was "totally lost" and that after seven weeks in the studio, there were no usable recordings. Two subsequent engineers, John Agnello and Bryce Goggin, had each worked with Deal in 1995 on parts of the Amps' album Pacer. Agnello became increasingly frustrated with Deal's drug use and the difficulty of retaining musicians. When Deal disappeared for several days without notice, Agnello left the recording sessions. Goggin later said it would have been impossible to find anyone able to play at the standards Deal required. She was unsatisfied with a drumming performance (by the percussionist of the Flaming Lips) that Goggin thought was outstanding, so he "told her to go home and practice playing drums." Deal followed his advice, and returned to her home in Ohio to practice the instrument. ## Subsequent recording and coalescence of the group Deal began recording again in 1999, first in Austin, Texas, and then at Electrical Audio studio in Chicago with Steve Albini, with whom she had previously worked on Pod, Pacer, and the Pixies' album Surfer Rosa. Although Deal performed most of the instruments herself at the 1999 sessions, her sister had some involvement. They recorded "The She", "Forced to Drive", and "Too Alive" in Chicago, with Deal's drum performance on the third track taken from the Texas session. Deal was satisfied with the material recorded up to this point, but realized she would not be able to tour without a band. She returned to New York to look for a backing group in March 2000. After a chance meeting with members of Fear, she invited drummer Andrew Jaimez, bassist Mando Lopez, and guitarist Richard Presley to jam with her at the studio she was renting. Deal wanted to continue playing with these musicians, and so within three months she moved to Fear's hometown Los Angeles. Jaimez, Lopez, and Presley joined the Breeders, and Kelley Deal rejoined the group soon after. About a month after Kim Deal's arrival, Jose Medeles replaced Jaimez, who decided he did not have enough time for the Breeders because of his involvement in other musical projects. The new line-up spent the rest of the year writing and rehearsing. The Breeders returned to Chicago in mid-2001 to continue recording with Albini. "Little Fury", "London Song", "Off You", "Put on a Side", "Full on Idle", "T and T", and "Huffer" were recorded in 2001. At some point from 2000 to 2002, the group spent time at the Grandmaster Recording Ltd. studio in Los Angeles. The session at Grandmaster Recording, engineered by Mark Arnold and Andrew Alekel, resulted in "Son of Three" and "Sinister Foxx". "Fire the Maid", a song from these sessions written and sung by Kelley Deal, was performed in concert in 2000 and 2001 but was not included on the album. Kelley Deal has stated that "Little Fury" and "Sinister Foxx" started as "just ideas" by the sisters that turned into full collaborations by the group—all five musicians received songwriting credits on these tracks. Kim Deal is credited as sole songwriter on the remaining ten tracks, although other band members contributed musical ideas as well. During the Title TK sessions, Kim Deal adopted a philosophy she calls "All Wave". This approach stipulates that only analog recording may be used, without computer editing. Deal has said that she likes "interesting mistakes" in song production, and that her beliefs about recording are "a reaction ... to everything sounding so straight and clean in most records today". The album's mastering was also done using analog processes, by Albini and Steve Rook, at Abbey Road Studios in London. ## Music and lyrics A sparse, minimal style of instrumentation is used on Title TK. Throughout the album, the band makes use of unexpected or jarring musical ideas. One reviewer described the way "keyboards buzz from out of nowhere, guitars hit bum notes intentionally, basslines amble up and down the scale, sometimes two at a time." Another commentator described the progression of "Put on a Side" as follows: "At 1.28 there is a distorted chug. At 2.29 a drum-roll. Neither of these introduces anything, continues or reappears. They just pop up and then evaporate like accidental fireworks." Title TK has been noted on one hand for big contrasts in speed and levity from song to song, and on the other, for the unified feel of the entire album. The unconventional character of Title TK's lyrics has been emphasized in reviews. Opinion has been divided on the intelligibility of the lyrics. Lines from "Son of Three" and "Little Fury" have been highlighted for their poetic qualities. Others have taken the album's words to be opaque with confusing imagery. Critics have noted both the dark tendencies and the humor of the lyrics. The Deal sisters' harmonies have been singled out for praise, and reviewers have described Kim's vocals as rough but also endearing. ### Songs Title TK begins with "Little Fury", named after a kind of pocketknife sold at truck stops with the word "fury" written along the side of the blade. On the call and response track, the Deal sisters sing over a heavy bassline, a funky drumbeat, and guitar sounds influenced by surf music and grunge. J.R. Moores wrote for Drowned in Sound that "Somebody considers unleashing a guitar solo, yet its notes are few and the vocals kick back in before it has the chance to go anywhere. Is it a solo or a riff? Whatever it is, it flicks its middle finger at other solos and riffs, exposing them as absurd, flamboyant, shallow fripperies. I'm not part of that club, it says." For PopMatters's Matt Cibula, the repeated line "Hold what you've got" is the Deals' reminder to themselves to keep the Breeders intact henceforth. On "London Song", Jim Abbott at The Orlando Sentinel said the syncopated guitar performance complements Title TK's "world-weary attitude," just as the sisters' "tough lost years ... [are] obvious from Kim's disconnected delivery on songs about hard times". By contrast, NY Rock's Jeanne Fury noted the track's upbeat, quirky energy. In the Japanese release's liner notes, critic Mia Clarke described the slow ballad "Off You" as having a lackadaisical feel; Pitchfork Media's Will Bryant was struck by the song's creepy quality, and compared it to the mood of the Pink Floyd album The Wall. Rolling Stone's Arion Berger said "Off You" is "as direct and heartbreaking as an eighty-five-year-old blues recording, and Kim, her voice clear and full of hope, can't help sounding like a young woman who's lived ten awful lifetimes." "The She", named after a nightclub that the Deals' brother used to visit, has been described as having a funky feel, with a start-and-stop rhythm of bass and drums. Bryant found the track's keyboard part reminiscent of Stereolab's music, while AllMusic's Heather Phares likened the entire song to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit". Cibula mentioned that the "creepy/cool ... sound [fits] the characteristic Kim Deal familiar/strange lyrics: 'Sorrow blowin' through the vents / I'm over Houston / You're over the night we met.'" Kim Deal plays every instrument on "Too Alive" and both sisters sing. Moores noted the track's buoyant feel and the steady strumming style of Deal's guitar. To Phares, the song possesses an immediacy as though the listener were there watching the performance in person. Bryant identified "Son of Three" as an example of "when the Breeders set out to rock", noting "the chugging guitars and stomping drums." The Breeders re-recorded "Son of Three" in July 2002 for its release as Title TK's third single; this version is faster than the album track, and reflects the speed they were playing the song in concert that year. The lyrics of both "Son of Three" and "The She" suggest extended road trips with unknown outcomes. The album's next song, "Put on a Side", has a distinctive bassline and a cramped, repressive feel. Berger wrote that Kim Deal's "voice grinds sweetly, weariedly, sloppily inside your brain," as she repeats twelve words over the course of the song: "Better I better I stayed up / Better mono, put on a side." An earlier version of "Full on Idle", Title TK's eighth track, was released on the Amps' Pacer in 1995. In a 1997 interview, Deal expressed an interest in redoing multiple Amps songs, partially because she did not feel Pacer was well recorded. Bryant opined that both versions of "Full on Idle" sound almost the same, but The Village Voice's Jessica Grose wrote that the Breeders' rendition is noticeably slower. In Cibula's view, this version contains elements of country music, cumbia, and ska. The Guardian's Betty Clarke cited the line "Obey your colorist, bleach it all away" as an example of Title TK's amusing, off-center lyrics. On "Sinister Foxx", Deal repeatedly sings "Has anyone seen the iguana?" She has explained this as being a reference to buying marijuana: "Have you ever bought a bag of weed? You walk in, and the pot dealer's got an empty terrarium ... Every time I go to a pot dealer's house, there's no iguana." Another line, "I'm in beer class every Thursday night", refers to the alcohol awareness classes that Richard Presley attended after being caught driving while drunk. Phares described the song as having a "sexy menace", and Berger compared the drum part to gunshots and door-knocking. Moores identified in "Forced to Drive" the "quiet-LOUD-quiet" dynamic for which Deal's former band, the Pixies, are famous. Berger noticed a similar contrast between the song's "pop verses" and "the gloom of a twisty, malignant chorus". For Abbott, this four-chord chorus "approaches exuberance" in its mixture of catchy melody and grunge. The penultimate track, "T and T", was described by Bryant as an instrumental introduction leading into "Huffer". Kelley Deal has stated that these two songs share a thematic union: the latter is about the negative side of inhaling paint or other substances, while the former stands for "Toil and Trouble", also about the hardships that inhaling chemicals can cause. "Huffer" is, according to Moores, a lively, poppy track, and critics have commented on its "da-da-da" and "ah-ah" chorus. ## Release and reception Title TK was released on May 20 and 21, 2002, on the labels 4AD (United Kingdom), Elektra Records (United States), V2 Records (Belgium), and Virgin Records (France); in Japan it came out on May 10 through P-Vine Records. The phrase "Title TK" means "title to come" in journalistic shorthand. The album cover was designed by Vaughan Oliver and Chris Bigg, with additional photography in the packaging by Onie M. Montes; Oliver, who began doing artwork for 4AD in 1980, also designed Breeders' releases including Pod and Last Splash. Three singles were released from Title TK: "Off You", "Huffer", and "Son of Three"; "Off You" reached number 25 on the Canadian Digital Songs chart, and "Son of Three" number 72 on the UK Singles Chart. Title TK reached the top 100 in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Germany. It peaked at number 130 in the United States, where as of June 2004, there were 45,000 units sold. Most critics responded positively to the album. Critical aggregator Metacritic gave Title TK a score of 71, indicating that the compiled reviews—from 19 critics total—were on the whole favorable. Betty Clarke of The Guardian wrote that Title TK is "a welcome return to punky pop that knows how to flex some melodic muscle", and singled out the isolation of different sounds as the best aspect of the album. Similarly, NME's John Robinson lauded the distinctive character of the drums, guitar, and vocals. Other positive commentary included praise for Albini's influence on the album's sound (PopMatters's Matt Cibula), and for the album's quirky appeal (Billboard critic Brian Garrity). In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau called the music "skeletal, fragmented, stumblebum", and applauded Kim and Kelley Deal's tuneful songwriting. While noting "they've been away so long they still think alt is a sloppy lifestyle rather than an embattled ethos", Christgau concluded that, "Through the imagistic baffle of their lyrics, they leave the impression that they subsist off their modest royalties, scattered gig fees, and compromised advances—mostly on beer." More negatively, Melanie McFarland of The Seattle Times lamented the too frequent changes in tone from song to song, and considered the album a step backwards from Last Splash. Spin magazine's Steve Kandell characterized Title TK as "a little unsure of itself", and pointed to the Breeders' re-recording of "Full on Idle" as evidence that "the creative coffers weren't exactly spilling over" for Deal. ## Track listing Japanese release The Japanese release contains the following bonus tracks: ## Personnel The following personnel were involved in making Title TK: ### Musicians - Kim Deal – guitar, organ, drums, bass, vocals - Kelley Deal – guitar, bass, vocals - Richard Presley – guitar - Mando Lopez – bass, guitar - Jose Medeles – drums - John McEntire – drum roll on "The She" ### Production - Steve Albini – engineering, mastering - Mark Arnold – engineering - Andrew Alekel – engineering - Steve Rook – mastering ### Art design - Vaughan Oliver – art design - Chris Bigg – art design - Onie M. Montes – additional photography ## Charts
1,976,125	Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel	1,162,244,824	Comedy radio show (1932–1933)	[ "1930s American radio programs", "1930s in comedy", "1932 radio programme debuts", "1933 radio programme endings", "American comedy radio programs", "Fictional law firms", "Marx Brothers", "NBC Blue Network radio programs" ]	Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel is a situation comedy radio show starring two of the Marx Brothers, Groucho and his older brother Chico Marx, and written primarily by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman. The series was originally broadcast in the United States on the National Broadcasting Company's Blue Network beginning on November 28, 1932, and ending on May 22, 1933. Sponsored by the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana and the Colonial Beacon Oil Company, it was the Monday night installment of the Five-Star Theater, an old-time radio variety series that offered a different program each weeknight. Episodes were broadcast live from NBC's WJZ station in New York City and later from a sound stage at RKO Pictures in Los Angeles, California, before returning to WJZ for the final episodes. The program depicts the misadventures of a small New York law firm, with Groucho as attorney Waldorf T. Flywheel (a crooked lawyer) and Chico as Flywheel's assistant, Emmanuel Ravelli (a half-wit whom Flywheel uses as a fall guy). The series was originally titled Beagle, Shyster, and Beagle, with Groucho's character named Waldorf T. Beagle, until a real lawyer from New York named Beagle contacted NBC and threatened to file a lawsuit unless the name was dropped. Many of the episodes' plots were partly or largely based upon Marx Brothers films. The show garnered respectable ratings for its early evening time slot, although a second season was not produced. It was thought that, like most radio shows of the time, the episodes had not been recorded. The episodes were thought entirely lost until 1988, when 25 of the 26 scripts were rediscovered in the Library of Congress storage and republished. Adaptations of the recovered scripts were performed and broadcast in the UK, on BBC Radio 4, between 1990 and 1993. In 1996, some recordings of the original show were discovered (all recorded from the final three episodes), including a complete recording of the last episode to air. ## Early development In 1932 Texaco introduced its "Fire Chief" gasoline to the public, so named because its octane rating was 66, higher than the United States government's requirements for fire engines. To advertise its new premium grade fuel, Texaco approached vaudeville comic Ed Wynn to star in a radio show titled Fire Chief. Wynn played the fire chief in front of an audience of 700 and the show was aired live over the NBC Red Network, beginning April 26, 1932. It immediately proved popular with over two million regular listeners and a Co-Operative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB) Rating of 44.8%. Upon seeing the success of Wynn's Fire Chief, the Standard Oils in New Jersey, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, and Colonial Beacon, decided to sponsor their own radio program to promote Esso Gasoline and Essolube Motor Oil. They turned to the advertising agency McCann Erickson, which developed Five-Star Theater, a variety series that offered a different show each night of the week. Groucho and Chico Marx, one half of the popular vaudeville and film stars the Marx Brothers, were approached to appear in a comedy show. Harpo and Zeppo were not required, as Harpo's trademark mime artistry did not translate to radio, while Zeppo was on the verge of leaving the act. Before this decision was officially reached, early drafts of the scripts featured guest appearances written for both absent brothers, with Harpo being represented through honks of his horn and other trademark sound effects. Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman, who had contributed to the scripts of the Marx Brothers' films Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), were enlisted to write the comedy show. It was titled Beagle, Shyster, and Beagle, and its premise involved an unethical lawyer/private detective and his bungling assistant. ## Casting Groucho Marx played lawyer Waldorf T. Beagle (later renamed Waldorf T. Flywheel), and Chico played his assistant Emmanuel Ravelli, the same name as the Italian character he played in the film Animal Crackers (1930). Mary McCoy played secretary Miss Dimple, and it is thought that Broderick Crawford also appeared as various characters. "Shyster" and the second "Beagle" (and later, the second "Flywheel") were never heard or referred to outside of the show's title. Groucho and Chico shared a weekly income of \$6,500 for appearing in the show. During the Great Depression, this was considered a high sum for 30 minutes' work, especially since radio scripts required no memorization and only a few minutes were needed for costume, hair and makeup. By comparison, Greta Garbo's weekly salary from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the same period was also \$6,500, though this was for a 40- or 50-hour week. Wynn was paid \$5,000 a week for Fire Chief. In contrast, almost two-thirds of American families were living on fewer than \$26 a week. Harpo Marx was paid as a cast member, although the physical, silent nature of his comedy meant that it was impossible to give him an on-air role without forcing him to break character. ## Production Five-Star Theater was broadcast from NBC's flagship station, WJZ in New York City. Because Groucho, Chico, Perrin, and Sheekman were living and working in Hollywood, they had to make a three-day train journey from Pasadena each week, and then another three-day trip back. The first episode was written as they took their first train ride to New York. A number of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel's scripts reused plots from Marx Brothers films. The plot of Episode 17 was suggested by the stolen painting plot in Animal Crackers, though it was a "Beauregard" in the film, not a Rembrandt. The 23rd episode also reused scenes from Animal Crackers, including the stolen diamond plot and Groucho's lines regarding the need for a seven-cent nickel. Monkey Business influenced two skits in Episode 25, and The Cocoanuts gave Episode 19 its plot. Episode 26, The Ocean Cruise, lifted some scenes virtually unchanged from the Marx Brothers' film Animal Crackers (with Zeppo Marx and Harpo Marx). Despite reusing some scripts from other sources, Perrin said that he and Sheekman "had hands full turning out a script each week". They found help from Tom McKnight and George Oppenheimer, whose names were passed along to Groucho. Perrin explained, " was in the men's room during a break, and he was complaining to the guy standing next to him, 'Geez, I wish we could find another writer or two to make life easier.' Suddenly there's a voice from one of the stalls: 'I've got just the guys for you!' Having Tom and George did make life easier, although Arthur and I went over their scripts for a light polishing." After traveling to New York to perform the first seven episodes, the four men decided to broadcast from Los Angeles instead. NBC did not have a studio on the West Coast, so for the next thirteen weeks, between January 16 and April 24, 1933, the show was transmitted from a borrowed empty soundstage at RKO Radio Pictures. Folding chairs were brought in for the audience of around thirty or forty people – coming from vaudeville, Groucho and Chico preferred to perform to a crowd – and were quickly cleared out at the end of each performance so that the stage would be ready for any filming the following day. The last four episodes of the show were performed back at WJZ in New York. Chico was often late for rehearsals, so Perrin would have to stand in for him on the read-throughs. When Chico eventually made his appearance, Perrin remembers, "he'd be reading Ravelli's lines and Groucho would tell him to stop 'show him how the line should be read'. My Italian accent was better than Chico's, you see. But Chico didn't care." ## Episodes Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel aired Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. on the NBC Blue Network to thirteen network affiliates in nine Eastern and Southern states. Twenty-six episodes were made, which were broadcast between November 28, 1932 and May 22, 1933. Each episode is introduced by the Blue Network announcer and features about fifteen minutes of drama and ten minutes of orchestral music between acts. The episodes end with Groucho and Chico – not in character, but as themselves – performing a 60-second skit promoting Esso and Essolube. ## Reception ### Ratings Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel was not enough of a success for Standard Oil to continue beyond one season. The CAB Rating for the show was 22.1% and placed 12th among the highest rated evening programs of the 1932–33 season. The CAB Rating was not disappointing – popular established shows such as The Shadow and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes did not perform as well – but it was less than half of Texaco's Fire Chief, which got a 44.8% CAB Rating and was the third highest-rated program of the season. One reason for the lower ratings may be because of the time slot the show aired. In September 1932, only 40% of radio owners were listening to the radio at 7:00 p.m., whereas 60% listened at 9:00 p.m. The 1932–1933 season's top-rated shows, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, Jack Pearl's Baron Münchhausen, and Fire Chief all aired after 9:00 p.m. Standard Oil decided it could not compete with Texaco in the ratings and Five-Star Theater was not renewed for a second season. In his 1959 autobiography, Groucho and Me, Groucho comments, "We thought we were doing pretty well as comic lawyers, but one day a few Middle East countries decided they wanted a bigger cut of the oil profits, or else. When this news broke, the price of gasoline nervously dropped two cents a gallon, and Chico and I, along with the other shows, were dropped from the network." In his 1976 book, The Secret Word Is Groucho, he writes, "Company sales, as a result of our show, had risen precipitously. Profits doubled in that brief time, and Esso felt guilty taking the money. So Esso dropped us after twenty-six weeks. Those were the days of guilt-edged securities, which don't exist today." ### Critical Although the successful Marx films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers contained plots involving adultery, Variety did not appreciate them in the radio show: > That's fine stuff for children! Chances are that if the Marxes proceed with their law office continuity along lines like this they will never be able to hold a kid listener. Firstly because parents don't want their children to hear about bad wives and divorces, and this isn't an agreeable theme to kids. Which means that if the Marxes don't look out, whatever kid following they have on the screen will be totally lost to them on the air. It's quite likely the Marxes can make themselves on the air. But they will have to use more headwork than their first effort displayed. Despite the content, Groucho's 13-year-old son Arthur found the show "extremely funny", albeit conceding that he may have been "a very easy audience". ### Legal Following the airing of the first episodes, a New York attorney named Morris Beagle filed a lawsuit for \$300,000 alleging his name had been slandered, and that its use was damaging his business and his health. He also claimed that people were calling his law firm and asking, "Is this Mr. Beagle?" When he answered, "Yes", the callers would say, "How's your partner, Shyster?" and hang up the phone. The sponsors and studio executives panicked, and from episode four the title of the show was changed to "Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel", and Walter T. Beagle was renamed Waldorf T. Flywheel. It was explained in the episode that the character had divorced and reverted to his "maiden name". ### Legacy The show was later praised by other comedians of the time. In 1988, Steve Allen said, "when judged in relation to other radio comedy scripts of the early 30s, they hold up very well indeed and are, in fact, superior to the material that was produced for the Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee, Joe Penner school. The rapid-fire jokes run the gamut from delightful to embarrassing." George Burns also found it "funny". Modern reviews of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel have also been positive. The New York Times' Herbert Mitgang described it as "one of the funniest radio shows of the early 1930s", adding that "the radio dialogue was so witty and outrageous, innocent form of original comedy – as well as serious drama". Rob White of the British Film Institute said the show "glitter[s] with a thousand-and-one sockeroos." ## Existing material ### Discovery of the scripts The episodes of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel were recorded, but for many years it was thought the recordings had not been preserved. At the time of the broadcasts, pre-recorded shows were frowned upon by advertisers and audiences. However, in 1988, Michael Barson, who worked in the United States Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, discovered that the scripts for twenty-five of the twenty-six episodes had been submitted to the Office, where they had been placed in storage. Nobody was aware that they still existed and their copyrights had not been renewed. This meant that Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel had fallen into the public domain. The scripts were published that same year by Pantheon in a book titled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show, edited by Michael Barson and with an interview with Perrin. In October 1988, Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel scenes were broadcast for the first time since the show went off the air in 1933 when National Public Radio, a non-profit media organization that provides content to public radio stations around the United States, aired an 18-minute recreation of Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel in markets that included Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, Texas, using Washington, D.C.-based Arena Stage actors to perform the Chico and Groucho lead roles from the published scripts. ### Rediscovery of lost recordings After 1996, three recordings of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel were found, including a five-minute excerpt of Episode 24 and a fifteen-minute recording of Episode 25. A complete recording of Episode 26 exists and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2005. ## BBC Radio adaption In 1990 the British Broadcasting Corporation's Radio 4 aired a version of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. Michael Roberts and Frank Lazarus performed the lead roles of Flywheel and Ravelli, wearing make-up and clothing similar to Groucho and Chico. The regular cast also included Lorelei King in all the female roles and Graham Hoadly as many of the other male characters, and featured Spike Milligan and Dick Vosburgh as guest stars. The scripts for the BBC series were adapted for a modern British audience by Mark Brisenden and were produced and directed by Dirk Maggs. Each episode incorporated material from two or three different original episodes, and occasionally included additional jokes from Marx Brothers' films. Commenting on the series, Maggs has said it was his favorite among the comedies he had directed, and described how they were performed. > The great thing about audience shows is doing the effects live on stage. BBC Radio Light Entertainment tended to have the effects operator hidden away behind curtains so they wouldn't distract the audience! A few Light Entertainment Producers like me have reasoned over the years that the spot effects are part of the entertainment so we brought the operator out front. And in the case of Flywheel we dressed him or her up as Harpo! Michael Roberts who played Groucho came out with such good ad libs that I was always happy to cut scripted gags to keep them. One great one was when he and Frank as Flywheel and Ravelli find themselves in a pigsty – the rest of the cast pushed in to make pig voices – and Mike ad libbed, "Imagine – two nice Jewish boys surrounded by ham" – it brought the house down. Six episodes were performed and recorded at the Paris Theatre and aired weekly between June 2 and July 7, 1990. The success of the first series led to another two being commissioned. The second series aired from May 11 to June 15, 1991, and the third from July 11 to August 15, 1992. The first series was made available by BBC Enterprises on a two-cassette release in 1991, but the second and third series were not.
2,180,530	The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power	1,169,678,471	1991 newsmagazine article on Scientology	[ "1991 documents", "1991 in science", "Eli Lilly and Company", "Scientology and law", "Time (magazine) articles", "Works critical of Scientology" ]	"The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" is an article, written in 1991 by U.S. investigative journalist Richard Behar, which is highly critical of Scientology. It was first published by Time magazine on May 6, 1991, as an eight-page cover story, and was later published in Reader's Digest in October 1991. Behar had previously published an article on Scientology in Forbes magazine. He stated that he was investigated by attorneys and private investigators affiliated with the Church of Scientology while researching the Time article, and that investigators contacted his friends and family as well. Behar's article covers topics including L. Ron Hubbard and the development of Scientology, its controversies over the years and history of litigation, conflict with psychiatry and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the suicide of Noah Lottick, its status as a religion, and its business dealings. After the article's publication, the Church of Scientology mounted a public relations campaign to address issues in the piece. It took out advertisements in USA Today for twelve weeks, and Church leader David Miscavige was interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline about what he considered to be an objective bias by the article's author. Miscavige alleged that the article was actually driven by the company Eli Lilly, because of Scientology's efforts against the drug Prozac. The Church of Scientology brought a libel suit against Time Warner and Behar, and sued Reader's Digest in multiple countries in Europe in an attempt to stop the article's publication there. The suit against Time Warner was dismissed in 1996, and the Church of Scientology's petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States was denied in 2001. Behar received awards in honor of his work on the article, including the Gerald Loeb Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, and the Conscience-in-Media Award. The article has had ramifications in the current treatment of Scientology in the media, with some publications theorizing that journalists are wary of the litigation that Time Warner went through. The article has been cited by Anderson Cooper on CNN, in a story on Panorama's 2007 program "Scientology and Me" on the BBC, and has been used as a reference for background on the history of Scientology, in books from both the cult and new religious movement perspectives. ## Research for the article Before penning "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power", Behar had written a 1986 article in Forbes magazine, "The Prophet and Profits of Scientology", which reported on the Church of Scientology's business dealings and L. Ron Hubbard's financial success. Behar wrote that during research for "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power", he and a Time contributing editor were themselves investigated by ten attorneys and six private investigators affiliated with the Church of Scientology. According to Behar, investigators contacted his friends and previous coworkers to ask them if he had a history of tax or drug problems, and obtained a copy of his personal credit report that had been obtained illegally from a national credit bureau. Behar conducted 150 interviews in the course of his research for the article. Behar wrote that the motive of these operatives was to "threaten, harass and discredit him". He later learned that the Church of Scientology had assigned its head private investigator to direct the Church's investigation into Behar. Anderson Cooper 360° reported that Behar had been contacted by Church of Scientology attorneys numerous times while doing research on the article. The parents of Noah Lottick, a Scientologist who had committed suicide, cooperated with Time and Reader's Digest. ## Synopsis The full title of the article is "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power: Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but is really a ruthless global scam—and aiming for the mainstream". The article reported on the founding of the Church of Scientology by L. Ron Hubbard and controversies involving the Church and its affiliated business operations, as well as the suicide of a Scientologist. The article related the May 11, 1990, suicide of Dr. Edward Lottick's son Noah Antrim Lottick. Lottick was a Russian studies student who had taken a series of Scientology courses; he died after jumping from a hotel tenth floor window. The Church of Scientology and Lottick's family have differing positions on the effect Scientology coursework had on him. While none of the parties assigned blame, they expressed misgivings about his death. Initially, his father had thought that Scientology was similar to Dale Carnegie's self-improvement techniques; however, after his ordeal, the elder Lottick came to believe that the organization is a "school for psychopaths". Mike Rinder, then head of the Church of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs and a Church spokesman, stated "I think Ed Lottick should look in the mirror... I think Ed Lottick made his son's life intolerable". The article outlined a brief history of Scientology, discussing Hubbard's initial background as a science fiction writer, and cited a California judge who had deemed Hubbard a "pathological liar". The Church of Scientology's litigation history was described, in addition to its conflicts with the Internal Revenue Service, with countries regarding whether or not to accept it as a religion, and its position against psychiatry. Behar wrote of the high costs involved in participation in the Church of Scientology, what he referred to as "front groups and financial scams", and harassment of critics. He estimated that the Church of Scientology paid US\$20 million annually to over one hundred attorneys. Behar maintained that though the Church of Scientology portrays itself as a religion, it was actually a "hugely profitable global racket" which intimidated members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. Cynthia Kisser, then director of the Cult Awareness Network, was quoted: "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members". ## Post-publication ### Church of Scientology's response The Church of Scientology responded to the publication of "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" by taking out color full-page ads in USA Today in May and June 1991, on every weekday for twelve weeks, denouncing the Time magazine cover article. Two official Church of Scientology responses were titled "Facts vs. Fiction, A Correction of Falsehoods Contained in the May 6, 1991, Issues of Time Magazine", and "The Story That Time Couldn't Tell". Prior to the advertising campaign, Scientologists distributed 88-page bound booklets which disputed points from Behar's article. The "Fact vs. Fiction" piece was a 1⁄4-inch-thick (0.64 cm) booklet, which criticized Behar's article and asserted "Behar's article omits the information on the dozens of community service programs conducted by Scientologists ... which have been acknowledged by community officials". One of the advertisements in USA Today accused Time of promoting Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and featured a 1936 issue of Time which had Hitler's picture on the front cover. The Church of Scientology sent out a news release condemning Time's "horrible history of supporting fascism", and said that the article was written because Time had been pressured by "vested interests". When asked by the St. Petersburg Times whether this was the case, Time Executive Editor Richard Duncan responded "Good Lord, no". Heber Jentzsch, at the time president of Church of Scientology International, issued a four-page news release which stated "Advertising is the only way the church could be assured of getting its message and its side of the story out to the public without the same vested interests behind the Time article distorting it". After the advertising run critiquing Time magazine in USA Today had completed, the Church of Scientology mounted a \$3 million public relations campaign about Scientology in USA Today, in June 1991. The Church of Scientology placed a 48-page advertising supplement in 1.8 million copies of USA Today. In a statement to the St. Petersburg Times, Scientology spokesman Richard Haworth explained "What we are trying to do is put the actual facts of Dianetics and Scientology out there". In response to the Church of Scientology's claims of inaccuracies in the article, a lawyer for Time responded "We've reviewed all of their allegations, and find nothing wrong with the Time story." In June 1991, Newsweek reported that staffers for Time said they had received calls from a man claiming to be a paralegal for Time, who asked them if they had signed a confidentiality form about the article. Time editors sent staffers a computer memo, warning them about calls related to the article, and staffers told Newsweek that "sources named in the story say detectives have asked about their talks with Time". A Church of Scientology spokesman called the claims "scurrilous". On February 14, 1992, Scientology leader David Miscavige gave Ted Koppel his first interview on Scientology on the ABC News program Nightline. The program noted that Scientology has vocal critics and cited Behar's 1991 article. Behar appeared on the program and gave his opinion of why individuals join Scientology, stating that the organization's "ulterior motive" is really to get people to take high-priced audit counseling. Behar stated on the program that he had evidence that members of the Church of Scientology had obtained his personal phone records. Later in the program, Koppel questioned Miscavige on the Church of Scientology's response to the Time magazine article, particularly the \$3 million the church spent advertising in USA Today. Miscavige explained that the first three weeks of the advertising campaign was meant to correct falsehoods from the Time article, and the rest of the twelve-week campaign was dedicated to informing the public about Scientology. Koppel asked Miscavige what specifically had upset him about the Time article, and Miscavige called Behar "a hater". Miscavige noted that Behar had written an article on Scientology and the Internal Revenue Service three years before he began work on the Time piece, and made allegations that Behar had attempted to get two Scientologists kidnapped. When Koppel questioned Miscavige further on this, Miscavige said that individuals had contacted Behar after an earlier article, and Behar had told them to "kidnap Scientologists out". Koppel pressed further, noting that this was a serious charge to make, and asked Miscavige if his allegations were accurate, why he had not pressed charges for attempted kidnapping. Miscavige said Koppel was "missing the issue", and said that his real point was that he thought the article was not an objective piece. Miscavige alleged on Nightline that the article itself was published as a result of a request by Eli Lilly and Company, because of "the damage we had caused to their killer drug Prozac". When Koppel asked Miscavige if he had affidavits or evidence to this effect, Miscavige responded "You think they'd admit it?" Miscavige stated that "Eli Lilly ordered a reprint of 750,000 copies of Time magazine before it came out", and that his attempts to investigate the matter with Eli Lilly and associated advertising companies were not successful. ### Litigation The Church brought a libel lawsuit against Time Warner and Behar, seeking damages of \$416 million. The Church alleged false and defamatory statements were made concerning the Church of Scientology International in the Time article. More specifically, the Church of Scientology's court statements claimed that Behar had been refining an anti-Scientology focus since his 1986 article in Forbes, which included gathering negative materials about Scientology, and "never accepting anything a Scientologist said and uniformly ignoring anything positive he learned about the Church". In its initial complaint filing, the Church quoted portions of the Behar article that it alleged were false and defamatory, including the quote from Cynthia Kisser, and Behar's own assertion that Scientology was a "global racket" that intimidated individuals in a "Mafia-like manner". Noah Lottick's parents submitted affidavits in the case, in which they "affirmed the accuracy of each statement in the article"; Edward Lottick "concluded that Scientology therapies were manipulations, and that no Scientology staff members attended the funeral" of their son. During the litigation, the Church of Scientology attempted to subpoena Behar in a separate ongoing lawsuit with the Internal Revenue Service, and accused a federal magistrate of leaking information to him. Behar was questioned for over 190 hours during 30 days of depositions with Scientology attorneys in the libel case. One question was about Behar's life in his parents' home while he was still inside the womb. St. Petersburg Times explained that this question was prompted by Scientology teachings that certain problems come from prenatal memories. Behar told the St. Petersburg Times he "felt it was extremely excessive". In a countersuit, Behar brought up the issues of Church of Scientology private investigators and what he viewed as harassment. By July 1996, all counts of the libel suit had been dismissed. In the course of the litigation through 1996, Time Warner had spent \$7.3 million in legal defense costs. The Church of Scientology also sued several individuals quoted in the Time article. The Church of Scientology sued Reader's Digest in Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany for publishing a condensed version of the Time story. The only court to provide a temporary injunction was in Lausanne, Switzerland. In France, Italy, and the Netherlands, the courts either dismissed the Church of Scientology's motions, or set injunction hearings far beyond the date of actual publication. The company defied the injunction and mailed copies of the article, "Scientology: A Dangerous Cult Goes Mainstream", to their 326,000 Swiss subscribers. Worldwide editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, Kenneth Tomlinson, told The New York Times that "a publisher cannot accept a court prohibiting distribution of a serious journalistic piece. ... The court order violates freedom of speech and freedom of the press". The Church of Scientology subsequently filed a criminal complaint against the Digest in Lausanne, and Mike Rinder stated it was in blatant violation of the law. By defying the Swiss court ban, the Reader's Digest risked a fine of about \$3,400, as well as a potential three months' jail time for the Swiss Digest editor-in-chief. A hearing on the injunction was set for November 11, 1991, and the injunction was later lifted by the Swiss court. In January 2001, a United States federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of the Church of Scientology International's case against Time Warner. In its opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Time Warner had not published "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" with an actual intent of malice, a standard that must be met for libel cases involving individuals and public groups. On October 1, 2001, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to consider reinstating the church's libel case Church of Scientology International v. Time Warner Inc., 00-1683. Time Warner said it refused to be "intimidated by the church's apparently limitless legal resources." In arguments presented to the Supreme Court, the Church of Scientology acknowledged that church officials had "committed improper acts" in the past, but also claimed that: "allegations of past misconduct were false and distorted, the result of the misunderstanding, suspicion and prejudice that typically greet a new religion". Of the rulings for Time Warner, the Church of Scientology complained that they "provide a safe harbor for biased journalism". Behar commented on the Church of Scientology's legal defeat, and said that the lawsuit had a chilling effect: "It's a tremendous defeat for Scientology ... But of course their doctrine states that the purpose of a suit is to harass, not to win, so from that perspective they hurt us all. They've had a real chilling effect on journalism, both before and after my piece". ### Awards As a result of writing the piece, Behar was presented with the 1992 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Conscience-in-Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, awarded to "those who have demonstrated singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice," and the Cult Awareness Network's Leo J. Ryan Award, in honor of Congressman Leo J. Ryan. Paulette Cooper was also awarded the 1992 Conscience-in-Media Award by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, for her book The Scandal of Scientology. This was the only time in the history of the American Society of Journalists and Authors that the award was presented to more than one journalist in the same year. In a February 1992 issue of Time, editor Elizabeth Valk congratulated Behar on his Conscience-in-Media Award, stating "Needless to say, we are delighted and proud". Valk noted that the honor had only been awarded seven times in the previous seventeen years of its existence. Managing editor Henry Muller also congratulated Behar in an April 1992 issue of Time. ## Analysis Insane Therapy noted that Scientology "achieved more notoriety ... with the publication of the journalist Richard Behar's highly critical article". Larson's Book of World Religions and Alternative Spirituality described the cover design of the article as it appeared in Time, writing that it "shouted" the headline from the magazine cover. In a 2005 piece, Salon.com magazine noted that for those interested in the Church of Scientology, the Time article still remains a "milestone in news coverage", and that those who back the Church believe it was "an outrageously biased account". ## Legacy The Church of Scientology's use of private investigators was cited in a 1998 article in the Boston Herald, and compared to Behar's experiences when researching "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power". After the paper ran a five-part series of critical articles in 1998, then Church of Scientology President Heber Jentzsch confirmed that a private investigative firm was hired to look into the personal life of Joseph Mallia, the reporter who wrote the articles. In a later piece titled "Church of Scientology probes Herald reporter—Investigation follows pattern of harassment" this investigation was likened to Behar's assertions of harassment, as well as other reporters' experiences from 1974, 1988, and 1997. Because of the history of conflict between Reader's Digest and Scientology, the writer of a 2005 cover story on Tom Cruise agreed to certain demands, including giving Scientology issues equal play in the writer's profile of Cruise, submitting questions for Cruise to Church of Scientology handlers, and sending the writer of the article to a one-day Church immersion course. Also in 2005, an article in Salon questioned whether the tactics of the Church's litigation and private investigations of Time Warner and other media sources had succeeded in decreasing the amount of investigative journalism pieces on Scientology in the press. A 2005 article in The Sunday Times cited the article, and came to the determination that the Church of Scientology's lawsuit against Time Warner "served to warn off other potential investigations", and that "The chill evidently lingers still". "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" continues to be used today by journalists in the media, as a reference for historical information on the Church of Scientology. In April 2007, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interviewed former Office of Special Affairs director Mike Rinder, in a live piece on Anderson Cooper 360° titled "Inside Scientology". The CNN story was prompted by the May 2007 airing of a BBC Panorama investigative program, "Scientology and Me". In the interview, Anderson Cooper quoted directly from "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" article, when asking Rinder about the history of Operation Snow White, and if those tactics were currently used by the Church. Rinder answered by stating that the individuals involved with Operation Snow White were no longer involved in Church of Scientology activities, and that the incident was "ancient history". Cooper then again referenced the Time magazine article noting that Behar asserted that he was illegally investigated by Scientology contacts during research for his article. Cooper questioned Rinder on the dismissed lawsuit against Time Warner, and Rinder acknowledged that all of the Church of Scientology's appeals against Time Warner were eventually rejected.
28,105,437	Illustrated Daily News	1,094,195,187	20th-century Los Angeles newspaper	[ "1923 establishments in California", "1954 disestablishments in California", "Daily newspapers published in Greater Los Angeles", "Defunct newspapers published in California", "Newspapers established in 1923", "Publications disestablished in 1954" ]	The Daily News (originally the Illustrated Daily News) was a newspaper published in Los Angeles from 1923 to 1954. It was founded in 1923 by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV and bought by Manchester Boddy who operated it through most of its existence. The Daily News was founded in 1923 by Vanderbilt as the first of several newspapers he wanted to manage. After quickly going into receivership, it was sold to Boddy, a businessman with no newspaper experience. Boddy was able to make the newspaper succeed, and it remained profitable through the 1930s and 1940s, taking a Democratic perspective at a time when most Los Angeles newspapers supported the Republican Party. The newspaper began a steep decline in the late 1940s, continuing into the early 1950s. In 1950, Boddy ran in both the Democratic and Republican primaries for the United States Senate. He finished a distant second in each, and lost interest in the newspaper. He sold his stake in the paper in 1952 and, after changes in ownership, ceased publication in December 1954; the business was sold to the Chandler family, who merged it with their publication, the Los Angeles Mirror, firing all Daily News employees without severance pay. ## Founding and initial insolvency The Illustrated Daily News was founded in 1923 in Los Angeles by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who wished to start his own newspaper chain. The young Vanderbilt had served as a news reporter in New York for four years, but had no experience running a paper. Believing the best newspaper was a democratic one, he offered stock to those who would pay \$5 for a year's subscription to his newspaper, with the right to elect two of the five directors. Repudiating the legendary adage of his great-grandfather William Henry Vanderbilt, "The public be damned," Cornelius Vanderbilt announced that the paper's philosophy would be "The public be served." Vanderbilt refused to lead the lifestyle of the idle rich—he had enlisted as a private during World War I—and believed the West Coast, with its increasing population, would become as important to the United States as the East Coast had been. A family friend, Lord Northcliffe, founder of Britain's Daily Mail, encouraged Vanderbilt to start a chain of serious-minded tabloids in the West, a contrast to Northcliffe's own racy newspapers. Vanderbilt loved the "swift, jazzy" tabloid format, but did not care for the sensationalism often paired with tabloid newspapers: he wanted to start one that would cost a cent and could, as he put it, "safely enter any home". Vanderbilt ignored attempts by the newspaper moguls who dominated Los Angeles journalism, William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler, to discourage him. Chandler warned him not to start another paper; Hearst tried to hire him to run a tabloid he planned to start in New York City. Vanderbilt ignored them, but found that billboard companies would not give him space. Denied advertising in other newspapers, Vanderbilt attempted to gain publicity for his paper by having trucks drive through the streets bearing the paper's banner and hiring boys to chalk the paper's name on sidewalks, much to the annoyance of landowners who had to clean it up. He bought a former automobile showroom at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Los Angeles Street and furnished it with the latest printing equipment, including two presses (a third was soon added when circulation exceeded expectations). Although downtown, this was further south than the other papers. As Vanderbilt prepared for an August 1923 opening (pushed back to the following month), potential investors toured the building, attracted by high-pressure sales tactics and the promise of a free lunch. Unusually for Los Angeles at the time, the paper's plant was a union shop, something Vanderbilt insisted on. The paper began publication on September 3, 1923, and was helped in its launch by the fact that the Great Tokyo Earthquake had just happened; it was able to provide full coverage, though using stock photographs of Japan. The initial price was one cent a copy. The tabloid format newspaper was to be devoted to the ideal of clean journalism and was prudish to an extreme: women's skirts were retouched in photos to cover the knees, while photos of wrestlers were altered so they appeared to be wearing shirts. Vanderbilt's rivals did not take well to the new competition—saboteurs planted a graphic sex story about Charlie Chaplin in the first edition, forcing Vanderbilt, at considerable expense, to stop the presses and redo Page Two before it was published. Up to a hundred Illustrated Daily News newsboys were treated at local hospitals each week after being assaulted. Nevertheless, in December 1923 Vanderbilt expanded to San Francisco with the Illustrated Daily Herald and in February 1925 to Miami—the Illustrated Daily Tab was intended to cash in on the Florida land boom. The newspaper paid for its staff's transportation, something rare at the time. Reporters were expected to carry rolls of nickels, so they could board streetcars and reach their assignments; if they had sufficient money with them, a taxicab was permitted, and Vanderbilt—"Neil" to the staff—let them use his two Packards to reach stories. Too often the least experienced newsman, Vanderbilt himself, would cover major stories. According to Rob Wagner in his history of Los Angeles newspapers of the time, Vanderbilt's "news stories reeked of naiveté and his editorials were sophomoric." Vanderbilt instructed his reporters to look for human interest stories other papers might overlook; one headline read, "FOUR HUNDRED CHICKENS DISAPPEAR". Among Vanderbilt's editorial targets was the Pacific Electric Railway—the paper deemed its streetcars a danger to pedestrians and termed them "red reapers". By 1924, the newspaper had a good circulation but was losing money because of low advertising revenues. Vanderbilt sought help from his parents, and they agreed to help if most authority went to their hand-picked manager, Harvey Johnson. His father poured over a million dollars into the newspaper in 1924–1925, but Johnson's involvement led to a rightward shift in the newspaper, which alienated many readers. In April 1926, Johnson concluded that the Illustrated Daily News and the two other newspapers could survive with fresh investment of \$300,000, but Vanderbilt's father refused to provide any more money. A petition for receivership was filed on May 3, 1926. Of the chain's three newspapers, the Daily News was deemed the most salvageable—the other two closed within weeks. ## Boddy takes over Following the filing of the petition for receivership in 1926, a consortium of the publishers of the other Los Angeles newspapers offered \$150,000 for the Illustrated Daily News, intending to shut it down. Los Angeles businessman Willis Lewis had invested heavily in the paper, and he put together a rival bid backed by the paper's outside shareholders, supporting book publishing executive Manchester Boddy to take over the paper and keep it as a going concern. The Vanderbilt family was willing to sign over a \$1 million note to the Boddy consortium to keep the paper going, and the stockholders' committee raised \$30,000 for a month's payroll. Boddy and Lewis both served on the Commercial Board, a group of young businessmen. The new publisher got Board members to lend him \$116,000 to buy a controlling interest in the paper, but if the paper did not show a profit within six months, the lenders could repossess. Boddy, who used other people's money to purchase the newspaper, once commented, "The Daily News was conceived in iniquity, born in bankruptcy, reared in panic, and refinanced every six months." The new publisher scrapped Vanderbilt's prudish policies and began a campaign against vice, spearheaded by reporter Gene Coughlin and directed against local gang boss Albert Marco. The Los Angeles police had a hands-off policy when it came to vice and organized crime. Most local reporters valued the perks given to them by the police and did nothing to push the issue. After Boddy began a crusade against crime and corruption, he weathered harassment by police and politicians, but circulation rose. In the pages of the Daily News, Boddy fought against the "L.A. System", entrenched graft in the city's government, to the profit of many policemen, politicians, and organized crime figures, under the leadership of Charles H. Crawford. Police chief James E. Davis wanted to have Boddy prosecuted for promoting illegal gambling by publishing horse race entries and results, as betting on horse races was then illegal in California. The district attorney's office chose to take no action, and Boddy later successfully advocated for a repeal of the ban, leading to the establishments of California tracks such as Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. Boddy also streamlined operations and stabilized the paper's management. Boddy, each day, wrote a front-page editorial espousing his views. His newspaper gave its reader a steady diet of coverage of celebrities, sports, and gossip, with illustrations of pro wrestlers and women in bathing suits. Boddy mocked Hearst and Chandler in his pages, and often embarrassed the powerful, once displaying a photograph of a city official picking his nose. By 1929, the Daily News was showing a profit, and three years later, amid the Depression, began publishing a broadsheet edition, raising its price from two to three cents. Boddy said that with a circulation of 150,000, the paper was profitable even without advertising. By 1932, Boddy had dropped the word "Illustrated" from the name of the paper. ## Prewar years During the first six years of Boddy's ownership, the Daily News maintained a conservative editorial policy. He was a personal supporter of President Herbert Hoover's bid for reelection in 1932. Los Angeles newspaper owners met and decided that, as all newspaper owners were supporting Hoover, one paper had to support the Democratic candidate, New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, and Boddy and the Daily News volunteered for the job. The day after the presidential election, which saw Roosevelt elected in a landslide, Boddy turned to his city editor and said of the voters: "They have made a terrible mistake. I helped them do it. But damn it, I had to make a living." After Roosevelt's election, the nation waited with anticipation for the specifics of the "New Deal" plan on which he had campaigned. Boddy had no more information than anyone else, but had been impressed by a program called "technocracy", which proposed replacing politicians with scientists and engineers possessing the technical expertise to coordinate the economy, a scheme Roosevelt did not advocate. On November 30, 1932, the Daily News printed a huge headline "New Deal Details Bared". The article contained no inside information, and actually did not even mention Roosevelt, but instead outlined technocracy. He continued to discuss technocracy for weeks, as the people of Los Angeles, desperate for plausible information from any source, bought copies of the Daily News, even invading the paper's loading dock to get them as quickly as possible. Even after Roosevelt took office, the Daily News trumpeted proposals to give money to the nation's citizens, such as Francis Townsend's plan that the federal government give \$200 a month to every citizen over age 60. The Daily News also gave space to the "Ham 'n' Eggs" plan whereby the elderly would get checks for \$30 every Thursday. Boddy hit the lecture circuit to advocate social credit, another plan for the government to return taxes to the citizenry. When the New Deal finally was brought forth, Boddy became an avid supporter of it, and so did his newspaper, making it the only Democratic daily in Los Angeles. In 1934, writer Upton Sinclair ran for the Democratic nomination for governor, advocating the End Poverty in California (EPIC) program. When Sinclair scored a surprise upset victory in the Democratic primary against George Creel, most newspapers closed ranks against him and supported the Republican candidate, Frank Merriam. The Daily News, on the other hand, opened its front page to Sinclair's program and called him "a great man". Though the Daily News eventually endorsed Merriam, who was elected, its objection was not that the program was too radical, but that it was not consistent with the New Deal. This did not stop Sinclair from being embittered at what he saw as a betrayal by the Daily News, accusing Boddy of "leading liberal movements up blind alleys and bludgeoning them". Boddy acquired the Los Angeles Record in 1935, changing its name to the Evening News. The two papers were subsequently merged under the Daily News name. Boddy's columns were so popular he secured a radio show on KFWB to read them over the air. In 1937, managing editor Matt Weinstock, who had been with the Daily News since being hired as a sports reporter in 1924, was faced with a vacancy when columnist E.V. Durling left for the Los Angeles Times. He took the job as columnist himself, soon giving up his managerial position, and wrote for the Daily News until it ceased publication in 1954. ## Decline and fall Boddy had predicted World War II several years in advance. When war came, his desire to be a crusading journalist diminished, and he devoted more time to the camellias on his estate, Descanso. Like most newspapers, the Daily News prospered during the war. Pioneering photojournalist Helen Brush Jenkins got her start replacing her husband at the Daily News when he went to war. She did so well there was no vacancy for him when he returned, and she kept her job there for 12 years, in 1951 capturing the light of a nuclear test in Nevada from the roof of the Daily News building, a picture dubbed, "Atomic Dawn". While there were woman journalists at other Los Angeles dailies during the war, they followed a path already broken by women at the Daily News, which also employed minorities such as Latino night editor Sparky Saldana and his brother, sportswriter Lupe Saldana. Until the war, the Daily News had been published on peach-colored paper; when it changed back from white afterwards, the paper held a parade through downtown entitled "The Peach is Back!" and tossed peaches to onlookers. Daily News readership peaked in 1947, when an average 300,000 copies per day were sold. In both absolute and relative terms, though, it was falling further and further behind the other Los Angeles dailies, such as the Times and Los Angeles Examiner. In addition, Boddy, who was now past sixty, was losing interest in managing the paper. Fierce competition from the new Chandler family tabloid, the Los Angeles Mirror, also hurt circulation and profits. Nevertheless, Boddy advanced money to keep the paper in business, lending nearly \$2 million to fund its operations between 1948 and 1952, funds for which he did not seek repayment in the paper's subsequent bankruptcy. The Daily News was the only Democratic newspaper in Los Angeles in the postwar years, featuring columns by Eleanor Roosevelt and Drew Pearson, with cartoons by Herb Block. In 1950, feeling he was repeating himself in print, Boddy sought another way to involve himself in public affairs by running for the Democratic nomination for United States Senate. Boddy was tapped to enter the race when incumbent Sheridan Downey dropped out during the primary. Democratic establishment figures distrusted the remaining major Democratic candidate, liberal Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, and feared that a Douglas victory would hand the election to the likely Republican candidate, Congressman Richard M. Nixon. Daily News staffers believed Boddy was abandoning his journalistic integrity in running. Boddy ran in both major party primaries, a practice known as "cross filing", but his campaign was ineffective, and he finished a distant second in each primary. During the campaign, he mocked Douglas's liberal views by dubbing her "the pink lady" in the Daily News, a nickname reused by the Nixon campaign in the general election. Just before the primary, when Nixon (who along with Douglas had also cross-filed) sent out election materials that did not mention he was a Republican, an ad appeared in the Daily News from the hitherto-unknown "Veterans Democratic Committee". The advertisement accused Nixon of masquerading as a Democrat, and dubbed him "Tricky Dick"—the first appearance of that Nixon moniker. Nixon went on to win the general election over Douglas in a landslide. After the primary defeat, Boddy went into semi-retirement, and profits from sales of the Daily News began to decrease. In early 1951, he made his assistant, Robert Smith, editor of the paper, and in mid-1952, sold out to a consortium led by Smith. In August 1952, Boddy announced his retirement as publisher in Smith's favor. Smith instituted changes, substituting a Sunday News for the money-losing Saturday edition. He called in William Townes as editor, who was well known for restoring ailing newspapers, but Smith fired Townes after twelve weeks on the job. Smith attempted to sell the paper, and reached an agreement with a small-time Oregon newspaper owner, Sheldon F. Sackett. After signing, Smith backed out of the deal. By the time Smith finally sold the paper, in December 1952 to Congressman Clinton D. McKinnon, who was leaving office after losing a Senate primary bid, the Daily News was losing over \$100,000 a month. In May 1953, the Daily News dropped the Sunday edition, changed from being an afternoon paper to morning, and cut its price from ten cents to seven. McKinnon related that he had been approached by labor leaders who wanted to keep the Daily News in business, but after the paper was purchased, much of their support failed to materialize. He went to "every wealthy liberal person I ever heard of", seeking money to keep the paper in business. He was able to increase circulation by 20,000 and halve the annual million dollar loss. Nevertheless, creditors pressed for repayment of debt, and in December 1954, the paper was sold to the Chandler family, owners of the Mirror. Under the sale agreement, the Mirror became the Mirror & Daily News (before again being renamed the Mirror-News). On December 18, 1954, publication of the Daily News ceased and all employees lost their jobs without severance pay. The unionized workforce lost their jobs just before Christmas. At its end, the Daily News was a six-column large tabloid and had a circulation of 195,000, published every day but Sunday. Subsequent bankruptcy proceedings revealed that Boddy, Smith, and McKinnon each took large losses in the paper's final years. ## Legacy Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2004, how "For nearly three decades, the Illustrated Daily News—later just the Daily News—used its peach-colored tabloid pages to champion the downtrodden and castigate political graft and vice." Jack Smith, who wrote for the Daily News and was later a columnist for the Times, remembered, "it may be that few of us were perfectly sober when we put the Daily News to bed, but it was a wonderful paper, full of humor, youthful energy, good writing and irreverence." An article in the later publication of the same name, the Los Angeles Daily News, stated of its predecessor, "While the Daily News' circulation never rivaled the Times or Examiner, its breezy approach to the news definitely had an impact on L.A. journalism." The Christian Science Monitor's West Coast correspondent, Richard Dyer MacCann, stated when the Daily News folded, > The surprise for most observers has been the staying power of this independent daily with its inadequate staff, its worn-out presses, and its fluctuating circulation and advertising income in face of rising costs. Being constantly in the throes of political debate among the various wings of the Democratic Party, the News nevertheless had many thousands of loyal supporters who felt the need of an opposition newspaper in Los Angeles. ## See also ## Explanatory notes
1,904,536	Cave Story	1,165,390,499	2004 video game	[ "2004 video games", "AROS software", "Action-adventure games", "Amiga games", "AmigaOS 4 games", "Cancelled PlayStation Vita games", "DSiWare games", "Doujin video games", "Dreamcast games", "Freeware games", "Indie games", "Linux games", "MacOS games", "Metroidvania games", "MorphOS games", "Multiplayer and single-player video games", "Nicalis games", "Nintendo 3DS eShop games", "Nintendo 3DS games", "Nintendo Switch games", "Platform games", "Retro-style video games", "Science fantasy video games", "Science fiction video games", "Sega Genesis games", "Side-scrolling video games", "Video games developed in Japan", "WiiWare games", "Windows games" ]	Cave Story, originally released as is a 2004 Metroidvania platform-adventure game for Microsoft Windows. It was developed over five years by Japanese independent developer Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya in his free time. Cave Story features 2D platform mechanics and is reminiscent of the games Amaya played in his youth, such as Metroid and Castlevania. After its initial self-published release, the game slowly gained popularity on the internet. It received widespread critical acclaim for many polished aspects of its design, such as its compelling characters, setting, story, and gameplay. Cave Story is considered by many as the quintessential indie game because of its one-person development team and influence on the video gaming world. Independent video game developer Nicalis worked with Amaya to port the game to WiiWare and DSiWare in 2010. An enhanced version, Cave Story+, was released for Steam in November 2011, and the original game was released for the Nintendo 3DS in October 2012 with added content. A 3D remake of the game, titled Cave Story 3D, was developed by Nicalis and published by NIS America for the Nintendo 3DS in November 2011. A port of Cave Story+ for the Nintendo Switch was released in June 2017. The fast-paced gameplay of Cave Story revolves around Quote, a robot who wakes up suffering amnesia and who must explore and blast his way through cavernous areas in order to figure out his backstory and escape from the cave. The character gains access to new areas as he powers up his weapons by collecting triangular experience crystals and solves various platforming puzzles. Quote speaks to non-player characters scattered around the game world in order to learn more about the world and its inhabitants. ## Gameplay The player controls the on-screen character directly using a keyboard or gamepad. The player progresses by navigating platform game puzzles and shooting enemies with the equipped weapon. When the player collects multiple weapons, they may be toggled at any time with the press of a button. Defeating all the enemies sometimes yields yellow triangular objects, which give experience points to weapons when collected. Weapons may be improved up to level three, but taking damage causes weapons to lose experience and levels. Health and missile capacity upgrades are scattered throughout the game world. The player must interact with a variety of non-player characters and objects to complete the game. ## Plot ### Setting Cave Story takes place within the cavernous interior of a floating island. The island is populated by Mimiga, a race of sentient, rabbit-like creatures. A particular species of red flower that grows in the island causes the normally peaceful Mimiga to fall into a violent frenzy when ingested. The island also conceals an artifact called the Demon Crown, which has vast magical powers. An army of robot soldiers was sent to the floating island on a military expedition, seeking to harness the Demon Crown as a weapon for wars on the surface. These robots slaughtered the Mimiga indiscriminately in their search for the crown, but were defeated when the Mimiga decided to eat the red flowers as a last resort. Shortly before the game begins, Professor Booster, the Sakamoto family, and various assistants formed a scientific party to research the island, but they became stranded when their medical doctor, Fuyuhiko Date, managed to acquire the Crown; he then forced the expedition to search for the red flowers. ### Story The player character awakens in a cave with no memory of how he came to be there. He finds a village of Mimiga, who are being persecuted by the Doctor. The Doctor's servants Misery and Balrog are looking for Sue Sakamoto, a girl who had been transformed into a Mimiga. Not finding her, they mistakenly abduct another Mimiga named Toroko instead. The player finds Sue in the Egg Corridor, where she discovers the egg of a Sky Dragon, which could allow her to escape the floating island if hatched. Sue attempts to rescue her brother Kazuma, but King, the leader of Mimiga Village, captures her and holds her responsible for Toroko's kidnapping. Sue tasks the player with retrieving Kazuma from Grasstown. After freeing him, they meet Professor Booster, who reveals that the Doctor plans to use the red flowers on Mimigas to create an army to take over the surface world. Booster sends the player to the Sand Zone to destroy the red flowers before the Doctor can find them. While there, the player meets Curly Brace, a female robot who also has no memories of her past, and Jenka, an old witch who is Misery's mother and guardian of the red flowers. Jenka calls the player character a "soldier from the surface", one of many who were sent to the island to slaughter the Mimiga. Balrog manages to steal the key to the warehouse containing the red flowers from Jenka, who urges the player to stop them. Before the player can reach the warehouse, however, the Doctor force-feeds the captured Toroko a red flower and fatally injures King, leaving the player to fight the rabid Toroko, who ultimately dies. Misery banishes the player to the Labyrinth deep inside the island as punishment for interfering with the Doctor's plans. Curly Brace has also been thrown into the Labyrinth and the two cooperate to escape. Balrog helps them to move the boulder blocking the exit, revealing his kind nature. The pair find and defeat the Core, a magical creature whose power keeps the island afloat, but the Doctor steps in to save it before the island collapses. Depending on certain conditions, the player may rescue Curly Brace, who had sacrificed her air tank to save the player character. When the player returns to Mimiga Village, they find that the Doctor has captured the Mimiga. In the now-ruined Egg Corridor, Kazuma offers the player a choice to escape the island with him using a Sky Dragon, leading to an alternate ending in which the Doctor conquers the surface world while Kazuma and the player hide in the mountains. The player may instead choose to confront the Doctor and destroy the island's Core, which would return the Mimiga to normal. The player scales the outer wall of the island to reach the Plantation where the Doctor is using the Mimigas as slave laborers to grow red flowers. The Doctor's servants capture the player and place him in a jail cell with Sue. She is taken away before the player wakes up, but her letter reveals that the Doctor was a member of the research expedition that included Sue's family and Professor Booster, but he betrayed them once he found the Demon Crown. Sue directs the player to find her mother who may have a plan to stop the Doctor. If the player saved Curly Brace earlier, they may find an item to restore her memories. Curly remembers that the player character's name is Quote, and that they were not the killer robots who slaughtered Mimigas in the past. Instead, they were sent to destroy the Demon Crown to prevent its power from falling into the wrong hands. Quote finds Sue's mother, Momorin, who is building a rocket that will allow access to the top of the island where the Doctor resides. After helping her complete the rocket, Quote confronts Misery and the Doctor. The Doctor has purified the essence of the red flowers into a crystal, which allows him to survive even after Quote kills him. The Doctor's spirit possesses the Core of the island, but Quote succeeds in destroying that as well, causing the island to begin falling to Earth. Unless the player has saved Curly, restored her memories, and acquired the Booster v2.0 from Professor Booster, Sue will lead the player to jump off the island. The two are rescued by Kazuma and his Sky Dragon, while Momorin, her assistant Itoh, and the captured Mimiga escape on a helicopter, leaving the rest of the island's inhabitants to their fates. Should the player complete the aforementioned tasks, they may proceed into the Blood-Stained Sanctuary, a bonus stage where Curly can be found and rescued; it is also here where Ballos — creator of the Demon Crown and Jenka's younger brother — is imprisoned. A powerful wizard who went insane and destroyed his homeland after being tortured by a jealous king, Ballos was sealed deep within the island by his sister. At some point, his niece Misery forced him to create the Demon Crown, but she and Balrog became cursed to serve whoever possessed it. Additionally, it is stated via narration that the Demon Crown will repair itself upon being destroyed, and it will only truly lose its power if Ballos is killed, necessitating that Quote and Curly kill him. With the help of Curly Brace, Quote defeats Ballos and stops the source of the negative energy that was causing the island to fall, saving its inhabitants. Balrog saves the two before they are crushed by Ballos' collapsing prison; Balrog had been sent by Misery as thanks for breaking her curse. Quote, Curly Brace, and Balrog leave the island to live out their days in peace. ## Development Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya developed Cave Story in his free time over five years. He began the project when he was in college and continued working on it after getting a job as a software developer. He started by writing the title screen music and programming rudimentary character movements. The idea for the cave setting evolved spontaneously when he created a number of enclosed spaces. Amaya admitted this lack of planning caused "problems down the line" because he did not have dedicated map editing and data management tools. Amaya describes the game as having an "old-fashioned feel", reminiscent of the games he played as a child, like Metroid. More importantly, this "retro" design choice allowed him to create a large amount of art on his own, which would have been impossible for a 3D game. At a Game Developers Conference project post-mortem, he emphasized the role of pragmatic design in shaping the game. While designing the main character, "Quote", Amaya drew inspiration from the Nintendo Plumber called Mario's iconic original appearance—a large, expressive face and a high contrast between his white skin and red shirt make him stand out from the dark cave backgrounds. Most other characters feature either light skin or white clothes for the same reason. To make levels memorable, Amaya designed them around a single theme, such as "warmth" for the Egg Corridor, and "arid and oppressive" for the Sand Zone. Instead of a tutorial level, a concept Amaya dislikes, the first level of the game gives the player two paths, one of which is blocked off until retrieving an item from the other path. This setup, inspired by the opening of Metroid, "lets players feel like they've solved problems on their own" and persists throughout the game. In beta versions of the game, all the enemies were shaped like bars of soap, a concept that evolved into the "Balrog" character. There was also a "frog prince" character who could travel through water more easily. Elements of this beta were incorporated into the Nintendo 3DS version of the game. ## Versions and ports ### Ports Cave Story has been ported to Linux based, Haiku OS, AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and Mac OS X operating systems, PlayStation Portable, Xbox, Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, GP2X, GP2X Wiz, and the TI graphing calculator. An enhanced port, featuring updated character designs, remixed music and extra game modes, was developed by Nicalis and released on WiiWare on 22 March 2010 in North America and 10 December 2010 in Europe. Nicalis also ported the game to DSiWare on 29 November 2010 in North America and 22 November 2011 in Japan. Although it does not feature the enhanced graphics and sound or some of the extra modes from the Wii version, it does include the Sanctuary Attack mode. There is also a free/libre SDL-based recreation of the original game engine, titled NXEngine, made by programmer Caitlin Shaw, which allows for extended modification of the game, and the creation of ports for additional devices. The game was released for the Nintendo 3DS's Nintendo eShop service (separate from the retail 3DS game) in the United States on 4 October 2012 and in Europe on 1 May 2014. This version includes the DSiWare version's Jukebox mode, as well as all the additional modes included in Cave Story+. ### Cave Story+ An enhanced PC version titled Cave Story+ was released by Nicalis on the Steam service on 22 November 2011. Cave Story+ features an alternative script that differs from the original English translation. This version contains all the additional modes from the WiiWare version, a remastered soundtrack, as well as the option to toggle the style of graphics between the classic style and that of the WiiWare version and the music of the original game, the WiiWare port, or the 3DS update. It also features an exclusive 'Wind Fortress' level. The game got an update that added an exclusive Machine Gun Challenge. The game was included as a bonus game in the Humble Indie Bundle 4 sale in December 2011, Humble Bundle 7 in December 2012, and was released on the Desura service in April 2012. On 19 January 2017, Nicalis announced a port of Cave Story+ on the Nintendo Switch, which released on 20 June 2017. This physical version is packaged with a full-color manual for the game and a Mini CD containing arrangements of the game's soundtrack made in FamiTracker, a chiptune music tracker based on the Famicom's synthesizers. It also added two-player cooperative gameplay and remixed version of the original soundtrack by the composers of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. Additionally, GameStop purchases of the Nintendo Switch version include one of three keychains modeled after Quote, Curly, and Balrog. ### Cave Story 3D Cave Story 3D is a 3D version of the game developed by Nicalis and published by NIS America as a retail title for the Nintendo 3DS. It was released on 8 November 2011 in North America, 11 November 2011 in Europe and 26 July 2012 in Japan. The game was built from scratch using 3D character models, featuring a dynamic camera system and another additional level, as well as a remixed soundtrack by Danny Baranowsky. The Japanese version features crossover content from various NIS and other companies' franchises such as Crazy Climber, Ikki, and Dragon Slayer. In order to devote more time to perfecting the title, Amaya quit his job as a software developer to become director of Cave Story 3D. He remarked that the transition to 3D was difficult because it required the consideration of so many more details. ## Reception The original Cave Story earned widespread critical acclaim. Upon release as Dōkutsu Monogatari, 1UP.com described it as "so massive that it rivals modern [Game Boy Advance] Castlevania and Metroid games in terms of scope and play time". Matt Miller of Game Informer observed that it combines elements of Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, The Legend of Zelda, and Castlevania into an "engrossing, challenging, and quite lengthy" whole. Inside Mac Games ascribed the game's popularity to its "polished feel, engaging storyline, and compelling artwork". John Szczepaniak of Retro Gamer magazine named it his favorite game of all time. Electronic Gaming Monthly stated that "the burgeoning Western indie game scene owes a tremendous debt to Japanese pioneers like Studio Pixel, whose freeware hit Cave Story proved that with sufficient vision, skill, and passion, a single developer can still craft a deep, compelling action game". Jonathan Holmes of Destructoid compared the game design to that of Shigeru Miyamoto in its ability to teach without tutorials, like at the beginning of Super Mario Bros. In July 2006, Cave Story earned 1st place in Super PLAY'''s list of the 50 best freeware games of all time. In July 2015, the game placed 14th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. The WiiWare version has received mostly positive reviews, with the central criticism being the 1200 Wii Point price tag (US\$12, £10), after years of free play. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com commended the graphical update, which "sacrifices none of [the game's] classic-influenced charm". He also remarked that the Classic Controller and Wii Remote are superior to the keyboard input of the PC original. On the issue of price, he explained that "the prospect of Amaya finally earning a little something for the hard work he invested in this masterpiece strikes me as satisfyingly poetic" and "absolutely worth your money". John Teti of Eurogamer had similar sentiments, but also noted the technical issues with the remixed music, recommending the original soundtrack. Edge compared the remake to The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, satisfying both modern tastes with its graphical overhaul and old school fans with the option to switch to the original graphics. Daemon Hatfield of IGN felt that Cave Story "belongs on a Nintendo system" and noted gameplay similarities to Blaster Master, in which damage reduces the power of weapons as well. Cave Story was nominated for Game of the Year at the 2010 Nintendo Power Awards, as well as WiiWare Game of the Year. Criticism of Cave Story 3D echoed that of the WiiWare version. Many reviewers cautioned that the graphical update does not justify the \$40 initial price point, especially with cheaper or free versions of the game available through download services. Parish defended the release, deriving satisfaction from the game's availability as a physical cartridge. Holmes praised the dynamic camera system and new graphics, comparing them to Disney films. He considers this release to be the "best version of the game, [but] not necessarily the definitive version". Jane Douglas of GameSpot felt that the 3DS Circle Pad was a comfortable fit for the game's control scheme. Audrey Drake of IGN noted that the 3D effect made it difficult to distinguish certain platforms between background and foreground, a complaint shared by Douglas. Simon Parkin of the UK Official Nintendo Magazine was more critical, citing lack of detail in the 3D models and a too-dark color palette. Japanese magazine Famitsu Weekly's four reviewers scored it 7, 7, 8, and 8 points out of 10 to a total of 30 out of 40 points, indicating average reviews. This version was nominated for Best Adventure Game at the 2011 Nintendo Power Awards. As of July 2018, Cave Story+ has sold an estimated 590,104 digital units on Steam. ## Legacy Quote appears as a downloadable character in Bit.Trip Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. Curly Brace appears as a bonus playable character in 1001 Spikes. Both Curly Brace and Quote appear as playable characters in the crossover fighting game Blade Strangers. Quote, Curly Brace and Ballos are featured as playable characters in Nicalis' puzzle game Crystal Crisis. Quote's hat is also featured in the game Terraria. ### Cave Story's Secret Santa On 8 December 2021, Tyrone Rodriguez of Nicalis teased a new Cave Story spin-off title, which was revealed to be Cave Story's Secret Santa on 9 December. This was a free game created in cooperation with Studio Pixel, and was available for a limited time, starting 9 December 2021. This game is based around the character Santa, a mimiga met in Cave Story, and is a stealth and puzzle-solving game set before the events of Cave Story. ### Impact Cave Story is considered to be one of the most influential video games to be released between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s. The game had an impact on the indie game industry, with its acclaim and success demonstrating that a one-person team could rival major studios. It is also one of the most internationally successful Japanese indie (dōjin soft) games, and contributed to the resurgence of the Metroidvania genre. The game's critical acclaim demonstrated the scope of what one person could do, and highlighted another take on the Metroidvania genre. It also vitalized the 2D platform game genre as a viable indie game format. The success of Cave Story paved the way for a large number of retro-themed 2D platformers that have appeared since the mid-2000s. Jonathan Holmes of Destructoid called Cave Story an "important game", observing its influence on artistic indie games like Braid or Meat Boy, as well as the continued relevance of 2D game design (cf. Capcom's Mega Man 9''). ### Legal issues While the game had been once released for free, Nicalis since taking over its publishing for major platforms has been issuing cease and desist letters and DMCA actions against fan projects using the game's assets as well as its decompiled codebase. The actions taken against projects using the decompiled code from the free release, including a game engine built atop this code, had been met with criticism from game developers since this action seems to apply retrospective rights that Nicalis did not have on the original release by Amaya.
321,401	Pigeon guillemot	1,151,939,956	Seabird in the auk family from North Pacific coastal waters	[ "Birds described in 1811", "Birds of the Aleutian Islands", "Cepphus", "Fauna of the San Francisco Bay Area", "Native birds of Alaska", "Taxa named by Peter Simon Pallas" ]	The pigeon guillemot (Cepphus columba) (/ˈɡɪlɪmɒt/) is a species of bird in the auk family, Alcidae. One of three species in the genus Cepphus, it is most closely related to the spectacled guillemot. There are five subspecies of the pigeon guillemot; all subspecies, when in , are dark brown with a black iridescent sheen and a distinctive wing patch broken by a brown-black wedge. Its has mottled grey and black and white . The long bill is black, as are the claws. The legs, feet, and inside of the mouth are red. It closely resembles the black guillemot, which is slightly smaller and lacks the dark wing wedge present in the pigeon guillemot. This seabird is found on North Pacific coastal waters, from Siberia through Alaska to California. The pigeon guillemot breeds and sometimes roosts on rocky shores, cliffs, and islands close to shallow water. In the winter, some birds move slightly south in the northernmost part of their range in response to advancing ice and migrate slightly north in the southern part of their range, generally preferring more sheltered areas. This species feeds on small fish and marine invertebrates, mostly near the sea floor, that it catches by pursuit diving. Pigeon guillemots are monogamous breeders, nesting in small colonies close to the shore. They defend small territories around a nesting cavity, in which they lay one or two eggs. Both parents incubate the eggs and feed the chicks. After leaving the nest the young bird is completely independent of its parents. Several birds and other animals prey on the eggs and chicks. The pigeon guillemot is considered to be a least concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to its large, stable population and wide range. Threats to this bird include climate change, introduced mammalian predators, and oil spills. ## Taxonomy and nomenclature The pigeon guillemot is one of three species of auk in the genus Cepphus, the other two being the black guillemot of the Atlantic Ocean and the spectacled guillemot from the Eastern Pacific. It was described in 1811 by Peter Simon Pallas in the second volume of his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica. A 1996 study looking at the mitochondrial DNA of the auk family found that the genus Cepphus is most closely related to the murrelets from the genus Synthliboramphus. An alternative arrangement, proposed in 2001 using genetic and morphological comparisons, found them as a sister clade to the murres, razorbill, little auk and great auk. Within the genus, the pigeon guillemot and spectacled guillemot are sister species, and the black guillemot is basal within the genus. The pigeon guillemot and the black guillemot form a superspecies. There are five recognised subspecies of the pigeon guillemot: - Cepphus columba columba Pallas, 1811 – northeast Siberia through the Bering Sea - C. c. snowi (Stejneger, 1897) – northern & central Kuril Islands - C. c. kaiurka (Portenko, 1937) – Commander Islands to west-central Aleutian Islands - C. c. adiantus (Storer, 1950) – central Aleutian Islands to Washington - C. c. eureka (Storer, 1950) – Oregon & California In the binomial name, the genus, Cepphus, is derived from the Greek kepphos, referring to an unknown pale waterbird mentioned by Aristotle among other classical writers, later variously identified as types of seabirds, including gulls, auks and gannets. The specific epithet, columba, is derived both from the Icelandic klumba, meaning "auk", and the Latin columba, meaning "pigeon". Pallas noted in his description of this species that the common name for the related black guillemot was Greenland dove. Snowi is dedicated to Captain Henry James Snow, a British seaman and hunter. The name of the subspecies kaiurka is derived from the Russian kachurka, meaning "petrel". Adiantus is derived from the Greek adiantos, "unwetted". The trinomial epithet of the subspecies C. c. eureka is from the motto of the state of California, which is derived from the Greek heurēka, meaning "I have found it". ## Description The pigeon guillemot is a medium-sized auk, 30 to 37 cm (12 to 15 in) in length and weighing 450 to 550 g (16 to 19 oz). Both sexes are alike in appearance and mass, except for Californian birds where females were found to have larger bills than males. The summer or of the adult is mostly dark brown with a black sheen, with a white wing patch broken by a brown-black wedge. In winter, the are iridescent black, often with black fringes giving a scalloped appearance, and the and rump are white. The forehead, , , eye line and ear coverts are black with white tips, sometimes the tips are narrow and the head looks black. In all plumages, the are plain and dark. Adults moult into their winter or between August and October, taking around a month to complete and leaving the bird unable to fly for around four weeks. Birds moult into their breeding plumage between January and March. The legs and feet are red, with black claws. The iris is brown and the eye is surrounded by a thin unbroken white eye-ring. The bill is long and black and the inside of the mouth is red. The juvenile pigeon guillemot resembles a winter adult but has underpart feathers tipped in brown, giving the appearance of barring, more brown feathers in the upperparts and its wing patch is smaller. Its legs are a grey-brown in color. It loses the brown underpart feathers after its first moult two to three months after fledging. Its moult to its first summer plumage is later than adults, happening between March and May, and first summer birds lack the glossy sheen of adults. The differences between the subspecies are based on body measurements such as the and wing length. These are larger in southern subspecies and smaller further north. The amount of white on the outer and increases in northern subspecies, except for Cepphus columba snowi, where the white is reduced or entirely absent. The pigeon guillemot walks well and habitually has an upright posture. When sitting it frequently rests on its tarsi. The wings of the pigeon guillemot are shorter and rounder than other auks, reflecting greater adaptation towards diving than flying. It has difficulty taking off in calm conditions without a runway, but once in the air it is faster than the black guillemot, having been recorded at 77 km/h (48 mph), about 20 km/h (12 mph) faster than the black guillemot. In the water it is a strong swimmer on the surface using its feet. When diving, propulsion is provided both by the wings, which beat at a rate of 2.1/s, but unusually for auks also by the feet. Pigeon guillemots have been recorded travelling 75 m (246 ft) horizontally on dives. The pigeon guillemot is similar to the related black guillemot, but can be distinguished by its larger size, and in the breeding season by its dusky-grey underwing and the dark brown wedge on the white wing patch. ## Distribution and habitat The pigeon guillemot ranges across the Northern Pacific, from the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia to coasts in western North America from Alaska to California. This bird's wintering range is more restricted than its breeding season range, the pigeon guillemot usually wintering at sea or on the coasts, from the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands to Hokkaido and southern California. In Alaska, some migrate south because of advancing sea-ice, although others remain in ice leads or ice holes some distance from the edge of the ice sheet. Further south, birds banded in the Farallon Islands in central California have been recorded moving north, as far as Oregon and even British Columbia. It generally is philopatric, meaning it returns to the colony where it hatched to breed, but it sometimes moves long distances after fledging before settling, for example a chick ringed in the Farallones was recorded breeding in British Columbia. This bird's breeding habitats are rocky shores, cliffs, and islands close to shallow water less than 50 m (160 ft) deep. It is flexible about its breeding site location, the important factor being protection from predators, and it is more commonly found breeding on offshore islands than coastal sea cliffs. In the winter it forages along rocky coasts, often in sheltered coves. Sandy-bottomed water is avoided, presumably because this does not provide the right habitat to feed in. It occasionally can be found further offshore, as far as the continental shelf break. In the Bering Sea and Alaska, it feeds in openings in ice sheets. ## Behaviour Pigeon guillemots are generally diurnal, but have been recorded feeding before dawn and after sunset. They typically sleep in loose groups in sheltered waters or on shore close to water. They typically rest spaced apart, but mated pairs rest close together. Bathing and preening can also happen on shore or at sea. ### Breeding The pigeon guillemot usually lays its eggs in rocky cavities near water, but it often nests in any available cavity, including caves, disused burrows of other seabirds, and even old bomb casings. It is noted that pigeon guillemots do not inhabit nests with gull eggs, specifically those of the western gull. This guillemot usually retains its nest site, meaning that nest sites are generally used multiple times, although it does not display this behaviour if its mate does not return to breed. The nests are found at a wide range of heights, from about 1 to 55 m (3.3 to 180.4 ft) above sea-level. Nesting sites are defended by established pairs, as is a small territory around the nest entrance of between 1–4 m<sup>2</sup> (11–43 sq ft). Both sexes defend the nesting site, although most defence is done by the male. Foreign eggs in this guillemot's nest are generally removed. Nest competition with Cassin's auklet is occasional, the pigeon guillemot almost always just removing the eggs, and rarely pithing before removal. On the other hand, larger auk species, tufted puffins and rhinoceros auklets, have been reported evicting pigeon guillemots from their nesting crevices. This guillemot nests at a variety of densities, ranging from a single individual to dense colonies. The nesting density is generally not affected by predation, although on a very local scale, nesting closer to neighbors has a slight advantage. Colonies are attended during the day and, except for birds incubating or brooding, adults do not remain in the colony at night. Birds usually arrive in the colony in the morning, with counts decreasing after early afternoon, when high tide is. Colony attendance is affected by the tide, more appearing when the tide is higher and less when the tide is lower, probably because the prey this bird feeds on is more accessible during low tide, thus more birds are away from the colony. The counts vary the most before laying, while they are relatively stable during incubation and egg laying. Pigeon guillemots form long-term pair bonds, the pairs usually reuniting each year, although occasionally pairs divorce. The formation of the pair bond is poorly understood. It is thought that form of play known as "water games", which involves chasing of birds on and under the water at sea, and duet-trilling may have a function in maintaining the pair bond or act as a prelude to copulation. The red colour of the mouth may also be a sexual signal. Usually arriving at its breeding range 40 to 50 days before laying starts, the pigeon guillemot breeds from late April to September. During this time, it generally lays a clutch of one or two eggs. The eggs have grey and brown blotches near the larger end of the egg and range in colour from creamy to pale blue-green. They measure 61.2 mm × 41.0 mm (2.41 in × 1.61 in) on average, but become longer when laid later in the breeding season. Incubated by both sexes, the eggs usually hatch after 26 to 32 days. The chick is continuously by both parents for three days, and then at intervals for another two to four days, after which it is able to control its own body temperature. Both parents are responsible for feeding the chicks, and bring single fish held in the bill throughout the day, but most frequently in the morning. The chicks usually fledge 34 to 42 days after hatching, although the time taken to fledge has been known to take anywhere from 29 to 54 days. Chicks fledge by leaving the colony and flying to sea, after which they are independent of their parents and receive no post-fledging care. After this, the adult also leaves the colony. Young birds do not breed until at least three years after fledging, with most first breeding at four years of age. While they may not return to breed, two or three year old birds may start attending the breeding colony before they reach sexual maturity, arriving in the colony after the breeding birds. Pigeon guillemots that reach adulthood have an average life-expectancy of 4.5 years, and the oldest recorded individual lived for 14 years. ### Calls and displays The pigeon guillemot is a very vocal bird, particularly during the breeding season, and makes several calls, some of which are paired with displays, to communicate with others of its kind. One such display call pairing is the conspicuous hunch-whistle, where the tail is slightly raised, the wings held slightly out and the head thrown back 45-90° while whistling, before snapping back to horizontal. The function of this call is to advertise ownership of a territory. Another call, the trill, denotes ownership over larger distances. Trills can be performed singly or as duets between pairs; if performed as a duet then the call also functions to help reinforce pair bond. Trills are usually given from a resting position, except for the trill-waggle, which has the bird raising its tail, opening its wings and ruffling the feathers of its neck and head, followed by a waggling of its outstretched neck and head. This display is antagonistic in a context where pigeon guillemots are in a group and often is the precursor to an attack. Low whistles are made by unpaired males attempting to attract a mate, and are deeper than hunch-whistles and involve less movement of the head. Other calls made include seeps and cheeps made between mates and screams made in the presence of predators. ### Feeding The pigeon guillemot forages by itself or in small groups, diving underwater for food, usually close to shore and during the breeding season within 1 km (0.6 mi) of the colony. It forages at depths from 6 to 45 m (20 to 148 ft), but it prefers depths between 15 and 20 m (50 and 70 ft). The dives can range from 10 to 144 seconds, and usually average 87 seconds, with an intermission between dives lasting around 98 seconds. Dives of two to ten seconds are typical when feeding on shoals of sandlance at the water's surface. Smaller prey are probably consumed underwater, but larger organisms are brought to the surface to eat after capture. The pigeon guillemot mostly feeds on benthic prey found at the lowest level in a body of water close to the sea floor, but it also takes some prey from higher in the water column. It mainly eats fish and other aquatic animals. Fish taken include sculpins, sandfish, cod, and capelin; invertebrates include shrimp and crabs like the pygmy rock crab, and even rarely polychaete worms, gastropods, bivalves and squid. The diet varies greatly, based on where the individual bird is, the season, and also from year to year, as ocean conditions change prey availability. For example, invertebrates are more commonly taken in winter. The foraging method used by this species differs from that of auks in other genera. It hangs upside down above the seafloor, probing with its head for prey and using its feet and wings to maintain position. The chick's diet varies slightly, with more fish than invertebrates, particularly rockfish (family Sebastidae). Specialization in the prey taken by a pigeon guillemot when foraging for its chicks generally results in greater reproductive success, with a high-lipid diet allowing for more growth. The adult pigeon guillemot requires about 20% of its own weight, or 90 grams (3.2 oz) of food each day. It doubles its rate of fishing when feeding the nestlings. As the nestlings get older, they are fed more, until 11 days after hatching, when the food generally levels out. The food they get, although, starts to decrease about 30 days after hatching. ## Predators and parasites Avian predation is the most common cause of egg loss in the pigeon guillemot. Species that prey on the nests include the northwestern crow, a common predator of both eggs and chicks, as well as glaucous-winged gulls, stoats and garter snakes. Raccoons are also common predators, preying on eggs, chicks, and adults. Adults are sometimes hunted by bald eagles, peregrine falcons, great horned owls and northern goshawks. In the water, they have been reported to be taken by orca and giant Pacific octopuses. This bird, especially its chicks, is vulnerable to Aspergillus fumigatus, a fungal disease, while in captivity. It is also vulnerable to the cestode Alcataenia campylacantha. Ticks (Ixodes uriae) and fleas (Ceratophyllus) have been recorded on chicks as well. ## Status The pigeon guillemot is considered to be a least concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This is due to multiple factors, including its large population, estimated at 470,000 individuals, its stable population, and its large range, as this bird is thought to occur over a range of 15,400,000 km<sup>2</sup> (5,950,000 sq mi). This bird is vulnerable to introduced mammalian predators, such as raccoons. The removal of introduced predators from breeding islands allows the species to recover. Climate change has a negative effect on this bird, and reproductive performance decreases with increased temperatures. It is also particularly vulnerable to oil, and adults near oiled shores display symptoms of hepatocellular injury, where elevated levels of aspartate aminotransferase can be found in the liver. Otherwise, the effects of oil spills on the pigeon guillemot are unclear. Unlike some seabirds, ingestion of plastic does not seem to be a problem for this species.
593,127	Kal Ho Naa Ho	1,173,894,723	2003 film by Nikhil Advani	[ "2000s Hindi-language films", "2003 directorial debut films", "2003 films", "2003 romantic comedy-drama films", "Films about Indian Americans", "Films directed by Nikkhil Advani", "Films distributed by Yash Raj Films", "Films scored by Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy", "Films shot in India", "Films shot in Mumbai", "Films shot in New York City", "Films shot in Toronto", "Foreign films set in the United States", "Indian films set in New York City", "Indian romantic comedy-drama films" ]	Kal Ho Naa Ho (, ), also abbreviated as KHNH, is a 2003 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy-drama film directed by Nikhil Advani, written by Karan Johar with dialogue by Niranjan Iyengar, and produced by Yash Johar. The film stars Jaya Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, and Preity Zinta, with Sushma Seth, Reema Lagoo, Lillete Dubey, and Delnaaz Irani in supporting roles. In Kal Ho Naa Ho, Naina Catherine Kapur (Zinta) and Aman Mathur (Shah Rukh Khan) fall in love, but a secret prevents him from reciprocating his feelings and results in a plan to set Naina up with her best friend, Rohit Patel (Saif Ali Khan). Collaborating with Johar, Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy composed the soundtrack and score. Anil Mehta, Manish Malhotra, and Sharmishta Roy were the cinematographer, costume designer and art director, respectively. Principal photography took place in Toronto, New York City, and Mumbai from January to October 2003. The soundtrack was released on 27 September 2003 to positive reviews; the title song, "It's The Time To Disco", "Kuch To Hua Hai", and "Pretty Woman" were particularly well-received. Kal Ho Naa Ho was released on 28 November 2003 with the promotional tagline, "A Story of a Lifetime ... In a Heartbeat". The film received positive critical feedback and was commercially successful; it grossed ₹860.9 million (US\$18.8 million), and was the highest-grossing Indian film of the year. The film explores non-resident Indians, inter-caste marriage, and homosexuality through innuendo and homosocial bonding. It won two National Film Awards, eight Filmfare Awards, thirteen International Indian Film Academy Awards, six Producers Guild Film Awards, three Screen Awards, and two Zee Cine Awards in 2004. ## Plot Naina Catherine Kapur is a pessimistic, uptight MBA student who lives in New York City with her widowed mother Jennifer, disabled brother Shiv, adopted sister Jia and paternal grandmother Lajjo. Jennifer runs an unsuccessful café with her neighbour, Jaswinder "Jazz" Kapoor. Lajjo is hostile to Jennifer and Jia as she believes that Jia's adoption led her son (Jennifer's husband and Naina's father) to commit suicide. Naina has two best friends: her classmate, Rohit Patel, and Jaspreet "Sweetu" Kapoor, Jazz's sister. Her life is dull and overshadowed by the loss of her father until Aman Mathur and his mother move in next door with his uncle, Pritam Chaddha. Aman's cheerfulness gradually wins over Naina's family and he slowly starts to solve their problems. He suggests that they change the café to an Indian restaurant and its success alleviates their financial burdens. Aman encourages Naina to be happy and to live life to the fullest; she ends up falling in love with him. Rohit also falls in love with Naina and asks Aman's help in expressing his feelings. Naina tells Rohit there is something she must say to him, leading him to think that she reciprocates his feelings. Naina reveals she is in love with Aman instead. Shaken, Rohit calls Aman to tell him what has happened. Naina goes to Aman's house and is shocked to see a wedding photograph of Aman and his wife, Priya. Heartbroken, she leaves. Aman's mother confronts him about what has happened. He says he loves Naina but has decided to hide it because he is dying from a heart condition. He is not actually married. Priya is his childhood friend and doctor. Aman vows to bring Naina and Rohit together before he dies. He believes that Rohit will be able to provide for her better than he can. He hatches a plan to transform Naina and Rohit's bond, and gradually their friendship blossoms into love. Naina discovers his plan and chides Aman for trying to ruin her friendship with Rohit. Aman takes out Rohit's diary and confesses his feelings for Naina, saying they are Rohit's. Naina forgives Aman and Rohit. Rohit proposes to Naina, and she accepts. Lajjo and Jennifer have a serious fight regarding Jia, who calls on Aman for help. Aman had previously discovered the truth about Jia's parents and despite Jennifer's objections, he reveals to Lajjo that her son had an extramarital affair and fathered Jia. When Jia's biological mother refused to accept her, Jennifer adopted her. Unable to deal with the guilt, Jennifer's husband committed suicide. An emotional Lajjo realises her mistakes and reconciles with Jennifer and Jia. Naina gains closure after learning the truth about her father's death. During Naina and Rohit's engagement, Aman has a heart attack. Only his mother knows he has been admitted to the hospital. Naina encounters Priya at a jewellery store, whom she recognises as Aman's wife. She introduces herself and her husband, Abhay, who reveals the truth about Aman. Shocked, Naina realises that Aman has sacrificed his love for her and leaves the mall in an emotional frenzy. Priya calls up Aman and informs him about what happened. Aman leaves the hospital and meets a frustrated Rohit, who asks why he and not Aman should marry Naina. Aman urges Rohit to marry Naina as a sign of respect for his dying wish to see Naina happy. Aman meets Naina, and they embrace while he tries to persuade her that he does not love her. Rohit and Naina's wedding, which Aman attends, takes place soon afterwards. Sometime after the wedding, Aman is on his deathbed and says goodbye to everyone. He is left alone with Rohit after Naina leaves the room in tears. Aman makes him promise that, although Naina is with Rohit in this lifetime, he will get her in the next. Twenty years later, a middle-aged Naina tells a grown-up Jia how Aman affected every aspect of their lives. They are joined by her daughter Riya and Rohit, who tells Naina that he loves her as they embrace. ## Cast - Jaya Bachchan as Jennifer Kapur - Shah Rukh Khan as Aman Mathur - Saif Ali Khan as Rohit Patel - Preity Zinta as Naina Catherine Kapur - Sushma Seth as Lajwanti "Lajjo" Kapur - Reema Lagoo as Namrata Mathur - Lillete Dubey as Jaswinder "Jazz" Kapoor - Delnaaz Paul as Jaspreet "Sweetu" Kapoor - Shoma Anand as Kammo - Kamini Khanna as Vimmo - Ketki Dave as Sarlaben Patel - Sulbha Arya as Kantaben - Athit Naik as Shiv Kapur - Jhanak Shukla as Jiah Kapoor - Simone Singh as Camilla - Satish Shah as Karsanbhai Patel - Rajpal Yadav as Guru - Dara Singh as Pritam Chaddha Special appearances - Sanjay Kapoor as Abhay Malhotra - Kajol as a dancer in the song "Maahi Ve" - Rani Mukerji as a dancer in the song "Maahi Ve" - Sonali Bendre as Dr. Priya Malhotra - Dheepesh Bhatt as Frankie Ramdayal - Anaita Shroff Adajania as Geeta Parekh Uncredited appearances - Anil Mehta as Rajnath Kapur - Farah Khan and Karan Johar as customers in Jenny's restaurant - Uday Chopra as a narrator who says "Day 6" ## Production ### Origin Unhappy with the polarising response to his 2001 production, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., Karan Johar decided to make what he called "a cool film" with "a different energy" from his previous projects. He began working on the script for a film that would later be titled Kal Ho Naa Ho. Before the filming started, it was initially entitled Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, but Johar later changed it to Kal Ho Naa Ho (naming it after the song "Aisa Milan Kal Ho Naa Ho" from the 1997 film Hameshaa). He used the former title Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna for his 2006 unnamed film. Around the same time, Nikhil Advani, who had served as an assistant director for Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin (1996), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Mohabbatein (2000), and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., had planned to direct a spy thriller set in Kashmir featuring Shah Rukh Khan. Advani sent an initial draft to Johar and his father, Yash Johar. They felt it was controversial and did not want Advani to choose such a risky subject for his debut film. Johar described Kal Ho Naa Ho's script to Advani who agreed to direct the film if he could make it his way. Johar agreed since he preferred not to direct the film to avoid repeating previous mistakes. He later regretted the decision and thought about taking over from Advani but refrained from doing so out of courtesy. Advani said that Johar "underestimated himself" thinking he could not "do justice to it." In an interview with Sukanya Verma of Rediff.com, Advani described Kal Ho Naa Ho as "the story of a family which is bogged down with a lot of problems"; one man enters their lives "and solves all their problems and makes them realise how their problems are not as big as they are perceived to be." ### Cast and crew Jaya Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta were cast in the lead roles in December 2002. The first name of Shah Rukh Khan's character, Aman, was a departure from his previous collaborations with Johar where his first name in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... was Rahul. Salman Khan, who is not related to Shah Rukh or Saif, and Kareena Kapoor were initially offered the roles of Rohit and Naina. Salman Khan declined the offer because he did not wish to "play second fiddle", and Kapoor refused the role because of a salary dispute with Johar. Saif Ali Khan and Zinta subsequently agreed to be part of the project. Neetu Singh was approached for the role of Naina's mother, Jennifer, but she turned it down. It was then offered to Bachchan, who was initially reluctant to take on the role. After Advani told her he would make the film in the style of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar, both of whom were Bachchan's favourite directors, she changed her mind immediately and accepted the part. Kajol and Rani Mukerji made special appearances in the song "Maahi Ve". Vogue India fashion director Anaita Shroff Adajania made a cameo appearance as Geeta Parekh, Naina and Rohit's fellow MBA candidate. Kal Ho Naa Ho was the last film produced by Yash Johar before his death on 26 June 2004. While Karan wrote the story and screenplay, the dialogue was written by Niranjan Iyengar. Anil Mehta and Sanjay Sankla were signed as cinematographer and editor, respectively; Mehta also appeared briefly as Naina's father (Jennifer's husband) at the beginning of the film. Sharmishta Roy was the film's production designer. Farah Khan choreographed the song scenes and appeared as a customer in Jennifer's café. Actor Arjun Kapoor was an assistant director of the film. ### Costume design The film's costumes were designed by Manish Malhotra. Zinta said in an interview with Subhash K. Jha that she preferred "a very 'preppy' look", similar to Ali MacGraw's in Love Story (1970), and wore glasses to indicate Naina's initially serious nature. Johar wanted Bachchan to wear jeans, believing that "it would be nice" for the audience "to see her in something unusual" and "break new ground" giving her a "fresh" look. Bachchan accepted without hesitation telling Johar, "If you are making it, I'll do it". Zinta designed and sewed the clothes for Gia's dolls in the film. ### Pre-production Johar and Advani were fascinated with New York City and wanted to set Kal Ho Naa Ho there. Johar went to New York City while he worked on the film's script and stayed at least one-and-a-half months studying the people, their culture, how they commute and the lifestyle of Americans and the non-resident Indians (NRI) there. He "sat in Central Park, stared at people, wrote the film, came back to Mumbai, narrated it to everybody, selected the cast." The city appealed to Advani, since he believed it mirrored Naina's personality. He summarised the similarity between the two: "You can be surrounded by millions of people right in the middle of Grand Central Station. And you can be extremely lonely." He had never been to New York City before, and used the films of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron to learn about life there. Like Johar, Advani analysed everything about the city: > When I went to scout for locations, I lived there for a month. I tried to imbibe everything there was in NY. I would just go and stand on the streets for an hour, observe people talking, make mental notes about how they walk, talk, how they don't look people in the eye. They are constantly on the move. I find that incredible. ### Principal photography Kal Ho Naa Ho was made on a budget of ₹220 million (about US\$4,818,211 in 2003) or ₹300 million (about US\$6,570,302 in 2003). Principal photography began on 20 January 2003 in Mumbai. Shah Rukh Khan became ill after four days of shooting and told Johar he would be unable to continue with the project, but Advani asked Johar to wait until the actor recovered. Khan's illness lasted for six months. Scenes with Saif Ali Khan and Zinta, including the song, "Kuch To Hua Hai", were shot in Toronto over an eight-day period in March–April 2003. Johar said in an interview with Subhash K. Jha that he tried to complete the film in Toronto thinking it would be a good substitute for New York City and avoid budget problems. He came to believe the idea was unoriginal and would not work out. The 80-person production unit then moved to New York City for additional filming in July 2003, when Shah Rukh Khan joined them. Advani and Mehta wanted to capture the city's change of seasons from winter to summer to highlight the transformation of Naina's personality, but were unable to do so due to Shah Rukh Khan's illness. As a result, they filmed the sequences set in New York City during the summer. Shooting in New York City began on 15 July, covering areas in and around the five boroughs and on Long Island. The street where Aman and Naina live was filmed in Brooklyn, where the unit camped for two weeks in local houses. A body double was used for Zinta's jogging scene during the film's opening credits since she had injured herself while shooting it. The Northeast blackout of 2003 forced the unit to cancel some filming. The shooting schedule in New York City lasted for fifty-two days. The final scenes, which included some songs, were filmed at the Filmistan Studios in Mumbai over about fifty days beginning in August 2003. Shooting ended in October 2003, "Maahi Ve" being the last scene filmed. According to Shah Rukh Khan, Kal Ho Naa Ho was made in sync sound as there were many indoor sequences in the film. He noted that sync sound "improved" his performance "considerably" describing it as "one of the biggest blessings for an actor." Johar had planned the film's climax differently, but Yash Johar persuaded him that Aman should die. Given Shah Rukh Khan's screen persona, he believed Aman's death would have a bigger impact on the audience. In September 2015, Shah Rukh Khan revealed that Johar "made a special edit" of the film for his children as a favour to him; in this version, the film ends before his character dies. ## Thematic analysis Kal Ho Naa Ho continued the trend set by Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) in which Indian family values are always upheld, regardless of the country of residence. Social and cultural analysis professor Gayatri Gopinath (author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures) noted how the film asserts "the essential Indianness" of its characters, and the entry of Aman Mathur gives them a sense of pride in their identity as Indians. This is seen when Aman helps overcome Jennifer Kapur's financial constraints by turning her café into an Indian restaurant and replacing the American flag with the Indian tricolour. In Postliberalization Indian Novels in English: Politics of Global Reception and Awards, Maria Ridda compares the film with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai because both films depict the internalisation of Western ideologies into Indian culture. Ridda agrees with Gopinath on the impact of Aman's transformation of Jennifer's café. She notes that all of Jennifer's friends and family work together on the renovation and it reinforces "a 'pan-Indian' sense of belonging." In an extensive comparative analysis of Kal Ho Naa Ho with Siddharth Anand's 2005 film, Salaam Namaste, Cleveland State University School of Communication assistant professor Anup Kumar believes the films are similar representing "as an archetype" the "'unity in diversity'" of the characters. In Salaam Namaste, the characters are from across India—one is from Bangladesh. Kumar notes that the characters' last names "signify ethnicity and caste." In Kal Ho Naa Ho, Jennifer and Lajjo are a Christian and Punjabi Sikh, respectively; Rohit is a Gujarati. According to Kumar, Rohit and Naina's marriage symbolises the unity of the people of Punjab and Gujarat. Both films emphasise different aspects of marriage. In Salaam Namaste, central characters Nick and Ambar's (Saif Ali Khan and Zinta) professional careers come first and they are fearful of commitment. Conversely, in Kal Ho Naa Ho the tradition of love-cum-arranged marriage is encouraged. Many critics noted Aman's resemblance to Rajesh Khanna's character, Anand Saigal, in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971). In both films, the protagonist is diagnosed with a terminal illness but believes in living life to the fullest. Despite accepting Aman and Anand's similar personalities, Mayank Shekhar of Mid-Day felt that the film had more in common with Farhan Akhtar's directorial debut, Dil Chahta Hai (2001), "in its look and lingos". Film journalists and critic, Komal Nahta, in his review of Kal Ho Naa Ho for Outlook, Ram Kamal Mukherjee of Stardust, Jitesh Pillai of The Times of India, and Paresh C. Palicha of The Hindu all agreed that the film is thematically similar to Anand. Each felt it shared common aspects with other films starring Khanna: 1970s Safar, where terminal illness is also a central motif, and Bawarchi (1972), in which the protagonist mends relationships between families and friends. Pillai also compared Shah Rukh Khan's death to Tom Hanks' in the 1993 legal drama, Philadelphia. Some reviewers and scholars believe that Kal Ho Naa Ho has indirect homosexual themes. Manjula Sen of The Telegraph and Mimansa Shekhar of The Indian Express feel there is homosexual innuendo, particularly in scenes where Rohit's servant Kantaben finds Rohit and Aman in what she thinks are compromising situations, leading her to believe they are a couple. Dina Holtzman writes in her book, Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, that Aman's death was similar to the death of Jai (Amitabh Bachchan's character in the 1975 film, Sholay). According to Holtzman, their deaths broke the bond between the two male leads and were necessary to establish a normative heterosexual relationship between Rohit and Naina in Kal Ho Naa Ho, and Veeru and Basanti in Sholay. ## Music Johar ended his association with the composing duo Jatin–Lalit after they stated publicly they were dissatisfied with his decision to use other music directors for Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.... The soundtrack for Kal Ho Naa Ho was composed by Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy in their first collaboration with Johar, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar. Unlike in many previous Bollywood films, Johar complied with international copyright laws and obtained permission to rework Roy Orbison's 1964 song "Oh, Pretty Woman" for the film; the revised song was entitled "Pretty Woman". The music for the title song, "Kal Ho Naa Ho", was composed by Loy Mendonsa, while he and Advani were at a German Bakery in Pune. Advani wanted a song thematically similar to Celine Dion's 1997 recording of "My Heart Will Go On", which he was humming at the time. When he heard it, Mendonsa came up with the tune and recorded it on his phone. After Shankar Mahadevan and Ehsaan Noorani listened to it, the trio composed the song. The soundtrack was released on 27 September 2003 under the Sony Music India label. The audio launch ceremony was held two days later at the Taj Lands End in Mumbai. The album had positive reviews and the title song, "It's the Time To Disco", "Kuch To Hua Hai" and "Pretty Woman" became popular. A Bollywood Hungama critic called it "a fabulous amalgamation of Indian melodies and contemporary sound." Another reviewer on the same website felt that, apart from "Kal Ho Naa Ho" and "Kuch To Hua Hai", the rest of the songs were in the "'average' to 'very average' category". Vipin Nair of Film Companion ranked the soundtrack 66th on his list of "100 Bollywood Albums". Nair noted that although the album "had a fairly diverse set of songs", he chose the title song as his favourite and called it "among the most moving songs produced since the start of the century". It was one of the highest-selling album of the year in India, with sales of over 2.3 million copies. The title track was referenced in 2015 by the German Embassy in India, which produced an eight-minute video entitled Lebe Jetzt ("Live now" in German). The video features German Ambassador to India Michael Steiner, his wife Elisse and former Indian Minister of External Affairs Salman Khurshid in the roles played by Shah Rukh Khan, Zinta and Saif Ali Khan respectively. ## Release Kal Ho Naa Ho was released on 28 November 2003, and promoted with the tagline, "A Story of a Lifetime ... In a Heartbeat". Its international distribution rights were acquired by Yash Raj Films. The film won the Prix Du Public award when it was screened at the 2004 Valenciennes Film Festival. It was also shown at the Marrakech International Film Festival in 2005. Costumes worn by Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, and Zinta were auctioned in December 2003 by Fame Adlabs in Mumbai. The film's script was added to the Margaret Herrick Library, the main repository of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, later that month. ## Reception ### Critical response #### India The film received positive reviews from critics, with the direction, story, screenplay, music, cinematography and performances gaining the most attention. Film critic and author Anupama Chopra praised Advani's direction, noting in her India Today review that he "emerges as a distinctive voice". Although she appreciated its technical aspects, she criticised the film's first half and its sub-plots. Mayank Shekhar called Kal Ho Naa Ho "a carefully constructed compendium of moments" which helped the audience "to feel lighter and to lighten up", concluding that "it works and is worth your entertainment bucks." Komal Nahta praised the film's direction, screenplay and lead performances—particularly Shah Rukh Khan, calling his character Aman "one of the best roles of his career." Ram Kamal Mukherjee described Zinta's performance as "astounding", saying that she "skillfully handled the hues of the complex character" and "walked through the character with elan." Mukherjee called Advani's and Johar's treatment of the story "unique", admiring the film's technical aspects and its treatment of homosexuality "with a dash of [humour], and thankfully by not degrading its social connection." Jitesh Pillai described Johar's screenplay as "endearing", writing that it "pinwheels with abandon from the bachelor with a heart of gold to the obdurate female lead." Pillai also praised the performances of Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, particularly their on-screen relationship and comic timing. He called Shah Rukh Khan "wonderful", describing him as "the soul" of the film and writing that Ali Khan's "joie de vivre makes it one of the most delectable performances seen in recent times." Rama Sharma of The Tribune thought that Shah Rukh Khan "infuses enough spark and affection", but was "overcharged" at times. He praised Mehta's cinematography for capturing nuances and "heightening the emotion." In The Hindu, Paresh C. Palicha praised Iyengar's "witty and crispy" dialogue but criticised the characters' Indian accents. Another Hindu critic, Ziya Us Salam, agreed with Nahta that the film belonged to Shah Rukh Khan. Although Shah Rukh Khan "does the same thing over and over again", he performs his role "with such panache that all you can do is sit back and wait for that master artiste to unfold his magic again." A third review in The Hindu by Chitra Mahesh called Kal Ho Naa Ho "a smartly-made film" and praised Saif Ali Khan's performance, saying that "he has proved yet again what a wonderfully natural actor he is." However, she wrote that Shah Rukh Khan "tries too hard to impress". Rohini Iyer of Rediff.com praised Kal Ho Naa Ho's "fresh" storytelling and "spicy humour", saying that Zinta "captures the spirit" of her character. She concluded her review by saying that the film "will carry you with its exuberance." According to Archana Vohra of NDTV, Advani "seems to have come up with an innovative way to present a done-to-death plot" and added: "Irrespective of the frills, fancy clothes and well-dressed stars, the film does strike a chord". Vohra, finding Bachchan "extremely well cast" as Jennifer and Saif Ali Khan's screen presence "electrifying", criticised Shah Rukh Khan for "playing the same kind of roles" as he did in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., but he "isn't too bad. Just needs to go easy on the histrionics." #### Overseas Kal Ho Naa Ho received a rating of 70 percent on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on ten reviews, with an average rating of 7.25 out of 10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has given the film a score of 54 based on four reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". In a positive review, Dave Kehr of The New York Times described Kal Ho Naa Ho as "a vigorous Bollywood blend of romantic comedy and family melodrama" and "a rich meal that may best be reserved for stomachs accustomed to such bountiful fare." Writing for Variety, Derek Elley called the film a "slam-dunk" effort from Johar, with "a lightness of touch that sets it apart from the previous hits." Elley praised Saif Ali Khan and Zinta, noting that they "more than hold" their own "against a huge cast". Manish Gajjar of the BBC found the script "fresh and appealing", and that Advani proves "he has the natural ability to handle both the lighter and serious moments in the film." Gajjar termed Kal Ho Naa Ho a "well-crafted product". David Parkinson of Radio Times wrote that the film "retains a distinctive Bollywood flavour", despite being inspired by "Hollywood romantic comedies". Parkinson criticised its length. He noted: "The pace slackens as plot demands take precedence over set pieces". Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News wrote, "Bollywood musicals, those big, loud, colorful extravaganzas from India, are an acquired taste and much of Kal Ho Naa Ho doesn't translate easily"; despite this mixed review, Bernard noted that the lead cast's characters "grow on you." ### Box office The film was successful at the box office, particularly overseas due to its New York City setting. Kal Ho Naa Ho was released on 400 screens across India and grossed ₹21.7 million (US\$475,000 in 2003) on its opening day, the year's fourth-highest first-day earnings. It earned ₹67.1 million (US\$1.47 million in 2003) by the end of its opening weekend, breaking Koi... Mil Gaya's record for the year's best opening weekend for Hindi films in India. At the end of its first week, the film collected ₹124.5 million (US\$2.7 million in 2003). Kal Ho Naa Ho earned ₹581.8 million (US\$12.7 million in 2003) in India and became the second-highest-grossing Indian film of 2003 in India, behind Koi... Mil Gaya. Abroad, Kal Ho Naa Ho was released in 37 theatres in the United Kingdom. The film debuted in sixth place and grossed ₹29.41 million (about US\$644,000 in 2003) over its first weekend, exceeded only by Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.... In the United States, where it premiered on 52 screens, it earned ₹34.62 million (US\$758,000 in 2003) by the end of its four-day first weekend. By the end of its first week, the film had grossed ₹84.64 million (\$1.8 million in 2003), the year's highest overseas first-week gross for an Indian film. In the first month after its release, Kal Ho Naa Ho collected about ₹180 million (US\$3.9 million in 2003) in the UK and US, grossing in the UK top ten. It earned ₹279.1 million (US\$6.1 million in 2003) overseas, becoming the year's highest-grossing Indian film world wide. Box Office India estimated the film's total collections to be ₹860.9 million (US\$18.8 million in 2003), making it 2003's most profitable Indian film. ## Awards and nominations At the 51st National Film Awards, Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy received the award for Best Music Direction and Sonu Nigam received the Best Male Playback Singer award. Kal Ho Naa Ho received eleven nominations at the 49th Filmfare Awards, and won eight—the most for any film that year, including: Best Actress (Zinta), Best Supporting Actor (Saif Ali Khan) and Best Supporting Actress (Bachchan). The film won thirteen of its sixteen nominations at the 5th IIFA Awards, including: Best Film, Best Actress (Zinta), Best Supporting Actor (Saif Ali Khan) and Best Supporting Actress (Bachchan). ## See also - List of films set in New York City - List of highest-grossing Indian films
5,689,780	Banksia marginata	1,153,534,539	Tree or woody shrub in the family Proteaceae found throughout much of southeastern Australia	[ "Banksia taxa by scientific name", "Flora of New South Wales", "Flora of South Australia", "Flora of Tasmania", "Flora of Victoria (state)", "Garden plants of Australia", "Ornamental trees", "Plants described in 1800", "Taxa named by Antonio José Cavanilles", "Trees of Australia", "Trees of Mediterranean climate", "Trees of mild maritime climate" ]	Banksia marginata, commonly known as the silver banksia, is a species of tree or woody shrub in the plant genus Banksia found throughout much of southeastern Australia. It ranges from the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia to north of Armidale, New South Wales, and across Tasmania and the islands of Bass Strait. It grows in various habitats, including Eucalyptus forest, scrub, heathland and moorland. Banksia marginata varies widely in habit, ranging from a 20-centimetre (7.9 in) shrub to a 12-metre (40 ft) tree. The narrow leaves are linear and the yellow inflorescences (flower spikes) occur from late summer to early winter. The flower spikes fade to brown and then grey and develop woody follicles bearing the winged seeds. Originally described by Antonio José Cavanilles in 1800, further collections of B. marginata were designated as several separate species by Robert Brown in 1810. However, all were reclassified as a single species by George Bentham in 1870. No distinct subspecies have been recognised by Banksia expert Alex George, who nonetheless concedes that further work is needed. Many species of bird, in particular honeyeaters, forage at the flower spikes, as do native and European honeybees. The response to bushfire varies. Some populations are serotinous: they are killed by fire and regenerate from large stores of seed which have been held in cones in the plant canopy and are released after a fire. Others regenerate from underground lignotubers or suckers from lateral roots. Although it has been used for timber, Banksia marginata is most commonly seen as a garden plant, with dwarf forms being commercially propagated and sold. ## Description Banksia marginata is a highly variable species, usually ranging from a small shrub around a metre (3 ft) tall to a 12-metre-high (39 ft) tree. Unusually large trees of 15 to possibly 30 m (50–100 ft) have been reported near Beeac in Victoria's Western District as well as several locations in Tasmania, while compact shrubs limited to 20 cm (7.9 in) high have been recorded on coastal heathland in Tasmania (such as at Rocky Cape National Park). Shrubs reach only 2 m (6.6 ft) high in Gibraltar Range National Park. The bark is pale grey and initially smooth before becoming finely tessellated with age. The new branchlets are hairy at first but lose their hairs as they mature, with new growth a pale or pinkish brown. The leaves are alternately arranged on the stems on 2–5 mm long petioles, and characteristically toothed in juvenile or younger leaves (3–7 cm [1.2–2.8 in] long). The narrow adult leaves are dull green in colour and generally linear, oblong or wedge-shaped (cuneate) and measure 1.5–6 cm (0.6–2.4 in) long and 0.3–1.3 cm (0.1–0.5 in) wide. The margins become entire with age, and the tip is most commonly truncate or emarginate, but can be acute or mucronate. The cellular makeup of the leaves shows evidence of lignification, and the leaves themselves are somewhat stiff. Leaves also have sunken stomates. The leaf undersurface is white with a prominent midrib covered in brownish hairs. The complex flower spikes, known as inflorescences, appear generally from late summer to early winter (February to June) in New South Wales and Victoria, although flowering occurs in late autumn and winter in the Gibraltar Range. Cylindrical in shape, they are composed of a central woody spike or axis, perpendicularly from which a large number of compact floral units arise, which measure 5–10 cm (2–4 in) tall and 4–6 cm (1.6–2.4 in) wide. Pale yellow in colour, they are composed of up to 1,000 individual flowers (784 recorded in the Gibraltar Range) and arise from nodes on branchlets that are at least three years old. Sometimes two may grow from successive nodes in the same flowering season. They can have a grey or golden tinge in late bud. As with most banksias, anthesis is acropetal; the opening of the individual buds proceeds up the flower spike from the base to the top. Over time the flower spikes fade to brown and then grey, and the old flowers generally persist on the cone. The woody follicles grow in the six months after flowering, with up to 150 developing on a single flower spike. In many populations, only a few follicles develop. Small and elliptic, they measure 0.7–1.7 cm (0.3–0.7 in) long, 0.2–0.5 cm (0.1–0.2 in) high, and 0.2–0.4 cm (0.1–0.2 in) wide. In coastal and floodplain populations, these usually open spontaneously and release seed, while they generally remain sealed until burnt by fire in plants from heathland and montane habitats. Each follicle contains one or two fertile seeds, between which lies a woody dark brown separator of similar shape to the seeds. Measuring 0.9–1.5 cm (0.4–0.6 in) in length, the seed is egg- to wedge-shaped (obovate to cuneate) and composed of a dark brown 0.8–1.1 cm (0.3–0.4 in) wide membranous "wing" and wedge- or sickle-shaped (cuneate–falcate) seed proper which measures 0.5–0.8 cm (0.2–0.3 in) long by 0.3–0.4 cm (0.1–0.2 in) wide. The seed surface can be smooth or covered in tiny ridges, and often glistens. The resulting seedling first grows two obovate cotyledon leaves, which may remain for several months as several more leaves appear. The cotyledons of Banksia marginata, B. paludosa and B. integrifolia are very similar in appearance. ## Taxonomy and naming Banksia marginata is commonly called the silver banksia, because the white undersides of its leaves contrast with the otherwise green foliage and give the plant a "silvery" look. Alternate common names include honeysuckle and dwarf honeysuckle. The aboriginal name in the Jardwadjali language of western Victoria was warock, while the Kaurna name from the Adelaide Plains was pitpauwe and the local name in the Macquarie Harbour region in Tasmania was tangan. A widely distributed and diverse plant, B. marginata was described independently and given many different names by early explorers. On his third voyage, Captain James Cook reported a "most common tree [...] about ten feet high, branching pretty much, with narrow leaves, and a large, yellow, cylindrical flower, consisting only of a vast number of filaments; which, being shed, leave a fruit like a pine top." in January 1777. The genus Banksia was named in honor of Sir Joseph Banks, a botanist who was with Captain Cook during his first voyage (1768-1771) in which he circumnavigated the world, including stops in New Zealand and Australia (Botany Bay). The species marginata was first collected by Luis Née in 1793, from somewhere between Sydney and Parramatta. In 1800, the Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles gave the species the binomial name it still bears today. The species name is the Latin adjective marginatus ("bordered") and refers to appearance of the lower surface of the recurved margins of the leaves when viewed from underneath. Cavanilles also described another specimen collected by Née in the same locality as a different species, Banksia microstachya Cav. A smaller shrub with dentate leaves, this turned out to be an immature plant of the same species with juvenile leaves. Robert Brown described 31 species of Banksia in his 1810 work Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen, including six taxa (B. marginata α and β plus four further species) now attributable to B. marginata. He split the genus into two subgenera, placing these species in subgenus Banksia verae, the "True Banksias". He described Banksia australis R.Br., giving the location of the collection as Port Phillip Bay in Victoria in 1802 (having crossed out Van Diemen's Land 1804). Brown's other collections which were reduced to synonymy with B. marginata were Banksia depressa R.Br., a prostrate shrub from Margate Rivulet in southeastern Tasmania, Banksia insularis R.Br., from Flinders and King Island, and Banksia patula R.Br., a shrub from the vicinity of Port Lincoln, South Australia. The French naturalist Aimé Bonpland in 1816 called it Banksia marcescens Bonpl., deemed an illegitimate name, as by that time the name Banksia marginata already had been published. Still more synonyms are Banksia ferrea Vent. ex Spreng. and Banksia gunnii Meisn. By the time Carl Meissner published his 1856 arrangement of the genus, there were 58 described Banksia species. Meissner divided Brown's Banksia verae, which had been renamed Eubanksia by Stephan Endlicher in 1847, into four series based on leaf properties. He listed six species and a further four varieties all now sunk into B. marginata in series Salicinae. In 1870, George Bentham published a thorough revision of Banksia in his landmark publication Flora Australiensis. In Bentham's arrangement, the number of recognised Banksia species was reduced from 60 to 46. Bentham observed that the characteristics Brown used to define B. australis, B. depressa, B. patula, and B. insularis were unable to distinguish separate forms as more specimens came to light, and hence declared them synonyms of B. marginata. Meissner's four series were replaced by four sections based on leaf, style and pollen-presenter characters. B. marginata was placed in section Eubanksia along with B. integrifolia and B. dentata. ### Placement within Banksia The current taxonomic arrangement of the genus Banksia is based on botanist Alex George's 1999 monograph for the Flora of Australia book series. In this arrangement, B. marginata is placed in Banksia subgenus Banksia, because its inflorescences take the form of Banksia's characteristic flower spikes, section Banksia because of its straight styles, and series Salicinae because its inflorescences are cylindrical. In a morphological cladistic analysis published in 1994, Kevin Thiele placed it as the most basal member of a newly described subseries Integrifoliae, within the series Salicinae. However, this subgrouping of the Salicinae was not supported by George. George did concede that major work is needed on Banksia marginata, which shows such a high degree of variability over its range. B. marginata's placement within Banksia may be summarised as follows: Genus Banksia : Subgenus Isostylis : Subgenus Banksia : : Section Oncostylis : : Section Coccinea : : Section Banksia : : : Series Grandes : : : Series Banksia : : : Series Crocinae : : : Series Prostratae : : : Series Cyrtostylis : : : Series Tetragonae : : : Series Bauerinae : : : Series Quercinae : : : Series Salicinae : : : : B. dentata – B. aquilonia – B. integrifolia – B. plagiocarpa – B. oblongifolia – B. robur – B. conferta – B. paludosa – B. marginata – B. canei – B. saxicola Since 1998, American botanist Austin Mast and co-authors have been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the subtribe Banksiinae, which then comprised genera Banksia and Dryandra. Their analyses suggest a phylogeny that differs greatly from George's taxonomic arrangement. Banksia marginata resolves as the closest relative, or "sister", to B. saxicola, the two taxa part of a larger group containing B. paludosa and the three subspecies of B. integrifolia. Early in 2007, Mast and Thiele rearranged the genus Banksia by merging Dryandra into it, and published B. subg. Spathulatae for the taxa having spoon-shaped cotyledons; thus B. subg. Banksia was redefined as encompassing taxa lacking spoon-shaped cotyledons. They foreshadowed publishing a full arrangement once DNA sampling of Dryandra was complete; in the meantime, if Mast and Thiele's nomenclatural changes are taken as an interim arrangement, then B. marginata is placed in B. subg. Spathulatae. ### Hybrids with other species Hybridisation with Banksia conferta subsp. penicillata at the site of an old abandoned railway between Newnes and Clarence in the Blue Mountains has been recorded; a single B. marginata plant was surrounded by plants with intermediate features but more strongly resembling B. conferta subsp. penicillata. B. marginata can also interbreed with B. paludosa where they are found together. A hybrid with B. saxicola was recorded from Mount William during the Banksia Atlas project. A purported hybrid with B. integrifolia, thought to be from Cape Paterson on Victoria's south coast, was first described by Alf Salkin and is commercially available in small quantities. It forms an attractive hardy low-growing plant to 1 m (3.3 ft). Salkin observed an intermediate form which occurred in coastal areas where Banksia marginata and B. integrifolia are found together. Calling it the Wilsons Promontory topodeme, he noted that it colonised sand dunes, had leaves similar to but narrower than integrifolia, and had persisting flowers on old spikes but not as persistent as marginata. He had collected this form from Revesby in New South Wales as well as Cape Paterson, and had received reports of similar plants at Marlo and Bemm Rivers. Stands of plants intermediate between B. integrifolia and B. marginata have been recorded near Mallacoota in East Gippsland. ## Distribution and habitat Banksia marginata is found from Baradine and Gibraltar Range National Park in northern New South Wales, southwards into Victoria and South Australia, as well as across Tasmania. It is found on the major islands of Bass Strait, including King, Flinders and Cape Barren Islands. There is one report of a collection from the Springbrook Mountains southwest of Southport in southeastern Queensland. It is extremely rare in southwestern New South Wales. In Victoria, it is predominantly coastal or near-coastal east of Traralgon, but in New South Wales it is absent from coastal areas in the Sydney region. Banksia marginata often grew as a large tree on the basalt plains west of Melbourne, but has almost disappeared. In the vicinity of Adelaide, it was common in the western suburbs on old sand dunes behind the beach foredunes. It remains common in the Adelaide foothills. The annual rainfall over its distribution ranges from 400 to 1,000 mm (16 to 39 in). In the Gibraltar Range National Park, it is a dominant shrub of open heathland and a non-dominant shrub of closed heath, mostly found in swampy heath associated with sedges. Plants here have some degree of self-compatibility. In the Sydney region, it grows in association with heath banksia (Banksia ericifolia), old man banksia (B. serrata), mountain devil (Lambertia formosa), lance-leaved geebung (Persoonia lanceolata) and dwarf apple (Angophora hispida) in heathland, and with silvertop ash (Eucalyptus sieberi), Blue Mountains ash (E. oreades), Sydney peppermint (E. piperita), scribbly gum (E. haemastoma), Blue Mountains mallee ash (E. stricta), brittle gum (E. mannifera), snow gum (E. pauciflora) and red bloodwood (Corymbia gummifera) in forested areas. It is widespread as an understory species in medium rainfall eucalypt forests across Victoria, occurring in association with manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis), narrow-leaf peppermint (E. radiata), messmate (E. obliqua), swamp gum (E. ovata) and brown stringybark (E. baxteri). It is a common shrub, sometimes small tree, in heathy and shrubby forests as well as coastal scrub and heath in part of its range. In South Gippsland, it is generally a shrub which regenerates from a lignotuber or suckers after bushfire and sets few seed. It has been recorded as a low spreading shrub in Croajingolong National Park in East Gippsland. In the Wombat State Forest west of Melbourne, it grows as a 1 to 2 m (3.3 to 6.6 ft) high shrub on less fertile soils, and as a large tree to 8 m (26 ft) on more fertile soils. Few trees remain, having been cleared for agriculture or for fuel. Similarly, further west in the Corangamite region, it is either a tree or suckering shrub. In Tasmania, Banksia marginata occupies a wide range of habitats, in mixed forest (where it grows as a small tree), button grass moorlands, flood plains of the Loddon, Franklin and Huon Rivers, as well as coastal regions. In parts of the west and southwest of Tasmania, the species is dominant within the threatened native vegetation community known as Banksia marginata wet scrub. There is no macrofossil record for the species, so it is unclear whether it is a recent introduction from the mainland or has only recently evolved, although its presence on both the mainland and Tasmania suggests it has been present since the Pleistocene. It grows in coastal habitats that would be occupied by Banksia integrifolia on the mainland. Banksia marginata grows on a variety of soil types, from clay loams, shale and peaty loams to sandy or rocky soils composed of quartzite, sandstone, limestone or granite, although sandier soils predominate. It is restricted to sandy soils in the Adelaide region. The soil types are of a wide range of pH, from highly acidic soils in the Grampians to alkaline soils in South Australia. Plants have been recorded at altitudes ranging from sea level to as high as 1,200 m (3,900 ft) AHD at Mount Field National Park. ## Ecology Numerous species of birds have been observed foraging and feeding at the flowers; these include rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus), musk lorikeet (Glossopsitta concinna), purple-crowned lorikeet (G. porphyrocephala), double-eyed fig-parrot (Cyclopsitta diophthalma), red wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata), little wattlebird (A. chrysoptera), yellow wattlebird (A. paradoxa), spiny-cheeked honeyeater (Acanthagenys rufogularis), yellow-faced honeyeater (Lichenostomus chrysops), singing honeyeater (Lichenostomus virescens), white-plumed honeyeater (L. penicillatus), black-chinned honeyeater (Melithreptus gularis), brown-headed honeyeater (M. brevirostris), white-naped honeyeater (M. lunatus), crescent honeyeater (Phylidonyris pyrrhoptera), New Holland honeyeater (P. novaehollandiae), tawny-crowned honeyeater (Gliciphila melanops), eastern spinebill (Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris), noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala), silvereye (Zosterops lateralis) and thornbills (Acanthiza species). In addition, the yellow-tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus) feeds on the seed. The agile antechinus (Antechinus agilis), bush rat (Rattus fuscipes), feathertail glider (Acrobates pygmaeus), and sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) have been recorded visiting flower spikes. Both pollen and nectar are consumed by the southwestern pygmy possum (Cercarteus concinnus). Ants, bees (both native and European honeybees), blowflies and brown butterflies have been recorded as visitors to flower spikes. The wasp Mesostoa kerri of the subfamily Mesostoinae within the family Braconidae causes stem galls on B. marginata in southeastern South Australia. The galls are either round to a diameter of 3.3 cm (1.3 in), or cigar-shaped to 15 cm (5.9 in). Their effect on the plant is unclear. B. marginata is a host plant for the larval and adult stages of the buprestid beetle Cyrioides imperialis. Much more pathological is the banksia longicorn beetle (Paroplites australis) which bores holes in the base of banksia plants which then weaken and fall or blow over with wind and die. Several species of fungus have been recorded growing on the foliage, including Acrospermum gaubae, Argopericonia elegans, Asterina systema-solare, Botryosphaeria banksiae, a species of Cladosporium, Cooksonomyces banksiae, Dimerium banksiae, Episphaerella banksiae, a Periconiella species, Satchmopsis australiensis, Tryssglobulus aspergilloides, and a species of Veronaea. All banksias have developed proteoid or cluster roots in response to the nutrient-poor conditions of Australian soils (particularly lacking in phosphorus). The root system of the suckering forms of Banksia marginata in Victoria and South Australia have a characteristic pattern with a deep tap root, and an extensive system of thick lateral roots 7.5–15 cm (3.0–5.9 in) below the surface. During the winter months, segments around 30 cm (0.98 ft) in length develop vegetative buds capable of forming suckers. Clusters of fine proteoid roots up to 15 cm (5.9 in) long arise from these lateral roots. The response of Banksia marginata to fire is variable. In the Gibraltar Range and Sydney regions, plants are killed by fire and regenerate from seed. They are serotinous, storing their seed in old cones, forming a seedbank in their canopy which is released after bushfire. A field study found that seeds were dispersed short distances (generally 8 m [26 ft] or less), with those closest to the parent plant faring the best. In Little Desert National Park in northwestern Victoria and also eastern South Australia, it grows as a low shrub which suckers (grows shoots from lateral roots) after fire. Plants do not appear to live longer than 25 years; after this time the ageing plants begin to die and are succeeded by younger plants arising from suckers around the parent. A field study in Gippsland found counting the nodes of Banksia marginata plants to be accurate in indicating age within a year up to 21 years since the last fire. There is anecdotal evidence of plants reaching 150 years old in this region. Plant species from communities dependent on fire are thought to self-select to be more flammable; Banksia marginata tested from a dry sclerophyll community in southeastern Tasmania was shown to burn readily, and fire would spread easily through it. Tasmanian forms are frost tolerant at any time of year, which might explain some of their success in spreading and growing in different habitats around the island. This attribute might have allowed them to survive cold periods in Tasmania during the Pleistocene. A trial in Western Australia showed Banksia marginata to be mildly sensitive to Phytophthora cinnamomi dieback. At Brisbane Ranges National Park west of Melbourne, which was invaded by Phytophthora cinnamomi in the 1970s, Banksia marginata (along with such species as Grevillea steiglitziana) was part of a secondary regrowth of understory species after more resistant shrubs such as grasses and sedges had grown back. ## Uses ### Aboriginal Australian uses The plant was often used by many indigenous clans and tribes throughout the east coast of Australia. The sweet nectar from the flowers was sucked or drained by soaking in water and in some cases mixed with some wattle gum to make a sweet lolly. The wood was also used to make needles. The Gunditjmarato peoples of the western district of Victoria used the spent flower cones to strain water by placing the cones in their mouths and using them like a straw. ### Timber The red-hued heartwood is coarse-grained and soft. It is sometimes used for turning, but requires careful drying before use to avoid warping. A sample was prepared in Victoria in 1885 as part of a collection of local timber species under the direction of Government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller. The collection was displayed in various exhibitions, including the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, and is housed at the Melbourne Museum. ### Cultivation Banksia marginata was first cultivated in England in 1802 (and was also listed as B. australis, B. insularis and B. marcescens). It was grown at Kew, Cambridge Botanic Gardens, Woburn Abbey and private gardens in Chelsea, Hackney and Harringay House. One specimen grown in a glasshouse at Kew was described as a tree 24 feet (7.3 m) high with a trunk girth of two feet (60 cm) at 40 years of age. B. marginata is generally fairly easy to grow in a well-drained sunny or partly-shaded position in the garden. It can be leggy in shadier positions, or a more compact bushy shrub in full sun . Some varieties from drier areas seem to do poorly in areas of summer humidity. The flowers are not prominent unless they are numerous. Established plants can withstand drought, coastal exposure and temperatures as low as −10 °C (14 °F). Propagation of plants can be by seed or cuttings; the latter is essential if trying to replicate plants of particular habit (such as dwarf specimens). Some Banksia marginata seed of subalpine provenance require stratification, namely keeping at 5 °C (41 °F) for 60 days before germination takes place over 6 to 25 days. Salkin proposed this was necessary so that seed released in a summer or autumn bushfire would lie dormant over the winter months before germinating in the spring. Banksia saxicola and Banksia canei seed also share this trait. Some dwarf forms have been commercially available in Australian nurseries, although some selections do not maintain their dwarf status in cultivation. Banksia 'Mini Marg' is a small form selected from the northeastern coast of Tasmania which reaches 30 cm (12 in) high and 1 m (3.3 ft) wide. 'Mallacoota Dwarf' was selected from a natural population at Mallacoota, Victoria. Alf Salkin reported a form from Kanangra Walls with a peach-tinged limb as having horticultural potential, as well as a prostrate form from Cape Liptrap in Victoria. Banksia marginata, and the dwarf cultivar 'Mini Marg', have also been used in bonsai.
11,024,036	God of War III	1,172,825,153	2010 video game	[ "2010 video games", "Action-adventure games", "Apocalyptic video games", "BAFTA winners (video games)", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animation winners", "Fiction about deicide", "Fiction about familicide", "God of War (franchise)", "Hack and slash games", "Mercenary Technology games", "Patricide in fiction", "PlayStation 3 games", "PlayStation 4 games", "Siblicide in fiction", "Single-player video games", "Sony Interactive Entertainment games", "Video game sequels", "Video games about revenge", "Video games based on Greek mythology", "Video games developed in the United States", "Video games scored by Cris Velasco", "Video games scored by Gerard Marino", "Video games scored by Mike Reagan", "Video games set in ancient Greece", "Video games set in antiquity" ]	God of War III is an action-adventure hack and slash video game developed by Santa Monica Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. First released for the PlayStation 3 on March 16, 2010, it is the fifth installment in the God of War series, the seventh chronologically, and the sequel to 2007's God of War II. Loosely based on Greek mythology, the game is set in ancient Greece with vengeance as its central motif. The player controls the protagonist Kratos, the former God of War, after his betrayal at the hands of his father Zeus, King of the Olympian gods. Reigniting the Great War, Kratos ascends Mount Olympus until he is abandoned by the Titan Gaia. Guided by Athena's spirit, Kratos battles monsters, gods, and Titans in a search for Pandora, without whom he cannot open Pandora's Box, defeat Zeus, and end the reign of the Olympian gods to have his revenge. The gameplay is similar to previous installments, focusing on combo-based combat with the player's main weapon—the Blades of Exile—and secondary weapons acquired during the game. It uses quick time events, where the player acts in a timed sequence to defeat strong enemies and bosses. The player can use up to four magical attacks and a power-enhancing ability as alternative combat options, and the game features puzzles and platforming elements. Compared with previous installments, God of War III offers a revamped magic system, more enemies, new camera angles, and downloadable content. God of War III was critically acclaimed upon release, with praise for the graphics, gameplay, and scope, although the plot received a mixed reception. The game received several awards, including "Most Anticipated Game of 2010" and "Best PS3 Game" at the 2009 and 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, respectively, and the "Artistic Achievement" award at the 2011 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Video Game Awards. The second best-selling game in the God of War series and the ninth best-selling PlayStation 3 game of all time, it sold nearly 5.2 million copies worldwide by June 2012 and was included in the God of War Saga released for PlayStation 3 on August 28, 2012. Since its release, it has also been named as one of the greatest games of all time. In celebration of the God of War franchise's tenth anniversary, a remastered version of the game, titled God of War III Remastered, was released for the PlayStation 4 (PS4) on July 14, 2015; as of June 2023, the remastered version has sold an estimated 4 million copies. After two more prequels were released, a direct sequel to God of War III simply titled God of War was released on April 20, 2018, which shifted the setting to Norse mythology. ## Gameplay God of War III is an action-adventure game with hack and slash elements. It is a third-person single-player video game. As with previous installments, the player controls the character Kratos from a fixed-camera perspective in combo-based combat, platforming, and puzzle games. The enemies are an assortment of Greek mythological creatures, including centaurs, harpies, chimeras, cyclopes, satyrs, minotaurs, Sirens, cerberuses, and Gorgons. The player must also climb walls and ladders, jump across chasms, and swing on ropes to proceed through the game. The puzzles included vary in difficulty: some puzzles only require objects to be placed in a specific position, while some require timing and precision, such as a puzzle with mechanics similar to Guitar Hero. In addition to finding Gorgon Eyes and Phoenix Feathers of the previous games, Minotaur Horns are a new item to be found. Where the eyes and feathers increase the player's health and magic meters, the horns increase the items meter, which allows further use of secondary weapons, called "Items". ### Combat Kratos' main weapon is the Blades of Exile, replacing the Blades of Athena used in previous installments and the opening moments of the game. The weapon is a pair of blades attached to chains wrapped around Kratos' wrists and forearms that can be swung in a number of maneuvers. During the game, Kratos acquires new weapons—the Claws of Hades, the Nemean Cestus, and the Nemesis Whip—with other combat options. The Nemean Cestus, a pair of gauntlets, and the Nemesis Whip, similar to the Blades of Exile, are required to advance in parts of the game; for example, the Nemean Cestus is needed to break through objects composed of onyx. Unlike in previous games, magical abilities are learned with the acquisition of a new weapon, giving each weapon its own magic attack; for example, the Army of Sparta may only be used with the Blades of Exile. Magic gives Kratos a variety of ways to attack and kill enemies, such as the Claws of Hades' Soul Summon ability, which conjures souls to attack enemies. Other magic includes the Nemean Cestus' Nemean Roar and the Nemesis Whip's Nemesis Rage. In addition to four primary weapons, three secondary ones, known as Items, are acquired: the Bow of Apollo, the Head of Helios, and the Boots of Hermes. All three are required to advance in certain stages of the game; for example, the Head of Helios can be used as a lantern in dark areas and to reveal hidden doorways. The relics Poseidon's Trident, the Golden Fleece, and Icarus' Wings acquired in previous games are retained and used to overcome environmental obstacles, with the Golden Fleece used to deflect enemy attacks. Hades' Soul allows Kratos to swim in the River Styx. The Blade of Olympus, a primary weapon in God of War II, is used in this game with the special ability Rage of Sparta for temporary invulnerability and increased attack damage. New additions to the gameplay include the combat grapple, a ranged-grab maneuver which, depending on the weapon, can pull Kratos towards foes or force them away—necessary at certain points in the game, with Kratos riding harpies across chasms—and a simple grab allowing him to use a weak foe as a battering ram. Kratos can now rapidly switch among the four primary weapons in battle, continuing the same attack combination. Other extra features include the addition of ten Godly Possessions, often hidden near defeated foes and providing additional abilities like unlimited magic during bonus play. The challenge mode in this game is called the Challenge of Olympus (seven trials) and is unlocked after the game's completion. This mode requires players to complete a series of specific tasks—for example, killing all enemies without weapons in a limited amount of time. The player may unlock additional rewards, such as bonus costumes for Kratos, behind-the-scenes videos, and concept art of the characters and environments, by completing the game's difficulty levels and challenge mode. A new mode, the Combat Arena, allows players to set difficulty levels and choose opponents to hone playing skills. ## Synopsis ### Setting As with previous games, God of War III is set in an alternate version of ancient Greece populated by Olympian gods, Titans, heroes, and other characters from Greek mythology. The events of the game are set between 2007's God of War II and 2018's God of War. The game is set across several locations on Mount Olympus, including the Tomb of Ares, the ancient city of Olympia, the Path of Eos, the Labyrinth, several areas of the Palace of the Gods, such as the Forum and Hera's Gardens, and the Underworld and Tartarus. The Tomb of Ares—housing the former God of War's remains—and the city of Olympia lie on the sides of Mount Olympus. Just beyond the city is the Path of Eos, a hidden cavern near the foot of Olympus. The Palace of the Gods is the home of the Olympians, and features the Forum (a small coliseum), Hera's Gardens, and the chambers of Aphrodite and Poseidon. The Labyrinth is a large aerial puzzle constructed by the architect Daedalus to imprison Pandora in the Caverns of Olympus, home of Skorpius and its offspring. The Underworld, ruled by Hades and divided by the River Styx, is the realm of the dead. Hades' palace contains the remains of his wife, Persephone, whom Kratos killed in Chains of Olympus. The Underworld is also home to statues of the three Judges of the Underworld, who hold the Chain of Balance connecting the Underworld to Olympus. Tartarus is the prison of the dead where the Titan Cronos was banished after Kratos retrieved Pandora's Box from Pandora's Temple in 2005's God of War. ### Characters Kratos (voiced by Terrence C. Carson), the protagonist of the game, is a Spartan demigod warrior who became the God of War after killing Ares and seeks revenge on Zeus for his betrayal. Other characters include Greek gods such as Athena (Erin Torpey), the Goddess of Wisdom and Kratos' mentor and ally; Zeus (Corey Burton), King of the Gods and the primary antagonist; Poseidon (Gideon Emery), God of the Sea; Hades (Clancy Brown), God of the Underworld; Hephaestus (Rip Torn), the Smith God; Hermes (Greg Ellis), Messenger of the Gods and the God of Speed and Commerce; Helios (Crispin Freeman), the Sun God; Hera (Adrienne Barbeau), Queen of the Gods who controls plant life; and Aphrodite (April Stewart), Goddess of Love and Sexuality. Several Titans are featured, including Gaia (Susan Blakeslee), Cronos (George Ball), Epimetheus, Oceanus, and Perses. Other characters include Hercules (Kevin Sorbo), a demigod and Kratos' half-brother; the architect Daedalus (Malcolm McDowell), Icarus' father; and Pandora (Natalie Lander), Hephaestus's artificial daughter. Minor characters include the three Judges of the Underworld: King Minos (Mark Moseley), King Rhadamanthus, and King Aeacus; Peirithous (Simon Templeman), an Underworld prisoner in love with Persephone, and Kratos' wife and daughter: Lysandra (Gwendoline Yeo) and Calliope (Debi Derryberry), who appear in a plot sequence in which Kratos journeys through his own psyche. ### Plot Kratos, Gaia, and the other Titans ascend Mount Olympus to destroy the Olympian gods. Poseidon launches an assault against them, but is killed by Kratos, causing the oceans to flood Greece. Reaching Olympus' peak, they attempt to attack Zeus, but he knocks them off the mountain. As Gaia clings to the mountainside, she refuses to save Kratos, deeming him a pawn for the Titans' revenge. Kratos falls into the River Styx, where he loses the Blade of Olympus before the souls of the Underworld weaken him and ruin the Blades of Athena. Climbing from the river, he is greeted by Athena's spirit, who ascended to a higher existence after sacrificing herself to save Zeus from Kratos, and had witnessed truths which she previously could not see. She gives Kratos the Blades of Exile and tells him he must extinguish the Flame of Olympus to kill Zeus. After finding the three Judges of the Underworld and the Chain of Balance, Kratos briefly meets the spirit of Pandora, whom he initially mistakes for his dead daughter, Calliope. Following an encounter with the Olympian blacksmith Hephaestus and recovering the Blade of Olympus, he kills Hades and releases the souls of the Underworld. Kratos considers searching for Calliope's soul, but Athena reminds him of his quest, and he leaves the Underworld. Kratos reaches Olympia and finds Gaia pleading for help, only for Kratos to sever her arm as payback for her earlier betrayal, causing her to fall to her apparent death. Kratos continues his ascent, murdering powerful foes such as the Titan Perses and the Sun God Helios, plunging Greece into eternal darkness in the process. He also pursues the overconfident Hermes to the Chamber of the Flame and finds that Pandora's Box is held within the Flame of Olympus, which Athena says can only be quelled by Pandora herself. Kratos then catches and kills Hermes, gaining his magic speed boots, while releasing a plague upon Greece. At the Forum, he has an audience with the drunken Hera, who ignores his request for Pandora's location and summons Hercules. After discussing his jealousy of his half-brother, Hercules duels with Kratos, but Kratos gains the upper hand and kills Hercules with the Nemean Cestus. Kratos then encounters Aphrodite, who is indifferent to his war on Olympus. She leads him back to her estranged husband, Hephaestus, through Hyperion's Gate. The blacksmith, learning of Kratos’s plan to quell the Flame of Olympus, sends him to Tartarus to retrieve the Omphalos Stone, claiming he will forge a new weapon for the Spartan. Kratos encounters Cronos, kills the Titan for the stone, and returns to Hephaestus. After forging the weapon, Hephaestus tries to kill Kratos, but is impaled by his own anvil. Before dying, Hephaestus admits that he was trying to protect his daughter Pandora, who was imprisoned in the Labyrinth after Kratos opened her box. He pleads with Kratos to spare her. Reusing the Hyperion Gate, Kratos travels through Hera's Garden, where he kills Hera for insulting Pandora, ending all Greek plant life, before making his way to the Labyrinth. The imprisoned architect, Daedalus, distraught to learn of his son Icarus’ death, dies as Kratos proceeds to unite the Labyrinth and venture through the aerial puzzle to rescue Pandora. Neutralizing the judges and breaking the Chain of Balance, Kratos raises the Labyrinth, and Pandora tries to enter the Flame. Zeus intervenes and fights Kratos, but Pandora sacrifices herself despite Kratos' reluctance. Finding Pandora's Box empty, Kratos attacks Zeus before Gaia joins the fray and attempts to kill them both. They escape through an open wound on her body and continue their battle inside her chest. Kratos impales Zeus against Gaia's heart with the Blade of Olympus, killing her and apparently Zeus. Believing Zeus to be dead, Kratos is attacked by Zeus' astral form, who rids him of his weapons and powers. Before Zeus can finish him off, Kratos is saved by a vision of Pandora during a journey into his psyche. With the help from the spirits of Calliope and his wife Lysandra, Kratos forgives himself before regaining consciousness along with the power of hope. He forces Zeus' spirit back into his body and then beats him to death, releasing a column of lightning into the sky. Kratos looks upon an apocalyptic Greece in complete chaos. Athena reappears, demanding that Kratos return what she thinks he took from Pandora's Box. When Kratos tells her it was empty, she refuses to believe this, explaining that when Zeus sealed the evils of the world in the box after the First Great War, she placed the power of hope in it as well. After foreseeing that it would eventually be opened, Athena then realizes that when Kratos opened the box to defeat Ares, the evils escaped and slowly corrupted the gods while Kratos was imbued with hope, which had been hidden by the guilt and failures of his past. She demands Kratos to return the power of hope with the intention of establishing her own rule over Greece. Kratos refuses and seemingly kills himself with the Blade of Olympus so that hope can be distributed among mankind. A disappointed Athena leaves empty-handed while Kratos collapses on a mural of a phoenix. In a post-credits scene, a trail of blood is seen leading away from the mural and the Blade of Olympus, implying Kratos' survival. ## Development In a 2007 interview with GameTrailers, God of War creator and game director David Jaffe explained his original intention for the series, which is different from the actual ending of God of War III, which was based on game director Stig Asmussen's vision. Jaffe's idea was that "God of War explains, or ultimately will explain, why there are no more Greek myths". He said that it would have been "hell on earth" as the gods and Titans battled each other for domination. Other mythological pantheons would have become involved after Kratos killed Zeus and the other Greek gods, and the result would be that humankind no longer believed in the gods—according to Jaffe, the only way a god can truly die. God of War III was first mentioned by God of War II game director Cory Barlog at a God of War II launch event. Barlog said that the game would have full 1080p HD resolution (changed to 720p in final release) and support Sixaxis tilt and vibration functions. Announced before the DualShock 3 controller was introduced, this caused confusion since the Sixaxis controller does not support rumble. During the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the creative team said that the Sixaxis tilt capability had been removed because they "could not find a suitable situation to use Sixaxis in the game effectively". After the first eight months of development, Barlog left Santa Monica for other opportunities, and Stig Asmussen took over as game director; Asmussen previously served as lead environment artist and art director on God of War and God of War II, respectively. In an interview with IGN, Asmussen said that Barlog "had a major impact on the game" and although he had left the team, they spoke several times afterwards and "bounced a few ideas off him," but there was no formal collaboration. He also said that David Jaffe "[had] been around the studio a few times" and they "[had] gone over some high-level stuff with him to get his observations and feedback." Early in development when Barlog was still with the team, he expressed interest in a cooperative mode "if we can do something unique with it". In November 2009, Asmussen told GamePro that although a multiplayer option had been discussed, it was unsuitable for God of War III: "There's a story we want to tell and an experience we want to deliver, and multi-player doesn't fit into that." By December 2009, the game was in its final developmental stages. In December 2008, Sony reported that God of War III would be the last game in the series. However, in January 2010 John Hight told Joystiq: "While God of War III will conclude the trilogy, it won't spell the end of the franchise ... We're going to be really careful about what we do next". Asmussen mentioned the possibility of downloadable content; the game would be shipped with the regular challenge mode, and new challenge modes might be released as downloadable content to maintain the series. In March 2009, it was reported that Sony was seeking opinions about a collector's edition from PlayStation 3 owners. In October, an Ultimate Edition was unveiled for North America, and an Ultimate Trilogy Edition was announced soon afterwards for a limited European, Australian, and New Zealand release. A Trilogy Edition was announced for Japan, where the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO) gave the game an adults-only Z rating after the previous two versions were considered suitable for players 17 and older. ### Technical Asmussen said that one of the greatest challenges in developing God of War III for the PlayStation 3 was the "complexity of everything"; individual tasks, such as designing Helios' decapitation, could take a year because the "level of detail [that was] expected [was] so high and intricate, it [crossed] multiple departments." He said that the PlayStation 3's hardware capabilities allowed more flexibility in character creation and interaction with the environment. The character model for Kratos in the PlayStation 2 (PS2) games used about 5,000 polygons; the PS3 model was about 20,000 – a high number, but less than that used by other models such as Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, who used 35,000. Ken Feldman, the art director, commented that the polygon count was not the only factor, and cited the increased texture detail as one of the reasons for Kratos' realistic appearance. The developers used a new technique called blended normal mapping to add realism to the basic model and hugely enhance the range of animation available (e.g., muscle movement, including visible veins, and facial animations). All of the main protagonists were animated by hand because the animators produced more effective work than basic motion capture, though the voice actors' facial movements were recorded by Image Metrics's performance capture system. For animating things like hair, the animators created a secondary animation code, known as Dynamic Simulation, which allows the PS3 itself to mathematically calculate the way it should look; it accurately generates motion that previously took the animators long hours to replicate. The engine for God of War III was from the first two installments. Santa Monica senior producer Steve Caterson said that the development team ported God of War II's engine to the PlayStation 3 and were able to quickly play the game. Everything that Kratos could do in previous games, he could do on the PlayStation 3, which allowed the developers to immediately begin designing new content. As the game was being developed, the code department would swap out PlayStation 2 components with PlayStation 3 components. They replaced the renderer, the particle system, and the collision system. Feldman said that although they were re-using the engine from God of War II, the core engine for God of War III was brand new. Between the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the time the game shipped, morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) was added, which graphics engineer Ben Diamand said "improved edges dramatically and saved substantial amounts of frame-rate." MLAA is "now a popular edge-detection process that can cost-effectively remove jagged edges from each frame", which helped Santa Monica free up the processing cycle and "allowed them to add to the spectacle in other ways." Diamand also said that "depth-of-field, motion blur, crepuscular 'god' rays and refraction were either added or improved in quality and speed" during that same time period. Asmussen estimated overall game length to be 10 to 20 hours, "depending on how good of a gamer you are." Santa Monica studio director John Hight reassured players that God of War III lasts longer than 10 hours: "We've done a lot of play testing on it ... We know, for a really hardcore player, it'll take them longer than it took them to play either of the previous God of War games." The finished game script was about 120 pages long, and the number of onscreen enemies increased from 15 in the previous games to a maximum of 50. To light the game, Turtle by Illuminate Labs was used. Head of development Christer Ericson of Santa Monica Studio confirmed that God of War III has seamless loading; no loading screens and no hard disk drive installation requirement. SCE America animator Bruno Velazquez said that while the first two God of War titles had computer-generated imagery (CGI) cinematics, there would be no true CGI in the third game: "all the cutscenes are created using our in-game engine." A God of War III game trailer debuted on Spike's GameTrailers TV on February 11, 2010, and Asmussen confirmed that all footage is of gameplay. New camera angles were added; during some major battles the player can still control Kratos while the camera pans away from the fight, and a first-person camera view was used for the final portion of the Poseidon and Zeus boss fights. According to Santa Monica Studio director of technology Tim Moss, God of War III used 35 gigabytes (GB) of Blu-ray Disc. God of War III's budget was \$44 million USD, and the game had a staff of 132 at the end of its development. Several voice actors returned from previous installments, including Terrence C. Carson, Erin Torpey, Corey Burton, Debi Derryberry, and Gwendoline Yeo, voicing Kratos, Athena, Zeus, Calliope, and Lysandra, respectively. Susan Blakeslee, who voiced two characters in God of War, voiced Gaia. Narrator Linda Hunt, who previously voiced Gaia, only provided an introductory narration for the game. Rip Torn, Natalie Lander, and Malcolm McDowell joined the cast of voice actors. Lloyd Sherr and Nolan North, who had originally voiced Cronos and Hades, were replaced by George Ball and Clancy Brown, respectively. Kevin Sorbo was chosen to voice Hercules because of his portrayal of the character in the television series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Elijah Wood had a minor voice role, and Josh Keaton and Fred Tatasciore, who voiced characters in previous games, also had minor roles. ## Release At E3 2009, the God of War III demo was unveiled, with Kratos on the cliffs of Mount Olympus battling Olympian legionnaires, a centaur, a chimera, and a cyclops. He decapitates Helios, encounters Perses, rides harpies, and uses the Blades of Athena and new weapons (the Nemean Cestus and Bow of Apollo). On October 28, 2009, SCE Europe sent emails to PlayStation Network members with an activation code for the demo. On October 30, GameStop began providing voucher codes for customers who pre-ordered the game, and early copies of God of War Collection had a voucher code to download the demo. The Blu-ray version of District 9 included the God of War III demo and a "making of" featurette, and the demo was released to Qore subscribers on February 4, 2010. On February 25, Sony Computer Entertainment released the demo for download on the PlayStation Store in Europe and North America. Just before the game's release, Eurogamer published an article comparing the graphics in the God of War III demo to those in the final game, reporting improved lighting and realistic motion blur in the final release. God of War III was released in North America on March 16, 2010, on March 18 in Australia, March 19 in Europe, and March 25 in Japan. The game outsold its predecessor by nearly 400,000 copies in its first week. According to retail tracker NPD Group, God of War III sold about 1.1 million copies in the United States by the end of March 2010, making it the best-selling game of that month, and its opening-month sales were 32 per cent higher than those of God of War II. By June 2012, God of War III had sold almost 5.2 million copies worldwide—about 2.8 million in North America, 2 million in PAL regions, and 417,866 in Japan and Asia. The game is also part of PlayStation 3's Greatest Hits lineup. On August 28, 2012, God of War III, God of War Collection, and God of War: Origins Collection were released in North America as the God of War Saga, part of Sony's PlayStation Collections line. ### Marketing God of War III had an extensive marketing campaign before its release. This campaign began in early 2008 when a teaser for God of War III appeared as an image (the original PlayStation 3 logo surrounded by the Greek omega) at the end of the instruction manual for God of War: Chains of Olympus. This was soon followed by a teaser trailer screened at Sony's 2008 E3 press conference. Another trailer premiered at the 2008 Spike Video Game Awards, and an "official" God of War III trailer was released in February 2009. A new trailer debuted with the release of God of War III on March 16, 2010. In October 2009, Santa Monica Studio announced the God of War III Ultimate Edition, available by pre-order in North America. The package included a replica Pandora's Box, a limited-edition The Art of God of War III book, and downloadable content (DLC) from the PlayStation Network, which included the "Challenge of Exile" mode, Kratos' "Dominus" costume, the God of War: Unearthing the Legend documentary, the God of War Trilogy Soundtrack, and the God of War: Blood & Metal EP. A limited Ultimate Trilogy Edition was released in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand and included the contents of the Ultimate Edition, as well as God of War Collection, four Kratos costumes, and God of War postcards. A God of War III PS3 bundle, with a 250GB PS3 and a copy of God of War III, was also available in Europe. A God of War III media kit with special packaging and content was distributed to journalists in the PAL regions, and several were given as prizes on PlayStation Europe's website during the week of March 22, 2010. In Japan, God of War III was released in two packages: a standalone version and a God of War Trilogy Edition. The latter included God of War III, God of War Collection, an art book, and a Kratos skin. For pre-orders, some retailers included a premium costume for Kratos: the Apollo, Forgotten Warrior, and Phantom of Chaos skins from Amazon.com, Game Crazy and Play.com, and GameStop, respectively. GameStop pre-orders also included a 17-by-24-inch (43 cm × 61 cm) poster signed by God of War III concept artist Andy Park and an entry in its "Be the Envy of the Gods" sweepstakes. 7-Eleven issued a God of War III poster for pre-orders and sold a Kratos' Fury Slurpee in God of War III cups. The cups and their specially marked Mountain Dew bottles had codes usable on the Slurpee website for God of War III downloadable content, including a behind-the-scenes video, wallpapers, PlayStation Home content, and an in-game Kratos skin, the Morpheus Armor. In December 2009, Santa Monica accepted video submissions from players to determine the ultimate God of War fan. The top 18 submissions were included in the closing credits of God of War: Unearthing the Legend, and all winners received a copy of the God of War III Ultimate Edition signed by the development team. Sony and Spike TV sponsored a Last Titan Standing contest, in which fans over 21 could win a chance to play God of War III before its mainstream release. Spike's GameTrailers TV presented God of War III: Last Titan Standing on March 15, 2010, and the winner received a custom-made God of War III PS3. A week before God of War III's release, the developers released Kratos' backstory on the God of War website, under the title "Path to Olympus". On March 20, 2010, a NASCAR car driven by Joey Logano during the Scotts Turf Builder 300 had a God of War III and GameStop-themed paint design. In April, Machinima.com released five "Art of the Game" videos for God of War III on the PlayStation Store, featuring interviews with team developers. A God of War III action figure line was produced by DC Unlimited. To celebrate the game's entrance into Sony's Greatest Hits library, Santa Monica sponsored a sweepstakes from March 4 to April 1, 2011. Fans could submit an original design of an "Ultimate God of War Monster" for one of three prizes: a limited folio edition, a special edition, and a paperback edition of The Art of God of War III, signed by the development team. The game has 36 trophies, awarded for player achievements (for example, "Releasing the Floodgates" for killing Poseidon). When players received the platinum trophy, they were linked to the website spartansstandtall.com. On May 4, 2010, the site became the official website for God of War: Ghost of Sparta, the next installment in the series and the second for the PlayStation Portable. Early copies of Ghost of Sparta (and all digital copies in Europe) included a voucher to download Kratos' brother Deimos as a costume for use in God of War III. ### Downloadable content On November 2, 2010, the Dominus character skin and Challenge of Exile mode—previously exclusive to the Ultimate Edition and Ultimate Trilogy Edition—were released as a bundle on the PlayStation Store. The bundle is free for PlayStation Plus subscribers, who could receive the Phantom of Chaos and Forgotten Warrior skins when purchasing God of War and God of War II, respectively, for a limited time. All previous pre-order bonus costumes—Apollo, Forgotten Warrior, and Phantom of Chaos—and the 7-Eleven promotional DLC—the Morpheus Armor—were also released on the PlayStation Store. ### God of War III Remastered God of War III Remastered is a remastered port of God of War III for the PlayStation 4 console. It was first released in North America on July 14, 2015, followed by Australia and mainland Europe on July 15, and the UK on July 17. Santa Monica's Creative Director Cory Barlog announced the remastered game in celebration of the God of War franchise's tenth anniversary. Ported by Wholesale Algorithms, the remastered version has full 1080p support targeted at 60 frames per second and features a photo mode, allowing players to edit their photos and share their favorite moments. All of the DLC that was released for God of War III is included with God of War III Remastered. By the end of its first week of release, God of War III Remastered was ninth in sales at retail in the UK. For the entire month of July 2015, the downloadable version was the seventh best-selling PlayStation 4 title from the PlayStation Store. By June 2023, the game had sold an estimated 4 million copies. ### Soundtrack In March and April 2010, God of War III: Original Soundtrack from the Video Game, composed by Gerard K. Marino, Ron Fish, Mike Reagan, Jeff Rona, and Cris Velasco, was included as downloadable content in the God of War III Ultimate Edition and Ultimate Trilogy Edition. Its CD was released on March 30 by SCE and Sumthing Else. The soundtrack was recorded by the Skywalker Session Orchestra and the Czech National Symphony Chorus. Each composer provided a different aesthetic to the score: for example, Marino's approach was brooding, rhythmic, and percussive, and Fish set hopeless and somber moods. In an interview with Game Music Online, Mike Reagan said that although the composers might have used each other's themes, they did not collaborate with each other. Reagan said the real collaboration came from Clint Bajakian, Senior Music Supervisor at Sony, and his team. In scoring for God of War III, Reagan said that the composers were "able to explore more melodic development than we were on the first [God of War]." The score was recorded under the new American Federation of Musicians video game agreement and because of Sony's vision and support, the composers were able to record locally with some of the best musicians in the world. In an interview with PlayStation.Blog, Clint Bajakian described the different ensembles that recorded the score: the brass section is the "lead guitar", the choir gives the game its epic feel, the strings are the body of the sound, and the percussion is the foundation. A nine-out-of-ten review from Square Enix Music Online praised the soundtrack's orchestration, calling it the best score in the series to date. G4 praised its quality, saying that the compositions were strong and it was "fantastic" as standalone music. A six-out-of-ten review from Tracksounds said that although the score "lacks the intricacy and personality that could set it apart and give it a sense of uniqueness...[it] delivers on its promise of a loud, wrathful bundle of tunes you can kill gods to...for better or worse." The reviewer said to "Enjoy in small doses." At the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, the soundtrack was nominated for Best Original Score. ## Reception God of War III received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator Metacritic, Adam Sessler of X-Play said that the game "finishes the trilogy on an exceptionally high note", and it "blends all of its best attributes into a stellar experience." IGN's Chris Roper said that God of War III "practically redefines" scale in video games, singling out the size of the Titans as being "larger than entire levels in other games". Mike Jackson of Official PlayStation Magazine UK called it the biggest God of War game yet; if it was the series' last game, "God of War III gives PlayStation's toughest hero the send-off he deserves." Matt Leone of 1UP said that the gameplay has "variety ... You seemingly see, acquire, and participate in something new around every corner". According to Leone, each weapon "adds a lot of depth to the combat system." Christian Donlan of Eurogamer said that the "combat system, level flow, and pacing of bosses and puzzles remains largely untouched. But everything's bigger, grander and more elaborate." He praised the weapons' accessibility, saying that it is easy to quickly switch between them. According to Tom McShea of GameSpot, the combat and scale "have been pushed further than ever before ... creating an experience so focused and explosively fun that it's hard to put down, and even harder to forget." McShea said that regardless of repetition, "the brutality of combat is one of the most satisfying aspects of God of War III." Joe Juba of Game Informer called God of War III "visceral" and "brutal", and Kratos "the undisputed king of the genre." Jackson, however, said the core gameplay's familiarity "makes it feel less than the very, very best", and according to Roper, two of the three additional weapons are similar to the main blades; they "have unique powers and slightly different moves, but by and large they're more of the same." Its plot received mixed reviews. GameTrailers said that God of War III's storyline makes Greek mythology more interesting. GameFront's Phil Hornshaw said it had an overly cruel antagonist, and the game assumed that the players reveled in the misery and violence as much as Kratos did. According to Donlan, the story is as simple as it can get. McShea said that although it does not pick up until near the end, it "becomes powerful and moving in unexpected ways, peaking in a thrilling conclusion that successfully touches on many different emotions and provides closure for this epic tale." Juba, on the other hand, considered that the plot "doesn't have any standout revelations or developments". Jackson called God of War III's graphics as good as (if not better than) those in Killzone 2 and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. According to Juba, the "cinematic camera work [is] even more impressive than Naughty Dog's feats with Uncharted 2." Roper said, "God of War III presents some of the most impressive visuals that I've ever seen in a game. Kratos in particular looks phenomenal, and is perhaps the single most impressive-looking character ever in videogames." According to GameTrailers, "the levels are expertly designed" and the game's scale is the most outstanding visual achievement. ### Awards and accolades God of War III was awarded the "Most Anticipated Game of 2010" at the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards. At the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, it was awarded "Best PS3 Game" and "Best Graphics", and Kratos received the "Biggest Badass" award. It was also a nominee for "Game of the Year", "Best Action Adventure Game", "Best Original Score", and "Character of the Year" (Kratos). Other individual awards include "Best Action/Adventure Game" (GameTrailers), "Best Action Game" (GameSpy), "Best PS3 Game" (Game Revolution), and "Best PS3 Exclusive" (Shacknews). At the 2011 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Video Game Awards, God of War III received the "Artistic Achievement" award, and it was a nominee for the "Action" and "Gameplay" awards. At the 14th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards (now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards), the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awarded God of War III with "Outstanding Achievement in Animation", as well as receiving nominations for "Game of the Year", "Action Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction", "Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering" and "Outstanding Character Performance" for Terrence C. Carson's vocal portrayal of Kratos. ### Remastered Though the original release of God of War III was met with critical acclaim, God of War III Remastered only garnered "generally favorable reviews", according to review aggregator Metacritic. Reviewers found it odd that Sony decided to remaster God of War III for PlayStation 4, as its story picks up immediately from the ending of God of War II, which may confuse newcomers who have never played the previous games. Praise was given to the smoother textures and improved frame rate, though because the original already had impressive graphics, the changes were not major, and reviewers said these changes were not a strong enough argument to rebuy the game for US\$40.
4,482,038	Bath School disaster	1,173,064,839	1927 bombing attacks in Bath Township, Michigan	[ "1927 disasters in the United States", "1927 fires in the United States", "1927 in Michigan", "1927 murders in the United States", "20th-century mass murder in the United States", "Arson in Michigan", "Arson in the 1920s", "Attacks on buildings and structures in the 1920s", "Bath Charter Township, Michigan", "Clinton County, Michigan", "Crimes in Michigan", "Elementary school killings in the United States", "Explosions in 1927", "Mass murder in 1927", "May 1927 events", "Murder in Michigan", "Murder–suicides in the United States", "School bombings in the United States", "School massacres in the United States", "Suicide car and truck bombings in the United States", "Terrorist incidents in Michigan", "Terrorist incidents in the United States in 1927", "Uxoricides" ]	The Bath School disaster, also known as the Bath School massacre, was a series of violent attacks perpetrated by Andrew Kehoe upon the Bath Consolidated School in Bath Charter Township, Michigan, United States, on May 18, 1927. The attacks killed 38 elementary schoolchildren and 6 adults, and injured at least 58 other people. Prior to the explosions at the school, Kehoe had murdered his wife, Nellie Price Kehoe, and firebombed his farm. Arriving at the site of the school explosion, Kehoe died when he set off explosives concealed in his truck. Kehoe, the 55-year-old school board treasurer, was angered by increased taxes and his defeat in the April 5, 1926, election for township clerk. It was thought by locals, he planned his "murderous revenge" following this public defeat. Kehoe had a reputation for being difficult, on the school board and in personal dealings. In addition, he was notified in June 1926 that his mortgage was going to be foreclosed upon. For much of the next year, Kehoe purchased explosives and secretly hid them on his property and under the school. On the day of the disaster, Kehoe set off explosions at his farmstead and at the Bath Consolidated School, destroying his farm and ripping through the north wing of the school. As rescue efforts began, Kehoe drove up to the schoolyard in his shrapnel-filled truck and triggered a second explosion, killing himself and four others, as well as injuring bystanders. During the rescue and recovery efforts, searchers discovered a further 500 pounds (230 kg) of explosives under the south wing of the school that had been set to go off simultaneously with the initial explosion. Kehoe had apparently intended to destroy the entire school, and everyone in it. ## Background ### Bath Township Bath Charter Township is a civil township located 10 miles (16 km) northeast of the city of Lansing in the U.S. state of Michigan. The township covers 31 square miles (80 km<sup>2</sup>) and the small unincorporated village of Bath is within its borders. The township itself lies within Clinton County, Michigan, an area of some 566 square miles (1,470 km<sup>2</sup>). In the early 1920s the area was primarily agricultural. After years of debate, Bath Township voters approved the creation of a consolidated school district in 1922, along with an increase in township property taxes to pay for a new school. When the school opened, it had 236 students enrolled from grade 1 to grade 12. The school's creation was controversial, but Monty Ellsworth wrote in his book about the disaster that consolidated schools had great advantages over the smaller rural schools they replaced. All landowners within the township area had to pay higher ad valorem property taxes. At the time of the bombing, Bath Township had about 300 adult residents. ### Andrew Kehoe Andrew Philip Kehoe was born in Tecumseh, Michigan, on February 1, 1872, into a family of thirteen children and attended the local high school. After graduating he studied electrical engineering at Michigan State College in East Lansing and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as an electrician for several years. At some point during this period, Kehoe suffered a head injury in a fall and was semi-conscious or in a coma for a period of several weeks. He later returned to Michigan and his father's farm. After his mother's death, Kehoe's father married a much younger widow, Frances Wilder, and a daughter was born. On September 17, 1911, as his stepmother attempted to light the family's oil stove, it exploded and set her on fire. Kehoe threw a bucket of water on her, but the fire was oil-based and his action spread the flames more rapidly, which engulfed and immolated her body. The injuries were fatal and she died the next day. Some of Kehoe's later neighbors in Bath Township believed that he had caused the stove explosion. Kehoe married Ellen "Nellie" Price in 1912, at the age of 40. Seven years later they moved to a farm outside Bath Township. Kehoe was said to be dependable, doing favors and volunteer work for his neighbors. He was also described as being notoriously impatient with any disagreement; he had shot and killed a neighbor's dog that had come on his property and annoyed him by barking. He had also beaten one of his horses to death when it did not perform to his expectations. Kehoe had a reputation for frugality, and was elected in 1924 as a trustee on the school board for three years and treasurer for one year. He argued strongly for lower taxes, and later superintendent of the board M. W. Keyes said that he "fought the expenditure of money for the most necessary equipment". Kehoe was considered difficult to work with, often voting against the rest of the board, wanting his own way and arguing with the township financial authorities. He protested that he paid too much in taxes and tried to get the valuation of his property reduced so he would pay less. In 1922, the Bath Township school tax was \$12.26 for every \$1000 valuation of a property, with the valuation on Kehoe's farm being \$10,000 (). In 1923 the school board raised the tax to \$18.80 per thousand dollar valuation and in 1926 the taxes went up to \$19.80. This meant that Kehoe's tax liability went from \$122.60 in 1922 () to \$198.00 in 1926 (). In June 1926 Kehoe was notified that the widow of his wife's uncle, who held the mortgage on his property, had begun foreclosure proceedings. Following the disaster, the local sheriff who had served the foreclosure notice reported that Kehoe had muttered, "If it hadn't been for that \$300 school tax I might have paid off this mortgage". Mrs. Price, the mortgage holder, also reported that Kehoe had stated, "If I can't live in that house, no one else will", when she had mentioned foreclosure to him. Kehoe was appointed in 1925 as temporary town clerk, but he was defeated in the April 5, 1926, election for that office. This public rejection by the community angered him. Ellsworth speculated that this defeat triggered Kehoe's desire for "murderous revenge", using the bombings to destroy the Bath Consolidated School and kill the community's children and many of its members. In Bath Massacre - America's First School Bombing, Arnie Bernstein cites Robert D. Hare's Psychopathy Checklist and says that Kehoe "fits the profile all too well". Carnegie Mellon University's Dr. Mary Ellen O'Toole, head of CMU's Department of Forensic Science, has stated that Kehoe could be described as an "injustice collector", meaning someone who obsessively collects perceived slights along with their personal misfortunes, latching on to these feelings of persecution until the individual feels forced to lash out. Kehoe's neighbor A. McMullen noted that Kehoe had stopped working on his farm altogether for most of the preceding year, and he had speculated that Kehoe was planning suicide. Kehoe had given him one of his horses about April 1927, but McMullen returned it for this reason. It was discovered later that Kehoe had cut all his wire fences as part of his preparations to destroy his farm, girdling young shade trees to kill them and cutting off his grapevine plants before putting them back on their stumps to hide the damage. He gathered lumber and other materials and put them in the tool shed which he later destroyed with an incendiary bomb. By the time of the bombing, Nellie Kehoe had become chronically ill with what resembled tuberculosis, for which there was no effective treatment or cure at the time. Her frequent hospital stays may have contributed to the family's debt. Kehoe had ceased making mortgage and homeowner's insurance payments months earlier. ### Purchase and planting of school explosives There is no clear indication of when Kehoe had the idea of massacring the schoolchildren and townspeople, but Ellsworth, who was a neighbor, thought that he conceived his plan after being defeated in the 1926 clerk election. The consensus of the townspeople was that he had worked on his plan at least since the previous August. Bath School Board member M. W. Keyes was quoted by The New York Times: > I have no doubt that he made his plans last Fall [1926] to blow up the school ... He was an experienced electrician and the board employed him in November to make some repairs on the school lighting system. He had ample opportunity then to plant the explosives and lay the wires for touching it off. Kehoe had free access to the school building during the summer vacation of 1926. From mid-1926, he began buying more than a ton of pyrotol, an incendiary explosive used by farmers during the era for excavation and burning debris. In November 1926 he drove to Lansing and bought two boxes of dynamite at a sporting goods store. Dynamite was also commonly used on farms, so his purchase of small amounts of explosives at different stores and on different dates did not raise any suspicions. Neighbors reported hearing explosions on the farm, with one calling him "the dynamite farmer". Following the disaster it was reported that Michigan State Police investigators had discovered that a considerable amount of dynamite had been stolen from a bridge construction site and that Kehoe was suspected of the theft. Investigators also recovered a container of gasoline, rigged with a tube, in the school's basement; investigators speculated that Kehoe had planned that the gasoline fumes would ignite from a spark scattering burning gasoline throughout the basement. In the undamaged section of the school it was found that Kehoe had concealed the explosives in six lengths of eavestrough pipe, three bamboo fishing rods and what were described as "windmill rods" that were placed in the basement ceiling. Kehoe purchased a .30-caliber Winchester bolt-action rifle in December 1926, according to the testimony of Lieutenant Lyle Morse, a Michigan State Police investigator with the Department of Public Safety. ### Further preparations Prior to the day of the disaster, Kehoe had loaded the back seat of his truck with metal debris capable of producing shrapnel during an explosion. He also bought a new set of tires for his truck to avoid breaking down when transporting the explosives. He made many trips to Lansing for more explosives, as well as to the school, the township, and his house. Ida Hall, who lived in a house next to the school, saw activity around the building on different nights during May. Early one morning after midnight she saw a man carrying objects inside. She also saw vehicles around the building several times late at night. Hall mentioned these events to a relative but they were never reported to police. Nellie was discharged from Lansing's St. Lawrence Hospital on May 16, and was murdered by her husband some time between her release and the bombings two days later. Kehoe put her body in a wheelbarrow at the rear of the farm's chicken coop, where it was found in a heavily charred condition after the farm explosions and fire. Piled around the cart were silverware and a metal cash box. The ashes of several banknotes could be seen through a slit in the cash box. Kehoe placed and wired homemade pyrotol firebombs in the house and throughout the farm buildings. ## Day of the disaster ### Farm bombs At approximately 8:45 a.m. on Wednesday, May 18, Kehoe detonated the firebombs in his house and farm buildings, causing some debris to fly into a neighbor's poultry brooding house. Neighbors noticed the fire, and volunteers rushed to the scene. O. H. Bush and several other men crawled through a broken window of the farmhouse in search of survivors. When they found no one in the house, they salvaged what furniture they could before the fire spread into the living room. Bush discovered dynamite in the corner; he picked up an armful of explosives and handed it to one of the men. As Kehoe left the burning property in his Ford truck, he stopped to tell those fighting the fire that they should get to the school and then drove off. ### North wing explosion Classes at Bath Consolidated School began at 8:30 a.m. Kehoe had set an alarm clock in the basement of the school's north wing which detonated the dynamite and pyrotol he had hidden there at about 8:45 a.m. Rescuers heading to the scene of the Kehoe farm fire heard the explosion at the school building and turned back in that direction. Parents within the rural community rushed to the school. The school building resembled a war zone, with 38 people killed in the initial explosion, mostly children. Eyewitnesses and survivors were interviewed afterwards by newspaper reporters. First-grade teacher Bernice Sterling told an Associated Press reporter that the explosion was like an earthquake: " ...the air seemed to be full of children and flying desks and books. Children were tossed high in the air, some were catapulted out of the building". Eyewitness Robert Gates said the scene was pure chaos at the school: Mother after mother came running into the school yard, and demanded information about her child and, on seeing the lifeless form lying on the lawn, sobbed and swooned ... In no time more than 100 men at work tearing away the debris of the school, and nearly as many women were frantically pawing over the timber and broken bricks for traces of their children. I saw more than one woman lift clusters of bricks held together by mortar heavier than the average man could have handled without a crowbar. Ellsworth recounted: I saw one mother, Mrs. Eugene Hart, sitting on the bank a short distance from the school with a little dead girl on each side of her and holding a little boy, Percy, who died a short time after they got him to the hospital. This was about the time Kehoe blew his car up in the street, severely wounding Perry, the oldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Hart". The north wing of the school had collapsed, leaving the edge of the roof on the ground. Ellsworth recalled that "there was a pile of children of about five or six under the roof". He volunteered to drive back to his farm and get a rope heavy enough to pull the school roof off the children's bodies. Returning to his farm, he saw Kehoe driving in the opposite direction, heading toward the school. "He grinned and waved his hand," Ellsworth said. "When he grinned, I could see both rows of his teeth". ### Truck explosion Kehoe drove up to the school about half an hour after the first explosion. He saw Superintendent Emory Huyck and summoned him over to his truck. Charles Hawson testified at the coroner's inquest that he saw the two men grapple over some type of long gun before Kehoe detonated the explosives stored in his truck, immediately killing himself; Huyck; Nelson McFarren, a retired farmer; and Cleo Clayton, an 8-year-old second-grader. Clayton had survived the first blast and then wandered out of the school building; he was killed by shrapnel from the exploding vehicle. The truck explosion spread debris over a large area and caused extensive damage to cars parked a half-block away, with their roofs catching on fire from the burning gasoline. It injured several others and mortally wounded postmaster Glenn O. Smith, who lost a leg and died before making it to the hospital. O. H. Bush recalled that one of his crew bound up "the wounds of Glenn Smith, the postmaster. His leg had been blown off". ### Recovery and rescue Telephone operators stayed at their stations for hours to summon doctors, undertakers, area hospital workers, and anyone else who might help. The Lansing Fire Department sent several firefighters and its chief. Local physician J. A. Crum and his wife, a nurse, who had both served in World War I, turned their Bath Township drugstore into a triage center. The dead bodies were taken to the town hall, which was used as a morgue. Hundreds of people worked in the wreckage all day and into the night in an effort to find and rescue any children pinned underneath. Area contractors sent all their men to assist, and many other people came to the scene in response to pleas for help. Eventually, thirty-four firefighters and the chief of the Lansing Fire Department arrived, as did several Michigan State Police officers who managed traffic to and from the scene. Michigan Governor Fred W. Green arrived during the afternoon of the disaster and assisted in the relief work, carting bricks away from the scene. The Lawrence Baking Company of Lansing sent a truck filled with pies and sandwiches which were served to rescuers in the township's community hall. The injured and dying were transported to Sparrow Hospital and St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing. The construction of the St. Lawrence facility had been financed in large part by Lawrence Price, Nellie Kehoe's uncle and formerly an executive in charge of Oldsmobile's Lansing Car Assembly. During the search for survivors and victims, rescuers found an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of dynamite which had failed to detonate in the south wing of the school. The search was halted to allow the state police to disarm the devices, and they found an alarm clock timed to go off at 8:45 a.m. Investigators speculated that the initial explosion may have caused a short circuit in the second set of bombs, preventing them from detonating. They searched the building and then returned to the recovery work. Police and fire officials gathered at the Kehoe farm to investigate the fires there. State troopers had searched for Nellie Kehoe throughout Michigan, thinking that she was at a tuberculosis sanatorium, but her charred remains were found the day after the disaster, among the ruins of the farm. All the Kehoe farm buildings were destroyed. Kehoe's two horses had burned to death, trapped inside the barn. Their carcasses were found with their legs hobbled together with wire, preventing their escape or rescue. Investigators found a wooden sign wired to the farm's fence with Kehoe's last message stenciled on it: "Criminals are made, not born". ## Aftermath The American Red Cross set up an operations center at the Crum drugstore and took the lead in providing aid and comfort to the victims. The Lansing Red Cross headquarters stayed open until 11:30 that night to answer telephone calls, update the list of dead and injured, and provide information and planning services for the following day. The local community responded generously, as reported at the time by the Associated Press: "a sympathetic public assured the rehabilitation of the stricken community. Aid was tendered freely in the hope that the grief of those who lost loved ones might be even slightly mitigated." The Red Cross managed donations sent to pay for medical expenses of the survivors and the burial costs of the deceased. In a few weeks, US\$5,284.15 () was raised through donations, including \$2,500 from the Clinton County Board of Supervisors and \$2,000 from the Michigan Legislature. The disaster received nationwide coverage in the days following, sharing headlines with Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic crossing (though Lindbergh's crossing received much more attention) and eliciting a national outpouring of grief. Newspaper headlines from across the U.S. characterized Kehoe as a maniac, a madman, and a fiend. People from across the world expressed sympathy to the families and the community of Bath Township, including letters from some Italian schoolchildren. One 5th grade class wrote: "Even if we are small, we understand all the sorrow and misfortune that has struck our dear brothers". Another Italian class wrote: "We are praying to God to give to the unfortunate mothers and fathers, the strength to bear the great sorrow that has descent on them, we are near to you in spirit". Kehoe's body was claimed by one of his sisters and was buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper's section of Mount Rest Cemetery in St. Johns, Michigan. The Price family buried Nellie Price Kehoe in a Lansing cemetery under her maiden name. Vehicles from outlying areas and surrounding states descended upon Bath Township by the thousands. Over 100,000 vehicles passed through on Saturday alone, an enormous amount of traffic for the area. Some residents regarded this as an unwarranted intrusion into their time of grief, but most accepted it as a show of sympathy and support from surrounding communities. Burials of individual victims started that Friday, two days after the disaster. Funerals and burials continued on Saturday and Sunday until all the dead were buried. For a time following the tragedy the town and Kehoe's burned-out farm continued to attract curiosity seekers. ### Coroner's inquest The coroner arrived at the scene on the day of the disaster and swore in six community leaders that afternoon to serve as a jury investigating the death of Superintendent Huyck. Informal testimony had been taken on May 19 and the formal coroner's inquest started on May 23. The Clinton County prosecutor conducted the examination, and more than 50 people testified before the jury. During his testimony, David Hart stated that Kehoe had told him that he had "killed a horse" and The New York Times reported people as saying that Kehoe had "an ungovernable temper" and "seemed to have a mania for killing things". Neighbors testified that he had been wiring the buildings at his farm about that time and that he was evasive about his reasons. Kehoe's neighbor Sidney J. Howell testified that after the fire began at the Kehoe farm, Kehoe warned him and three men to leave there, saying, "Boys, you are my friends, you better get out of here, you better go down to the school." Three telephone linemen working near Bath Township testified that Kehoe passed them in his truck on the road toward the school, and they saw him arrive there. His truck swerved and stopped in front of the building. In the next instant, according to the linemen, the truck blew up, and one of them was struck by shrapnel. Other witnesses testified that Kehoe paused after stopping, calling Huyck over to the truck and that the two men struggled before Kehoe's truck was blown up. Although there was never any doubt that Kehoe was the perpetrator, the jury was asked to determine if the school board or its employees were guilty of criminal negligence. After more than a week of testimony, the jury exonerated the school board and its employees. In its verdict, the jury concluded that Kehoe “conducted himself sanely and so concealed his operations that there was no cause to suspect any of his actions; and we further find that the school board, and Frank Smith, janitor of the school building, were not negligent in and about their duties, and were not guilty of any negligence in not discovering Kehoe's plan.” The inquest determined that Kehoe murdered Huyck on the morning of May 18. It was also the jury's verdict that the school was blown up as part of a plan and that Kehoe alone, without the aid of conspirators, murdered 43 people in total, including his wife Nellie. Suicide was determined to be the cause of Kehoe's death, which brought the total number of dead to 44 at the time of the inquest. On August 22, three months after the bombing, fourth-grader Beatrice Gibbs died following hip surgery. Hers was the 45th and final death directly attributable to the Bath School disaster, which made it the deadliest attack ever to occur in an American school to date. Richard Fritz, whose older sister Marjorie was killed in the explosion, was injured and died almost one year later of myocarditis at the age of eight. Although Richard is not included on many lists of the victims, his death from myocarditis is thought to have been directly caused by an infection resulting from his injuries. ### Rebuilding Governor Green quickly called for donations to aid the townspeople and created the Bath Relief Fund with the money supplied by donors, the state, and local governments. People from around the country donated to the fund. School resumed on September 5, 1927, and, for the 1927–1928 school year, was held in the community hall, township hall, and two retail buildings. Most of the surviving students returned. The board appointed O. M. Brant of Luther, Michigan, to succeed Huyck as superintendent. Lansing architect Warren Holmes donated construction plans, and the school board approved the contracts for a new building on September 14. On September 15, U.S. Senator James J. Couzens presented his personal check for \$75,000 () to the Bath construction fund to help build the new school. The board demolished the damaged portion of the school and constructed a new wing with the donated funds. During the reconstruction dynamite was found in the building on three separate occasions. The James Couzens Agricultural School was dedicated on August 18, 1928. The Kehoe farm was completely plowed to ensure that no explosives were hidden in the ground and was sold at auction to pay the mortgage. ### Legacy Artist Carleton W. Angell presented the board with a memorial statue in 1928 entitled Girl With a Cat (also known colloquially as Girl With a Kitten). The Bath School Museum in the school district's middle school contains many items connected with the disaster, including the statue. In 1975, the Couzens building was demolished and the site was redeveloped as the James Couzens Memorial Park, dedicated to the victims. At the center of the park is the Bath Consolidated School's original cupola, which survived the disaster and remained on the school until the Couzens building was torn down. After some debate, a Michigan State Historical Marker was installed at the park in 1991 by the Michigan Historical Commission. In 2002 a bronze plaque bearing the names of those killed in the disaster was placed on a large stone near the entrance of the park. On November 3, 2008, the town announced that tombstones had been donated for Emilie and Robert Bromundt, the last two bombing victims whose graves were still unmarked. A grant from a foundation paid for the grave markers. In September 2014, a gravestone was installed at the grave of Richard A. Fritz, whose death in 1928 was attributed to injuries sustained in the explosion. The gravestone was paid for by an author writing about the disaster for a book. A documentary on the disaster was released in 2011, including interviews with various survivors which had been taped starting in 2004. May 18, 2017, the disaster's 90th anniversary, was marked with a panel discussion at the Bath Middle School. On May 1, 2022, weeks short of the disaster's 95th anniversary, Irene Dunham, the last Bath School student from the time of the disaster, died at age 114. The disaster is regarded by some as an act of terrorism. Arnie Bernstein, author of Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing said that it "resonates powerfully for modern readers and reminds us that domestic terrorism and mass murder are sadly not just a product of our times". Medical experts writing in Journal of Surgical Research characterized the disaster as "the largest pediatric terrorist disaster in U.S. history". Harold Schechter, who wrote Psycho USA and Maniac, called the disaster "a horrendous act of terrorist mass murder". ## See also - List of homicides in Michigan - List of rampage killers (school massacres) - List of school-related attacks - List of attacks related to primary schools - List of attacks related to secondary schools
3,200,791	Hurricane Ismael	1,171,664,038	Category 1 Pacific hurricane in 1995	[ "1995 Pacific hurricane season", "1995 in Arkansas", "1995 in Mexico", "1995 in Oklahoma", "1995 in Texas", "1995 natural disasters in the United States", "Category 1 Pacific hurricanes", "Hurricanes and tropical depressions of the Gulf of California", "Hurricanes in Arkansas", "Hurricanes in New Mexico", "Hurricanes in Oklahoma", "Hurricanes in Texas", "Pacific hurricanes in Mexico", "Retired Pacific hurricanes" ]	Hurricane Ismael was a weak, but deadly Pacific hurricane that killed over one hundred people in northern Mexico in September of the 1995 Pacific hurricane season. It developed from a persistent area of deep convection on September 12, and steadily strengthened as it moved to the north-northwest. Ismael attained hurricane status on September 14 while located 210 miles (340 km) off the coast of Mexico. It continued to the north, and after passing a short distance east of Baja California it made landfall on Topolobampo in the state of Sinaloa with winds of 80 mph (130 km/h). Ismael rapidly weakened over land, and dissipated on September 16 over northwestern Mexico. The remnants entered the United States and extended eastward into the Mid-Atlantic States. Offshore, Ismael produced waves of up to 30 feet (9.1 m) in height. Hundreds of fishermen were unprepared for the hurricane, which was expected to move more slowly, and as a result 52 ships were wrecked, killing 57 fishermen. On land, Ismael caused 59 deaths in mainland Mexico and resulted in \$26 million in damage (1995 USD\$, 2023 USD). The hurricane destroyed thousands of houses, leaving 30,000 people homeless. Moisture from the storm extended into the United States, causing heavy rainfall and localized moderate damage in southeastern New Mexico. ## Meteorological history A poorly organized area of convection persisted about 170 miles (270 km) off the southern coast of Guatemala on September 9. It moved west-northwestward, and after three days without further organization a circulation developed off the southwest coast of Mexico. The system quickly organized, resulting in Dvorak classifications beginning later that day. Convective banding became better organized, and late on September 12 it developed into Tropical Depression Ten while located about 350 miles (560 km) south-southwest of Manzanillo, Colima. The depression moved to the northwest, and following an increase in deep convection it intensified into Tropical Storm Ismael early on September 13. Upon attaining tropical storm status, Ismael was located in an area of warm water temperatures with well-established upper-level outflow. Initially the storm moved to the northwest, though in response to the interaction with an upper-level low over Baja California Ismael gradually turned to the north. Such a change in motion was not operationally predicted by forecasters, though they noted uncertainty in Ismael's track due to the low. Ismael steadily strengthened as it moved northward, though it failed to organize significantly; early on September 14 the center remained poorly defined despite winds of 70 mph (110 km/h). However, the outflow remained well-organized as it remained over warm waters. Ismael became better organized, and later on September 14 it intensified into a hurricane while located 210 miles (340 km) west-southwest of Puerto Vallarta. Ismael quickly developed a poorly defined eye, and six hours after becoming a hurricane it reached a peak intensity of 80 mph (130 km/h). Steered between a mid- to upper-level trough to its west and a ridge to its east, Ismael accelerated as it moved just west of due north. Late on September 14 Ismael passed 65 miles (105 km) east of Cabo San Lucas. The hurricane maintained its strength as it continued northward, and made landfall on Topolobampo in the state of Sinaloa on September 15. Ismael rapidly weakened as the circulation crossed the high terrain of the Sierra Madre Occidental, and it dissipated early on September 16 about 55 miles (89 km) south of the Mexico/United States border. The remnants of Ismael continued northward, and moisture from the storm extended over the southwestern United States eastward through the Mid-Atlantic States. ## Preparations Initially, Hurricane Ismael was predicted to remain over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. However, when a northward motion became apparent, the government of Mexico issued a tropical storm warning from Manzanillo, Colima, to Cabo Corrientes, Jalisco and for the Islas Marias. Shortly thereafter, the warning was extended to Los Mochis and issued for the eastern coast of Baja California Sur south of 25° N. Ten hours before Ismael made its final landfall, the Mexican government issued a hurricane warning from Mazatlán to Los Mochis. Prior to the arrival of the hurricane, 1,572 people evacuated to five emergency shelters. ## Impact Hurricane Ismael produced 30 feet (9.1 m) waves over the Gulf of California and coastal waters off of Mexico. The hurricane, which was forecast to move more slowly, left hundreds of fishermen unprepared due to deficient communications between the boats and harbor authorities. As a result, 52 boats were wrecked, of which 20 sank. 57 fishermen died offshore, with dozens washing ashore as the high tides receded. About 150 fishermen survived the storm by waiting on islands, sandbars, or disabled fishing boats. Navy rescue teams and other fishermen searched for days off the Mexican coast to find victims and survivors from the storm. While moving through northwestern Mexico, Hurricane Ismael dropped moderate to heavy rainfall including a state record of 7.76 inches (197 mm) in Sinaloa, resulting in the flooding of four municipalities. In one municipality, the passage of the hurricane destroyed 373 cardboard houses and damaged 4,790 others. The passage of the hurricane left 177 houses without drinking water and left four municipalities without power. Damage was heaviest where the hurricane made landfall. In Los Mochis, the winds from Ismael knocked down houses and telephone poles, though no deaths were reported. 59 people were killed in Sinaloa. Ismael produced heavy rainfall further to the north, peaking at 10.9 inches (280 mm) in Sonora. Severe flooding was reported in Huatabampo. The hurricane directly affected 24,111 people in 8 municipalities. Throughout Sonora, the strong winds destroyed 4,728 houses and removed the roofs of 6,827 homes. The hurricane also destroyed 107 schools and 2 health centers in the state. The passage of Hurricane Ismael damaged high-tension power lines and cable lines, causing interruptions to the communication system. The hurricane also weakened 2,163 miles (3,481 km) of gravel roads and damaged about 100 miles (160 km) of paved highways. 250 people lost their jobs in Sonora due to sunken or damaged fishing boats. In addition, about 83 square miles (210 km<sup>2</sup>) of crop lands were impacted. Damage in Sonora amounted to \$8.6 million (1995 USD, \$50 million 1995 MXN, \$ 2023 USD). Throughout Mexico the hurricane left 30,000 people homeless. Including offshore casualties, Ismael caused at least 116 deaths and damage totaling to \$26 million (1995 USD, \$197 million 1995 MXN, \$ 2023 USD). Moisture from the remnants of Ismael extended into southwestern Arizona and southern New Mexico. The storm dropped heavy precipitation near the New Mexico/Texas border, including a peak total of 8.53 inches (217 mm) in Hobbs, New Mexico. In addition, there were unofficial estimates of over 10 inches (250 mm). The rainfall led to flooding of roads and buildings. Multiple highways and railroads were closed due to washouts. Damaged totaled to \$250,000 (1995 USD) in New Mexico. In Lubbock, Texas, the rainfall led to flash flooding, closing many intersections and roads. The remnants of Ismael produced over 3 inches (76 mm) of rain in southwestern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas, with moisture extending eastward into the Mid-Atlantic States. There, the rainfall helped to relieve drought conditions. ## Aftermath Following the passage of the hurricane, reinforcement workers quickly repaired the communication network, and other workers distributed aid to victims in Sonora. The Mexican government allocated about \$4.5 million (1995 USD\$, 34 million 1995 MXN, \$ 2023 USD) in funds for the restoration of houses and the overall infrastructure. Officials distributed 4,800 sheets, 500 cushions, and 1,500 blankets to hurricane victims. All sunken ships and drowned bodies were ultimately recovered by divers. Due to the damage and deaths, the World Meteorological Organization retired the name Ismael and replaced it with Israel, another Spanish name beginning with the letter "I" set to be used in the 2001 Pacific hurricane season. During the 2001 season, a reporter stationed in Israel felt offended from the name choice, and the president of the Anti-Defamation League felt it was insensitive. Hundreds of people sent e-mails or called the National Hurricane Center, and as a result Max Mayfield called the members of the World Meteorological Organization. The name Israel was replaced with Ivo during the season. ## See also - List of Pacific hurricanes - List of retired Pacific hurricane names
424,150	Iranian Embassy siege	1,173,019,770	1980 hostage situation in the Iranian Embassy in London	[ "1980 crimes", "1980 disasters in the United Kingdom", "1980 fires", "1980 in London", "1980 in international relations", "1980 murders in the United Kingdom", "1980s fires in the United Kingdom", "1980s in the City of Westminster", "20th century in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea", "20th-century history of the British Army", "April 1980 events", "April 1980 events in the United Kingdom", "Arab nationalism in Iran", "Attacks on buildings and structures in 1980", "Attacks on diplomatic missions in the United Kingdom", "Attacks on diplomatic missions of Iran", "Battles and military actions in London", "Diplomatic incidents", "Fires in London", "Hostage taking in the United Kingdom", "Iran–United Kingdom relations", "Khuzestan conflict", "May 1980 events", "May 1980 events in the United Kingdom", "Metropolitan Police operations", "Military raids", "Sieges in the United Kingdom", "Special Air Service operations", "Terrorist incidents in London in the 1980s", "Terrorist incidents in the United Kingdom in 1980" ]	The Iranian Embassy siege took place from 30 April to 5 May 1980, after a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy on Prince's Gate in South Kensington, London. The gunmen, Iranian Arabs campaigning for sovereignty of Khuzestan Province, took 26 people hostage, including embassy staff, several visitors, and a police officer who had been guarding the embassy. They demanded the release of prisoners in Khuzestan and their own safe passage out of the United Kingdom. The British government quickly decided that safe passage would not be granted and a siege ensued. Subsequently, police negotiators secured the release of five hostages in exchange for minor concessions, such as the broadcasting of the hostage-takers' demands on British television. By the sixth day of the siege the gunmen were increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress in meeting their demands. That evening, they killed a hostage and threw his body out of the embassy. The Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces regiment of the British Army, initiated "Operation Nimrod" to rescue the remaining hostages, abseiling from the roof and forcing entry through the windows. During the 17-minute raid they rescued all but one of the remaining hostages and killed five of the six hostage-takers. An inquest cleared the SAS of any wrongdoing. The sole remaining gunman served 27 years in British prisons. The operation brought the SAS to the public eye for the first time and bolstered the reputation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government. The SAS was quickly overwhelmed by the number of applications it received from people inspired by the operation and experienced greater demand for its expertise from foreign governments. The building, damaged by fire during the assault, was not reopened until 1993. The SAS raid, televised live on a bank holiday evening, became a defining moment in British history and proved a career boost for several journalists; it became the subject of multiple documentaries and works of fiction, including several films and television series. ## Background ### Motives The hostage-takers were members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA), Iranian Arabs protesting for the establishment of an autonomous Arab state in the southern region of the Iranian province of Khūzestān which is home to an Arabic-speaking minority. The oil-rich area had become the source of much of Iran's wealth, having been developed by multi-national companies during the reign of the Shah. According to Oan Ali Mohammed, suppression of the Arab sovereignty movement was the spark that led to his desire to attack the Iranian Embassy in London. The plan was inspired by the Iran hostage crisis in which supporters of the revolution held the staff of the American embassy in Tehran hostage. ### Arrival in London Using Iraqi passports, Oan and three other members of the DRFLA arrived in London on 31 March 1980 and rented a flat in Earl's Court, West London. They claimed they had met by chance on the flight. Over the following days, the group swelled, with up to a dozen men in the flat on one occasion. Oan was 27 and from Khūzestān; he had studied at the University of Tehran, where he became politically active. He had been imprisoned by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and bore scars which he said were from torture in SAVAK custody. The other members of his group were Shakir Abdullah Radhil, known as "Faisal", Oan's second-in-command who also claimed to have been tortured by SAVAK; Shakir Sultan Said, or "Hassan"; Themir Moammed Hussein, or Abbas; Fowzi Badavi Nejad, or "Ali"; and Makki Hanoun Ali, the youngest of the group, who went by the name of "Makki". On 30 April the men informed their landlord that they were going to Bristol for a week and then returning to Iraq, stated that they would no longer require the flat, and arranged for their belongings to be sent to Iraq. They left the building at 09:30 (BST) on 30 April. Their initial destination is unknown, but en route to the Iranian Embassy they collected firearms (including pistols and submachine guns), ammunition and hand grenades. The weapons, predominantly Soviet-made, are believed to have been smuggled into the United Kingdom in a diplomatic bag belonging to Iraq. Shortly before 11:30, and almost two hours after vacating the nearby flat in Lexham Gardens in South Kensington, the six men arrived outside the embassy. According to a 2014 academic study into the Iran–Iraq War (which broke out later in 1980), the attackers were "recruited and trained" by the Iraqi government as part of a campaign of subversion against Iran, which included sponsorship of several separatist movements. ### Special Air Service The Special Air Service (SAS) is a regiment of the British Army and part of the United Kingdom's special forces, originally formed in the Second World War to conduct irregular warfare. Western European governments were prompted to form specialist police and military counter-terrorist units following the Munich massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games, during which a police operation to end a hostage crisis ended in chaos. In the resulting firefight, a police officer, most of the hostage-takers, and all of the hostages were killed. In response, West Germany created GSG 9, which was quickly followed by the French GIGN. Following these examples, the British government, worried that the country was unprepared for a similar crisis in the United Kingdom, ordered the formation of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) Wing of the SAS. This became the UK's primary anti-terrorist and anti-hijacking unit. The SAS had taken part in counter-insurgency operations abroad since 1945, and had trained the bodyguards of influential people whose deaths would be contrary to British interests. Thus, it was believed to be better prepared for the role than any unit in the police or elsewhere in the armed forces. The CRW Wing's first operational experience was the storming of Lufthansa Flight 181 in 1977, when a small detachment of soldiers were sent to assist GSG 9, the elite West German police unit set up after the events of 1972. ## Siege ### Day one: 30 April At approximately 11:30 on Wednesday 30 April the six heavily armed members of DRFLA stormed the Iranian Embassy building on Princes Gate, South Kensington. The gunmen quickly overpowered Police Constable Trevor Lock of the Metropolitan Police's Diplomatic Protection Group (DPG). Lock was carrying a concealed Smith & Wesson .38-calibre revolver, but was unable to draw it before he was overpowered, although he did manage to press the "panic button" on his radio. Lock was later frisked, but the gunman conducting the search did not find the constable's weapon. He remained in possession of the revolver, and to keep it concealed he refused to remove his coat, which he told the gunmen was to "preserve his image" as a police officer. The officer also refused offers of food throughout the siege for fear that the weapon would be seen if he had to use the toilet and a gunman decided to escort him. Although the majority of the people in the embassy were captured, three managed to escape; two by climbing out of a ground-floor window and the third by climbing across a first-floor parapet to the Ethiopian Embassy next door. A fourth person, Gholam-Ali Afrouz, the chargé d'affaires and thus most senior Iranian official present, briefly escaped by jumping out of a first-floor window, but was injured in the process and quickly captured. Afrouz and the 25 other hostages were all taken to a room on the second floor. The majority of the hostages were embassy staff, predominantly Iranian nationals, but several British employees were also captured. The other hostages were all visitors, with the exception of Lock, the British police officer guarding the embassy. Afrouz had been appointed to the position less than a year before, his predecessor having been dismissed after the revolution. Abbas Fallahi, who had been a butler before the revolution, was appointed the doorman by Afrouz. One of the British members of staff was Ron Morris, from Battersea, who had worked for the embassy in various positions since 1947. During the course of the siege, police and journalists established the identities of several other hostages. Mustapha Karkouti was a journalist covering the crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran and was at the embassy for an interview with Abdul Fazi Ezzati, the cultural attaché. Muhammad Hashir Faruqi was another journalist, at the embassy to interview Afrouz for an article on the Iranian Revolution. Simeon "Sim" Harris and Chris Cramer, both employees of the BBC, were at the embassy attempting to obtain visas to visit Iran, hoping to cover the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, after several unsuccessful attempts. They found themselves sitting next to Moutaba Mehrnavard, who was there to consult Ahmad Dadgar, the embassy's medical adviser, and Ali Asghar Tabatabai, who was collecting a map for use in a presentation he had been asked to give at the end of a course he had been attending. Police arrived at the embassy almost immediately after the first reports of gunfire, and, within ten minutes, seven DPG officers were on the scene. The officers moved to surround the embassy, but retreated when a gunman appeared at a window and threatened to open fire. Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Dellow arrived nearly 30 minutes later and took command of the operation. Dellow established a temporary headquarters in his car before moving it to the Royal School of Needlework further down Princes Gate and then to 24 Princes Gate, a nursery school. From his various command posts, Dellow coordinated the police response, including the deployment of D11, the Metropolitan Police's marksmen, and officers with specialist surveillance equipment. Police negotiators, led by Max Vernon, made contact with Oan via a field telephone passed through one of the embassy windows, and were assisted by a negotiator and a psychiatrist. At 15:15 Oan issued the DRFLA's first demand, the release of 91 Arabs held in prisons in Khūzestān, and threatened to blow up the embassy and the hostages if this were not done by noon on 1 May. Large numbers of journalists were on the scene quickly and were moved into a holding area to the west of the front of the embassy, while dozens of Iranian protesters also arrived near the embassy and remained there throughout the siege. A separate police command post was established to contain the protests, which descended into violent confrontations with the police on several occasions. Shortly after the beginning of the crisis, the British government's emergency committee COBRA, was assembled. COBRA is made up of ministers, civil servants and expert advisers, including representatives from the police and the armed forces. The meeting was chaired by William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, as Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, was unavailable. The Iranian government accused the British and American governments of sponsoring the attack as revenge for the ongoing siege of the US Embassy in Tehran. Given the lack of co-operation from Iran, Thatcher, kept apprised of the situation by Whitelaw, determined that British law would be applied to the embassy. At 16:30, the gunmen released their first hostage, Frieda Mozaffarian. She had been unwell since the siege began, and Oan had asked for a doctor to be sent into the embassy to treat her, but the police refused. The other hostages deceived Oan into believing that Mozaffarian was pregnant, and Oan eventually released Mozaffarian after her condition deteriorated. ### Day two: 1 May The COBRA meetings continued through the night and into Thursday. Meanwhile, two teams were dispatched from the headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) near Hereford, and arrived at a holding area in Regent's Park Barracks. The teams, from B Squadron, complemented by specialists from other squadrons, were equipped with CS gas, stun grenades, and explosives and armed with Browning Hi-Power pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Rose, commander of 22 SAS, had travelled ahead of the detachment and introduced himself to Dellow, the commander of the police operation. At approximately 03:30 on 1 May, one of the SAS teams moved into the building next door to the embassy, normally occupied by the Royal College of General Practitioners, where they were briefed on Rose's "immediate action" plan, to be implemented should the SAS be required to storm the building before a more sophisticated plan could be formed. Early in the morning of 1 May, the gunmen ordered one of the hostages to telephone the BBC's news desk. During the call, Oan took the receiver and spoke directly to the BBC journalist. He identified the group to which the gunmen belonged and stated that the non-Iranian hostages would not be harmed, but refused to allow the journalist to speak to any other hostages. At some point during the day, the police disabled the embassy's telephone lines, leaving the hostage-takers just the field telephone for outside communication. As the hostages woke up, Chris Cramer, a sound organiser for the BBC, appeared to become seriously ill. He and three other non-Arab hostages had decided one of them must get out, and to do this, he had convincingly exaggerated the symptoms of an existing illness. His colleague, Sim Harris, was taken to the field telephone to negotiate for a doctor. The police negotiator refused the request, instead telling Harris to persuade Oan to release Cramer. The ensuing negotiations between Harris, Oan, and the police took up most of the morning, and Cramer was eventually released at 11:15. He was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, accompanied by police officers sent to gather information from him. As the deadline of noon approached, set the previous day for the release of the Arab prisoners, the police became convinced that the gunmen did not have the capability to carry out their threat of blowing up the embassy, and persuaded Oan to agree to a new deadline of 14:00. The police allowed the deadline to pass, to no immediate response from the gunmen. During the afternoon, Oan altered his demands, requesting that the British media broadcast a statement of the group's grievances and for ambassadors of three Arab countries to negotiate the group's safe passage out of the UK once the statement had been broadcast. At approximately 20:00, Oan became agitated by noises coming from the Ethiopian Embassy next door. The noise came from technicians who were drilling holes in the wall to implant listening devices, but PC Trevor Lock, when asked to identify the sound, attributed it to mice. COBRA decided to create ambient noise to cover the sound created by the technicians and instructed British Gas to commence drilling in an adjacent road, supposedly to repair a gas main. The drilling was aborted after it agitated the gunmen, and instead British Airports Authority, owner of London Heathrow Airport, was told to instruct approaching aircraft to fly over the embassy at low altitude. ### Day three: 2 May At 09:30 on 2 May, Oan appeared at the first-floor window of the embassy to demand access to the telex system, which the police had disabled along with the telephone lines, and threatened to kill Abdul Fazi Ezzati, the cultural attaché. The police refused and Oan pushed Ezzati, who he had been holding at gunpoint at the window, across the room, before demanding to speak to somebody from the BBC who knew Sim Harris. The police, relieved to have a demand to which they could easily agree, produced Tony Crabb, managing director of BBC Television News and Harris's boss. Oan shouted his demands; for safe passage out of the UK, to be negotiated by three ambassadors from Arab countries, to Crabb from the first-floor window, and instructed that they should be broadcast along with a statement of the hostage-takers' aims by the BBC. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office informally approached the embassies of Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar to ask if their ambassadors would be willing to talk to the hostage-takers. The Jordanian ambassador immediately refused and the other five said they would consult their governments. The BBC broadcast the statement that evening, but in a form unsatisfactory to Oan, who considered it to be truncated and incorrect. Meanwhile, the police located the embassy caretaker and took him to their forward headquarters to brief the SAS and senior police officers. He informed them that the embassy's front door was reinforced by a steel security door, and that the windows on the ground floor and first floor were fitted with armoured glass, the result of recommendations made after the SAS had been asked to review security arrangements for the embassy several years earlier. Plans for entering the embassy by battering the front door and ground-floor windows were quickly scrapped and work began on other ideas. ### Day four: 3 May Oan, angered by the BBC's incorrect reporting of his demands the previous evening, contacted the police negotiators shortly after 06:00 and accused the authorities of deceiving him. He demanded to speak with an Arab ambassador, but the negotiator on duty claimed that talks were still being arranged by the Foreign Office. Recognising the delaying tactic, Oan told the negotiator that the British hostages would be the last to be released because of the British authorities' deceit. He added that a hostage would be killed unless Tony Crabb was brought back to the embassy. Crabb did not arrive at the embassy until 15:30, nearly ten hours after Oan demanded his presence, to the frustration of both Oan and Sim Harris. Oan then relayed another statement to Crabb via Mustapha Karkouti, a journalist also being held hostage in the embassy. The police guaranteed that the statement would be broadcast on the BBC's next news bulletin, in exchange for the release of two hostages. The hostages decided amongst themselves that the two to be released would be Hiyech Kanji and Ali-Guil Ghanzafar; the former as she was pregnant and the latter for no other reason than his loud snoring, which kept the other hostages awake at night and irritated the terrorists. Later in the evening, at approximately 23:00, an SAS team reconnoitred the roof of the embassy. They discovered a skylight, and succeeded in unlocking it for potential use as an access point, should they later be required to storm the building. They also attached ropes to the chimneys to allow soldiers to abseil down the building and gain access through the windows if necessary. ### Day five: 4 May During the day, the Foreign Office held further talks with diplomats from Arabian countries in the hope of persuading them to go to the embassy and talk to the hostage-takers. The talks, hosted by Douglas Hurd, ended in stalemate. The diplomats insisted they must be able to offer safe passage out of the UK for the gunmen, believing this to be the only way to guarantee a peaceful outcome, but the British government was adamant that safe passage would not be considered under any circumstances. Karkouti, through whom Oan had issued his revised demands the previous day, became increasingly ill throughout the day and by the evening was feverish, which led to suggestions that the police had spiked the food that had been sent into the embassy. John Dellow, the commander of the police operation, had apparently considered the idea and even consulted a doctor about its viability, but eventually dismissed it as "impracticable". The SAS officers involved in the operation, including Brigadier Peter de la Billière, Director SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Rose, commander of 22 SAS, and Major Hector Gullan, commander of the team that would undertake any raid, spent the day refining their plans for an assault. ### Day six: 5 May Oan woke Lock at dawn, convinced that an intruder was in the embassy. Lock was sent to investigate, but no intruder was found. Later in the morning, Oan called Lock to examine a bulge in the wall separating the Iranian embassy from the Ethiopian embassy next door. The bulge had, in fact, been caused by the removal of bricks to allow an assault team to break through the wall and to implant listening devices, resulting in a weakening of the wall. Although Lock assured him that he did not believe the police were about to storm the building, Oan remained convinced that they were "up to something" and moved the male hostages from the room in which they had spent the last four days to another down the hall. Tensions rose throughout the morning and, at 13:00, Oan told the police that he would kill a hostage unless he was able to speak to an Arab ambassador within 45 minutes. At 13:40, Lock informed the negotiator that the gunmen had taken Abbas Lavasani, the embassy's chief press officer, downstairs and were preparing to execute him. Lavasani, a strong supporter of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, had repeatedly provoked his captors during the siege. According to Lock, Lavasani stated that "if they were going to kill a hostage, [Lavasani] wanted it to be him." At exactly 13:45, 45 minutes after Oan's demand to speak to an ambassador, three shots were heard from inside the embassy. Whitelaw, who had been chairing the COBRA crisis meeting during the siege, was rushed back to Whitehall from a function he had been attending in Slough, roughly 20 miles (30 km) away, arriving 19 minutes after the shots had been reported. He was briefed on the SAS plan by de la Billière, who told him to expect that up to 40 percent of the hostages would be killed in an assault. After deliberations, Whitelaw instructed the SAS to prepare to assault the building at short notice, an order that was received by Lieutenant-Colonel Rose at 15:50. By 17:00, the SAS were in a position to assault the embassy at ten minutes' notice. The police negotiators recruited the imam from Regent's Park Mosque at 18:20, fearing that a "crisis point" had been reached, and asked him to talk to the gunmen. Three further shots were fired during the course of the imam's conversation with Oan. Oan announced that a hostage had been killed, and the rest would die in 30 minutes unless his demands were met. A few minutes later, Lavasani's body was dumped out of the front door. Upon a preliminary examination, conducted at the scene, a forensic pathologist estimated that Lavasani had been dead for at least an hour, meaning he could not have been killed by the three most recent shots, and leading the police to believe that two hostages had been killed. In fact, only Lavasani had been shot. After Lavasani's body had been recovered, Sir David McNee, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, contacted the Home Secretary to request approval to hand control of the operation over to the British Army, under the provisions of Military Aid to the Civil Power. Whitelaw relayed the request to Thatcher, and the prime minister agreed immediately. Thus John Dellow, the ranking police officer at the embassy, signed over control of the operation to Lieutenant-Colonel Rose at 19:07, authorising Rose to order an assault at his discretion. The signed note is now on display at New Scotland Yard's Crime Museum. Meanwhile, the police negotiators began stalling Oan. They offered concessions in order to distract him and prevent him killing further hostages, buying time for the SAS to make its final preparations for the now-inevitable assault. ## SAS assault The two SAS teams on-scene, Red Team and Blue Team, were ordered to begin their simultaneous assaults, under the codename Operation Nimrod, at 19:23. One group of four men from Red Team abseiled from the roof down the rear of the building, while another four-man team lowered a stun grenade through the skylight. The detonation of the stun grenade was supposed to coincide with the abseiling teams detonating explosives to gain entry to the building through the second-floor windows. Their descent had not gone according to plan and WO1 Goodyear, leading the abseilers, became entangled in his rope. While trying to assist him, one of the other soldiers had accidentally smashed a window with his foot. The noise of the breaking window alerted Oan, who was on the first floor communicating with the police negotiators, and he went to investigate. The soldiers were unable to use explosives in case they injured their stranded comrade, but managed to smash their way into the embassy. After the first three soldiers and WO1 Goodyear entered, a fire started and travelled up the curtains and out of the second-floor window, severely burning Goodyear. A second wave of abseilers cut him free, and he fell to the balcony below before entering the embassy behind the rest of his team. Slightly behind Red Team, Blue Team detonated explosives on a first-floor window; forcing Sim Harris, who had just run into the room, to take cover. Much of the operation at the front of the embassy took place in full view of the assembled journalists and was broadcast on live television, and Harris's escape across the parapet of a first-floor balcony was famously captured on video. As the soldiers emerged onto the first-floor landing, Lock tackled Oan to prevent him attacking the SAS operatives. Oan, still armed, was subsequently shot dead by one of the soldiers. Meanwhile, further teams entered the embassy through the back door and cleared the ground floor and cellar. During the raid, the gunmen holding the male hostages opened fire on their captives, killing Ali Akbar Samadzadeh and wounding two others. The SAS began evacuating hostages, taking them down the stairs towards the back door of the embassy. Two of the terrorists were hiding amongst the hostages; one of them produced a hand grenade when he was identified. An SAS soldier, who was unable to shoot for concern of hitting a hostage or another soldier, pushed the grenade-wielding terrorist to the bottom of the stairs, where two other soldiers shot him dead. The raid lasted seventeen minutes and involved 30 to 35 soldiers. The terrorists killed one hostage and seriously wounded two others during the raid while the SAS killed all but one of the terrorists. The rescued hostages and the remaining terrorist, who was still concealed amongst them, were taken into the embassy's back garden and restrained on the ground while they were identified. The last terrorist was identified by Sim Harris and led away by the SAS. ## Hostages ## Perpetrators ## Aftermath After the end of the siege, PC Trevor Lock was widely considered a hero. He was awarded the George Medal, the United Kingdom's second-highest civil honour, for his conduct during the siege and for tackling Oan during the SAS raid, the only time during the siege that he drew his concealed side arm. In addition, he was honoured with the Freedom of the City of London and in a motion in the House of Commons. Police historian Michael J. Waldren, referring to the television series Dixon of Dock Green, suggested that Lock's restraint in the use of his revolver was "a defining example of the power of the Dixon image", and academic Maurice Punch noted the contrast between Lock's actions and the highly aggressive tactics of the SAS. Another academic, Steven Moysey, commented on the difference in outcomes between the Iranian Embassy siege and the 1975 Balcombe Street siege, in which the police negotiated the surrender of four Provisional Irish Republican Army members without military involvement. Nonetheless, the siege led to calls for increasing the firepower of the police to enable them to prevent and deal with similar incidents in the future, and an official report recommended that specialist police firearms units, such as the Metropolitan Police's D11, be better resourced and equipped. Warrant Officer Class 1 Tommy Goodyear was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for his part in the assault, in which he shot dead a terrorist who was apparently about to throw a grenade amongst the hostages. After the operation concluded, the staff sergeant who was caught in his abseil rope was treated at St Stephen's Hospital in Fulham. He suffered serious burns to his legs, but went on to make a full recovery. The Iranian government welcomed the end of the siege, and declared that the two hostages killed were martyrs for the Iranian Revolution. They also thanked the British government for "the persevering action of your police force during the unjust hostage-taking event at the Embassy". After the assault concluded, the police conducted an investigation into the siege and the deaths of the two hostages and five terrorists, including the actions of the SAS. The soldiers' weapons were taken away for examination and, the following day, the soldiers themselves were interviewed at length by the police at the regiment's base in Hereford. There was controversy over the deaths of two terrorists in the telex room, where the male hostages were held. Hostages later said in interviews that they had persuaded their captors to surrender and television footage appeared to show them throwing weapons out of the window and holding a white flag. The two SAS soldiers who killed the men both stated at the inquest into the terrorists' deaths that they believed the men had been reaching for weapons before they were shot. The inquest jury reached the verdict that the soldiers' actions were justifiable homicide (later known as "lawful killing"). Fowzi Nejad was the only gunman to survive the SAS assault. After being identified, he was dragged away by an SAS trooper, who allegedly intended to take him back into the building and shoot him. The soldier reportedly changed his mind when it was pointed out to him that the raid was being broadcast on live television. It later emerged that the footage from the back of the embassy was coming from a wireless camera placed in the window of a flat overlooking the embassy. The camera had been installed by ITN technicians, who had posed as guests of a local resident in order to get past the police cordon, which had been in place since the beginning of the siege. Nejad was arrested, and was eventually tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the siege. He became eligible for parole in 2005. As a foreign national, he would normally have been immediately deported to his home country but Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into British law by the Human Rights Act 1998, has been held by the European Court of Human Rights to prohibit deportation in cases where the person concerned would be likely to be tortured or executed in his home country. Nejad was eventually paroled in 2008 and granted leave to remain in the UK, but was not given political asylum. The Home Office released a statement, saying "We do not give refugee status to convicted terrorists. Our aim is to deport people as quickly as possible but the law requires us to first obtain assurances that the person being returned will not face certain death". After 27 years in prison, Nejad was deemed no longer to be a threat to society, but Trevor Lock wrote to the Home Office to oppose his release. Because it is accepted by the British government that he would be executed or tortured, he cannot be deported to Iran; he now lives in south London, having assumed another identity. ## Long-term impact Prior to 1980, London had been the scene of several terrorist incidents related to Middle East politics, including the assassination of the former prime minister of the Republic of Yemen, and an attack on a coach containing staff from the Israeli airline El Al. Although there were other isolated incidents relating to Middle Eastern and North African politics in the years following the embassy siege, most prominently the murder of Yvonne Fletcher from inside the Libyan embassy in 1984, historian Jerry White believed the resolution of the siege "effectively marked the end of London's three years as a world theatre for the resolution of Middle Eastern troubles". The SAS raid, codenamed "Operation Nimrod", was broadcast live at peak time on a bank holiday Monday evening and was viewed by millions of people, mostly in the UK, making it a defining moment in British history. Both the BBC and ITV interrupted their scheduled programming, the BBC interrupting the broadcast of the World Snooker Championship final, to show the end of the siege, which proved to be a major career boost for several journalists. Kate Adie, the BBC's duty reporter at the embassy when the SAS assault began, went on to cover Nejad's trial and then to report from war zones across the world and eventually to become chief news correspondent for BBC News, while David Goldsmith and his team, responsible for the hidden camera at the back of the embassy, were awarded a BAFTA for their coverage. The success of the operation, combined with the high profile it was given by the media, invoked a sense of national pride compared to Victory in Europe Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. The operation was declared "an almost unqualified success". Margaret Thatcher recalled that she was congratulated wherever she went over the following days, and received messages of support and congratulation from other world leaders. However, the incident strained already-tense relations between the UK and Iran following the Iranian Revolution. The Iranian government declared that the siege of the embassy was planned by the British and American governments, and that the hostages who had been killed were martyrs for the Revolution. Operation Nimrod brought the SAS, a regiment that had fallen into obscurity after its fame during the Second World War (partly owing to the covert nature of its operations), back into the public eye. The regiment was not pleased with its new high profile, having enjoyed its previous obscurity. Nonetheless, the operation vindicated the SAS, which had been threatened with disbandment and whose use of resources had previously been considered a waste. The regiment was quickly overwhelmed by new applicants. Membership of 22 SAS is open only to individuals currently serving in the Armed Forces (allowing applications from any individual in any service), but the unit also has two regiments from the volunteer Territorial Army (TA): 21 SAS and 23 SAS. Both the TA regiments received hundreds more applications than in previous years, prompting de la Billière to remark that the applicants seemed "convinced that a balaclava helmet and a sub-machine gun would be handed to them over the counter, so that they could go off and conduct embassy-style sieges of their own". Meanwhile, the SAS became a sought-after assignment for career army officers. All three units were forced to introduce additional fitness tests at the start of the application process. The SAS also experienced an increased demand for their expertise in training the forces of friendly countries and those whose collapse was considered not to be in Britain's interest. The government developed a protocol for lending the SAS to foreign governments to assist with hijackings or sieges, and it became fashionable for politicians to be seen associating with the regiment. Despite its new fame, the SAS did not have a high profile during the 1982 Falklands War, partly due to a lack of operations, and next came to the fore during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. The British government's response to the crisis, and the successful use of force to end it, strengthened the Conservative government of the day and boosted Thatcher's personal credibility. McNee believed that the conclusion of the siege exemplified the British government's policy of refusing to give in to terrorist demands, "nowhere was the effectiveness of this response to terrorism more effectively demonstrated". The embassy building was severely damaged by fire. It was more than a decade before the British and Iranian governments came to an agreement whereby the United Kingdom would repair the damage to the embassy in London and Iran would pay for repairs to the British embassy in Tehran, which had been damaged during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Iranian diplomats began working from 16 Princes Gate again in December 1993. The DRFLA was undermined by its links with the Iraqi government after it emerged that Iraq had sponsored the training and equipping of the hostage-takers. The Iran–Iraq War started five months after the end of the siege and continued for eight years. The campaign for autonomy of Khūzestān was largely forgotten in the wake of the hostilities, as was the DRFLA. ## Cultural impact As well as factual television documentaries, the dramatic conclusion of the siege inspired a wave of fictional works about the SAS in the form of novels, television programmes, and films. Among them were the 1982 film Who Dares Wins and the 2017 film 6 Days, which was released on Netflix. The siege features in the 2006 video game The Regiment, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege – a 2015 tactical shooter video game focusing on counter-terrorism – uses the Iranian Embassy Siege as inspiration, with a playable character having canonically participated in the siege. The SAS also feature in the book Rainbow Six, upon which the game series was based. The embassy siege was referenced multiple times in the television drama Ultimate Force (2002–2008), which stars Ross Kemp as the leader of a fictional SAS unit. As well as fictional representations in media, the siege inspired a version of Palitoy's Action Man figure, clad in black and equipped with a gas mask, mimicking the soldiers who stormed the embassy. ## See also - List of terrorist incidents in London - List of hostage crises - History of the Special Air Service - Attack on the Iranian Embassy in London (2018)
6,599,521	Halifax Gibbet	1,155,774,079	Execution machinery in Yorkshire, England	[ "Execution equipment", "Execution methods", "Execution sites in England", "Halifax, West Yorkshire", "History of West Yorkshire" ]	The Halifax Gibbet /ˈhælɪfæks ˈdʒɪbɪt/ was an early guillotine used in the town of Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. Estimated to have been installed during the 16th century, it was used as an alternative to beheading by axe or sword. Halifax was once part of the Manor of Wakefield, where ancient custom and law gave the Lord of the Manor the authority to execute summarily by decapitation any thief caught with stolen goods to the value of 13d or more (), or who confessed to having stolen goods of at least that value. Decapitation was a fairly common method of execution in England, but Halifax was unusual in two respects: it employed a guillotine-like machine that appears to have been unique in the country, and it continued to decapitate petty criminals until the mid-17th century. The device consisted of an axe head fitted to the base of a heavy wooden block that ran in grooves between two 15-foot-tall (4.6 m) uprights, mounted on a stone base about 4 feet (1.2 m) high. A rope attached to the block ran over a pulley, allowing it to be raised, after which the rope was secured by attaching it to a pin in the base. The block carrying the axe was then released either by withdrawing the pin or by cutting the rope once the prisoner was in place. Almost 100 people were beheaded in Halifax between the first recorded execution in 1286 and the last in 1650, but as the date of the gibbet's installation is uncertain, it cannot be determined with any accuracy how many individuals died via the Halifax Gibbet. By 1650, public opinion considered beheading to be an excessively severe punishment for petty theft; use of the gibbet was forbidden by Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, and the structure was dismantled. The stone base was rediscovered and preserved in about 1840, and a non-working replica was erected on the site in 1974. The names of 52 people known to have been beheaded by the device are listed on a nearby plaque. ## Background What became known as the Halifax Gibbet Law gave the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield, of which the town of Halifax was a part, the power to try and execute any felon for the theft of goods to the value of 13d or more (), or more: > If a felon be taken within their liberty or precincts of the said forest [the Forest of Hardwick], either handhabend [caught with the stolen goods in his hand or in the act of stealing], backberand [caught carrying stolen goods on his back], or confessand [having confessed to the crime] cloth or any other commodity to the value of 131⁄2d, that they shall after three market days or meeting days within the town of Halifax after such his apprehension, and being condemned he shall be taken to the gibbet and there have his head cut off from his body. The Gibbet Law may have been a last vestige of the Anglo-Saxon custom of infangthief, which allowed landowners to enforce summary justice on thieves within the boundaries of their estates. Samuel Midgley in his Halifax and its Gibbet-Law Placed in a True Light, published in 1761, states that the law dates from a time "not in the memory of man to the contrary". It may have been the consequence of rights granted by King Henry III to John de Warenne (1231–1304), Lord of the Manor of Wakefield. Such baronial jurisdiction was by no means unusual in medieval England and was described in the 11th-century legal text entitled De Baronibus, qui suas habent curias et consuetudines (Concerning the barons who have their courts of law and customs). Neither was the decapitation of convicted felons unique to Halifax; the earls of Chester amongst others also exercised the right to "behead any malefactor or thief, who was apprehended in the action, or against whom it was made apparent by sufficient witness, or confession, before four inhabitants of the place", recorded as the Custom of Cheshire. A commission appointed by King Edward I in 1278 reported that there were at that time 94 privately owned gibbets and gallows in use in Yorkshire, including one owned by the Archbishop of York. What was unusual about Halifax was that the custom lingered on there for so long after it had been abandoned elsewhere. Suspected thieves were detained in the custody of the lord of the manor's bailiff, who would summon a jury of 16 local men "out of the most wealthy and best reputed", four each from four local townships. The jury had only two questions to decide on: were the stolen goods found in the possession of the accused, and were they worth at least 13d. The jury, the accused, and those claiming that their property had been stolen, were brought together in a room at the bailiff's house. No oaths were administered and there was no judge or defence counsel present; each side presented their case, and the jury decided on guilt or innocence. The law was applied so strictly that anyone who apprehended a thief with his property was not allowed to recover it unless the miscreant and the stolen goods were presented to the bailiff. The goods were otherwise forfeited to the lord of the manor, and their previous rightful owner was liable to find himself charged with theftbote, or conniving in the felony. Halifax's reputation for strict law enforcement was noted by the antiquary William Camden and by the "Water Poet" John Taylor, who penned the Beggar's Litany: "From Hell, Hull, and Halifax, Good Lord, deliver us!" Before his execution a convicted felon was usually detained in custody for three market days, on each of which he was publicly displayed in the stocks, accompanied by the stolen goods. After the sentence had been carried out a county coroner would visit Halifax and convene a jury of 12 men, sometimes the same individuals who had found the felon guilty, and ask them to give an account under oath of the circumstances of the conviction and execution, for the official records. The punishment could only be meted out to those within the confines of the Forest of Hardwick, of which Halifax was a part. The gibbet was about 500 yards (460 m) from the boundary of the area, and if the condemned person succeeded in escaping from the forest then he could not legally be brought back to face his punishment. At least two men succeeded in cheating the executioner in that way: a man named Dinnis and another called Lacy. Dinnis was never seen in Halifax again, but Lacy rather unwisely decided to return to the town seven years after his escape; he was apprehended and finally executed in 1623. ## History The earliest known record of punishment by decapitation in Halifax is the beheading of John of Dalton in 1286, but official records were not maintained until the parish registers began in 1538. Between then and 1650, when the last executions took place, 56 men and women are recorded as having been decapitated. The total number of executions identified since 1286 is just short of 100. Local weavers specialised in the production of kersey, a hardwearing and inexpensive woollen fabric that was often used for military uniforms; by the 16th century Halifax and the surrounding Calder Valley was the largest producer of the material in England. In the final part of the manufacturing process the cloth was hung outdoors on large structures known as tenterframes and left to dry, after having been conditioned by a fulling mill. Daniel Defoe wrote a detailed account of what he had been told of the gibbet's history during his visit to Halifax in Volume 3 of his A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, published in 1727. He reports that "Modern accounts pretend to say, it [the gibbet] was for all sorts of felons; but I am well assured, it was first erected purely, or at least principally, for such thieves as were apprehended stealing cloth from the tenters; and it seems very reasonable to think it was so". Eighteenth-century historians argued that the area's prosperity attracted the "wicked and ungovernable"; the cloth, left outside and unattended, presented easy pickings, and hence justified severe punishment to protect the local economy. James Holt on the other hand, writing in 1997, sees the Halifax Gibbet Law as a practical application of the Anglo-Saxon law of infangtheof. Royal assizes were held only twice a year in the area; to bring a prosecution was "vastly expensive", and the stolen goods were forfeited to the Crown, as they were considered to be the property of the accused. But the Halifax Gibbet Law allowed "the party injured, to have his goods restored to him again, with as little loss and damage, as can be contrived; to the great encouragement of the honest and industrious, and as great terror to the wicked and evil doers." The Halifax Gibbet's final victims were Abraham Wilkinson and Anthony Mitchell. Wilkinson had been found guilty of stealing 16 yards (15 m) of russet-coloured kersey cloth, 9 yards (8.2 m) of which, found in his possession, was valued at "9 shillings at the least", and Mitchell of stealing and selling two horses, one valued at 9 shillings and the other at 48 shillings. The pair were found guilty and executed on the same day, 30 April 1650. Writing in 1834 John William Parker, publisher of The Saturday Magazine, suggested that the gibbet might have remained in use for longer in Halifax had the bailiff not been warned that if he used it again he would be "called to public account for it". Midgley comments that the final executions "were by some persons in that age, judged to be too severe; thence came it to pass, that the gibbet, and the customary law, for the forest of Hardwick, got its suspension". Oliver Cromwell finally ended the exercise of Halifax Gibbet Law. To the Puritans it was "part of ancient ritual to be jettisoned along with all the old feasts and celebrations of the medieval world and the Church of Rome". Moreover, it ran counter to the Puritan objection to imposing the death penalty for petty theft; felons were subsequently sent to the Assizes in York for trial. ## Mechanism It is uncertain when the Halifax Gibbet was first introduced, but it may not have been until some time in the 16th century; before then decapitation would have been carried out by an executioner using an axe or a sword. The device, which seems to have been unique in England, consisted of two 15-foot (4.6 m) tall parallel beams of wood joined at the top by a transverse beam. Running in grooves within the beams was a square wooden block 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m) in length, into the bottom of which was fitted an axe head weighing 7 pounds 12 ounces (3.5 kg). The whole structure sat on a platform of stone blocks, 9 feet (2.7 m) square and 4 feet (1.2 m) high, which was ascended by a flight of steps. A rope attached to the top of the wooden block holding the axe ran over a pulley at the top of the structure, allowing the block to be raised. The rope was then fastened by a pin to the structure's stone base. The gibbet could be operated by cutting the rope supporting the blade or by pulling out the pin that held the rope. If the offender was to be executed for stealing an animal, a cord was fastened to the pin and tied to either the stolen animal or one of the same species, which was then driven off, withdrawing the pin and allowing the blade to drop. In an early contemporary account of 1586 Raphael Holinshed attests to the efficiency of the gibbet, and adds some detail about the participation of the onlookers: > In the nether end of the sliding block is an axe keyed or fastened with an iron into the wood, which being drawn up to the top of the frame is there fastened by a wooden pin ... unto the middest of which pin also there is a long rope fastened that cometh down among the people, so that when the offender hath made his confession, and hath laid his neck over the nethermost block, every man there present doth either take hold of the rope (or putteth forth his arm so near to the same as he can get, in token that he is willing to see true justice executed) and pulling out the pin in this manner, the head block wherein the axe is fastened doth fall down with such violence, that if the neck of the transgressor were so big as that of a bull, it should be cut in sunder at a stroke, and roll from the body by a huge distance. An article in the September 1832 edition of The Imperial Magazine describes the victim's final moments: > The persons who had found the verdict, and the attending clergymen, placed themselves on the scaffold with the prisoner. The fourth psalm was then played round the scaffold on the bagpipes, after which the minister prayed with the prisoner till he received the final stroke. In Thomas Deloney's novel Thomas of Reading (1600) the invention of the Halifax Gibbet is attributed to a friar, who proposed the device as a solution to the difficulty of finding local residents willing to act as hangmen. Although the guillotine as a method of beheading is most closely associated in the popular imagination with late 18th-century Revolutionary France, several other decapitation devices had long been in use throughout Europe. It is uncertain whether Dr Guillotin was familiar with the Halifax Gibbet. A 16th century device constructed in Edinburgh is called the Maiden. It dates from 1564, and those it executed included James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton in 1584. The story, published sixty years later, was that he had been responsible for its introduction after seeing the Halifax Gibbet, but this story is unsupported. The Maiden was stored and is now on display in the National Museum of Scotland. It is rather shorter than the Halifax Gibbet, standing only 10 feet (3.0 m) tall, the same height as the French guillotine. ## Restoration The Halifax Gibbet was dismantled after the last executions in 1650, and the site was neglected until the platform on which the gibbet had been mounted was rediscovered in about 1840. A full-size non-working replica was erected on the original stone base in August 1974; it includes a blade made from a casting of the original, which as of 2011 is displayed in the Bankfield Museum in Boothtown on the outskirts of Halifax. A commemorative plaque nearby lists the names of the 52 people known to have been executed by the device. ## See also - Listed buildings in Halifax, West Yorkshire
847,310	Louie Nunn	1,130,843,495	52nd governor of Kentucky	[ "1924 births", "2004 deaths", "20th-century American politicians", "American Disciples of Christ", "Candidates in the 1972 United States elections", "County judges in Kentucky", "Kentucky lawyers", "Methodists from Kentucky", "People from Barren County, Kentucky", "Republican Party governors of Kentucky", "United States Army non-commissioned officers", "United States Army personnel of World War II", "University of Louisville School of Law alumni" ]	Louie Broady Nunn (March 8, 1924 – January 29, 2004) was an American politician who served as the 52nd governor of Kentucky. Elected in 1967, he was the only Republican to hold the office between the end of Simeon Willis's term in 1947 and the election of Ernie Fletcher in 2003. After rendering non-combat service in World War II and graduating from law school, Nunn entered local politics, becoming the first Republican county judge in the history of Barren County, Kentucky. He worked on the campaigns of Republican candidates for national office, including John Sherman Cooper, Thruston Morton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was the Republican nominee for governor in 1963, but ultimately lost a close election to Democrat Ned Breathitt. An executive order signed by Governor Bert T. Combs that desegregated Kentucky's public services became a major issue in the campaign. Nunn vowed to repeal the order if elected, while Breathitt promised to continue it. In 1967, Nunn ran for governor again. After defeating Marlow Cook in the Republican gubernatorial primary, he eked out a victory over Democrat Henry Ward. The state offices were split between Democrats and Republicans, and Nunn was saddled with a Democratic lieutenant governor, Wendell Ford. Despite a Democratic majority in the General Assembly, Nunn was able to enact most of his priorities, including tax increases that funded improvements to the state park system and the construction of a statewide network of mental health centers. He oversaw the transition of Northern Kentucky University from a community college to a senior institution and brought the University of Louisville into the state university system. The later years of his administration were marred by race riots in Louisville and a violent protest against the Vietnam War at the University of Kentucky. Following his term as governor, he lost to Walter Dee Huddleston in the 1972 senatorial election and John Y. Brown Jr. in the 1979 gubernatorial election. In his later years, he sometimes supported the political ambitions of his son, Steve, and advocated for the legalization of industrial hemp in Kentucky. He died of a heart attack on January 29, 2004. ## Early life Louie Broady Nunn was born in Park, Kentucky – a small community on the border of Barren and Metcalfe counties – on March 8, 1924. His first name, Louie, honored a deceased friend of his father's; his middle name, Broady, was a surname in his mother's family. Louie was the youngest of the four sons born to Waller Harrison and Mary (Roberts) Nunn; their youngest child, Virginia, was their only daughter. The Nunns were farmers and operated a general store, though Waller suffered from a congenital heart condition and severe arthritis and was limited to light chores. The eldest brother, Lee Roy, became an influential campaigner and fundraiser for the Republican Party. Nunn obtained the first eight years of his education in a one-room, one-teacher schoolhouse in Park. During his teenage years, he gave himself a hernia while lifting a heavy piece of farm equipment. This, combined with his father's health history, may have contributed to back pain issues that plagued him for most of his life. In 1938, he matriculated to Hiseville High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Bowling Green Business University, now Western Kentucky University. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nunn departed for Cincinnati, Ohio, to take flying lessons in hopes of becoming a B-17 pilot. By the time he finished his flight training, however, the Army had discontinued its air cadet program. On June 2, 1943, he enlisted in the Army and received his recruit training at Fort Wolters near Fort Worth, Texas. He was transferred numerous times. First, he was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base near Wichita Falls, Texas. Next, he was assigned to the 97th Infantry Division, then received additional training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Finally, he transferred to the Army Medical Corps, but his back injury flared up, and he received a medical discharge on September 13, 1945. He held the rank of corporal at the time of his discharge. Following his military duty, Nunn pursued a pre-law degree at the University of Cincinnati. Three years later, he matriculated to the University of Louisville School of Law where he was a classmate of future congressman Marlow Cook. Nunn earned his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1950. He opened his legal practice in Glasgow, Kentucky, in September 1950. On October 12, 1950, Nunn married Beula Cornelius Aspley, a divorcee from Bond, Kentucky. The couple had two children – Jennie Lou, born in 1951, and Steve, born in 1952. Aspley also had three children from her first marriage. Nunn left the Methodist denomination in which he had been raised after marrying Aspley, joining her as a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). ## Political career On June 17, 1953, Nunn declared as a Republican candidate for county judge and was ultimately the only Republican to declare. In the Democratic primary, one of the challengers charged that the incumbent had misused his office for personal gain. In the wake of the investigation, a group of disgruntled Democrats formed an organization to elect Nunn, who defeated his Democratic challenger by a vote of 5,171 to 4,378, becoming the first Republican elected county judge in the history of the heavily Democratic county. In 1956, Nunn served as statewide campaign manager for Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential bid, as well as the senatorial campaigns of John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton. The Kentucky Junior Chamber of Commerce named him "Young Man of the Year" in 1956. He was not a candidate for re-election as county judge in 1957 but was appointed as city attorney for the city of Glasgow in 1958. He considered running for governor in 1959 but became convinced it would be a bad year for Republicans and did not make the race. He managed successful re-election campaigns for Senator Cooper in 1960 and Senator Morton in 1962. He also managed the state campaign of presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1960. Although John F. Kennedy won the election, Nixon carried Kentucky 54% to 46%. Nunn was the Republican nominee for governor of Kentucky in 1963. During the campaign, he attacked an executive order issued by sitting Democratic governor Bert T. Combs that desegregated public accommodations in the state. Calling the order "a dictatorial edict of questionable constitutionality", Nunn charged that it had been dictated by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. In a television appearance, Nunn displayed a copy of the order and declared "My first act will be to abolish this." The New Republic accused him of conducting "the first outright segregationist campaign in Kentucky". He lost the election to Democrat Ned Breathitt by a margin of just over 13,000 votes. ### Governor of Kentucky In 1967, Nunn faced his old classmate, Jefferson County Judge Marlow Cook, in Kentucky's first Republican gubernatorial primary in many years. Nunn attacked Cook as a "liberal, former New Yorker", and some of his supporters referred to Cook's "Jewish backers". The injection of antisemitism into the campaign drew criticism from Senator John Sherman Cooper, who threw his support to Cook. Nunn also attacked Cook for his Catholic faith, a tactic that proved particularly effective with the state's Protestant voters. In a close vote, Nunn defeated Cook to secure the nomination. Nunn then faced Democrat Henry Ward in the general election. During the campaign, Nunn charged that Democrats wanted to raise taxes to pay for administrative inefficiencies. He also played up divisions within the Democratic party, and was endorsed by two-time former Democratic Governor A. B. "Happy" Chandler. Nunn allied himself closely with the national Republican campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson, bringing several prominent Republicans to the state to speak for him. He won the election by a vote of 454,123 to 425,674, even though half of the other state offices went to Democrats, including the lieutenant governorship, won by Wendell Ford. The General Assembly was controlled by Democrats, but Nunn was able to pass most of his agenda. Despite a campaign promise not to raise taxes when the outgoing Breathitt administration projected a shortfall of \$24 million in the state budget, Nunn convinced the General Assembly to pass an increase in the motor vehicle license fee from \$5.00 to \$12.50 and raise the state sales tax from three percent to five percent. Nunn's budget focused on increased funding for education, mental health, and economic development. In the 1970 legislative session, the General Assembly enacted Nunn's proposals to eliminate taxes on prescription drugs and the use fee charged on vehicles transferred within families, but rejected his plans to reduce the income tax for low-income families and increase tax credits for the blind and the elderly. Nunn oversaw the entry of the University of Louisville into the state's public university system. Fulfilling a campaign promise, he helped transform Northern Kentucky Community College into Northern Kentucky State College (which later became Northern Kentucky University), a four-year institution and member of the state university system. Historian Lowell H. Harrison argued that these actions diluted state support to existing higher education institutions. Nunn also supported the newly created Kentucky Educational Television. Nunn doubled the accommodations in the state park system. Barren River Lake State Resort Park was completed during his tenure, and three other parks were planned and funded during his administration. He also greatly improved the state mental health system. Under his leadership, a statewide network of 22 mental health centers was completed, and all four state psychiatric hospitals were accredited for the first time. Nunn called the revamping of the state mental health system his proudest accomplishment as governor. There was not total agreement between Nunn and the legislature, however. The governor vetoed one-quarter of the bills passed in the 1968 legislative session and 14 percent of those passed in the 1970 session. An open housing bill became law without Nunn's signature, and he also refused to sign the 1970 state budget as a form of protest. (Unsigned bills become law after ten days under the Kentucky Constitution, in contrast to the pocket veto provision in the federal constitution.) A supporter of President Nixon's law-and-order philosophies, Nunn called out the National Guard to break up violent protests in the state. In May 1968, he sent the Guard to Louisville to break up race-related protests that followed peaceful civil rights marches. This action was criticized by civil rights leaders across the state. In May 1970, Nunn again dispatched the Guard to quell protests against the Vietnam War at the University of Kentucky, and imposed a curfew that interfered with final examinations. The latter protest culminated in the burning of one of the university's ROTC buildings. From 1968 to 1969, Nunn served on the Executive Committee of the National Governors' Conference and, in 1971, chaired the Republican Governors Association. The Courier-Journal said of Nunn's administration "On the whole, his management of the state's finances has been sound. ... [H]e took a general fund facing a deficit, restored it to solvency, and kept it healthy. No scandals have marred the Nunn record. He chose able men to direct his revenue and finance departments, and their efficiency saved the state millions of dollars." Historian Thomas D. Clark called Nunn the strongest of Kentucky's eight Republican governors. At the time, Kentucky governors could not serve consecutive terms; in the 1971 race, Nunn backed Tom Emberton, who lost to Ford. ## Later career Following his term as governor, Nunn opened a law practice in Lexington. He campaigned for the retiring Cooper's seat in 1972, losing to Democrat Walter Dee Huddleston, a state senator who had managed Ford's campaign. His loss came despite a landslide victory for Richard Nixon in the state and was generally blamed on his advocacy of raising the sales tax to 5 percent from 3 percent in 1968. He continued working on behalf of Republican candidates and backed Ronald Reagan's primary challenge to incumbent Gerald Ford in 1975. His last run for office came in 1979 when he was again the Republican nominee for governor against Democrat John Y. Brown Jr. He decried the excessive spending, expanding government, and increased state employment that had occurred under Democratic administrations. He also attacked Brown for his playboy image (he was married to former Miss America Phyllis George) and his refusal to release his tax returns, as well as his inexperience in government. Despite these attacks, Nunn lost by a vote of 558,008 to 381,278 and returned to his legal practice. In the 1980s, Nunn served on the boards of regents of Morehead State University and Kentucky State University. He served as a lecturer at Western Kentucky University, and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Louisville in 1999. During the late 1980s, he criticized Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the emerging leaders of the state's Republican party, for not doing more to support other Republicans in their bids for office; McConnell maintained that he had to focus on his own reelection campaign in 1990. In 1988, Nunn unsuccessfully challenged Congressman Jim Bunning in his bid to retain his position as Kentucky's Republican national committeeman. In 1994, Nunn's wife Beula filed for divorce from a hospital bed where she lay dying of cancer. She claimed she was trying to preserve some of her estate for her children. A Metcalfe County judge granted the divorce, but Nunn challenged the ruling, and it was later set aside. Some property issues were still pending at the time of Beula's death in 1995. During the divorce proceedings, Nunn's son Steve sided with his mother, causing a rift between him and his father. A 1994 letter from the elder Nunn alleged that Steve Nunn physically and verbally abused Louie Nunn and other members of his family. The letter was discovered in 2009 when Steve Nunn was charged with the murder of his former fiancée, Amanda Ross. The letter also quoted Louie Nunn of saying "you have no family" to Steve, indicating that their relationship had deteriorated long before Louie’s death, allegedly because of the younger Nunn's abusiveness. In 1999, Nunn again considered a bid for governor, precluding a potential bid by his son, Steve, a state representative from Glasgow. He cited personal and health issues for not making the race. In 2000, he backed the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain. Nunn reconciled with his son, and when Steve ran for governor in 2003, Louie supported him. After Steve Nunn ran third in a four-way primary, the elder Nunn supported the Republican nominee, Ernie Fletcher, hosting a fundraiser for him. Nunn also became an advocate of legalizing industrial hemp in Kentucky, writing, "Frankly, I was opposed to the legalization of hemp for years because I had been of the opinion hemp was marijuana. I was short-sighted in my thinking, and I was wrong." In 2000, Nunn secured an acquittal for the actor Woody Harrelson, who came to Lee County, Kentucky, and planted hemp seeds in open defiance of Kentucky's law forbidding the cultivation of hemp. Later, he traveled to South Dakota where, at the base of Mount Rushmore, he publicly presented an Oglala Lakota leader with bales of hemp after the tribe's crop was confiscated by officers from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Louie B. Nunn died of a heart attack at his home just outside Versailles, Kentucky, on January 29, 2004, hours after hosting a luncheon with labor leaders seeking help in dealing with the newly elected Fletcher administration. He was buried at the Cosby Methodist Church cemetery in Hart County, Kentucky. The Cumberland Parkway was renamed the Louie B. Nunn Cumberland Parkway in 2000, and the main lodge at the Barren River Lake State Resort Park is also named in Nunn's honor. ## See also - Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History
195,485	Daspletosaurus	1,170,830,674	Genus of tyrannosaurid dinosaur from Late Cretaceous period	[ "Campanian genus extinctions", "Campanian genus first appearances", "Campanian life", "Dinosaur Park fauna", "Fossil taxa described in 1970", "Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of North America", "Oldman fauna", "Paleontology in Alberta", "Taxa named by Dale Russell", "Tyrannosaurids" ]	Daspletosaurus (/dæsˌpliːtəˈsɔːrəs/ das-PLEET-ə-SOR-əs; meaning "frightful lizard") is a genus of tyrannosaurid dinosaur that lived in Laramidia between about 77 and 75 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. The genus Daspletosaurus contains three species. Fossils of the earlier type species, D. torosus, have been found in Alberta, and fossils of a later second species, D. wilsoni, and third species, D. horneri, have been found only in Montana. A possible fourth species, also from Alberta, awaits formal identification. The taxon Thanatotheristes has been suggested to represent a species of Daspletosaurus, D. degrootorum, but this has not been widely supported. Daspletosaurus is closely related to the much larger and more recent tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus rex. Like most tyrannosaurids, Daspletosaurus was a multi-tonne bipedal predator equipped with dozens of large, sharp teeth. Daspletosaurus had the small forelimbs typical of tyrannosaurids, although they were proportionately longer than in other genera. As an apex predator, Daspletosaurus was at the top of the food chain, probably preying on large dinosaurs like the ceratopsid Centrosaurus and the hadrosaur Hypacrosaurus. In some areas, Daspletosaurus coexisted with another tyrannosaurid, Gorgosaurus, though there is some evidence of niche differentiation between the two. While Daspletosaurus fossils are not as common as other tyrannosaurid fossils, the available specimens allow some analysis of the biology of these animals, including social behavior, diet, and life history. ## Discovery and naming The type specimen of Daspletosaurus torosus (CMN 8506) is a partial skeleton including the skull, the shoulder, a forelimb, the pelvis, a femur, and all of the vertebrae from the neck, torso, and hip, as well as the first eleven tail vertebrae. It was discovered in 1921 near Steveville, Alberta, by Charles Mortram Sternberg, who thought it was a new species of Gorgosaurus. It was not until 1970 that the specimen was fully described by Dale Russell, who made it the type of a new genus, Daspletosaurus, from the Greek δασπλής (dasplēs, stem and connective vowel resulting in dasplēto-) ("frightful") and σαυρος (sauros) ("lizard"). The type species is Daspletosaurus torosus, the specific name torosus being Latin for 'muscular' or 'brawny'. Aside from the type, there is only one other well-known specimen, RTMP 2001.36.1, a relatively complete skeleton discovered in 2001. Both specimens were recovered from the Oldman Formation in the Judith River Group of Alberta. The Oldman Formation was deposited during the middle Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, from about 79.5 to 77 Ma (million years ago). Dale Russell also suggested that a specimen of an immature Albertosaurus (CMN 11315) from the younger Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Alberta actually belonged to a third specimen of Daspletosaurus as D. cf. torosus, extending the temporal range of the genus by approximately 3.5 million years into the Maastrichtian. He based this referral on features of its limb and pelvic girdle, as well as the curvature of the hand claws, which he interpreted as traits matching Daspletosaurus. This reassignment was not universally accepted, and thorough re-examination of the specimen favoured its initial referral to Albertosaurus sarcophagus, despite lacking many of the diagnostic skeletal traits used to identify mature tyrannosaurids. An additional maxilla and various teeth from an Edmontosaurus-dominated bonebed in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation was also mistakenly referred to Daspletosaurus, but all the tyrannosaurid material has all since been confirmed to belong to Albertosaurus. ### Assigned species Over the years, various additional species have been assigned to the genus Daspletosaurus. Though some have been designated as Daspletosaurus spp, this does not imply that they all represent the same species. Along with the holotype, Russell designated a specimen collected by Barnum Brown in 1913 as the paratype of D. torosus. This specimen (AMNH 5438) consists of parts of the hindleg, the pelvis, and some of its associated vertebrae. It was discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta. The Dinosaur Park Formation was formerly known as the Upper Oldman Formation and dates back to the middle Campanian, between 76.5 and 74.8 million years ago. Daspletosaurus fossils are known specifically from the middle to upper section of the formation, between 75.6 and 75.0 million years ago. In 1914, Brown collected a nearly complete skeleton and skull; forty years later his American Museum of Natural History sold this specimen to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It was mounted for display in Chicago and labeled as Albertosaurus libratus for many years, but after several skull features were later found to be modeled in plaster, including most of the teeth, the specimen (FMNH PR308) was reassigned to Daspletosaurus torosus by Thomas Carr in 1999. A total of eight specimens have been collected from the Dinosaur Park Formation over the years since, most of them within the boundaries of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Phil Currie believes that the Dinosaur Park specimens represent a new species of Daspletosaurus, distinguished by certain features of the skull. Pictures of this new species have been published, but it still awaits a name and full description in print. A new tyrannosaurid specimen (OMNH 10131), including skull fragments, ribs, and parts of the hindlimb, was reported from New Mexico in 1990 and assigned to the now-defunct genus Aublysodon. Many later authors have reassigned this specimen, along with a few others from New Mexico, to yet another unnamed species of Daspletosaurus. However, research published in 2010 showed that this species, from the Hunter Wash Member of the Kirtland Formation, is actually a more primitive tyrannosauroid, and was classified in the genus Bistahieversor. In 1992, Jack Horner and colleagues published an extremely preliminary report of a tyrannosaurid from the upper parts of the Campanian Two Medicine Formation in Montana, which was interpreted as a transitional species between Daspletosaurus and the later Tyrannosaurus. Currie (2003) stated that the tyrannosaurid from the Two Medicine Formation mentioned by Horner et al. (1992) may be an unnamed third species of Daspletosaurus. Another partial skeleton was reported from the Upper Two Medicine in 2001, preserving the remains of a juvenile hadrosaur in its abdominal cavity. This specimen was assigned to Daspletosaurus but not to any particular species. The remains of at least three more Daspletosaurus have also been described in a Two Medicine bonebed by Currie et al. (2005); the authors stated that this fossil material likely represents then-unnamed species mentioned by Horner et al. (1992), but cautioned that further study and description of Daspletosaurus would be necessary before the species can be determined with certainty. In 2017, the Two Medicine Formation taxon was named as the new species D. horneri. Isolated tyrannosaurid teeth in the upper portions of the Judith River Formation are likely from Gorgosaurus as well as some species of Daspletosaurus, probably D. torosus. However, in the lower portion Judith River Formation, around 78 million years ago, there is some evidence for a new undescribed tyrannosaurid taxon. A specimen in the collections of Triebold Paleontology excavated between 2002 and 2004, known as "Sir William", shows some characteristics of Daspletosaurus suggesting a new earlier species to the genus. However the specimen shows many characteristics typical of early tyrannosaurines such as Teratophoneus and even some of the later Tyrannosaurus, which may suggest an entirely new genus. In 2017, John Wilson discovered the bones of a tyrannosaurid, including a partial disarticulated skull, cervical, sacral, and caudal vertebrae, and a rib, chevron, and first metatarsal, from the "Jack’s B2" site of the Judith River Formation. Elías A. Warshaw and Denver W. Fowler described these remains (BDM 107) in 2022 as belonging to a new species of Daspletosaurus, D. wilsoni. It represents a transitional species between D. torosus and D. horneri, as it existed between them in time. These three species likely evolved directly through anagenesis. ## Description While very large by the standard of modern predators, Daspletosaurus was not the largest tyrannosaurid. Adults could reach a length of 8.5–10 metres (28–33 ft) from snout to tail, a hip height of 2.2 metres (7.2 ft), and a body mass of 2–4 metric tons (2.2–4.4 short tons). ### Skull Daspletosaurus had a massive skull that could reach more than 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) in length. The bones were heavily constructed and some, including the nasal bones on top of the snout, were fused for strength. Large fenestrae (openings) in the skull reduced its weight. An adult Daspletosaurus was armed with about six dozen teeth that were very long but oval in cross section rather than blade-like. Unlike its other teeth, those in the premaxilla at the end of the upper jaw had a D-shaped cross section, an example of heterodonty always seen in tyrannosaurids. Unique skull features included the rough outer surface of the maxilla (upper jaw bone) and the pronounced crests around the eyes on the lacrimal, postorbital, and jugal bones. The orbit (eye socket) was a tall oval, somewhere in between the circular shape seen in Gorgosaurus and the 'keyhole' shape of Tyrannosaurus. Split carinae (edges) have been found on Daspletosaurus teeth. ### Postcranial skeleton Daspletosaurus shared the same body form as other tyrannosaurids, with a short, S-shaped neck supporting the massive skull. It walked on its two thick hindlimbs, which ended in four-toed feet, although the first digit (the hallux) did not contact the ground. In contrast, the forelimbs were extremely small and bore only two digits, although Daspletosaurus had the longest forelimbs in proportion to body size of any tyrannosaurid. A long, heavy tail served as a counterweight to the head and torso, with the center of gravity over the hips. ### Soft tissue reconstruction From a comparison of the degree of wear of teeth of Daspletosaurus with other extinct and extant animals, it is concluded that Daspletosaurus, as well as other non-avian theropods, had lips that protected the teeth from external influences. Due to this feature, the snout of Daspletosaurus more closely resembled lizards than crocodiles, which lack lips. ## Classification and systematics Daspletosaurus belongs in the subfamily Tyrannosaurinae within the family Tyrannosauridae, along with Tarbosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Alioramini. Animals in this subfamily are more closely related to Tyrannosaurus than to Albertosaurus and are known – with the exception of Alioramus – for their robust build with proportionally larger skulls and longer femora than in the other subfamily, the Albertosaurinae. It further belongs to the tribe Daspletosaurini, consisting of it and the taxon Thanatotheristes. Daspletosaurus is usually considered to be closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex, or even a direct ancestor through anagenesis. Gregory Paul reassigned D. torosus to the genus Tyrannosaurus, creating the new combination Tyrannosaurus torosus, but this has not been generally accepted. Many researchers believe Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus to be sister taxa or even to be the same genus, with Daspletosaurus a more basal relative. On the other hand, Phil Currie and colleagues find Daspletosaurus to be more closely related to Tarbosaurus and other Asian tyrannosaurids like Alioramus than to the North American Tyrannosaurus. The systematics (evolutionary relationships) of Daspletosaurus have become clearer as new species have been described. Below is a cladogram of Tyrannosaurinae based on the phylogenetic analysis conducted by Warshaw & Fowler (2022). Here, it is proposed that the three Daspletosaurus species evolved through anagenesis in the Tyrannosaurinae in a line leading to Zhuchengtyrannus, Tarbosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus. Due to their more fragmentary nature, Thanatotheristes and Nanuqsaurus were excluded from this analysis. ## Paleobiology ### Senses There are indications of D. horneri possessing integumentary sensory organs, possibly used in touch, modulation of precise jaw movements, temperature reading, and prey detection. The large flat scales may have further protected the snout during prey capture and intra-specific combat. ### Social behavior A young specimen of the Dinosaur Park Daspletosaurus species (TMP 94.143.1) shows bite marks on the face that were inflicted by another tyrannosaur. The bite marks are healed over, indicating that the animal survived the bite. A full-grown Dinosaur Park Daspletosaurus (TMP 85.62.1) also exhibits tyrannosaur bite marks, showing that attacks to the face were not limited to younger animals. While it is possible that the bites were attributable to other species, intraspecific aggression, including facial biting, is very common among predators. Facial bites are seen in other tyrannosaurs like Gorgosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, as well as in other theropod genera like Sinraptor and Saurornitholestes. Darren Tanke and Phil Currie hypothesize that the bites are due to intraspecific competition for territory or resources, or for dominance within a social group. Evidence that Daspletosaurus lived in social groups comes from a bonebed found in the Two Medicine Formation of Montana. The bonebed includes the remains of three Daspletosaurus, including a large adult, a small juvenile, and another individual of intermediate size. At least five hadrosaurs are preserved at the same location. Geologic evidence indicates that the remains were not brought together by river currents but that all of the animals were buried simultaneously at the same location. The hadrosaur remains are scattered and bear numerous marks from tyrannosaur teeth, indicating that the Daspletosaurus were feeding on the hadrosaurs at the time of death. The cause of death is unknown. Currie speculates that the daspletosaurs formed a pack, although this cannot be stated with certainty. Other scientists are skeptical of the evidence for social groups in Daspletosaurus and other large theropods; Brian Roach and Daniel Brinkman have suggested that Daspletosaurus social interaction would have more closely resembled the modern Komodo dragon, where non-cooperative individuals mob carcasses, frequently attacking and even cannibalizing each other in the process. Fossils of other tyrannosaurids like Teratophoneus and Albertosaurus among other genera suggest that gregarious behavior may have been widespread in tyrannosaurs and thus may vindicate the hypothesis of Daspletosaurus being a social animal, as bonebeds of these genera containing multiple specimens in a wide range of ages have been excavated and described from these different genera. Evidence of cannibalism in Daspletosaurus was published in 2015. ### Life history Paleontologist Gregory Erickson and colleagues have studied the growth and life history of tyrannosaurids. Analysis of bone histology can determine the age of a specimen when it died. Growth rates can be examined when the ages of various individuals are plotted against their size on a graph. Erickson has shown that after a long time as juveniles, tyrannosaurs underwent tremendous growth spurts for about four years midway through their lives. After the rapid growth phase ended with sexual maturity, growth slowed down considerably in adult animals. Erickson only examined Daspletosaurus from the Dinosaur Park Formation, but these specimens show the same pattern. Compared to albertosaurines, Daspletosaurus showed a faster growth rate during the rapid growth period due to its higher adult weight. The maximum growth rate in Daspletosaurus was 180 kilograms (400 lb) per year, based on a mass estimate of 1,800 kilograms (2.0 short tons) in adults. Other authors have suggested higher adult weights for Daspletosaurus; this would change the magnitude of the growth rate but not the overall pattern. By tabulating the number of specimens of each age group, Erickson and his colleagues were able to draw conclusions about life history in a population of Albertosaurus. Their analysis showed that, while juveniles were rare in the fossil record, subadults in the rapid growth phase and adults were far more common. While this could be due to preservation or collection biases, Erickson hypothesized that the difference was due to low mortality among juveniles over a certain size, which is also seen in some modern large mammals like elephants. This low mortality may have resulted from a lack of predation, since tyrannosaurs surpassed all contemporaneous predators in size by the age of two. Paleontologists have not found enough Daspletosaurus remains for a similar analysis, but Erickson notes that the same general trend seems to apply. A 2009 study found evidence of Trichomonas gallinae-like infection in the jaws of various specimens of Daspletosaurus. ## Paleoecology All known Daspletosaurus fossils have been found in formations dating to the middle to late Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period, between 77 and 75 million years ago. Since the middle of the Cretaceous, North America had been divided in half by the Western Interior Seaway, with much of Montana and Alberta below the surface. However, the uplift of the Rocky Mountains in the Laramide Orogeny to the west, which began during the time of Daspletosaurus, forced the seaway to retreat eastwards and southwards. Rivers flowed down from the mountains and drained into the seaway, carrying sediment along with them that formed the Two Medicine Formation, the Judith River Group, and other sedimentary formations in the region. About 73 million years ago, the seaway began to advance westwards and northwards again, and the entire region was covered by the Bearpaw Sea, represented throughout the western United States and Canada by the massive Bearpaw Shale. Daspletosaurus lived in a vast floodplain along the western shore of the interior seaway. Large rivers watered the land, occasionally flooding and blanketing the region with new sediment. When water was plentiful, the region could support a great deal of plant and animal life, but periodic droughts also struck the region, resulting in mass mortality as preserved in the many bonebed deposits found in Two Medicine and Judith River sediments, including the Daspletosaurus bonebed. Similar conditions exist today in East Africa. Volcanic eruptions from the west periodically blanketed the region with ash, also resulting in large-scale mortality, while simultaneously enriching the soil for future plant growth. It is these ash beds that allow precise radiometric dating as well. Fluctuating sea levels also resulted in a variety of other environments at different times and places within the Judith River Group, including offshore and nearshore marine habitats, coastal wetlands, deltas, and lagoons, in addition to the inland floodplains. The Two Medicine Formation was deposited at higher elevations farther inland than the other two formations. The excellent vertebrate fossil record of Two Medicine and Judith River rocks resulted from a combination of abundant animal life, periodic natural disasters, and the deposition of large amounts of sediment. Many types of freshwater and estuarine fish are represented, including sharks, rays, sturgeons, gars, and others. The Judith River Group preserves the remains of many aquatic amphibians and reptiles, including frogs, salamanders, turtles, Champsosaurus and crocodilians. Terrestrial lizards, including whiptails, skinks, monitors, and alligator lizards have also been discovered. Azhdarchid pterosaurs, and birds like Apatornis and Avisaurus flew overhead, while several varieties of mammals coexisted with Daspletosaurus and other types of dinosaurs in the various formations that make up the Judith River wedge. In the Oldman Formation (the geological equivalent of the Judith River formation), Daspletosaurus torosus could have preyed upon the hadrosaur species Brachylophosaurus canadensis, the ceratopsians Coronosaurus brinkmani and Albertaceratops nesmoi, pachycephalosaurs, ornithomimids, therizinosaurs, and possibly ankylosaurs. Other predators included troodontids, oviraptorosaurs, the dromaeosaurid Saurornitholestes, and possibly an albertosaurine tyrannosaur (genus currently unknown). The younger Dinosaur Park and Two Medicine Formations had faunas similar to the Oldman, with the Dinosaur Park in particular preserving an unrivaled array of dinosaurs. The albertosaurine Gorgosaurus lived alongside unnamed species of Daspletosaurus in the Dinosaur Park and Upper Two Medicine environments. Young tyrannosaurs may have filled the niches in between adult tyrannosaurs and smaller theropods, which were separated by two orders of magnitude in mass. A Saurornitholestes dentary has been discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation that bore tooth marks left by the bite of a young tyrannosaur, possibly Daspletosaurus. ### Coexistence with Gorgosaurus In the late Campanian of North America, Daspletosaurus was a contemporary of the albertosaurine tyrannosaurid Gorgosaurus. This is one of the few examples of two tyrannosaur genera coexisting. In modern predator guilds, similar-sized predators are separated into different ecological niches by anatomical, behavioral or geographical differences that limit competition. Several studies have attempted to explain niche differentiation in Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus. Dale Russell hypothesized that the more lightly built and more common Gorgosaurus may have preyed on the abundant hadrosaurs of the time, while the more robust and less common Daspletosaurus may have specialized on the less prevalent but better-defended ceratopsids, which may have been more difficult to hunt. However, a specimen of Daspletosaurus (OTM 200) from the Two Medicine Formation preserves the digested remains of a juvenile hadrosaur in its gut region. The higher and broader muzzles of tyrannosaurines like Daspletosaurus are mechanically stronger than the lower snouts of albertosaurines like Gorgosaurus, although tooth strengths are similar between the two groups. This may indicate a difference in feeding mechanics or diet. Other authors have suggested that competition was limited by geographical separation. Unlike some other groups of dinosaurs, there appears to be no correlation with distance from the sea. Neither Daspletosaurus nor Gorgosaurus was more common at higher or lower elevations than the other. However, while there is some overlap, Gorgosaurus appears to be more common at northern latitudes, with species of Daspletosaurus more abundant to the south. The same pattern is seen in other groups of dinosaurs. Chasmosaurine ceratopsians and hadrosaurine hadrosaurs (a group now generally referred to as saurolophines) are also more common in the Two Medicine Formation and in southwestern North America during the Campanian. Thomas Holtz has suggested that this pattern indicates shared ecological preferences between tyrannosaurines, chasmosaurines and hadrosaurines. Holtz notes that, at the end of the later Maastrichtian stage, tyrannosaurines like Tyrannosaurus rex, hadrosaurines and chasmosaurines like Triceratops were widespread throughout western North America, while albertosaurines and centrosaurines became extinct, and lambeosaurines were very rare. ## See also - Timeline of tyrannosaur research - 2017 in archosaur paleontology
39,797,588	Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar	1,138,524,113	1936 commemorative U.S. coin	[ "Currencies introduced in 1936", "Early United States commemorative coins", "Elgin, Illinois", "Fifty-cent coins", "United States silver coins" ]	The Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar was a fifty-cent commemorative coin issued by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936, part of the wave of commemoratives authorized by Congress and struck that year. Intended to commemorate the centennial of the founding of Elgin, the piece was designed by local sculptor Trygve Rovelstad. The obverse depicts an idealized head of a pioneer man. The reverse shows a grouping of pioneers, and is based upon a sculptural group that Rovelstad hoped to build as a memorial to those who settled Illinois, but which was not erected in his lifetime. Rovelstad had heard of other efforts to gain authorization for commemorative coins, which were sold by the Mint to a designated group at face value and then retailed to the public at a premium. In 1935, through his congressman, he had legislation introduced into the House of Representatives for a commemorative coin in honor of Elgin's centennial that year. Rovelstad hoped that the proposed coin would both depict and be a source of funds for his memorial to the pioneers. Texas coin dealer L.W. Hoffecker heard of the effort and contacted Rovelstad to offer his assistance—Hoffecker had been a force behind the Old Spanish Trail half dollar, issued in 1935 and distributed by him. The bill for the Elgin coin did not pass until 1936. Hoffecker was able to sell about 20,000 coins, four-fifths of the issue: the remaining 5,000 were returned to the Mint for melting. Unlike many commemorative coins of that era, the piece was not bought up by dealers and speculators, but was sold directly to collectors at the issue price. Art historian Cornelius Vermeule considered the Elgin coin among the most outstanding American commemoratives. ## Inception Elgin, Illinois, is located on the Fox River about 30 miles (48 km) west of Chicago. The community was founded in 1835 by James and Hezekiah Gifford, who named it. It became a village in 1847 and a city in 1854. In the latter year, a watch company was founded there, and the city became well known for the firm's timepieces; it also was notable for the production of tools, shoes, wood products, and weekly church bulletins. Sculptor Trygve Rovelstad (1903–1990), born to Norwegian immigrants in the United States, sought to erect a statue in his hometown of Elgin as a monument to those pioneers who had settled Illinois. The city leaders approved, and in 1934, a foundation was laid for the statue in Davidson Park, the site of the Giffords' first cabin. Rovelstad was unable to raise the money to construct and erect the statue, but having learned of recent commemorative coin issues, decided this would be a good means of funding the statue. The sculptor had a bill introduced in Congress in May 1935 to authorize a half dollar to celebrate Elgin's centennial and to honor the pioneer. Nevertheless, the bill initially was not considered. News of the bill appeared in the July 1935 The Numismatist (the journal of the American Numismatic Association [ANA]), and on July 11, Lyman W. Hoffecker wrote to the Elgin Centennial Monumental Committee, inquiring how the coins would be distributed. Hoffecker, an El Paso, Texas, coin dealer, was then leading the committee in his hometown that was selling the Old Spanish Trail half dollar to the public. Although some recent commemoratives had sparked outcry from collectors that speculators had been allowed to buy up quantities of the new issues, Hoffecker would gain praise for equitably distributing the Old Spanish Trail piece. In the correspondence between the two men, Hoffecker gave Rovelstad a number of tips about how to deal with Congress. Even though the bill was still mired in committee, Hoffecker advised what to do once the bill was signed. He did not know yet that Rovelstad was a sculptor, and wrote to him in September 1935 about the models to be submitted for approval, "These should also be 10 [inches, or 25.4 cm] in diameter, and this is where your trouble commences. These sculptors all want to incorporate their own ideas in the design and ask anywhere from \$400.00 to \$1,000.00 for their work, telling you what trouble it is to get the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts and many other things which do not exist." Hoffecker also offered to handle the issue for the committee; he proposed to advance the money necessary to purchase the new coins from the government and to handle the distribution. He stated that he had enjoyed the distribution of the Old Spanish Trail piece, though he lied to Rovelstad, stating he was not a coin dealer—the letterhead that Hoffecker used to write to Rovelstad said "Loans and Mortgages" under his name. He also warned Rovelstad, "It would not be good for either of us if the word got out you had disposed of the entire issue to me." In October 1935, Hoffecker made a formal offer, based on the bill, which called for 10,000 half dollars: he would pay the Elgin committee \$12,000 and sell the coins at \$2.00 each. He would advance the face value of the coins to the Mint, as well as engraving and shipping charges. In selling the coins, he would try to distribute them to as many collectors as possible, leaving dealers and speculators for later. Rovelstad agreed by letter in November. ## Preparation Illinois Representative Chauncey Reed had introduced the Elgin coin legislation at Rovelstad's behest, and both the sculptor and Hoffecker worked with him to advance the bill through Congress. In February 1936, Hoffecker, who had been appointed by ANA President T. James Clarke to lead a committee against abuses in the issuance of commemorative coins, went to Washington, passing through Chicago on his way to visit Rovelstad. The two men had hoped to keep the mintage to 10,000, to be able to sell the coins at a higher price. Congress, however, was not minded to create a low-mintage commemorative, as there had been several issues which had been struck in small numbers only to sell at high prices, and the bill was amended to provide for 25,000 half dollars. Hoffecker hoped to lower the number, urging the sculptor to lobby for a decrease. Hoffecker noted it would be much more work to sell 25,000, and they could not command as high a price. There were a large number of commemorative coin bills in Congress in 1936, and the dealer feared that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would start vetoing them. Hoffecker visited Washington twice more in May, once meeting Rovelstad there, where they lobbied members of Congress. The bill finally passed, and was signed by President Roosevelt on June 16, 1936. The bill required the coins to be struck at a single mint and to bear the date "1936" regardless of when they were struck. All 25,000 would have to be paid for by the chairman of the Elgin committee (that is, Rovelstad) at one time; a lesser quantity could not be issued. The pieces were "in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city of Elgin, Illinois, and the erection of the heroic Pioneer Memorial"—Rovelstad's statue. Hoffecker suggested that Rovelstad seek to have the mintage divided among the three mints, but conceded that unless Congress had erred in the enacted language, this gambit was not likely to succeed. He also told Rovelstad to get in touch with Assistant Mint Director Mary M. O'Reilly and seek to have the coins struck at the Denver Mint, as the closest mint to El Paso, to minimize shipping charges. Nothing came of either proposal; all of the coins would be struck at the Philadelphia Mint. After Rovelstad submitted his designs for the coin to the Mint, they were sent to the Commission of Fine Arts for its opinion. The designs arrived on July 15, 1936, and were approved two days later, with the request that the head of the pioneer on the obverse, in three-quarter view (facing forward and to one side) as submitted by Rovelstad, be in profile instead. The sculptor complied, and submitted plaster models by mid-August; photographs were sent to the commission by the Mint on August 15. Two days later, commission chairman Charles Moore wrote to O'Reilly, stating that the sculptor member of the commission, Lee Lawrie, had viewed the designs, and complained he could not see what the object was behind the pioneers, and that the gun appeared to be held awkwardly. Lawrie also stated that some of the lettering should be strengthened, but if the Mint director, Nellie Tayloe Ross, was not disturbed by these things, the coin should go forward. Moore indicated that he had no desire to delay the coin, and forwarded the commission's recommendation, on condition that the Mint do what it could to address these concerns. With the exception of possible work on the lettering, no changes were made. Once the commission had approved the designs, they were immediately sent to the Medallic Art Company of New York, which reduced the designs to furnish hubs from which coinage dies could be made. In early October 1936, the Philadelphia Mint struck 25,000 coins, with 15 extra for inspection by the 1937 Assay Commission. Rovelstad went to Philadelphia to witness the initiation of production and stayed at the home of Mint Chief Engraver John R. Sinnock. The first ten pieces were handed to the sculptor, who placed them in paper envelopes and took them home to Illinois. According to his wife, Gloria, he was offered a job at the Mint by Sinnock but declined. ## Design The obverse of the Elgin Centennial half dollar depicts a pioneer, attested to by the legend above him. The bearded visage had been previously sculpted by Rovelstad and appears, slightly modified, as the head of the rifleman on the left of the group on the reverse. The year "1673" on the obverse marks the year explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette entered what is now Illinois. Although the coin was issued for Elgin's centennial, neither the date of founding (1835) nor that of the anniversary appears. The reverse side depicts a group of pioneers (four adults and a baby in its mother's arms). The grouping is a bas relief of the model for the memorial that Rovelstad hoped to build. The child is the second baby to be implied, but not fully seen, on a US coin–one is sketched with the mother inside the Conestoga wagon on the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar, first struck in 1926. One would be more fully depicted on the Roanoke Island half dollar in 1937. The grouping had also appeared on Rovelstad's 1935 medal for Elgin's centennial. Rovelstad placed, both on the medal and on the base for the statue, the words, "To the men who have blazed the trails, who have conquered the soil, and who have built an empire in the land of the Illini." Inclusion of the various mottos required by statute, such as "In God We Trust", meant that not even part of this dedication could be placed on the coin. The name of the city was not in the original models that Rovelstad sent Hoffecker for his comments; the numismatist wrote on July 15, 1936, "I would not overlook putting the word 'Elgin' on your coin, as it would be a good ad for your city". Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on the artistry of American coins, had high praise for the coin and its sculptor: "it is more difficult to find a more aesthetically satisfying, technically superior commemorative half-dollar than the Elgin, Illinois, Centennial of 1936." Vermeule observed that the figures on the reverse appear almost three-dimensional. He noted that the technique of spacing out the letters of the word "Pioneer" above the head presages that used by later Chief Engraver Gilroy Roberts on the obverse of the Kennedy half dollar. According to Vermeule, Rovelstad "has produced one of the major documents of sculptural plasticity and vibrant relief in the series of commemorative coins. His obverse is worthy of a Roman medallion, and his reverse rivals the great Neoclassic dies of England or Bavaria in the nineteenth century." ## Release Once the authorizing legislation was enacted, Hoffecker and Rovelstad came to a new agreement. Hoffecker would advance the money for the new coins and pay for the die making and shipping costs, which were the committee's responsibility under the legislation. The coins would be sold at \$1.50 each; Hoffecker would take 35 cents per coin as commission. The coins were to remain on sale through Hoffecker until January 1, 1937 or until they were sold out, whichever came first. The agreement provided that Hoffecker "use every ethical means known to him to push the sale of these coins". Coin dealer B. Max Mehl, in his 1937 pamphlet on commemorative coins, stated that he considered the price of \$1.50 too high when there was an issue of 25,000 struck. On July 1, 1936, Hoffecker sent 3,500 letters offering the new coins, which had not yet been struck, to people who were on his mailing list or had enquired. He claimed to have 7,000 orders already, and urged collectors not to delay. His bank offered to have the coins shipped there and to carry the coins as part of its cash on hand, which would allow him to pay for them as orders came in, but Hoffecker preferred to pay for the coins at the start. Hoffecker stated in letters that other coin dealers had offered to buy the entire issue, but he had declined. At this time, there was a boom in commemorative coins, and dealers were trying to get all the special issues they could. The Philadelphia Mint shipped 24,990 coins (the authorized mintage less the first ten pieces, which Rovelstad had taken) to Hoffecker on October 7, 1936; they were received in El Paso four days later. Hoffecker wrote to Frank Duffield, editor of The Numismatist, stating that he had the envelopes for already-ordered pieces all prepared, and hoped to mail the last of them out by the evening of October 13; the editor commented, "This sounds like real service". Several hundred pieces had been ordered through banks in Elgin; they received several consignments and eventually sold over a thousand. The Elgin Watch Company purchased 100 coins. By November 1936, 16,170 pieces had been sold. Only about 2,000 more were sold in the next four months; Hoffecker's statement for March 1937 shows 18,790 sold with an additional 330 on consignment to the First National Bank of Elgin. Rovelstad had received \$8,680.00 and Hoffecker \$6,576.50. At this point, discussion turned to what to do with the remaining pieces, some 5,620 (a few hundred pieces were given away or otherwise disposed of). Rovelstad agreed to allow the coin dealer to purchase 250 pieces at \$1 each; he was still selling them in 1948. Other dealers were uninterested in large purchases as the direct sale to collectors meant that few who wanted and could afford the Elgin coin lacked it. With demand at a standstill, Hoffecker feared that the remaining pieces would wind up in the hands of speculators. Five thousand pieces were returned to the Mint for melting. ## Aftermath and collecting Rovelstad used the profits from the half dollar to continue work on his statuary group. He sought direct funding from the federal government in 1938 and from the Illinois Legislature the following year; both attempts failed. Through the half century that followed, he progressed on the statues, and by the time of his death in 1990, he had completed the group in plaster of Paris, that still needed to be bronzed before display. Shortly before his death, he told his wife, "I've lived a full life and have no regrets. The Pioneer Memorial is now completed. I've done all I could. Now it's up to others to see it erected. I can do no more." Rovelstad's tenant, Steve Youngren, established a foundation to raise money to complete the project. It raised \$456,000, exceeding the actual cost by nearly ten percent, and the memorial was completed and dedicated in 2001. Hoffecker served as president of the ANA from 1939 to 1941; he died January 13, 1955 at the age of 86. According to the 2014 edition of R.S. Yeoman's A Guide Book of United States Coins, the Elgin Centennial half dollar lists at \$250 in Almost Uncirculated (AU-50) condition, rising to \$550 in near-pristine MS-66. According to numismatic historian Q. David Bowers, "nothing untoward was associated with the distribution of the Elgin Centennial half dollars, and certainly at the Illinois end of the deal sculptor Trygve A. Rovelstad's intentions and ethics were of the highest order. L.W. Hoffecker distributed the pieces in a skillfully orchestrated publicity campaign and did as well as anyone could have done at the time."
45,363,148	The Sirens and Ulysses	1,093,504,440	1837 painting by William Etty	[ "1837 paintings", "Collection of Manchester Art Gallery", "Death in art", "Maritime paintings", "Musical instruments in art", "Nude art", "Odysseus", "Paintings based on the Odyssey", "Paintings by William Etty", "Paintings depicting Greek myths", "Sirens (mythology)", "Skulls in art" ]	The Sirens and Ulysses is a large oil painting on canvas by the English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1837. It depicts the scene from Homer's Odyssey in which Ulysses (Odysseus) resists the bewitching song of the sirens by having his ship's crew tie him up, while they are ordered to block their own ears to prevent themselves from hearing the song. While traditionally the sirens had been depicted as human–animal chimeras, Etty portrayed them as naked young women, on an island strewn with corpses in varying states of decay. The painting divided opinion at the time of its first exhibition, with some critics greatly admiring it while others derided it as tasteless and unpleasant. Possibly owing to its unusually large size, 442.5 by 297 cm (14 ft 6.2 in by 9 ft 8.9 in), the work initially failed to sell, and was bought later that year at a bargain price by the Manchester merchant Daniel Grant. Grant died shortly afterwards, and his brother donated The Sirens and Ulysses to the Royal Manchester Institution. The Sirens and Ulysses was painted using an experimental technique, which caused it to begin to deteriorate as soon as it was complete. It was shown in a major London exhibition of Etty's work in 1849 and at the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, but was then considered in too poor a condition for continued public display and was placed in the gallery's archives. Restoration began on the work in 2003, and in 2010 the painting went on display in the Manchester Art Gallery, over 150 years after being consigned to storage. ## Background York-born William Etty (1787–1849) had originally been an apprentice printer in Hull, but on completing his apprenticeship at the age of 18 moved to London to become an artist. Strongly influenced by the works of Titian and Rubens, he became famous for painting nude figures in biblical, literary and mythological settings. While many of his peers greatly admired him and elected him a full Royal Academician in 1828, others condemned the content of his work as indecent. Throughout his early career Etty was highly regarded by the wealthy lawyer Thomas Myers, who had been educated at Eton College and thus had a good knowledge of classical mythology. From 1832 onwards Myers regularly wrote to Etty to suggest potential subjects for paintings. Myers was convinced that there was a significant market for very large paintings, and encouraged Etty to make such works. In 1834, he suggested the theme of Ulysses ("Odysseus" in the original Greek) encountering the sirens, a scene from the Odyssey in which a ship's crew sails past the island home of the sirens. The sirens were famous for the beauty of their singing, which would lure sailors to their deaths. Ulysses wanted to hear their song, so had his crew lash him to the ship's mast under strict orders not to untie him, after which they blocked their ears until they were safely out of range of the island. The topic of Ulysses encountering the sirens was well suited to Etty's taste; as he wrote at the time, "My aim in all my great pictures has been to paint some great moral on the heart ... the importance of resisting SENSUAL DELIGHTS". In his depiction of the scene, he probably worked from Alexander Pope's translation, "Their song is death, and makes destruction please. / Unblest the man whom music wins to stay / Nigh the curs'd shore, and listen to the lay ... In verdant meads they sport, and wide around / Lie human bones that whiten all the ground. / The ground polluted floats with human gore / And human carnage taints the dreadful shore." ## Composition and reception The Sirens and Ulysses shows three sirens singing on an island, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead sailors. Ulysses is visible in the background tied to the mast of his ship, while dark clouds rise in the background. Ulysses appears larger than his fellow sailors, while the sirens hold out their arms in traditional dramatic poses. The three sirens are very similar in appearance, and Etty's biographer Leonard Robinson believes it likely that Etty painted the same model in three different poses. Robinson considers their classical poses to be the result of Etty's lifelong attendance at the Academy's Life Classes, where models were always in traditional poses, while former curator of York Art Gallery Richard Green considers their pose a tribute to the Nereids in Rubens's The Disembarkation at Marseilles, a work Etty is known to have admired and of which he made a copy in 1823. The physical appearance of the sirens is not described in the Odyssey, and the traditional Greek representation of them was as bird-lion or bird-human chimeras. Etty rationalised the fully human appearance of his sirens by explaining that their forms became fully human once out of the sea, an approach followed by a number of later painters of the subject. Etty put a great deal of effort into the painting, including visiting a mortuary to sketch the models for the dead and decaying bodies on the sirens' island. His use of real corpses became publicly known, causing complaints from some critics. Although he visited Brighton in 1836 to make studies of the sea in connection with the painting, Etty had little experience of landscape and seascape painting, and the painting of the sea and clouds is rudimentary in comparison with the rest of the work. The painting was Etty's largest work to that time, measuring 442.5 cm by 297 cm (14 ft 6 in by 9 ft 9 in). The work was completed in 1837 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts later that year, and hung in the Academy's new building at Trafalgar Square (now the National Gallery). The work, and Etty's methods in making it, divided opinion: The Gentleman's Magazine considered it "by far the finest [painting] that Mr. Etty has ever painted ... it is a historical work of the first class, and abounds with beauties of all kinds", while The Spectator described it as "a disgusting combination of voluptuousness and loathsome putridity—glowing in colour and wonderful in execution, but conceived in the worst possible taste". Possibly because of its size, The Sirens and Ulysses failed to sell at the 1837 Summer Exhibition. In October 1837 wealthy Manchester cotton merchant Daniel Grant, an admirer of Etty who had already commissioned Venus and her Doves from him, met Etty at Heaton Park races and offered to buy The Sirens and Ulysses and Etty's smaller Samson Betrayed by Delilah unseen for a total of £200. Etty was hoping for £400 for the two paintings, but on being told by Grant that his firm had lost £100,000 that year offered a price of £300 for the pair. Grant counter-offered £250 (about £ in today's terms), which Etty refused. On leaving at the end of the evening, Grant suddenly said, "Will you take the money?", startling Etty, who in his surprise agreed. Grant died shortly afterwards, leaving the painting to his brother William, who in turn gave it to the Royal Manchester Institution in 1839. Etty considered the painting to be his best work, insisting that it form the centrepiece of his 1849 Royal Society of Arts solo exhibition. The Royal Manchester Institution was concerned that the painting would be damaged if moved, refusing to allow it to be used in the exhibition until Etty, and a number of influential friends, visited Manchester to beg them to release it. Etty died later that year, and his work enjoyed a brief boom in popularity. Interest in him declined over time, and by the end of the 19th century, the cost of all his paintings had fallen below their original prices. As it was rarely exhibited, The Sirens and Ulysses had little influence on later artists, although it is credited as an influence on Frederic Leighton's 1858 The Fisherman and the Syren. > Ulysses and the Sirens is one of those great efforts of my Art achieved in the vigour of my life, I can never make again. ## Removal and restoration Etty had used experimental techniques to make The Sirens and Ulysses, using a strong glue as a paint stabiliser which caused the paint to dry hard and brittle, and to flake off once dry, a problem made worse by the painting's large size causing it to flex whenever it was moved. From the moment it was complete it began to deteriorate. After it was exhibited at the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition it was considered in too poor a condition for public display, and it was placed in long-term storage in the archives of the Royal Manchester Institution and its successor, the Manchester Art Gallery. In the mid-20th century there were a number of unsuccessful attempts to repair The Sirens and Ulysses, but an attempt to clean the painting unintentionally damaged the paint further. In 2003, Manchester Art Gallery staff determined that if conservation work were not undertaken, the painting would soon be beyond repair. The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and AXA Art Insurance provided funding for the restoration. A replacement canvas to which the painting had been attached in the 1930s was removed. Following this, a mixture of isinglass adhesive and chalk was used to restore the surface of the painting, and the paint added during the earlier attempted restoration was removed. A new double layer of canvas was added to the back of the painting, and the three layers were glued together. In 2006 the repaired painting was moved back from the conservation studios to the Manchester Art Gallery. The Gallery Nine section of the MAG was converted into a temporary studio, open to the public to watch the final retouching work until it was completed in 2010, and The Sirens and Ulysses currently hangs in Gallery Three.
14,978,159	Peter Drummond (RAF officer)	1,168,146,348	Royal Air Force senior commander	[ "1894 births", "1945 deaths", "Aerial disappearances of military personnel in action", "Australian Army soldiers", "Australian Companions of the Distinguished Service Order", "Australian Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath", "Australian Officers of the Order of the British Empire", "Australian World War I flying aces", "Australian military personnel of World War I", "Australian recipients of the Military Cross", "Commanders of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece)", "Graduates of the Royal College of Defence Studies", "Military personnel from Perth, Western Australia", "Missing in action of World War II", "People educated at Scotch College, Perth", "Royal Air Force air marshals of World War II", "Royal Air Force personnel killed in World War II", "Royal Air Force personnel of World War I", "Royal Flying Corps officers", "Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1945" ]	Air Marshal Sir Peter Roy Maxwell Drummond, (2 June 1894 – 27 March 1945) was an Australian-born senior commander in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He rose from private soldier in World War I to air marshal in World War II. Drummond enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1914 and the following year saw service as a medical orderly during the Gallipoli campaign. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and became a fighter ace in the Middle Eastern theatre, where he was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order and Bar. Transferring to the RAF on its formation in 1918, he remained in the British armed forces for the rest of his life. Between the wars, Drummond saw action in the Sudan—earning appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire—and was posted to Australia on secondment to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) as Director of Operations and Intelligence. In Britain, he commanded RAF stations Tangmere and Northolt. Ranked air commodore at the outbreak of World War II, he was Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder's Deputy Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Middle East from 1941 to 1943. Drummond was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1941 for his services in the Middle East, and knighted in the same order two years later. He was twice offered command of the RAAF during the war but the RAF was unwilling to release him to take up the position. Britain's Air Member for Training from 1943, Drummond was killed in a plane crash at sea in 1945. ## Early life Drummond was born on 2 June 1894 in Perth, Western Australia, to merchant John Maxwell Drummond and his wife Caroline (née Lockhart). Registered as Roy Maxwell Drummond, he acquired the nickname "Peter" during his schooling at Scotch College, and formally adopted it as his first name in 1943. He served in the cadets and worked as a bank clerk before enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force on 10 September 1914. ## World War I ### Soldier and pilot At 5 ft 7in (171 cm) in height, Drummond was judged too slight of build for the infantry and was instead assigned to the 2nd Stationary Hospital of the Australian Army Medical Corps as an orderly. By December 1914, when his unit sailed for Egypt, Drummond was ranked corporal. He was sent to Gallipoli in April 1915 and served on a hospital ship, assisting surgeons in operations on the wounded. Drummond was evacuated to England later that year, suffering from dysentery. In December, he applied for a transfer to the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and was discharged from the Australian Army in April 1916. Following pilot training in the United Kingdom, Drummond received the rank of temporary second lieutenant and was posted to Egypt, where he was assigned to No. 1 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps (numbered 67 Squadron RFC by the British). During the Sinai and Palestine campaign, he took part in the air assaults that preceded the Battle of Magdhaba on 23 December 1916. He later wrote, "The day before the Magdhaba battle, the whole crowd of us with all the bombs we could carry, went out. You couldn't see the place for smoke after we had left ... The Turks were retreating all the time and we had great sport coming down to about 50 feet and peppering them with machine guns ..." On 20 March 1917, Drummond, flying a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2, was one of two pilots who strafed enemy troops threatening Lieutenant Frank McNamara as he rescued a downed Australian airman, the action for which McNamara was awarded his Victoria Cross. ### Flight commander and ace Drummond was awarded the Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" on 20 April 1917, when he and Lieutenant Adrian Cole engaged and drove off six enemy aircraft that were attempting to bomb Allied cavalry; the award was promulgated in The London Gazette on 16 August. Drummond was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 1 May 1917. Later that month he was appointed a flight commander in No. 1 Squadron, with the temporary rank of captain. He joined No. 111 Squadron RFC as a flight commander and temporary captain in October. On 12 December, he and his observer were escorting two Australian aircraft in a Bristol Fighter near Tul Karem, Palestine, when they were spotted by three German Albatros scouts. Drummond attacked and destroyed all three of the enemy aircraft. This achievement earned him the Distinguished Service Order for his "great skill and daring"; the award was promulgated on 26 March 1918. On 27 March 1918, again near Tul Karem, Drummond and another pilot scrambled to attack a German scout. As his wingman dealt with the intruder, Drummond, flying a Nieuport, single-handedly engaged six other German aircraft that had suddenly appeared. According to his own account, after he had destroyed one and "sent another down in a spin", Drummond developed engine trouble and had to land behind enemy lines. Finding his engine firing again, he took off before he could be captured by Turkish troops and gained a start over the four still-circling German scouts, "who had also concluded that the fight was over". He was forced to land three more times in enemy territory—once in a cavalry camp where he "carried away a line full of washing" with his undercarriage in his escape—before he shook off all but one of the pursuing fighters and landed safely behind Allied lines. He was awarded a Bar to his DSO on 26 July for his "gallant and successful" actions. The RFC merged with the Royal Naval Air Service to form the Royal Air Force (RAF) on 1 April 1918. Drummond was given command of No. 145 Squadron RAF, which operated Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5 fighters, in July 1918, and was made an acting major on 2 September. He finished the war an ace, credited with eight victories, and was mentioned in despatches on 5 June 1919. ## Inter-war years Drummond remained in the RAF following World War I, holding command of No. 111 Squadron in 1919, and receiving his permanent commission as an acting captain on 1 August that year. He was based in the Sudan from January to July 1920, as part of Britain's system of "control without occupation", using aircraft instead of armies to put down local rebellions. As acting squadron leader, Drummond commanded "H" Unit, the entire complement of which consisted of two aircraft. Returning to Britain, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire on 22 July 1921 in recognition of his "excellent work" in the face of "adverse conditions", conducting a successful reconnaissance and bombing campaign against Garjak Nuer tribesmen. He entered RAF Staff College, Andover, in 1922. On 1 January 1923, Drummond was promoted to squadron leader; he graduated from Andover the same year. Also in 1923, he proposed an officer exchange scheme for the RAF and the newly formed Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Following a staff posting to the Air Ministry, he was seconded to the RAAF in 1925, serving four years as Director of Operations and Intelligence at Air Force Headquarters, Melbourne. He married Isabel Drake-Brockman, cousin of Brigadier General Edmund Drake-Brockman, at St John's Anglican Church in Toorak, Victoria, on 17 July 1929; the couple had a son and two daughters. Drummond returned to the UK in November that year. He studied at the Imperial Defence College, London, in 1930, and was promoted wing commander on 1 July 1931. From November 1931 to June 1933, he commanded RAF Tangmere, a fighter base. After Tangmere, Drummond spent three years at the Air Ministry. In September 1936 he assumed command of RAF Northolt. While in charge of Northolt he was promoted to group captain on 1 January 1937. That November, Drummond was appointed senior air staff officer (SASO) at RAF Middle East in Cairo. He was raised to air commodore on 1 July 1939. ## World War II ### Deputy Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Middle East At the outbreak of World War II, Drummond was still SASO RAF Middle East. In early 1940 he became involved in preparations for Operation Pike, an Anglo-French plan to bomb oil fields in the Caucasus; the Soviet Union was at this time seen as allied to Nazi Germany, in the wake of the invasion of Poland and the Winter War. Drummond led a delegation to Aleppo, Syria, to discuss Turkey's defence again possible German or Russian attack. He planned to operate British aircraft out of French bases in northern Syria if Pike went ahead. Drummond was made an acting air vice-marshal on 19 June 1940, and temporary air vice-marshal on 10 January the next year. On 1 June 1941, he was raised to acting air marshal and appointed Deputy Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) RAF Middle East, following Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder's elevation to AOC-in-C. The Australian Dictionary of Biography credits Tedder and Drummond with developing their command as "a mobile strike-force capable of co-operating fully with the other two services", and Tedder later remarked on the importance of his deputy's contribution to the Allied victory in North Africa. Tedder's biographer, Vincent Orange, contended that "Tedder's growing eminence ... owes a great deal to Drummond's wise and dedicated support". Drummond considered the Middle East a "Battle for Airfields", as whichever side held the Mediterranean landing grounds could protect its shipping at the expense of the enemy's. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham found Drummond "a thorough non-cooperator" but Drummond's assistant, Arthur Lee, described him as "a refreshing man to work with ... without pose or frills, serious, but with a sense of humour nearly as irreverent and sarcastic as Tedder's". Drummond was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 24 September 1941 "in recognition of distinguished services rendered in operational commands of the Royal Air Force" from 1 October 1940 to 31 March 1941. His temporary rank of air vice-marshal was made substantive on 14 April 1942. In early 1942 the Australian government sought Drummond for the position of Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) of the RAAF, to succeed Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, RAF, at the completion of the latter's two-year term. Australia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stanley Bruce, had recommended Drummond in a cable to Prime Minister John Curtin on 5 February. Although the British government was initially supportive of the plan, the Air Ministry eventually declined to release Drummond from his role in the Middle East, partly to avoid disruption to the region's command and also because it did not believe that Drummond's operational abilities would be put to sufficient use in the largely administrative role of CAS. Drummond himself was reportedly dubious about the appointment because of the division of authority between RAAF Headquarters and Allied Air Force Headquarters, South West Pacific Area (SWPA). Burnett had recommended his deputy, Air Vice-Marshal William Bostock, for CAS but in May 1942 the position went to acting Air Commodore George Jones. Bostock in turn became Air Officer Commanding RAAF Command, Australia's main operational organisation under SWPA. An ongoing conflict between Jones (now promoted air vice-marshal) and Bostock led to moves in April 1943 to bring in an officer senior to both men to head the RAAF in a unified command structure, and Drummond was once more approached by the Australian government. Drummond had indicated that he was happy to serve in Australia but the Air Ministry again refused to release him, having selected him for a seat on the Air Council as Air Member for Training. ### Final posting and loss at sea Drummond succeeded Air Marshal Sir Guy Garrod as Air Member for Training on 27 April 1943. He was raised to temporary air marshal on 1 June 1943, and appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the King's Birthday Honours the following day. Drummond's position on the Air Council included administering the Empire Air Training Scheme, making him partly responsible for the serious oversupply of aircrew that was apparent by 1944; Drummond believed that the situation would be counteracted only if the upcoming invasion of Europe led to heavy casualties. He remained an advocate of close cooperation between the RAF and Dominion air forces; the Adelaide Advertiser quoted him as saying, "Daily journeying to my London office ... I make a point of passing the Boomerang Club at Australia House just for the pleasure and gratification of swapping a salute and a 'good day' with some of the best air crew in the world—the RAAF." On 27 March 1945, Drummond was en route to Canada with other dignitaries to attend a ceremony marking the closure of the Empire Air Training Scheme. His plane, a B-24 Liberator nicknamed Commando that was formerly the personal transport of Winston Churchill, disappeared near the Azores and all aboard were presumed killed. Frank McNamara, now an RAAF air vice-marshal based in England and a close friend, broke the news to Drummond's widow. Air Marshal Sir Roderic Hill succeeded Drummond as Air Member for Training. Drummond was survived by his wife and three children. A memorial service for the victims of the Azores flight was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 8 May 1945. Drummond was twice mentioned in despatches for his service in World War II, on 11 June 1942, and on 19 September 1946 (for his performance as SASO RAF Middle East in 1940–41). On 3 May 1946, he was posthumously granted permission to wear the award of Commander of the Order of the Phoenix, conferred by the Kingdom of Greece. Tedder wrote in 1948 that Drummond as Deputy AOC-in-C Middle East "bore so much of the burden and took so little of the credit"; Vincent Orange observed that the two commanders remained friends and that Drummond "might well have succeeded Tedder as Chief of the Air Staff" but for his early death. He is commemorated on Panel 264 of the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.