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Green Park tube station
| 1,160,552,683 |
London Underground station
|
[
"1906 establishments in England",
"Buildings and structures in Green Park",
"Buildings and structures in Mayfair",
"Buildings and structures on Piccadilly",
"Former Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway stations",
"Jubilee line stations",
"London Underground Night Tube stations",
"Piccadilly line stations",
"Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1906",
"Tube stations in the City of Westminster",
"Victoria line stations"
] |
Green Park is a London Underground station located on the edge of Green Park, with entrances on both sides of Piccadilly. It is served by the Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria lines. On the Jubilee line it is between Bond Street and Westminster; on the Piccadilly line it is between Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner and on the Victoria line it is between Victoria and Oxford Circus. It is in fare zone 1.
The station was opened in 1906 by the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR) and was originally named Dover Street due to its location in that street. It was modernised in the 1930s when lifts were replaced with escalators and extended in the 1960s and 1970s when the Victoria and Jubilee lines were constructed.
The station is near The Ritz Hotel, the Royal Academy of Arts, St James's Palace, Berkeley Square, Bond Street, the Burlington Arcade and Fortnum & Mason, and is one of two serving Buckingham Palace (the other being St James's Park).
## History
### Piccadilly line
#### Rival schemes
During the final years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century numerous competing schemes for underground railways through central London were proposed. A number of the schemes submitted to parliament for approval as private bills included proposals for lines running under Piccadilly with stations in the area of the current Green Park station.
The first two proposals came before parliament in 1897. The Brompton and Piccadilly Circus Railway (B&PCR) proposed a line between South Kensington and Piccadilly Circus and the City and West End Railway (C&WER) proposed a line between Hammersmith and Cannon Street. The B&PCR proposed a station on the north side at Dover Street and the C&WER proposed a station on the south side at Arlington Street. Following review by parliament, the C&WER bill was rejected and the B&PCR bill was approved and received royal assent in August 1897.
In 1902, the Charing Cross, Hammersmith and District Railway (CCH&DR) proposed a line between Charing Cross and Barnes with a parallel shuttle line running between Hyde Park Corner and Charing Cross. A station was planned at Walsingham House on the north-east corner of Green Park. This scheme was rejected by parliament.
The same year, the Central London Railway (CLR, now the central section of the Central line) submitted a bill that aimed to turn its line running between Shepherd's Bush and Bank into a loop by constructing a second roughly parallel line to the south. This would have run along Piccadilly with a station at St James's Street just to the east of Dover Street. Delayed while a royal commission considered general principles of underground railways in London, the scheme was never fully considered and although it was re-presented in 1903, it was dropped two years later.
A third scheme for 1902 was the Piccadilly, City and North East London Railway (PC&NELR) which proposed a route between Hammersmith and Southgate. It planned a station at Albemarle Street, just to the east of Dover Street. Although favoured in parliament and likely to be approved, this scheme failed due to a falling-out between the backers and the sale of part of the proposals to a rival.
In 1905, some of the promoters of the PC&NELR regrouped and submitted a proposal for the Hammersmith, City and North East London Railway. As the CLR had done previously, the company proposed a station at St James's Street. Owing to failures in the application process, this scheme was also rejected.
#### Construction and opening
While the various rival schemes were unsuccessful in obtaining parliamentary approval, the B&PCR was unsuccessful in raising the funds needed to construct its line. It was not until after the B&PCR had been taken over by Charles Yerkes's Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company that the money became available. Tunnelling began in 1902 shortly before the B&PCR was merged with the Great Northern and Strand Railway to create the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR, the predecessor of the Piccadilly line).
The GNP&BR opened the station on 15 December 1906 as Dover Street. As with most of the other GNP&BR stations, the station building, on the east side of Dover Street, was designed by Leslie Green. It featured the company's standard red glazed terracotta facade with wide semi-circular arches at first-floor level. Platform and passageway walls were decorated in glazed cream tiles in Green's standard arrangement with margins, patterning and station names in mid-blue. When it opened, the station to the west was Down Street. The station was provided with four Otis electric lifts paired in two 23-foot (7.0 m) diameter shafts and a spiral stair in a smaller shaft. The platforms are 27.4 metres (90 ft) below the level of Piccadilly.
#### Reconstruction
The station was busy and unsuccessful attempts to control crowds with gates at platform level were made in 1918. In the 1930s, the station was included amongst those modernised in conjunction with the northern and western extensions of the Piccadilly line. A new sub-surface ticket hall was opened on 18 September 1933 with a pair of Otis escalators provided to replace the lifts. The new ticket hall was accessed from subway entrances in Piccadilly. On the north side, an entrance was provided in Devonshire House on the corner with Stratton Street; on the south side an entrance was constructed on a piece of land taken from the park. The shelter for the southern entrance was designed by Charles Holden. The original station building, the lifts and the redundant below-ground passages were closed and the station was renamed Green Park. Part of the ground floor was used as a tea shop until the 1960s. In 1955, a third escalator was added to help deal with increased passenger numbers.
### Victoria line
Proposals for an underground line linking Victoria to Finsbury Park date from 1937 when planning by the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) for future services considered a variety of new routes and extensions to existing lines. Parliament approved the line in 1955, but a shortage of funds meant that work did not start until after government loans were approved in 1962.
Construction works began in 1962. The 1930s ticket hall under the roadway of Piccadilly was enlarged to provide space for new Victoria line escalators and a long interchange passageway was provided between the Victoria line and Piccadilly line platforms. In 1965 a collapse of soft ground during the excavation of one of the tunnels near Green Park station meant that the ground had to be chemically stabilised before work could continue. The disused station building in Dover Street was demolished the following year in conjunction with the works for the new line. A vent shaft was constructed and an electrical sub-station was built in the basement of the new building. The 1930s entrance on the south side of Piccadilly was also reconstructed.
The enlarged ticket hall, new platforms and passageways were decorated in grey tiles. Platforms are approximately 23.4 metres (77 ft) below street level. Platform roundel signs were on backlit illuminated panels. Seat recesses on the Victoria line platforms were tiled in an abstract pattern by Hans Unger of coloured circles representing a bird's-eye view of trees in Green Park.
After trial running of empty trains from 24 February 1969, the Victoria line platforms opened on 7 March 1969 with the opening of the third stage of the line between Warren Street and Victoria. The same day, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the line by riding a train from Green Park to Oxford Circus.
### Jubilee line
The origins of the Jubilee line are less clearly defined than those of the Victoria line. During World War II and throughout the 1950s and early 1960s consideration was given to various routes connecting north-west and south-east London via the West End and the City of London. Planning of the Victoria line had the greater priority and it was not until after construction of that line started that detailed planning began for the new line, first called the Fleet line in 1965 as it was planned to run in an east–west direction along Fleet Street. Lack of funding meant that only the first stage of the proposed line, from Baker Street to Charing Cross, received royal assent in July 1969; funding was agreed in August 1971.
Tunnelling began in February 1972 and was completed by the end of 1974. In 1977, during construction of the stations, the name of the line was changed to the Jubilee line, to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee that year. A construction shaft in Hays Mews north of the station was used for an electrical substation and ventilation shaft. At Green Park, the ticket hall was enlarged slightly to provide space for escalators for the new line which connect to an intermediate concourse providing interchange between the Jubilee and Victoria lines. A second flight of escalators descends to the Jubilee line platforms, which are 31.1 metres (102 ft) below street level, the deepest of the three sets. Interchange between the Jubilee and Piccadilly lines was via the ticket hall. Platform walls were tiled in a deep red with black leaf patterns by June Fraser. Trial running of trains began in August 1978 and the Jubilee line opened on 1 May the next year. The line had been officially opened by Prince Charles the previous day, starting with a train journey from Green Park to Charing Cross. In 1993, to alleviate congestion, a third escalator was installed in the lower flight to replace a fixed staircase.
Work on the Fleet line's stages 2 and 3 did not proceed and it was not until 1992 that an alternative route was approved. The Jubilee line extension took the line south of the River Thames via Waterloo, which was impractical to reach from the line's existing terminus at Charing Cross. New tunnels branching from the original route south of Green Park were to be constructed, and the line to Charing Cross was to be closed. Tunnelling began in May 1994, and improvements were carried out at Green Park to provide a direct passageway connection between the Jubilee and Piccadilly lines, including lifts to the platforms at each end. A new ventilation shaft and an emergency exit to Arlington Street were built. The new extension opened in stages starting at Stratford in the east, with services to Charing Cross ending on 19 November 1999 and the final section between Green Park and Waterloo opening the following day.
### Recent changes
In 2008, Transport for London (TfL) announced a project to provide step-free access to all three lines in advance of the 2012 London Olympics. The project also included the construction of a new entrance on the south side of Piccadilly with ramped access directly from Green Park designed by Capita Symonds and Alacanthus LW architects. Work commenced in May 2009 to install two lifts from the ticket hall to the Victoria line platforms and the interchange passageway to the Piccadilly line. This work and a third lift in the new park-side entrance between the street level and the ticket hall were completed ahead of schedule in 2011. At the same time, Green Park station underwent a major improvement programme which saw the tiling on the Victoria and Piccadilly line platforms and the interchange passageways replaced. When the Jubilee line opened, the Hans Unger tiling in the seat recesses of the Victoria line platforms was replaced with a design using the leaf patterns used on the Jubilee line platforms; the Unger design was reinstated during the restoration.
The new park entrance and street level shelter feature artwork within the Portland stone cladding titled Sea Strata designed by John Maine RA. The Diana Fountain was relocated from its original site in the centre of the park to form the centrepiece of the new entrance.
To help moderate temperatures in the station, a system using cool ground water extracted from boreholes sunk 130 metres (430 ft) into the chalk aquifer below London was installed. The extracted water passes through a heat exchanger connected to the cast-iron tunnel lining and the warmed water is returned to the aquifer through a second set of boreholes 200 metres (660 ft) away.
## Proposal for new connection
In July 2005, a report, DLR Horizon 2020 Study, for the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) examined "pragmatic development schemes" to expand and improve the DLR network between 2012 and 2020. One of the proposals was an extension of the DLR from Bank to Charing Cross. Unused tunnels under Strand constructed as part of Stage 1 of the Fleet line would be enlarged to accommodate the larger DLR trains. In 2011, the DLR published a proposal to continue the extension to Victoria via Green Park. No further work has been done on these proposals.
## Piccadilly bombing
At around 9:00 pm on 9 October 1975, members of the Provisional IRA's Balcombe Street Gang detonated a bomb at a bus stop outside Green Park station, killing 23-year-old Graham Ronald Tuck and injuring 20 others. The attack was part of a bombing campaign carried out by the gang and in addition to the death and injuries caused damage to the Ritz Hotel and neighbouring buildings.
## Services and connections
### Services
The station is in Travelcard Zone 1, between Bond Street and Westminster on the Jubilee line, Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly Circus on the Piccadilly line and Victoria and Oxford Circus on the Victoria line. On weekdays Jubilee line trains typically run every 2–21⁄2 minutes between 05:38 and 00:34 northbound and 05:26 and 00:45 southbound; on the Piccadilly line trains typically run every 21⁄2–31⁄2 minutes between 05:48 and 00:34 westbound and 00:32 eastbound, and on the Victoria line trains typically run every 100–135 seconds between 05:36 and 00:39 northbound and 05:36 and 00:31 southbound.
As of it is the station on the London Underground with million passengers using it per year.
### Connections
London Buses day and night routes serve the station.
## In popular culture
The opening scene of the 1997 film version of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove was set on the eastbound platforms at both Dover Street and Knightsbridge stations, both represented by the same studio mock-up, complete with a working recreation of a 1906 Stock train.
|
532,471 |
White swamphen
| 1,149,806,832 |
Extinct species of rail from Lord Howe Island
|
[
"Bird extinctions since 1500",
"Birds described in 1790",
"Extinct birds of Lord Howe Island",
"Extinct flightless birds",
"Porphyrio",
"Taxa named by John White (surgeon)"
] |
The white swamphen (Porphyrio albus), also known as the Lord Howe swamphen, Lord Howe gallinule or white gallinule, is an extinct species of rail which lived on Lord Howe Island, east of Australia. It was first encountered when the crews of British ships visited the island between 1788 and 1790, and all contemporary accounts and illustrations were produced during this time. Today, two skins exist: the holotype in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, and another in Liverpool's World Museum. Although historical confusion has existed about the provenance of the specimens and the classification and anatomy of the bird, it is now thought to have been a distinct species endemic to Lord Howe Island and most similar to the Australasian swamphen. Subfossil bones have also been discovered since.
The white swamphen was 36 to 55 cm (14 to 22 in) long. Both known skins have mainly-white plumage, although the Liverpool specimen also has dispersed blue feathers. This is unlike other swamphens, but contemporary accounts indicate birds with all-white, all-blue, and mixed blue-and-white plumage. The chicks were black, becoming blue and then white as they aged. Although this has been interpreted as due to albinism, it may have been progressive greying in which feathers lose their pigment with age. The bird's bill, frontal shield and legs were red, and it had a claw (or spur) on its wing. Little was recorded about the white swamphen's behaviour. It may not have been flightless, but was probably a poor flier. This and its docility made the bird easy prey for visiting humans, who killed it with sticks. Reportedly once common, the species may have been hunted to extinction before 1834, when Lord Howe Island was settled.
## Taxonomy
Lord Howe Island is a small, remote island about 600 kilometres (370 mi) east of Australia. Ships first arrived on the island in 1788, including two which supplied the British penal colony on Norfolk Island and three transport ships of the British First Fleet. When HMS Supply passed the island, the ship's commander named it after First Lord of the Admiralty Richard Howe. Crews of the visiting ships captured native birds (including white swamphens), and all contemporary descriptions and depictions of the species were made between 1788 and 1790. The bird was first mentioned by the master of HMS Supply, David Blackburn, in a 1788 letter to a friend. Other accounts and illustrations were produced by Arthur Bowes Smyth, the fleet's naval officer and surgeon, who drew the first known illustration of the species; Arthur Phillip, governor of New South Wales; and George Raper, midshipman of HMS Sirius. Secondhand accounts also exist, and at least ten contemporary illustrations are known. The accounts indicate that the population varied, and individual bird plumage was white, blue, or mixed blue-and-white.
In 1790, the white swamphen was scientifically described and named by the surgeon John White in a book about his time in New South Wales. He named the bird Fulica alba, the specific name being derived from the Latin word for white (albus). White found the bird most similar to the western swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio, then in the genus Fulica). Although he apparently never visited Lord Howe Island, White may have questioned sailors and based some of his description on earlier accounts. He said he had described a skin at the Leverian Museum, and his book included an illustration of the specimen by the artist Sarah Stone. It is uncertain when (and how) the specimen arrived at the museum. This skin, the holotype specimen of the species, was purchased by the Natural History Museum of Vienna in 1806 and is catalogued as specimen NMW 50.761. The naturalist John Latham listed the bird as Gallinula alba in a later 1790 work, and wrote that it may have been a variety of purple swamphen (or "gallinule").
One other white swamphen specimen is in Liverpool's World Museum, where it is catalogued as specimen NML-VZ D3213. Obtained by the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, it later entered the collection of the traveller William Bullock and was purchased by Lord Stanley; Stanley's son donated it to Liverpool's public museums in 1850. Although White said that the first specimen was obtained from Lord Howe Island, the provenance of the second has been unclear; it was originally said to have come from New Zealand, resulting in taxonomic confusion. Phillip wrote that the bird could also be found on Norfolk Island and elsewhere, but Latham said it could be found only on Norfolk Island. When the first specimen was sold by the Leverian Museum, it was listed as coming from New Holland (which Australia was called at the time)—perhaps because it was sent from Sydney. A note by the naturalist Edgar Leopold Layard on a contemporary illustration of the bird by Captain John Hunter inaccurately stated that it only lived on Ball's Pyramid, an islet off Lord Howe Island.
The Zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck assigned the white swamphen to the swamphen genus Porphyrio as P. albus in 1820, and the zoologist George Robert Gray considered it an albino variety of the Australasian swamphen (P. melanotus) as P. m. varius alba in 1844. The belief that the bird was simply an albino was held by several later writers, and many failed to notice that White cited Lord Howe Island as the origin of the Vienna specimen. In 1860 and 1873, the ornithologist August von Pelzeln said that the Vienna specimen had come from Norfolk Island, and assigned the species to the genus Notornis as N. alba; the takahē (P. hochstetteri) of New Zealand was also placed in that genus at the time. In 1873, the naturalist Osbert Salvin agreed that the Lord Howe Island bird was similar to the takahē, although he had apparently never seen the Vienna specimen, basing his conclusion on a drawing provided by von Pelzeln. Salvin included a takahē-like illustration of the Vienna specimen by the artist John Gerrard Keulemans, based on von Pelzeln's drawing, in his article.
In 1875, the ornithologist George Dawson Rowley noted differences between the Vienna and Liverpool specimens and named a new species based on the latter: P. stanleyi, named after Lord Stanley. He believed that the Liverpool specimen was a juvenile from Lord Howe Island or New Zealand, and continued to believe that the Vienna specimen was from Norfolk Island. Despite naming the new species, Rowley considered the possibility that P. stanleyi was an albino Australasian swamphen and considered the Vienna bird more similar to the takahē. In 1901, the ornithologist Henry Ogg Forbes had the Liverpool specimen dismounted so he could examine it for damage. Forbes found it similar enough to the Vienna specimen to belong to the same species, N. alba. The zoologist Walter Rothschild considered the two species distinct from each other in 1907, but placed them both in the genus Notornis. Rothschild thought that the image published by Phillip in 1789 depicted N. stanleyi from Lord Howe Island, and the image published by White in 1790 showed N. alba from Norfolk Island. He disagreed that the specimens were albinos, thinking instead that they were evolving into a white species. Rothschild published an illustration of N. alba by Keulemans where it is similar to a takahē, inaccurately showing it with dark primary feathers, although the Vienna specimen on which it was based is all white. In 1910, the ornithologist Tom Iredale demonstrated that there was no proof of the white swamphen existing anywhere but on Lord Howe Island and noted that early visitors to Norfolk Island (such as Captain James Cook and Lieutenant Philip Gidley King) did not mention the bird. In 1913, after examining the Vienna specimen, Iredale concluded that the bird belonged in the genus Porphyrio and did not resemble the takahē.
In 1928, the ornithologist Gregory Mathews discussed a 1790 painting by Raper which he thought differed enough from P. albus in proportions and colouration that he named a new species based on it: P. raperi. Mathews also considered P. albus distinct enough to warrant a new genus, Kentrophorina, due to having a claw (or spur) on one wing. In 1936, he conceded that P. raperi was a synonym of P. albus. The ornithologist Keith Alfred Hindwood agreed that the bird was an albino P. melanotus in 1932, and pointed out that the naturalists Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster (his son) did not record the bird when Cook's ship visited Norfolk Island in 1774. In 1940, Hindwood found the white swamphen so closely related to the Australasian swamphen that he considered them subspecies of the same species: P. albus albus and P. albus melanotus (since albus is the older name). Hindwood suggested that the population on Lord Howe Island was white; blue Australasian swamphens occasionally arrived (stragglers from elsewhere have been found on the island) and bred with the white birds, accounting for the blue and partially-blue individuals in the old accounts. He also pointed out that Australasian swamphens are prone to white feathering. In 1941, the biologist Ernst Mayr proposed that the white swamphen was a partially-albinistic population of Australasian swamphens. Mayr suggested that the blue swamphens remaining on Lord Howe Island were not stragglers, but had survived because they were less conspicuous than the white ones. In 1967, the ornithologist James Greenway also considered the white swamphen a subspecies (with P. stanleyi a synonym) and considered the white individuals albinos. He suggested that the similarities between the wing feathers of the white swamphen and the takahē were due to parallel evolution in two isolated populations of reluctant fliers.
The ornithologist Sidney Dillon Ripley found the white swamphen to be intermediate between the takahē and the purple swamphen in 1977, based on patterns of the leg-scutes, and reported that X-rays of bones also showed similarities with the takahē. He considered only the Vienna specimen to be a white swamphen, whereas he considered the Liverpool specimen to be an albino Australasian swamphen (listing P. stanleyi as a junior synonym of that bird) from New Zealand. In 1991, the ornithologist Ian Hutton reported subfossil bones of the white swamphen. Hutton agreed that the birds described as having white-and-blue feathers were hybrids between the white swamphen and the Australasian swamphen, an idea also considered by the ornithologists Barry Taylor and Ber van Perlo in 2000. In 2000, the writer Errol Fuller said that since swamphens are widespread colonists, it would be expected that populations would evolve similarly to the takahē when they found refuges without mammals (losing flight and becoming bulkier with stouter legs, for example); this was the case with the white swamphen. Fuller suggested that they could be called "white takahēs", which had been alluded to earlier; the white birds may have been a colour morph of the population, or the blue birds may have been Australasian swamphens which associated with the white birds.
In 2015, the biologists Juan C. Garcia-R. and Steve A. Trewick analysed the DNA of the purple swamphens. They found that the white swamphen was most closely related to the Philippine swamphen (P. pulverulentus), and the black-backed swamphen (P. indicus) more closely related to both than to other species in its region. Garcia-R. and Trewick used DNA from the Vienna specimen, but were unable to obtain usable DNA from the Liverpool specimen. They suggested that the white swamphen may have descended from a few migrant Philippine swamphens during the late Pleistocene (about 500,000 years ago), dispersing over other islands. This indicates a complex history, since their lineages are not recorded on the islands between them; according to the biologists, such results (based on ancient DNA sources) should be treated with caution. Although many purple swamphen taxa had been considered subspecies of the species P. porphyrio, they considered this a paraphyletic (unnatural) grouping since they found different species to group among the subspecies. The cladogram below shows the phylogenetic position of the white swamphen according to the 2015 study:
The ornithologists Hein van Grouw and Julian P. Hume concluded in 2016 that many of the old accounts had errors in the bird's provenance, that it was endemic to Lord Howe Island, and suggested when the specimens were collected (between March and May 1788) and under which circumstances they arrived in England. They concluded that the white swamphen was a valid species which changed colouration with age, after reconstructing the colouration of juvenile birds before turning white (which was distinct from other swamphens). Van Grouw and Hume found the white swamphen anatomically more similar to the Australasian swamphen than the Philippine swamphen, and suggested that studies with more-complete data sets than the earlier DNA might yield different results. Due to their anatomical similarities, geographic proximity and the recolonisation of Lord Howe and Norfolk Island by Australasian swamphens, they found it likely that the white swamphen was descended from Australasian swamphens.
In 2021, Hume and colleagues reported the results of their palaeontological reconnaissance of Lord Howe Island, which included the discovery of subfossil white swamphen bones. A complete pelvis and representatives of most limb bones were found in the dunes of Blinky Beach (situated at the end of an airport runway), and the authors stated these would provide new insight into the morphology and behaviour of the species.
## Description
The length of the white swamphen has been given as 36 cm (14 in) and 55 cm (22 in), making it similar to the Australasian swamphen in size. Its wings were proportionally the shortest of all swamphens. The wing of the Vienna specimen is 218 mm (9 in) mm long, the tail is 73.3 mm (3 in), the culmen with its frontal shield (the fleshy plate on the head) is 79 mm (3 in), the tarsus is 86 mm (3 in), and the middle toe is 77.7 mm (3 in) long. The wing of the Liverpool specimen is 235 mm (9 in) long, the tarsus is 88.4 mm (3 in) and the middle toe is 66.5 mm (3 in). Its tail and beak are damaged, and cannot be reliably measured. The white swamphen differed from most other swamphens (except the Australasian swamphen) in having a short middle toe; it is the same length as the tarsus, or longer, in other species. The white swamphen's tail was also the shortest. Both specimens have a claw (or spur) on their wings; it is longer and more discernible in the Vienna specimen, and sharp and buried in the feathers of the Liverpool specimen. This feature is variable among other kinds of swamphen. The softness of the rectrices (tail feathers) and the lengths of the secondary and wing covert feathers relative to the primary feathers appear to have been intermediate between those of the purple swamphen and the takahē.
Although the known skins are mostly white, contemporary illustrations depict some blue individuals; others had a mixture of white and blue feathers. Their legs were red or yellow, but the latter colour may be present only on dried specimens. The bill and frontal shield were red, and the iris was red or brown. According to notes written on an illustration by an unknown artist (in the collection of the artist Thomas Watling, inaccurately dated 1792), the chicks were black and became bluish-grey and then white as they matured. The Vienna specimen is pure white, but the Liverpool specimen has yellowish reflections on its neck and breast, blackish-blue feathers speckled on the head (concentrated near the upper surface of the shield) and neck, blue feathers on the breast, and purplish-blue feathers on the shoulders, back, scapular, and lesser covert feathers. Some of the rectrices (tail feathers) are purplish-brown, and some of the scapular feathers and those on the mid-back are sooty-brown at the base and sooty-blue further up. The central rectrices are sooty-brown and bluish. This colouration indicates that the Liverpool specimen was a younger bird than the Vienna specimen, and the latter had reached the final stage of maturity. Since the Liverpool specimen preserves some of its original colour, van Grouw, and Hume were able to reconstruct its natural colouration before becoming white. It differed from other swamphens in having blackish-blue lores, forehead, crown, nape, and hind neck; purple-blue mantle, back, and wings; a darker rump and upper-tail covert feathers; and dark greyish-blue underparts.
Phillip gave a detailed description in 1789, possibly based on a live bird he received in Sydney:
> This beautiful bird greatly resembles the purple Gallinule in shape and make, but is much superior in size, being as large as a dunghill fowl. The length from the end of the bill to that of the claws is two feet three inches; the bill is very stout, and the colour of it, the whole top of the head, and the irides red; the sides of the head around the eyes are reddish, very thinly sprinkled with white feathers; the whole of the plumage without exception is white. The legs the colour of the bill. This species is pretty common on Lord Howe’s Island, Norfolk Island, and other places, and is a very tame species. The other sex, supposed to be the male, is said to have some blue on the wings.
### Condition of the specimens
The Vienna specimen is today a study skin with its legs outstretched (not a taxidermy mount), but van Grouw and Hume suggested that Stone's 1790 illustration showed its original mounted pose. It is in good condition; although the legs are faded to a pale orange-brown, they were probably reddish in the living bird. It has no yellowish or purple feathers, contradicting Rothschild's observation. Forbes suggested that the Liverpool specimen was "remade" and mounted after Stone's illustration, though its present pose is dissimilar. Keulemans's illustration of the mount shows the present pose, so Forbes was either incorrect or a new pose was based on Keulemans's image. The Liverpool specimen is in good condition, although it has lost some feathers from its head and neck. The bill is broken, and its rhamphotheca (the keratinous covering of the bill) is missing; the underlying bone was painted red to simulate an undamaged bill, which has caused some confusion. The legs have also been painted red, and there is no indication of their original colouration. The reason only white specimens are known today may be collecting bias; unusually-coloured specimens are more likely to be collected than normally-coloured ones.
## Behaviour and ecology
The white swamphen inhabited wooded lowland areas in wetlands. Nothing was recorded about its social and reproductive behaviour and its nest, eggs and call were never described. Presumably it did not migrate. Blackburn's 1788 account is the only one that mentions the diet of this bird:
> ... On the shore we caught several sorts of birds ... and a white fowl – something like a Guinea hen, with a very strong thick & sharp pointed bill of a red colour – stout legs and claws – I believe they are carnivorous they hold their food between the thumb or hind claw & the bottom of the foot & lift it to the mouth without stopping so much as a parrot.
Some contemporary accounts indicated that the bird was flightless. Rowley considered the Liverpool specimen (representing the separate species P. stanleyi) capable of flight, due to its longer wings; Rothschild believed that both were flightless, although he was inconsistent about whether their wings were the same length. Van Grouw and Hume found that both specimens showed evidence of an increased terrestrial lifestyle (including decreased wing length, more robust feet and short toes), and were in the process of becoming flightless. Although it may still have been capable of flight, it was behaviourally flightless, similar to other island birds, such as some parrots. Though the white swamphen was similar in size to the Australasian swamphen, it had proportionally shorter wings and therefore a higher wing load – perhaps the highest of all swamphens. Upon the discovery of subfossil pelvic and limb bones in 2021, Hume and colleagues preliminarily stated that these bones were much more robust in the white swamphen than in the volant Australasian swamphen, a trait common in flightless rails.
Van Grouw and Hume pointed out that a white colour aberration in birds is rarely caused by albinism (which is less common than formerly believed), but by leucism or progressive greying – a phenomenon van Grouw described in 2012 and 2013. These conditions produce white feathers due to the absence of cells which produce the pigment melanin. Leucism is inherited, and the white feathering is present in juveniles and does not change with age; progressive greying causes normally-coloured juveniles to lose pigment-producing cells with age, and they become white as they moult. Since contemporary accounts indicate that the white swamphen turned from black to bluish-grey and then white, Van Grouw and Hume concluded that it underwent inheritable progressive greying. Progressive greying is a common cause of white feathers in many types of birds (including rails), although such specimens have sometimes been inaccurately referred to as albinos. The condition does not affect carotenoid pigments (red and yellow), and the bill and legs of the white swamphens retained their colouration. The large number of white individuals on Lord Howe Island may be due to its small founding population, which would have facilitated the spread of inheritable progressive greying.
## Extinction
Although the white swamphen was considered common during the late 18th century, it appears to have disappeared quickly; the period from the island's discovery to the last mention of living birds is only two years (1788–90). It had probably vanished by 1834, when Lord Howe Island was first settled, or during the following decade. Whalers and sealers had used the island for supplies, and may have hunted the bird to extinction. Habitat destruction probably did not play a role, and animal predators (such as rats and cats) arrived later. Several contemporary accounts stress the ease with which the island's birds were hunted, and the large number which could be taken to provision ships. In 1789, White described how the white swamphen could be caught:
> They [sailors] also found on it, in great plenty, a kind of fowl, resembling much of the Guinea fowl in shape and size, but widely different in colour; they being in general all white, with a red fleshy substance rising, like a cock’s comb, from the head, and not unlike a piece of sealing-wax. These not being birds of flight, nor in the least wild, the sailors availing themselves of their gentleness and inability to take wing from their pursuits, easily struck them down with sticks.
The fact that they could be killed with sticks may have been due to their poor flying ability, which would have made them vulnerable to human predation. With no natural enemies on the island, they were tame and curious. The physician John Foulis conducted a mid-1840s ornithological survey on the island but did not mention the bird, so it was almost certainly extinct by that time. In 1909, the writer Arthur Francis Basset Hull expressed hope that the bird still survived in unexplored mountains.
Eight types of bird have become extinct due to human interference since Lord Howe Island was discovered, including the Lord Howe pigeon (Columba vitiensis godmanae), the Lord Howe parakeet (Cyanoramphus subflavescens), the Lord Howe gerygone (Gerygone insularis), the Lord Howe fantail (Rhipidura fuliginosa cervina), the Lord Howe thrush (Turdus poliocephalus vinitinctus), the robust white-eye (Zosterops strenuus) and the Lord Howe starling (Aplonis fusca hulliana). The extinction of so many native birds is similar to extinctions on several other islands, such as the Mascarenes.
## See also
- List of recently extinct bird species
|
40,996,456 |
Lythronax
| 1,169,979,349 |
Genus of tyrannosaurid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period
|
[
"Campanian genera",
"Cretaceous Utah",
"Fossil taxa described in 2013",
"Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument",
"Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of North America",
"Monotypic dinosaur genera",
"Paleontology in Utah",
"Taxa named by Philip J. Currie",
"Taxa named by Scott D. Sampson",
"Tyrannosaurids"
] |
Lythronax (LYE-thro-nax) is a genus of tyrannosaurid dinosaur that lived in North America around 81.9-81.5 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. The only known specimen was discovered in Utah in the Wahweap Formation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in 2009, and it consists of a partial skull and skeleton. In 2013, it became the basis of the new genus and species Lythronax argestes; the generic name Lythronax means "gore king", and the specific name argestes originates from the Greek poet Homer's name for the wind from the southwest, in reference to the specimen's geographic provenance in North America.
Size estimates for Lythronax have ranged between 5 and 8 m (16 and 26 ft) in length, and between 0.5 and 2.5 t (1,100 and 5,500 lb) in weight. It was a heavily built tyrannosaurid, and as a member of that group, it would have had small, two-fingered forelimbs, strong hindlimbs, and a very robust skull. The rear part of the skull of Lythronax appears to have been very broad, with eye sockets that faced forwards to a similar degree as seen in Tyrannosaurus. Lythronax had 11 tooth sockets in the maxilla bone of the upper jaw; most tyrannosaurids had more. The frontmost teeth were the largest, the longest being almost 13 cm (5 in) long. Other details of the skull and skeleton which distinguished Lythronax from other tyrannosaurids included the s-shaped outer margin of the maxilla and a process of the astragalus of the ankle, a projection that expanded further upwards compared to its relatives.
The holotype was found in the Reynolds Point Member of the Wahweap Formation, which dates to the Campanian stage of the Cretaceous. Lythronax is thus the oldest known member of the family Tyrannosauridae, and it is thought to have been more basal than Tyrannosaurus. Due to its age, Lythronax is important for understanding the evolutionary origins of tyrannosaurids, including the development of their anatomical specializations. The forward-facing eyes of Lythronax gave it depth perception, which may have been useful during pursuit or ambush predation.
## Discovery and naming
In 2009, Scott Richardson of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was searching for fossils with a co-worker in the Wahweap Formation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, southern Utah, when they came across a leg and nasal bone of a theropod dinosaur in the Nipple Butte area. Richardson contacted a team of paleontologists at the University of Utah, who were excited but initially skeptical, since theropod fossils had not been discovered in the area before. They were sent a photo of the nasal bone from which they identified it as belonging to a tyrannosaur, which was likely a new species because it came from an age with no known members of that group. The fossil remains were carefully excavated over a year by a joint team from the BLM and the Natural History Museum of Utah (UMNH). The locality, which is public land, was designated as UMNH VP 1501. Prior to the dinosaur's formal description, it had been referred to as the "Nipple Butte Tyrannosaur" or "Wahweap tyrannosaurid".
The specimen, UMNH VP 20200 (with the prefix denoting its storage in the UMNH), was made the holotype of the new genus and species Lythronax argestes by paleontologist Mark A. Loewen and colleagues in 2013. The generic name is derived from the Greek words lythron (λύθρον), meaning "gore", and anax (ἄναξ), meaning "king". The specific name argestes (ἀργεστής) is a Greek name used by the poet Homer for the wind from the southwest, in reference to where the specimen was found within North America. In full, the scientific name can be translated as "gore king (or "king of gore") from the southwest". Loewen stated that the suffix meaning "king" in the name of Lythronax was intended to allude to its later, similar relative Tyrannosaurus rex. The prefix meaning "gore" was chosen to exemplify "its presumed lifestyle as a predator with its head covered in the blood of a dead animal".
The holotype and single known specimen of Lythronax consists of a partial skull and skeleton, which includes the right maxilla, both nasals, the right frontal, the left jugal, the left quadrate, the right laterosphenoid, the right palatine, the left dentary, the left splenial, the left surangular, the left prearticular, a dorsal rib, a caudal chevron, both pubic bones, the left tibia and fibula, and left second and fourth metatarsals. In the paper that named Lythronax, the authors also described a new specimen of the geologically younger tyrannosaur Teratophoneus (which had been named in 2011); this genus is known from the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase–Escalante, and the two tyrannosaurs were used to investigate the evolutionary and geographical origins of the family Tyrannosauridae. Based on the paper's conclusions, the UMNH referred to Lythronax as a "great-uncle" of Tyrannosaurus on their website.
In 2017, the US government announced plans to shrink the Grand Staircase–Escalante (to little over half its size) and Bears Ears monuments to enable coal mining and other energy development on the land; this was the largest reduction of US national monuments in history. Lythronax itself was one of two dinosaurs from the former monument mentioned in the presidential proclamation, along with Diabloceratops. American paleontologist Scott D. Sampson (a co-describer of Lythronax), who had overseen much of the early research at the monument, expressed fear that such a move would threaten further discoveries. Media outlets stressed the importance of the area's fossil discoveries—including more than 25 new taxa—while some highlighted Lythronax as one of the significant finds. The US government was subsequently sued by a group of scientists, environmentalists, and Native Americans; in 2021, the monument was restored to its former extent by the subsequent administration.
## Description
At the time Lythronax was announced, news sites reported size estimates of about 7.3–8 m (24–26 ft) in length and around 2.5 t (5,500 lb) in weight, based on comparisons to the much larger relative Tyrannosaurus; Loewen stated that it may have grown even larger. American paleontologist Gregory S. Paul gave a lower estimate of 5 m (16 ft) in length and a weight of only 500 kg (1,100 lb) in 2016. In 2019, based on volumetric analysis, the size of the holotype was estimated at 6.8 m (22 ft) in length, 2.3 m (7.5 ft) in hip height and 1.4 t (1.5 short tons) in body mass. Lythronax was a relatively robust tyrannosaurid. Like other members of the group, it would have possessed small, two-fingered forelimbs, large and strong hindlimbs, broad jaws, and a very robustly constructed skull. Although earlier small-bodied members of the superfamily Tyrannosauroidea possessed protofeathers, their presence could have varied between species or the age of an individual.
Lythronax had a relatively short snout and a broad skull (width over 40% of the length), as in other tyrannosaurids. The nasal bones along the top of the snout were much wider at the front than the middle, unlike in other tyrannosaurids. Viewed from above, the outer margins of the skull (formed by the maxilla and jugal bones) were strongly sigmoid-shaped (or s-shaped). Along with the width of the frontal bone (a bone at the top of the skull), this appeared to have made the rear part of Lythronax's skull very broad, with orbits (eye sockets) that faced nearly forwards. These features are otherwise only known in Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus; earlier-diverging tyrannosaurids had less forward-facing orbits, and the rears of their skulls were narrower.
Lythronax was also distinct in that the surfaces of the frontal bone that contacted the prefrontal and postorbital bones at its front and rear sides were separated by only a narrow groove. The maxillae of Lythronax were robust and strongly convex along their outer margins, as in all other known tyrannosaurids, but differed in their sigmoid-shaped margins. Lythronax had 11 alveoli (tooth sockets) in each maxilla, a trait shared with no tyrannosaurs other than Teratophoneus and Bistahieversor (other tyrannosaurs had 12 or more maxillary alveoli). The maxillary teeth were heterodont (differentiated), the first five being much larger than those following. Some of the frontmost teeth were almost 13 cm (5 in) long. The teeth were similar to bananas in shape, robust, and serrated. As in Tyrannosaurus, the shelf of the palate was well developed.
The jugal bone (or "cheek" bone) was robust, and had a broad postorbital process (which projected upwards from the jugal to contact the postorbital bone), unlike other tyrannosaurs except Bistahieversor, Tyrannosaurus and Tarbosaurus. The front border of the postorbital process had a strong process which indicates that Lythronax had a large subocular flange (a projection into the lower part of the orbit), dissimilar to the smaller ones of other tyrannosaurids. Each ramus of the dentary (half of the tooth-bearing portion of the lower jaw) was strongly concave towards the outer side (bowing inwards along the length of the skull). This mirrored the contours of the maxilla of the upper jaw, and the strong expansion of the rear skull; this was similar to Bistahieversor, Tyrannosaurus, and Tarbosaurus, but unlike other tyrannosauroids. The dentary was also deep at the rear end, indicating that the following part of the mandible was comparable to Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus in depth, but not to other tyrannosaurids. Like other tyrannosaurids, the surangular bone behind the dentary had a deep and well-developed shelf just in front of where the jaw articulated with the skull, and Lythronax was similar to Tyrannosaurus in that this shelf had a concave upper surface.
Though the postcranial skeleton of Lythronax is poorly known, the known remains of the pubis (part of the pelvis) and the hindlimb show features typical within Tyrannosauridae. The pubic boot, an expansion on the lower end of the pubis, had a large forward-directed process as in all tyrannosaurids. In Lythronax, the pubic boot was large and comparatively deep, most similar to those of Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but dissimilar to the less expanded pubic boots of Teratophoneus, Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, and Daspletosaurus. The fibula, a bone of the lower leg, had a deep midline depression on its upper end, as in other tyrannosaurids. In Lythronax, the astragalus of the ankle had an ascending process above its articulation with the foot which was expanded further upwards compared to its relatives.
## Classification
Lythronax argestes belongs to the family Tyrannosauridae, a family of large-bodied coelurosaurs; most tyrannosaurid genera are known from North America and Asia. Based on its stratigraphic position, Lythronax is the oldest tyrannosaurid discovered so far. Prior to Lythronax being formally named, Zanno and colleagues noted in 2013 that the holotype specimen was likely distinct from Teratophoneus and Bistahieversor, both likewise from southern Utah. This would mean there were at least three tyrannosaurid genera present in the Western Interior Basin during the Campanian stage. A phylogenetic analysis conducted by Zanno and colleagues placed all three taxa within a single group of Tyrannosauridae to the exclusion of all other members of the group.
A detailed phylogenetic analysis, conducted by Loewen and colleagues to accompany their 2013 description of Lythronax, based on 303 cranial and 198 postcranial features, placed it and Teratophoneus within the subfamily Tyrannosaurinae. Lythronax was a sister taxon of a group consisting of the Maastrichtian taxa Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus and the late Campanian Zhuchengtyrannus. It was more closely related to this group than other taxa such as Daspletosaurus and Teratophoneus, which were younger than Lythronax but older than the group.
In 2017, American paleontologists Stephen Brusatte and Thomas D. Carr published a new phylogenetic analysis of Tyrannosauroidea, including a more comprehensive suite of anatomical characteristics and taxa, that disagreed with the results of Loewen and colleagues. While the tribe Alioramini was outside Tyrannosauridae in the analysis by Loewen and colleagues, Brusatte and Carr placed that group as the most basal (early-diverging or "primitive") group within Tyrannosaurinae. Conversely, Loewen and colleagues found Bistahieversor to be a derived ("advanced") tyrannosaurine closely related to the likewise derived Teratophoneus and Lythronax, while Brusatte and Carr placed it in a more basal position directly outside Tyrannosauridae, with both Teratophoneus and Lythronax as basal tyrannosaurines. It was suggested that both of these results stemmed from an over-weighting of some features by Loewen and colleagues, which resulted in the long-snouted alioramin forms being excluded from the short-snouted tyrannosaurines, and the placement of Bistahieversor and Lythronax closer to Tyrannosaurus than otherwise. The results of the two contrasting analyses are shown in the cladograms below:
Topology 1: Loewen and colleagues, 2013
Topology 2: Brusatte and Carr, 2017
In a popular book published in 2016, Paul suggested that Lythronax argestes may be a member of the genus Tyrannosaurus, and remarked that derived tyrannosaurids "are being badly oversplit at the genus level". Subsequent publications—including both taxonomic and phylogenetic analyses—have retained the species in the separate genus Lythronax.
## Paleobiogeography
During the Late Cretaceous period (around 95 million years ago), the Western Interior Seaway isolated western North America (Laramidia) from eastern North America (Appalachia), and occasionally isolated depositional basins from each other. This led to the development of highly endemic ecosystems in Laramidia; these ecosystems have also roughly been divided into a northern province and a southern province, but such a clean division is contested. Like many Laramidian dinosaur lineages, the evolutionary history of tyrannosaurids—which are limited in distribution to Asia and Laramidia—is characterized by faunal interchange between the two continents. The sequence of interchange events which occurred among Laramidian tyrannosaurids is unclear, and the diverse tyrannosauroids which have been discovered in southern Laramidia (including Lythronax, Teratophoneus, and Bistahieversor) have complicated their evolutionary history further. In particular, an unresolved question is whether Tyrannosaurus originated from Asian tyrannosaurids or from south Laramidian tyrannosaurids.
Based on their phylogenetic results, Zanno and colleagues proposed that the then-unnamed Lythronax displayed features that united tyrannosaurids from southern Laramidia to the exclusion of other genera. While Loewen and colleagues did not recover a unique group of southern taxa, they did resolve all three as being closely related to each other and basal to a group of larger, later forms. From these results, Loewen and colleagues suggested that there was significant biogeographic division between northern Laramidian and southern Laramidian forms with limited interchange. Also, because they found Alioramini to be placed outside Tyrannosauridae, and the Asian genera Tarbosaurus and Zhuchengtyrannus in a group excluding all other tyrannosaurids, Loewen and colleagues proposed that there was only a single interchange of tyrannosaurids from North America to Asia. They suggested the interchange took place during the late Campanian, when global sea levels fell, Tyrannosaurus being descended from North American forms from before such migration took place.
Due to their differing phylogenetic results, the biogeographic conclusions of Loewen and colleagues were disputed by Brusatte and Carr. Since Bistahieversor from southern Laramidia was placed outside Tyrannosauridae, and Teratophoneus from Utah nested closest to the Alaskan Nanuqsaurus, Brusatte and Carr instead suggested that there were dynamic and recurrent interchanges of tyrannosaurid fauna between northern and southern Laramidia, and rejected the presence of endemic provinces. The Asian taxa Tarbosaurus, Zhuchengtyrannus, Qianzhousaurus, and Alioramus were also placed within Tyrannosaurinae, among North American genera. Brusatte and Carr proposed that at least two continental interchanges occurred, where Tyrannosaurinae originated in Asia and migrated to North America after the divergence of alioramins, and then returned to Asia again with Tarbosaurus and Zhuchengtyrannus. Another possible scenario suggested by Brusatte and Carr was that two separate migrations to Asia occurred, which separately gave rise to alioramins and larger, later forms. In both scenarios, Tyrannosaurus, nested among Asian taxa, was an "invasive migrant species that spread across Laramidia" from Asia in the Maastrichtian.
The hypotheses of Asian-North American migration of Brusatte and Carr were supported by a later run of their analysis by Canadian paleontologist Jared Voris and colleagues in 2020. However, Voris and colleagues amended the original analysis through the additions of the new genera Dynamoterror from southern Laramidia (New Mexico) and Thanatotheristes from northern Laramidia (Alberta), and they were able to replicate the north–south divisions of tyrannosaurids suggested by Loewen and colleagues. The southern taxa Teratophoneus, Dynamoterror, and Lythronax formed an exclusive group (to the exclusion of Nanuqsaurus, contrary to Brusatte and Carr) of short- and deep-snouted taxa outside a group of more derived northern Laramidian forms, and the southern Laramidian forms also had a separate skeletal morphotype. Voris and colleagues suggested these morphological differences arose for ecological reasons, possibly including prey composition or feeding strategies. As the major prey groups were the same between northern and southern Laramidia when tyrannosaurids lived in those regions, Voris and colleagues concluded the differences in cranial anatomy arose from differences in feeding strategies.
## Paleobiology
Lythronax differed from most other tyrannosaurids due to its shortened skull with a broadened rear, as well as its forward-directed orbits (which were a direct consequence of its skull morphology). No other tyrannosauroids had such forward-directed orbits except for Tyrannosaurus and Tarbosaurus, although more derived tyrannosauroids generally had larger and more forward-directed orbits than basal tyrannosauroids. The discovery of Lythronax suggests that these characters had appeared by at least 80 million years ago.
The forward-directed orbits of Lythronax would have enhanced the field of view of its binocular vision by increasing the separation between the orbits and making their lines of sight more parallel to each other (i.e. reducing the optic axis divergence), which would have given Lythronax depth perception. In 2006, paleontologist Kent Stevens suggested that the similar orbits of Tyrannosaurus would have aided either pursuit predation by the observation of distant prey and the three-dimensional detection of obstacles, or ambush predation by the ability to judge the timing and direction of lunges.
As a tyrannosaurid, Lythronax would likely have shared the group's other specializations to predatory lifestyles, including large body size; a large skull with powerful jaw muscles and robust teeth; reinforced sutures holding the skull bones together; and relatively small forelimbs. The teeth and jaw muscles of Lythronax would have contributed to strong bite forces, for not just carving out chunks of flesh but also crushing bone. The stresses and loads of these bites would have been effectively absorbed by the fused, arched nasal bones and the reinforced sutures.
## Paleoenvironment
Lythronax was found in terrestrial sedimentary rocks belonging to the lower part of the Reynolds Point Member of the Wahweap Formation. The age of the rocks that yielded Lythronax have been estimated to be 81.49 Ma, with a range of uncertainty between 81.86-81.45 Ma. The overall Wahweap Formation has been radiometrically dated as being between 82.2 and 77.3 million years old. During the time Lythronax lived, the Western Interior Seaway was at its widest extent, almost completely isolating southern Laramidia from the rest of North America. The area where dinosaurs existed included lakes, floodplains, and rivers, which flowed east. The Wahweap Formation is part of the Grand Staircase region, an immense sequence of sedimentary rock layers that stretch south from Bryce Canyon National Park through Zion National Park and into the Grand Canyon. Among other lines of evidence, the presence of rapidly deposited sediments suggests a wet, seasonal climate.
Lythronax was likely the largest predator of its ecosystem. It shared its paleoenvironment with other dinosaurs, such as the hadrosaurs Acristavus and Adelolophus, the ceratopsian Diabloceratops, and unnamed ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs. Vertebrates present in the Wahweap Formation at the time included freshwater fish, bowfins, abundant rays and sharks, turtles such as Compsemys, crocodilians, and lungfish. Numerous mammals lived in this region, which included several genera of multituberculates, cladotherians, marsupials, and placental insectivores. The mammals were more primitive than those that lived in the younger Kaiparowits Formation. Trace fossils are relatively abundant in the Wahweap Formation, and suggest the presence of crocodylomorphs, as well as ornithischian and theropod dinosaurs. Evidence of invertebrate activity in this formation ranged from fossilized insect burrows in petrified logs to fossils of mollusks, large crabs, and a wide diversity of gastropods and ostracods.
## See also
- Timeline of tyrannosaur research
|
607,964 |
Hi-5 (Australian group)
| 1,173,513,491 |
Australian children's musical group
|
[
"1998 establishments in Australia",
"2019 disestablishments in Australia",
"ARIA Award winners",
"Australian children's musical groups",
"Australian children's musicians",
"Australian children's television presenters",
"Helpmann Award winners",
"Logie Award winners",
"Musical groups disestablished in 2019",
"Musical groups established in 1998",
"Musical groups from Sydney",
"Musical quintets",
"New South Wales musical groups",
"Sony Music Australia artists"
] |
Hi-5 were an Australian children's musical group formed in 1998 in association with the children's television series of the same name. Helena Harris and Posie Graeme-Evans created the television series for the Nine Network, which premiered in 1999. The group were made up of five performers who entertained and educated preschool children through music, movement and play. Kellie Crawford, Kathleen de Leon Jones, Nathan Foley, Tim Harding and Charli Robinson were the founding members. By the end of 2008, all of the original line-up had left, and the group's membership changed several more times after that. They collectively starred in several television series, released albums, and performed on worldwide tours. The television series features puppet characters Chatterbox and Jup Jup, who were included in the group's live stage shows.
Hi-5 were one of Australia's highest paid entertainment groups, placing in the Business Review Weekly's annual list several times, earning an estimated A\$18 million in 2007. As employees of the brand, once owned by the Nine Network, the members of Hi-5 did not hold equity. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) certified their albums as double platinum (It's a Party), platinum (Jump and Jive with Hi-5, Boom Boom Beat, It's a Hi-5 Christmas) and gold (Celebrate). Four of them reached the top 10 on the ARIA Albums Chart; It's a Party (number four, July 2000), Boom Boom Beat (number three, August 2001), It's a Hi-5 Christmas (number four, December 2001) and Hi-5 Hits (number ten, July 2003). By 2004, the original line-up had received three Logie Television Awards for Most Outstanding Children's Program and five consecutive ARIA Music Awards for Best Children's Album.
The group's later iterations did not enjoy the same popularity or critical success as its original line-up. Hi-5 were last nominated for a major Australian award in 2012 and last released an album in 2014. The Nine Network sold the brand in 2012 to Malaysian-based group Asiasons, who shifted its commercial focus to the Southeast Asian market. After a short-lived television revival in 2017, the group's production company wholly relocated to Singapore and began employing a roster of temporary performers for touring purposes until 2019.
## History
### 1998–1999: Formation
Hi-5 were formed in September 1998 in Sydney, Australia, as a children's musical group. Television producer Helena Harris, who had worked on Bananas in Pyjamas, co-created Hi-5 as a concept for a new television show of the same name for the Nine Network. She and co-producer Posie Graeme-Evans developed the series as preschool entertainment, blending educational theories with a musical appeal to capture children's attention. Harris said that while Hi-5 was predominantly a television series, its music was able to be differentiated from the show. Featuring five performers, the cast were intended to act as the audience's older siblings or friends, rather than adults teaching children. Harris was inspired to develop a show with broad appeal and accessible themes such as family and animals. She modelled the group's style on the fast-paced nature of contemporary music videos and strove to allude to items of current interest (such as relevant curriculum as well as popular jokes, films and music) to keep children engaged. Harris recalled watching the Spice Girls, whose dance moves she believed preschoolers could copy. The creators saw the need for "life-affirming" television for rapidly maturing preschoolers and found most children learn from programs which use music and movement.
After auditions for the group in June 1998 (narrowing down around 300 people to only five), the television pilot for Hi-5 was produced in mid-1998. The original cast consisted of Kellie Crawford (née Hoggart), Kathleen de Leon Jones, Nathan Foley, Tim Harding and Charli Robinson. After being commissioned, production began in October 1998. The first series premiered in April 1999 on the Nine Network. In September, Sony Music released their debut album, Jump and Jive with Hi-5, which reached number 33 on the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Albums Chart.
### 2000–2006: Early success
Hi-5 won the 2000 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Children's Program in recognition of their television program, and the ARIA Award for Best Children's Album for Jump and Jive with Hi-5. Their releases consistently received album accreditations; Celebrate was certified as gold, while Jump and Jive with Hi-5, Boom Boom Beat and It's a Hi-5 Christmas went platinum, and It's a Party received double platinum status. Four of their albums reached the top 10 on the ARIA Albums Chart; It's a Party (number four, July 2000), Boom Boom Beat (number three, August 2001), It's a Hi-5 Christmas (number four, December 2001) and Hi-5 Hits (number ten, July 2003). It was reported in 2005 that a feature film starring the group was in early development, as well as arrangements for a single release.
Hi-5 toured nationally for up to eight months of every year, with sell-out concerts in venues such as the Sydney Opera House. The quintet's production of Hi-5 Alive won the 2002 Helpmann Award for Best Presentation for Children, while their Space Magic production was nominated in the same category in 2006. The group first toured the UK in 2004, and in 2005 performed in arenas around Australia to maximise the audience capacity. In addition to their regular tours, Hi-5 appeared annually at Vision Australia's Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne, broadcast live by the Nine Network on Christmas Eve.
### 2006–2008: Replacement of original members
In early 2006, de Leon Jones announced she was pregnant, and would take maternity leave from April onwards. Sun Park was introduced as her temporary replacement; de Leon Jones gave birth to her first child in July. Park was part of the television series filming in 2006 and toured with the group across Australia. In July 2006, de Leon Jones said she was intent on returning to Hi-5; however, in July 2007, made the decision to leave the group permanently to focus on being a mother. Park took her place as a full-time member.
A serious motorcycle accident in June 2007 left Harding unable to keep up with the pace of Hi-5's performances. Just a few days before this, Stevie Nicholson had been hired as an understudy and was put straight to work as a temporary replacement for Harding. The group toured the Hi-5 Circus Stageshow in 2007; the show adopted a circus theme and incorporated tricks such as trapeze, tightrope walking and gymnastics. They had only one week of training; some members benefitted from prior experience. Nicholson debuted on tour with the Circus show in Singapore. Harding permanently departed in November after recovering from his injuries and was replaced by Nicholson.
Robinson (then referred to as Delaney) exited from the group in February 2008. She expressed an interest in proving herself as an actor for an adult audience and said she would help find a replacement member. After leaving, she established a career in the Australian media industry as a presenter. In April, Casey Burgess was revealed as Robinson's replacement and began touring with the group.
In March 2008, the Nine Network, along with production company Southern Star, purchased the Hi-5 brand. The change of ownership saw Harris and Graeme-Evans end their involvement with the franchise, which was placed under the direction of Martin Hersov and Cathy Payne, Nine and Southern Star executives.
By November 2008, the remaining original cast members had stated their intent to withdraw from the group. Crawford reported in October that she would be leaving at the end of the year to explore other options, and a month later, Foley outlined his plan to exit and focus on his adult music career. In December, Park also stated she would be departing the group since she had expected only to be a temporary replacement. The Daily Telegraph's Sydney Confidential reporter alleged that Hi-5's production company had asked Crawford and Foley to leave, and that the producers were "opting to recruit younger, cheaper performers". Neither of them responded to these reports, but Park denied the industry rumours, saying that there had been no pressure for any of them to resign. The departing members gave their final performance at Carols by Candlelight on Christmas Eve in Melbourne.
### 2009–2013: Second generation
In February 2009, Lauren Brant, Fely Irvine and Tim Maddren joined Nicholson and Burgess to complete the group's new line-up. Burgess described the change as a difficult transition period that led to uncertainty over their future. They toured regional Australian locations in early 2010 to build a new audience. The group celebrated the 500th episode of the television series in 2010, and in 2011, they rerecorded several of the original line-up's songs. They did not receive the same positive critical reception as the original members; one reviewer found fault with the new line-up's vocal abilities. The group joined World Vision Australia as ambassadors in 2009, beginning their work in the Philippines while on a promotional tour, and completing a volunteer trip to Cambodia in 2012. They also became representatives of the Starlight Children's Foundation in 2009; their work included regular visits to hospitals while on tour.
Irvine's final performance as part of Hi-5 was at Carols by Candlelight on Christmas Eve 2011. Nine Network representatives said she would leave to explore "other career options". Her replacement, Dayen Zheng, joined the group in January 2012. Burgess and Maddren departed in early 2013; Maddren had secured a role in the Australian musical production of The Addams Family, while Burgess had decided to further her solo music career.
In June 2012, the Nine Network announced that because of their ongoing financial difficulties, they had sold the Hi-5 brand in its entirety to Malaysian-based equity group, Asiasons. Datuk Jared Lim, Asiasons's managing director, described plans to expand Hi-5 throughout Southeast Asia, while keeping the group's presence in Australia intact. Julie Greene, former producer of the television series, assumed the role of executive creative director.
### 2013–2016: Third generation, shift to Southeast Asia
New members Mary Lascaris and Ainsley Melham joined Nicholson, Brant, and Zheng in early 2013. The audition process was filmed and turned into a documentary-style film, Some Kind of Wonderful, which premiered exclusively through Hoyts Cinemas in Australia in March. The press branded this line-up as a "new generation" of the group.
Throughout this period, the production company shifted the commercial focus of the group to the Southeast Asian market, with an increase in Asian touring locations. In 2014, the group debuted in the Middle East with a Dubai show and toured Bangkok for the first time in ten years. They returned to the Philippines in 2015 for an encore season after a sold-out run of concerts the previous year. A new television series entitled Hi-5 House was filmed in Singapore and Malaysia between 2013 and 2015, and aired on pay-TV channel Nick Jr. in Australia and Disney Junior in Asia; its success in Asia resulted in an Asian Television Award for Best Preschool Program in 2015. The program premiered worldwide on online television streaming service Netflix in March 2016.
Brant's final performances were in July 2014 for the Australian House Hits tour, in which the cast wore costumes she designed under her new fashion label, Loliboli. Her successor, Tanika Anderson, was already working with the group as an understudy and puppeteer. Nicholson departed in December 2015 to further his performing career and promote his children's book, Superdudes. He was replaced by Lachie Dearing, who was introduced on tour in January 2016. After being cast in an Australian musical production of Xanadu in January 2016, Melham left the group, and new member Gabe Brown took his place in February. Brown was later succeeded by Chris White.
### 2016–2019: Fourth generation, short-lived television revival
The Nine Network renewed its partnership with the Hi-5 franchise in October 2016 and expressed plans to revive the original television series with a new cast in 2017. As a result, Zheng, Lascaris, Anderson and White gave their last performances in December 2016. After auditions were held in November 2016, new members Courtney Clarke, Shay Clifford, Joe Kalou and Bailey Spalding were revealed in December, joining Dearing to form the fourth generation of the group. The quintet debuted at Carols by Candlelight on Christmas Eve, Hi-5's first appearance at the Nine event since 2012. The new television series was filmed in Malaysia and premiered in May 2017 on Nine's multichannel, 9Go! in Australia. Additional filming in 2018 was halted before the Australian production office was closed and the brand was relocated to Singapore. All five members departed the group, and the brand used temporary touring members for the remainder of 2018. The franchise continued employing non-permanent performers for touring purposes in 2019.
## Musical style
Hi-5 were described as "a pop group for kids" by Foley in 2004. Chris Harriott was the group's primary composer, writing thousands of their tracks. Graeme-Evans and Harriott had worked together when he scored the themes for the teen dramas series, The Miraculous Mellops (1991) and Mirror, Mirror (1995), and he had worked on his own in Australian theatre. The creators approached him and tasked him with writing top ten songs for an age range of two to six. Harriott worked regularly with a group of lyricists, including Chris Phillips, Leone Carey and Lisa Hoppe. Foley cited the Wiggles as an influence of Hi-5, but noted the respective groups had different musical styles, with Harriott's compositions resembling top 40 rather than nursery rhymes. Original member of the Wiggles and classical musician Phillip Wilcher commended the gentle educational appeal of Hi-5's music, and declared that they seemed to "know the subtle difference between childlike and childish."
### Educational value
Hi-5, and the related television series, blended educational aspects with music and movement, while regularly updating the music and costumes to remain "abreast of the times". The members were presented as older siblings or friends to their young audience, rather than appearing as adults teaching them. The series' creators loosely based it on an underlying educational structure influenced by Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. The producers recognised that most children have a preferred style of learning, and structured the group's work to have each member modelling skills in a specific area such as kinesthetic learning and musicality. Harris observed most children would identify with the presenter who demonstrated their favoured learning style. According to the group's website, Hi-5 incorporated Piaget's theory of cognitive development. The educational theory caters to a wide range of ages in the audience while being aimed primarily at children aged two to eight. Harris intended for the central themes promoted to be universally accessible, as she believed children are essentially the same around the world. The pace and design of the group's performances were influenced by that of contemporary music videos. They encouraged participation at their live stage shows through interactive elements with which the children engage. Group members expressed that performances were adapted to include more songs and physical elements in countries where English is not the main spoken language.
## Brand and finances
Hi-5 brand creators, Harris and Graeme-Evans, originally owned it under their joint production company Kids Like Us. In contrast to their peer entertainers, the Wiggles, the cast of Hi-5 did not hold equity, but were employees of the brand. Crawford noted, "the money system has to go a long way around before it gets to us". In March 2008, the Nine Network and production company Southern Star purchased the Hi-5 brand. The franchise was placed under the direction of Martin Hersov and Cathy Payne, Nine and Southern Star executives, while Harris and Graeme-Evans ended their involvement with the company with the sale.
The brand dropped from a net worth of A\$18 million in 2009 to A\$9.7 million in 2010. In June 2012, the Nine Network sold the Hi-5 brand to Asian equity group, Asiasons, through a private fund. The company planned to expand the brand throughout Southeast Asia, while maintaining its presence in Australia. Former series' producer Julie Greene became the brand's executive creative director. The Hi-5 brand was consolidated under Tremendous Entertainment in 2014, after the equity fund was sold. The Nine Network renewed its partnership with the Hi-5 franchise in October 2016 and participated in the production of a new television series in 2017. In September 2018, the Australian production office was closed; the entire franchise relocated to Singapore.
The franchise launched a series of international versions; each group toured and produced local adaptations of the television series. In 2002, an American version of Hi-5 was created; the group filmed for television, recorded albums and toured. By 2005, franchises local to India, South America and Germany were planned, but these did not eventuate. A television series and a tour introduced the UK group in 2008. After the brand's sale in 2012, there was a return to licensing international groups. In 2014, a Latin American group was created, followed by a local version for the Philippines in 2015, and the introduction of an Indonesian group in 2017.
## Reception
### Commercial performance
Business Review Weekly's annual Australian income list recognised the group as one of the country's highest paid entertainment groups, estimating annual earnings of A\$18 million in 2007. The franchise was reported as Australia's highest selling children's music property in 2007. The original quintet consistently received album ARIA accreditations for their releases: Celebrate was accredited as gold, while Jump and Jive with Hi-5, Boom Boom Beat and It's a Hi-5 Christmas went platinum. It's a Party received double platinum status. Four of the original line-up's albums reached the top 10 on the ARIA Albums Chart – It's a Party peaked at number four in July 2000; Boom Boom Beat reached number three in August 2001; It's a Hi-5 Christmas at number four in December 2001; and their greatest hits album, Hi-5 Hits, reached number ten in July 2003.
### Critical reviews
Critics in the Australian press often described Hi-5 as quality children's entertainment. The original line-up were praised both as a cohesive ensemble, and for their talents at singing and dancing. Reviewers highlighted the group members' energy and enthusiasm. Hi-5's music has been described as simple, "infectious", and inspired by pop music. The brand's employment of diverse performers, to serve as positive role models for children, was well-received. The group's concert tours were admired for the fast pace of the shows and the bright colours of the staging design. Reviewing the Circus Stageshow in 2008, Nicole Bittar of The Age described the members as versatile and cheerful, and commended their circus skills. A 2015 concert was viewed by The Daily Telegraph as "well-choreographed and performed". The group's productions have also been noted for their humour, incorporating slapstick elements inspired by pantomime comedy. Reporters said they had a teenage and adult following, with dedicated older fans; adult followers in the Philippines would use the group's songs to learn English.
Later iterations of the group were criticised for their performances, and the brand was criticised for frequent membership changes. In her blog for The Daily Telegraph in 2011, Sarrah Le Marquand found fault with Brant's musical abilities, claiming that while she was an enthusiastic entertainer, she had limited vocal talent. The reporter went on to suggest the entire line-up at the time were "melodically challenged". A business blog argued that the group's target audience was unclear; while the franchise was aimed at preschoolers, the music and choreography seemed too complicated and like it was designed for an audience of older children. The writer stated that the group had undefined member roles and that the performers attempted to upstage each other. Similarly, in a 2011 survey by the Australian Council on Children and the Media, parents condemned the costuming of the group, stating it was inappropriate for the audience and "premature sexualisation". Commentators have expressed disapproval of the franchise frequently replacing its performers with new talent; the newer line-ups were described as unrecognisable. Critiquing the debut of a new line-up at Carols by Candlelight in 2016, David Knox wrote that the performance was unmemorable, and suggested that their strengths were not demonstrated at the event.
## Members
Original members
- Kellie Crawford (1998–2008)
- Kathleen de Leon Jones (1998–2006)
- Nathan Foley (1998–2008)
- Tim Harding (1998–2007)
- Charli Robinson (1998–2008)
Former members
- Sun Park (2006–2008)
- Stevie Nicholson (2007–2015)
- Casey Burgess (2008–2013)
- Lauren Brant (2009–2014)
- Fely Irvine (2009–2011)
- Tim Maddren (2009–2013)
- Dayen Zheng (2012–2016)
- Mary Lascaris (2013–2016)
- Ainsley Melham (2013–2016)
- Tanika Anderson (2014–2016)
- Lachie Dearing (2016–2018)
- Gabe Brown (2016)
- Chris White (2016)
- Courtney Clarke (2016–2018)
- Shay Clifford (2016–2018)
- Joe Kalou (2016–2018)
- Bailey Spalding (2016–2018)
### Timeline
## Discography
- Jump and Jive with Hi-5 (1999)
- It's a Party (2000)
- Boom Boom Beat (2001)
- It's a Hi-5 Christmas (2001)
- Celebrate (2002)
- Hi-5 Holiday (2003)
- Jingle Jangle Jingle with Hi-5 (2004)
- Making Music (2005)
- Wish Upon a Star (2006)
- Wow! (2007)
- Planet Earth (2008)
- Spin Me Round (2009)
- Turn the Music Up! (2010)
- Sing it Loud (2011)
- Hi-5 Hot Hits! (2014)
## Awards and nominations
|
1,466,653 |
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
| 1,167,255,790 |
1999 video game
|
[
"1999 video games",
"Action-adventure games",
"Crystal Dynamics games",
"Dark fantasy video games",
"Dreamcast games",
"Eidos Interactive games",
"Legacy of Kain",
"Nixxes Software games",
"PlayStation (console) games",
"Single-player video games",
"Video games about parallel universes",
"Video games about revenge",
"Video games about vampires",
"Video games about zombies",
"Video games adapted into comics",
"Video games developed in the Netherlands",
"Video games developed in the United States",
"Video games scored by Kurt Harland",
"Video games written by Amy Hennig",
"Windows games"
] |
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is an action-adventure video game developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Eidos Interactive. It was released for the PlayStation and Microsoft Windows in 1999 and for the Dreamcast in 2000. As the second game in the Legacy of Kain series, Soul Reaver is the sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Soul Reaver was followed by three games, one of which, Soul Reaver 2, is a direct sequel.
Taking place 1500 years after the events of Blood Omen, Soul Reaver chronicles the journey of the vampire-turned-wraith Raziel, lieutenant to the vampire lord Kain. Raziel is killed by Kain, but is revived by The Elder God to become his "soul reaver" and to exact revenge. Raziel shares this title with Kain's sword, the Soul Reaver, which he acquires during the game.
Crystal Dynamics began development of the game in 1997, but a deteriorating relationship with Silicon Knights, who had developed Blood Omen, created legal problems. This and other delays forced material originally planned for Soul Reaver to be instead released with later games of the series. Soul Reaver was generally well received by critics and praised for its intriguing gothic story and high-quality graphics. However, the game was criticized for simple and repetitive gameplay and an unsatisfying climax. By 2001, the game sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.
## Gameplay
The player controls Raziel, a disfigured and ghostly vampire. The game is normally shown from a third-person perspective behind Raziel, but players can rotate the viewpoint around him. Gameplay relies largely on shifting between the material and spectral planes of existence to progress through areas. Although interaction with objects is limited in the spectral realm, this can be advantageous, because Raziel can phase through otherwise impassable gates there, and water is insubstantial, allowing him to walk on lakebeds; however, blocks, doors, and switches can be manipulated only in the physical realm. Many puzzles are based on the differences between the two realms; for example, platforms and environment features in one realm may change form to open new paths in the other. Block puzzles are also common and require the rotation, flipping, and moving of large blocks to progress, often with a time limit and while avoiding enemies.
Combat in Soul Reaver is a hack and slash system, involving the use of combinations of various different attacks before a finishing move. Raziel's enemies are grouped into humans, spectral creatures, and most commonly, vampires. Human enemies include peasants, vampire hunters and vampire worshippers. In the spectral realm, players fight minor enemies called Sluagh and the souls of dead vampires who have become wraiths. Each brood of vampire enemies has unique powers reminiscent of their clan leader. Human and spectral enemies can be killed with Raziel's claws or any weapon, but vampires must be bludgeoned into a stunned state and then destroyed by impaling them, setting them on fire, or tossing them into a hazard such as sunlight or water. When killed, enemies leave behind souls that replenish Raziel's health, which automatically decreases in the material realm and increases in the spectral. Possession of the Soul Reaver sword stops automatic degeneration of health in the physical realm, but Raziel loses the sword instantly if he sustains damage and can regain it only by restoring his health to full.
At first, Raziel can jump, glide using his torn wings, move blocks, and pick up and throw objects and enemies. Initially unarmed, he fights using his claws, but can alternatively use weapons such as rocks, torches, spears and staffs, and the Soul Reaver. Raziel can freely shift to the spectral realm, but can return to the material realm only through special portals when at full health. Raziel automatically shifts to the spectral realm if he runs out of health. As the game progresses, Raziel gains the powers of his clan brothers after defeating them and becomes able to phase through gates in the spectral realm and climb walls in the material realm. Initially vulnerable to water, he overcomes this weakness and learns to swim. He also gains the ability to constrict objects and enemies with a band of energy, although this feature was one of the few abilities not to feature in future games. Players can find an ancient relic that gives Raziel the power to fire bolts of telekinetic energy, which cause little damage by themselves but can knock enemies into hazards and push objects from a distance. Baptism in holy flame can transform the Soul Reaver into the Fire Reaver, which can set enemies aflame and adds fire to Raziel's telekinetic bolts. Players can also find magical glyphs that allow Raziel to expend magical energy to attack groups of enemies simultaneously. These glyphs typically involve vampire weaknesses such as sunlight, fire, water, or sound, as well as additions such as telekinetic force (available well before the normal telekinesis becomes available) and the causing of earthquakes to temporarily stun enemies. Glyphs are acquired through finding glyph altars, specific locations in Nosgoth where the skills can be learned, and solving a puzzle before being granted the magical ability. However, Raziel begins the game with access to the 'Shift' glyph, granting the ability to shift between the material and spectral planes, with no glyph altar necessary.
## Plot
### Setting
Soul Reaver takes place within the fictional world of Nosgoth, where the health of the land is tied to the nine Pillars of Nosgoth, and each pillar in turn is represented by a guardian. Before the events of Soul Reaver, the guardians became corrupt, and, after Kain killed eight of them, he discovered he was the final one. Refusing to sacrifice himself to restore the Pillars, he doomed Nosgoth to eternal decay and proceeded to raise his vampire lieutenants, including Raziel, to besiege the land. By the time of Soul Reaver's introduction, the vampires are now the land's dominant species and apex predators, the humans have been decimated, and the vampire tribes have each claimed a region of Nosgoth and turned their attention to internal matters. Unknown to the vampires, beneath Nosgoth lurks The Elder God, an ancient and powerful entity. The Elder God controls the Wheel of Fate, a cycle of reincarnation of souls that circle the Wheel in a loop of predestination; however, because vampires are immortal, their souls do not spin with the Wheel, causing the land to decay as the Wheel stalls. By the time that Raziel is revived centuries after the game's opening cinematic, Nosgoth is on the brink of collapse, little more than a wasteland wracked with cataclysms and earthquakes.
### Characters
The protagonist of Soul Reaver is the vampire-turned-wraith Raziel, whom Kain casts to death at the beginning of the game. Although Kain is the protagonist of the previous game, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, he is the primary antagonist and final boss of Soul Reaver. The Elder God resurrects and assists Raziel, explains the game's controls, and describes previous events in the story. Ariel, who preceded Kain as the guardian of the Pillar of Balance, appears as a spirit and offers Raziel advice on occasion. During his quest, Raziel meets his brothers - Melchiah, Zephon, Rahab and Dumah - who serve as the game's bosses. Each has developed different powers that Raziel partially gains by killing them and devouring their souls. A fifth brother, Turel, was omitted due to time constraints on development.
### Story
Raziel approaches Kain's throne and extends newly grown wings. In an act of seeming jealousy, Kain tears the bones from Raziel's wings and has him thrown into the Lake of the Dead, a large natural whirlpool; however, Raziel is resurrected as a wraith by The Elder God to become his "soul reaver" and kill Kain, thus restoring Nosgoth. With The Elder God's guidance, Raziel adapts to his new form and returns to Nosgoth. Infiltrating a Necropolis inhabited by the Melchahim vampires, Raziel finds his brother Melchiah, who has devolved into a beast unable to sustain his own flesh. After Raziel kills Melchiah and absorbs his soul, he confronts Kain among the ruined Pillars of Nosgoth in the Sanctuary of the Clans. Kain does not appear surprised to see Raziel, apparently having even been expecting him, and implies that he has destroyed Raziel's vampire clan, which only enrages Raziel even further. When Raziel begins to criticize him, Kain simply launches a tirade against him before noting what has become of the empire and engaging him in combat. Kain quickly overpowers Raziel and attempts to strike him down with the Soul Reaver, a powerful sword that absorbs its victims' souls, but the Reaver shatters when it strikes Raziel, and Kain escapes, strangely satisfied. Raziel enters the spectral realm to find the blade's soul-devouring spectral form, which binds itself to him. After this, Raziel meets Ariel, who restores his strength, and learns of Zephon's location from The Elder God.
Raziel ventures into a large cathedral once inhabited by the humans and finds the Zephonim clan. After ascending into the cathedral's spires, he finds that Zephon is now a large insect like creature whose body has merged into the cathedral spire in which he dwells. Raziel kills Zephon and uses the gained power to infiltrate an ancient crypt. There, Raziel discovers coffins for members of the Sarafan, a fanatical order of vampire hunters killed centuries before Kain's rule. To Raziel's horror, he finds the crypt was designated for him and his brothers; as cruel irony, Kain revived the Sarafan to serve him as his vampire sons. Raziel ventures through a secret passage under the crypt and finds a flooded abbey inhabited by the Rahabim clan, whose members have mutated into amphibians; its leader, Rahab, has become a merman. Raziel tells Rahab what he has learned about their human pasts, but Rahab is unmoved, claiming that Kain "saved" them, and attacks. Raziel defeats Rahab and absorbs his soul, then crosses the Lake of the Dead to the abandoned fortress of his brother Dumah. The Elder God explains that the Dumahim vampires were scattered following an invasion of human hunters. Raziel eventually finds Dumah shackled to his throne with his heart pierced. Raziel revives Dumah and leads him into a giant furnace, burning him alive and absorbing his soul.
Afterward, Raziel discovers the Oracle's Cave, where Moebius the Time Streamer once hid the Chronoplast, a magical time machine. Raziel traverses the caves and finds Kain in the Chronoplast's control room. Raziel is angered over what he has learned but Kain says that his actions are justified due to being subject to destiny, and when Raziel confronts him over transforming the Sarafan into vampires, Kain scoffs at his perception of them as noble crusaders defending Nosgoth. Raziel attacks Kain while the latter continues to adjust the Chronoplast's controls. Although Raziel eventually gains an advantage, the Chronoplast activates, and Kain escapes through a time portal, beckoning Raziel to follow. Raziel complies, ignoring warnings from The Elder God. At the end of the game, Raziel emerges from the timeslip and is greeted by Moebius. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver ends on a cliffhanger by showing a postscript, a verse where Moebius comments on the nature of time and his ability to "plunge the fate of planets into chaos", leading directly into the events of Soul Reaver 2.
## Development
Soul Reaver entered development alongside Blood Omen 2 in 1997 and focused on puzzle solving instead of Blood Omen 2's action. During design, the development team created larger areas that could be explored more thoroughly as Raziel acquired new powers, avoiding the "shallow[ness]" of Blood Omen's layout. Crystal Dynamics based Soul Reaver on Silicon Knights' research of vampire mythology for Blood Omen. Other aspects of the game, such as the idea of a fallen vampire who devoured souls, were inspired by the epic poem "Paradise Lost". According to senior designer Richard Lermarchand the "look and feel" of the game was inspired by "stylish vampire flicks...like Blade, Interview with the Vampire and Bram Stoker's Dracula", as well as "the more arty renderings of the old black and white Nosferatu and a great film for the 80s called Near Dark". Character and level designs were influenced by anime and manga, including Vampire Hunter D and the films of Hayao Miyazaki.
The staff aimed to develop gameplay similar to Tomb Raider and used an upgraded version of Gex 3's game engine to generate the three-dimensional game world. According to Lemarchand, they also aimed to combine gameplay with storytelling in a similar manner to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Amy Hennig, the game's director, likened the technological advance from Blood Omen to Soul Reaver to the evolution of The Legend of Zelda series from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64—bringing the franchise into 3D while maintaining a similar style.
Before Soul Reaver's release, the relationship between Silicon Knights and Crystal Dynamics dissolved. Because their research was used, Silicon Knights filed an injunction to stop further promotion of the game. Other delays pushed the release date from October 1998 to August 1999.
These delays forced Crystal Dynamics to cut significant game material, including additional powers for Raziel, a third battle with Kain, and an expanded Glyph system which would have given elemental powers to the Soul Reaver. In an interview, series director Amy Hennig stated that the development team split the original, much larger plans in two after realizing that they had "over-designed the game", given the constraints on time and data. This decision explains Soul Reaver's cliffhanger ending and the appearance of originally planned material in later games. Despite the split, Hennig explained that the team left unused components - such as extra power-ups and enemies - in Soul Reaver's game engine to avoid unforeseen glitches that might have arisen from their removal.
### Audio
Kurt Harland composed most of the music for Soul Reaver; Jim Hedges handled the remaining audio. Harland remarked that, under Amy Hennig's direction, he programmed music to change based on the current gameplay situation - for example, combat or swimming. This variation was accomplished through a custom Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) driver, which altered music based on signals from the game engine. Each vampire tribe had corresponding music; one tribe of vampires was associated with a slow, thumping theme to convey a sense of working machinery. To further fit the music to the environment, the sound team consulted level designers regarding layout and appearance. Music from both Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 was released on a promotional soundtrack in 2001.
For the game's voice acting, Raziel was voiced by Michael Bell, and Tony Jay, who had provided the voice of Mortanius and other characters in Blood Omen, voiced The Elder God. Anna Gunn, Simon Templeman and Richard Doyle reprised their roles from Blood Omen as Ariel, Kain and Moebius. Bell, Templeman and Jay also provided the voices of Melchiah, Dumah and Zephon, respectively, and Neil Ross, who voiced Malek the Paladin and King Ottmar in Blood Omen, voiced Rahab.
## Release
### Marketing
Soul Reaver was showcased at the 1998 E3, where attendees were given free demo discs. Over time, further demo disks were released, including one bundled with Official PlayStation Magazine. Soul Reaver was released for the PC and Sony PlayStation in 1999 and for the Dreamcast version in 2000. The Dreamcast version used a much higher frame rate than did the PlayStation or PC version, and the Dreamcast port had further graphical enhancements. A Japanese release for the game was planned, but canceled. In 2000, Soul Reaver was added to Sony's "Greatest Hits" list, and the combined, global sales of its PlayStation, Dreamcast and computer versions surpassed 1.4 million units by late 2001. Sony later re-released the game for digital download on the PlayStation Network in 2009.
Eidos Interactive, the game's publisher, spent US\$4,000,000 on a pre-release advertising campaign, which included magazine articles, television ads, and a tie-in comic book published by Top Cow Productions. Because such films like Stir of Echoes, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project and The Mummy had premiered earlier in 1999, Soul Reaver's release was considered "ideally timed" for a horror-oriented game. The lack of load times was a key marketing point praised by several reviewers. After release, Eidos and BBI partnered to release action figures of Raziel and Kain.
#### ESRB rating
The PlayStation version of the game initially received a Teen rating from the ESRB, but this version's rating was increased to Mature when it was released as a Greatest Hits title, which is also retained with its PSN reissue. The Dreamcast port of the game had always been rated Mature.
### Reception
Daniel Erickson reviewed the PlayStation version of the game for Next Generation, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Difficult puzzles and the omission of a map make this stylized game for hardcore adventure-gamers only."
Soul Reaver's dark and gothic atmosphere was generally well-received, and several publications praised the game's cut scenes. IGN's reviewer called it "such an ambitious game – and one that achieves nearly everything it sets out to do – that few games come close to it", and praised the soundtrack for blending with the atmosphere unobtrusively. The Dreamcast port was cited as "perhaps one of the best looking console games ever made". Next Generation Magazine echoed this, stating that, "even if you own the PlayStation version, you may want to rent this anyway", but expressed disappointment that no new features were added to the Dreamcast port. AllGame's reviewer called the cut scenes "seamless", and their frequency neither too high nor too low. The game's storyline was praised by Game Informer as being "grim and interesting". Soul Reaver's voice acting was also highly praised; GameSpot ranked this aspect of the game in its list of top ten "Best Voice Acting in Games". GameSpot also considered the atmosphere as rich as that of Blood Omen, yet less dramatically overstated, and considered the graphics "among the best that have ever been on the PlayStation."
GamePro praised the aspect of shifting between realms, particularly the visual effects involved. Similarly, Edge described the transition between realms as a "complex and inspired piece of design", noting that it makes players think on different levels and consider "each room as two rooms, the answer to a puzzle possibly existing in either." However, the magazine criticized the save system for occasionally forcing players to replay large sections of the game to get to new areas. IGN stated that acquiring and learning the powers of Raziel's brothers constituted part of the fun, and that Raziel's moves were well animated and articulated. Finding minimal difficulty in using camera controls, GameSpot likened them to those of Banjo-Kazooie and stated that players would want to adjust the camera deliberately to watch Raziel's movements. Presenting differences between Soul Reaver and the Tomb Raider series, AllGame stated that the game's puzzles would challenge "all but the most experienced gamers", while Game Informer considered the puzzles "difficult-to-the-point-of-insanity". Computer Gaming World enjoyed the devouring of souls.
Website reviewers deemed Soul Reaver's gameplay too non-linear and its objectives too unclear. GameSpot criticized the warp system for using confusing symbols that did little or nothing to indicate the warp's destination, and weighed the fun of impaling vampires with the Soul Reaver against the lack of challenge presented by bosses and most enemies. Next Generation Magazine considered the game challenging due to "difficult puzzles and lack of a map", requiring the player to backtrack. The Tampa Tribune also criticized the camera controls, though noted that the "auto-facing" feature made the difficulties negligible. PC Zone criticized the PC port of the game for "chunky" graphics and bad camera controls, stating "it feels too much like a PlayStation release ported hurriedly on to the PC". Computer Gaming World similarly felt that the limitations of the PlayStation carried over in the PC port, rendering the latter's visuals "mind-numbingly boring". The publication praised the Lucifer-based story for engaging players, but was disappointed that "it peters out in an unsatisfying climax". Game Informer stated, "Even after years in development, Soul Reaver doesn't feel finished. It feels rushed." 1UP.com ranked Soul Reaver second on its "Top 5 Games That Ended Halfway Through", stating "it's pretty clear that the plot would have been a lot different if the money hadn't inconveniently run out." GamesRadar placed Soul Reaver at \#4 on a 2007 list of the top seven video game apocalypses, regarding the post-apocalyptic Nosgoth as "one of the most fascinating wastelands we've ever explored".
During the 3rd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver for "Console Adventure/Role-Playing Game of the Year".
|
2,867,405 |
Mário de Andrade
| 1,171,046,718 |
Brazilian writer, musicologist and photographer
|
[
"1893 births",
"1945 deaths",
"20th-century Brazilian LGBT people",
"20th-century Brazilian male writers",
"20th-century Brazilian poets",
"20th-century Brazilian short story writers",
"20th-century musicologists",
"Academic staff of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro",
"Brazilian LGBT poets",
"Brazilian ethnomusicologists",
"Brazilian male poets",
"Brazilian male short story writers",
"Brazilian musicologists",
"Brazilian people of Portuguese descent",
"Magic realism writers"
] |
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. He wrote one of the first and most influential collections of modern Brazilian poetry, Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City), published in 1922. He has had considerable influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.
Andrade was a central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism. His photography and essays on a wide variety of subjects, from history to literature and music, were widely published. He was the driving force behind the Modern Art Week, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil, and a member of the avant-garde "Group of Five." The ideas behind the Week were further explored in the preface to his poetry collection Pauliceia Desvairada, and in the poems themselves.
After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. Work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other concerns followed unevenly, often interrupted by Andrade's shifting relationship with the Brazilian government. At the end of his life, he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing a role he had long held as a catalyst of the city's—and the nation's—entry into artistic modernity.
## Early life
Andrade was born in São Paulo and lived there virtually all of his life. As a child, he was a piano prodigy, and he later studied at the Music and Drama Conservatory of São Paulo. His formal education was solely in music, but at the same time, as Albert T. Luper records, he pursued persistent and solitary studies in history, art, and particularly poetry. Andrade had a solid command of French, and read Rimbaud and the major Symbolists. Although he wrote poetry throughout his musical education, he did not think to do so professionally until the career as a professional pianist to which he aspired was no longer an option.
In 1913, his 14-year-old brother Renato died suddenly during a football game; Andrade left the Conservatory to stay at Araraquara, where his family had a farm. When he returned, his piano playing was afflicted intermittently by trembling of his hands. Although he ultimately did receive a degree in piano, he gave no concerts and began studying singing and music theory with an eye toward becoming a professor of music. At the same time, he began writing more seriously. In 1917, the year of his graduation, he published his first book of poems, Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema (There is a drop of blood in each poem), under the pseudonym Mário Sobral. The book contains hints of Andrade's growing sense of a distinctive Brazilian identity, but it does so within the context of a poetry that (like most Brazilian poetry of the period) is strongly indebted to earlier European—particularly French—literature.
His first book does not seem to have had an enormous impact, and Andrade broadened the scope of his writing. He left São Paulo for the countryside, and began an activity that would continue for the rest of his life: the meticulous documentation of the history, people, culture, and particularly music of the Brazilian interior, both in the state of São Paulo and in the wilder areas to the northeast. He published essays in São Paulo magazines, accompanied occasionally by his own photographs, but primarily he accumulated massive amounts of information about Brazilian life and folklore. Between these trips, Andrade taught piano at the Conservatory, and became one of its professors in 1921.
## The Modern Art Week
While these folklore-gathering trips were going on, Andrade developed a group of friends among young artists and writers in São Paulo, who, like him, were aware of the growing modernist movement in Europe. Several of them were later known as the Grupo dos Cinco (the Group of Five): Andrade, poets Oswald de Andrade (no relation) and Menotti del Picchia, and artists Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti. Malfatti had been to Europe before World War I, and introduced São Paulo to expressionism. Jack E. Tomlins, the translator of Andrade's second book, describes in his introduction a particularly crucial event in the development of Andrade's modernist philosophy. In 1920, he had recently met the modernist sculptor Victor Brecheret, and bought a sculpture from him entitled "Bust of Christ," which depicted Christ as a Brazilian with braided hair. His family (apparently to his surprise) was shocked and furious. Andrade retreated to his room alone, and later recalled, in a lecture translated by Tomlins, that—still "delirious"—he went out onto his balcony and "looked down at the square below without actually seeing it."
> Noises, lights, the ingenuous bantering of the taxi drivers: they all floated up to me. I was apparently calm and was thinking about nothing in particular. I don't know what suddenly happened to me. I went to my desk, opened a notebook, and wrote down a title that had never before crossed my mind: Hallucinated City.
Retaining that title (Paulicéia Desvairada, in Portuguese), Andrade worked on the book for the next two years. He very quickly produced a "barbaric canticle", as he called it in the same lecture, and then gradually edited it down to half its original size.
These poems were entirely different from his earlier formal and abstract work. The lines of verse vary greatly in length and in syntactical structure, consisting primarily of impressionistic and fragmented descriptions interspersed with seemingly overheard, disconnected bits of speech in São Paulo dialect. The speaker of the poems often seems overwhelmed by the maze of dialogue that constantly interrupts him, as in "Colloque Sentimental":
<table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><p><poem style="font-style:italic;text-align:left" lang="pt"> A rua toda nua ... As casas sem luzes ... E a mirra dos martírios inconscientes ... Deixe-me pôr o lenço no nariz. Tenho todos os perfumes de Paris! </poem></p></td>
<td><blockquote>
<p>The street all naked ... The lightless houses ... And the myrrh of unwitting martyrs ... Let me put my handkerchief to my nose. I have all the perfumes of Paris!"</p>
</blockquote></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
After the poems were completed, Andrade wrote what he called an "Extremely Interesting Preface", in an attempt to explain in hindsight the poems' theoretical context (though Bruce Dean Willis has suggested that the theories of the preface have more to do with his later work than with Paulicéia). The preface is self-deprecating ("This preface—although interesting—useless") but ambitious, presenting a theory not just of poetry but of the aesthetics of language, in order to explain the innovations of his new poems. Andrade explains their tangle of language in musical terms:
> There are certain figures of speech in which we can see the embryo of oral harmony, just as we find the germ of musical harmony in the reading of the symphonies of Pythagoras. Antithesis: genuine dissonance.
He makes a distinction, however, between language and music, in that "words are not fused like notes; rather they are shuffled together, and they become incomprehensible." However, as Willis has pointed out, there is a pessimism to the preface; in one of its key passages, it compares poetry to the submerged riches of El Dorado, which can never be recovered.
In 1922, while preparing Paulicéia Desvairada for publication, Andrade collaborated with Malfatti and Oswald de Andrade in creating a single event that would introduce their work to the wider public: the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week). The Semana included exhibitions of paintings by Malfatti and other artists, readings, and lectures on art, music, and literature. Andrade was the chief organizer and the central figure in the event, which was greeted with skepticism but was well-attended. He gave lectures on both the principles of modernism and his work in Brazilian folk music, and read his "Extremely Interesting Preface." As the climactic event of the Semana, he read from Paulicéia Desvairada. The poems' use of free verse and colloquial São Paulo expressions, though related to European modernist poems of the same period, were entirely new to Brazilians. The reading was accompanied by persistent jeers, but Andrade persevered, and later discovered that a large part of the audience found it transformative. It has been cited frequently as the seminal event in modern Brazilian literature.
The Group of Five continued working together in the 1920s, during which their reputations solidified and hostility to their work gradually diminished, but eventually the group split apart; Andrade and Oswald de Andrade had a serious (and public) falling-out in 1929. New groups were formed out of the splinters of the original, and in the end many different modernist movements could trace their origins to the Modern Art Week.
## "The apprentice tourist"
Throughout the 1920s Andrade continued traveling in Brazil, studying the culture and folklore of the interior. He began to formulate a sophisticated theory of the social dimensions of folk music, which is at once nationalistic and deeply personal. Andrade's explicit subject was the relationship between "artistic" music and the music of the street and countryside, including both Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian styles. The work was controversial for its formal discussions of dance music and folk music; those controversies were compounded by Andrade's style, which was at once poetic (Luper calls it "Joycean") and polemical.
His travels through Brazil became more than just research trips; in 1927, he started writing a travelogue called "The apprentice tourist" for the newspaper O Diario Nacional. The column served as an introduction for cosmopolites to indigenous Brazil. At the same time, it served as an advertisement for Andrade's own work. A number of Andrade's photographs were published alongside the column, showing the landscape and people. Occasionally, Andrade himself would appear in them, usually filtered through the landscape, as in the self-portrait-as-shadow on this page. His photographs thus served to further his modernist project and his own work at the same time as their function in recording folklore.
Though Andrade continued taking photographs throughout his career, these images from the 20s comprise the bulk of his notable work, and the 1927 series in particular. He was particularly interested in the capacity of photographs to capture or restate the past, a power he saw as highly personal. In the late 1930s, he wrote:
> . . .the objects, the designs, the photographs that belong to my existence from some day in the past, for me always retain an enormous force for the reconstitution of life. Seeing them, I don't simply remember, but re-live with the same sensation and same old state, the day that I already lived. . .
In many of the images, figures are shadowed, blurred, or otherwise nearly invisible, a form of portraiture that for Andrade became a kind of modernist sublime.
## Macunaíma
At the same time, Andrade was developing an extensive familiarity with the dialects and cultures of large parts of Brazil. He started to apply to prose fiction the speech-patterned technique he had developed in writing the poems of Hallucinated city. He wrote two novels during this period using these techniques: the first, Love, Intransitive Verb, was largely a formal experiment.; the second, written shortly after and published in 1928, was Macunaíma, a novel about a man ("The hero without a character" is the subtitle of the novel) from an indigenous tribe who comes to São Paulo, learns its languages—both of them, the novel says: Portuguese and Brazilian—and returns. The style of the novel is composite, mixing vivid descriptions of both jungle and city with abrupt turns toward fantasy, the style that would later be called magical realism. Linguistically, too, the novel is composite; as the rural hero comes into contact with his urban environment, the novel reflects the meeting of languages. Relying heavily on the primitivism that Andrade learned from the European modernists, the novel lingers over possible indigenous cannibalism even as it explores Macunaíma's immersion in urban life. Critic Kimberle S. López has argued that cannibalism is the novel's driving thematic force: the eating of cultures by other cultures.
Formally, Macunaíma is an ecstatic blend of dialects and of the urban and rural rhythms that Andrade was collecting in his research. It contains an entirely new style of prose—deeply musical, frankly poetic, and full of gods and almost-gods, yet containing considerable narrative momentum. At the same time, the novel as a whole is pessimistic. It ends with Macunaíma's willful destruction of his own village; despite the euphoria of the collision, the meeting of cultures the novel documents is inevitably catastrophic. As Severino João Albuquerque has demonstrated, the novel presents "construction and destruction" as inseparable. It is a novel of both power (Macunaíma has all kinds of strange powers) and alienation.
Even as Macunaíma changed the nature of Brazilian literature in an instant—Albuquerque calls it "the cornerstone text of Brazilian Modernism"—the inner conflict in the novel was a strong part of its influence. Modernismo, as Andrade depicted it, was formally tied to the innovations of recent European literature and based on the productive meeting of cultural forces in Brazil's diverse population; but it was fiercely nationalistic, based in large part on distinguishing Brazil's culture from the world and on documenting the damage caused by the lingering effects of colonial rule. At the same time, the complex inner life of its hero suggests themes little explored in earlier Brazilian literature, which critics have taken to refer back to Andrade himself. While Macunaíma is not autobiographical in the strict sense, it clearly reflects and refracts Andrade's own life. Andrade was a mulatto; his parents were landowners but were in no sense a part of Brazil's Portuguese pseudo-aristocracy. Some critics have paralleled Andrade's race and family background to the interaction between categories of his character Macunaíma. Macunaíma's body itself is a composite: his skin is darker than that of his fellow tribesmen, and at one point in the novel, he has an adult's body and a child's head. He himself is a wanderer, never belonging to any one place.
Other critics have argued for similar analogues between Andrade's sexuality and Macunaíma's complex status. Though Andrade was not openly gay, and there is no direct evidence of his sexual practices, many of Andrade's friends have reported after his death that he was clearly interested in men (the subject is only reluctantly discussed in Brazil). It was over a pseudonymous accusation of effeminacy that Andrade broke with Oswald de Andrade in 1929. Macunaíma prefers women, but his constant state of belonging and not belonging is associated with sex. The character is sexually precocious, starting his romantic adventures at the age of six, and his particular form of eroticism seems always to lead to destruction of one kind or another.
Inevitably, Macunaíma's polemicism and sheer strangeness have become less obvious as it has grown ensconced in mainstream Brazilian culture and education. Once regarded by academic critics as an awkwardly constructed work of more historical than literary importance, the novel has come to be recognized as a modernist masterpiece whose difficulties are part of its aesthetic. Andrade is a national cultural icon; his face has appeared on the Brazilian currency. A film of Macunaíma was made in 1969, by Brazilian director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, updating Andrade's story to the 1960s and shifting it to Rio de Janeiro; the film was rereleased internationally in 2009.
## Late life and musical research
Andrade was not directly affected by the Revolution of 1930, in which Getúlio Vargas seized power and became dictator, but he belonged to the landed class the Revolution was designed to displace, and his employment prospects declined under the Vargas regime. He was able to remain at the Conservatory, where he was now Chair of History of Music and Aesthetics. With this title he became a de facto national authority on the history of music, and his research turned from the personal bent of his 1920s work to textbooks and chronologies. He continued to document rural folk music, and during the 1930s made an enormous collection of recordings of the songs and other forms of music of the interior. The recordings were exhaustive, with a selection based on comprehensiveness rather than an aesthetic judgment, and including context, related folktalkes, and other non-musical sound. Andrade's techniques were influential in the development of ethnomusicology in Brazil and predate similar work done elsewhere, including the well-known recordings of Alan Lomax. He is credited with coining the word "popularesque," which he defined as imitations of Brazilian folk music by erudite urban musicians ("erudite" is generally a deprecation in Andrade's vocabulary). The word continues to have currency in discussion of Brazilian music as both a scholarly and nationalist category.
In 1935, during an unstable period in Vargas's government, Andrade and writer and archaeologist Paulo Duarte, who had for many years desired to promote cultural research and activity in the city through a municipal agency, were able to create a unified São Paulo Department of Culture (Departamento de Cultura e Recreação da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo). Andrade was named founding director. The Department of Culture had a broad purview, overseeing cultural and demographic research, the construction of parks and playgrounds, and a considerable publishing wing. Andrade approached the position with characteristic ambition, using it to expand his work in folklore and folk music while organizing myriad performances, lectures, and expositions. He moved his collection of recordings to the Department, and expanding and enhancing it became one of the Department's chief functions, overseen by Andrade's former student, Oneyda Alvarenga. The collection, called the Discoteca Municipal, was "probably the largest and best-organized in the entire hemisphere."
At the same time, Andrade was refining his theory of music. He attempted to pull together his research into a general theory. Concerned as always with Modernismo's need to break from the past, he formulated a distinction between the classical music of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, and what he called the music of the future, which would be based simultaneously on modernist breakdowns of musical form and on an understanding of folk and popular music. The music of the past, he said, was conceived in terms of space: whether counterpoint, with its multiple voices arranged in vertical alignment, or the symphonic forms, in which the dominant voice is typically projected on top of a complex accompaniment. Future music would be arranged in time rather than space: "moment by moment" (in Luper's translation). This temporal music would be inspired not by "contemplative remembrance", but by the deep longing or desire expressed by the Portuguese word saudade.
Through his position at the Department of Culture in this period, he was able to assist Dina Lévi-Strauss and her husband, Claude Lévi-Strauss with films they were making based on field research in Mato Grosso and Rondônia.
Andrade's position at the Department of Culture was abruptly revoked in 1937, when Vargas returned to power and Duarte was exiled. In 1938 Andrade moved to Rio de Janeiro to take up a post at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. While there he directed the Congresso da Língua Nacional Cantada (Congress of National Musical Language), a major folklore and folk music conference. He returned to São Paulo in 1941, where he worked on a collected edition of his poetry.
Andrade's final project was a long poem called "Meditação Sôbre o Tietê." The work is dense and difficult, and was dismissed by its early critics as "without meaning", although recent work on it has been more enthusiastic. One critic, David T Haberly, has compared it favorably to William Carlos Williams's Paterson, a dense but influential unfinished epic using composite construction. Like Paterson, it is a poem about a city; the "Meditação" is centered on the Tietê River, which flows through São Paulo. The poem is simultaneously a summation of Andrade's career, commenting on poems written long before, and a love poem addressed to the river and to the city itself. In both cases, the poem hints at a larger context: it compares the river to the Tagus in Lisbon and the Seine in Paris, as if claiming an international position for Andrade as well. At the same time, the poem associates both Andrade's voice and the river with "banzeiro," a word from the Afro-Brazilian musical tradition: music that can unite man and river. The poem is the definitive and final statement of Andrade's ambition and his nationalism.
Andrade died at his home in São Paulo of a heart attack on February 25, 1945, at the age of 51. Because of his tenuous relationship with the Vargas regime, the initial official reaction to his career was muted. However, the publication of his Complete Poems in 1955 (the year after Vargas's death) signalled the start of Andrade's canonization as one of the cultural heroes of Brazil. On February 15, 1960, the municipal library of São Paulo was renamed Biblioteca Mário de Andrade.
## Bibliography of English translations
- Hallucinated City (Paulicéia Desvairada) (1922). Translated by Jack E. Tomlins. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1968.
- Fraulein (Amar, Verbo Intransitivo) (1927). Translated by Margaret Richardson Hollingsworth. New York: Macaulay, 1933.
- To Love, Intransitive Verb (Amar, Verbo Intransitivo) (2018). Translated by Ana Lessa-Schmidt. Hanover, CT: New London Librarium, 2018.
- Popular Music and Song in Brazil (Ensaio sobre Música Brasileira) (1928). Translated by Luiz Victor Le Cocq D'Oliveira. Sponsored by the Ministry of State for Foreign Affairs of Brazil: Division of Intellectual Cooperation. Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1943.
- Macunaíma (1928). Translated by E. A. Goodland (New York: Random House, 1984); later trans. Katrina Dodson (New Directions, forthcoming)
- Brazilian Sculpture: An Identity in Profile/Escultura Brasileira: Perfil de uma Identidate.'' Catalog of exhibition in English and Portuguese. Includes text by Mário de Andrade and others. Edited by Élcior Ferreira de Santana Filho. São Paulo, Brazil: Associação dos Amigos da Pinateca, 1997.
|
26,564,768 |
Manchester United F.C. 9–0 Ipswich Town F.C.
| 1,141,305,672 |
Association football match in England
|
[
"1990s in Manchester",
"1994–95 FA Premier League",
"Ipswich Town F.C. matches",
"Manchester United F.C. matches",
"March 1995 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Premier League matches",
"Record association football wins"
] |
The football match between Manchester United and Ipswich Town played at Old Trafford, Manchester, on 4 March 1995 as part of the 1994–95 FA Premier League finished in a 9–0 victory for the home team. The result stands as the joint record, with Southampton having subsequently lost by the same scoreline at home to Leicester City in 2019 and away at Manchester United in 2021, while Bournemouth also lost 9–0 to Liverpool in 2022. The two teams went into the match at opposite ends of the table; Manchester United were second, while Ipswich Town were second-last. In the corresponding fixture at Ipswich's Portman Road ground earlier in the season, they had beaten United 3–2. Manchester United were missing Eric Cantona, their French international forward who was serving a nine-month suspension, and their attacking partnership of Andy Cole and Mark Hughes was not well regarded by pundits.
Playing in front of the highest attendance in the league to that point in the season, United scored three times in the first half; Roy Keane opened the scoring, before Cole added two more. In the second half, United scored four times in the first twenty minutes; Cole scored his third and fourth, while Hughes also scored two. Paul Ince scored United's eighth with a free kick into an empty net while Ipswich's goalkeeper Craig Forrest argued with the referee, before Cole scored a Premier League-record fifth goal, United's ninth, in the 89th minute. Ipswich finished the season in last place and were relegated by 18 points, while Manchester United finished second behind champions Blackburn Rovers. Despite the record score at Old Trafford, Ipswich's victory at Portman Road proved to be the more significant result with regard to the final placings, as Manchester United missed out on the title by a single point.
## Background
Manchester United were the reigning Premier League champions, having won the 1993–94 title by eight points ahead of Blackburn Rovers. However, they had been knocked out of the 1994–95 UEFA Champions League in the group stage, and were trailing Blackburn by three points at the top of the table going into this match. In response to their elimination from European competition, and their need for a goal-scorer, they signed Andy Cole from Newcastle United for a British record fee of £7 million in January 1995.
Ipswich Town had returned to the top flight of English football in time for the start of the Premier League in the 1992–93 season; however, they had finished in the bottom half of the table in both of the new league's first two seasons and had narrowly avoided relegation to the First Division in the final minutes of the 1993–94 campaign, finishing one point above the relegation zone. Coming into this match, Ipswich were in 21st place in the league, three points and a game ahead of bottom club Leicester City, but eight points away from escaping the relegation zone.
Before this match, the two teams had met 50 times in all competitions; Manchester United had the upper hand with 24 wins to Ipswich's 18. The remaining eight matches, which finished as draws, were all in the league, where it was a similar story, with Manchester United winning 20 of the teams' 45 meetings, while Ipswich had 17 wins. The most recent game between the two sides, which was played at Ipswich's Portman Road on 24 September 1994, finished in a 3–2 win for Ipswich. The Manchester United players were indignant at Ipswich's enthusiastic celebrations after the win: the United midfielder, Brian McClair, said "they were more than exuberant in their celebrations, so that stuck a bit". In the period between the two sides' meetings that season, Ipswich had replaced John Lyall with George Burley as their manager.
Despite this contrast in the fortunes of the two clubs, United had won just one of their four meetings with Ipswich in the first two seasons of the Premier League; they had been held to draws in both of Ipswich's visits to Old Trafford, and lost 2–1 on their first Premier League visit to Portman Road in January 1993.
## Team selection
Ipswich selected a back four that featured David Linighan, Neil Thompson, John Wark and Frank Yallop; they had an average age of 32, and were described by The Guardian's Richard Barker as "one of the slowest back fours the game has seen". Up front, Lee Chapman started, but Paul Mason – who had scored twice during Ipswich's victory over United in September – was a substitute. Despite already having conceded 60 league goals that season, Burley had stated Ipswich's intention to attack: "I'm certainly not going to put nine behind the ball. We'll play two up front and look to get forward".
Prior to the game, Manchester United's Russian winger and season's top scorer Andrei Kanchelskis had handed in a transfer request, which was rejected by the United manager, Alex Ferguson. Kanchelskis, along with Ryan Giggs, Cole and Mark Hughes, made up United's attack for the match. The pairing of Cole and Hughes up front was not considered well-matched; The Guardian's Stephen Bierley suggested that Cole was much better matched with Eric Cantona, but the French forward was serving a nine-month suspension for kicking a spectator. United had conceded just three league goals at Old Trafford all season.
## Match
### Summary
The match took place at Old Trafford at 15:00 on 4 March 1995 in front of a crowd of 43,804, the largest in the league to date that season. Manchester United kicked off, attacking the Stretford End at the west end of the stadium, and within the first few minutes they had put the ball into the Ipswich penalty area five times; from three crosses and two corner kicks. According to Rogan Taylor's report for The Observer, the Ipswich defence was panicked by these early attacks, and he suggested that Andy Cole should have scored from one of them, had he not accidentally stepped on the ball. In the 15th minute, after an attack down the left wing, Hughes turned near the edge of the six-yard box, and played the ball out to Roy Keane on the edge of the area. Keane kept his shot low, and it went in off the post. Four minutes later, Giggs dispossessed Ipswich's Canadian right-back, Frank Yallop, on the halfway line. He broke clear and passed the ball to Cole, who rolled it in from close range. In the 37th minute, Kanchelskis attacked up the right wing for Manchester United, and crossed the ball into the box; Hughes shot at goal with a bicycle kick that hit the bar and rebounded to Cole, who scored his second of the game and made it 3–0. During his half-time team talk, Ferguson urged his team on, challenging them to score another three goals.
Keane was replaced with Lee Sharpe at half-time. Seven minutes after the break, Hughes passed the ball out to Denis Irwin, who crossed it into the area. In the confusion, it was initially reported that Yallop had put the ball into his own goal, but video replays showed that the final touch had been from Cole, securing his hat-trick. Within a minute, a low cross from Giggs found Hughes, who scored United's fifth with a volley that went in off the crossbar. The pair were also responsible for United's next goal; the Ipswich goalkeeper Craig Forrest parried a shot from Giggs out to Hughes, who headed it in. When Ian Marshall replaced Chapman in the 64th minute, Marshall thanked United's defender Gary Pallister "for being invited to join the practice match", according to an article published by United. A minute later, Hughes helped to set up the seventh goal with a pass to McClair, whose shot was saved by Forrest but rebounded to Cole, who put it in the net. In the 73rd minute, a foul was given against Forrest, who the referee, Graham Poll, cautioned for handling the ball outside of his area. While Forrest was arguing the decision, Manchester United took the free kick quickly, and Paul Ince lobbed the ball straight into the empty goal to make the score 8–0. In the last few minutes of the match, Cole scored his fifth and United's ninth, from a corner delivered by Giggs. The United fans chanted "we want ten", to which the away fans responded "we want one". The match finished 9–0 to Manchester United.
### Details
### Statistics
## Reaction
The result was Manchester United's biggest league victory in 103 years, matching the nine-goal margin they recorded in a 10–1 win at home to Wolverhampton Wanderers on 15 October 1892. Alex Ferguson had previously won twice 8–0 as Aberdeen manager, but noted: "That was as near as perfection as you can get. The performance superseded the number of goals scored." According to his biographer, Michael Crick, Ferguson later said he was "praying that United wouldn't reach ten, as he felt sorry for the Ipswich manager". The Ipswich manager George Burley declined to face the press for the normal post-match interview. The victory cancelled out Blackburn's goal difference advantage at the top of the table as Rovers beat Aston Villa 1–0 at Villa Park on the same day, although Rovers' manager Kenny Dalglish shrugged off the result saying, "You get three points whether you win 9–0 or 1–0." McClair referenced Ipswich's win earlier in the season, but denied that the scale of the win had been about revenge: "it wasn't a case of: 'We're going to humiliate you and grind you into dust,' it was just: 'We're going to score as many as we can and keep going until it's over.' That's just the Manchester United way: it's never over."
Although he was hurt in a tackle by Ipswich defender Linighan, Cole was determined to play on in the second half despite his manager's suggestion he be substituted as the points were already secured. Cole noted: "I sensed a hat-trick was there for the taking and I was determined to get one". Cole's five-goal haul was later equalled by Alan Shearer – for Newcastle United against Sheffield Wednesday in September 1999; Jermain Defoe – for Tottenham Hotspur against Wigan Athletic in November 2009; Dimitar Berbatov – for Manchester United against Blackburn Rovers in November 2010; and Sergio Agüero – for Manchester City against Newcastle United in October 2015. Cole's haul was the first time for twelve years that a player in the top flight of English football had scored five goals in a game: Ian Rush and Tony Woodcock each scored five in separate matches on the same day in 1983.
Manchester United went on to finish second in the league, just one point behind Blackburn, while Ipswich were relegated, finishing bottom of the table. Ipswich goalkeeper Forrest went on to concede a further seven goals against Manchester United, playing for West Ham United in a 7–1 defeat in April 2000. Cole recalled that when he met Forrest years later, Forrest introduced Cole to his wife as "the man who made his life a misery".
The record Manchester United set for the biggest Premier League win would not be equalled until Leicester City beat Southampton by the same scoreline, away from home on 25 October 2019. The following season, United would equal their biggest victory, also against Southampton, with a 9–0 win at Old Trafford on 2 February 2021, and the record was again matched in August 2022, when Liverpool beat AFC Bournemouth 9–0.
|
330,943 |
Red-billed tropicbird
| 1,119,065,461 |
Species of seabird of tropical oceans
|
[
"Birds described in 1758",
"Birds of Ascension Island",
"Birds of Cape Verde",
"Birds of Saint Helena Island",
"Birds of the Caribbean",
"Birds of the Indian Ocean",
"Birds of the Middle East",
"Phaethontidae",
"Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus"
] |
The red-billed tropicbird (Phaethon aethereus) is a tropicbird, one of three closely related species of seabird of tropical oceans. Superficially resembling a tern in appearance, it has mostly white plumage with some black markings on the wings and back, a black mask and, as its common name suggests, a red bill. Most adults have that are about two times their body length, with those in males being generally longer than those in females. The red-billed tropicbird itself has three subspecies recognized, including the nominate. The subspecies mesonauta is distinguished from the nominate by the rosy tinge of its fresh plumage, and the subspecies indicus can be differentiated by its smaller size, more restricted mask, and more orange bill. This species ranges across the tropical Atlantic, eastern Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The nominate is found in the southern Atlantic Ocean, the subspecies indicus in the waters off of the Middle East and in the Indian Ocean, and the subspecies mesonauta in the eastern portions of both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans and in the Caribbean. It was one of the many species described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae.
Nesting takes place in loose colonies, as they nest a scrape found on a cliff face that is easy to take off from. A single egg is laid and is incubated by both sexes for about six weeks. Whether the egg hatches or not can be influenced by pollution and weather, although the latter has a minimal effect on whether a chick fledges or not. After a chick fledges, the parents will usually stop visiting the nest and the chick will leave. Birds of all ages feed on fish and squid, catching them by diving from the air into the water. However, the red-billed tropicbird sometimes follows surface-feeding predators. The predators will drive the prey to the surface, which are then seized by the tropicbird.
In some areas, introduced black and brown rats raid nests for eggs and young. Cats also threaten the red-billed tropicbird. This bird is considered to be a least-concern species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), though populations are thought to be declining. In some places, such as Brazil and Mexico, this bird is considered to be threatened.
## Taxonomy and etymology
English naturalist Francis Willughby wrote about the red-billed tropicbird in the 17th century, having seen a specimen held by the Royal Society. It was one of the many bird species originally described by Linnaeus in the landmark 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, and still bears its original scientific name, Phaethon aethereus. The genus name is derived from Ancient Greek phaethon, "sun" while the species name comes from Latin aetherius, "heavenly". This bird is called the red-billed tropicbird due to its red bill and its location in the tropicbird genus. An alternative common name was "bosun bird", also spelt "boatswain bird", from the similarity of its shrill call to a boatswain's whistle. An alternative derivation of the name is from the semblance of the tail feathers to marlin spikes. Local names used in the West Indies include "truphit", "trophic", "white bird", "paille-en-queue", "paille-en-cul", "flèche-en-cul", and "fétu". In a 1945 paper, American ornithologist Waldo Lee McAtee proposed it be called the barred-backed tropicbird after its most distinguishing feature.
The red-billed tropicbird is basal (the earliest offshoot) in the genus Phaethon, the sole extant genus in the family Phaethontidae, the tropicbirds. The split between this tropicbird and the other tropicbirds, the red-tailed and white-tailed tropicbird, is thought to have occurred about six million years ago.
There are three subspecies, including the nominate, of this tropicbird:
## Description
The red-billed tropicbird measures 90 to 105 cm (35 to 41 in) on average, which includes the 46 to 56 cm (18 to 22 in)-long . Without them the tropicbird measures about 48 cm (19 in). It has a wingspan of 99 to 106 cm (39 to 42 in). In overall appearance it is tern-like in shape. Its plumage is white, with black wing tips, and a back that is finely barred in black. It has a black mask that extends up from just above the lores to the sides of its nape, with gray mottling usually seen near the nape and hindneck. The tail has black shaft streaks, as do tail streamers. The are white, with some black on the outermost primaries and tertials and occasionally with black markings on the flanks. The iris is blackish-brown, and the bill is red. The legs, base of the central toe, and parts of the outer toes are orange-yellow while the rest of the feet are black. Although the sexes are similar, the males are generally larger than females, with the tail streamers being around 12 cm (4.7 in) longer on the male than on the female.
The subspecies of this bird can usually be distinguished by their difference in size and plumage. The subspecies Phaethon aethereus mesonauta can be differentiated by its slightly rosy tinge when its plumage is fresh, the bolder look of the black barring on the upper wing, and the more solid look of the black on the outer wing. The subspecies P. a. indicus can be distinguished by its smaller size, its smaller mask on the face, which often does not extend far behind the eye, and its more orange bill with a black cutting edge.
When the chicks hatch, they are covered with gray down. This down is eventually cleared in about 40 to 50 days. The young chicks lack tail streamers. The juvenile looks similar to the adult with a mostly white crown. In the juvenile, the stripes above the eye usually are connected at the nape. The tail feathers usually have black tips or subterminal dots and without the tail streamers that are distinctive on the adult. Occasionally, a juvenile will have black markings on its flanks and under tail coverts.
The red-billed tropicbird can be differentiated from the other tropicbirds by its red bill in combination with its white tail streamers. The slightly smaller red-tailed tropicbird has red rather than white tail streamers, and the white-tailed tropicbird can be differentiated by its smaller size, black stripe along its upper wing coverts, and its yellow-orange bill. Juvenile red-billed tropicbirds have more heavily barred upper parts than juveniles of other species. In flight, the royal tern can be confused with the adult red-billed tropicbird but can be distinguished by the former's less direct flight pattern and its lack of tail streamers.
This tropicbird moults once every year as an adult, following a complex basic strategy. This is completed before courtship and lasts between 19 and 29 weeks, with most being completed in 24 weeks. Birds gain their adult plumage at two to three years of age.
The red-billed tropicbird usually only calls near breeding colonies, where it joins in with groups of other adults, numbering from 2 to 20, in circling above the sea and making loud, harsh kreeeee-kreeeee-kri-kri-kri-kr screams. If disturbed at the nest, the chicks will vocalize a loud and piercing shriek, either rasping or reeling.
## Distribution and habitat
The red-billed tropicbird has the smallest range of the three tropicbird species, yet it still ranges across the Neotropics, as well as the tropical Atlantic, eastern Pacific, and Indian oceans. The nominate subspecies Phaethon aethereus aethereus breeds on islands in the Atlantic south of the equator, including Ascension, and Saint Helena on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and Fernando de Noronha and Abrolhos Archipelago in Brazilian waters. It is a vagrant to the coastline of Namibia and South Africa. The subspecies P. a. mesonauta is found in the east Atlantic, the east Pacific, and in the Caribbean. This subspecies was restricted to the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic but it has colonised the Canary Islands in the 21st century, especially Fuerteventura but also on other islands in that archipelago. The Indian Ocean subspecies, P. a. indicus is found in waters off Pakistan, western India, southwestern Sri Lanka, the Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula. The subspecies is also a rare but regular vagrant to Seychelles.
Within the West Indies, this species is most common in the Lesser Antilles, Virgin Islands and small islands east of Puerto Rico. Breeding in the Western Palearctic occurs on the Cape Verde Islands and the Îles des Madeleines off Senegal. In 2000, the total number of pairs there was probably less than 150. In the Pacific Ocean, it breeds from the Gulf of California and Revillagigedo Islands, Mexico in the north, to the Galápagos Islands, Isla Plata, Ecuador and San Lorenzo Island, Peru. Researchers Larry Spear and David Ainley estimated the minimum population of the Pacific at around 15,750 birds in 1995 after 15 years of field observations. Red-billed tropicbirds disperse widely when not breeding, the juveniles more so than the adults, with birds in the Pacific reaching the 45th parallel north off Washington State and 32nd parallel south off Chile, with 19 records as of 2007 from Hawaii—some 4,300 kilometers (2,700 mi) from Mexico. It sometimes wanders further, including five records from Great Britain, and two from Australia: October–December 2010 on Lord Howe Island and September 2014 on Ashmore Reef. In July 2005, one was found in eastern New Brunswick, Canada, while another has been seen at Matinicus Rock, Maine regularly since 2000.
## Behavior
The red-billed tropicbird can reach speeds of 44 kilometers per hour (27 mph) when flying out at sea, cruising a minimum of 30 meters (100 ft) above the sea. It cannot stand and is not proficient at walking, and requires an unobstructed takeoff to fly from land. Conversely it can lift off the sea without much effort. Its plumage is waterproof and it floats on water.
### Breeding
The red-billed tropicbird usually nests on isolated cliff faces, in loose colonies. It uses a simple scrape nest, located in a place it can easily take off from. The age of first breeding is usually five years, although this age is variable; a three-year-old tropicbird was once seen breeding. In some locations, breeding happens year-round, while in others, breeding occurs seasonally. For example, for islands in the California Current, breeding starts in November or December, while it occurs year round in the Galápagos. Breeding is influenced by the availability of food, with an increase in food generally causing an increase in breeding. Individually, this bird only breeds every nine to twelve months. A breeding bird usually returns to its partner and nest location from the previous breeding cycle.
Courtship and pairing usually lasts three to five weeks, during which this bird performs aerial courtship displays to potential mates. The courtship displays include flying in the air which takes the form of gliding interspersed with short periods of rapid wing-beating. In one display, a pair glide together for 100–300 meters (330–980 ft), with one bird around 30 cm (12 in) above the other. The upper bird bends its wings down and the lower lifts its up, so they are almost touching. The two sink to about 6 meters (20 ft) above the sea before breaking off.
At nest sites, battles sometimes occur between two or more pairs before the original owners declare themselves as the owner of the nest. Red-billed tropicbirds are aggressive at nest sites, fighting with each other and ousting species such as shearwaters, petrels, and white-tailed tropicbirds. They have also been recorded taking over nests of white-tailed tropicbirds and raising their young if they failed to destroy their eggs. Vagrant red-billed tropicbirds have been implicated in egg loss in red-tailed tropicbird nests in Hawaii.
This tropicbird usually lays a clutch of one white buff to pale purple egg with reddish-brown spots. The egg usually measures 45 by 60 millimeters (1.8 by 2.4 in) and weighs around 67 grams (2.4 oz)—10% of the adult female's weight. It is incubated by both sexes for 42 to 46 days. If the egg does not survive the first few days in the nest, the female will usually lay a replacement egg. The chicks that hatch eventually fledge in about 10 to 15 weeks after hatching, although most fledge after about 80 to 90 days. Normally, the maximum weight of the chicks is about 725 grams (1.6 lb), but on years that are hotter than average, this can drop to about 600 grams (1.3 lb).
Born helpless and unable to move around (nidicolous and semi-altricial), the chicks are constantly brooded by the parents until they are 3 to 5 days old, when they can thermoregulate their body temperature. They grow their first feathers—scapulars—at 13–15 days, followed by primaries at 24–27 days, tail feathers at 30–35 days and are fully feathered by 55 days. They are attended by the parents more between the 30th and 60th days; a behavior possibly related to the greater food requirements of the chicks during those days. Semi-digested food is regurgitated and then fed to younger birds, with older birds being fed solid food. The parents can be seen at normal rates with the chicks up to about the 70th day, after which the attendance by the parents falls rapidly. Chicks receive no care after fledging, with only about one out of seven chicks receiving food after the 80th day, and almost no chicks are visited after about 90 days. After fledging, the chicks will leave the nest, with few remaining after about 100 days.
### Feeding
Although it is a poor swimmer, the red-billed tropicbird feeds on fish and squid. The fish are usually small, between about 10 and 20 cm (4 and 8 in), although some caught are up to 30 cm (12 in). The aquatic prey is mostly caught by diving into the water from the air, although flying fish, the preferred fish of this species, are sometimes caught while in the air. Fish species eaten include Pacific thread herring (Opisthonema libertate), sharpchin flying fish (Fodiator acutus), flying fish of the genus Hirundichthys, sailfin flying fish (Parexocoetus brachypterus), ornamented flying fish (Cypselurus callopterus), bigwing halfbeak (Oxyporhamphus micropterus), longfin halfbeak (Hemiramphus saltator), tropical two-wing flying fish (Exocoetus volitans), redlip blenny (Ophioblennius atlanticus), squirrelfish (Holocentrus adscensionis), mackerel scad (Decapterus macarellus), shortjaw leatherjacket (Oligoplites refulgens), and mackerels (Scomber spp.). Squid eaten include the glass squid (Hyaloteuthis pelagica).
As they grow, the chicks are fed increasingly larger quantities of fish and squid by their parents, generally partly digested and regurgitated. Most fish that the chicks are fed are below 6 cm (2.4 in) in length, although some fish fed to larger chicks can be up to 30 cm (12 in) in length.
This species of tropicbird usually forages alone. It usually dives into waters away from the coastline, diving from the air, at heights up to 40 meters (130 ft). It will usually hover over the water before diving. Sometimes, this bird follows predators that feed near the surface, such as dolphins or tuna. The red-billed tropicbird will feed on the fish driven either to or above the surface by the aforementioned predators. It usually forages in warmer waters, though does hunt in areas of cooler currents such as the Gulf of California. The species has also been recorded foraging in salt wedge estuaries.
## Relationship with humans
The red-billed tropicbird, a bird not indigenous to Bermuda, was displayed in error on the \$50 Bermudian dollar and was replaced in 2012 by the white-tailed tropicbird, the tropicbird that can be found in Bermuda.
## Status
Accurate assessment of red-billed tropicbird numbers is difficult due to the remote locations of nesting sites and vast areas of the sea where they might be found. This bird is considered to be a least-concern species according to the IUCN. This is due to the fact that the range, declination, and numbers of this species, although small, do not meet the criteria required to be considered a vulnerable species. The range of this species is believed to be 86.3 million square kilometers (33.3 million sq mi), with an estimated 3,300 to 13,000 mature individuals. In the western Atlantic, a more precise number was given for the population there in 2000; about 4,000 to 5,000 pairs. The population is declining, mainly due to human exploitation of the bird's environment and predation by invasive species, such as rats. These predators have the potential to drive populations of the red-billed tropicbird into serious decline. It is estimated that this bird experienced a population bottleneck about 450 to 750 years ago, likely due to exploitation by humans. This has resulted in low genetic diversity in this tropicbird, which makes the likelihood of it adapting to sudden environmental changes low. In Mexico and Brazil, it is considered to be threatened.
### Threats and survival
The eggs and chicks of red-billed tropicbirds are prey for both brown and black rats in places like Abrolhos Archipelago, where these rats are invasive species. Feral cats are also predators of breeding tropicbirds, with the birds providing about 3% of the diet of the cats in locations such as the Caribbean island Saba. On Saba, the problem has only arisen since about 2000. On Ascension Island, the effect of the eradication of feral cats was the increase of the red-billed tropicbird population there by about 1.6% in a year. On the Galápagos Islands, the short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) occasionally eats young birds. Toxoplasma gondii, an intracellular parasite, can be found in this bird. About 28% of red-billed tropicbirds produce antibodies for T. gondii.
Under normal conditions about 75% of the eggs hatch. Hatching success can drop to about 35% in unusually hot conditions. Egg shell thinning, a potential cause of egg mortality, can be caused by pollutants. About 78% of chicks fledge in normal years, with that percentage only dropping slightly, to 77%, in abnormally hot years. Most egg and chick mortality during periods of normal climate is caused by nest fights between the parents and other birds. Breeding adults usually survive the year, with only about 18% dying every year. The young have a lower survival rate, with about 29% dying each year. The lifespan of this bird is anywhere from 16 to 30 years.
|
22,612,619 |
1946 California's 12th congressional district election
| 1,173,910,022 |
Election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives
|
[
"1946 California elections",
"1946 United States House of Representatives elections",
"Anti-communism in the United States",
"Richard Nixon",
"United States House of Representatives elections in California"
] |
An election for a seat in the United States House of Representatives took place in California's 12th congressional district on November 5, 1946, the date set by law for the elections for the 80th United States Congress. In the 12th district election, the candidates were five-term incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis, Republican challenger Richard Nixon, and former congressman and Prohibition Party candidate John Hoeppel. Nixon was elected with 56% of the vote, starting him on the road that would, almost a quarter century later, lead to the presidency.
First elected to Congress in 1936, Voorhis had defeated lackluster Republican opposition four times in the then-rural Los Angeles County district to win re-election. For the 1946 election, Republicans sought a candidate who could unite the party and run a strong race against Voorhis in the Republican-leaning district. After failing to secure the candidacy of General George Patton, in November 1945 they settled on Lieutenant Commander Richard Nixon, who had lived in the district prior to his World War II service.
Nixon spent most of 1946 campaigning in the district, while Voorhis did not return from Washington D.C. until the end of August. Nixon's campaign worked hard to generate publicity in the district, while Voorhis, dealing with congressional business in the capital, received little newspaper coverage. Voorhis received the most votes in the June primary elections, but his percentage of the vote decreased from his share in the 1944 primaries. At five debates held across the district in September and October, Nixon was able to paint the incumbent as ineffectual and to suggest that Voorhis was connected to communist-linked organizations. Voorhis and his campaign were constantly on the defensive and were ineffective in rebutting Nixon's contentions. The challenger defeated Voorhis in the November general election.
Various explanations have been put forward for Nixon's victory, from national political trends to red-baiting on the part of the challenger. Some historians contend that Nixon received large amounts of funding from wealthy backers determined to defeat Voorhis, while others dismiss such allegations. These matters remain subjects of historical debate.
## Background
### District and campaigns
Since its creation following the 1930 census, the 12th district had been represented by Democrats. The 12th stretched from just south of Pasadena to the Orange and San Bernardino county lines, encompassing such small towns as Whittier, Pomona and Covina. The area has since been entirely absorbed into the Los Angeles megalopolis, but at the time it was principally agricultural. The freeway system had barely touched the 12th district; only a small segment of the Pasadena Freeway cut across its northwest corner.
In 1932, John Hoeppel was elected to represent the 12th district. In 1936, Hoeppel was vulnerable as he had been convicted for trying to sell a nomination to West Point. Voorhis defeated Hoeppel in the Democratic primary and easily won the general election. Voorhis, who gained a reputation as a respected and hard-working representative, nicknamed "Kid Atlas" by the press for taking the weight of the world on his shoulders, was loyal to the New Deal.
The 12th district leaned Republican, the more so after 1941 when the Republican-dominated California State Legislature attempted to gerrymander Congressman Voorhis out of office by removing strong Democratic precincts in East Los Angeles from the district during the decennial redistricting. The revamped 12th district had little industry and almost no union influence. Voorhis was left with such Republican strongholds as San Marino, where he did not campaign, concluding that he would receive the same number of votes whether he visited there or not. Despite the maneuvers of the Republicans in the legislature, Voorhis was re-elected in 1942, receiving 57% of the vote, and won with a similar percentage two years later. Voorhis had not faced strong opposition prior to 1946. In his initial election, Voorhis benefited from the Roosevelt landslide of 1936. His 1938 opponent was so shy that Voorhis had to introduce him to the crowd at a joint appearance. In 1940, he faced Captain Irwin Minger, a little-known commandant of a military school, and his 1942 opponent, radio preacher and former Prohibition Party gubernatorial candidate Robert P. Shuler, "embarrassed GOP regulars". In 1944, the 12th district Republicans were bitterly divided, and Voorhis easily triumphed.
### Republican search for a candidate
As Voorhis served his fifth term in the House, Republicans searched for a candidate capable of defeating him. Local Republicans formed what became known as the "Committee of One Hundred" (officially, the "Candidate and Fact-Finding Committee") to select a candidate with broad support in advance of the June 1946 primary election. This move caused some editorial concern in the district: The Alhambra Tribune and News, fearing the choice of a candidate was being taken away from voters in favor of a small group, editorialized that the committee formation was "a step in the wrong direction" and an attempt to "shove Tammany Hall tactics down our throats".
The Committee initially wooed State Commissioner of Education (and former Whittier College president) Walter Dexter. Dexter was reluctant to give up his state post to run and sought a guarantee that he would receive another job if his candidacy failed. He continued to consider running for several months without reaching a decision, frustrating local Republicans. As Dexter dithered, Republicans tried to get General George Patton to run, though they were not certain if the general was a Republican. However, a day after the Los Angeles Times speculated on the run, Patton announced from Germany his intent to "keep completely out of politics". The Committee also contacted Stanley Barnes, a rising young Republican attorney and former football star at the University of California, Berkeley. Barnes declined to be considered, skeptical of the chances of defeating Voorhis.
With little progress made on securing a high-profile candidate, Committee working groups held interviews. Of the eight men who applied, the most prominent was former congressman John Hoeppel, who promised to keep "the Jews and the niggers" out of the district. On October 6, 1945, the Monrovia News Post reported that while Dexter seemed the likely candidate, "of course anything can happen in politics and generally does". The News Post stated that other names discussed by the Committee included "Lt. [sic] Richard Nixon, U.S.N.R., of Whittier." Congressman Voorhis wrote his father and political adviser, Charles Voorhis, on October 15, "I understand the General has decided not to run in the 12th district. Dr. Dexter would, in my opinion, be hard to beat. But at least it would be a clean, decent campaign, and I'm not so sure I wouldn't prefer that even if I lost." Herman Perry, Whittier Bank of America branch manager and Nixon family friend, wrote to Nixon, who was then a lieutenant commander in the Navy, telling him he should apply for the Committee's endorsement. Nixon replied enthusiastically. When Dexter finally turned the Committee down, he recommended Nixon, his onetime student. Dexter died only days later of a heart attack, and Patton died in an auto accident before the 1946 campaign began.
At the time, Nixon was stationed in Baltimore, Maryland, using his legal training to deal with military contract terminations. On November 1, 1945, he flew to California to meet influential Republicans and give a speech at a Committee meeting. The meeting was advertised throughout the district and was open to any potential candidate. However, the advertisements for the meeting noted that Nixon would be flying in to speak. A number of potential rivals also showed up at the meeting on November 2, 1945, including a local judge and assemblyman. Nixon, who spoke last, was "electrifying", according to one Committee member. When the Committee met to vote on November 28, Nixon received over two-thirds of the vote, which was then made unanimous. Committee chairman Roy Day immediately notified the victor of the Committee's endorsement.
Nixon was already arranging to research Voorhis's record and to meet with Republican leaders in Washington, including House Minority Leader (and future Speaker) Joseph W. Martin, Jr. The newly minted candidate wrote to Day regarding Voorhis, "His 'conservative' reputation must be blasted. But my main efforts are being directed toward building up a positive, progressive group of speeches which tell what we want to do, not what the Democrats have failed to do ... I'm really hopped up over this deal, and I believe we can win." However, "wheelhorse" Republicans deemed Nixon's campaign hopeless. Nixon was a virtual unknown outside of his hometown of Whittier and was facing a popular and respected incumbent. Charles Voorhis wrote his son that the Republicans had endorsed a Quaker named Richard Nixon, but hoped that his son would retain a large part of the Quaker vote. The elder Voorhis was confident that his son would triumph again, writing, "It is just another campaign that we have to go through ... In any event, we have nothing to worry about now."
## Primary campaign
Nixon was discharged from the Navy at the start of 1946. Within days, he and his wife Pat Nixon, the latter almost eight months pregnant, returned to Whittier. They initially moved in with the candidate's parents, Frank and Hannah. Nixon returned to his old law firm, but spent most of his time campaigning. Roy Day, chairman of the now-dissolved Committee, appointed himself as Nixon's campaign manager. This self-appointment dismayed the candidate somewhat, and Nixon unsuccessfully sought to replace Day.
Voorhis had been in Washington since August 1945, attending to congressional business. He did not return to the district until August 1946, well after the June primary. By his own account, he was busy dealing with:
> [The a]mendment of the Social Security Act, the Case Labor bill, the British loan, terminal leave pay for soldiers, and several appropriation bills [and] the most important problem our country had ever faced in all its history—the problem of what to do about atomic energy. I felt sure that the people of the district would rather have me stay on the job than come home to campaign.
Beginning in February, the Republican hopeful began a heavy speaking schedule, addressing civic groups across the 400 square miles (1,000 km<sup>2</sup>) district. Nixon's efforts to get publicity were aided by the birth of his daughter Tricia in late February. The new father was extensively interviewed and photographed with his infant daughter. Congressman Voorhis's office sent the Nixons a government pamphlet entitled Infant Care, of which representatives received 150 per month to distribute to their constituents. When Richard Nixon sent his rival a note of thanks in early April, the congressman responded with a letter proposing that the two debate once Congress adjourned in August.
In mid-March, Nixon was approached by former congressman Hoeppel, who hated Voorhis. Hoeppel offered to enter the Democratic primary in exchange for a payment of several hundred dollars plus the promise of a civil service job once the Republican was elected. After consulting with his aides, Nixon turned him down. Subsequently, Hoeppel filed as a Prohibition Party candidate. Voorhis was privy to these events through an informant close to the former representative, and was convinced that Roy Day had arranged to pay Hoeppel's filing fee. The congressman feared that Hoeppel would serve as a stalking horse for Nixon, sparing the Republican from any "mudslinging". Voorhis responded to Hoeppel's filing with a letter to his campaign manager, Baldwin Park realtor Jack Long, stating that "it would be worthwhile for us to try our level best to beat him in the Prohibition primary by a write-in campaign".
On March 18, two days before the filing deadline, Nixon filed in both the Republican and Democratic primaries under California's cross-filing system. Voorhis also filed in the two major party primaries. Under cross-filing, if the same candidate won both major party endorsements, he would be effectively elected, with only minor party candidates to stand against him. Day advanced the \$200 (the current equivalent of \$2,230) for Nixon's filing fees, later noting that he had great difficulty being reimbursed.
By late March, Nixon's stock speeches to civic groups were becoming worn. Day hired political consultant Murray Chotiner for \$580 for the primary campaign, and the consultant warned that unless new life came into the campaign, it was in serious danger. In the following years, Chotiner was to become Nixon's campaign manager, adviser, and friend in an association that lasted until Chotiner's death a few months before President Nixon's 1974 resignation.
Chotiner arranged for stories in local papers alleging that Voorhis had been endorsed by "the PAC", hoping that voters would take that to mean the Congress of Industrial Organizations's Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC). The CIO was a labor federation which later merged with the American Federation of Labor to form the AFL-CIO. It had been organized in 1943 and took left-wing stands; its PAC was seen as a communist front organization by some. A second PAC, the National Citizen's Political Action Committee (NCPAC) was also affiliated with the CIO, but was open to those outside the labor movement. Among the 1946 members of the NCPAC were actors Melvyn Douglas and Ronald Reagan. Both PACs had been headed by the late labor leader, Sidney Hillman, and the two organizations shared office space in New York City. While the CIO's national leadership decried communism; some of the local CIO-PAC branches were dominated by Communist Party members. The CIO-PAC, which had endorsed Voorhis in 1944, refused to back him again. The Southern California chapter of the NCPAC endorsed Voorhis on April 1, 1946. Chotiner's strategy was to conflate the two PACs in the public eye.
Nourished by the PAC controversy, the Republican campaign gained new life as Nixon returned to the lecture circuit. After Nixon spoke to a Lions Club meeting on May 1, a worried Voorhis supporter wrote to the congressman, "He carried the group by storm. He is dangerous. You will have the fight of your life to beat him."
The primary was held on June 4, 1946. Both Voorhis and Nixon won his own party's primary, with Voorhis garnering a considerable number of votes in the Republican poll. When all the votes from all primaries were added together, Voorhis outpolled Nixon by 7,000 votes. Voorhis's total percentage of the vote decreased from 60% in the 1944 primaries to 53.5% in 1946. Hoeppel survived the write-in campaign to advance to the general election.
### Results
#### Democratic
#### Republican
#### Prohibition
## General election
Following a two-week vacation in British Columbia after the primary, Nixon returned to the 12th district. The Republican began the general election campaign by replacing Roy Day with South Pasadena engineer Harrison McCall as campaign manager. As Chotiner was increasingly distracted by his position as Southern California campaign manager for the (successful) reelection bid of Republican Senator William Knowland, the Nixon campaign added publicist William Arnold. Voorhis, on the other hand, remained in Washington, dealing with Congressional business and generating little publicity. He corresponded with his father and with his campaign manager, Jack Long, by letter. Voorhis hoped to return to California in mid-August but while returning from Washington in August, he was forced to have surgery for hemorrhoids in Ogden, Utah. Voorhis spent two weeks in an Ogden hotel recuperating from the operation and did not return to the district until the end of August. Voorhis wrote later, "I can't say I was exactly 'ready for the fray'. But the 'fray' was certainly ready for me."
### South Pasadena debate
Nixon did not reply to Voorhis's April debate proposal. In May, the congressman wrote to Long as Nixon's campaign initially made the alleged PAC endorsement an issue. Voorhis suggested that Nixon be challenged to debates as a matter of urgency. Long responded in June, saying that though Nixon was known as a champion debater during his Whittier College days, "with your age and experience the general public might not take kindly to your challenging a boy like Nixon". Long advised awaiting a challenge from Nixon. By August, the two campaigns had settled on a debate to be held before a veteran's group in Whittier on September 20. However, the "Independent Voters of South Pasadena" (IVSP), headed by future Voorhis biographer Paul Bullock, announced a September 13 town meeting on campaign issues at South Pasadena Junior High School. The IVSP's actual purpose in having the meeting was to get a vulnerable Republican assemblyman (who declined his invitation) to debate his Democratic rival, but Senate and 12th district Republican and Democratic candidates were invited. Given that the debate sponsors were liberals, some of Nixon's aides advised him to refuse, but he overrode them. Voorhis also accepted; when it was suggested to him later he should have sent a spokesman, he responded, "I suppose so, but I just couldn't bring myself to refuse." Both Senate candidates declined their invitations, with Senator Knowland sending Chotiner in his place, while Democratic candidate Will Rogers, Jr. sent Representative Chester E. Holifield of the neighboring 19th district.
The town meeting attracted a packed crowd of over a thousand, with Nixon supporters distributing anti-Voorhis literature at the door. The Senate proxies spoke first for their candidates, followed by Voorhis. Nixon, who had notified organizers that he would be late due to another commitment, arrived during Voorhis's speech, and remained backstage until the congressman had completed his talk. He then came onstage, shook hands with Voorhis, and delivered a fifteen-minute address. A question-and-answer period then followed, with a Nixon supporter asking Voorhis about his onetime Socialist registration, and about his views on monetary policy. After the representative responded, a Voorhis supporter asked Nixon why he was making "false charges" about the supposed Voorhis CIO-PAC endorsement. In response, Nixon reached into his pocket and pulled out a copy of a Southern California NCPAC bulletin mentioning the group's endorsement of Voorhis. The congressman was unaware of the endorsement; those of his aides in the know had "completely forgotten" to tell him. Nixon walked halfway across the stage and displayed it to Voorhis, asking him to read it for himself. Voorhis came from his seat and took it, and (according to Bullock, who served as timekeeper at the debate) "mumbled" that this seemed to be a different organization from the CIO-PAC. Nixon reclaimed the document, and began to read out names of the members of the boards of directors of the two groups, "It's the same thing, virtually, when they have the same directors." The crowd began to cheer Nixon, who later wrote, "I could tell by the audience reaction that I had made my point", and to jeer Voorhis, who wrote, "They'd boo and laugh at my remarks, and this disturbed me."
In the midst of the turmoil, Prohibition Party candidate Hoeppel came down the aisle (according to Bullock, possibly drunk) and demanded to know why he had been excluded from the debate. He was permitted to ask one question, of Voorhis, and the evening ended. According to Bullock, "the magnitude of Nixon's triumph did not immediately dawn on us." Congressman Holifield had grasped it, and when Voorhis asked him, "How did it go?" he responded, "Jerry, he cut you to pieces."
### Additional debates
On September 19, Voorhis wired the NCPAC's Los Angeles and New York offices, requesting that "whatever qualified endorsement the Citizens PAC may have given me be withdrawn". By this time, newspapers across the district had printed Nixon's charges, along with a Nixon advertisement castigating Voorhis for allegedly accusing Nixon of lying about the PAC endorsement. According to Nixon biographer Roger Morris, the repudiation of NCPAC endorsements did not help Voorhis, as his actions "would seem to many a half-guilty shedding of sinister backing he never had. To the end, as Chotiner had calculated, the PACs were hopelessly entangled." The Nixon campaign distributed 25,000 thimbles labeled "Nixon for Congress/Put the needle in the P.A.C."
The second debate was held at Patriotic Hall in Whittier on September 20. As the debate was sponsored by the Whittier Ex-Servicemen's Association, attendance was limited to veterans. The candidates debated the best way of dealing with the postwar housing shortage. Voorhis favored restricting building of commercial structures to free up materials for housing, while Nixon urged the removal of all building restrictions. When Nixon repeated his PAC allegations, Voorhis noted his request to the NCPAC, stating that he could not be held responsible for its actions. According to Morris, the debate ended as a draw, or perhaps even a Voorhis victory. Chotiner convinced Nixon that he needed to run an aggressive campaign to the end, and McCall challenged the Voorhis campaign to as many as eight additional debates, of which three were actually held.
The debates captured the interest of the public in the district and attracted large crowds. The candidates were compared to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who had famously debated in their 1858 senatorial campaign, and bands played marches as each candidate entered the venue. The two candidates' third meeting was held at Bridges Auditorium in Claremont on October 11. Voorhis was, by his own admission, "awfully tired". The candidates discussed labor policy, and Nixon "scored" by detailing a policy for dealing with public strikes that Voorhis too late realized was taken from a bill he had drafted. Nixon took Voorhis aside after the debate and lambasted him for addressing him as "Lieutenant Commander Nixon", accusing him of pandering to former enlisted men's dislike of officers.
In the fourth debate, on October 23 at Monrovia High School, Nixon attacked Voorhis's congressional record. The challenger alleged that in the previous four years, Voorhis only had been able to pass a single bill through Congress and into law. The bill in question transferred jurisdiction over rabbit farming from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. Nixon chided, "One has to be a rabbit to get effective representation in this congressional district." Voorhis responded that he had sponsored an act to employ the physically handicapped, but Nixon stated that it was not a law, but a joint resolution. Nixon restated his allegation regarding Voorhis and the PAC; Voorhis retorted that he had repudiated the NCPAC endorsement. Nixon parried with a comment that Voorhis's voting record "earned him the endorsement, whether he wanted it or not". Nixon also contended that in 46 votes, Voorhis had almost entirely followed the CIO-PAC agenda. Distraught, Voorhis stayed up until 4 am studying the votes Nixon had taxed him with. He concluded that due to duplications, there were actually only 27 roll calls in question, on many of which he had opposed the CIO-PAC position. The congressman also found that the votes "friendly" to the CIO-PAC included one authorizing a school lunch program.
The final debate took place October 28 at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, to an overflow crowd in excess of a thousand. Voorhis went on the attack, charging Nixon with misrepresenting the "46 votes" to avoid real debate and any discussion of where Nixon himself stood on issues. The Republican candidate stated that he was fighting for "the person on a pension trying to keep up with the rising cost of living ... the white-collar worker who has not had a raise ... Americans have had enough, and they have come to the conclusion that they are going to do something." Nixon sat down to thunderous applause, and the San Gabriel Sun described Voorhis: "He pauses, breathes heavily, scans the audience with tired eyes, adjusts his glasses nervously with both hands, and then strikes the podium with an open hand."
### Final days
In mid October, the Nixon campaign unveiled an advertisement which foreshadowed his run for Senate four years later. After stating that Nixon, at the South Pasadena debate, confronted the congressman with "a photostatic copy of his endorsement by the communist-dominated PAC", the ad stated, "Among the extreme left-wingers with whom Voorhis kept company in voting the PAC line are Helen Gahagan Douglas, Vito Marcantonio ..." On October 29, the Alhambra Post-Advocate and Monrovia News-Post printed identical pieces entitled "How Jerry and Vito voted", comparing the California congressman's voting record with that of Marcantonio, a leftist New York congressman. In 1950, a similar comparison between the voting record of Marcantonio and Democratic Senate nominee Douglas, printed on pink paper, came to be known as the "Pink Sheet".
The Nixon campaign continued to run newspaper ads touching on the PAC issue. One ad suggested Radio Moscow had urged the election of the CIO slate. Others touched on Voorhis's past registration as a Socialist, and stated that his congressional record "is more Socialistic and Communistic than Democratic". The Democrats brought James Roosevelt and other prominent Democrats into the district to campaign for Voorhis. Nixon proposed that his wartime acquaintance, former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen campaign for him. However, the candidate could not get permission from the California Republican committee for Stassen to visit. Voorhis publicized a letter he had received from the Republican governor, Earl Warren, praising him for a disability insurance proposal he had made. Nixon supporters asked Warren for a letter praising Nixon, or at least a retraction of the Voorhis letter. Warren refused, saying that Voorhis deserved the compliment, and Nixon would not receive an endorsement. This conflict began a contentious relationship between Nixon and Warren which lasted until Warren's death shortly before Nixon's resignation as president.
No polls had been taken during the campaign. On election night, Voorhis took an early lead in the vote count, but was soon overtaken by his challenger, whose margin increased as the night went on. Nixon defeated Voorhis by over 15,000 votes. The Republican won 19 of the 22 municipalities in the district, including Voorhis's home town of San Dimas. Voorhis won the Democratic strongholds of El Monte and Monterey Park, as well as rural Baldwin Park. Time magazine's post-election issue came out in mid-November, and it praised the future president for "politely avoid[ing] personal attacks on his opponent".
### Results
## Aftermath and analysis
### Candidates
The day after the election, Voorhis issued a concession statement, wishing Nixon well in his new position, and stating:
> I have given the best years of my life to serving this district in Congress. By the will of the people that work is ended. I have no regrets about the record I have written. I know the principles I have stood for and the measures I have fought for are right. I know, too, that, in broad outline at least, they are vital to the future safety and welfare of our country. I know the day will come when a lot more people will recognize this than was the case on November fifth.
Former congressman Hoeppel, who gathered just over one percent of the vote, wrote Nixon after the election, stating that he had never expected to win, and that his purpose had been "to expose what I considered to be the alien-minded, un-American, PAC, Red, congressional record of the Democratic incumbent". Despite any hard feelings, Voorhis sent Nixon a letter of congratulations in early December 1946. Nixon and Voorhis met for an hour at Voorhis's office, and parted, according to Voorhis, as friends. In 1971, Voorhis said that the two had never spoken again. Voorhis's final letter as a congressman, written on December 31, was to his father, who had been his political adviser throughout his congressional career. Representative Voorhis wrote, "It has been primarily due to your help, your confidence, your advice ... above all to a feeling I have always had that your hand was on my shoulder. Thanks ... God bless you."
Voorhis never ran again for political office, working as an executive in the cooperative movement for twenty years after his defeat. Hoeppel continued as publisher and editor of National Defense magazine, a publication for veterans, until his 1960 retirement, and died in Arcadia in 1976 at age 95. Nixon served two terms in the House, and in 1950 was elected to the United States Senate, continuing his political rise, which would lead him to the White House in 1969.
### Historical issues
The 12th district race of 1946 was little noticed at the time. As Nixon became prominent, the 1946 race was scrutinized more closely. Nixon biographer Herbert Parmet noted, "Except for Nixon's subsequent reputation, what happened in California's Twelfth would have been indistinguishable from campaigns across the country to elect the Eightieth Congress." Jonathan Aitken, also a biographer of Nixon, attributes the later scrutiny to "the unexpected toppling of a liberal icon and [the Democratic Party's] regret over the meteoric rise of the new Republican hero who won the seat".
Nixon's defeat of Voorhis has been cited as the first of a number of red-baiting campaigns by the future president which elevated him to the House, the Senate, the Vice Presidency, and eventually put him in position to run for president. Nixon, in his 1978 memoir, stated that the central issue in the 1946 campaign was "the quality of life in postwar America", and he won because voters "had 'had enough,' and they decided to do something about it". Voorhis, in his 1947 memoir, indicated that the "most important single factor in the campaign of 1946 was the difference in general attitude between the 'outs' and the 'ins'. Anyone seeking to unseat an incumbent needed only to point out all the things that had gone wrong and all the trouble of the war period and its aftermath."
In later years, Voorhis had more to say about the reasons for his defeat. In 1958, he alleged that voters had received anonymous phone calls saying that he was a communist, that newspapers had stated that he was a fellow traveler, and that when Nixon got angry, he would "do anything". In November 1962, after Nixon's defeat in the California gubernatorial race, Voorhis appeared on Howard K. Smith's News and Comment program on ABC in the episode entitled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon" and complained about the way Nixon had conducted himself in the 1946 race. Voorhis's appearance was overshadowed by the controversial participation of Nixon adversary Alger Hiss. In 1972, Voorhis authored a book, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon, in which he stated that Nixon was "quite a ruthless opponent" whose "one cardinal and unbreakable rule of conduct" was "to win, whatever it takes to do it". In 1981, three years before his death, Voorhis denied in an interview that he had been endorsed by the NCPAC.
In his memoirs, Voorhis alleged that in October 1945, "a representative of a large New York financial house" journeyed to California to meet with a number of influential Californians and "bawl them out" for allowing Voorhis, whom the New Yorker supposedly described as "one of the most dangerous men in Washington", to remain in Congress. In an early draft of his memoir, Voorhis wrote that he had documentation showing that "the Nixon campaign was a creature of big eastern financial interests". Nixon biographer Roger Morris suggested that the amount the Nixon campaign reported "was only a small fraction of what actually went into the campaign." According to Morris, the Committee of One Hundred represented wealthy interests, and Nixon benefited from "the University Club ... the corporate levies, the vastly larger forces arrayed against Voorhis". Nixon himself addressed this point in his memoir:
> As I moved up the political ladder, my adversaries tried to picture me as the hand-picked stooge of oil magnates, rich bankers, real estate tycoons and conservative millionaires. But a look at the list of my early supporters shows that they were typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, and a furniture dealer.
Nixon biographer Irwin Gellman, writing in 1999, nine years after Morris, disagreed with the latter's conclusions. Gellman argued that the Committee was a "grassroots" group which was "far from sophisticated" in its efforts to find a candidate. Parmet wrote that the campaign was not well financed, "Nixon had to learn that money would be scarce until he became a winner ... The Nixon campaign of 1946 did look like a shoestring affair." Aitken points out that Nixon spent no money on radio advertising during the campaign.
Other allegations center on Murray Chotiner, painting him as the evil genius of the campaign. Voorhis, for example, in his 1972 book, deemed himself "the first victim of the Nixon-Chotiner formula for political success." Several writers, including Kenneth Kurz in his book, Nixon's Enemies, and Ingrid Scobie in her biography of Helen Douglas, Center Stage, describe Chotiner incorrectly as Nixon's 1946 campaign manager. Part of this inflation is due to Chotiner himself, who, in later years, lost no opportunity to exaggerate his role in the 1946 race, to the annoyance of Day and McCall. According to Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose, "Nevertheless, the legend grew. In the eyes of Nixon's critics, as a candidate he was merely a front man for Chotiner's evil manipulations. But it simply was not so."
A number of biographies on Nixon or Voorhis, or which otherwise touch on the 1946 campaign, state with varying degrees of certainty that during the final weekend of the campaign, anonymous calls were made to district households. The caller would ask "Did you know Jerry Voorhis is a communist?" and then hang up. According to Bullock, there was a phone bank staffed by workers who had responded to a newspaper ad, run by the Nixon organization in Alhambra. Bullock cites as his source for this Zita Remley, a "Voorhis admirer", who stated that her niece had worked there. Although the niece died before Bullock's book was written, according to Bullock, Remley's "reputation for veracity is unchallengeable".
### Campaigns
Nixon spent most of 1946 campaigning in the district, and worked hard to extend his name recognition beyond his hometown of Whittier. In 1952, as Nixon ran for vice president, the Madera News-Tribune set forth its view of why Nixon beat Voorhis, "He rang doorbells, he talked on street corners and in auditoriums, he kissed babies, patted old ladies on the cheek, and otherwise made himself known wherever and whenever two people would stop and listen to him. He made friends with the press and radio, he went out of his way to be congenial and likable." Bullock indicated that regardless of the tactics used, Nixon would likely have beaten the incumbent given the national Republican tide that swept the party into power in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1931.
Starting in the primary, the Nixon campaign made determined efforts to woo the district's newspapers. The campaign targeted smaller papers, especially the small weekly newspapers that were distributed for free; Republican surveys found that these were widely read and trusted. Nixon supporter and Republican National Committeeman from California McIntyre Faries arranged to buy ads on behalf of the Nixon campaign on condition that the newspaper run an editorial at its direction (most of the papers were, in any event, Republican in their outlook). These efforts paid off; 26 of the 30 newspapers serving the district endorsed Nixon. According to Nixon biographer Morris, Voorhis was given no coverage in newspapers, or limited to small paid advertisements. The paper owners told the Voorhis campaign that, with the postwar paper shortage, space had to be saved for regular customers.
Voorhis's campaign, described by Bullock as "traditionally amateurish and poorly put together", was slow to perceive the threat presented by Nixon and remained continually on the defensive. In 1971, in an article marking the 25th anniversary of the campaign, Voorhis acknowledged that "I never had much of an organization; frankly, there was no form to it. And we needed it badly in 1946." In the same article, the Los Angeles Times described Voorhis's campaign as "undermanned, underfinanced, outgunned, outmaneuvered and he apparently was on the wrong side of most of the issues of the day". His one avenue of outreach in the press was his newspaper column, People's Business, which ran in most local newspapers. In July 1946, Voorhis chose to suspend this column lest it be thought that he was using it as a means of campaigning. According to Gellman, this weakened Voorhis's political outreach.
One blunder identified by Gellman was Voorhis's decision to debate Nixon, as it raised the challenger's profile to the same level as the incumbent's. This decision was described by Morris as "quiet hubris". Nixon later stated, "In 1946, a damn fool incumbent named Jerry Voorhis debated a young unknown lawyer, and it cost him the election." Gellman itemized Voorhis's other errors: "He never established a viable Democratic organization; instead he relied on his father and friends to evaluate voters' likely habits. Rather than return to campaign in the primary when he recognized Nixon's attractiveness, he remained in the capital, allowing Nixon to court newspaper publishers and reporters as well as constituents who wanted to have firsthand contact with their congressional representative. Even when Voorhis returned to the district, he made one blunder after another."
Ambrose summed up his chapter on the 1946 campaign:
> For Whittier and the 12th district, Nixon's first campaign produced the first Nixon haters and the first group of Nixon supporters. This was a consequence of his campaigning style and his penchant for polarizing his constituents over basic issues. The numbers of both groups would grow in the years ahead, until virtually everyone in the nation belonged to either one or the other.
|
6,086,795 |
Ann Bannon
| 1,173,015,928 |
American author
|
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"American LGBT scientists",
"American erotica writers",
"American lesbian writers",
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"Novelists from Illinois",
"People from Hinsdale, Illinois",
"People with chronic fatigue syndrome",
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"University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni",
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Ann Weldy (born September 15, 1932), better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is an American author who, from 1957 to 1962, wrote six lesbian pulp fiction novels known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. The books' enduring popularity and impact on lesbian identity has earned her the title "Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction". Bannon was a young housewife trying to address her own issues of sexuality when she was inspired to write her first novel. Her subsequent books featured four characters who reappeared throughout the series, including her eponymous heroine, Beebo Brinker, who came to embody the archetype of a butch lesbian. The majority of her characters mirrored people she knew, but their stories reflected a life she did not feel she was able to live. Despite her traditional upbringing and role in married life, her novels defied conventions for romance stories and depictions of lesbians by addressing complex homosexual relationships.
Her books shaped lesbian identity for lesbians and heterosexuals alike, but Bannon was mostly unaware of their impact. She stopped writing in 1962. Later, she earned a doctorate in linguistics and became an academic. She endured a difficult marriage for 27 years and, as she separated from her husband in the 1980s, her books were republished; she was stunned to learn of their influence on society. They were released again between 2001 and 2003 and were adapted as an award-winning Off-Broadway production. They are taught in women's and LGBT studies courses, and Bannon has received numerous awards for pioneering lesbian and gay literature. She has been described as "the premier fictional representation of US lesbian life in the fifties and sixties", and it has been said that her books "rest on the bookshelf of nearly every even faintly literate Lesbian".
## Early life
Ann Bannon was born Ann Weldy in Joliet, Illinois, in 1932. She was the only child of her mother's first marriage. Her mother married again and had a son with her second husband. Her mother married a third time and had four more sons.
Bannon grew up in nearby Hinsdale with her mother and stepfather, and had the responsibility of taking care of four siblings due to the family's financial problems. She took comfort in a vibrant imaginary life during this time and found solace in writing. Growing up, she was surrounded by music, particularly jazz, as her family hosted small recitals for friends and neighbors. One became a character in her books: a perennial bachelor named Jack who slung jokes and witticisms at the audiences.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign she belonged to Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority where she befriended a beautiful older sorority sister, "the prettiest I had ever seen", quite popular with men and with women. Bannon witnessed a younger sorority sister's unabashed infatuation with the older sister. She recalls it was an awkward situation, even though the older sorority sister was "unfailingly gracious" to the younger one. In recognizing the younger woman's attractions, she began to suspect her own sexuality. She said, "I saw a lot of it happening and I didn't know what to make of it. I don't even know how to put it—I was absolutely consumed with it, it was an extraordinary thing." Another sorority sister was physically remarkable, very tall—almost 6 feet (1.8 m), with a husky voice and boyish nickname, that Bannon imagined was a blend of Johnny Weissmuller and Ingrid Bergman. She recalled entering the communal restroom and seeing the sister, "both of us in underwear, and experienc(ing) a sort of electric shock", and trying not to stare at her. In 1954, she graduated with a degree in French and soon married an engineer thirteen years older whose job made them relocate frequently.
Bannon was 22 years old when she began writing her first pulp novel. She was influenced by the only lesbian novels she had read, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall from 1928 and Vin Packer's Spring Fire from 1952, albeit in two different ways: she was unable to relate to the dismal tones in Hall's novel, but as a sorority girl was more familiar with the plot and circumstances of Spring Fire. Bannon said, "Both books completely obsessed me for the better part of two years." Although recently married and on her way to having two children, she found the books struck a chord in her life and recognized emotions in herself that compelled her to write about them. In the beginning of her marriage she was left alone quite a lot and said, "I was kind of desperate to get some of the things that had been consuming me for a long time down on paper." In 1956, after having sent her first manuscript to Marijane Meaker (Packer's real name), Meaker invited her to New York to discuss the manuscript with Meaker's editor at Gold Medal Books; Bannon said her husband "only let [her] go because [she'd] discovered that there was a women’s hotel called the Barbizon.”
## Writing career
### Background
Paperback books in the United States expanded prominently after World War II through the marketing strategies of Pocket Books, who began to distribute publications through newspapers, newsstands, grocery stores, and bus and train stations. The retail opportunities of paperback books grew about tenfold with this method. In 1950, rival company Gold Medal Books published Women's Barracks, a fictionalized account of author Tereska Torrès' experience serving in the Free French Forces. The book depicts a lesbian relationship the author witnessed, ending with one of the women committing suicide. It sold 4.5 million copies, and Gold Medal Books' editors were "thrilled". Its success earned it a mention in the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952. Gold Medal Books was a branch of Fawcett Publications that focused on paperback books which at the time were printed on very cheap paper, not designed to last for more than a year, sold for 25 cents in drug stores and other venues all over the United States and Canada. The books made for cheap, easy reading that could be discarded at the end of a trip at very little cost to the customer. Because of the low quality of production, they earned the name pulp fiction.
Gold Medal Books quickly followed Women's Barracks with Spring Fire, eager to cash in on the unprecedented sales, and it sold almost 1.5 million copies in 1952. Vin Packer, whose real name is Marijane Meaker, and Gold Medal Books were overwhelmed with mail from women who identified with the lesbian characters.
One of the letters was from Bannon, asking for professional assistance in getting published. On writing to Meaker, she said, "To this day I have no idea why she responded to me out of the thousands of letters she was getting at that time. Thank God she did. I was both thrilled and terrified." Bannon visited Meaker and was introduced to Greenwich Village, which made a significant impression on Bannon: she called it "Emerald City, Wonderland, and Brigadoon combined—a place where gay people could walk the crooked streets hand in hand." Meaker set up a meeting with Gold Medal Books editor Dick Carroll, who read Bannon's initial 600-page manuscript. It was a story about the women in her sorority whom she admired, with a subplot consisting of two sorority sisters who had fallen in love with each other. Carroll told her to take it back and focus on the two characters who had an affair. Bannon claims she went back and told their story, delivered the draft to Carroll and saw it published without a single word changed. While raising two young children, Bannon lived in Philadelphia and took trips into New York City to visit Greenwich Village and stayed with friends. She said of the women she saw in Greenwich Village, "I wanted to be one of them, to speak to other women, if only in print. And so I made a beginning—and that beginning was the story that became Odd Girl Out."
### The Beebo Brinker Chronicles
#### Odd Girl Out
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles are six books in all, first published between 1957 and 1962. They featured four characters who appeared in at least three of the books in a chronological saga of coming to terms with their homosexuality and navigating their ways through gay and lesbian relationships. The first in the series, Odd Girl Out, was published in 1957, and became Gold Medal Books' second best-selling title of the year. Based on Bannon's own experiences, the plot involved a lesbian relationship between two sorority sisters in a fictional sorority at a fictional midwestern university. As was custom with pulp fiction novels, neither the cover art nor the title were under the control of the author. Both were approved by the publisher in order to be as suggestive and lurid as possible. The main character is Laura Landon, who realizes that she's in love with Beth, her older, more experienced roommate, a leader in the sorority.
Lesbians depicted in literature were relatively rare in the 1950s. It was the publisher's policy in any novel involving lesbianism that the characters would never receive any satisfaction from the relationship. One or both usually ended up committing suicide, going insane, or leaving the relationship. Marijane Meaker discusses this in the 2004 foreword of Spring Fire: she was told by editor Dick Carroll that because the books were distributed by the U.S. Post Office instead of private companies delivering directly to stores, postal inspectors would send the books back to the publisher if homosexuality was depicted positively. The Postal Service relaxed their censorship after several First Amendment obscenity trials, including Roth v. United States and another regarding Allen Ginsberg's Howl in the mid-1950s, which gave Bannon a modicum of freedom in her plots. Although the ending to Odd Girl Out did not veer too far from the unsatisfactory resolution formula of Spring Fire, Women's Barracks, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, it examined Laura's internal struggle in the realization that despite her femininity, she was deeply in love with another woman, and at the end she embraced it, which was rare in lesbian fiction.
The characters and their stories served as an extension of the fantasy life Bannon developed as a child. They became her "fantasy friends" whose loves and lives she witnessed and through which she lived her own life vicariously, helping her through a difficult marriage, and a longing for a life she did not feel she was free to live. "I realized very early that I should not marry, but I was going to make the best of a bad thing, and I was going to make it a good thing," she remembered. Having no practical experience in a lesbian relationship while writing Odd Girl Out, she set out to gain what she termed "fieldwork experience" in her trips to Greenwich Village, and was successful enough to introduce those experiences into the next book in the series before relocating once more to Southern California. But she explained her fears about staying in Greenwich Village, saying
> I would sit there (in a gay bar) in the evenings thinking, 'What if (a police raid) happens tonight and I get hauled off to the slam with all these other women?' I had been extremely low profile, very proper, very Victorian wife. I know that sounds crazy in the 60s, but I was raised by my mother and grandmother, who really came out of that era, and talk about a rigid role-playing crowd! I couldn't imagine living through it. I just couldn't. I thought, 'Well, that would do it. I'd have to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.' As easy as it might be if you were a young woman in today's generation to think that was exaggerating, it wasn't. It was terrifying.
#### I Am a Woman
Bannon followed Odd Girl Out with I Am a Woman (In Love With a Woman — Must Society Reject Me?) in 1959. I Am a Woman (the working and common title) featured Laura after her affair with Beth, as she finds herself in New York City's Greenwich Village, and meets a wisecracking gay man named Jack, and becomes his best friend. Laura has to choose between a straight woman with a wild and curious streak, and a fascinating new character that proved to be her most popular of the series, Beebo Brinker, who came to embody the description of a thoroughly butch lesbian. Beebo was smart, handsome, chivalrous, and virile. Once again based on what Bannon knew, Beebo was nearly 6 feet (1.8 m) tall with a husky voice and a formidable physique. The personality however, Bannon says, was drawn out of her sheer need for Beebo to exist. After spending time in Greenwich Village and not finding anyone like her, Bannon instead created her. She remembered, "I put Beebo together just as I wanted her, in my heart and mind ... She was just, quite literally, the butch of my dreams." The resolution to I Am a Woman completely flouted the trends of miserable lesbian fiction endings, which made Bannon a hero to many lesbians.
Letters began to pour in for her from all over the country. There were mostly propositions from men, but the letters from women thanked her profusely and begged her for reassurance that they would be all right. Bannon described the impact her books had from the letters she received from people who were isolated in small towns: "The most important things they learned (from the books) were that 1) they weren't unique and doomed to lifelong isolation, 2) ... they weren't 'abnormal,' and 3) there was hope for a happy life. They wrote to me in thousands, asking me to confirm these wonderful things, which I gladly did—even though I felt only marginally better informed than they were." The books were even translated into other languages, which was also quite rare for the brief lives of pulp novels. Bannon received international and domestic mail from women, saying, "This is the only book (and they would say this about all of them) that I've read where the women really love each other, where its OK for them to love each other, and they don't have to kill themselves afterwards."
#### Women in the Shadows
Although her husband was aware of the books she was writing, he showed no interest in the subject. He was interested enough in the money she made from them, however, but had forbidden her to use her married surname, not wishing to see it on a book cover with art of questionable taste. She took the name "Bannon" from a list of his customers and liked it because it contained her own name in it. She continued to experience difficulty in her marriage, however, and in realizing that "not all lesbians were nice people", she took these frustrations out on her characters. "I couldn't stand some of what was happening to me–but Beebo could take it. Beebo really, in a way, had my nervous breakdown for me ... I think I was overwhelmed with grief and anger that I was not able to express," she recalled later. Women in the Shadows was also published in 1959 and proved very unpopular with Bannon's readers. The book examined interracial relationships, self-loathing in matters of sexuality and race, alcoholism, jealousy, violence, and as Laura marries Jack in an atypical arrangement in the 1950s, also explored the intricate details of what it was like to pass as heterosexual in an attempt to live some semblance of what was considered a normal life at the time.
#### Journey to a Woman
Her fourth book in the series, Journey to a Woman, published in 1960, again shows parallels between Bannon's own life and her plots. Beth, of Laura's affair in Odd Girl Out, is living with her husband and children in Southern California. She tries to find Laura again nine years after college, and escapes a deranged woman who has a fixation on her, a reflection of a relationship Bannon had with a beautiful, but "very bewildered and unstable person." Beth writes to an author of lesbian books in New York, and goes to meet her in hope of finding Laura. They have a brief relationship, after which Beth finds Laura married to Jack and with a child, then discovers Beebo as well. A fifth book, The Marriage, also published in 1960, again addresses issues of love outside the realm of socially acceptable relationships, although it is not primarily about homosexuality. In it, Jack and Laura are friends with a young married couple who discover they are brother and sister, and must decide whether they will stay together or conform to societal standards.
#### Beebo Brinker
Returning to the character she fantasized about the most, the last book in the series, Beebo Brinker, published in 1962, was Bannon's prequel to Odd Girl Out. It follows Beebo around Greenwich Village ten years before she meets Laura in I Am a Woman. Beebo gets off the bus from her rural hometown into New York City to find a waiting friend in Jack, and to discover herself. She begins an affair with a famous and fading movie star, and follows her to California, only to return to be more honest about what she wants in her life.
In 1961 and 1962 Bannon also contributed several articles to ONE, Inc., the magazine of a homophile activist organization in Southern California. One of them was a chapter that had been cut from the final draft of Women in the Shadows. She was invited to speak to the Mattachine Society in the early 1960s, but her husband's stern disapproval of her activities began to take its toll. She stated later, "It began to be very painful. So every time I would start to reach out (to the lesbian/gay community), I would get struck down ... In my own life, I couldn't operationalize (my feeling that gays should end the secrecy and take more pride in themselves and their lives). I couldn't find a way."
## Rediscovery
After Beebo Brinker, Bannon said the energy to write about the characters left her, but she got so good at her "obsessive fantasies" that even after the books were written she continued to live internally, and suspected it affected her subsequent relationships. "I realize now that I was in a sort of 'holding pattern,' a way of keeping my sanity intact while waiting for my children to grow up and the freedom door to open", she recalled. Returning to school, Bannon completed her master's degree at Sacramento State University and her doctorate in linguistics at Stanford University. She was an English professor at Sacramento State and later became associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences—later the College of Arts and Letters.
Bannon's books began to fade away from publishing memory after initial publication, especially after Gold Medal Books went out of business. In 1975, however, Bannon was asked to include four of her books in Arno Press's library edition of Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature. Then, in 1983, Barbara Grier of the lesbian publishing company Naiad Press actively tracked Bannon down and reissued the books in new covers. Grier discussed the novels, answering the question of who among lesbian paperback authors should be highlighted: "Ann Bannon. Without even a discussion ... In terms of actual influence, sales, everything, Bannon."
Bannon did not outwardly advertise the fact that the books had been released again in her department at Sacramento State. Not being tenured, she was unsure how the information would be received. However, word got out: "I was jet-propelled out of the closet. People stared at me around campus, and the PE majors all waved. My chairman told me to put the books into my promotion file, and one of my colleagues told me my file was the only one that was any fun." She often received small recognitions from students and faculty who were pleased and surprised, once getting a bouquet of flowers from a student. She said of the rediscovery, "I was so ready for something fresh and exciting in my life. It had seemed to me, up to that point, that not only had the books and the characters died, so had Ann Bannon." However, following a bitter divorce, and just as the Naiad Press editions of her books were released, Bannon endured a bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, which she connects to repressing herself for so long. "You've got to think that it's connected, somehow. At the time I denied it fiercely, but I really think I beat myself up horribly, in ways I'll never know."
In 1984, Bannon's books were featured in the documentary Before Stonewall about how gay men and lesbians lived prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots, wherein one woman remembered picking up one of Bannon's books for the first time: "I picked up this paperback and I opened it up ... and it sent a shiver of excitement in my whole body that I had never felt before." She was featured in the Canadian documentary Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives in 1992, which recounted women's personal stories of living as lesbians from the 1940s to 1960s. The books were selected for the Quality Paperback Book Club in 1995. Bannon also provided the foreword for Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949–1969 in 1999, discussing her reaction to the artwork on her own books and the other lesbian pulp fiction books she bought and read. Five of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles were reissued by Cleis Press again between 2001 and 2003—excluding The Marriage—with autobiographical forewords that described Bannon's experiences of writing the books and her reaction to their popularity, causing another wave of interest.
Reacting to the renewed interest in the books, Bannon wrote in the 2002 introduction to Odd Girl Out that she was shocked to find out that her characters were not only remembered but that they were archetypes among the lesbian community. The books are frequently on required reading lists for Women's and LGBT studies college courses. Bannon often admits to being surprised by this, explaining that she had no such aspirations when she was writing Odd Girl Out: "If I had known, it might well have resulted in a much more polished product, but one that would have been so cautious and self-conscious as to be entirely forgettable. It would never—my best guess—have had the vibrant life it has now."
Literary scholar Yvonne Keller named Bannon as one of a small group of writers whose work formed the subgenre of "pro-lesbian" pulp fiction; others include Sloane Britain, Paula Christian, Joan Ellis, March Hastings, Marjorie Lee, Della Martin, Rea Michaels, Claire Morgan, Vin Packer, Randy Salem, Artemis Smith, Valerie Taylor, Tereska Torres, and Shirley Verel.
## Themes
### Identity
Since so little information was available about lesbians and lesbianism at the time, Bannon's books, through their far-reaching distribution and popularity served to form a part of a lesbian identity not only for the heterosexual population at large, but lesbians themselves. Lesbian author and historian Joan Nestle called the books "survival literature", explaining: "In whatever towns or cities these books were read, they were spreading the information that meant a new hope for trapped and isolated women". One retrospective writer noted, "[U]ntil the late 1960s, when the sexual revolution was emerging, the pulps provided a cultural space that helped to forge a queer identity".
Scholar Andrea Loewenstein published the first in-depth review of Bannon's books in 1980, and notes that they were "exceptionally good pulp" that caused unexpected strong feelings of sadness or anger among lesbians when they were read twenty years after being published. Bannon depicts strict roles of butch and femme, and gays and lesbians as self-destructive, closeted, paranoid, and alcoholic. Loewenstein remarks that readers in 1980 had a tendency to reject that kind of reality in Bannon's stories. "Since much of our past is so bitter, [we] ... pretend away our most recent history". Loewenstein suggests the struggles Bannon's characters endured were ones that Bannon must have faced herself. When Laura declares her joy in her love for Beth in Odd Girl Out while simultaneously questioning if it is right, Loewenstein states "one hears quite clearly the voice of Ann Bannon, questioning her own right to happiness". Similarly, remarking on Bannon's treatment of Beebo in Women in the Shadows by making her violent, alcoholic and self-destructive, Loewenstein notes, "she needs to humiliate Beebo so badly that she makes her disappear". Loewenstein remarks Bannon's characters are deeply conflicted by enjoying relationships they feel are morally wrong, and they are acting out cycles of self-hatred, though what remains at the end is "surprisingly ... passionate, tender, and erotic".
Writer Diane Hamer attests that Bannon's books and characters represent a part of identity where women are unsure if they are gay or straight, man or woman, ashamed or accepting of who they are. In receiving no clear answers from Bannon herself, women were left to try to figure these questions out for themselves. Hamer writes, "What Bannon did was to provide a range of possible trajectories to lesbianism ... Bannon, by constructing fictional biographies for her lesbian characters, produced a new knowledge about how one arrives at a lesbian identity."
Bannon also addresses the issue of race in Women in the Shadows when Laura begins an affair with a woman representing herself as Eastern Indian, but who is actually a lighter skinned African American. The duality of their relationship is expressed not only in skin color but through their personalities. Laura, blond and passionate, contrasts with Tris, who is dark but emotionally detached. Race, in this instance, is a "metaphor for the opposition between inside and outside that govern Bannon's sense of what a lesbian is".
The concept of a lesbian identity is also explored throughout Journey to a Woman, as Beth leaves her husband and children to find Laura. Beth is followed by Vega, a woman scarred deeply—both emotionally and physically—with whom Beth had an affair. Vega shoots herself at the end of the story. Scholar Christopher Nealon suggests that Vega's scars and emotional pain represent the anguish of self-hatred and the self-destructive phases Bannon imposed upon her characters in Women in the Shadows. Because Laura has grown from the complete adoration of Beth in Odd Girl Out and is unable to give Beth the same devotion when Beth finds her again, Nealon writes that Bannon makes the point that it is impossible to sustain "a lesbian identity that always returns to the moment of self-discovery". Beth, instead, finds Beebo, now older and much calmer, who gives her hope and the promise of love, which Nealon equates to a final identity for Bannon's characters.
In the new forewords to the Cleis Press editions, Bannon addressed the criticisms of her characters as self-destructive in limiting roles, explaining that she simply depicted what she knew and felt at the time. Bannon has said she knows the concerns of the women who are uncomfortable with the themes of her books: "I can understand that; they weren't there. To them some of it looks negative and some of it looks depressing. Although I didn't feel that way. I always felt excited when I was writing them."
### Gender
All five books of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles depict characters trying to come to terms with their ostracism from heterosexual society. Christopher Nealon adds that the characters are also trying to "understand the relationship between their bodies and their desires"; the continuing appeal of the novels, Nealon states, is due to the characters being "beautifully misembodied".
In Odd Girl Out, Laura Landon's resistance to the idea that she may be homosexual lies in her own concept of femininity rather than any repugnance for loving women. In I Am a Woman, the second book in the series, Beebo's butch appearance "seems to alternately terrify and attract Laura", leading to a very erotic physical relationship. However, when Laura lashes out at Beebo in a moment of self-pity, it is her masculinity that Laura attacks, invalidating Beebo's uniqueness and the core of her desirability violently. In the book that exhibits the most self-destruction in the series, Women in the Shadows, Laura expresses shame when accompanying Beebo outside of Greenwich Village, fearing Beebo will be arrested and jailed. Facing the end of their relationship, Beebo expresses the desire to be a man, if only to be able to marry Laura to give her a normal life.
Bannon's last book, Beebo Brinker, which takes place before the others when Beebo is eighteen years old, focuses on her realization not only that she is gay, but that she is also a masculine woman. Nealon writes that Bannon's exploration of Beebo's masculinity is not to give excuses for her desires, but "to get at the source of specialness, the sources of her claim to be treated with dignity". By connecting her characters' bodies with their desires, Bannon allows further understanding of self as normal, and that homosexuality is acceptable.
## Style
Bannon's books, like most pulp fiction novels, were not reviewed by newspapers or magazines when they were originally published between 1957 and 1962. However, since their release they have been the subject of analyses that offer differing opinions of Bannon's books as a reflection of the moral standards of the decade, a subtle defiance of those morals, or a combination of both. Andrea Loewenstein notes Bannon's use of cliché, suggesting that it reflected Bannon's own belief in the culturally repressive ideas of the 1950s. Conversely, writer Jeff Weinstein remarks that Bannon's "potboilers" are an expression of freedom because they address issues mainstream fiction did not in the 1950s. Instead of cliché, Weinstein writes that her characters become more realistic as she exploits the dramatic plots, because they "are influenced by the melodramatic conventions of the culture that excludes them".
Diane Hamer likens Bannon's work to the Mills and Boon of lesbian literature, but unlike conventional romance novels, her stories never really have neat and tidy conclusions. Hamer also takes note of Bannon's use of Freudian symbolism: in I Am a Woman, Jack frequently mentions that he is being psychoanalyzed, and his friends react with interest. Jack labels Laura "Mother" and continues to refer to this nickname instead of her real name throughout the series, as though Bannon—through Jack—is vaguely mocking Freud and the ideas that have framed the construction of sexuality in the 1950s. Scholar Michele Barale remarks that Bannon's literary devices in Beebo Brinker defy the expectations of the audience for whom the novel was specifically marketed: heterosexual males. Bannon chooses the first character, an "everyman" named—significantly—Jack Mann, with whom the male audience identifies, only to divulge that he is gay and has maternal instincts. His interest turns to Beebo, whom he finds "handsome" and lost, and he takes her home, gets her drunk, and becomes asexually intimate with her. Barale writes that Bannon manipulates male readers to become interested in the story, then turns them into voyeurs and imposes homosexual desires upon them, though eventually places them in a safe position to understand a gay story from a heterosexual point of view.
The erotic nature of the books has been noted as adding to their uniqueness. Loewenstein remarks on the intensity of Laura's passion: "The presentation of a woman as a joyfully aggressive person is, in itself, a rare achievement in 1957". A 2002 retrospective of Bannon's books claims "there were more explicit and nuanced representations of sexuality in those paperbacks than could be found almost anywhere else". Author Suzana Danuta Walters represents the eroticism in Bannon's books as a form of rebellion. In the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Jenifer Levin writes, "Know this: Beebo lives. From the midst of a repressive era, from the pen of a very proper, scholarly, seemingly conforming wife and mother, came this astonishingly open queer figment of fictional being, like molten material from some volcano of the lesbian soul."
Bannon's books have, with the benefit of time, been described in vastly different terms, from "literary works" among pulp contemporaries, to "libidinised trash". However disparately Bannon's books are described in feminist and lesbian literary retrospectives, almost every mention concedes the significance of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. One retrospective writer called Bannon's books "titillating trash, but indispensable reading to the nation's lesbians."
## Legacy
Critics have since remarked that Bannon's books are remarkable for portraying homosexual relationships relatively accurately. The continuity of characters in the series also gave her books a unique quality, especially when most lesbian characters during this time were one-dimensional stereotypes who met punishment for their desires. Bannon's characters have been called "accessibly human", and still engrossing by contemporary standards compared to being "revolutionary" when first released. LGBT historian Susan Stryker describes the relationships between Bannon's characters as mostly positive, satisfactory, and at times complex depictions of lesbian and gay relationships, which Bannon attributed to not letting go of the hope that she could "salvage (her) own life." One retrospective of lesbian pulp fiction remarked on the reasons why Bannon's books in particular were popular is because they were so different from anything else being published at the time: "Bannon was implicitly challenging the prevailing belief that homosexual life was brief, episodic, and more often than not resulted in death ... Bannon insisted on the continuity of lesbian love, while everything in her culture was speaking of its quick and ugly demise."
Bannon set her stories in and among gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s that were secret. As described in Beebo Brinker, one had to knock on the door and be recognized before being let in. In reality, women were not allowed to wear pants in some bars in New York City. Police raided bars and arrested everyone within regularly; a raid on a gay bar prompted the seminal Stonewall riots in 1969 that started the gay rights movement. Because of the atmosphere of secrecy and shame, little was recorded at the time about what it was like to be gay then, and Bannon unwittingly recorded history from her own visits to Greenwich Village. In 2007, one of the writers who adapted three of the books into a play said of Bannon's work, "I think she rises above the pulp. She wasn't trying to write trash. There wasn't any place for a woman to be writing this kind of material ... But I just think the writing's transcended its time and its era and its market."
Author Katherine V. Forrest claimed Bannon and her books "are in a class by themselves" and credits Bannon with saving her life, writing in 2005, "Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air ... I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was."
### Adaptations
In 2007, an off-off-Broadway company named The Hourglass Group produced an adaptation of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles in a production that ran for a month. The writers, Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman, used material from I Am a Woman, Women in the Shadows and Journey to a Woman to predominantly positive reviews. It was successful enough to be moved Off Broadway for another ten-week run in 2008. The play's writers commented on the difficulty of lesbian-themed works finding financial success. They were tempted to make it more appealing by turning to camp for comedy. However, one of the writers said, "I just felt like, how can you turn these people into a joke? I mean, these people are real people! Why would I direct a play where I held the characters in some sort of contempt or felt that they were ridiculous? We are allowed to do something else besides camp." The stage adaptation of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles was produced by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, and it won the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Award for "fair, accurate, and inclusive" portrayals of gay and lesbian people in New York Theater. In 2021 the Palm Springs Desert Ensemble Theatre produced the play.
In April 2008, Bannon appeared with the Seattle Women's Chorus in a performance called "Vixen Fiction". Bannon read excerpts of her work and discussed the effects of her writing on her own life and the lives of her readers. U.S. cable network HBO has optioned Bannon's novels for potential development as a series.
### Honors
In 1997, Bannon's work was included in a collection of authors who had made the deepest impact on the lives and identities of gays and lesbians, titled Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers. In 2000, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors awarded Bannon a Certificate of Honor "for breaking new ground with works like Odd Girl Out and Women in the Shadows" and for "voic (ing) lesbian experiences at a time when explicit lesbian subject matter was silenced by government and communities." In 2004, Bannon was elected into the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame. She received the Sacramento State Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award for 2005, and received the Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society the same year; the GCLS created the Ann Bannon GCLS Popular Choice Award. She was the recipient of the Alice B Award in 2008, that goes to authors whose careers have been distinguished by consistently well-written stories about lesbians. In May 2008, Bannon was given the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.
In 2012, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the LGBT History Month.
### In retirement
Bannon retired from teaching and college administration at California State University, Sacramento, in 1997, but tours the country visiting paperback-collecting conventions and speaking at colleges and universities about her writings and experiences. She was a guest of National Public Radio's Peabody Award-winning talk show "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, and has also been featured in Gross's book, All I Did Was Ask, a collection of transcripts from the show. Bannon also speaks at gay-themed events around the country and is working on her memoirs.
In a 2002 editorial written by Bannon in Curve, she discussed how her books survived despite criticisms by censors, Victorian moralists, and purveyors of literary "snobbery" in writing, "To the persistent surprise of many of us, and of the critics who found us such an easy target years ago, the books by, of and for women found a life of their own. They—and we—may still not be regarded as conventionally acceptable 'nice' literature, as it were—but I have come to value that historical judgment. We wrote the stories no one else could tell. And in so doing, we captured a slice of life in a particular time and place that still resonates for members of our community."
## Personal life
Bannon lives in Sacramento. She has two children with her former husband. In 2021 she told an interviewer that her elder daughter, who converted to Catholicism and became very conservative, "does not approve of any of this at all" but that her younger daughter is "open and welcoming and loving".
|
319,149 |
Burning of Parliament
| 1,168,364,127 |
1834 destruction of the Houses of Parliament in London
|
[
"1834 disasters in the United Kingdom",
"1834 fires",
"1834 in London",
"19th-century fires in the United Kingdom",
"Building and structure fires in London",
"Burned buildings and structures in the United Kingdom",
"Fires at legislative buildings",
"October 1834 events",
"Palace of Westminster",
"Political history of London"
] |
The Palace of Westminster, the medieval royal palace used as the home of the British parliament, was largely destroyed by fire on 16 October 1834. The blaze was caused by the burning of small wooden tally sticks which had been used as part of the accounting procedures of the Exchequer until 1826. The sticks were disposed of carelessly in the two furnaces under the House of Lords, which caused a chimney fire in the two flues that ran under the floor of the Lords' chamber and up through the walls.
The resulting fire spread rapidly throughout the complex and developed into the largest conflagration in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz of the Second World War; the event attracted large crowds which included several artists who provided pictorial records of the event. The fire lasted for most of the night and destroyed a large part of the palace, including the converted St Stephen's Chapel—the meeting place of the House of Commons—the Lords Chamber, the Painted Chamber and the official residences of the Speaker and the Clerk of the House of Commons.
The actions of Superintendent James Braidwood of the London Fire Engine Establishment ensured that Westminster Hall and a few other parts of the old Houses of Parliament survived the blaze. In 1836 a competition for designs for a new palace was won by Charles Barry. Barry's plans, developed in collaboration with Augustus Pugin, incorporated the surviving buildings into the new complex. The competition established Gothic Revival as the predominant national architectural style and the palace has since been categorised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value.
## Background
The Palace of Westminster originally dates from the early eleventh century when Canute the Great built his royal residence on the north side of the River Thames. Successive kings added to the complex: Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey; William the Conqueror began building a new palace; his son, William Rufus, continued the process, which included Westminster Hall, started in 1097; Henry III built new buildings for the Exchequer—the taxation and revenue gathering department of the country—in 1270 and the Court of Common Pleas, along with the Court of King's Bench and Court of Chancery. By 1245 the King's throne was present in the palace, which signified that the building was at the centre of English royal administration.
In 1295 Westminster was the venue for the Model Parliament, the first English representative assembly, summoned by Edward I; during his reign he called sixteen parliaments, which sat either in the Painted Chamber or the White Chamber. By 1332 the barons (representing the titled classes) and burgesses and citizens (representing the commons) began to meet separately, and by 1377 the two bodies were entirely detached. In 1512 a fire destroyed part of the royal palace complex and Henry VIII moved the royal residence to the nearby Palace of Whitehall, although Westminster still retained its status as a royal palace. In 1547 Henry's son, Edward VI, provided St Stephen's Chapel for the Commons to use as their debating chamber. The House of Lords met in the medieval hall of the Queen's Chamber, before moving to the Lesser Hall in 1801. Over the three centuries from 1547 the palace was enlarged and altered, becoming a warren of wooden passages and stairways.
St Stephen's Chapel remained largely unchanged until 1692 when Sir Christopher Wren, at the time the Master of the King's Works, was instructed to make structural alterations. He lowered the roof, removed the stained glass windows, put in a new floor and covered the original gothic architecture with wood panelling. He also added galleries from which the public could watch proceedings. The result was described by one visitor to the chamber as "dark, gloomy, and badly ventilated, and so small ... when an important debate occurred ... the members were really to be pitied". When the future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone remembered his arrival as a new MP in 1832, he recounted "What I may term corporeal conveniences were ... marvellously small. I do not think that in any part of the building it afforded the means of so much as washing the hands." The facilities were so poor that, in debates in 1831 and 1834, Joseph Hume, a Radical MP, called for new accommodation for the House, while his fellow MP William Cobbett asked "Why are we squeezed into so small a space that it is absolutely impossible that there should be calm and regular discussion, even from circumstance alone ... Why are 658 of us crammed into a space that allows each of us no more than a foot and a half square?"
By 1834 the palace complex had been further developed, firstly by John Vardy in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century by James Wyatt and Sir John Soane. Vardy added the Stone Building, in a Palladian style to the West side of Westminster Hall; Wyatt enlarged the Commons, moved the Lords into the Court of Requests and rebuilt the Speaker's House. Soane, taking on responsibility for the palace complex on Wyatt's death in 1813, undertook rebuilding of Westminster Hall and constructed the Law Courts in a Neoclassical style. Soane also provided a new royal entrance, staircase and gallery, as well as committee rooms and libraries.
The potential dangers of the building were apparent to some, as no fire stops or party walls were present in the building to slow the progress of a fire. In the late eighteenth century a committee of MPs predicted that there would be a disaster if the palace caught fire. This was followed by a 1789 report from fourteen architects warning against the possibility of fire in the palace; signatories included Soane and Robert Adam. Soane again warned of the dangers in 1828, when he wrote that "the want of security from fire, the narrow, gloomy and unhealthy passages, and the insufficiency of the accommodations in this building are important objections which call loudly for revision and speedy amendment." His report was again ignored.
Since medieval times the Exchequer had used tally sticks, pieces of carved, notched wood, normally willow, as part of their accounting procedures. The parliamentary historian Caroline Shenton has described the tally sticks as "roughly as long as the span of an index finger and thumb". These sticks were split in two so that the two sides to an agreement had a record of the situation. Once the purpose of each tally had come to an end, they were routinely destroyed. By the end of the eighteenth century the usefulness of the tally system had likewise come to an end, and a 1782 Act of Parliament stated that all records should be on paper, not tallies. The Act also abolished sinecure positions in the Exchequer, but a clause in the act ensured it could only take effect once the remaining sinecure-holders had died or retired. The final sinecure-holder died in 1826 and the act came into force, although it took until 1834 for the antiquated procedures to be replaced. The novelist Charles Dickens, in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association, described the retention of the tallies for so long as an "obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom"; he also mocked the bureaucratic steps needed to implement change from wood to paper. He said that "all the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception." By the time the replacement process had finished, there were two cart-loads of old tally sticks awaiting disposal.
In October 1834 Richard Weobley, the Clerk of Works, received instructions from Treasury officials to clear the old tally sticks while parliament was adjourned. He decided against giving the sticks away to parliamentary staff to use as firewood, and instead opted to burn them in the two heating furnaces of the House of Lords, directly below the peers' chambers. The furnaces had been designed to burn coal—which gives off a high heat with little flame—and not wood, which burns with a high flame. The flues of the furnaces ran up the walls of the basement in which they were housed, under the floors of the Lords' chamber, then up through the walls and out through the chimneys.
## 16 October 1834
The process of destroying the tally sticks began at dawn on 16 October and continued throughout the day; two Irish labourers, Joshua Cross and Patrick Furlong, were assigned the task. Weobley checked in on the men throughout the day, claiming subsequently that, on his visits, both furnace doors were open, which allowed the two labourers to watch the flames, while the piles of sticks in both furnaces were only ever four inches (ten centimetres) high. Another witness to the events, Richard Reynolds, the firelighter in the Lords, later reported that he had seen Cross and Furlong throwing handfuls of tallies onto the fire—an accusation they both denied.
Those tending the furnaces were unaware that the heat from the fires had melted the copper lining of the flues and started a chimney fire. With the doors of the furnaces open, more oxygen was drawn into the furnaces, which ensured the fire burned more fiercely, and the flames driven farther up the flues than they should have been. The flues had been weakened over time by having footholds cut in them by the child chimney sweeps. Although these footholds would have been repaired as the child exited on finishing the cleaning, the fabric of the chimney was still weakened by the action. In October 1834 the chimneys had not yet had their annual sweep, and a considerable amount of clinker had built up inside the flues.
A strong smell of burning was present in the Lords' chambers during the afternoon of 16 October, and at 4:00 pm two gentlemen tourists visiting to see the Armada tapestries that hung there were unable to view them properly because of the thick smoke. As they approached Black Rod's box in the corner of the room, they felt heat from the floor coming through their boots. Shortly after 4:00 pm Cross and Furlong finished work, put the last few sticks into the furnaces—closing the doors as they did so—and left to go to the nearby Star and Garter public house.
Shortly after 5:00 pm, heat and sparks from a flue ignited the woodwork above. The first flames were spotted at 6:00 pm, under the door of the House of Lords, by the wife of one of the doorkeepers; she entered the chamber to see Black Rod's box alight, and flames burning the curtains and wood panels, and raised the alarm. For 25 minutes the staff inside the palace initially panicked and then tried to deal with the blaze, but they did not call for assistance, or alert staff at the House of Commons, at the other end of the palace complex.
At 6:30 pm there was a flashover, a giant ball of flame that The Manchester Guardian reported "burst forth in the centre of the House of Lords, ... and burnt with such fury that in less than half an hour, the whole interior ... presented ... one entire mass of fire." The explosion, and the resultant burning roof, lit up the skyline, and could be seen by the royal family in Windsor Castle, 20 miles (32 km) away. Alerted by the flames, help arrived from nearby parish fire engines; as there were only two hand-pump engines on the scene, they were of limited use. They were joined at 6:45 pm by 100 soldiers from the Grenadier Guards, some of whom helped the police in forming a large square in front of the palace to keep the growing crowd back from the firefighters; some of the soldiers assisted the firemen in pumping the water supply from the engines.
The London Fire Engine Establishment (LFEE)—an organisation run by several insurance companies in the absence of a publicly run brigade—was alerted at about 7:00 pm, by which time the fire had spread from the House of Lords. The head of the LFEE, James Braidwood, brought with him 12 engines and 64 firemen, even though the Palace of Westminster was a collection of uninsured government buildings, and therefore fell outside the protection of the LFEE. Some of the firefighters ran their hoses down to the Thames. The river was at low tide and it meant a poor supply of water for the engines on the river side of the building.
By the time Braidwood and his men had arrived on the scene, the House of Lords had been destroyed. A strong south-westerly breeze had fanned the flames along the wood-panelled and narrow corridors into St Stephen's Chapel. Shortly after his arrival the roof of the chapel collapsed; the resultant noise was so loud that the watching crowds thought there had been a Gunpowder Plot-style explosion. According to The Manchester Guardian, "By half-past seven o'clock the engines were brought to play upon the building both from the river and the land side, but the flames had by this time acquired such a predominance that the quantity of water thrown upon them produced no visible effect." Braidwood saw it was too late to save most of the palace, so elected to focus his efforts on saving Westminster Hall, and he had his firemen cut away the part of the roof that connected the hall to the already burning Speaker's House, and then soak the hall's roof to prevent it catching fire. In doing so he saved the medieval structure at the expense of those parts of the complex already ablaze.
The glow from the burning, and the news spreading quickly round London, ensured that crowds continued to turn up in increasing numbers to watch the spectacle. Among them was a reporter for The Times, who noticed that there were "vast gangs of the light-fingered gentry in attendance, who doubtless reaped a rich harvest, and [who] did not fail to commit several desperate outrages". The crowds were so thick that they blocked Westminster Bridge in their attempts to get a good view, and many took to the river in whatever craft they could find or hire in order to watch better. A crowd of thousands congregated in Parliament Square to witness the spectacle, including the Prime Minister—Lord Melbourne—and many of his cabinet. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher, was one of those present that night, and he later recalled that:
> The crowd was quiet, rather pleased than otherwise; whew'd and whistled when the breeze came as if to encourage it: "there's a flare-up (what we call shine) for the House o' Lords."—"A judgment for the Poor-Law Bill!"—"There go their hacts" (acts)! Such exclamations seemed to be the prevailing ones. A man sorry I did not anywhere see.
This view was doubted by Sir John Hobhouse, the First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, who oversaw the upkeep of royal buildings, including the Palace of Westminster. He wrote that "the crowd behaved very well; only one man was taken up for huzzaing when the flames increased. ... on the whole, it was impossible for any large assemblage of people to behave better." Many of the MPs and peers present, including Lord Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, helped break down doors to rescue books and other treasures, aided by passers-by; the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms had to break into a burning room to save the parliamentary mace.
At 9:00 pm three Guards regiments arrived on the scene. Although the troops assisted in crowd control, their arrival was also a reaction of the authorities to fears of a possible insurrection, for which the destruction of parliament could have signalled the first step. The three European revolutions of 1830—the French, Belgian and Polish actions—were still of concern, as were the unrest from the Captain Swing riots, and the recent passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which altered the relief provided by the workhouse system.
At around 1:30 am the tide had risen enough to allow the LFEE's floating fire engine to arrive on the scene. Braidwood had called for the engine five hours previously, but the low tide had hampered its progress from its downriver mooring at Rotherhithe. Once it arrived it was effective in bringing under control the fire that had taken hold in the Speaker's House.
Braidwood regarded Westminster Hall as safe from destruction by 1:45 am, partly because of the actions of the floating fire engine, but also because a change in the direction of the wind kept the flames away from the Hall. Once the crowd realised that the hall was safe they began to disperse, and had left by around 3:00 am, by which time the fire near the Hall was nearly out, although it continued to burn towards the south of the complex. The firemen remained in place until about 5:00 am, when they had extinguished the last remaining flames and the police and soldiers had been replaced by new shifts.
The House of Lords, as well as its robing and committee rooms, were all destroyed, as was the Painted Chamber, and the connecting end of the Royal Gallery. The House of Commons, along with its library and committee rooms, the official residence of the Clerk of the House and the Speaker's House, were devastated. Other buildings, such as the Law Courts, were badly damaged. The buildings within the complex which emerged relatively unscathed included Westminster Hall, the cloisters and undercroft of St Stephen's, the Jewel Tower and Soane's new buildings to the south. The British standard measurements, the yard and pound, were both lost in the blaze; the measurements had been created in 1496. Also lost were most of the procedural records for the House of Commons, which dated back as far as the late 15th century. The original Acts of Parliament from 1497 survived, as did the Lords' Journals, all of which were stored in the Jewel Tower at the time of the fire. In the words of Shenton, the fire was "the most momentous blaze in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz" of the Second World War. Despite the size and ferocity of the fire, there were no deaths, although there were nine casualties during the night's events that were serious enough to require hospitalisation.
## Aftermath
The day after the fire the Office of Woods and Forests issued a report outlining the damage, stating that "the strictest enquiry is in progress as to the cause of this calamity, but there is not the slightest reason to suppose that it has arisen from any other than accidental causes." The Times reported on some of the possible causes of the fire, but indicated that it was likely that the burning of the Exchequer tallies was to blame. The same day the cabinet ministers who were in London met for an emergency cabinet meeting; they ordered a list of witnesses to be drawn up, and on 22 October a committee of the Privy Council sat to investigate the fire.
The committee, which met in private, heard numerous theories as to the causes of the fire, including the lax attitude of plumbers working in the Lords, carelessness of the servants at Howard's Coffee House—situated inside the palace—and a gas explosion. Other rumours began to circulate; the Prime Minister received an anonymous letter claiming that the fire was an arson attack. The committee issued its report on 8 November, which identified the burning of the tallies as the cause of the fire. The committee thought it unlikely that Cross and Furlong had been as careful in filling the furnaces as they had claimed, and the report stated that "it is unfortunate that Mr Weobley did not more effectively superintend the burning of the tallies".
King William IV offered Buckingham Palace as a replacement to parliament; the proposal was declined by MPs who considered the building "dingy". Parliament still needed somewhere to meet, and the Lesser Hall and Painted Chamber were re-roofed and furnished for the Commons and Lords respectively for the State Opening of Parliament on 23 February 1835.
Although the architect Robert Smirke was appointed in December 1834 to design a replacement palace, pressure from the former MP Lieutenant Colonel Sir Edward Cust to open the process up to a competition gained popularity in the press and led to the formation in 1835 of a Royal Commission, which decided that although competitors would not be required to follow the outline of the original palace, the surviving buildings of Westminster Hall, the Undercroft Chapel and the Cloisters of St Stephen's would all be incorporated into the new complex.
There were 97 entries to the competition, which closed in November 1835; each entry was to be identifiable only by a pseudonym or symbol. The commission presented their recommendation in February 1836; the winning entry, which brought a prize of £1,500, was number 64, identified by a portcullis—the symbol chosen by the architect Charles Barry. Uninspired by any English secular Elizabethan or Gothic buildings, Barry had visited Belgium to view examples of Flemish civic architecture before he drafted his design; to complete the necessary pen and ink drawings, which are now lost, he employed Augustus Pugin, a 23-year-old architect who was, in the words of the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, "the most fertile and passionate of the Gothicists". Thirty-four of the competitors petitioned parliament against the selection of Barry, who was a friend of Cust, but their plea was rejected, and the former prime minister Sir Robert Peel defended Barry and the selection process.
## New Palace of Westminster
Barry planned an enfilade, or what Christopher Jones, the former BBC political editor, has called "one long spine of Lords' and Commons' Chambers" which enabled the Speaker of the House of Commons to look through the line of the building to see the Queen's throne in the House of Lords. Laid out around 11 courtyards, the building included several residences with accommodation for about 200 people, and comprised a total of 1,180 rooms, 126 staircases and 2 miles (3.2 km) of corridors. Between 1836 and 1837 Pugin made more detailed drawings on which estimates were made for the palace's completion; reports of the cost estimates vary from £707,000 to £725,000, with six years until completion of the project.
In June 1838 Barry and colleagues undertook a tour of Britain to locate a supply of stone for the building, eventually choosing Magnesian Limestone from the Anston quarry of the Duke of Leeds. Work started on building the river frontage on 1 January 1839, and Barry's wife laid the foundation stone on 27 April 1840. The stone was badly quarried and handled, and with the polluted atmosphere in London it proved to be problematic, with the first signs of deterioration showing in 1849, and extensive renovations required periodically.
Although there was a setback in progress with a stonemasons' strike between September 1841 and May 1843, the House of Lords had its first sitting in the new chamber in 1847. In 1852 the Commons was finished, and both Houses sat in their new chambers for the first time; Queen Victoria first used the newly completed royal entrance. In the same year, while Barry was appointed a Knight Bachelor, Pugin suffered a mental breakdown and, following incarceration at Bethlehem Pauper Hospital for the Insane, died at the age of 40.
The clock tower was completed in 1858, and the Victoria Tower in 1860; Barry died in May that year, before the building work was completed. The final stages of the work were overseen by his son, Edward, who continued working on the building until 1870. The total cost of the building came to around £2.5 million.
## Legacy
In 1836 the Royal Commission on Public Records was formed to look into the loss of the parliamentary records, and make recommendations on the preservation of future archives. Their published recommendations in 1837 led to the Public Record Act (1838), which set up the Public Record Office, initially based in Chancery Lane.
The fire became the "single most depicted event in nineteenth-century London ... attracting to the scene a host of engravers, watercolourists and painters". Among them were J. M. W. Turner, the landscape painter, who later produced two pictures of the fire, and the Romantic painter John Constable, who sketched the fire from a hansom cab on Westminster Bridge.
The destruction of the standard measurements led to an overhaul of the British weights and measures system. An inquiry that ran from 1838 to 1841 considered the two competing systems used in the country, the avoirdupois and troy measures, and decided that avoirdupois would be used forthwith; troy weights were retained solely for gold, silver and precious stones. The destroyed weights and measures were recast by William Simms, the scientific instrument maker, who produced the replacements after "countless hours of tests and experiments to determine the best metal, the best shape of bar, and the corrections for temperature".
The Palace of Westminster has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, and is classified as being of outstanding universal value. UNESCO describe the site as being "of great historic and symbolic significance", in part because it is "one of the most significant monuments of neo-Gothic architecture, as an outstanding, coherent and complete example of neo-Gothic style". The decision to use the Gothic design for the palace set the national style, even for secular buildings.
In 2015 the chairman of the House of Commons Commission, John Thurso, stated that the palace was in a "dire condition". The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, agreed and said that the building was in need of extensive repairs. He reported that parliament "suffers from flooding, contains a great deal of asbestos and has fire safety issues", which would cost £3 billion to fix.
|
5,153,700 |
The Halo Graphic Novel
| 1,141,019,702 |
2006 American graphic novel
|
[
"2006 comics debuts",
"Comics based on Halo (franchise)",
"Comics by Jean Giraud",
"Comics set on fictional planets",
"English-language books",
"Marvel Comics graphic novels",
"Novels based on Halo (franchise)",
"Science fiction graphic novels"
] |
The Halo Graphic Novel is a graphic novel anthology of the military science fiction video game series Halo, published by Marvel Comics in partnership with Bungie. The Halo Graphic Novel was the series' first entry into the sequential art medium, and features aspects of the Halo universe which until then had not been discussed or seen in any medium.
The majority of the book is divided into four short stories by different writers and artists from the computer game and comic industries. Each story focuses on different aspects of the Halo universe, revealing stories that are tangential to the main plot of the game. Apart from the stories, the book also contains an extensive art gallery compiled of contributions from Bungie, Marvel and independent sources.
Released on July 19, 2006, The Halo Graphic Novel was well-received, with reviewers noting the cohesiveness of the work as a whole, as well as the diversity of the individual material. The success of the novel led to Marvel announcing a new limited comic series, Halo: Uprising, and other future Halo comic books.
## Background and publication
The origins for the Halo Graphic Novel lay in Microsoft and Bungie's exploration of new mediums to expand the Halo franchise into, with sequential art being the main focus. The comic was originally pitched by the head of Microsoft's Franchise Development Eric Trautmann, who led the assembly of a draft comic written by John Ney Rieber and illustrated by Adi Granov. Bungie disliked the comic and Trautmann's comic team, with art director Lorraine McLees calling it "a lump of coal". Bungie asked to choose their own artists and writers instead. Pete Parsons, the studio director of Bungie, wanted to hire Alan Moore and Joe Kubert for the graphic novel, though Trautmann was highly skeptical that such high-profile artists would deign to work on the project.
After many unsuccessful negotiation attempts, Lorraine suggested that Bungie finance and edit the novel itself before pursuing a publisher, allowing the studio to maintain control over the content and pursue the venture unencumbered by outside intervention. Lead designer Maria Cabardo created a "dream team" roster of writers and artists Bungie admired, and through a period of negotiation Bungie was able to gain contributions from many of those named on the list. Buoyed by their success in approaching those in the medium that they respected and admired, including British comic book artist Simon Bisley and French artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the progress of Halo Graphic Novel was described as a "cool morale boost for our team to see their universe, their characters, realized by people that we idolize in the comic industry."
The novel was completed after a two-year development cycle and Bungie sought out a publisher, eventually approaching Marvel Comics. Bungie cited Marvel's "passion for Halo" and "reach in the comic and publishing industry" as the main draws to the company. The studio worked alongside Marvel director of development Ruwan Jayatilleke, an early champion of the project, to assist in the distribution and publication of the novel.
The stories themselves were designed as glimpses into the Halo universe, including information on the inner workings of the alien Covenant, as well as details regarding elements of the backstory that were hitherto undisclosed. Jarrard explained that "The stories that happen off camera, the parallel events to the arcs that our fans know from the existing mediums, are the stories we really wanted to tell." Jarrard further described this as an attempt to move away from the story of the Master Chief, the central character of the franchise, and focus instead on what they believed to be the core themes that lay behind the game universe, such as maintaining hope in the face of overwhelming odds and humanity's struggle for survival; themes that extended beyond "... a genetically enhanced super soldier picking up two guns and kicking some alien butt." The four stories that ended up in the final publication were "the most interesting to [Bungie], and the writers of [the novel]". Although Bungie created the story arcs present in the Halo Graphic Novel, the studio described the importance of providing a framework for each story that the various artists and writers could tell without jeopardizing their own voice. Artist Simon Bisley said that, "The stress was to make the characters look very much as they do in the game. Beyond that point I was given free rein to interpret the script and the action" based on what was given to the artists and writers.
## Contents
The graphic novel comprises 128 pages and four main stories; each has an introduction by the creators of the work detailing their thoughts about the plot or their experiences adding to the Halo lore.
### The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor
"The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor" takes place during the video game Halo: Combat Evolved. The Covenant Special Operations Commander Rtas 'Vadumee and his team are sent to answer the distress call from a Covenant agricultural ship, Infinite Succor. Believing that it might have been attacked by humans, 'Vadumee and his team instead discover the ship has been infested by the parasitic Flood, who gain the knowledge of those they infect and are trying to use the ship to escape imprisonment. Fighting waves of Flood, including the reanimated remains of his fallen soldiers, and being wounded and losing the left mandibles on his jaw, 'Vadumee plots a slipspace course into the system's sun that destroys Infinite Succor and the Flood, then escapes via a Covenant shuttle as the sole survivor.
The central premise behind the story of "The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor" was to showcase the true danger posed by the Flood and the inner workings of the Covenant military machine, to dispel the image of the Covenant as enemies that merely sit around for players to shoot. The story was written by Lee Hammock with art provided by Simon Bisley. Hammock described the process of writing the story as a "heady task" since he had to respect Halo fans' knowledge of the characters and canon, ensuring that "characters that [the fans] know as a part of themselves are portrayed aptly". These difficulties were mitigated by the knowledge that fans were not as intimately connected to the history of the character of Rtas as they were to the likes of the Master Chief; this allowed ample room to expand 'Vadumee's background in sync with the Halo canon while permitting the writer to "bring something new to the table".
### Armor Testing
In the Halo universe, Earth and humanity's various colonies are governed by the United Nations Space Command. Faced with the technological superiority of the Covenant, humanity's chief hope is the tenacity of the SPARTANs, elite supersoldiers equipped with special armor. The protagonist of the Halo series, the Master Chief, is one of the few SPARTANs in active service by the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. "Armor Testing" takes place shortly before the opening of Halo 2, as the UNSC field-tests a new version of the SPARTAN's armor in a series of exercises which prove to be a challenging endeavor for all involved. A lone SPARTAN puts the armor through its paces by dropping from Earth's atmosphere and engaging in a mock battle against UNSC special forces. This SPARTAN is revealed to be a woman, Maria-062, who has come out of retirement as a special favor to test the new equipment before it is sent to the Master Chief.
The concept of the story was inspired by the book Skunkworks, a memoir of the testing of military projects at Lockheed; highlighting the rigorous experimentation the SPARTAN equipment goes through before it ends up in the hands of the Master Chief was an idea that Bungie originally wanted to pursue at the beginning of Halo 2. Bungie instead opted to communicate this background information at a later time. "Armor Testing" was written by Jay Faerber with pencils by W. Andrew Robinson and colors by Ed Lee.
### Breaking Quarantine
Like "The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor", "Breaking Quarantine" deals with the Flood outbreak that occurs during Halo. While "The Last Voyage" tells the story from the Covenant perspective, "Breaking Quarantine" highlights the escape of the human soldier Sgt. Johnson from the Flood. Johnson is a minor personality in Halo: Combat Evolved who becomes an important character in the following two games; while the novel Halo: First Strike explains that Johnson resists Flood infestation due to a medical condition, no other story up to that point explained how Johnson escapes. "Breaking Quarantine" is an example of Bungie's attempts to expand the story arcs of secondary characters that would have no opportunity to go explained in the main storyline. Unlike the other stories, "Breaking Quarantine" contains no dialogue, only weapon sound effects, which are rendered in Japanese. Both art and story were provided by Tsutomu Nihei, a manga artist and architect who based his illustrations directly on the structures found within the game.
### Second Sunrise over New Mombasa
Near the beginning of Halo 2, the Covenant stumble upon humanity's best-guarded secret—the location of Earth—and launch a direct attack on the city of New Mombasa, Kenya. By the time players arrive at the city in Halo 2, it is deserted; "Second Sunrise", which takes place during the attack, explains that this was not always the case. The story is told through the eyes of a reporter who creates propaganda for the UNSC. When the Covenant invade the city, the reporter and fellow citizens take to its defense, until they are forced to flee as the city faces ruin.
Bungie described "Second Sunrise" as an attempt to put a human face on the conflict by illustrating the effects of war on the common citizen. The story was written by Brett Lewis with art provided by Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Giraud explained that his son's enjoyment of the game series ultimately compelled him to accept an invitation to contribute his art; before penciling, he had never played the video games.
### Supplemental
Located after the main body of stories is a selection of art pieces that represent interpretations of the Halo universe from a number of comic book artists. These contributors include Doug Alexander, Rick Berry, Geof Darrow, and more than twenty-five others, both freelance and from Bungie—including lead composer Martin O'Donnell.
A few promotional pieces were created before the Halo Graphic Novel'''s release date, including a sixteen-page preview, released May 31, 2006, which contained Bungie's introductions to each story along with short excerpts of each story. A full-color poster of the book's cover was released on June 28, 2006.
## Reception
Critical reaction from both the gaming community and the comic book community was positive. UGO Networks praised the novel, citing the wealth of contributions from recognized artists and the strength of the material in fleshing out the Halo universe as the work's greatest strength. They gave it an overall grade of B+. Mike Deeley of Comics Bulletin lauded the book for the diverse range of storytelling and art styles that lent the Halo Graphic Novel the feel of an anthology yet still retained a cohesive whole. Other areas that received particular attention included Tsutomu Nihei's work on Breaking Quarantine for its vivid imagery and its focus on visual storytelling in lieu of any dialogue.
Some reviewers expressed their disappointment at the novel's focus on minor characters and events, with the presence of the Master Chief—the central character of the Halo series and its most iconic figure—limited to featuring in artwork and a brief appearance in the first story. On the other hand, GameTrailers praised Bungie for having the moxie to not focus on the major character. Each publication had their own opinions on the weakest story in the collection; both IGN and GameTrailers thought that "Armor Testing" had the least emotional impact, although its surprise ending and art were well done.
Upon release, the Halo Graphic Novel proved to be a "rare hit" for the games-to-comics genre, debuting at No. 2 on both the Nielsen BookScan and Diamond sales charts. At least 100,000 copies were rumored to have been published, and the comic continued to be one of the top-selling graphic novels months after its debut. The success of the novel led Marvel Comics and Bungie to announce a four-issue monthly Halo comic series at San Diego Comic-Con 2006 called Halo: Uprising''. Despite delays, the first issue of the limited series was released on August 22, 2007.
Dark Horse released a new edition of the graphic novel in 2021.
|
3,216,159 |
Battle of Auberoche
| 1,170,824,500 |
Battle during the Hundred Years' War (1345)
|
[
"1345 in England",
"1345 in France",
"Battles in Nouvelle-Aquitaine",
"Battles of the Hundred Years' War",
"Conflicts in 1345",
"History of Dordogne",
"Hundred Years' War, 1337–1360"
] |
The Battle of Auberoche was fought on 21 October 1345 during the Gascon campaign of 1345 between an Anglo-Gascon force of 1,200 men under Henry, Earl of Derby, and a French army of 7,000 commanded by Louis of Poitiers. It was fought at the village of Auberoche near Périgueux in northern Aquitaine. At the time, Gascony was a territory of the English Crown and the "English" army included a large proportion of native Gascons. The battle resulted in a heavy defeat for the French, who suffered very high casualties, with their leaders killed or captured.
The battle took place during the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. Along with the Battle of Bergerac earlier in the year, it marked a change in the military balance of power in the region as the French position subsequently collapsed. It was one of a series of victories which would lead to Henry of Lancaster being called "one of the best warriors in the world" by a contemporary chronicler.
## Background
Since the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English monarchs had held titles and lands within France, the possession of which made them vassals of the kings of France. Over the centuries, English holdings in France had varied in size, but by 1337 only Gascony in south-western France and Ponthieu in northern France were left. The independent-minded Gascons had their own customs and claimed to have a separate language. A large proportion of the enormous quantity of red wine that they produced was shipped to England in a profitable trade. The Gascons preferred their relationship with a distant English king who left them alone to one with a French king who would interfere in their affairs.
Before the war commenced at least 1,000 ships a year departed Gascony. Among their cargoes were over 80,000 tuns of wine. The duty levied by the English Crown on wine from Bordeaux, the capital of Gascony, was more than all other customs duties combined and by far the largest source of state income. Bordeaux had a population of over 50,000, greater than London's, and Bordeaux was possibly richer. However, by this time English Gascony had become so truncated by French encroachments that it relied on imports of food, largely from England. Any interruptions to regular shipping were liable to starve Gascony and financially cripple England; the French were well aware of this.
The status of the English kings' French fiefs was a major source of conflict between the two monarchies throughout the Middle Ages. French monarchs systematically sought to check the growth of English power, stripping away lands as the opportunity arose. Towards the end of 1336, following a series of disagreements between Philip VI of France (r. 1328–1350) and Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377), Philip decided that war was the only way to drive the English out for good. On 24 May 1337, Philip's Great Council in Paris agreed that the Duchy of Aquitaine, effectively Gascony, should be taken back into Philip's hands on the grounds that Edward was in breach of his obligations as a vassal. This marked the start of the Hundred Years' War, which was to last 116 years.
Although Gascony was the cause of the war, Edward was able to spare few resources for its defence, and previously when an English army had campaigned on the continent it had operated in northern France. In most campaigning seasons the Gascons had to rely on their own resources and had been hard pressed by the French. In 1339 the French besieged Bordeaux, the capital of Gascony, even breaking into the city with a large force before they were repulsed. Typically the Gascons could field 3,000–6,000 men, the large majority infantry, although up to two-thirds of them would be tied down in garrisons.
There was no formal border between English and French territory. Many landholders owned a patchwork of widely separated estates, perhaps owing fealty to a different overlord for each, or holding some rights from the French Crown as the monarch and others from the English Crown as their liege lord. Each small estate was likely to have a fortified tower or keep, with larger estates having castles. Fortifications were also constructed at transport choke points, to collect tolls and to restrict military passage; fortified towns grew up alongside all bridges and most fords over the many rivers in the region.
Military forces could support themselves by foraging so long as they moved on at frequent intervals. If they wished to remain in one place for any length of time, as was necessary to besiege a castle, then access to water transport was essential for supplies of food and fodder, and desirable for such items as siege equipment. Warfare was usually a struggle for possession of castles and other fortified points, and for the mutable loyalty of the local nobility; the region had been in a state of flux for centuries and many local lords served whichever monarch was considered the stronger, regardless of national ties.
By 1345, after eight years of war, English-controlled territory mostly consisted of a coastal strip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, with isolated strongholds further inland. The French had strong fortifications throughout what had once been English-controlled Gascony. Several directly threatened Bordeaux: Libourne, 20 miles (32 km) to the east, allowed French armies to assemble a day's march from Bordeaux; the strongly fortified town of Blaye was situated on the north bank of the Gironde only 25 miles (40 km) downstream of Bordeaux and in a position to interdict its vital seaborne communications; the fortress of Langon, 30 miles (48 km) south of Bordeaux, blocked upstream communication along the Garonne, and facilitated the supply of any French force advancing on Bordeaux.
## Plans
Edward determined early in 1345 to attack France on three fronts. The Earl of Northampton would lead a small force to Brittany, a slightly larger force would proceed to Gascony under the command of Henry, Earl of Derby and the main force would accompany Edward to northern France or Flanders. The previous Seneschal of Gascony, Nicholas de la Beche, was replaced by the more senior Ralph, Earl of Stafford, who sailed for Gascony in February with an advance force. Derby was appointed the King's Lieutenant in Gascony on 13 March 1345 and received a contract to raise a force of 2,000 men in England, and further troops in Gascony itself. The highly detailed contract of indenture had a term of six months from the opening of the campaign in Gascony, with an option for Edward III to extend it for a further six months on the same terms. Derby was given a high degree of autonomy; for example, his strategic instructions were: si guerre soit, et a faire le bien q'il poet ("if there is war, do the best you can").
In early 1345 the French decided to stand on the defensive in the south west. Their intelligence correctly predicted English offensives in the three theatres, but they did not have the money to raise a significant army in each. They anticipated, correctly, that the English planned to make their main effort in northern France. Thus they directed what resources they had there, planning to assemble their main army at Arras on 22 July. South-western France was encouraged to rely on its own resources, but as the Truce of Malestroit, signed in early 1343, was still in effect, the local lords were reluctant to spend money, and little was done.
## Prelude
Derby's force embarked at Southampton at the end of May. Due to bad weather, his fleet of 151 ships was forced to shelter in Falmouth for several weeks en route, finally departing on 23 July. The Gascons, primed by Stafford to expect Derby's arrival in late May and sensing the French weakness, took the field without him. The Gascons captured the large, weakly garrisoned castles of Montravel and Monbreton on the Dordogne in early June; both were taken by surprise and their seizure broke the tenuous Truce of Malestroit. Stafford made a short advance north to besiege Blaye with his advance party and perhaps 1,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 infantry of the Gascon lords. Having established the siege he left the Gascons to prosecute it and proceeded to Langon, south of Bordeaux, and set up a second siege. The Anglo-Gascon forces at both sieges could be readily supplied by ship. The French issued an urgent call to arms.
Meanwhile, small independent parties of Gascons raided across the region. Local French groups joined them, and several minor nobles threw in their lot with the Anglo-Gascons. They had several significant successes, but their main effect was to tie down most of the weak French garrisons in the region and to cause them to call for reinforcements. The few mobile French troops in the region immobilised themselves with sieges: of Casseneuil in the Agenais; Monchamp near Condom; and Montcuq, a strong but strategically insignificant castle south of Bergerac. Large areas were effectively undefended.
Edward III's main army sailed on 29 June. They anchored off Sluys (Sluis) in Flanders until 22 July, while Edward attended to diplomatic affairs. When they sailed, probably intending to land in Normandy, they were scattered by a storm and found their way to various English ports over the following week. After more than five weeks on board ship, the men and horses had to be disembarked. There was a further week's delay while the King and his council debated what to do, by which time it proved impossible to take any action with the main English army before winter. Aware of this, Philip VI despatched reinforcements to Brittany and Gascony. Peter, Duke of Bourbon was appointed French commander in Gascony on 8 August and based himself at Agen.
## Bergerac
On 9 August 1345, Derby arrived in Bordeaux with 500 men-at-arms, 500 mounted archers and 1,000 English and Welsh foot archers. After two weeks recruiting and organising, Derby marched his force to Langon, rendezvoused with Stafford and took command of the combined force. Stafford had to this point pursued a cautious strategy of small-scale sieges. Derby's intention was quite different; rather than continue a cautious war of sieges he was determined to strike directly at the French main force before it was fully assembled.
The French, hearing of Derby's arrival, concentrated their forces at the strategically important town of Bergerac, where there was an important bridge over the Dordogne River. After a council of war, Derby decided to strike at the French there. The capture of the town, which had good river supply links to Bordeaux, would provide the Anglo-Gascon army with a base from which to carry the war to the French. It would also force the lifting of the siege of the nearby allied castle of Montcuq and sever communications between French forces north and south of the Dordogne. The English believed that if the French field army could be beaten or distracted the town could be easily taken.
Derby moved rapidly and took the French army by surprise, defeating them in a running battle. French casualties were heavy, with many killed and a large number captured, including their commander. The surviving French from their field army rallied around John, Count of Armagnac, and retreated north to Périgueux. Within days of the battle, Bergerac fell to an Anglo-Gascon assault and was subsequently sacked. After consolidating and reorganising for two weeks Derby left a large garrison in the town and moved north to the Anglo-Gascon stronghold of Mussidan in the Isle valley with 6,000–8,000 men. He then pushed west to Périgueux, the provincial capital, taking several strongpoints on the way.
The city's defences were antiquated and derelict, but the size of the French force defending it prohibited an assault. Derby blockaded Périgueux and captured strongholds blocking the main routes into the city. John, Duke of Normandy, the son and heir of Philip VI, gathered an army reportedly numbering over 20,000 and manoeuvred in the area. In early October a very large detachment relieved the city and drove off Derby's force, which withdrew towards Bordeaux. Further reinforced, the French started besieging the English-held strongpoints.
## Siege
The main French force of 7,000, commanded by Louis of Poitiers, besieged the castle of Auberoche, nine miles (14 km) east of Périgueux. Auberoche perches on a rocky promontory completely commanding the River Auvézère and the valley road at a point where the valley narrows almost to a gorge. The small Anglo-Gascon garrison was commanded by Frank van Hallen. The French encampment was divided in two, with the majority of the soldiers camped close to the river between the castle and village, while a smaller force was situated to prevent any relief attempts from the north.
The chronicler Froissart tells a tale, most likely apocryphal, that a soldier attempting to reach English lines with a letter requesting help was captured and returned to the castle via a trebuchet. A messenger did get through French lines and reached Derby, who was already returning to the area with a scratch force of 1,200 English and Gascon soldiers: 400 men-at-arms and 800 mounted archers.
## Battle
Knowing he was outnumbered, Derby waited near Périgueux for several days for the arrival of a force under the Earl of Pembroke. Unknown to Derby, another French army of some 9,000 to 10,000 men under the Duke of Normandy was only 25 miles (40 km) away. On the evening of 20 October Derby decided that waiting any longer would invite an attack from the larger French army and made a night march, crossing the shallow river twice, so that by morning he was situated on a low wooded hill about a mile (1.6 km) from the main French camp in the valley by the river. Derby personally reconnoitred the French position. Still hoping for the last-minute arrival of Pembroke, Derby called a council of his officers. It was decided that rather than wait and possibly lose the advantage of surprise, the army would attack immediately and attempt to overrun the French camp before an effective defence could be devised.
Derby planned a three-pronged assault. The attack was launched as the French were having their evening meal, and complete surprise was achieved. His longbowmen shot from the treeline to the west into the French position. The French, packed tightly into the narrow meadow, not expecting an attack and unarmoured, are reported to have taken heavy casualties from this. Adam Murimuth, a contemporary chronicler, estimates French casualties at this stage at around 1,000.
While the French were confused and distracted by this attack from the west, Derby made a cavalry charge with his 400 men-at-arms from the south. They had some 200 to 300 yards (200 to 300 m) across flat ground to cover to reach the French. French soldiers struggled into their armour and their commanders rallied their still superior forces. A small number of Anglo-Gascon infantry had followed a path in the woods to emerge in the French rear and attacked from the north-west. The fighting continued in the area of the camp for some time.
Hallen realised that the French troops guarding his exit from the castle were either distracted or had been drawn off to join the fighting; he sallied with all the mounted men he could muster and took the French in the rear. At this further unexpected attack the French defence collapsed and they routed, pursued by the English cavalry. Those French still holding their position in the small camp to the north fled without fighting.
French casualties are uncertain, but were heavy. Murimuth states that French fatalities caused by the archers alone were 700 men-at-arms and over 1,000 infantry. Total casualties are variously described by modern historians as "appalling", "extremely high", "staggering", and "heavy". Many French nobles were taken prisoner; lesser men were, as was customary, put to the sword. The French commander, Louis of Poitiers, died of his wounds. Surviving prisoners included the second-in-command, Bertrand de l'Isle-Jourdain, two counts, seven viscounts, three barons, the seneschals of Clermont and Toulouse, a nephew of the Pope and so many knights that they were not counted.
## Aftermath
The French left behind them a large quantity of loot and supplies. This was in addition to the ransoms extracted from the French captives for their release, which was due to the individuals who had captured them, shared with their liege lords. The ransoms alone made a fortune for many of the soldiers in Derby's army, as well as Derby himself, who was said to have made at least £50,000 (£ as of ) from the day's captives, approximately equal to Edward III's annual income. Over the following year Philip VI paid large amounts from the royal treasury as contributions towards the captives' ransoms.
The Duke of Normandy lost heart on hearing of the defeat. Despite outnumbering the Anglo-Gascon force eight to one he retreated to Angoulême and disbanded his army. The French also abandoned all of their ongoing sieges of other Anglo-Gascon garrisons. Derby was left almost completely unopposed for six months, during which he seized more towns, including Montségur, La Réole and Aiguillon and greatly increased English territory and influence in south-west France.
Local morale, and more importantly prestige in the border region, had decidedly swung England's way following this conflict, providing an influx of taxes and recruits for the English armies. Local lords of note declared for the English, bringing significant retinues with them. The four-month campaign has been described as "the first successful land campaign of... the Hundred Years' War", which had commenced more than eight years earlier. With this success, the English had established a regional dominance which would last over thirty years.
Modern historians have praised the generalship demonstrated by Derby in this campaign: "superb and innovative tactician"; "ris[ing] to the level of genius"; "brilliant in the extreme"; "stunning"; "brilliant". A chronicler writing fifty years after the event described him in Chroniques de quatres premier Valois as "one of the best warriors in the world". Derby went on to lead another successful campaign in 1346.
## Notes, citations and sources
### Explanatory notes
### General sources
[1345 in England](Category:1345_in_England "wikilink") [1345 in France](Category:1345_in_France "wikilink") [Battles in Nouvelle-Aquitaine](Category:Battles_in_Nouvelle-Aquitaine "wikilink") [Auberoche](Category:Battles_of_the_Hundred_Years'_War "wikilink") [Conflicts in 1345](Category:Conflicts_in_1345 "wikilink") [History of Dordogne](Category:History_of_Dordogne "wikilink") [Hundred Years' War, 1337–1360](Category:Hundred_Years'_War,_1337–1360 "wikilink")
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Alfred Russel Wallace
| 1,172,431,702 |
British naturalist (1823–1913)
|
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Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
Wallace did extensive fieldwork, starting in the Amazon River basin. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species, and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography", or more specifically of zoogeography.
Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, working on warning coloration in animals and reinforcement (sometimes known as the Wallace effect), a way that natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Wallace's 1904 book Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He was one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of whether there was life on Mars.
Aside from scientific work, he was a social activist, critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with other scientists. He was one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. He wrote prolifically on both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Southeast Asia, The Malay Archipelago, was first published in 1869. It continues to be both popular and highly regarded.
## Biography
### Early life
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire. He was the eighth of nine children born to Mary Anne Wallace () and Thomas Vere Wallace. His mother was English, while his father was of Scottish ancestry. His family claimed a connection to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century.
Wallace's father graduated in law but never practised it. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family's financial position. Wallace's mother was from a middle-class family of Hertford, to which place his family moved when Wallace was five years old. He attended Hertford Grammar School until 1837, when he reached the age of 14, the normal leaving age for a pupil not going on to university.
Wallace then moved to London to board with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. This was a stopgap measure until William, his oldest brother, was ready to take him on as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute. Here he was exposed to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of the English-born political theorist Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice for six years. They moved repeatedly to different places in Mid-Wales. Then at the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace worked as a land surveyor in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. The natural history of his surroundings aroused his interest; from 1841 he collected flowers and plants as an amateur botanist.
One result of Wallace's early travels is a modern controversy about his nationality. Since he was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh. Other historians have questioned this because neither of his parents were Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because he consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh. One Wallace scholar has stated that the most reasonable interpretation is therefore that he was an Englishman born in Wales.
In 1843 Wallace's father died, and a decline in demand for surveying meant William's business no longer had work available. For a short time Wallace was unemployed, then early in 1844 he was engaged by the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach drawing, mapmaking, and surveying. He had already read George Combe's The Constitution of Man, and after Spencer Hall lectured on mesmerism, Wallace as well as some of the older pupils tried it out. Wallace spent many hours at the town library in Leicester; he read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative, Darwin's Journal (The Voyage of the Beagle), and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. One evening Wallace met the entomologist Henry Bates, who was 19 years old, and had published an 1843 paper on beetles in the journal Zoologist. He befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects.
When Wallace's brother William died in March 1845, Wallace left his teaching position to assume control of his brother's firm in Neath, but his brother John and he were unable to make the business work. After a few months, he found work as a civil engineer for a nearby firm that was working on a survey for a proposed railway in the Vale of Neath. Wallace's work on the survey was largely outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to indulge his new passion for collecting insects. Wallace persuaded his brother John to join him in starting another architecture and civil engineering firm. It carried out projects including the design of a building for the Neath Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1843. William Jevons, the founder of that institute, was impressed by Wallace and persuaded him to give lectures there on science and engineering. In the autumn of 1846, John and he purchased a cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister Fanny. During this period, he exchanged letters with Bates about books. He had re-read Darwin's Journal, and said "As the Journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt's 'Personal Narrative'—as a work of general interest, perhaps superior to it." In 1845, Wallace had been convinced by Robert Chambers's anonymously published treatise on progressive development, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and found Bates to be more critical.
### Exploration and study of the natural world
Inspired by the chronicles of earlier and contemporary travelling naturalists, Wallace decided to travel abroad. He later wrote that Darwin's Journal and Humboldt's Personal Narrative were "the two works to whose inspiration I owe my determination to visit the tropics as a collector." After reading A voyage up the river Amazon, by William Henry Edwards, Wallace and Bates estimated that by collecting and selling natural history specimens such as birds and insects they could meet their costs, with the prospect of good profits. They therefore engaged as their agent Samuel Stevens who would advertise and arrange sales to institutions and private collectors, for a commission of 20% on sales plus 5% on despatching freight and remittances of money.
In 1848, Wallace and Bates left for Brazil aboard the Mischief. They intended to collect insects and other animal specimens in the Amazon Rainforest for their private collections, selling the duplicates to museums and collectors back in Britain to fund the trip. Wallace hoped to gather evidence of the transmutation of species. Bates and he spent most of their first year collecting near Belém, then explored inland separately, occasionally meeting to discuss their findings. In 1849, they were briefly joined by another young explorer, the botanist Richard Spruce, along with Wallace's younger brother Herbert. Herbert soon left (dying two years later from yellow fever), but Spruce, like Bates, would spend over ten years collecting in South America. Wallace spent four years charting the Rio Negro, collecting specimens and making notes on the peoples and languages he encountered as well as the geography, flora, and fauna.
On 12 July 1852, Wallace embarked for the UK on the brig Helen. After 25 days at sea, the ship's cargo caught fire, and the crew was forced to abandon ship. All the specimens Wallace had on the ship, mostly collected during the last, and most interesting, two years of his trip, were lost. He managed to save a few notes and pencil sketches, but little else. Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open boat before being picked up by the brig Jordeson, which was sailing from Cuba to London. The Jordeson's provisions were strained by the unexpected passengers, but after a difficult passage on short rations, the ship reached its destination on 1 October 1852.
The lost collection had been insured for £200 by Stevens. After his return to Britain, Wallace spent 18 months in London living on the insurance payment, and selling a few specimens that had been shipped home. During this period, despite having lost almost all the notes from his South American expedition, he wrote six academic papers (including "On the Monkeys of the Amazon") and two books, Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses and Travels on the Amazon. At the same time, he made connections with several other British naturalists.
Bates and others were collecting in the Amazon area, Wallace was more interested in new opportunities in the Malay Archipelago as demonstrated by the travel writings of Ida Laura Pfeiffer, and valuable insect specimens she collected which Stevens sold as her agent. In March 1853 Wallace wrote to Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, who was then in London, and who arranged assistance in Sarawak for Wallace. In June Wallace wrote to Murchison at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) for support, proposing to again fund his exploring entirely from sale of duplicate collections. He later recalled that, while researching in the insect-room of the British Museum, he was introduced to Darwin and they "had a few minutes' conversation." After presenting a paper and a large map of the Rio Negro to the RGS, Wallace was elected a Fellow of the society on 27 February 1854. Free passage arranged on Royal Navy ships was stalled by the Crimean War, but eventually the RGS funded first class travel by P&O steamships. Wallace and a young assistant, Charles Allen, embarked at Southampton on 4 March 1854. After the overland journey to Suez and another change of ship at Ceylon they disembarked at Singapore on 19 April 1854.
From 1854 to 1862, Wallace travelled around the islands of the Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia). His main objective "was to obtain specimens of natural history, both for my private collection and to supply duplicates to museums and amateurs". In addition to Allen, he "generally employed one or two, and sometimes three Malay servants" as assistants, and paid large numbers of local people at various places to bring specimens. His total was 125,660 specimens, most of which were insects including more than 83,000 beetles, Several thousand of the specimens represented species new to science, Overall, more than thirty men worked for him at some stage as full-time paid collectors. He also hired guides, porters, cooks and boat crews, so well over 100 individuals worked for him.
After collecting expeditions to Bukit Timah Hill in Singapore, and to Malacca, Wallace and Allen reached Sarawak in October 1854, and were welcomed at Kuching by Sir James Brooke's (then) heir Captain John Brooke. Wallace hired a Malay named Ali as a general servant and cook, and spent the early 1855 wet season in a small Dyak house at the foot of Mount Santubong, overlooking a branch outlet of the Sarawak River. He read about species distribution, and wrote his "Sarawak Paper". In March he moved to the Simunjon coal-works, operated by the Borneo Company under Ludvig Verner Helms, and supplemented collecting by paying workers a cent for each insect. A specimen of the previously unknown gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus (now called Wallace's flying frog) came from a Chinese workman who told Wallace that it glided down. Local people also assisted with shooting orangutans. They spent time with Sir James, then in February 1856 Allen chose to stay on with the missionaries at Kuching.
On reaching Singapore in May 1856, Wallace hired a bird-skinner. With Ali as cook, they collected for two days on Bali, then from 17 June to 30 August on Lombok. In December 1856, Darwin had written to contacts worldwide to get specimens for his continuing research into variation under domestication. At Lombok's port city, Ampanam, Wallace wrote telling his agent, Stevens, about specimens shipped, including a domestic duck variety "for Mr. Darwin & he would perhaps also like the jungle cock, which is often domesticated here & is doubtless one of the originals of the domestic breed of poultry." In the same letter, Wallace said birds from Bali and Lombok, divided by a narrow strait, "belong to two quite distinct zoological provinces, of which they form the extreme limits", Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malacca, and Australia and the Moluccas. Stevens arranged publication of relevant paragraphs in the January 1857 issue of The Zoologist. After further investigation, the zoogeographical boundary eventually became known as the Wallace Line.
Ali became Wallace's most trusted assistant, a skilled collector and researcher. Wallace collected and preserved the delicate insect specimens, while most of the birds were collected and prepared by his assistants; of those, Ali collected and prepared around 5000. While exploring the archipelago, Wallace refined his thoughts about evolution, and had his famous insight on natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article outlining his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's theory, that same year.
Accounts of Wallace's studies and adventures were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago. This became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century, and has never been out of print. It was praised by scientists such as Darwin (to whom the book was dedicated), by Lyell, and by non-scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad. Conrad called the book his "favorite bedside companion" and used information from it for several of his novels, especially Lord Jim. A set of 80 bird skeletons Wallace collected in Indonesia are held in the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, and described as of exceptional historical significance.
### Return to England, marriage and children
In 1862, Wallace returned to England, where he moved in with his sister Fanny Sims and her husband Thomas. While recovering from his travels, Wallace organised his collections and gave numerous lectures about his adventures and discoveries to scientific societies such as the Zoological Society of London. Later that year, he visited Darwin at Down House, and became friendly with both Lyell and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and gave lectures defending natural selection. He corresponded with Darwin about topics including sexual selection, warning coloration, and the possible effect of natural selection on hybridisation and the divergence of species. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
After a year of courtship, Wallace became engaged in 1864 to a young woman whom, in his autobiography, he would only identify as Miss L. Miss L. was the daughter of Lewis Leslie who played chess with Wallace, but to Wallace's great dismay, she broke off the engagement. In 1866, Wallace married Annie Mitten. Wallace had been introduced to Mitten through the botanist Richard Spruce, who had befriended Wallace in Brazil and who was a friend of Annie Mitten's father, William Mitten, an expert on mosses. In 1872, Wallace built the Dell, a house of concrete, on land he leased in Grays in Essex, where he lived until 1876. The Wallaces had three children: Herbert (1867–1874), Violet (1869–1945), and William (1871–1951).
### Financial struggles
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was very concerned about the financial security of his family. While he was in the Malay Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought in a considerable amount of money, which had been carefully invested by the agent who sold the specimens for Wallace. On his return to the UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines that squandered most of the money, and he found himself badly in need of the proceeds from the publication of The Malay Archipelago.
Despite assistance from his friends, he was never able to secure a permanent salaried position such as a curatorship in a museum. To remain financially solvent, Wallace worked grading government examinations, wrote 25 papers for publication between 1872 and 1876 for various modest sums, and was paid by Lyell and Darwin to help edit some of their works.
In 1876, Wallace needed a £500 advance from the publisher of The Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of his personal property. Darwin was very aware of Wallace's financial difficulties and lobbied long and hard to get Wallace awarded a government pension for his lifetime contributions to science. When the £200 annual pension was awarded in 1881, it helped to stabilise Wallace's financial position by supplementing the income from his writings.
### Social activism
In 1881, Wallace was elected as the first president of the newly formed Land Nationalisation Society. In the next year, he published a book, Land Nationalisation; Its Necessity and Its Aims, on the subject. He criticised the UK's free trade policies for the negative impact they had on working-class people. In 1889, Wallace read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and declared himself a socialist, despite his earlier foray as a speculative investor. After reading Progress and Poverty, the bestselling book by the progressive land reformist Henry George, Wallace described it as "Undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century."
Wallace opposed eugenics, an idea supported by other prominent 19th-century evolutionary thinkers, on the grounds that contemporary society was too corrupt and unjust to allow any reasonable determination of who was fit or unfit. In his 1890 article "Human Selection" he wrote, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent ..." He said, "The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight," "Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft."
In 1898, Wallace wrote a paper advocating a pure paper money system, not backed by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920 book Stabilizing the Dollar to Wallace.
Wallace wrote on other social and political topics, including in support of women's suffrage and repeatedly on the dangers and wastefulness of militarism. In an 1899 essay, he called for popular opinion to be rallied against warfare by showing people "that all modern wars are dynastic; that they are caused by the ambition, the interests, the jealousies, and the insatiable greed of power of their rulers, or of the great mercantile and financial classes which have power and influence over their rulers; and that the results of war are never good for the people, who yet bear all its burthens (burdens)". In a letter published by the Daily Mail in 1909, with aviation in its infancy, he advocated an international treaty to ban the military use of aircraft, arguing against the idea "that this new horror is 'inevitable', and that all we can do is to be sure and be in the front rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no other term can so fitly describe the dropping of, say, ten thousand bombs at midnight into an enemy's capital from an invisible flight of airships."
In 1898, Wallace published The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures, about developments in the 19th century. The first part of the book covered the major scientific and technical advances of the century; the second part covered what Wallace considered to be its social failures including the destruction and waste of wars and arms races, the rise of the urban poor and the dangerous conditions in which they lived and worked, a harsh criminal justice system that failed to reform criminals, abuses in a mental health system based on privately owned sanatoriums, the environmental damage caused by capitalism, and the evils of European colonialism. Wallace continued his social activism for the rest of his life, publishing the book The Revolt of Democracy just weeks before his death.
### Further scientific work
In 1880, he published Island Life as a sequel to The Geographic Distribution of Animals. In November 1886, Wallace began a ten-month trip to the United States to give a series of popular lectures. Most of the lectures were on Darwinism (evolution through natural selection), but he also gave speeches on biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-economic reform. During the trip, he was reunited with his brother John who had emigrated to California years before. He spent a week in Colorado, with the American botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide, exploring the flora of the Rocky Mountains and gathering evidence that would lead him to a theory on how glaciation might explain certain commonalities between the mountain flora of Europe, Asia and North America, which he published in 1891 in the paper "English and American Flowers". He met many other prominent American naturalists and viewed their collections. His 1889 book Darwinism used information he collected on his American trip and information he had compiled for the lectures.
### Death
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at home, aged 90, in the country house he called Old Orchard, which he had built a decade earlier. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him "the last of the giants [belonging] to that wonderful group of intellectuals composed of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, Owen, and other scientists, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century". Another commentator in the same edition said: "No apology need be made for the few literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the 'Malay Archipelago'."
Some of Wallace's friends suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and had him buried in the small cemetery at Broadstone, Dorset. Several prominent British scientists formed a committee to have a medallion of Wallace placed in Westminster Abbey near where Darwin had been buried. The medallion was unveiled on 1 November 1915.
## Theory of evolution
### Early evolutionary thinking
Wallace began his career as a travelling naturalist who already believed in the transmutation of species. The concept had been advocated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant, among others. It was widely discussed, but not generally accepted by leading naturalists, and was considered to have radical, even revolutionary connotations. Prominent anatomists and geologists such as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Adam Sedgwick, and Lyell attacked transmutation vigorously. It has been suggested that Wallace accepted the idea of the transmutation of species in part because he was always inclined to favour radical ideas in politics, religion and science, and because he was unusually open to marginal, even fringe, ideas in science.
Wallace was profoundly influenced by Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a controversial work of popular science published anonymously in 1844. It advocated an evolutionary origin for the solar system, the earth, and living things. Wallace wrote to Henry Bates in 1845 describing it as "an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proven by ... more research". In 1847, he wrote to Bates that he would "like to take some one family [of beetles] to study thoroughly, ... with a view to the theory of the origin of species."
Wallace planned fieldwork to test the evolutionary hypothesis that closely related species should inhabit neighbouring territories. During his work in the Amazon basin, he came to realise that geographical barriers—such as the Amazon and its major tributaries—often separated the ranges of closely allied species. He included these observations in his 1853 paper "On the Monkeys of the Amazon". Near the end of the paper he asked the question, "Are very closely allied species ever separated by a wide interval of country?"
In February 1855, while working in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, Wallace wrote "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species". The paper was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. In this paper, he discussed observations of the geographic and geologic distribution of both living and fossil species, a field that became biogeography. His conclusion that "Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species" has come to be known as the "Sarawak Law", answering his own question in his paper on the monkeys of the Amazon basin. Although it does not mention possible mechanisms for evolution, this paper foreshadowed the momentous paper he would write three years later.
The paper challenged Lyell's belief that species were immutable. Although Darwin had written to him in 1842 expressing support for transmutation, Lyell had continued to be strongly opposed to the idea. Around the start of 1856, he told Darwin about Wallace's paper, as did Edward Blyth who thought it "Good! Upon the whole! ... Wallace has, I think put the matter well; and according to his theory the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species." Despite this hint, Darwin mistook Wallace's conclusion for the progressive creationism of the time, writing that it was "nothing very new ... Uses my simile of tree [but] it seems all creation with him." Lyell was more impressed, and opened a notebook on species in which he grappled with the consequences, particularly for human ancestry. Darwin had already shown his theory to their mutual friend Joseph Hooker and now, for the first time spelt out the full details of natural selection to Lyell. Although Lyell could not agree, he urged Darwin to publish to establish priority. Darwin demurred at first, but began writing up a species sketch of his continuing work in May 1856.
### Natural selection and Darwin
By February 1858, Wallace had been convinced by his biogeographical research in the Malay Archipelago that evolution was real. He later wrote in his autobiography that the problem was of how species change from one well-marked form to another. He stated that it was while he was in bed with a fever that he thought about Malthus's idea of positive checks on human population, and had the idea of natural selection. His autobiography says that he was on the island of Ternate at the time; but the evidence of his journal suggests that he was in fact on the island of Gilolo. From 1858 to 1861, he rented a house on Ternate from the Dutchman Maarten Dirk van Renesse van Duivenbode, which he used as a base for expeditions to other islands such as Gilolo.
Wallace describes how he discovered natural selection as follows:
> It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained.
Wallace had once briefly met Darwin, and was one of the correspondents whose observations Darwin used to support his own theories. Although Wallace's first letter to Darwin has been lost, Wallace carefully kept the letters he received. In the first letter, dated 1 May 1857, Darwin commented that Wallace's letter of 10 October which he had recently received, as well as Wallace's paper "On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species" of 1855, showed that they thought alike, with similar conclusions, and said that he was preparing his own work for publication in about two years time. The second letter, dated 22 December 1857, said how glad he was that Wallace was theorising about distribution, adding that "without speculation there is no good and original observation" but commented that "I believe I go much further than you". Wallace believed this and sent Darwin his February 1858 essay, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type", asking Darwin to review it and pass it to Charles Lyell if he thought it worthwhile. Although Wallace had sent several articles for journal publication during his travels through the Malay archipelago, the Ternate essay was in a private letter. Darwin received the essay on 18 June 1858. Although the essay did not use Darwin's term "natural selection", it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was very similar to the theory that Darwin had worked on for 20 years, but had yet to publish. Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters ... he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal." Distraught about the illness of his baby son, Darwin put the problem to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided to publish the essay in a joint presentation together with unpublished writings which highlighted Darwin's priority. Wallace's essay was presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, along with excerpts from an essay which Darwin had disclosed privately to Hooker in 1847 and a letter Darwin had written to Asa Gray in 1857.
Communication with Wallace in the far-off Malay Archipelago involved months of delay, so he was not part of this rapid publication. Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, happy that he had been included at all, and never expressed bitterness in public or in private. Darwin's social and scientific status was far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken seriously. Lyell and Hooker's arrangement relegated Wallace to the position of co-discoverer, and he was not the social equal of Darwin or the other prominent British natural scientists. All the same, the joint reading of their papers on natural selection associated Wallace with the more famous Darwin. This, combined with Darwin's (as well as Hooker's and Lyell's) advocacy on his behalf, would give Wallace greater access to the highest levels of the scientific community. The reaction to the reading was muted, with the president of the Linnean Society remarking in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any striking discoveries; but, with Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species later in 1859, its significance became apparent. When Wallace returned to the UK, he met Darwin. Although some of Wallace's opinions in the ensuing years would test Darwin's patience, they remained on friendly terms for the rest of Darwin's life.
Over the years, a few people have questioned this version of events. In the early 1980s, two books, one by Arnold Brackman and another by John Langdon Brooks, suggested not only that there had been a conspiracy to rob Wallace of his proper credit, but that Darwin had actually stolen a key idea from Wallace to finish his own theory. These claims have been examined and found unconvincing by a number of scholars. Shipping schedules show that, contrary to these accusations, Wallace's letter could not have been delivered earlier than the date shown in Darwin's letter to Lyell.
#### Defence of Darwin and his ideas
After Wallace returned to England in 1862, he became one of the staunchest defenders of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In an incident in 1863 that particularly pleased Darwin, Wallace published the short paper "Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species". This rebutted a paper by a professor of geology at the University of Dublin that had sharply criticised Darwin's comments in the Origin on how hexagonal honey bee cells could have evolved through natural selection. An even longer defence was a 1867 article in the Quarterly Journal of Science called "Creation by Law". It reviewed George Campbell, the 8th Duke of Argyll's book, The Reign of Law, which aimed to refute natural selection. After an 1870 meeting of the British Science Association, Wallace wrote to Darwin complaining that there were "no opponents left who know anything of natural history, so that there are none of the good discussions we used to have".
#### Differences between Darwin and Wallace
Historians of science have noted that, while Darwin considered the ideas in Wallace's paper to be essentially the same as his own, there were differences. Darwin emphasised competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasised environmental pressures on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local conditions, leading populations in different locations to diverge. The historian of science Peter J. Bowler has suggested that in the paper he mailed to Darwin, Wallace might have been discussing group selection. Against this, Malcolm Kottler showed that Wallace was indeed discussing individual variation and selection.
Others have noted that Wallace appeared to have envisioned natural selection as a kind of feedback mechanism that kept species and varieties adapted to their environment (now called 'stabilizing", as opposed to 'directional' selection). They point to a largely overlooked passage of Wallace's famous 1858 paper, in which he likened "this principle ... [to] the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities". The cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson observed in the 1970s that, although writing it only as an example, Wallace had "probably said the most powerful thing that'd been said in the 19th Century". Bateson revisited the topic in his 1979 book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and other scholars have continued to explore the connection between natural selection and systems theory.
#### Warning coloration and sexual selection
Warning coloration was one of Wallace's contributions to the evolutionary biology of animal coloration. In 1867, Darwin wrote to Wallace about a problem in explaining how some caterpillars could have evolved conspicuous colour schemes. Darwin had come to believe that many conspicuous animal colour schemes were due to sexual selection, but he saw that this could not apply to caterpillars. Wallace responded that he and Bates had observed that many of the most spectacular butterflies had a peculiar odour and taste, and that he had been told by John Jenner Weir that birds would not eat a certain kind of common white moth because they found it unpalatable. Since the moth was as conspicuous at dusk as a coloured caterpillar in daylight, it seemed likely that the conspicuous colours served as a warning to predators and thus could have evolved through natural selection. Darwin was impressed by the idea. At a later meeting of the Entomological Society, Wallace asked for any evidence anyone might have on the topic. In 1869, Weir published data from experiments and observations involving brightly coloured caterpillars that supported Wallace's idea. Wallace attributed less importance than Darwin to sexual selection. In his 1878 book Tropical Nature and Other Essays, he wrote extensively about the coloration of animals and plants, and proposed alternative explanations for a number of cases Darwin had attributed to sexual selection. He revisited the topic at length in his 1889 book Darwinism. In 1890, he wrote a critical review in Nature of his friend Edward Bagnall Poulton's The Colours of Animals which supported Darwin on sexual selection, attacking especially Poulton's claims on the "aesthetic preferences of the insect world".
#### Wallace effect
In 1889, Wallace wrote the book Darwinism, which explained and defended natural selection. In it, he proposed the hypothesis that natural selection could drive the reproductive isolation of two varieties by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Thus it might contribute to the development of new species. He suggested the following scenario: When two populations of a species had diverged beyond a certain point, each adapted to particular conditions, hybrid offspring would be less adapted than either parent form and so natural selection would tend to eliminate the hybrids. Furthermore, under such conditions, natural selection would favour the development of barriers to hybridisation, as individuals that avoided hybrid matings would tend to have more fit offspring, and thus contribute to the reproductive isolation of the two incipient species. This idea came to be known as the Wallace effect, later called reinforcement. Wallace had suggested to Darwin that natural selection could play a role in preventing hybridisation in private correspondence as early as 1868, but had not worked it out to this level of detail. It continues to be a topic of research in evolutionary biology today, with both computer simulation and empirical results supporting its validity.
### Application of theory to humans, and role of teleology in evolution
In 1864, Wallace published a paper, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection'", applying the theory to humankind. Darwin had not yet publicly addressed the subject, although Thomas Huxley had in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. Wallace explained the apparent stability of the human stock by pointing to the vast gap in cranial capacities between humans and the great apes. Unlike some other Darwinists, including Darwin himself, he did not "regard modern primitives as almost filling the gap between man and ape". He saw the evolution of humans in two stages: achieving a bipedal posture that freed the hands to carry out the dictates of the brain, and the "recognition of the human brain as a totally new factor in the history of life". Wallace seems to have been the first evolutionist to see that the human brain effectively made further specialisation of the body unnecessary. Wallace wrote the paper for the Anthropological Society of London to address the debate between the supporters of monogenism, the belief that all human races shared a common ancestor and were one species, and the supporters of polygenism, who held that different races had separate origins and were different species. Wallace's anthropological observations of Native Americans in the Amazon, and especially his time living among the Dayak people of Borneo, had convinced him that human beings were a single species with a common ancestor. He still felt that natural selection might have continued to act on mental faculties after the development of the different races; and he did not dispute the nearly universal view among European anthropologists of the time that Europeans were intellectually superior to other races. According to political scientist Adam Jones, "Wallace found little difficulty in reconciling the extermination of native peoples with his progressive political views". In 1864, in the aforementioned paper, he stated "It is the same great law of the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact." He argued that the natives die out due to an unequal struggle.
Shortly afterwards, Wallace became a spiritualist. At about the same time, he began to maintain that natural selection could not account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, metaphysical musings, or wit and humour. He stated that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history: the creation of life from inorganic matter; the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals; and the generation of the higher mental faculties in humankind. He believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit.
While some historians have concluded that Wallace's belief that natural selection was insufficient to explain the development of consciousness and the higher functions of the human mind was directly caused by his adoption of spiritualism, other scholars have disagreed, and some maintain that Wallace never believed natural selection applied to those areas. Reaction to Wallace's ideas on this topic among leading naturalists at the time varied. Lyell endorsed Wallace's views on human evolution rather than Darwin's. Wallace's belief that human consciousness could not be entirely a product of purely material causes was shared by a number of prominent intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All the same, many, including Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin himself, were critical of Wallace's views.
As the historian of science and sceptic Michael Shermer has stated, Wallace's views in this area were at odds with two major tenets of the emerging Darwinian philosophy. These were that evolution was not teleological (purpose-driven), and that it was not anthropocentric (human-centred). Much later in his life Wallace returned to these themes, that evolution suggested that the universe might have a purpose, and that certain aspects of living organisms might not be explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes. He set out his ideas in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World of Life, later expanded into a book of the same name. Shermer commented that this anticipated ideas about design in nature and directed evolution that would arise from religious traditions throughout the 20th century.
### Assessment of Wallace's role in history of evolutionary theory
In many accounts of the development of evolutionary theory, Wallace is mentioned only in passing as simply being the stimulus to the publication of Darwin's own theory. In reality, Wallace developed his own distinct evolutionary views which diverged from Darwin's, and was considered by many (especially Darwin) to be a leading thinker on evolution in his day, whose ideas could not be ignored. One historian of science has pointed out that, through both private correspondence and published works, Darwin and Wallace exchanged knowledge and stimulated each other's ideas and theories over an extended period. Wallace is the most-cited naturalist in Darwin's Descent of Man, occasionally in strong disagreement. Darwin and Wallace agreed on the importance of natural selection, and some of the factors responsible for it: competition between species and geographical isolation. But Wallace believed that evolution had a purpose ("teleology") in maintaining species' fitness to their environment, whereas Darwin hesitated to attribute any purpose to a random natural process. Scientific discoveries since the 19th century support Darwin's viewpoint, by identifying additional mechanisms and triggers such as mutations triggered by environmental radiation or mutagenic chemicals. Wallace remained an ardent defender of natural selection for the rest of his life. By the 1880s, evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles, but natural selection less so. Wallace's 1889 Darwinism was a response to the scientific critics of natural selection. Of all Wallace's books, it is the most cited by scholarly publications.
## Other scientific contributions
### Biogeography and ecology
In 1872, at the urging of many of his friends, including Darwin, Philip Sclater, and Alfred Newton, Wallace began research for a general review of the geographic distribution of animals. Initial progress was slow, in part because classification systems for many types of animals were in flux. He resumed the work in earnest in 1874 after the publication of a number of new works on classification. Extending the system developed by Sclater for birds—which divided the earth into six separate geographic regions for describing species distribution—to cover mammals, reptiles and insects as well, Wallace created the basis for the zoogeographic regions in use today. He discussed the factors then known to influence the current and past geographic distribution of animals within each geographic region.
These factors included the effects of the appearance and disappearance of land bridges (such as the one currently connecting North America and South America) and the effects of periods of increased glaciation. He provided maps showing factors, such as elevation of mountains, depths of oceans, and the character of regional vegetation, that affected the distribution of animals. He summarised all the known families and genera of the higher animals and listed their known geographic distributions. The text was organised so that it would be easy for a traveller to learn what animals could be found in a particular location. The resulting two-volume work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, was published in 1876 and served as the definitive text on zoogeography for the next 80 years.
The book included evidence from the fossil record to discuss the processes of evolution and migration that had led to the geographical distribution of modern species. For example, he discussed how fossil evidence showed that tapirs had originated in the Northern Hemisphere, migrating between North America and Eurasia and then, much more recently, to South America after which the northern species became extinct, leaving the modern distribution of two isolated groups of tapir species in South America and Southeast Asia. Wallace was very aware of, and interested in, the mass extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) he wrote, "We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared". He added that he believed the most likely cause for the rapid extinctions was glaciation, but by the time he wrote World of Life (1911) he had come to believe those extinctions were "due to man's agency".
In 1880, Wallace published the book Island Life as a sequel to The Geographical Distribution of Animals. It surveyed the distribution of both animal and plant species on islands. Wallace classified islands into oceanic and two types of continental islands. Oceanic islands, in his view, such as the Galapagos and Hawaiian Islands (then called Sandwich Islands) formed in mid-ocean and never part of any large continent. Such islands were characterised by a complete lack of terrestrial mammals and amphibians, and their inhabitants (except migratory birds and species introduced by humans) were typically the result of accidental colonisation and subsequent evolution. Continental islands, in his scheme, were divided into those that were recently separated from a continent (like Britain) and those much less recently (like Madagascar). Wallace discussed how that difference affected flora and fauna. He discussed how isolation affected evolution and how that could result in the preservation of classes of animals, such as the lemurs of Madagascar that were remnants of once widespread continental faunas. He extensively discussed how changes of climate, particularly periods of increased glaciation, may have affected the distribution of flora and fauna on some islands, and the first portion of the book discusses possible causes of these great ice ages. Island Life was considered a very important work at the time of its publication. It was discussed extensively in scientific circles both in published reviews and in private correspondence.
### Environmentalism
Wallace's extensive work in biogeography made him aware of the impact of human activities on the natural world. In Tropical Nature and Other Essays (1878), he warned about the dangers of deforestation and soil erosion, especially in tropical climates prone to heavy rainfall. Noting the complex interactions between vegetation and climate, he warned that the extensive clearing of rainforest for coffee cultivation in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) and India would adversely impact the climate in those countries and lead to their impoverishment due to soil erosion. In Island Life, Wallace again mentioned deforestation and invasive species. On the impact of European colonisation on the island of Saint Helena, he wrote that the island was "now so barren and forbidding that some persons find it difficult to believe that it was once all green and fertile". He explained that the soil was protected by the island's vegetation; once that was destroyed, the soil was washed off the steep slopes by heavy tropical rain, leaving "bare rock or sterile clay". He attributed the "irreparable destruction" to feral goats, introduced in 1513. The island's forests were further damaged by the "reckless waste" of the East India Company from 1651, which used the bark of valuable redwood and ebony trees for tanning, leaving the wood to rot unused. Wallace's comments on environment grew more urgent later in his career. In The World of Life (1911) he wrote that people should view nature "as invested with a certain sanctity, to be used by us but not abused, and never to be recklessly destroyed or defaced."
### Astrobiology
Wallace's 1904 book Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He concluded that the Earth was the only planet in the Solar System that could possibly support life, mainly because it was the only one in which water could exist in the liquid phase. His treatment of Mars in this book was brief, and in 1907, Wallace returned to the subject with the book Is Mars Habitable? to criticise the claims made by the American astronomer Percival Lowell that there were Martian canals built by intelligent beings. Wallace did months of research, consulted various experts, and produced his own scientific analysis of the Martian climate and atmospheric conditions. He pointed out that spectroscopic analysis had shown no signs of water vapour in the Martian atmosphere, that Lowell's analysis of Mars's climate badly overestimated the surface temperature, and that low atmospheric pressure would make liquid water, let alone a planet-girding irrigation system, impossible. Richard Milner comments that Wallace "effectively debunked Lowell's illusionary network of Martian canals." Wallace became interested in the topic because his anthropocentric philosophy inclined him to believe that man would be unique in the universe.
## Other activities
### Spiritualism
Wallace was an enthusiast of phrenology. Early in his career, he experimented with hypnosis, then known as mesmerism, managing to hypnotise some of his students in Leicester. When he began these experiments, the topic was very controversial: early experimenters, such as John Elliotson, had been harshly criticised by the medical and scientific establishment. Wallace drew a connection between his experiences with mesmerism and spiritualism, arguing that one should not deny observations on "a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility".
Wallace began investigating spiritualism in the summer of 1865, possibly at the urging of his older sister Fanny Sims. After reviewing the literature and attempting to test what he witnessed at séances, he came to believe in it. For the rest of his life, he remained convinced that at least some séance phenomena were genuine, despite accusations of fraud and evidence of trickery. One biographer suggested that the emotional shock when his first fiancée broke their engagement contributed to his receptiveness to spiritualism. Other scholars have emphasised his desire to find scientific explanations for all phenomena. In 1874, Wallace visited the spirit photographer Frederick Hudson. He declared that a photograph of him with his deceased mother was genuine. Others reached a different conclusion: Hudson's photographs had previously been exposed as fraudulent in 1872.
Wallace's public advocacy of spiritualism and his repeated defence of spiritualist mediums against allegations of fraud in the 1870s damaged his scientific reputation. In 1875 he published the evidence he believed proved his position in On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. His attitude permanently strained his relationships with previously friendly scientists such as Henry Bates, Thomas Huxley, and even Darwin. Others, such as the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter and zoologist E. Ray Lankester became publicly hostile to Wallace over the issue. Wallace was heavily criticised by the press; The Lancet was particularly harsh. When, in 1879, Darwin first tried to rally support among naturalists to get a civil pension awarded to Wallace, Joseph Hooker responded that "Wallace has lost caste considerably, not only by his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately and against the whole voice of the committee of his section of the British Association, brought about a discussion on Spiritualism at one of its sectional meetings ... This he is said to have done in an underhanded manner, and I well remember the indignation it gave rise to in the B.A. Council." Hooker eventually relented and agreed to support the pension request.
### Flat Earth wager
In 1870, a flat-Earth proponent named John Hampden offered a £500 wager (roughly ) in a magazine advertisement to anyone who could demonstrate a convex curvature in a body of water such as a river, canal, or lake. Wallace, intrigued by the challenge and short of money at the time, designed an experiment in which he set up two objects along a six-mile (10 km) stretch of canal. Both objects were at the same height above the water, and he mounted a telescope on a bridge at the same height above the water as well. When seen through the telescope, one object appeared higher than the other, showing the curvature of the Earth. The judge for the wager, the editor of Field magazine, declared Wallace the winner, but Hampden refused to accept the result. He sued Wallace and launched a campaign, which persisted for several years, of writing letters to various publications and to organisations of which Wallace was a member denouncing him as a swindler and a thief. Wallace won multiple libel suits against Hampden, but the resulting litigation cost Wallace more than the amount of the wager, and the controversy frustrated him for years.
### Anti-vaccination campaign
In the early 1880s, Wallace joined the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination. Wallace originally saw the issue as a matter of personal liberty; but, after studying statistics provided by anti-vaccination activists, he began to question the efficacy of vaccination. At the time, the germ theory of disease was new and far from universally accepted. Moreover, no one knew enough about the human immune system to understand why vaccination worked. Wallace discovered instances where supporters of vaccination had used questionable, in a few cases completely false, statistics to support their arguments. Always suspicious of authority, Wallace suspected that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination, and became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were due to better hygiene and improvements in public sanitation.
Another factor in Wallace's thinking was his belief that, because of the action of natural selection, organisms were in a state of balance with their environment, and that everything in nature, served a useful purpose. Wallace pointed out that vaccination, which at the time was often unsanitary, could be dangerous.
In 1890, Wallace gave evidence to a Royal Commission investigating the controversy. It found errors in his testimony, including some questionable statistics. The Lancet averred that Wallace and other activists were being selective in their choice of statistics. The commission found that smallpox vaccination was effective and should remain compulsory, though they recommended some changes in procedures to improve safety, and that the penalties for people who refused to comply be made less severe. Years later, in 1898, Wallace wrote a pamphlet, Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, attacking the commission's findings. It, in turn, was attacked by The Lancet, which stated that it repeated many of the same errors as his evidence given to the commission.
## Legacy and historical perception
### Honours
As a result of his writing, Wallace became a well-known figure both as a scientist and as a social activist, and was often sought out for his views. He became president of the anthropology section of the British Association in 1866, and of the Entomological Society of London in 1870. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1873. The British Association elected him as head of its biology section in 1876. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1893. He was asked to chair the International Congress of Spiritualists meeting in London in 1898. He received honorary doctorates and professional honours, such the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1868 and its Darwin Medal in 1890, and the Order of Merit in 1908.
### Obscurity and rehabilitation
Wallace's fame faded quickly after his death. For a long time, he was treated as a relatively obscure figure in the history of science. Reasons for this lack of attention may have included his modesty, his willingness to champion unpopular causes without regard for his own reputation, and the discomfort of much of the scientific community with some of his unconventional ideas. The reason that the theory of evolution is popularly credited to Darwin is likely the impact of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Recently, Wallace has become better known, with the publication of at least five book-length biographies and two anthologies of his writings published since 2000. A web page dedicated to Wallace scholarship is maintained at Western Kentucky University. In a 2010 book, the environmentalist Tim Flannery argued that Wallace was "the first modern scientist to comprehend how essential cooperation is to our survival", and suggested that Wallace's understanding of natural selection and his later work on the atmosphere should be seen as a forerunner to modern ecological thinking. A collection of his medals, including the Order of Merit, were sold at auction for £273,000 in 2022.
### Centenary celebrations
The Natural History Museum, London, co-ordinated commemorative events for the Wallace centenary worldwide in the 'Wallace100' project in 2013. On 24 January, his portrait was unveiled in the Main Hall of the museum by Bill Bailey, a fervent admirer. Bailey further championed Wallace in his 2013 BBC Two series "Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero". On 7 November 2013, the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death, Sir David Attenborough unveiled a statue of Wallace at the museum. The statue, sculpted by Anthony Smith, was donated by the A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund. It depicts Wallace as a young man, collecting in the jungle. November 2013 marked the debut of The Animated Life of A. R. Wallace, a paper-puppet animation film dedicated to Wallace's centennial. In addition, Bailey unveiled a bust of Wallace, sculpted by Felicity Crawley, in Twyn Square in Usk, Monmouthshire in November 2021.
### Bicentenary celebrations
Commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Wallace's birth celebrated during the course of 2023 range from naturalist walk events to scientific congresses and presentations. A Harvard Museum of Natural History event in April of 2023 will also include a mixologist-designed special cocktail to honor Wallace's legacy.
### Memorials
Mount Wallace in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range was named in his honour in 1895. In 1928, a house at Richard Hale School (then called Hertford Grammar School, where he had been a pupil) was named after Wallace. The Alfred Russel Wallace building is a prominent feature of the Glyntaff campus at the University of South Wales, by Pontypridd, with several teaching spaces and laboratories for science courses. The Natural Sciences Building at Swansea University and lecture theatre at Cardiff University are named after him, as are impact craters on Mars and the Moon. In 1986, the Royal Entomological Society mounted a year-long expedition to the Dumoga-Bone National Park in North Sulawesi named Project Wallace. A group of Indonesian islands is known as the Wallacea biogeographical region in his honour, and Operation Wallacea, named after the region, awards "Alfred Russel Wallace Grants" to undergraduate ecology students. Several hundred species of plants and animals, both living and fossil, have been named after Wallace, such as the gecko Cyrtodactylus wallacei, and the freshwater stingray Potamotrygon wallacei.
## Writings
Wallace was a prolific author. In 2002, a historian of science published a quantitative analysis of Wallace's publications. He found that Wallace had published 22 full-length books and at least 747 shorter pieces, 508 of which were scientific papers (191 of them published in Nature). He further broke down the 747 short pieces by their primary subjects: 29% were on biogeography and natural history, 27% were on evolutionary theory, 25% were social commentary, 12% were on anthropology, and 7% were on spiritualism and phrenology. An online bibliography of Wallace's writings has more than 750 entries.
|
341,723 |
StarCraft: Ghost
| 1,160,706,772 |
Cancelled video game
|
[
"Action games",
"Cancelled GameCube games",
"Cancelled PlayStation 2 games",
"Cancelled Xbox games",
"Multiplayer and single-player video games",
"Spy video games",
"StarCraft games",
"Stealth video games",
"Third-person shooters",
"Vaporware video games",
"Video games about psychic powers",
"Video games developed in the United States",
"Video games featuring female protagonists",
"Video games scored by Kevin Manthei"
] |
StarCraft: Ghost was a military science fiction stealth-action video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. It was intended to be part of Blizzard's StarCraft series and was announced in September 20, 2002. It was to be developed by Nihilistic Software for the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 video game consoles. Several delays in development caused Blizzard to move back the release date and the game has not materialized. Nihilistic Software ceded development to Swingin' Ape Studios in 2004 before Blizzard bought the company, and plans for the GameCube version were canceled in 2005.
Blizzard announced in March 2006 that the game was put on "indefinite hold" while the company investigated seventh generation video game console possibilities. Subsequent public statements from company personnel had been contradictory about whether production was to be renewed or planned story elements worked into other products. The continued delay of Ghost caused it to be labeled vaporware, and it was ranked fifth in Wired News' annual Vaporware Awards in 2005. In 2014, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime confirmed that Ghost had been canceled.
Unlike its real-time strategy predecessor StarCraft, Ghost was to be a third-person shooter, and intended to give players a closer and more personal view of the StarCraft universe. Following Nova, a Terran psychic espionage operative called a "ghost", the game would have been set four years after the conclusion of StarCraft: Brood War and cover a conspiracy about a secretive military project conducted by Nova's superiors in the imperial Terran Dominion. Very little of the game's storyline has been released; however, in November 2006 after the game's postponement, a novel was published called StarCraft Ghost: Nova, which covers the backstory of the central character.
## Gameplay
### Campaign
During StarCraft: Ghost's gameplay, the player's character Nova used stealth and darkness to reach objectives and remain undetected. Nova had a cloaking device that allowed for temporary concealment, but certain hostile non-player characters could overcome this with special devices and abilities. Nova was also equipped with thermal imaging goggles and a special EMP device for disabling electronic devices and vehicles. In addition to the focus on stealth elements, StarCraft: Ghost included a complex combat system. Blizzard planned to include a small arsenal of weaponry with assault and sniper rifles, grenades, shotguns, and flamethrowers. Nova could engage in hand-to-hand combat and used these skills to eliminate enemy threats quietly. If alerted, enemy characters would hunt for the player, set up traps, and fire blindly to nullify Nova's cloaking device.
Nova was agile, acrobatic, and able to perform maneuvers such as mantling and climbing ledges, hanging from pipes, and sliding down ziplines. The player had access to Nova's psionic powers honed through training as a ghost agent, such as the ability to improve her speed and reflexes drastically. StarCraft: Ghost included many of the vehicle units featured in StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. Some vehicles, such as space battlecruisers and starfighters, only played support roles, while others, such as hoverbikes, scout cars, and futuristic siege tanks, could be piloted.
### Multiplayer
The multiplayer mode in StarCraft: Ghost differed from the stealth-based mechanics of the single-player portion. It aimed to give players a personal view of the battles from the real-time strategy games of the series. Accordingly, Ghost's multiplayer was structured around class-based team gameplay and fighting in a variety of game modes. Ghost incorporated traditional game modes from multiplayer video games such as deathmatch, capture the flag, and king of the hill, but also introduced two game modes specifically designed for the StarCraft universe. The first was "Mobile Conflict", which required two teams to fight for control of a single Terran military factory with the ability of atmospheric flight. Using vehicles and team tactics, both teams were required to first board the structure and then capture its control room to fly it to the team's starting point. The structure was then landed and had to be defended from capture by the opposing team for a set amount of time.
The second mode was "Invasion", in which two teams fought for control of mineral resource nodes. Whenever teams captured a node they gained points that could be used to purchase classes and vehicles. In all of the team-based game modes, teams had access to four Terran unit classes: light infantry, marine, firebat, and ghost. The light infantry class had minimal armor but a larger range of weapons, while the marine was a heavily armored soldier with an assault rifle and grenades. The firebat was a heavy marine armed with a flamethrower and napalm rockets. Finally, the ghost was a variation of Nova's character in the single-player mode, equipped with a cloaking device, thermal vision, EMP device, and sniper rifle, but lacked the speed ability. Due to the size of the armor worn by marines and firebats, only ghosts and light infantry could pilot vehicles.
## Plot
Ghost took place in the fictional universe of the StarCraft series. The series is set in a distant part of the galaxy called the Koprulu Sector and begins in the year 2499. Terran exiles from Earth are governed by a totalitarian empire, the Terran Dominion, that is opposed by several smaller rebel groups. Two alien races discover humanity: the insectoid Zerg, who begin to invade planets controlled by the Terrans; and the Protoss, an enigmatic race with strong psionic power that attempt to eradicate the Zerg. Ghost took place four years after the conclusion of StarCraft: Brood War, in which the Zerg become the dominant power in the sector and leave both the Protoss and the Dominion in ruins. The game followed the story of Nova, a young ghost agent—a human espionage operative with psychic abilities—in the employ of the Dominion.
Although the game was canceled, the backstory for Nova was released in the novel StarCraft Ghost: Nova by Keith R. A. DeCandido. It was meant to accompany the game's release, but was published in 2006 after development halted. In the novel, Nova is a fifteen-year-old girl and daughter to one of the ruling families of the Confederacy of Man, an oppressive government featured in StarCraft. The Confederacy is overthrown by rebels, who go on to form the Dominion. Nova has significant psionic potential, but has been kept out of the Confederate ghost operative training program because of her father's influence. After her family is murdered by rebels, Nova loses control of her mental abilities and accidentally kills 300 people around her home. She flees from her home before she is caught, and is later forced to work for an organized crime boss as an enforcer and executioner. She is rescued by a Confederate agent who is investigating her disappearance during a rebel attack on the Confederate capital that leads to the Confederacy's destruction. Nova is consequently acquired by the newly formed Terran Dominion, who erase her memory and train her as a ghost agent.
Few details have been revealed about Ghost's plot beyond Nova's backstory. Under emperor Arcturus Mengsk, the Terran Dominion has rebuilt much of its former strength and controls a new military formed to counter the Zerg. To further bolster the effectiveness of his military, Mengsk initiates a secret research operation codenamed Project: Shadow Blade and places it under the command of his right-hand man, General Horace Warfield. In the program, an experimental and potentially lethal gas called terrazine is used to enhance the genetic structure of the Dominion's psychic ghost agents. The process is described as changing the agents into "shadowy superhuman beings bent on executing the will of their true master". It is into the midst of this that Nova finishes her training and is dispatched in operations against the Koprulu Liberation Front, a rebel group that challenges Mengsk's empire. However, Nova's mission leads her to uncover a conspiracy that involves Shadow Blade. This revelation causes her to question her loyalty to the Dominion and could upset the balance of power within the galaxy.
## Development and cancellation
On September 20, 2002, Blizzard Entertainment announced the development of StarCraft: Ghost in conjunction with fellow video game company Nihilistic Software. Nihilistic aimed to release the game for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube video game consoles in late 2003, which elicited positive reactions from the press. The game was consistently delayed, and during the third quarter of 2004, Nihilistic discontinued their work on the project. Blizzard stated that Nihilistic had completed the tasks it had been contracted for, and the game would be delivered on time.
In July 2004, Blizzard Entertainment began collaboration with Swingin' Ape Studios to work on the game, and bought the company in May 2005. Despite anticipation for the game by industry journalists, Ghost was delayed again and its release date was pushed back to September 2005. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005, Ghost was officially reannounced, but the GameCube version was canceled by Swingin' Ape Studios due to the platform's lack of online support. The game's release on the remaining two platforms was again delayed until 2006. Despite the efforts of Swingin' Ape, Ghost failed to materialize as scheduled, and in March 2006 Blizzard Entertainment announced an indefinite postponement on development of Ghost while the company explored new options with the emerging seventh generation of video game consoles. Despite its long development history, IGN noted that the concept of Ghost still held promise. Although the game's development was suspended, Keith R. A. DeCandido's novel StarCraft Ghost: Nova was published several months later in November 2006.
Complementing Nihilistic's and Swingin' Ape Studio's work on the game, Blizzard's cinematics team—originally formed to develop StarCraft's cut scenes—created the cut scenes for Ghost's single-player campaign, which are integral to the game's storyline. The team, which originally consisted of six people, grew to 25, and used newer hardware, software, and cinematics techniques to create higher quality cut scenes than those featured in StarCraft and Brood War. The game's trailer, composed of the cinematics team's work, was released in August 2005.
Since Ghost's production halted, Blizzard Entertainment has sporadically released information about the title. The game's protagonist, Nova, shows up in one campaign mission of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, in which players are given the option to side with her or fight against her forces. She also features in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, as well her own campaign in StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops. Metzen further stated that he believed Ghost had an excellent storyline that may be told in future novels following from DeCandido's Nova. In June 2007, Rob Pardo, one of the lead developers at Blizzard Entertainment, indicated that there still was interest in finishing Ghost. Later in an interview, Pardo stated that Blizzard had been "stubborn" in persevering with Ghost, but they "were not able to execute [the game] at the level we wanted to". Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime and Pardo gave a presentation on the company's history at the D.I.C.E. Summit in February 2008. During the presentation, they listed games canceled by Blizzard, which did not include Ghost. When questioned about this, Blizzard's co-founder Frank Pearce explained that the title was never "technically canceled" and that it was not in the company's focus at the time due to a finite amount of development resources. Morhaime later elaborated that it was the sudden success of World of Warcraft and the concurrent development of StarCraft II that consumed Blizzard's resources, leading to Ghost being put on hold. Despite Blizzard's announcements, many of the video games industry's journalists now list Ghost as canceled and consider it vaporware; the game was ranked fifth in the 2005 edition of Wired News' annual Vaporware Awards.
On September 23, 2014 in an interview with Polygon about the cancellation of Blizzard's next generation MMO Titan, Mike Morhaime confirmed that StarCraft: Ghost was also cancelled. Morhaime said, "It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft: Ghost, but it has always resulted in better-quality work." In a July 2016 Polygon article, it was suggested that when the game's production halted the main reasons it was shelved were because the game worked on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, but it was scheduled to be released in 2005 when the Xbox 360 was about to be released, and it would take a lot of resources to move from the previous console generation to the current generation as well as Blizzard having a lot of success with its then recently released PC-only game World of Warcraft.
## Leak
In January 2020, videos appearing to be from the Xbox version of the cancelled game started appearing online. On February 16, 2020, numerous videos showing different missions, areas, and gameplay were uploaded to the web. Reports of the Xbox development version game files leaking to the public started to emerge. Journalists at gaming publications such as Kotaku verified the legitimacy of the code that began to disseminate online. Throughout the day, infringement notices were issued to channels hosting footage of the game on YouTube, resulting in many videos being removed. Eventually the files widely disseminated online through filesharing methods such as public torrent trackers. This was the second time a playable, albeit unfinished and rough, version of a cancelled Blizzard game has leaked online, with Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans being leaked online in September 2016.
## See also
- Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, another cancelled Blizzard project
[Action games](Category:Action_games "wikilink") [Cancelled GameCube games](Category:Cancelled_GameCube_games "wikilink") [Cancelled PlayStation 2 games](Category:Cancelled_PlayStation_2_games "wikilink") [Cancelled Xbox games](Category:Cancelled_Xbox_games "wikilink") [Multiplayer and single-player video games](Category:Multiplayer_and_single-player_video_games "wikilink") [Spy video games](Category:Spy_video_games "wikilink") [StarCraft games](Category:StarCraft_games "wikilink") [Stealth video games](Category:Stealth_video_games "wikilink") [Third-person shooters](Category:Third-person_shooters "wikilink") [Vaporware video games](Category:Vaporware_video_games "wikilink") [Video games scored by Kevin Manthei](Category:Video_games_scored_by_Kevin_Manthei "wikilink") [Video games about psychic powers](Category:Video_games_about_psychic_powers "wikilink") [Video games developed in the United States](Category:Video_games_developed_in_the_United_States "wikilink") [Video games featuring female protagonists](Category:Video_games_featuring_female_protagonists "wikilink")
|
178,842 |
The Phantom Tollbooth
| 1,154,001,299 |
1961 children's novel by Norton Juster and Illustrator Jules Feiffer
|
[
"1961 American novels",
"1961 children's books",
"1961 debut novels",
"1961 fantasy novels",
"American children's novels",
"American fantasy novels adapted into films",
"Books by Norton Juster",
"Children's fantasy novels",
"Novels adapted into operas",
"Novels set in fictional countries",
"Random House books"
] |
The Phantom Tollbooth is a children's fantasy adventure novel written by Norton Juster, with illustrations by Jules Feiffer, first published in 1961. The story follows a bored young boy named Milo who unexpectedly receives a magic tollbooth that transports him to the once prosperous, but now troubled, Kingdom of Wisdom. Along with a dog named Tock and the Humbug, Milo goes on a quest to the Castle in the Air seeking the kingdom's two exiled princesses, named Rhyme and Reason. As Milo learns valuable lessons, he finds a love of learning in a story full of puns and wordplay, such as exploring the literal meanings of idioms.
In 1958, Juster had received a Ford Foundation grant for a children's book about cities. Unable to make progress on that project, he turned to writing what became The Phantom Tollbooth, his first book. His housemate, Feiffer, a cartoonist, interested himself in the project. Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, bought the book and published it. The Phantom Tollbooth received rave reviews and has as of 2021 sold almost five million copies, far more than expected. It has been adapted into a film, opera, and play, and translated into many languages.
Though the book is on its face an adventure story, a major theme is the need for a love of education; through this, Milo applies what he has learned in school, advances in his personal development, and learns to love the life that previously bored him. Critics have compared its appeal to that of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Additionally Maurice Sendak, in his introductory "An Appreciation" included in editions of the book since 1996, quotes a critic as comparing The Phantom Tollbooth to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "As Pilgrim's Progress is concerned with the awakening of the sluggardly spirit, The Phantom Tollbooth is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind."
## Plot
Milo is a boy bored by the world around him; every activity seems a waste of time. He arrives home from another boring day at school to find a mysterious package. Among its contents are a small tollbooth and a map of "the Lands Beyond," illustrating the Kingdom of Wisdom (which will also guide the reader from its place on the endpapers of the book). Attached to the package is a note "For Milo, who has plenty of time." Warned by an included sign to have his destination in mind, he decides without much thought to go to Dictionopolis, assuming this is a pretend game to be played on the floor of his room. He maneuvers through the tollbooth in his electric toy car and instantly finds himself driving on a road that is clearly not in his city apartment.
Milo begins with Expectations, a pleasant place where he starts on Wisdom's road. In Expectations, he seeks directions from the Whether Man, who is full of endless talk. As Milo drives on, he daydreams and gets lost in the Doldrums, a colorless place where nothing ever happens. Milo soon joins the inhabitants, the Lethargarians, in killing time there, a pastime angrily interrupted by the arrival of Tock, a talking, oversized dog with an alarm clock on each side (a "watchdog"), who tells Milo that only by thinking can he get out of the Doldrums. Head abuzz with unaccustomed thoughts, Milo is soon back on his road, and Tock joins him on his journey through Wisdom.
Milo and Tock travel to Dictionopolis, one of two capital cities of the divided Kingdom of Wisdom and home to King Azaz the Unabridged. They meet King Azaz's cabinet officials and visit the Word Market, where the words and letters are sold that empower the world. A fight between the Spelling Bee and the blustering Humbug breaks up the market, and Milo and Tock are arrested by the very short Officer Shrift. In prison, Milo meets Faintly Macabre, the Not-so-Wicked Which (not to be confused with Witch), long in charge of which words should be used in Wisdom. She tells him how the two rulers, King Azaz and his brother, the Mathemagician, had two adopted younger sisters, Rhyme and Reason, to whom everyone came to settle disputes. All lived in harmony until the rulers disagreed with the princesses' decision that letters (championed by Azaz) and numbers (by the Mathemagician) were equally important. They banished the princesses to the Castle in the Air and, since then, the land has had neither Rhyme nor Reason.
Milo and Tock leave the dungeon. King Azaz hosts them at a banquet where the guests literally eat their words, served to them on plates. After the meal, King Azaz lets Milo and Tock talk themselves into a dangerous quest to rescue the princesses. Azaz flatters the Humbug into being their guide, and boy, dog and insect set off for the Mathemagician's capital of Digitopolis as they must gain his approval before they can begin their quest.
Along the way, they meet such characters as Alec Bings, a little boy suspended in the air who sees through things and who will grow down until he reaches the ground. He then meets the world's smallest giant, the world's biggest dwarf, the world's thinnest fat man, and the world's fattest thin man, who turn out to just be one regular man. Milo then loses time in substituting for Chroma the Great, a conductor whose orchestra creates the colors of the world.
They meet a twelve-sided creature called the Dodecahedron, who leads them to Digitopolis. There, they meet the Mathemagician, who is still angry at Azaz and who will not give his blessing to anything that his brother has approved. Milo maneuvers him into saying he will permit the quest if the boy can show the two have concurred on anything since they banished the princesses. To the number wizard's shock, Milo proves that the two have agreed to disagree, and the Mathemagician gives his reluctant consent.
In the Mountains of Ignorance, the journeyers contend with demons like the Terrible Trivium and the Gelatinous Giant. After overcoming obstacles and their own fears, they reach the Castle in the Air. Princesses Rhyme and Reason welcome Milo and agree to return to Wisdom. Unable to enter the castle, the demons cut it loose, letting it drift away, but Milo realizes Tock can carry them down because 'time flies'. The demons pursue, but the armies of Wisdom arrive and repel them. Rhyme and Reason heal the divisions in the old Kingdom of Wisdom, Azaz and the Mathemagician are reconciled, and all enjoy a three-day celebration.
Milo says goodbye and drives back through the tollbooth. Suddenly he is back in his own room, and discovers he has been gone only an hour, though his journey seemed to take weeks. He awakens the next day with plans to return to the kingdom, but finds the tollbooth gone when he gets home from school. A note instead is there, "For Milo, who now knows the way." The note states that the tollbooth is being sent to another child who needs help finding direction in life. Milo is somewhat disappointed but agrees and looks at a now-interesting world around him, concluding that even if he found a way back, he might not have time to go, for there is so much to do right where he is.
## Writing
Architect Norton Juster was living in his hometown of Brooklyn, after three years in the Navy. In June 1960, he gained a \$5,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to write a children's book about cities. Juster argued that the young baby boomers would soon have responsibility for the cities, and many lived in the suburbs and did not know them. In his proposal, he said he wanted "to stimulate and heighten perception – to help children notice and appreciate the visual world around them – to help excite them and shape their interest in an environment they will eventually reshape." Beginning with great enthusiasm, he ground to a halt with too many notes and too little progress. He took a weekend break with friends at Fire Island, and came back determined to put aside the cities book and seek inspiration in another writing project.
Juster's guilt over his lack of progress on the cities book had led him to write pieces of stories about a little boy named Milo, which he began to develop into a book. Juster quit his job so that he could work on the book. His imagination fired by a boy who approached him on the street and with whom he discussed the nature of infinity, Juster wanted to finish the story about "a boy who asked too many questions" before returning to the book on cities. Juster shared his house in Brooklyn Heights with cartoonist Jules Feiffer whose bedroom was immediately below, and who could hear him pacing in the night. Feiffer was surprised to learn that his friend's insomnia was not caused by the cities book, but by a book about a boy. Juster showed Feiffer the draft to date and, unbidden, the artist began sketching illustrations. Feiffer knew Judy Sheftel, who put deals together in the publishing trade and was his future bride. Sheftel got Jason Epstein, an innovative editor at Random House with a deep appreciation for children's literature, to agree to review the manuscript. Some at Random House considered the book's vocabulary too difficult: at the time, educators advised against children's literature containing words the target audience did not already know, fearing the unfamiliar would discourage young learners. Based on seven chapters of manuscript, plus a three-page outline of the rest of the story, Epstein bought the book.
Since Juster did the cooking for the housemates, if Feiffer wanted to eat, he had to do the drawings. Feiffer quickly realized the book would require illustrations of the type and quality that John Tenniel had created for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and although a nationally known artist, doubted his competence to do the text justice. Feiffer considers the double-spread illustration of demons late in the book to be a success and one of his favorites. It differs from his usual style (which would involve a white background), and instead uses Gustave Doré's drawings as an inspiration.
It became a game, with Feiffer trying to draw things the way he wanted, and Juster trying to describe things that were impossible to sketch. These included the Triple Demons of Compromise—one short and fat, one tall and thin, and the third exactly like the first two. Feiffer got his revenge by depicting the author as the Whether Man, clad in a toga.
Repeated edits altered the protagonist's name (originally Tony), removed his parents entirely from the book, and deleted text attempting to describe how the tollbooth package had been delivered. Milo's age was removed from the text—early drafts have him aged eight or nine—as Juster decided not to state it, lest potential readers decide they were too old to care.
## Themes
Since no one has ever bothered to explain the importance of learning to Milo, he regards school as the biggest waste of time in his life. Juster intended that the book speak to the importance of learning to love learning. Teaching methods that might bore children, by memorization for example, are mocked in the book, as in the case of the Spelling Bee. Like the Bee, the Humbug's insult to his fellow insect goes over Milo's head, but possibly not the reader's: "A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect." According to Mary Liston in her journal article on law in fantasy realms, "The Phantom Tollbooth concerns the difference between education and wisdom and what processes are conducive to synthesizing both, so as to encourage an attitude of engagement, alertness, and responsibility within an increasingly autonomous individual."
Another theme is the need for common sense to back up rules. Milo journeys through a land where, without Rhyme or Reason, the art of governance has been lost, leading to bizarre results. Milo repeatedly meets characters to whom words are more important than their meaning. The Whether Man, for all his talk, is unable to provide Milo with the information or guidance the boy wants, while Officer Shrift's investigation of the overturning of the Word Market contains the forms of law, without justice. The denizens around Digitopolis are little better; the twelve-faced Dodecahedron, named for what he is, turns the logic of his naming on its head when he asks if everyone with one face is called Milo. The attitudes now displayed by the adherents of both brothers are summed up by the Dodecahedron, "as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?"
As Milo struggles with words and begins the process of making himself their master, he also has difficulty with numbers, especially when he speaks with .58 of a child, who with parents and two siblings (whom Milo does not meet) makes up an average family. Milo has had difficulties in school with mathematics and problem solving; his reaction to this encounter is to protest that averages are not real. The partial child enlightens Milo that there is beauty in math beyond the tedium of learning an endless set of rules, "one of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are". Late in the book, Princess Reason counsels Milo, who has much learning ahead of him, not to be discouraged by its complexity, "You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons". An index card in the Juster papers sets forth the germ of the princess' "memorable" counsel to Milo, "Quite often the road to Rhyme + Reason is through the right mistakes."
Although Milo is bored with learning, that does not mean he knew nothing before his journey. He exhibits characteristics of a well-schooled child of his time; his speech is polite and peppered with "please" and "thank you", and when he unexpectedly encounters the partial child, he requests pardon for staring. He can count to a thousand, though his tact in bringing up the subject in the presence of the numbers-hating King Azaz is not the best. Mindful of his mother's admonition to eat lightly when a guest, he initially orders a light meal at the banquet, only to find the waiters bringing in insubstantial light beams. Not realizing he will be asked to eat his words, he then makes a plausible start at a speech before being interrupted by the king. The Phantom Tollbooth displays Milo's growth; Leonard S. Marcus in his notes to its annotated edition writes that the boy learns to think in the abstract, pledging after his unintentional jump to Conclusions that he will not make up his mind again without a good reason. Milo does not accept the word of the demon of insincerity that he is a threat and is rewarded by learning he is not. Just for a moment, Milo is able to float in the air beside Alec Bings and see things from the perspective he will have as an adult, allowing the young reader to contemplate what it will be like to do the same. According to Liston, Milo "transforms himself from an unthinking and compliant Lethargarian to a young adult with greater consciousness, a firmer sense of self, and a newly found set of responsibilities".
Even though the day is won by Milo and his fellow questers, it is a great but not a permanent victory, as he hears the kingly brothers begin to argue again as he departs. Juster has written that it was his intent to get Milo out of there as quickly as possible, and that "the fight would have to be won again and again".
Milo's trip through the lands beyond the tollbooth teaches the previously bored child to appreciate both journey and destination. This is a lesson that had been unlearned by the citizens of Wisdom, as exemplified by the described fate of the twin cities of Reality and Illusions. Although the city of Illusions never actually existed, Reality was lost as its residents concentrated on getting to their destination as quickly as possible, and, unappreciated, the city withered away, unnoticed by the busy people who still hasten along its former streets. Milo meets his trials by defining himself as different from the kingdom's inhabitants, who either demand or accept conformity, as enforced by the kingdom's laws, which discourage (and even outlaw) thought. Milo cannot accept such laws, beginning when, in the Doldrums, he thinks, thus violating a local ordinance and separating himself from the thoughtless inhabitants. Liston opined that because the Kingdom of Wisdom's "laws require the impossible, they contradict what it means to be fully human".
## Influences and comparisons
The Phantom Tollbooth contains allusions to many works, including those loved by Juster in his own upbringing. Some of Juster's favorite books as a child, including The Wind in the Willows, had endpaper maps; Juster insisted on one, over Feiffer's opposition, going so far as to sketch one and require that his collaborator reproduce it in his own style. Juster was also inspired by his father Samuel's love of puns, with which the book is more than sprinkled. In his childhood, Juster spent much time listening to the radio. According to Juster, the need to envision the action when listening to radio serials helped inspire The Phantom Tollbooth, as well as yielding the character of Tock, based on sidekick Jim Fairfield from Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Jim gave Tock his wisdom, courage, and adventurous spirit. As a child, Juster had synesthesia, and could only do arithmetic by making associations between numbers and colors. He remembered that the condition affected word associations. "One of the things I always did was think literally when I heard words. On the Lone Ranger [radio serial] they would say, 'Here come the Injuns!' and I always had an image of engines, of train engines."
Some of the incidents in the book stem from Juster's own past. In Digitopolis, the Numbers Mine, where gemlike numerals are dug for, recalled one of Juster's architecture professors at the University of Pennsylvania, who compared numbers and equations to jewels. The Marx Brothers films were a staple for Juster as a child and his father would quote lengthy passages from the movies; this inspired the unending series of straight-faced puns that fills the book.
Growing up in a Jewish-American household where the parents demanded high achievement, Juster was intimately familiar with expectations, though in his case many of his parents' hopes were centered on his older brother, an academic star. The Terrible Trivium, the well-dressed, polite demon who sets the questers to mindless tasks, was Juster's way of representing his own tendency to avoid what he should be doing in favor of a more congenial occupation, such as his evasion of the grant project to write The Phantom Tollbooth. Juster drew on Feiffer's life experiences as well; the Whether Man's adage "Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens" was a favorite of the cartoonist's mother.
Juster had not read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when he wrote The Phantom Tollbooth, but the two books, each about a bored child plunged into a world of absurd logic, have repeatedly been compared. According to Daniel Hahn in his 2012 article on the Juster book, "Alice is clearly Milo's closest literary kin". Milo's conversation with the Whether Man, which leaves him no more comprehending than when he came, recalls that of Alice with the Cheshire Cat. The questions of authority (something omnipresent for a child) and of justice run through both books; the Queen of Hearts' arbitrary justice is echoed, though with less violence, by Officer Shrift. Alice's sovereigns, representing the authority figures of Victorian childhood life, rule absolutely (though not necessarily effectively); a child of the post-World War II world, Milo journeys through a more bureaucratic realm. His quest is far more purposeful than the frustrating journey Alice experiences, and the outcome differs as well—Milo restores his kingdom while Alice overturns hers. Carroll leaves us uncertain if Alice has learned anything from her adventures, but Juster makes it clear that Milo has acquired tools he will need to find his way through life.
## Publication and reception
The Phantom Tollbooth was published in September 1961. Its competition among new books for the minds and hearts of children included Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. The Bronze Bow, set in the Biblical times, was newly available, and would bring Elizabeth George Speare her second Newbery Award in three years. Neither publisher nor first-time author expected many sales for The Phantom Tollbooth, but Juster was nevertheless disappointed not to find his work on store shelves. His mother, Minnie, did her part, as her son put it, "terrorizing" bookstore owners into displaying it.
Juster says the book was rescued from the remainders table when Emily Maxwell wrote a strong review of it in The New Yorker. Maxwell wrote, "As Pilgrim's Progress is concerned with the awakening of the sluggardly spirit, The Phantom Tollbooth is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind." Hers was far from the only positive piece; children's author Ann McGovern reviewed it for The New York Times, writing "Norton Juster's amazing fantasy has something wonderful for anyone old enough to relish the allegorical wisdom of Alice in Wonderland and the pointed whimsy of The Wizard of Oz". John Crosby wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, "In a world which sometimes seems to have gone mad, it is refreshing to pause and consider for a moment a book for children which contains a character called 'Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which.' The name of the book is The Phantom Tollbooth and it was written by a bearded elf named Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, who is the cleverest of the young neurotics". Dissenting was the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, which in March 1962 deemed the book an "intensive and extensive fantasy, heavily burdened with contrivance and whimsy".
In 1962, the book was published in Britain. Siriol Hugh-Jones wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, "The Phantom Tollbooth is something every adult seems sure will turn into a modern Alice ... The obvious guess is that the appeal of this sort of writing is directed towards just the sort of adults who derive a perfectly grown-up pleasure from regularly rereading the Alices. As one might expect, it is illustrated by every grown-up's favourite child-like pictures with the built-in sad sophistication, the work of Jules Feiffer." Jennifer Bourdillon reviewed it for The Listener, "This is the story of an imaginary journey, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress of a little boy in his car ... One would hardly have thought from the sound of this that it would have so magnetic an appeal, but the brilliant verbal humour and the weird and wonderful characters (the Dodecahedron, the Watchdog, Faintly Macabre) make it that rare delight, a book which parents and children can share." It reached Australia in 1963; The Canberra Times''' reviewer, J.E.B., deemed it memorable, causing readers to quote from it and leaf through its pages again.
## Later history, editions and adaptations
After publication, Juster sent a copy of the book to the Ford Foundation, with an explanation of how the projected book on cities had transformed into The Phantom Tollbooth. He never heard back from them, and learned years later that they were delighted by the turn of events. With the book having become an unexpected hit, Juster found himself answering letters from young readers and a few parents. He found that children understood the wordplay at different ages, and he heard from the occasional college student as well. Some students wrote a second time after a gap of years "and they'll talk to me about a whole different book, normally. But now they've got a lot more of the words right. A lot more of the fun kind of crazy references". He learned too that readers were capable of more than he had intended, as in the case of the letter sent by the Mathemagician to King Azaz. Composed entirely of numbers, some readers assumed it was a code and set about breaking it, only to appeal to Juster for help when they were not successful. The numbers were not intended to have any meaning, and were meant to convey that the Mathemagician's letter could not have been understood by Azaz or his advisers.
As the book became acclaimed as a modern classic, it began to be used in the classroom, and Juster corresponded with some teachers. After the book's readers attained adulthood, they wrote of its influence on them. Novelist Cathleen Schine recalled, "it was as if someone had turned on the lights. The concepts of irony, of double entendre, of words as play, of the pleasure and inevitability of intellectual absurdity, were suddenly accessible to me. They made sense to me in an extremely personal way." British fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones read her copy so often it fell apart: "it didn't occur to us that it might be about something. It struck us as a little like The Wizard of Oz, only better." One reader, signing himself "Milo", wrote to Rolling Stone in 1970, "If you want to get freaked out of your undernourished head, pick up The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. They tell you it's a kids' book, but take my word for it, no one who reads it is ever the same. No hype."
The book continued to garner positive reviews and comments. In 1998, Amanda Foreman wrote for The Sunday Times of London, "I want to shout about The Phantom from the rooftops. I want to stand in Waterloo and press copies into people's hands. This is a book that should be in every home. ... Whether you are 8 or 88 Juster's mixture of allegorical wisdom and logical whimsy will take you on a journey of the spirit. The Phantom is a mappa mundi of our hearts, proving once again that in laughter and simplicity lies the truth of life". In a 2011 article written for the book's fiftieth anniversary, Adam Gopnik wrote, "The book is made magical by Juster's and Feiffer's gift for transforming abstract philosophical ideas into unforgettable images."
The book has been translated into many foreign languages, including Chinese, Croatian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai, Turkish and three different Spanish editions: one for Spain, one for Latin America, and one for Spanish speakers in the United States. Juster stated that he did not know if the wordplay of the original carries through to the translated works. In 1969, Chuck Jones made The Phantom Tollbooth into a musical film of the same name, produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1970. Milo's town and room were depicted in live action, with the film changing to animation beyond the tollbooth. Juster disliked the film, describing it as "drivel". In February 2010, director Gary Ross began development of a remake of The Phantom Tollbooth, with the first draft of the script written by Alex Tse. As of August 2016, the remake has moved to TriStar Pictures, with Michael Vukadinovich writing the adaption. The classical composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez in 1987 composed A Colorful Symphony based on the work. Audiobooks of The Phantom Tollbooth have been narrated by Norman Dietz, David Hyde Pierce, and Rainn Wilson. The Pierce version was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children in 2010.
In 2011, The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth was published, which includes sketches and copies of Juster's handwritten drafts and word lists, Feiffer's early drawings, and an introduction and annotations by Leonard S. Marcus. A fiftieth anniversary edition was also published, with appreciations by Maurice Sendak, Michael Chabon and Philip Pullman. More than three million copies have been sold of the original book in the U.S. alone. It has been adapted into a small-scale opera with music by Arnold Black, and a book by Juster and Sheldon Harnick, produced by Opera Delaware in 1995. It was then revamped into a musical that had its debut to strong reviews at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and then made a national tour.
The Phantom Tollbooth remains acknowledged as a classic of children's literature. Based on a 2007 online poll, the U.S. National Education Association listed it as one of the "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". In 2012, it was ranked number 21 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal.
In 2017, TriStar Pictures announced that Matt Shakman would direct its upcoming "live-action/hybrid" film adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth''. In 2018, Carlos Saldanha replaced Shakman due to scheduling conflicts. Theodore Melfi is drafting the screenplay after Michael Vukadinovich and Phil Johnston.
In 2011, Juster stated that he felt that his book still had relevance, even though children's lives had changed since 1961:
> When I grew up I still felt like that puzzled kid—disconnected, disinterested and confused. There was no rhyme or reason in his life. My thoughts focused on him, and I began writing about his childhood, which was really mine ... Today's world of texting and tweeting is quite a different place, but children are still the same as they've always been. They still get bored and confused, and still struggle to figure out the important questions of life. Well, one thing has changed: As many states eliminate tolls on highways, some children may never encounter a real tollbooth. Luckily there are other routes to the Lands Beyond. And it is possible to seek them, and fun to try.
## See also
- List of The Phantom Tollbooth characters
## Other works cited
## Selected editions
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Flag of Hong Kong
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Regional flag
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[
"Flags introduced in 1997",
"Flags of Hong Kong",
"Government of Hong Kong",
"Red and white flags",
"Regional symbols of Hong Kong"
] |
The flag of Hong Kong, officially the regional flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, depicts a white stylised five-petal Hong Kong orchid tree (Bauhinia blakeana) flower in the centre of a Chinese red field. Its original design was unveiled on 4 April 1990 at the Third Session of the Seventh National People's Congress. The current design was approved on 10 August 1996 at the Fourth Plenum of the Preparatory Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The precise use of the flag is regulated by laws passed by the 58th executive meeting of the State Council held in Beijing. The design of the flag is enshrined in Hong Kong's Basic Law, the territory's constitutional document, and regulations regarding the use, prohibition of use, desecration, and manufacture of the flag are stated in the Regional Flag and Regional Emblem Ordinance. The flag of Hong Kong was officially adopted and hoisted on 1 July 1997, during the handover ceremony marking the transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom back to China.
## Current design
### Symbolism
The design of the flag comes with cultural, political, and regional meanings. The colour itself is significant; red is a festive colour for the Chinese people, used to convey a sense of celebration and nationalism. Moreover, the red colour is identical to that used in the national PRC flag, chosen to signify the link re-established between post-colonial Hong Kong and Mainland China. The position of red and white on the flag symbolises the "one country, two systems" political principle applied to the region. The stylised rendering of the Bauhinia blakeana flower, a flower discovered in Hong Kong, is meant to serve as a harmonising symbol for this dichotomy. The five stars of the Chinese national flag are replicated on the petals of the flower. The Chinese name of Bauhinia × blakeana is most commonly rendered as "洋紫荊", but is often shortened to 紫荊 / 紫荆 in official uses since "洋" (yáng) means "foreign" in Chinese, notwithstanding 紫荊 / 紫荆 refers to another genus called Cercis. A sculpture of the plant has been erected in Golden Bauhinia Square in Hong Kong.
Before the adoption of the flag, the Chairman of the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee explained the significance of the flag's design to the National People's Congress:
> The regional flag carries a design of five bauhinia petals, each with a star in the middle, on a red background. The red flag represents the motherland and the bauhinia represents Hong Kong. The design implies that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China and prospers in the embrace of the motherland. The five stars on the flower symbolise the fact that all Hong Kong compatriots love their motherland, while the red and white colours embody the principle of "one country, two systems".
### Construction
The Hong Kong government has specified sizes, colours, and manufacturing parameters in which the flag is to be made. The ratio of its length to breadth is 3:2. In its centre is a five-petal stylised rendering of a white Bauhinia blakeana flower. If a circle circumscribes the flower, it should have a diameter 0.6 times the entire height of the flag. The petals are uniformly spread around the centre point of the flag, radiating outward and pointing in a clockwise direction. Each of the flower's petals bears a five-pointed red star with a red trace, suggestive of a flower stamen. The heading that is used to allow a flag to be slid or raised onto a pole is white.
A slightly different geometrical description of the flag is specified in the mandatory National Standard "GB 16689-2004: Regional flag of Hong Kong special administrative region".
### Size specifications
This table lists all the official sizes for the flag. Sizes deviating from this list are considered non-standard. If a flag is not of official size, it must be a scaled-down or scaled-up version of one of the official sizes.
### Colour specifications
The Regional Flag and Regional Emblem Ordinance stipulates that "The regional flag is in red, the chrominance value of which is identical with that of the national flag of the People’s Republic of China."
### Manufacture regulations
The Regional Flag and Regional Emblem Ordinance stipulates that the Hong Kong flag must be manufactured according to specifications laid out in the ordinance. If flags are not produced in design according to the ordinance, the Secretary for Justice may petition the District Court for an injunction to prohibit the person or company from manufacturing the flags. If the District Court agrees that the flags are not in compliance, it may issue an injunction and order that the flags and the materials that were used to make the flags to be seized by the government.
## Protocol
The Hong Kong flag is flown daily from the chief executive's official residence, Government House, the Hong Kong International Airport, and at all border crossings and points of entry into Hong Kong. At major government offices and buildings, such as the Office of the Chief Executive, the Executive Council, the Court of Final Appeal, the High Court, the Legislative Council, and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices overseas, the flag is displayed during days when these offices are working. Other government offices and buildings, such as hospitals, schools, departmental headquarters, sports grounds, and cultural venues should fly the flag on occasions such as the National Day of the PRC (1 October), the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day (1 July), and New Year's Day. The flag should be raised at 8:00 a.m. and lowered at 6:00 p.m. The raising and lowering of the flag should be done slowly; it must reach the peak of the flag staff when it is raised, and it may not touch the ground when it is lowered. The flag may not be raised in severe weather conditions. A Hong Kong flag that is either damaged, defaced, faded or substandard must not be displayed or used.
### Display
Whenever the PRC national flag is flown together with the regional Hong Kong flag, the national flag must be flown at the centre, above the regional flag, or otherwise in a more prominent position than that of the regional flag. The regional flag must be smaller in size than the national flag, and it must be displayed to the left of the national flag. When the flags are displayed inside a building, the left and right sides of a person looking at the flags, and with his or her back toward the wall, are used as reference points for the left and right sides of a flag. When the flags are displayed outside a building, the left and right sides of a person standing in front of the building and looking towards the front entrance are used as reference points for the left and right sides of a flag. The national flag should be raised before the regional flag is raised, and it should be lowered after the regional flag is lowered.
An exception to this rule occurs during medal presentation ceremonies at multi-sport events such as the Olympics and Asian Games. As Hong Kong competes separately from mainland China, should an athlete from Hong Kong win the gold medal, and an athlete from mainland China win the silver and/or bronze medal(s) in the same event, the regional flag of Hong Kong would be raised in the centre above the national flag(s) during the medal presentation ceremony.
#### Half-mast
The Hong Kong flag must be lowered to half-mast as a token of mourning when any of the following people die:
- President of the People's Republic of China
- Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress
- Premier of the State Council
- Chairman of the Central Military Commission
- Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
- Persons who have made outstanding contributions to the People's Republic of China as the Central People's Government advises the Chief Executive.
- Persons who have made outstanding contributions to world peace or the cause of human progress as the Central People's Government advises the Chief Executive.
- Persons whom the Chief Executive considers to have made outstanding contributions to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region or for whom they consider it appropriate to fly the flag at half-mast.
The flag may also be flown at half-mast when the Central People's Government advises the Chief Executive to do so, or when the Chief Executive considers it appropriate to do so, on occurrences of unfortunate events causing especially serious casualties, or when serious natural calamities have caused heavy casualties. When raising a flag to be flown at half-mast, it should first be raised to the top of the pole and then lowered to a point where the distance between the top of the flag and the top of the pole is one third of the length of the pole. When lowering the flag from half-mast, it should first be raised to the peak of the pole before it is lowered.
### Prohibition of use and desecration
The Regional Flag and Regional Emblem Ordinance states what manner of use of the Hong Kong flag is prohibited and that desecration of the flag is prohibited; it also states that it is a punishable offence for a person to use the flag in a prohibited manner or desecrate the flag. According to the ordinance, a flag may not be used in advertisements or trademarks, and that "publicly and wilfully burning, mutilating, scrawling on, defiling or trampling" the flag is considered flag desecration. Similarly, the National Flag and National Emblem Ordinance extends the same prohibition toward the national PRC flag. The ordinances also allow for the Chief Executive to make stipulations regarding the use of the flag. In stipulations made in 1997, the Chief Executive further specified that the use of the flag in "any trade, calling or profession, or the logo, seal or badge of any non-governmental organisation" is also prohibited unless prior permission was obtained.
The first conviction of flag desecration occurred in 1999. Protesters Ng Kung Siu and Lee Kin Yun wrote the word "Shame" on both the national PRC flag and the Hong Kong flag, and were convicted of violating the National Flag and National Emblem Ordinance and the Regional Flag and Regional Emblem Ordinance. The Court of Appeal overturned the verdict, ruling that the ordinances were unnecessary restrictions on the freedom of expression and in violation of both the Basic Law and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Upon further appeal, however, the Court of Final Appeal maintained the original guilty verdict, holding that this restriction on the freedom of expression was justifiable in that the protection of the flags played a role in national unity and territorial integrity and constituted a restriction on the mode of expressing one's message but did not interfere with one's freedom to express the same message in other ways.
Leung Kwok-hung, a former member of the Legislative Council and a political activist in Hong Kong, was penalised in February 2001, before he became a member of the Legislative Council, for defiling the flag. He was convicted of three counts of desecrating the flag—for two incidents on 1 July 2000 during the third anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China and for one incident on 9 July of the same year during a protest against elections to choose the Election Committee, the electoral college which chooses the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Leung was placed on a good-behaviour bond for 12 months in the sum of HK\$3,000.
Zhu Rongchang, a mainland Chinese farmer has been jailed for three weeks after setting fire to a Chinese flag in Hong Kong. Zhu was charged for "publicly and wilfully" burning the Chinese flag at Golden Bauhinia Square in central Hong Kong. The 74-year-old man is reportedly the third person charged for desecrating the Chinese national flag, but he is first to be jailed under the law.
In early 2013, protestors went to the streets flying the old colonial flag demanding more democracy and resignation of Chief Executive Leung Chun Ying. The use of the flag has created concerns from Chinese authorities and request from Leung to stop flying the flag. Despite the calls from Leung the old flags are not subject to use restrictions beyond not being allowed to be placed on flagpoles and are freely sold and manufactured in the territory.
## Previous flags of Hong Kong
### Pre-colonial period
#### Qing dynasty (1862–1895)
Prior to the secession of Hong Kong to the United Kingdom following the First Opium War via the Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong fell under the jurisdiction of the government of China and flew the flag and ensign of the Chinese government of the time. Prior to the establishment of the crown colony of Hong Kong, the ruling dynasty in China was the Qing dynasty. Despite being established in 1644, the Qing Empire had no official flags until 1862. Prior to 1898, when the Second Convention of Peking was signed between the Qing Court and the government of the United Kingdom, the New Territories was still Qing land. The flag itself features the "Azure Dragon" on a plain yellow field with the red flaming pearl of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner.
### Colonial flags
Prior to Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty, the flag of Hong Kong was a colonial Blue Ensign flag. The flag of colonial Hong Kong underwent several changes from then until 1997.
#### Use of Union Flag (1843–1871)
In 1843, a seal representing Hong Kong was instituted. The design was based on a local waterfront scene; three local merchants with their commercial goods are shown on the foreground, a square-rigged ship and a junk occupy the middle ground, while the background consists of conical hills and clouds. In 1868, a Hong Kong flag was produced, a Blue Ensign flag with a badge based on this "local scene", but the design was rejected by Hong Kong Governor Richard Graves MacDonnell.
#### First colonial flag (1871–1876)
On 3 July 1869, a new design for the Hong Kong flag was commissioned at a cost of £3, which featured a "gentleman in an evening coat who is purchasing tea on the beach at Kowloon". After a brief discussion in the executive council, it was determined that the new design was very problematic and it was not adopted.
In 1870, a "white crown over HK" badge for the Blue Ensign flag was proposed by the Colonial Secretary. The letters "HK" were omitted and the crown became full-colour three years later. It is unclear exactly what the badge looked like during that period of time, but it was unlikely to be the "local scene". It should have been a crown of some sort, which may, or may not, have had the letters "HK" below it. In 1876, the "local scene" badge (Chinese: 阿群帶路圖 Picture of "Ar Kwan" Guiding the British soldier) was re-adopted to the Blue Ensign flag with the Admiralty's approval.
#### Second colonial flag (1876–1955)
During a government meeting, held in 1911, it was suggested that the name of the colony appear on the flag in both Latin and Chinese scripts. However, this was dismissed as it would "look absurd" to both Chinese and Europeans. The flag which was eventually adopted featured the Blue Ensign together with a "local scene" of traders in the foreground and both European-style and Chinese-style trading ships in the background.
#### Japanese occupation period (1941–1945)
During the Second World War, Hong Kong was seized and occupied by the Empire of Japan from 1941 to 1945. During the occupation, the Japanese military government used the flag of Japan in its official works in Hong Kong.
#### Third colonial flag (1955–1959)
The flag was similar in design to that previously used. It featured a British Blue Ensign with a local waterfront scene.
#### Fourth colonial flag (1959–1997)
A coat of arms for Hong Kong was granted on 21 January 1959 by the College of Arms in London. The Hong Kong flag was revised in the same year to feature the coat of arms in the Blue Ensign flag. This design was used officially from 1959 until Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty in 1997. Since then, the colonial flag has been appropriated by protestors, such as on the annual 1 July marches for universal suffrage, as a "symbol of antagonism towards the mainland", along with a blue flag featuring the coat of arms, used by those advocating independence. The flag features a British Blue Ensign with the coat of arms of Hong Kong (1959–1997).
## Flags used by government departments
### Flags of the governor of Hong Kong
### Council flags
#### Hong Kong Regional Council
The flag of the Regional Council represented the governmental body which oversaw matters related to the outlying areas of the territory during the colonial period. The flag itself featured a stylised dark green R at a 45-degree angle on white background.
#### Hong Kong Urban Council
The flag of the Urban Council represented the governmental body which was responsible for matters pertaining to the urban areas of the territory during the colonial period. The flag itself features a simplified white Bauhinia blakeana on a magenta background.
## Proposals before the handover
Before Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty, between 20 May 1987 and 31 March 1988, a contest was held amongst Hong Kong residents to help choose a flag for post-colonial Hong Kong, with 7,147 design submissions, in which 4,489 submissions were about flag designs. Architect Tao Ho was chosen as one of the panel judges to pick Hong Kong's new flag. He recalled that some of the designs had been rather funny and with political twists: "One had a hammer and sickle on one side and a dollar sign on the other." Some designs were rejected because they contained copyrighted materials, for example, the emblem of Urban Council, Hong Kong Arts Festival and Hong Kong Tourism Board. Six designs were chosen as finalists by the judges, but were all later rejected by the PRC. Ho and two others were then asked by the PRC to submit new proposals.
Looking for inspiration, Ho wandered into a garden and picked up a Bauhinia blakeana flower. He observed the symmetry of the five petals, and how their winding pattern conveyed to him a dynamic feeling. This led him to incorporate the flower into the flag to represent Hong Kong. The design was adopted on 4 April 1990 at the Third Session of the Seventh National People's Congress, and the flag was first officially hoisted seconds after midnight on 1 July 1997 in the handover ceremony marking the transfer of sovereignty. It was hoisted together with the national PRC flag, while the Chinese national anthem, "March of the Volunteers", was played. The Union Flag and the colonial Hong Kong flag were lowered seconds before midnight.
## See also
- Emblem of Hong Kong
- Black Bauhinia flag
- List of Hong Kong flags
- List of Chinese flags
- List of British flags
- Flag of Macau
|
51,120,604 |
Jacob Gens
| 1,158,240,241 |
Jewish head of the Vilnius Ghetto (1903–1943)
|
[
"1903 births",
"1943 deaths",
"Executed Jewish collaborators with Nazi Germany",
"Executed Lithuanian collaborators with Nazi Germany",
"Jewish Lithuanian history",
"Lithuanian Army officers",
"Lithuanian Jews who died in the Holocaust",
"Lithuanian Zionists",
"People executed by Nazi Germany by firearm",
"People who died in the Vilna Ghetto"
] |
Jacob Gens (1 April 1903 – 14 September 1943) was the head of the Vilnius Ghetto government. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked at several jobs, including as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
When Germany invaded Lithuania, Gens headed the Jewish hospital in Vilnius before the formation of the ghetto in September 1941. He was appointed chief of the ghetto police force and in July 1942 the Germans appointed him head of the ghetto Jewish government. He attempted to secure better conditions in the ghetto and believed that it was possible to save some Jews by working for the Germans. Gens and his policemen helped Germans in rounding up the Jews for deportation and execution in Ponary in October–December 1941 and in liquidating several smaller ghettos from late 1942 to early 1943. His policies, including the attempt to save some Jews by surrendering others for deportation or execution, continue to be a subject of debate and controversy.
Gens was shot by the Gestapo on 14 September 1943, shortly before the ghetto was liquidated and most of the residents were sent either to labor camps or to execution at an extermination camp. His Lithuanian wife and daughter escaped the Gestapo and survived the war.
## Early life
Gens was born on 1 April 1903 in Ilgviečiai [lt] near Šiauliai in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Lithuania. His father was a merchant and Gens was the oldest of four sons. Gens attended a Russian-language primary school and then a secondary school in Šiauliai. He was fluent in Lithuanian, Russian, German, and Yiddish, and knew some Hebrew, Polish, and English. In 1919, Gens enlisted in the newly formed Lithuanian Army. He was sent to officers' school and completed the training as a junior lieutenant. N. Karni, who was a cadet with Gens, said that he "had great personal charm. I do not remember him ever being in a bad mood." Karni also felt Gens had "leadership qualities, he had personality, he was a man of principles". Gens' participation in the Polish–Lithuanian War and the completion of his secondary schooling earned Gens a promotion to senior lieutenant.
Gens was transferred into the army reserves in 1924 and moved to Ukmergė to teach physical education and the Lithuanian language at a Jewish school. In 1924, Gens married Elvyra Budreikaitė, a non-Jewish Lithuanian. He appears to have wanted to transfer from the infantry into the Lithuanian Air Force, but at the time it was accepting only unmarried men. The couple had a daughter, Ada, in 1926, and moved to Kaunas the following year. Gens studied at Kaunas University and worked as an accountant at the Ministry of Justice. He graduated in 1935 with a degree in law and economics. He was called back to the regular army in the late 1930s and promoted to captain. He worked for the Shell Oil Corporation for two years from 1935, then took a job with Lietūkis [lt], a Lithuanian co-operative.
Gens was a Zionist, and was a follower of the Revisionist Zionism school, which called for most European Jews to immediately emigrate to create the State of Israel in what were then the League of Nations mandates of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. He belonged to Brith ha-Hayal, a Jewish organization for military reservists.
## Administrator of Jewish hospital
After the formation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic in July 1940, Gens was fired from his job. He was unable to secure a work permit nor was he allowed to continue to live in Kaunas. He went to live with his brother, Solomon, in Vilnius, and although Gens was on a list to be sent to Soviet labor camps, he managed to secure an unregistered job at the Vilnius health department through an old military colleague, Colonel Juozas Ūsas. Gens was not on the official payroll, which meant that the political officer attached to the hospital did not need to be informed of his employment. During June 1941, when thousands of the Lithuanians were exiled to Siberia, Gens remained in hiding and was not deported.
The German Army entered Vilnius on 24 June 1941, as part of their invasion of Russia in World War II. After their arrival, Gens was put in charge of the Jewish hospital. The occupying authorities ordered the creation of the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, with community-selected members. In early September 1941, the Germans murdered most of the Judenrat, which left the Jewish community leaderless before and during the relocation of the Jews into two ghettos in Vilnius. During this period, the hospital sheltered several prominent Jews from Vilnius. When the ghettos were formed, the Jewish hospital was included within the confines of the larger ghetto, an unusual arrangement for a Nazi-period ghetto. Most ghettos were organized to exclude any Jewish hospitals, forcing the inhabitants to either do without a hospital or set up a makeshift one.
## Chief of the Vilnius Ghetto police
In September 1941, Gens was named the commander of the Jewish policemen for the Vilnius Ghetto by the head of the new Judenrat, Anatol Friend. Officially, the duties of Gens and his policemen were to carry out German and Judenrat orders and provide law enforcement for the inhabitants of the ghetto. Included in their first duty, and considered by the occupiers as the single most important task, was the uncovering of any anti-German activity in the ghetto.
The police force comprised around 200 men at the start, and Gens appointed Salk Dessler as his deputy commandant. Other chief subordinates included Joseph Muszkat and Meir Levas. Dessler was a Revisionist Zionist, and Muszkat and Levas had been members of the Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist Zionists. The police force included many other former Betar members, and this may have been because Gens favored people coming from his own political leanings. This led to a conflict with the Bund, another Jewish political group. The Bund appears to have wanted the police force to be more of a militia, with Gens and his supporters wishing it to be a more conventional police force. After some initial political wrangling, Gens' faction won, but the Bundists remained strong in the Judenrat.
### Aktions of 1941
The smaller ghetto was liquidated in mid-October 1941, which left the larger one. From late October to December 1941, the ghetto was subject to Aktions, selections of people for deportation and execution in Ponary. Gens was afraid that the actions of the Germans would result in a widespread massacre. He persuaded the Gestapo to let the Jewish police round up the deportees. Gens, backed by the Jewish police force, was responsible for deciding who was to be sent for resettlement and execution. In October, this brought him into conflict with the ghetto's rabbis, who argued Gens was acting against Jewish law. Gens disagreed and considered it to be lawful to sacrifice some people to save others.
During the deportations, he tried to secure more work permits from the Germans but they refused to issue them. He attempted to protect those he could. During the Aktion on 3–5 November, in which the paperwork of everyone in the ghetto was checked, holders of work passes – which allowed the holder to protect a spouse and only two children under 16 – were checked and anyone not listed on someone's work permit was sent to Ponary. At one point, while Gens was checking permits, a family with three children went through the checkpoint, and Gens pulled aside the third child. Shortly afterwards, a family with only one child passed through the checkpoint. Gens began berating the father for losing track of his second child and pushed the third child from the first family into the second family. This incident took place under the supervision of German officials, who did not intervene.
All those removed from the ghetto were taken to Ponary where they were killed. The last deportation took place on 21 December 1941, leaving between 12,500 and 17,200 residents in the ghetto. Of those, about 3,000 were "illegal", or residents without a work permit. At least 60,000 Jews had lived in Vilnius when the German occupation began.
Gens and the Judenrat in the larger ghetto were aware of the executions in Ponary by the end of September 1941, when survivors began returning to the ghetto. The survivors, some of them wounded and all of them female, were mostly brought to Gens, and perhaps to the Judenrat, to whom they relayed their stories. Gens urged them to keep quiet, and some of the wounded were kept in the hospital to prevent them from repeating their stories. Knowledge of the massacres at Ponary became common in the ghetto by late December 1941 or early January 1942.
### Relations with the Judenrat
After the Aktions in late 1941, no further large-scale deportations or other massacres took place in the Vilnius Ghetto. This period of calm lasted throughout 1942 and early 1943. During this period, Gens' department oversaw the three police precincts the ghetto had been divided into, as well as the ghetto's prison. The police force in early 1942 had about 200 policemen.
During early 1942, Gens became involved in a power struggle with the head of the Judenrat, Anatol Friend. Friend had not been involved in Vilnius' Jewish organizations prior to the German invasion, and did not have much support from the ghetto's inhabitants. Gens was viewed favorably by the ghetto residents, partly because he lived in the ghetto when he could have escaped. Over time, Gens and the police force encroached on the functions of the Judenrat. The Germans backed Gens' efforts to secure more power, and implied that he was not responsible to the Judenrat, and that the Judenrat had no power over Gens or the Jewish policemen.
In February, the Germans allowed the Judenrat to set up a judicial system. Before this, justice was administered solely by Gens and his policemen; after this, Gens' department still retained some judicial functions over injuries to policemen, escapes from jail, or leaving the ghetto without leave. In June 1942, Gens took the responsibility for carrying out the death sentence imposed on five men from the ghetto who had been convicted of murder. A sixth man, convicted of committing a murder in another ghetto, was hanged at the same time. Some residents accused the Jewish police force of taking bribes at the gates leading into the ghetto. The police also organized parties which were occasionally attended by Gestapo.
Gens had a dispute with a tailor named Weisskopf, who ran a tailoring workshop in the ghetto. Weisskopf tried to increase his own power base by negotiating directly with the German Army and not going through the ghetto's Labor Department. When Gens ordered all work contracts to go through the Labor Department, Weisskopf appealed to his German contacts, but the Gebeitskommissar of Vilnius, Hans Hingst, preferred that control of such contracts go through his own office which worked through the ghetto's administration. Hingst thus ruled in Gens' favor. The ghetto police then searched Weisskopf's house, found contraband, arrested him, and jailed him for four days, after which he lost his position running the workshop.
Gens also came into conflict with the Judenrat and Friend over the Jewish policemen who guarded the gates into the ghetto. The Germans allowed the Jewish policemen to control access to the ghetto and conduct searches for contraband. Gens' policy was that when no Germans were present at the gates, the policemen would do minimal searches and would allow the smuggling of food and other necessary items. If Germans were present at the gates, the policemen conducted thorough searches and often beat up attempted smugglers. In Gens' view, if the Germans thought the Jewish policemen were not vigilant enough, the policemen would be replaced by German guards and any opportunity for smuggling would cease. He also claimed that even when the Germans were present, any confiscated items were brought into the ghetto, which would not be the case if there were German guards at the gates.
## Head of the Vilnius Ghetto
On 10 July 1942, the Judenrat of the Vilnius Ghetto was dissolved by Franz Murer, the German deputy for Jewish Affairs, for incompetence and ineffectiveness. Gens was appointed as head of the ghetto; he retained his position as chief of the Jewish police force, and took the title of "chief of the ghetto and police in Vilnius". Dessler was named Gens' deputy for police functions and Friend was Gens' deputy for administration. Gens asked the rest of the Judenrat to remain in the administration as heads of the various ghetto departments, which they did.
### Views and policies
Inhabitants of the ghetto referred to Gens derisively as "King Jacob the First". The historian Lucy Dawidowicz describes him as one of a group of "strong, even dictatorial" leaders who were "the policy and decision makers in their ghettos, the strategical thinkers on the ghetto's possibilities for survival". Gens thought that labor would provide a way for the inhabitants to survive. Along with several other ghetto leaders, he hoped to preserve some of the ghetto inhabitants and outlast the Nazi occupation. Historian Michael Marrus describes Gens' leadership style as "intensely authoritarian" and Marrus argues that Gens came to "believe that [he] alone could save a portion of the ghetto inmates". This belief has made Gens a controversial figure both at the time and to this day. He sought to save at least some of the population by working for the Germans and to do that he relied on the police force. As part of his efforts to secure support, he held a "political club" of sorts in his home, bringing together some of the community leaders for colloquia to discuss Jewish history, recent events, and the fate of the Jews.
### Liquidation of smaller ghettos
In July 1942, the Germans ordered Gens to give up 500 children and old people, but by late July he had persuaded the Germans to abandon the order for children to be surrendered. He reduced the entire command to 100 older residents, and on 26 July handed over 84 elderly, mostly terminally ill or disabled, who were then executed by the Nazis. The Jewish administration employed over 1500 people in September 1942, including some intellectuals who were appointed to jobs to ensure their survival. This suggestion was made by community leaders and approved by Gens.
In late 1942, the Germans consolidated some small ghettos in the Vilnius region with Gens' help. These included the ghettos at Oszmiana, Švenčionys, Soly, and Michaliszki. During one of these consolidations, on 25 October, Gens gave up 400 old people in return for saving the remaining 600 Jewish residents of Oszmiana. He bribed Martin Weiss, commander of the Ponary killing squad, to accept the lower quota. The Jewish police from Vilnius as well as some Lithuanians were forced to kill the 400 Jews. One ghetto diarist claimed that the Vilnius ghetto was outraged by Gens' participation in the killings, but other diarists stated that most ghetto inhabitants approved of Gens' choice to save some. By April 1943, most of these small ghettos were gone, with their inhabitants either moved to labor camps, shot, or moved to the Vilnius Ghetto. On 4–5 April, the last inhabitants were loaded into trains under the supervision of the Vilnius Jewish police, and the police accompanied the trains, which passed through Vilnius on their way to Ponary. Gens joined his policemen when the train went through Vilnius and was arrested along with them when the train arrived at Ponary. Gens and the policemen were released, but the other Jews on the train were executed. It appears that the Germans misled Gens about the destination of the trains. Gens justified the participation of the Vilnius ghetto police in these roundups by claiming that their participation saved at least some of the ghetto residents when otherwise the Germans would have shot them all.
### Relations with Jewish resistance
Gens' relations with the various Jewish resistance groups were strained. He allowed some resistance members to escape the ghetto, but opposed the plans for resistance because he felt they would threaten the entire ghetto's existence. Gens promised to provide aid to the resistance groups and may have promised to join them in a revolt if the time was right. He did provide money, taken from the various Judenrat funds, to the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), a resistance group in the ghetto. Because of the need for secrecy, the FPO did not have a way to directly solicit money from the ghetto inhabitants. Gens provided funds to another resistance group, the "Struggle Group" established by Boris 'Borka' Fridman. It later merged with the "Yechiel Group", established by Yechiel Sheinbaum, to form the "Yechiel's Struggle Group". He provided a pistol to the Struggle Group, its first. The FPO tried to prevent the formation of other resistance groups in the ghetto, mainly because they feared that it would increase the chances of German discovery as well as competition for scarce resources. Gens' support for the Struggle Group appears to have led to friction between himself and the FPO.
On 26 June 1943, Gens ordered the arrest of Josef Glazman, who had previously worked for Gens but now was a leader of the FPO. Glazman was arrested but, while being escorted towards a labor camp, was freed by a group of FPO members. Gens then negotiated with the FPO and secured Glazman's rearrest in return for assurances of Glazman's safety.
In July 1943, Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel demanded that Gens hand over Yitzhak Wittenberg, a leader of the FPO. Although Wittenberg was arrested, he was freed by FPO members. Gens' reaction to this was to spread the word that unless Wittenberg turned himself in, the Germans would destroy the ghetto. The ghetto residents supported Gens in this dispute. On 16 July, Wittenberg turned himself in. What happened next is unclear: some sources report that Wittenberg committed suicide while in custody, possibly with a cyanide pill provided by Gens; others state that Wittenberg was poisoned by Gens then turned over to the Gestapo, or that he was tortured to death by the Gestapo and given a cyanide pill by Gens' second-in-command.
### Welfare and cultural efforts
While Gens was in control of the ghetto, he continued to oversee the sanitary and health efforts in the ghetto, running that part of the ghetto administration like a military operation. Although conditions were very crowded and often unsanitary, the ghetto never suffered a major epidemic and there were fewer deaths due to disease than in other ghettos. A network of children's homes was set up in March 1942 on Gens' orders. These homes were for orphans or those with parents who could not care properly for them. A department of the ghetto administration was in charge of supervising bosses who employed children under the age of 16.
In May 1942, Gens secured German permission for residents of the ghetto to sell belongings or property they left with gentiles outside the ghetto. The proceeds were to be split half and half between the Jewish owners and the Germans. In practice, the Germans often kept more than half the value, but it still allowed ghetto residents to receive some value for the property they no longer controlled. Then in October 1942, the Germans allowed the Jewish ghetto police to retrieve Jewish property left with others outside the ghetto and bring it back to the ghetto. In the same month Gens set up a program to collect, repair, and redistribute winter clothing. The clothes were donated by ghetto residents, repaired in workshops in the ghetto, and then given to the poor and needy. The effort was credited with helping many of the poorest residents survive the winter of 1942–1943.
Gens started a theater in the ghetto, where poetry readings as well as the production of new and old plays took place. Gens continued the policy of supporting the ghetto library and in March 1943 he ordered that all ghetto residents should turn their privately owned books over to the library, except for textbooks and prayer books. He also set up a ghetto publishing house. Nothing was ever published, but the authors were paid for their manuscripts. An archive of historical documents relating to the ghetto was set up. The ghetto had a symphony orchestra, the formation of which owed some impetus to Gens and his police force. Gens justified these cultural activities by claiming that the Jewish administration "wanted to give man the chance to be free of the ghetto for a few hours, and we succeeded in this. Our days here are harsh and grim. Our body is here in the ghetto, but they have not broken our spirit."
## Personal privileges and family
Gens' wife and daughter at first went to Kaunas but, after the formation of the ghetto, they returned to Vilnius and lived near the ghetto's perimeter. His wife used her maiden name rather than Gens'. According to Leonard Tushnet, there were unfounded rumors that the couple had divorced. Gens did not refute the rumors, as he thought they would help protect his family. Other sources state that the two were divorced to protect Elvyra and Ada. Elvyra Gens was opposed to her husband taking a leading role in the government of the ghetto and urged him to "pass" as a Lithuanian. It is not clear exactly why Gens went into the ghetto, but in a letter to his wife, Gens said "This is the first time in my life that I have to engage in such duties. My heart is broken. But I shall always do what is necessary for the sake of the Jews in the ghetto."
Gens' mother and a brother, Solomon, were both imprisoned in the Vilnius Ghetto. Another brother, Ephraim, was head of the ghetto police in the Šiauliai Ghetto, and was the only Gens brother to survive the Holocaust.
The Germans allowed Gens some privileges not accorded to other Vilnius Jews. He was not required to wear the yellow badge of the Star of David on the front and back of his clothes; instead, he wore a white and blue armband with the Star of David. He was allowed to enter and leave the ghetto at any time, and his daughter was not required to live in the ghetto, even though other half-Jews were confined within the ghetto. Gens and the Jewish policemen were allowed to carry pistols.
## Death
On 13 September, the Germans ordered him to report to the Gestapo headquarters on the following day. He was urged to flee but chose to go, telling others that if he fled "thousands of Jews will pay for it with their lives". Gens was shot by Obersturmfuhrer Rolf Neugebauer, head of the Vilnius Gestapo, on 14 September 1943. The Gestapo said that he was killed for funneling money to the FPO. Dessler was named as Gens' successor as ghetto chief, but was soon replaced with a council which included Friend and Gens' brother, Solomon.
The ghetto was liquidated between 22 and 24 September 1943. Three thousand six hundred residents went to labor camps (including 2,000 sent to labor camps in Vilnius); 5,000 women and children went to Majdanek, where they were gassed to death; and a few hundred elderly and sick were sent to Ponary and shot. The few Jews who remained in Vilnius were shot just before the Soviet Army arrived. A few FPO members escaped to the nearby forests.
Gens' wife and daughter were living near the ghetto on the day he was shot. A Jewish policeman informed them that Gens had been shot and that the Gestapo was looking for them. They fled and managed to stay in hiding until Soviet troops arrived. In 1945, they obtained papers for repatriation to Poland. From there they moved to West Germany as Jewish aliyah. They emigrated to Australia in 1948 and to the United States in 1953.
## Legacy
The role of the Judenrats has been controversial. Both Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, early historians of the Holocaust, argued that without the help of the Judenrats, the Germans would have been hampered in their extermination efforts. Arendt went further and condemned those Jews who served as leaders in the ghettos for helping destroy their own people. More recent historians have recognized that the situation facing the Jewish leaders was more complex – they faced conflicting sets of goals and had essentially no power to change the demands the Germans made of them.
Gens himself has been called "one of the most controversial Jewish ghetto leaders". Chaim Lazar, a member of the FPO, wrote of Gens that "It may be charged that his course was harmful, but everyone knows that he was never a traitor. All that he did during his tenure as Chief of the Ghetto was for his people". Yitzhak Arad, in his history of the Vilnius Ghetto, says that Gens "erred in his fundamental conception – that the German administration regarded the existence of the ghetto and its inhabitants vital for economic reasons" and that "the policy laid down by Jacob Gens was the only one that afforded hope and some prospect of survival". Vadim Altskan, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, states that "... Holocaust historiography treated people such as ... Jacob Gens ... as instruments of destruction in the hands of the Nazi killing machine. ... Applied retrospectively, these charges for the most part are judgmental and add very little to our understanding of the events. Neither Jewish functionaries nor 'ordinary' Jews had any practical or psychological experience in dealing with the grim reality of the Nazi occupation, because never before in their long history of persecution had the Jews experienced an assault of such magnitude and careful design." Regarding the charge of collaborating with the Germans, Dawidowicz opined, "to say that [Gens and others like him] 'cooperated' or 'collaborated' with the Germans is semantic confusion and historical misrepresentation". The Israeli Zionist poet Nathan Alterman investigated the history of the Vilnius Ghetto, including interviewing survivors such as Abba Kovner, and stated "Had I been in the ghetto, I would have been on the side of the Judenrat."
Gens is one of the main characters in Joshua Sobol's plays Ghetto and Adam. They depict him as a complex, morally ambiguous character forced to choose between two evils.
|
8,457,430 |
French colonization of Texas
| 1,168,055,123 |
French colony near present-day Inez, Texas (1685 to 1689)
|
[
"1680s establishments in New France",
"1680s in France",
"1680s in New France",
"1680s in Texas",
"1685 establishments in the French colonial empire",
"17th-century establishments in Texas",
"Colonial United States (French)",
"Former French colonies",
"Former colonies in North America",
"French Texas",
"French forts in the United States",
"New France",
"Populated places established in 1685",
"Pre-statehood history of Texas"
] |
The French colonization of Texas began with the establishment of a fort in present-day southeastern Texas. Fort Saint Louis was established in 1685 near Arenosa Creek and Matagorda Bay by explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle. He intended to found the colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River, but inaccurate maps and navigational errors caused his ships to anchor instead 400 miles (640 km) to the west, off the coast of Texas. The colony survived until 1688. The present-day town of Inez is near the fort's site. The colony faced numerous difficulties during its brief existence, including Native American raids, epidemics, and harsh conditions. From that base, La Salle led several expeditions to find the Mississippi River. These did not succeed, but La Salle did explore much of the Rio Grande and parts of east Texas.
During one of his absences in 1686, the colony's last ship was wrecked, leaving the colonists unable to obtain resources from the French colonies of the Caribbean. As conditions deteriorated, La Salle realized the colony could survive only with help from the French settlements in Illinois Country to the north, along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. His last expedition ended along the Brazos River in early 1687, when La Salle and five of his men were murdered during a mutiny. Although a handful of men reached Illinois Country, help never made it to the fort. Most of the remaining members of the colony were killed during a Karankawa raid in late 1688, though four children survived after being adopted as captives. Although the colony lasted only three years, it established France's claim to possession of the region that is now Texas. The United States later claimed, unsuccessfully, this region as part of the Louisiana Purchase because of the early French colony.
Spain learned of La Salle's mission in 1686. Concerned that the French colony could threaten Spain's control over the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the unsettled southeastern region of North America, the Crown funded multiple expeditions to locate and eliminate the settlement. The unsuccessful expeditions helped Spain to better understand the geography of the Gulf Coast region. When the Spanish finally discovered the remains of the French colony at the fort in 1689, they buried the cannons and burned the buildings. Years later, Spanish authorities built a presidio at the same location. When the presidio was abandoned, the site of the French settlement was lost to history. The fort was rediscovered by historians and excavated in 1996, and the area is now an archaeological site. In 1995, researchers located the ship La Belle in Matagorda Bay, with several sections of the hull remaining virtually intact. They constructed a cofferdam, the first to be used in North America to excavate the ship as if in dry conditions.
## La Salle expeditions
### First expedition
By the late 17th century, much of North America had been claimed by European countries. Spain had claimed Florida as well as modern-day Mexico and much of the southwestern part of the continent. The northern and central Atlantic coast was becoming England's Thirteen Colonies, and New France comprised much of what is now eastern Canada as well as the central Illinois Country. The French feared that their colonies were vulnerable to a potential attack from its neighboring colonies. In 1681, French nobleman Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched an expedition down the Mississippi River from New France, at first believing he would find a path to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, La Salle found a route to the Gulf of Mexico. Although Hernando De Soto had explored and claimed this area for Spain 140 years before, on April 9, 1682, La Salle claimed the Mississippi River valley for French king Louis XIV, naming the territory Louisiana in his honor.
Unless France established a base at the mouth of the Mississippi, Spain would have an opportunity to control the entire Gulf of Mexico and potentially pose a threat to New France's southern borders. La Salle believed that the Mississippi River was near the eastern edge of New Spain. On his return to France in 1684, he proposed to the Crown the establishment of a colony at the mouth of the river. The colony could provide a base for promoting Christianity among the native peoples as well as a convenient location for attacking the Spanish province of Nueva Vizcaya and gaining control of its lucrative silver mines. He argued that a small number of Frenchmen could successfully invade New Spain by allying themselves with some of the more than 15,000 Native Americans who were angry over Spanish enslavement. After Spain declared war on France in October 1687, King Louis agreed to support La Salle's plan. He was to return to North America and confirm "the Indians' allegiance to the crown, leading them to the true faith, and maintaining intertribal peace".
### Second expedition
La Salle originally planned to sail to New France, journey overland to the south and Illinois Country, and then travel down the Mississippi River to its mouth. To spite Spain, Louis XIV insisted that La Salle sail through the Gulf of Mexico, which Spain considered its exclusive property. Although La Salle had requested only one ship, on July 24, 1684, he left La Rochelle, France with four: the 36-gun man of war Le Joly, the 300-ton storeship L'Aimable, the barque La Belle, and the ketch St. François. Although Louis XIV had provided both Le Joly and La Belle, La Salle desired more cargo space and leased L'Aimable and St. François from French merchants. Louis also provided 100 soldiers and full crews for the ships, as well as funds to hire skilled workers to join the expedition. La Salle was forced to purchase trade goods himself for expected encounters with Native Americans.
The ships carried a total of nearly 300 people, including soldiers, artisans and craftsmen, six Catholic missionaries, eight merchants, and over a dozen women and children. Shortly after their departure, France and Spain ceased hostilities, and Louis was no longer interested in sending La Salle further assistance. Details of the voyage were kept secret so that Spain would not learn about it. La Salle's naval commander, the Sieur de Beaujeu, resented La Salle's keeping their destination until the party was well underway. The discord between the two intensified when they reached Saint-Domingue, on the island of Hispaniola, and quarreled over where to anchor. Beaujeu sailed to another part of the island, allowing Spanish privateers to capture the St. François, which had been fully loaded with supplies, provisions, and tools for the colony.
During the 58-day voyage, two people died of illness and one woman gave birth to a child. The voyage to Saint-Domingue had lasted longer than expected, and provisions ran low, especially after the loss of the St. François. La Salle had little money with which to replenish supplies, and finally two of the merchants aboard the expedition sold some of their trade goods to the islanders, and lent their profits to La Salle. To fill the gaps left after several men deserted, La Salle recruited a few islanders to join the expedition.
In late November 1684, when La Salle had fully recovered from a severe illness, the three remaining ships continued their search for the Mississippi River delta. Before they left Santo Domingo, local sailors warned that strong Gulf currents flowed east and would tug the ships toward the Florida straits unless they corrected for it. On December 18, the ships reached the Gulf of Mexico and entered waters that Spain claimed as its territory. None of the members of the expedition had ever been in the Gulf of Mexico or knew how to navigate it. Due to a combination of inaccurate maps, La Salle's previous miscalculation of the latitude of the mouth of the Mississippi River, and overcorrection for the currents, the expedition failed to find the Mississippi. Instead, they landed at Matagorda Bay in early 1685, 400 miles (640 km) west of the Mississippi.
## First settlement
On February 20, the colonists set foot on land for the first time in three months since leaving Saint-Domingue. They set up a temporary camp near the site of the present-day Matagorda Island Lighthouse. The chronicler of the expedition, Henri Joutel, described his first view of Texas: "The country did not seem very favorable to me. It was flat and sandy but did nevertheless produce grass. There were several salt pools. We hardly saw any wild fowl except some cranes and Canadian (sic) geese which were not expecting us."
Against Beaujeu's advice, La Salle ordered La Belle and the Aimable "to negotiate the narrow and shallow pass" to bring the supplies closer to the campsite. To lighten L'Aimable'''s load, its eight cannons and a small portion of its cargo were removed. After La Belle successfully negotiated the pass, La Salle sent her pilot to L'Aimable to assist with the navigation, but L'Aimable's captain refused the help. As the Aimable set sail, a band of Karankawa approached and carried off some of the settlers. La Salle led a small group of soldiers to rescue them, leaving no one to direct the Aimable. When he returned, he found the Aimable grounded on a sandbar. Upon hearing that the captain had ordered the ship to sail forward after it had struck a sandbar, La Salle became convinced that the captain had deliberately grounded the ship.
For several days the men attempted to salvage the tools and provisions that had been loaded on the Aimable, but a bad storm prevented them from recovering more than food, cannons, powder, and a small amount of the merchandise. The ship sank on March 7. The French watched the Karankawa loot the wreckage. As French soldiers approached the Native American village to retrieve their supplies, the villagers hid. On discovering the deserted village, the soldiers not only reclaimed the looted merchandise but also took animal pelts and two canoes. The angry Karankawa attacked, killing two Frenchmen and injuring others.
Beaujeu, having fulfilled his mission in escorting the colonists across the ocean, returned to France aboard the Joly in mid-March 1685. Many of the colonists chose to return to France with him, leaving approximately 180. Although Beaujeu delivered a message from La Salle requesting additional supplies, French authorities, having made peace with Spain, never responded. The remaining colonists suffered from dysentery and venereal diseases, and people died daily. Those who were fit helped build crude dwellings and a temporary fort on Matagorda Island.
### Fort
On March 24, La Salle took 52 men in five canoes to find a less exposed settlement site. They found Garcitas Creek that had fresh water and fish, with good soil along its banks. They named it Rivière aux Boeufs for the nearby buffalo herds. The fort was constructed on a bluff overlooking the creek, 1.5 leagues from its mouth. Two men died, one of a rattlesnake bite and another from drowning while trying to fish. At night, the Karankawa would sometimes surround the camp and howl, but the soldiers could scare them away with a few gunshots. The fort has sometimes been referred to as "Fort St. Louis" but that name was not used during the life of the settlement and appears to be a later invention.
In early June, La Salle summoned the rest of the colonists from the temporary campsite to the new settlement site. Seventy people began the 50-mile (80 km) overland trek on June 12. All of the supplies had to be hauled from the Belle, a physically draining task that was finally completed by the middle of July. The last load was accompanied by the 30 men who had remained behind to guard the ship. Although trees grew near the site, they were not suitable for building, and timber had to be transported to the building site from several miles inland. Some timbers were salvaged from the Aimable. By the end of July, over half of the settlers had died, most from a combination of scant rations and overwork.
The remaining settlers built a large two-story structure at the center of the settlement. The ground floor was divided into three rooms: one for La Salle, one for the priests, and one for the officers of the expedition. The upper story consisted of a single room used to store supplies. Surrounding the fort were several smaller structures to provide shelter for the other members of the expedition. The eight cannons, each weighing 700 to 1,200 pounds (320 to 540 kg), had been salvaged from L'Aimable and were positioned around the colony for protection.
### Difficulties
For several months after the permanent camp was built, the colonists took short trips to explore their surroundings. At the end of October 1685, La Salle decided to undertake a longer expedition and reloaded the Belle with many of the remaining supplies. He took 50 men, plus the Belle's crew of 27 sailors, leaving behind 34 men, women, and children. Most of the men traveled with La Salle in canoes, while the Belle followed further off the coast. After three days of travel, they learned of hostile Native Americans in the area. Twenty of the Frenchmen attacked the Native American village, where they found Spanish artifacts. Several of the men died on this expedition from eating prickly pear. The Karankawa killed a small group of the men who had camped on shore, including the captain of the Belle.
From January until March 1686, La Salle and most of his men searched overland for the Mississippi River, traveling towards the Rio Grande, possibly as far west as modern-day Langtry, Texas. The men questioned the local Native American tribes, asking for information on the locations of the Spaniards and the Spanish mines, offering gifts, and telling stories that portrayed the Spanish as cruel and the French as benevolent. When the group returned, they were unable to find the Belle where they had left her and were forced to walk back to the fort.
The following month they traveled east, hoping to locate the Mississippi and return to Canada. During their travels, the group encountered the Caddo, who gave the Frenchmen a map depicting their territory, that of their neighbors, and the location of the Mississippi River. The Caddo often made friendship pacts with neighboring peoples and extended their policy of peaceful negotiation to the French. While visiting the Caddo, the French met Jumano traders, who reported on the activities of the Spanish in New Mexico. These traders later informed Spanish officials of the Frenchmen they had seen.
Four of the men deserted when they reached the Neches River. La Salle and one of his nephews became very ill, forcing the group to halt for two months. While the men recovered, the group ran low on food and gunpowder. In August, the eight surviving members of the expedition returned to Fort Saint Louis, having never left East Texas.
While La Salle was gone, six of those who had remained on the Belle finally arrived at Fort Saint Louis. According to them, the new captain of the Belle was always drunk. Many of the sailors did not know how to sail, and they grounded the boat on Matagorda Peninsula. The survivors took a canoe to the fort, leaving the ship behind. The destruction of their last ship left the settlers stranded on the Texas coast, with no hope of gaining assistance from the French colonies in the Caribbean Sea.
By early January 1687, fewer than 45 of the original 180 people remained in the colony, which was beset by internal strife. La Salle believed that their only hope of survival lay in trekking overland to request assistance from New France, and some time that month he led a final expedition to try to reach the Illinois Country. Fewer than 20 people remained at Fort Saint Louis, primarily women, children, and those deemed unfit, as well as seven soldiers and three missionaries with whom La Salle was unhappy. Seventeen men were included on the expedition, including La Salle, his brother, and two of his nephews. While camping near present-day Navasota on March 18, several of the men quarreled over the division of buffalo meat. That night, an expedition member killed one of La Salle's nephews and two other men in their sleep. The following day La Salle was killed while approaching the camp to investigate his nephew's disappearance. Infighting led to the deaths of two other expedition members within a short time. Two of the surviving members, including Jean L'Archeveque, joined the Caddo. The remaining six men, led by Henri Joutel, made their way to Illinois Country. During their journey through Illinois to Canada, the men did not tell anyone that La Salle was dead. They reached France in the summer of 1688 and informed King Louis of La Salle's death and the horrible conditions in the colony. Louis did not send aid.
## Spanish response
Spanish pirate and guarda costa privateer Juan Corso had independently heard rumors of the colony as early as the Spring of 1685; he set out to eliminate the settlement but his ship was caught in rough seas and poor weather and was lost with all hands. Afterwards La Salle's mission had remained nearly secret until 1686 when former expedition member Denis Thomas, who had deserted in Santo Domingo, was arrested for piracy. Trying to have his punishment reduced, Thomas informed his Spanish jailers of La Salle's plan to found a colony and eventually conquer Spanish silver mines. Despite his confession, Thomas was hanged.
The Spanish government felt the French colony would be a threat to their mines and shipping routes, and Carlos II's Council of War thought that "Spain needed swift action 'to remove this thorn which has been thrust into the heart of America. The greater the delay the greater the difficulty of attainment.'" The Spanish had no idea where to find La Salle, and in 1686 they sent a sea expedition and two land expeditions to try to locate his colony. Although the expeditions were unable to find La Salle, they did narrow the search to the area between the Rio Grande and the Mississippi. Four Spanish expeditions the following year failed to find La Salle, but helped Spain to better understand the geography of the Gulf Coast region.
In 1688, the Spanish sent three more expeditions, two by sea and one by land. The land expedition, led by Alonso De León, discovered Jean Gery, who had deserted the French colony and was living in Southern Texas with the Coahuiltecans. Using Gery as a translator and guide, De León finally found the French fort in late April 1689. The fort and the five crude houses surrounding it were in ruins. Several months before, the Karankawa had attacked the settlement. They destroyed the structures and left the bodies of three people, including a woman who had been shot in the back. A Spanish priest who had accompanied De León conducted funeral services for the three victims. The chronicler of the Spanish expedition, Juan Bautista de Chapa [es], wrote that the devastation was God's punishment for opposing the pope, as Pope Alexander VI had granted the Indies exclusively to the Spanish. The remains of the fort were destroyed by the Spanish, who also buried the French cannons left behind. The Spanish later built a fort on the same location.
In early 1689, Spanish authorities received a plea, written in French. Jumano scouts had received these papers from the Caddo, who asked that they be delivered to the Spanish. The papers included a parchment painting of a ship, as well as a written message from Jean L'Archevêque. The message read:
> I do not know what sort of people you are. We are French[;] we are among the savages[;] we would like much to be Among the Christians such as we are[.] ... we are solely grieved to be among beasts like these who believe neither in God nor in anything. Gentlemen, if you are willing to take us away, you have only to send a message. ... We will deliver ourselves up to you.
De León later rescued L'Archeveque and his companion Jacques Grollet. On interrogation, the men maintained that over 100 of the French settlers had died of smallpox, and the others had been killed by Native Americans. The only people known to have survived the final attack were the Talon children, who had been adopted by the Karankawa. According to the children, the settlement had been attacked around Christmas of 1688, and all the remaining settlers had been killed.
## Legacy
Only 15 or 16 people survived the colony. Six returned to France, while nine others were captured by the Spanish, including the four children who had been spared by the Karankawa. The children were initially brought to the viceroy of New Spain, the Conde de Galve, who treated them as servants. Two of the boys, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste, later returned to France. Of the remaining Spanish captives, three became Spanish citizens and settled in New Mexico. Although the French colony had been utterly destroyed, Spain feared that another French attempt was inevitable. For the first time, the Spanish crown authorized small outposts in eastern Texas and at Pensacola. In 1722, the Spanish built a fort, Presidio La Bahia, and Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga on the site of Fort Saint Louis.
France did not abandon its claims to Texas until November 3, 1762, when it ceded all of its territory west of the Mississippi River to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, following its defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years' War. It ceded New France to Britain. In 1803, three years after Spain had returned Louisiana to France, Napoleon sold the territory to the United States. The original agreement between Spain and France had not explicitly specified the borders of Louisiana, and the descriptions in the documents were ambiguous and contradictory. The United States insisted that its purchase included all of the territory France had claimed, including all of Texas. The dispute was not resolved until the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, in which Spain ceded Florida to the United States in return for the United States' relinquishing its claim on Texas.
The official boundary of Texas was set at the Sabine River (the current boundary between Texas and Louisiana), and following the Red and Arkansas rivers to the 42nd parallel (California's current northern border).
## Excavation
In 1908, historian Herbert Eugene Bolton identified an area along Garcitas Creek, near Matagorda Bay, as the location of Fort St. Louis. Other historians, before and after Bolton, argued that the fort was located on Lavaca River in Jackson County. Five decades later, the University of Texas at Austin funded a partial excavation of Bolton's site, a part of the Keeran ranch. Although several thousand items were recovered, archaeologists could not accurately distinguish between French and Spanish artifacts of the 17th century, and no report on the findings was ever issued. In the 1970s, the artifacts were reexamined by Kathleen Gilmore, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. She determined that while most of the artifacts were Spanish, some definitively matched artifacts recovered from French and French-Canadian excavations of the same time period.
In late 1996, Keeran ranch workers exploring with metal detectors located eight cast-iron cannons buried near Garcitas Creek. After excavating the cannons, the Texas Historical Commission (THC) confirmed they were from Fort Saint Louis. In 2000 a THC excavation discovered the locations of three of the buildings that had housed the French colony and the three graves dug by the Spanish.
For decades, the THC had also been searching for the wreckage of La Belle. In 1995, the shipwreck was discovered in Matagorda Bay. Researchers excavated a 792-pound (359 kg) cast-bronze cannon from the waters, as well as musket balls, bronze straight pins, and trade beads. Large sections of the wooden hull were intact, protected from the damaging effects of warm salt water by layers of muddy sediment which "essentially creat[ed] an oxygen-free time capsule". La Belle was the oldest French shipwreck discovered in the Western Hemisphere to that date. To enable the archaeologists to recover as many of the artifacts as possible, a cofferdam was constructed around the ship. The cofferdam held back the waters of the bay, allowing archaeologists to conduct the excavation as if it were on land. This was the first attempt in North America to excavate a shipwreck in dry conditions. Previous shipwreck excavations using cofferdams were completed in Europe, but never on a ship as large as the Belle.
The National Underwater and Marine Agency searched for L'Aimable'' from 1997 until 1999. Although they found a promising location, the ship was buried under more than 25 feet (7.6 m) of sand and could not be reached.
## See also
- France–Republic of Texas relations, 1839–1845
|
33,150,271 |
Weesperplein metro station
| 1,170,867,376 |
Metro station in Amsterdam
|
[
"Amsterdam Metro stations",
"Railway stations in the Netherlands opened in the 1970s",
"Railway stations opened in 1977"
] |
Weesperplein is an underground metro station in the city centre of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Served by lines 51, 53 and 54 of the Amsterdam Metro, the station was constructed using caissons with a length and width of 40 metres (130 ft). The station has two floors, the upper floor featuring a station hall with stores and the lower floor containing the tracks. Construction at Weesperplein started in August 1970. The first test rides passed through the station in January 1977. Extensive tests were carried out in September that year before the station opened on 16 October.
Another platform below the existing one was built as the station was originally planned to be the intersection point of two lines. This platform was instead used as a fallout shelter with a capacity of 5,000 people when the majority of the network was cancelled in 1975 following protests against the destruction of houses. The shelter was not maintained from 1999 onwards and equipment was removed in 2004 to make way for smoke extraction machinery.
Repairs conducted at the station during a renovation in 2011 were of poor quality and had to be redone. Weesperplein was renovated again during 2017 and 2018, when a new elevator and two more staircases between the hall and tracks were constructed. It was the fifth most used station of the Amsterdam Metro in 2018.
## Layout
Weesperplein and other metro stations on the East Line were designed by two architects from the Government of Amsterdam: Ben Spängberg and Sier van Rhijn [nl]. The station is located under Weesperstraat and consists of two underground levels. The top level has eight entrances from the streets and includes the paygates of the metro system and some stores such as an Albert Heijn To Go convenience store and a sandwich shop. The level below is where the metro tracks are located and has two side platforms. All other metro stations on the East Line have an island platform, but an exception was made for Weesperplein as it was supposed to be a station where two lines would intersect, which also resulted in a larger station hall. The rest of the metro system runs on double-track; Weesperplein is the only station to have a third reserve track in between those two. This track can be used in case of an emergency. In 2018, bicycle parking racks outside one of the entrances were replaced by flowers.
### Ghost station and shelter
In Weesperplein, planners had to consider the possibility of an additional East–West Line. Since the second line was almost guaranteed to be built at the time, the decision was made to start work on the bottom platform in advance as building it afterwards would have been too complicated. An extra area below the platform used by the East Line was created, which consisted of large open areas made out of concrete. This area only had the space to fit in an island platform, as columns supporting the entire station structure above limited the size of the tunnel. In the original plan, the line would have run under houses and caused their demolition.
After the East–West Line was cancelled by the municipality on 19 March 1975, the area was converted to be used as a fallout shelter. The whole station has a capacity to house up to 12,000 people, 5,000 of them inside the shelter. The shelter included beds, water tanks, and garbage chutes for disposing of radioactive clothing. There are showering areas at the very bottom with bulkheads, but the shower heads and disposal systems were removed later. The doors are watertight and undergo annual testing to ensure functionality. Public shelters in Amsterdam, including the shelter at Weesperplein, were not maintained from 1999 onwards. In 2004, the equipment was removed to make way for smoke extraction machinery in case of a fire. The former shelter can be accessed via sliding doors at the top level of the station.
## History
### Background
The Bureau Stadsspoor (City Track Bureau) was formed in 1963 following a 1960 report and concluded that Amsterdam needed a new rail system to move large numbers of people. The bureau released five reports by 1966 and laid out a final plan for a total of four metro lines in the city, which was presented to the public in the same year during a press conference by alderman Roel de Wit. The plan included two East–West lines, which would intersect each other twice: at Looiersgracht and at Weesperplein. The municipal council and the mayor of Amsterdam came together in April 1968 to debate on the metro. A month later, the council approved the plans based on the advice of the bureau and reserved 5 million Dutch guilder for the design of the eastern branches of the two East–West lines, which was the first phase of the project. Expectations were that the lines would be running within five years and that the total cost would be around 250 million guilder.
### Construction
Weesperplein was the first Amsterdam Metro station to begin construction, work commencing in August 1970. It was expected to take 4 to 5 years to finish the station. Most underground areas of the East Line were constructed by using caissons, which made pumping out groundwater unnecessary. The caissons were built above ground on-site, and generally had a length of 40 metres (130 ft) and a width of 10–18 metres (33–59 ft). At Weesperplein these were 40 metres wide, even wider than those at Amsterdam Centraal, which were 30 metres (98 ft). The earth below the caissons was rinsed with water and pumped out, allowing the caissons to be lowered into place. There were protests against the construction of the metro, as this method required the demolition of the houses above the line. A tram stop with multiple amenities dating back to 1923 had to be destroyed for the metro.
The station was reported to be almost complete by June 1974; operations were expected to start years later. During the process of digging the station, two former freshwater storage basements were found. In the city centre of Amsterdam within the Singelgracht are 33 of these basements, but not much is known of them as they have not been in use since the mid-19th century.
### Opening and early years
A train was first rolled into the underground tunnels by the Gemeente Vervoerbedrijf (GVB) on 25 January 1977, and mayor Ivo Samkalden drove the metro under supervision. The section from Weesperplein to Amsterdam Centraal was not completed yet at the time. Before the public opening, journalists and members of the municipality council were given a ride from Amsterdam Amstel to Weesperplein. Testing of regular metro operations started in late August 1977, after training of staff was completed.
The metro line, including Weesperplein station, opened to the public on 16 October. For the first few years, Weesperplein was the terminus of the system: trains that came into the station were turned around with a switch that was located just after the station and ran the other direction towards Bijlmermeer. At Bijlmermeer the line split into two, one line ending at Gaasperplas and the other at Holendrecht. The section towards Centraal station was opened later on 11 October 1980 and Weesperplein was no longer a terminus for the two lines. Braille patterns were installed on the handrails at the station in 1984 to assist blind and visually impaired people.
In 1990, a tram-metro hybrid named sneltram (high-speed tram) started operations as line 51. Using special trains, the metro line would convert into a high-speed tram line at Amstelveen and run alongside regular trams. A high-speed tram caught fire at the Weesperplein station on 12 July 1999 due to a blocked disc brake. Although the tram was carrying no passengers at the time, the smoke coming from the fire caused all levels of the station to be evacuated. Two people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation, but were discharged quickly after their injuries were determined to be minor.
### 2010s
During a 2011 renovation, asbestos was found in one of the emergency stairs of the station, which prevented metro operations for another two months. An internal review of the renovation found that the quality of repairs fell short of standards and that these had to be redone regularly. In 2014, an exact replica of the station was built in Vught, North Brabant, to enable police, first aid, firefighting, and military personnel to train for emergency situations. The GVB started to play music through the speakers of underground metro stations in April 2017 as a test. The type of music would depend on the time of day: slow and calming music during rush hours, and energetic music during the afternoon.
A renovation of the station started in May 2017 with one of the entrances. The renovation was split into five phases to allow the station to be kept open, each phase taking three to four months. Concrete was replaced with glass to make it seem lighter and more spacious. As the payment gates located before the stairs from the hall to the platform frequently caused congestion on the platform due to passengers not being able to leave quickly, they were moved to the actual station entrances, creating one large central hall. A new elevator from the hall to the platforms was constructed, and the three existing ones were renovated. Two new staircases to the tracks were also built. Supply of new and disposal of old material was done by using the rails at night, when the Amsterdam Metro does not run. This was done to avoid creating traffic jams above ground. Walls were given smooth curves to direct passengers.
Writing for Het Parool, Marc Kruyswijk commented that before the renovations, the station was a place "where you would prefer to spend as little time as possible," but after the renovation, it "suddenly looked as if it was not only a part of the past but also a part of the present". The same newspaper had previously called it an "underground labyrinth" where travellers had difficulties in finding the exits. In 2018, Het Parool reported that the station was already somewhat done in case a new East–West Line was planned. This would make Weesperplein a station where travellers could connect from one line to the other, as originally intended in the 1970s. Weesperplein was the fifth most used station of the Amsterdam Metro in 2018 with 36,373 passengers per day, behind Amsterdam Centraal, Amsterdam Zuid, Amsterdam Amstel and Amsterdam Bijlmer.
## Artwork
Artists were invited by officials to create artwork for most stations, but Weesperplein and Bijlmer station had a public competition, where all Dutch artists were allowed to send their ideas. Of the 198 submissions, three were selected to be placed in Weesperplein.
Luchtspiegelingen by Matthijs van Dam is composed of 12 panels showing Weesperstraat and Sarphatistraat seen from below. The view of roads, cars and clouds gives the illusion of looking up through the station to the outside. The panels were placed on the ceiling at platform level in 1977 and were removed in 2010 due to fire safety concerns. They were reinstalled eight years later, this time on the ceiling of the station hall. Verplaatsing by Charles Bergmans is ten square pieces of hard rocks. Located in the station hall, travelers could sit on them, which made their surfaces smooth and shiny over the years. Signatuur van de anonieme arbeider by Pieter Engels is three bronze beams forming the letter A. The beams symbolize the three groups that made the metro possible: Amsterdam, contractors and workers (Dutch: Amsterdam, aannemer en arbeider).
## Services
The station is served by metro lines 51, 53 and 54. North-bound, all three lines use the same track and end at Amsterdam Centraal. South-bound, M53 ends at Gaasperplas, and M54 ends at Gein. The tram-metro hybrid line M51 used to serve the Amstelveen suburb by heading south after Amsterdam Zuid and end at Westwijk, but the section after Zuid was closed in 2019 and replaced by an actual tramline. M51 now continues west-bound after Zuid and ends at Isolatorweg as a full metro line. A tram stop near the entrance of the metro station with the same name is served by tram lines 1, 7 and 19. In the early rush hour, bus 246 runs twice in one direction towards Schiphol–Zuid. At night, night buses N85 and N86 stop near the station.
|
1,364,442 |
Mount Melbourne
| 1,173,790,960 |
Stratovolcano in the Antarctic
|
[
"Antarctic Specially Protected Areas",
"Borchgrevink Coast",
"Stratovolcanoes of Antarctica",
"Volcanoes of Victoria Land"
] |
Mount Melbourne is a 2,733-metre-high (8,967 ft) ice-covered stratovolcano in Victoria Land, Antarctica, between Wood Bay and Terra Nova Bay. It is an elongated mountain with a summit caldera filled with ice with numerous parasitic vents; a volcanic field surrounds the edifice. Mount Melbourne has a volume of about 180 cubic kilometres (43 cu mi) and consists of tephra deposits and lava flows; tephra deposits are also found encased within ice and have been used to date the last eruption of Mount Melbourne to 1892 ± 30 years. The volcano is fumarolically active.
The volcano is part of the McMurdo Volcanic Group, and together with The Pleiades, Mount Overlord, Mount Rittmann and the Malta Plateau forms a subprovince, the Melbourne volcanic province. The volcanism is related both to the West Antarctic Rift and to local tectonic structures such as faults and grabens. Mount Melbourne has mainly erupted trachyandesite and trachyte, which formed within a magma chamber; basaltic rocks are less common.
Geothermal heat flow on Mount Melbourne has created a unique ecosystem formed by mosses and liverworts that grow between fumaroles, ice towers, and ice hummocks. This type of vegetation is found at other volcanoes of Antarctica and develops when volcanic heat generates meltwater from snow and ice, thus allowing plants to grow in the cold Antarctic environment. These mosses are particularly common in a protected area known as Cryptogam Ridge within and south of the summit caldera.
## Description
Mount Melbourne lies in North Victoria Land, facing Wood Bay of the Ross Sea. To the southeast lies Cape Washington and due south lies Terra Nova Bay; Campbell Glacier runs west from the volcano and Tinker Glacier lies north of the volcanic field. The seasonal Italian Mario Zucchelli Station lies 40 kilometres (25 mi) from the volcano; the 5th Chinese station in Antarctica (due to be completed in 2022), the Korean Jang Bogo Station, the German Gondwana Station and a neutrino detector are also in the area. Mount Melbourne was discovered and first recognized as a volcano by James Ross in 1841 and named after William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, who was then the prime minister of the United Kingdom. The volcano and its surroundings were investigated by New Zealand-based parties in the 1960s, by German ones in the 1970s and 1980s and by Italian-based parties in the 1980s and 1990s. The volcano and its summit can be accessed from the stations by helicopter.
### Volcano
Mount Melbourne is an elongated stratovolcano formed by lava flows and tephra fall deposits, with gentle slopes. The volcano is uneroded and forms a cone with a base area of 25 by 55 kilometres (16 mi × 34 mi). Viewed from afar, Mount Melbourne has a nearly perfect cone-like profile that has drawn comparisons to Mount Etna in Italy and Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand. Lava domes and short lava flows form the summit while volcanic mounds, cones, domes and scoria cones dot its flanks; 6.4 kilometres (4 mi) from the summit is a large parasitic vent on the north-northeastern slope, which generated several lava flows. Part of the edifice rises from below sea level. Pyroclastic flow deposits – a rarity for Antarctic volcanoes – have been reported. The total volume of the edifice is about 180 cubic kilometres (43 cu mi).
A 1-kilometre-wide (0.62 mi) crater or caldera sits at the top of the volcano. The highest point of the volcano lies east-northeast of the caldera and reaches 2,733 metres (8,967 ft) elevation. The caldera has an incomplete rim and is filled with snow, leaving a 500-metre-wide (1,600 ft) depression. The rim of the caldera is covered by volcanic ejecta including lapilli and lava bombs, probably the products of the most recent eruption, which overlie a 15-metre-thick (49 ft) layer of pumice lapilli. Three small, nested craters formed by phreatomagmatic eruptions occur on the southern rim of the summit caldera. Pyroclastic fall deposits crop out in the northern rim of the caldera and there are more alternating lava-tephra sequences elsewhere in the summit region. There is evidence of past structural instability (collapse structures) on the eastern and southeastern flanks, and an arcuate (with the shape of an arc) 50-to-100-metre-high (160 to 330 ft) scarp on the eastern flank appears to be an incipient sector collapse.
Except for geothermal areas, the ground is bouldery. Some of the coastal areas around the volcano are ice-free and rocky. Frost heave has been observed in the summit region. Small creeks flow down the eastern flank of Mount Melbourne; they are fed by meltwater during summer and quickly disappear when the snow is gone.
### Glaciation
The mountain is covered with permanent ice, which extends to the coast and leaves only a few exposures of the underlying rock; rocky outcrops are most exposed on the eastern flank. The caldera hosts a névé that generates a westward-flowing glacier. An icefall lies northwest of the caldera. Glaciers emanating from snowfields on the volcano have deposited moraines; these and tills from both Pleistocene and Holocene glaciations crop out at Edmonson Point.
Tephra layers crop out in ice cliffs and seracs and testify to recent eruptions, including the one that deposited the ejecta and lapilli pumice units on the summit. Tephra bands are also found in other glaciers of the region. They form when snow accumulates on top of tephra that fell onto ice and in the case of Mount Melbourne they indicate eruptions during the last few thousand years. Volcanic sediments from Mount Melbourne are also found in Terra Nova Bay.
### Volcanic field
Mount Melbourne is surrounded by a volcanic field consisting of 60 exposed volcanoes, which have the form of scoria cones and tuff rings with hyaloclastite deposits, lava flows and pillow lavas. Some of these volcanoes formed under ice. The volcanic field forms a peninsula which is separated by steep faults from the Transantarctic Mountains to the north. Among these volcanoes is Shield Nunatak southwest from Mount Melbourne, a subglacial volcano, now exposed, that may have formed during the last 21,000 to 17,000 years. The Cape Washington ridge consists mostly of lava, including pillow lava, overlaid by scoria cones, and is the remnant of a shield volcano. Edmonson Point is another volcanic complex in the volcanic field that formed partly while interacting with glaciers and partly through phreatomagmatic activity. Other volcanoes in the field are Baker Rocks, Oscar Point and Random Hills. These volcanoes are aligned mainly in a north–south direction, with palagonitized outcrops that expose dikes. Perfectly preserved scoria cones occur at Pinckard Table north of the volcanic field, while Harrow Peak is a heavily eroded lava plug. The total volume of volcanic rocks is about 250 cubic kilometres (60 cu mi) and their emplacement apparently altered the path of the Campbell Glacier.
## Geology
Mount Melbourne is part of the McMurdo Volcanic Group, which includes the active volcano Mount Erebus. This volcanic group is one of the largest alkaline volcanic provinces in the world, comparable with that of the East African Rift, and is subdivided into the Melbourne, the Hallett and the Erebus volcanic provinces. The volcanic group consists of large shield volcanoes mainly near the coast, stratovolcanoes and monogenetic volcanoes which formed parallel to the Transantarctic Mountains.
Volcanic activity of the McMurdo Volcanic Group is tied to continental rifting and commenced during the Oligocene. It is unclear whether this is caused by a local hotspot beneath the area or mantle convection in the area of the West Antarctic Rift. The latter is one of the largest continental rifts on Earth but little known and possibly inactive today. The Ross Sea and the Victoria Land Basin developed along this rift and were deeply buried, while the Transantarctic Mountains were rapidly uplifted during the last fifty million years and are on the "shoulder" of the rift. The line separating the two is a major crustal suture, with large differences in elevation and crustal thickness across the suture. Many of the volcanoes appear to have formed under the influence of fault zones in the area, and increased activity in the last thirty million years has been correlated to the reactivation of faults.
Mount Melbourne is part of a volcano alignment that includes The Pleiades, Mount Overlord, Mount Rittmann – all large stratovolcanoes – which with the Malta Plateau form the Melbourne province of the McMurdo Volcanic Group. In addition, this province consists of numerous smaller volcanic centres, volcanic intrusions and sequences of volcanic rocks, and has been active for the past twenty-five million years. Volcanic edifices buried under sediment are also part of the Melbourne province, including a cone southeast of Cape Washington, which has a size comparable to that of Mount Melbourne.
Mount Melbourne and its volcanic field are over a basement of Precambrian to Ordovician age, which consists of volcanic and metamorphic rocks of the Wilson Terrane. The volcano is at the intersection of three geological structures: the Rennick Graben of Cretaceous age, the Victoria Land Basin and the Polar 3 magnetic anomaly. The Terror Rift in the Victoria Land Basin runs between Mount Melbourne and Mount Erebus and appears to be related to their existence. Mount Melbourne appears to lie in a graben; the marginal faults on the eastern flank of Mount Melbourne are still active with earthquakes. North–south-trending faulting may also be responsible for the trend in edifice structure, and strike-slip faulting takes place on the eastern flank. Recent offset on faults and Holocene coastal uplift in the area indicates that tectonic activity is ongoing.
Tomographic studies have shown an area of low seismic velocity at 80 kilometres (50 mi) depth under the volcano, which may be due to temperatures there being 300 °C (540 °F) hotter than normal. Anomalies underneath Mount Melbourne are connected to similar anomalies under the Terror Rift. These anomalies above 100 kilometres (62 mi) depth are focused under Mount Melbourne and the neighbouring Priestley Fault. A low gravity anomaly over Mount Melbourne may reflect either the presence of low-density volcanic rocks or of a magma chamber under the volcano.
### Composition
Trachyandesite and trachyte are the most common rocks on Mount Melbourne, with basalt being less common and mostly occurring around its base. The rocks define a mildly alkaline suite rich in potassium, unlike the rocks elsewhere in the volcanic field. The rest of the volcanic field also features alkali basalts, basanite and mugearite. Phenocrysts include aegirine, amphibole, anorthoclase, augite, clinopyroxene, fayalite, hedenbergite, ilmenite, kaersutite, magnetite, olivine, plagioclase and sanidine. Gneiss, granulite, harzburgite, lherzolite and tholeiite xenoliths are found in the volcanic field and form the core of many lava bombs. Inclusions in xenoliths indicate that the gaseous components of the Mount Melbourne volcanic field magmas consist mainly of carbon dioxide. The rocks in the volcanic field have porphyritic to vitrophyric textures.
The trachytes and mugearites formed through magmatic differentiation in a crustal magma chamber from alkali basalts, defining an alkali basalt-trachyte differentiation series. Basalts were mainly erupted early in the history of the volcano. During the last hundred thousand years the magma chamber became established; this allowed both the differentiation of trachytes and the occurrence of large eruptions. A gap in the rock spectrum ("Daly gap") with a scarcity of benmoreite and mugearite has been noted at Mount Melbourne and other volcanoes in the region. There is no agreement on which processes contributed to petrogenesis in the Mount Melbourne volcanic field but diverse mantle domains and assimilation and fractional crystallization processes appear to have played a role. The magmatic system that feeds Mount Melbourne appears to have a composition distinct from the one associated with the Mount Melbourne volcanic field.
Hydrothermal alteration has affected parts of the summit area, leaving yellow and white deposits that contrast with the black volcanic rocks. Hydrothermal sinter deposits have formed in geothermal areas from past liquid water flow. Clay containing allophane, amorphous silica and feldspar are found in the summit area.
## Eruption history
Mount Melbourne was active beginning 3.0–2.7 million years ago. Activity has been subdivided into an older Pliocene Cape Washington stage, an early Pleistocene Random Hills stage, the Shield Nunatak stage that is 400,000 to 100,000 years old, and the recent Mount Melbourne stage. Volcanic activity migrated north from Cape Washington towards the Transantarctic Mountains and eventually became centralized at Mount Melbourne. During the last hundred thousand years Mount Melbourne has produced about 0.0015 cubic kilometres per year (0.00036 cu mi/a) of magma. The earliest records of the volcano noted its young appearance.
### Mount Melbourne volcanic field
Ages obtained on the Mount Melbourne volcanic field include 2.96 ± 0.20 million years, 740,000 ± 100,000 years and 200,000 ± 40,000 years for Baker Rocks, 2.7 ± 0.2 million years and 450,000 ± 50,000 years for Cape Washington, 74,000 ± 110,000 years and 50,000 ± 20,000 years for Edmonson Point, less than 400,000 years for Markham Island, 745,000 ± 66,000 years for Harrows Peak, 1.368 ± 0.090 million years for Pinkard Table, 1.55 ± 0.05 million years, 431,000 ± 82,000 and 110,000 ± 70,000 years for Shield Nunatak, and 2.5 ± 0.1 million years for Willows Nunatak. The northeastern parasitic cone formed after the bulk of the volcano and appears to be younger than the summit.
Radiometric dating has shown that the appearance of a landform at Mount Melbourne is not indicative of its age; some well preserved vents are older than heavily eroded ones. On the other hand, a lack of proper margins of error and lack of details on which samples were dated has been problematic for radiometric dating efforts.
### Tephra
Tephra found at the Allan Hills, in Dome C and in the Siple Dome ice cores may come from Mount Melbourne. Some marine tephra layers originally attributed to Mount Melbourne may instead come from Mount Rittmann, and many tephra layers in the area have compositions that do not match these from Mount Melbourne. There are additional tephra layers attributed to the volcano:
- Tephra layers less than 500,000 years old in the Frontier Mountain and Lichen Hills blue-ice areas have been attributed to volcanoes in the Mount Melbourne volcanic province.
- A tephra layer less than 30,000 years old in a sediment core from the Ross Sea has a composition indicating that it was erupted at Mount Melbourne. Its deposition has been used to infer that that part of the western Ross Sea was ice-free at that time.
- A tephra layer found in the Ross Sea has been interpreted as originating from an eruption of Mount Melbourne 9,700 ± 5,300 years ago.
- In the Talos Dome ice core record, two tephra layers emplaced 2,680 and 5,280 years ago have compositions similar to these of Mount Melbourne.
- Tephra layers at Siple Dome indicate eruptions at Mount Melbourne in 304 CE, which deposited substantial amounts of sulfate on the ice sheet.
- A tephra layer at Siple Dome dated to 1810 CE might have been erupted by Mount Melbourne, but its attribution is less certain than for the 304 CE tephra.
### Mount Melbourne proper
The Edmonson Point ignimbrite is a trachytic ignimbrite that crops out at Edmonson Point. It consists of three units of ash-supported, lapilli- and pumice-rich deposits with intercalated breccia lenses that reach a thickness of 30 metres (98 ft). They are two ignimbrite units separated by a base surge deposit. Faulting has offset the sequences, which are intruded by dikes. The Edmonson Point ignimbrite was produced by large Plinian eruptions and is about 120,000 years old. The eruption deposited tephra into the Ross Sea, and correlative tephra layers were found in the Talos Dome ice core.
After this ignimbrite, a series of dikes gave rise to the Adelie Penguin Rookery lava field. This lava field, which probably formed subglacially, is made up by numerous blocky lava flows with glassy margins that reach a thickness of 300 metres (1,000 ft) and are formed by hawaiite and benmoreite. They were fed through numerous dikes, which also gave rise to small scoria cones and spatter cones, and were emplaced non-contemporaneously. A tuff cone rises from the lava field and is formed by monogenetic volcano ejecta, including lava bombs encasing granite fragments and bombs large enough to leave craters in the ash they fell in. Ropy basalt lava flows with an uncertain source vent, and a undissected scoria cone rise above the lava field and complete the Edmonson Point system. The Adelie Penguin Rookery lava field was erupted about 90,000 years ago, and its emplacement may have been accompanied by the emission of tephra recorded in the Talos Dome ice core.
Rocks at the summit have ages of between 260,000 and 10,000 years. Individual eruptions have been dated to 10,000 ± 20,000, 80,000 ± 15,000, 260,000 ± 60,000 and 15,000 ± 35,000 years ago. Highly imprecise ages of late Pleistocene to Holocene age have been obtained from the ejecta layer on the summit. One large eruption took place 13,500 ± 4,300 years ago;
### Last eruption and present-day activity
Tephrochronology has yielded an age of 1892 ± 30 CE for the last eruption. This eruption deposited a major tephra layer around the volcano, which crops out mainly on its eastern side and in the Aviator and Tinker Glaciers. The three small craters on the rim of the Mount Melbourne summit crater formed at the end of this eruption.
No eruptions have been observed during historical time, and the volcano is considered to be quiescent and a low-hazard volcano. Ongoing deformation and seismic activity occurs at Mount Melbourne, and the latter may be caused either by the movement of fluids underground or by fracturing processes. Icequakes caused by glacier movement also occur. Geothermal activity was steady between 1963 and 1983, while ground deformation commenced in 1997. This deformation was probably caused by changes in the geothermal system.
### Hazards and monitoring
Future moderate to large explosive eruptions such as Plinian eruptions are possible. The prevailing winds would transport volcanic ash eastward across the Ross Sea, and the ash might affect research stations close to Mount Melbourne such as Mario Zucchelli, Gondwana and Jang Bogo. The hazards of Antarctic volcano eruptions are poorly known. Mount Melbourne is remote, and thus renewed eruptions would likely not impact any human habitations but regional environmental or even global climate impacts, as well as disruptions of air travel, are possible.
Italian scientists began a volcanology research program on Mount Melbourne in the late 1980s, establishing a volcanological observatory in 1988. In 1990 they installed seismic stations around Mount Melbourne and between 1999 and 2001 a network of geodetic measurement stations around Terra Nova Bay, including several aimed at monitoring the Mount Melbourne volcano. Beginning in 2012 Korean scientists at the Jang Bogo Station added another seismic station network to monitor the volcano. In 2016–2019 geochemical, seismological and volcanological research was carried out at Mount Melbourne as part of the ICE-VOLC project.
## Geothermal activity
Geothermal activity occurs around the summit crater, on the upper parts of the volcano and on the northwestern slope between 2,400 and 2,500 metres (7,900 and 8,200 ft) elevation. Another geothermal area exists close to Edmonson Point, including fumaroles, thermal anomalies and freshwater ponds. Their temperatures of 15 to 20 °C (59 to 68 °F) are considerably higher than normal atmospheric temperatures in Antarctica. The geothermal areas are visible in infrared light from aircraft. Satellite images have identified areas with temperatures of over 100 to 200 °C (212 to 392 °F).
Individual geothermally heated areas cover surfaces of a few hectares. Typically, the soil consists of a thin sand layer with organic matter covering scoria gravel. In some places, the ground is too hot to be touched. Mount Melbourne is one of several volcanoes in Antarctica that feature such geothermal soils.
Fumarolic landforms include ice towers, fumaroles, ice "roofs", caves in snow and firn, bare ground, ice hummocks surrounding fumarolic vents, puddles formed by condensed water vapour and steaming ground:
- Ice hummocks are hollow glacial structures that encase fumaroles. They reach heights of 4 metres (13 ft) and widths of 1 to 6 metres (3 to 20 ft). They mainly form over colder ground and widely spaced fumarolic vents.
- Ice towers are widespread around the caldera, especially in the north-northwestern and south-southeastern sectors, while warm ground is more restricted. In the northern sector of the volcano, ice towers and bare ground form a southeast–northwest trending lineament. Ice towers form when fumarolic gases freeze in the cold Antarctic air.
- Glacial caves form when geothermal heat melts ice, leaving cavities. Some of these caves are in the summit caldera and reach lengths of several hundred metres, with ceilings reaching 3 metres (9.8 ft) height. Several caves have been accessed through ice towers or through gaps where the ice surrounding the cave rests on rock, and one ice cave ("Aurora Ice Cave") was mapped in 2016.
The caves and ice towers release water-vapour-rich warm air. Fumarole temperatures can reach 60 °C (140 °F), contrasting with the cold air. Fumaroles release gases containing excesses of volcanic carbon dioxide and methane. Hydrogen sulfide gas has been detected too, but only at low concentrations which do not prevent the development of vegetation. Yellow deposits have been identified as sulfur.
The geothermal manifestations appear to be powered mainly by steam, as there is no evidence of geothermal landforms related to liquid water flow and heat conduction is not effective enough at most sites. It is possible that underground liquid water reservoirs form in some areas, however. The steam is produced by the melting and evaporation of snow and ice, and is then channelled through rocks to the vents. Atmospheric air likely circulates underground and is heated, eventually exiting in ice towers. An early theory that the ice towers formed on top of a cooling lava flow is considered improbable given the long duration of fumarolic activity; a lava-heated system would have cooled down by now.
## Climate
There are no detailed meteorological records of the summit region. Winds blow mostly from the west and more rarely from the northwest. Catabatic winds blow from the Priestly and Reeves valleys. Precipitation is scarce. During winter, polar night lasts about three months. Temperatures in the summit region have been variously reported to either not exceed −30 °C (−22 °F) or to range between −6 and −20 °C (21 and −4 °F). Seasonal temperature variation is high and reaches 30 °C (54 °F).
During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a marine ice sheet occupied Terra Nova Bay. The "Terra Nova Drift" was deposited between 25,000 and 7,000 years ago and is overlaid by later moraines from retreating ice during the post-LGM period. During the late Holocene after 5,000 years before present, glaciers advanced again as part of the Neoglacial. One minor advance occurred in the last c. 650 years.
## Life
Algae, lichens, liverworts and mosses grow on geothermally heated terrain on the upper parts of Mount Melbourne. Algae form crusts on the heated ground. Mosses form cushions and often occur around steam vents and under ice hummocks. The moss species Campylopus pyriformis does not grow leaves on Mount Melbourne. Pohlia nutans forms small shoots. The two moss species form separate stands which occur at different sites of the volcano. Together with occurrences at Mount Erebus, they constitute the highest mosses growing in Antarctica. Small peat deposits have been found.
Vegetation is particularly common on a ridge within and south of the main crater, "Cryptogam Ridge". It features a long snow-free area with a gravelly ground, small terraces and stone stripes. Soil temperatures recorded there reach 40 to 50 °C (104 to 122 °F). These are the only occurrences of Campylopus pyriformis on warm ground in Antarctica.
Mount Melbourne along with Mount Erebus, Mount Rittmann and Deception Island is one of four volcanoes in Antarctica known for having geothermal habitats, although other poorly studied volcanoes such as Mount Berlin, Mount Hampton and Mount Kauffman may also have them. In South America, high-elevation geothermal environments similar to Mount Melbourne are found at Socompa. Vegetation on geothermally heated terrain is unusual in Antarctica but other occurs elsewhere, including on Bouvet, Deception Island, Mount Erebus and the South Sandwich Islands.
The geothermal area at the summit of Mount Melbourne makes up Antarctic Specially Protected Area 118, which contains two specially restricted areas around Cryptogam Ridge and some markers used in studies of volcano deformation. Some algae from Mount Melbourne were accidentally transferred to Deception Island or Mount Erebus.
Edmonson Point and Cape Washington have Adelie penguin and emperor penguin rookeries and south polar skuas and Weddel seals are also found. More than twenty-four lichen plus six moss species (including Bryum argenteum moss) have been found at Edmonson Point, as well as microbial mats formed by cyanobacteria. Nematodes and collembola complete the biota of Edmonson Point.
### Biology
The vegetation on Mount Melbourne grows mainly on terrain heated to temperatures of over 10 to 20 °C (50 to 68 °F), and there are gradations in vegetation type from colder to warmer temperatures. There are differences between the vegetation and bacterial communities at Cryptogam Ridge and those on the northwest slope of Mount Melbourne; distinct soils may be the reason for such differences.
These communities must have reached Mount Melbourne from far away. Transport was probably by wind as there is no flowing water in the region. Mount Melbourne was recently active, has a polar night lasting thirteen weeks, has soils containing toxic elements such as mercury, is distant from ecosystems that could be the source of colonization events, and lies away from the westerlies, which may explain why the vegetation is species-poor. Pohlia nutans may have arrived only recently on Mount Melbourne, or this volcano is not as favourable for its growth as Mount Rittmann, where this moss is more common. Its colonies are less vigorous on Mount Melbourne than Campylopus pyriformis.
Condensing fumarole gases and meltwater from snow form the water supply of this vegetation. Mosses are concentrated around fumarolic vents as there is more fresh water available there. The steam freezes in the cold air, forming the ice hummocks that act as a shelter and maintain stable humidity and temperature. The geothermal heating and the availability of freshwater sets these volcanic biological communities apart from other Antarctic vegetation communities that are heated by the sun.
Some bacterial species are nitrogen fixing. Genetic analysis has found that some mosses at Mount Melbourne are mutating, yielding genetic variation. The hot, wet soils at Mount Melbourne host thermophilic organisms, making Mount Melbourne an island of thermophilic life on an ice-cold continent. Cold-tolerant microbes coexist with the thermophiles.
Other species associated with the vegetation are the protozoan Corythion dubium, which is a testate amoeba common in Antarctica and the only invertebrate found in the geothermal habitats of Mount Melbourne, actinobacteria and various actinomycetes and fungal genera. Several bacterial species were first described from Mount Melbourne's geothermal terrains:
- Alicyclobacillus pohliae from the northwest slope.
- Aneurinibacillus terranovensis from Cryptogam Ridge and also from Mount Rittmann volcano.
- Bacillus fumarioli from Cryptogam Ridge.
- Bacillus thermoantarcticus from Cryptogam Ridge, later renamed to Bacillus thermantarcticus. A further reclassification to Geobacillus thermantarcticus was proposed in 2012.
- Brevibacillus levickii from the northwest slope.
## See also
- List of Ultras of Antarctica
- List of volcanoes in Antarctica
|
8,148,683 |
Red warbler
| 1,114,166,174 |
Species of bird
|
[
"Birds described in 1827",
"Birds of Mexico",
"Birds of the Sierra Madre Occidental",
"Birds of the Sierra Madre del Sur",
"Birds of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt",
"Cardellina",
"Endemic birds of Mexico",
"Taxa named by William John Swainson"
] |
The red warbler (Cardellina rubra) is a small passerine bird of the New World warbler family Parulidae endemic to the highlands of Mexico, north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It is closely related to, and forms a superspecies with, the pink-headed warbler of southern Mexico and Guatemala. There are three subspecies, found in disjunct populations, which differ in the color of their ear patch and in the brightness and tone of their body plumage. The adult is bright red, with a white or gray ear patch, depending on the subspecies; young birds are pinkish-brown, with a whitish ear patch and two pale .
Breeding typically occurs between February and May. The female lays three or four eggs in a domed nest, which she builds on the ground. Though she alone incubates the eggs, both sexes feed the young and remove fecal sacs from the nest. The young fledge within 10–11 days of hatching. The red warbler is an insectivore, gleaning primarily in understory shrubs. Although this bird is considered to be a least-concern species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), its numbers are thought to be declining due to habitat destruction.
## Taxonomy
English jeweler and naturalist William Bullock and his son traveled to Mexico soon after its independence, spending six months in 1823 collecting archaeological artifacts and many bird and fish species new to science. The bird specimens were given to naturalist William John Swainson, their countryman, to formally describe, which he did in 1827. Among these was the red warbler, which was assigned to the genus Setophaga, as Setophaga rubra. Over the next half century, other authorities moved it to Cardellina, with the red-faced warbler, and to the widespread tropical warbler genus Basileuterus, as well as to the Old World warbler genus Sylvia and the Old World tit genus Parus. In 1873, English naturalists Philip Lutley Sclater and Osbert Salvin moved the species to the genus Ergaticus, where it remained for more than a century.
The red warbler forms a superspecies with the pink-headed warbler of Chiapas and Guatemala. Despite their disjunct ranges and considerably different plumages, the two have sometimes been considered conspecific. Conversely, it has also been suggested that the red warbler should be split into a northern gray-eared species (C. melanauris) and a southern white-eared species (C. rubra). A comprehensive 2010 paper by Irby Lovette and colleagues analyzing mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of the New World warblers found that the red and pink-headed warblers are each other's closest relative and that their common ancestor diverged from a lineage that gave rise to the red-faced warbler. The authors recommended moving the red and pink-headed warblers to the genus Cardellina, a suggestion which has been adopted by the International Ornithologists' Union (IOC).
There are three subspecies, which differ slightly in appearance:
- C. r. rubra, described by Swainson in 1827, has white ear patches and is found from southern Jalisco and southern Hidalgo to Oaxaca.
- C. r. melanauris, originally described and named by American ornithologist Robert Thomas Moore in 1937 as Ergaticus ruber melanauris, has dark gray ear patches and somewhat more scarlet upperparts than C. r. rubra. The subspecific name is derived from the Ancient Greek melan- "black/dark", and Latin auris "ear". It is found from southwestern Chihuahua to northern Nayarit.
- C. r. rowleyi was originally described and named by R. T. Orr and J. D. Webster in 1968 as Ergaticus ruber rowleyi, in honor of J. Stewart Rowley, a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. It has white ear patches and ruby-red upperparts (brightest of the three subspecies), and is found in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains, from Guerrero to southern Oaxaca.
"Red warbler" has been designated the official name by the IOC. It is a straightforward reference to its color. The genus name Cardellina is the diminutive of the Italian cardella, a regional name for the European goldfinch, while its specific name, rubra, is Latin for "red".
## Description
The red warbler is a small passerine, measuring 12.5–13.5 cm (4.9–5.3 in) in length, and weighing from 7.6 to 8.7 g (0.27 to 0.31 oz). As an adult, it is red overall, with either a white or dark gray (depending on the subspecies) auricular patch on each side of its head. Its wings and tail are slightly darker, dusky red, and edged in pinkish-red. Its legs are a dull red-brown, and its thin bill is pinkish-gray with a dark tip. The iris is dark brown to blackish. Plumage varies little between the sexes, although the female tends to be a little duller or more orange-tinged. Adult pairs separate and molt fully from August, after the breeding season.
The adult red warbler is hard to confuse with any other bird species in its range; the scarlet tanager and summer tanager have similar mostly-red plumage but are larger with thick conical bills.
As a juvenile, the red warbler is pinkish-brown with a whitish auricular patch. Its darker wings and tail show pinkish-cinnamon edges, with two paler on the former.
### Voice
The red warbler has several common calls, including a high, thin tsii and a stronger pseet. Its song is a mix of short trills and richer warbles, interspersed with high-pitched chips. Unlike other species in the same habitat zone, it tends to sing only during bright morning hours during the breeding season. It does not sing – and even its calling frequency decreases – in cloudy weather, regardless of season.
## Distribution and habitat
Endemic to the highlands of Mexico north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the red warbler has three disjunct populations that correspond to the three subspecies: from southwestern Chihuahua to northern Nayarit, from southern Jalisco and southern Hidalgo to Oaxaca, and from Guerrero into southern Oaxaca in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains. It is fairly common to common in the country's interior and on adjacent slopes, where it occurs at elevations ranging from 1,800 to 3,900 metres (5,900 to 12,800 ft) above sea level; it does not occur along either coast. It is an altitudinal migrant, moving from higher humid or semi-humid pine, pine-oak and fir forests in the breeding season to lower elevations, often in oak forests, in the winter. It is among the most common of the small birds in its woodland habitat, second only to the golden-crowned kinglet in fir forests in one study and the third most common warbler in oak-conifer woodlands in another.
Though the species was reported to have been collected in Texas in the late 19th century, the record's location was not widely believed, and there is no strong evidence that it ever occurred there. It has strayed as far north as southeastern Arizona, where a bird was found on Mount Lemmon in 2018.
## Behavior
Though it occasionally joins mixed-species flocks, the red warbler is more typically found alone or in pairs. Youngsters probably choose mates in the autumn of their first year, and pairs remain together year-round, except during severe weather and during post-breeding molt.
### Breeding
The red warbler breeds primarily in early spring, from February until May, though at least one nest containing young has been found as late as the end of June. By late February, the male establishes a territory that averages about 40 square metres, defending it with song. Other males may intrude by silently flying in at a height of around 3 m (10 ft) and back to their own territory. Deep incursions result in combat, after which the interloper usually leaves. Beginning in mid-March, the male courts the female by chasing her through the undergrowth. The pair then perch together while the male sings and the female calls softly. The female alone builds the nest, a task which typically takes 4–6 days. She chooses a sunlit area, such as an area of windfall, the brushy edge of a trail or water course, or a small clearing, for its location. Tightly woven of plant material, the nest is hidden in ground vegetation and anchored to the stalks of surrounding vegetation. The nest, which is usually oven-shaped with a side or upward-facing entrance, measures roughly 15 cm (6 in) wide by 18 cm (7 in) long by 11 cm (4.5 in) high. Bulky and untidy on the outside, it is typically constructed primarily of dead pine needles and dead grass, though gray lichens, green moss, dead leaves, shreds of bark and tips of fern fronds are also used; most of these materials are gathered from the ground close to the nest, though some is picked from low branches or further away. A few nests are only cups, lacking the roof of the more typical structures. Inside, the nest is tidy and compact, lined with fine grasses and plant fluff, which is generally gathered some distance from the nest.
Early in the breeding season, there may be a gap of as many as 11 days between the completion of the nest and the laying of the first egg. Later in the season, this time decreases so that the first egg is laid as soon as the nest is ready. The female normally lays three eggs, though clutches of up to four have been recorded. The eggs, which are variously described as pale pink with evenly distributed brown spots or white with cinnamon and rust spots densely ringing the larger end of the egg, measure 16–17 mm (0.63–0.67 in) by 13 mm (0.51 in) and weigh 1–1.4 g (0.035–0.049 oz). The female alone incubates the eggs for 16 days; the male does not even approach the nest until several days after the eggs hatch. She sits facing the back wall of the nest, with her head and body sheltered by its roof and her tail sticking out the opening. She sits tight at the approach of danger, typically not flying until a potential predator actually makes contact with the nest.
Both adults feed the nestlings and remove fecal sacs, though the female removes far more than the male does. The parents move deceptively when approaching the nest, foraging – or pretending to forage – in nearby vegetation. They stay only a few seconds in any one spot, including at the nest, making it more difficult for a predator to locate the young. Nestlings make a rapid, high-pitched peeping call as an adult approaches carrying food. They fledge within 10–11 days of hatching. Young birds are fully grown three weeks after fledging, upon which time they are driven off by their parents.
### Food and feeding
The red warbler is an insectivore. It gleans primarily in understory shrubs at low to middle levels, moving slowly and deliberately through more open areas of the vegetation, and feeding with quick jabs into cracks in bark and pine needle clusters. It sometimes hovers briefly to feed at pine needle clusters, a foraging technique known as "hover gleaning". Though it lacks any obvious adaptations for climbing, it regularly does so in its search for prey items on bark and epiphytes on branches, often hanging head-down as it probes. In areas of deciduous growth, it typically flycatches, making brief aerial sorties from a perch in pursuit of flying insects. While it seldom associates with mixed-species flocks, it often feeds alongside other birds with no signs of conflict, displaying no hostility towards other species—such as the slate-throated whitestart (Myioborus miniatus)—with which it competes. It has been observed chasing off a flycatcher of the genus Empidonax. Its foraging area is quite small, often amounting to only a few dozen square meters (several hundred square feet) per day. Late in the afternoon, its rate of foraging declines, and it rests, often taking brief naps, in the forest understory. Though it does not generally feed after sunset, it may do so to take advantage of transient food sources, such as hatching Neuroptera.
### Parasitism and predation
The red warbler is presumably hunted by small hawks such as the sharp-shinned hawk, and its nest raided by wrens, rodents, raccoons, feral cats and snakes. Isospora cardellinae is a protozoan species that has been isolated from a red warbler from Nevado de Toluca National Park, Mexico. It is a parasite that lives in cells in the villi of the bird's small intestine.
### Toxicity
In the 16th century, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún had reported that a red bird matching the description of the red warbler was regarded as inedible by the Aztecs. Researchers Patricia Escalante and John W. Daly isolated two alkaloids in preliminary investigations of the feathers. The presence of these alkaloids render the bird unpalatable; humans find it inedible.
## Conservation and threats
The red warbler is currently rated as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Though there is evidence that its numbers are decreasing, the decline has not been precipitous (that is, less than a 30% decline over ten years or three generations), and the population remains quite large, estimates ranging from 50,000 to 499,999 birds. The forested areas in which it occurs include some of the most threatened habitats in Mexico; logging, agricultural expansion, firewood gathering, road building, tourist development, overgrazing and intensive urbanization are among the many things contributing to the destruction of the forests. There is some evidence that selective logging in pine forests may actually favor this species, which prefers more open, sunlit areas in which to breed.
## Note
|
100,730 |
Winnipeg
| 1,173,701,779 |
Capital city of Manitoba, Canada
|
[
"Cities in Manitoba",
"District of Keewatin",
"Hudson's Bay Company trading posts",
"Populated places established in 1738",
"Winnipeg"
] |
Winnipeg (/ˈwɪnɪpɛɡ/ ) is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. As of 2021, Winnipeg had a city population of 749,607 and a metropolitan population of 834,678, making it Canada's sixth-largest city and eighth-largest metropolitan area.
The city is named after the nearby Lake Winnipeg; the name comes from the Western Cree words for "muddy water" – winipīhk. The region was a trading centre for Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans; it is the traditional territory of the Anishinabe (Ojibway), Ininew (Cree), Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota, and is the birthplace of the Métis Nation. French traders built the first fort, Fort Rouge, on the site in 1738. A settlement was later founded by the Selkirk settlers of the Red River Colony in 1812, the nucleus of which was incorporated as the City of Winnipeg in 1873. Being far inland, the local climate is extremely seasonal even by Canadian standards, with average January highs of around −11 °C (12 °F) and average July highs of 26 °C (79 °F).
Known as the "Gateway to the West", Winnipeg is a railway and transportation hub with a diversified economy. This multicultural city hosts numerous annual festivals, including the Festival du Voyageur, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Jazz Winnipeg Festival, the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, and Folklorama. In 1967, Winnipeg was the first Canadian host of the Pan American Games. It is home to several professional sports franchises, including the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (Canadian football), Winnipeg Jets (ice hockey), Manitoba Moose (ice hockey), Valour FC (association football), Winnipeg Sea Bears (basketball), and the Winnipeg Goldeyes (baseball).
## Etymology
Winnipeg is named after nearby Lake Winnipeg, 65 km north of the city. English explorer Henry Kelsey may have been the first European to see the lake in 1690, and he adopted the Cree and Ojibwe name win-nipi (also transcribed win-nipiy or ouenpig) meaning "murky water" or "muddy water" (modern Cree: wīnipēk, ᐑᓂᐯᐠ). French-Canadian fur trader La Vérendrye referred to the lake as Lac Gouinipique or Ouinipigon when he built the first forts in the area in the 1730s. Local newspaper The Nor'-Wester included the name on its masthead on February 24, 1866, and the city was incorporated by that name by the Manitoba Legislature in 1873.
## History
### Early history
Winnipeg lies at the confluence of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North, a location now known as "The Forks." This point was at the crossroads of canoe routes travelled by First Nations before European contact. Evidence provided by archaeology, petroglyphs, rock art, and oral history indicates that native peoples used the area in prehistoric times for camping, harvesting, hunting, tool making, fishing, trading and, farther north, for agriculture.
Estimates of the date of first settlement in this area range from 11,500 years ago for a site southwest of the present city to 6,000 years ago at The Forks. In 1805, Canadian colonists observed First Nations peoples engaged in farming activity along the Red River. The practice quickly expanded, driven by the demand by traders for provisions. The rivers provided an extensive transportation network linking northern First Peoples with those to the south along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The Ojibwe made some of the first maps on birch bark, which helped fur traders navigate the waterways of the area.
Sieur de La Vérendrye built the first fur trading post on the site in 1738, called Fort Rouge. French trading continued at this site for several decades before the arrival of the British Hudson's Bay Company after France ceded the territory following its defeat in the Seven Years' War. Many French men who were trappers married First Nations women; their mixed-race children hunted, traded, and lived in the area. Their descendants are known as the Métis.
Lord Selkirk was involved with the first permanent settlement (known as the Red River Colony), the purchase of land from the Hudson's Bay Company, and a survey of river lots in the early 19th century. The North West Company built Fort Gibraltar in 1809, and the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Douglas in 1812, both in the area of present-day Winnipeg. The two companies competed fiercely over trade. The Métis and Lord Selkirk's settlers fought at the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816. In 1821, the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies merged, ending their long rivalry. Fort Gibraltar was renamed Fort Garry in 1822 and became the leading post in the region for the Hudson's Bay Company. A flood destroyed the fort in 1826 and it was not rebuilt until 1835. A rebuilt section of the fort, consisting of the front gate and a section of the wall, is near the modern-day corner of Main Street and Broadway in downtown Winnipeg.
In 1869–70, present-day Winnipeg was the site of the Red River Rebellion, a conflict between the local provisional government of Métis, led by Louis Riel, and newcomers from eastern Canada. General Garnet Wolseley was sent to put down the uprising. The Manitoba Act of 1870 made Manitoba the fifth province of the three-year-old Canadian Confederation. Treaty 1, which encompassed the city and much of the surrounding area, was signed on 3 August 1871 by representatives of the Crown and local Indigenous groups, comprising the Brokenhead Ojibway, Sagkeeng, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe, Sandy Bay and Swan Lake communities. On 8 November 1873, Winnipeg was incorporated as a city, with the Selkirk settlement as its nucleus. Métis legislator and interpreter James McKay named the city. Winnipeg's mandate was to govern and provide municipal services to citizens attracted to trade expansion between Upper Fort Garry / Lower Fort Garry and Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Winnipeg developed rapidly after the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881. The railway divided the North End, which housed mainly Eastern Europeans, from the richer Anglo-Saxon southern part of the city. It also contributed to a demographic shift beginning shortly after Confederation that saw the francophone population decrease from a majority to a small minority group. This shift resulted in Premier Thomas Greenway controversially ending legislative bilingualism and removing funding for French Catholic Schools in 1890.
### Modern history (1900–present)
By 1911, Winnipeg was Canada's third-largest city. However, the city faced financial difficulty when the Panama Canal opened in 1914. The canal reduced reliance on Canada's rail system for international trade; the increase in shipping traffic helped Vancouver to surpass Winnipeg in both prosperity and population by the end of World War I.
More than 30,000 workers walked off their jobs in May 1919 in what came to be known as the Winnipeg general strike. The strike was a product of postwar recession, labour conditions, the activity of union organizers and a large influx of returning World War I soldiers seeking work. After many arrests, deportations, and incidents of violence, the strike ended on 21 June 1919 when the Riot Act was read and a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers charged a group of strikers. Two strikers were killed and at least thirty others were injured on the day that became known as Bloody Saturday; the event polarized the population. One of the leaders of the strike, J. S. Woodsworth, went on to found Canada's first major socialist party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which later became the New Democratic Party.
The Manitoba Legislative Building, constructed mainly of Tyndall stone, opened in 1920; its dome supports a bronze statue finished in gold leaf, titled "Eternal Youth and the Spirit of Enterprise" (commonly known as the "Golden Boy"). The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression resulted in widespread unemployment, worsened by drought and low agricultural prices. The Depression ended after the start of World War II in 1939.
In the Battle of Hong Kong, The Winnipeg Grenadiers were among the first Canadians to engage in combat against Japan. Battalion members who survived combat were taken prisoner and endured brutal treatment in prisoner of war camps. In 1942, the Victory Loan Campaign staged a mock Nazi invasion of Winnipeg to promote awareness of the stakes of the war in Europe. When the war ended, pent-up demand generated a boom in housing development, although building activity was checked by the 1950 Red River flood. The federal government estimated damage at over \$26 million, although the province indicated that it was at least double that. The damage caused by the flood led then-Premier Duff Roblin to advocate for the construction of the Red River Floodway.
Before 1972, Winnipeg was the largest of thirteen cities and towns in a metropolitan area around the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. In 1960, the Metropolitan Corporation of Greater Winnipeg was established to co-ordinate service delivery in the metropolitan region. A consolidated metropolitan "unicity" government incorporating Winnipeg and its surrounding municipalities was established on 27 July 1971, taking effect in 1972. The City of Winnipeg Act incorporated the current city. In 2003, the City of Winnipeg Act was repealed and replaced with the City of Winnipeg Charter.
Winnipeg experienced a severe economic downturn in advance of the early 1980s recession, during which the city incurred closures of prominent businesses, including the Winnipeg Tribune, as well as the Swift's and Canada Packers meat packing plants. In 1981, Winnipeg was one of the first cities in Canada to sign a tripartite agreement with the provincial and federal governments to redevelop its downtown area, and the three levels of government contributed over \$271 million to its development. In 1989, the reclamation and redevelopment of the CNR rail yards turned The Forks into Winnipeg's most popular tourist attraction. The city was threatened by the 1997 Red River flood as well as further floods in 2009 and 2011.
## Geography
Winnipeg lies at the bottom of the Red River Valley, a flood plain with an extremely flat topography. It is on the eastern edge of the Canadian Prairies in Western Canada and is known as the "Gateway to the West". Winnipeg is bordered by tallgrass prairie to the west and south and the aspen parkland to the northeast, although most of the native prairie grasses have been removed for agriculture and urbanization. It is relatively close to many large Canadian Shield lakes and parks, as well as Lake Winnipeg (the Earth's 11th largest freshwater lake). Winnipeg has North America's largest extant mature urban elm forest. The city has an area of 464.08 km<sup>2</sup> (179.18 sq mi).
Winnipeg has four major rivers: the Red, Assiniboine, La Salle and Seine. The city was subject to severe flooding in the past. The Red River reached its greatest flood height in 1826. Another large flood in 1950 caused millions of dollars in damage and mass evacuations. This flood prompted Duff Roblin's provincial government to build the Red River Floodway to protect the city. In the 1997 flood, flood control dikes were reinforced and raised using sandbags; Winnipeg suffered limited damage compared to the flood's impact on cities without such structures, such as Grand Forks, North Dakota. The generally flat terrain and the poor drainage of the Red River Valley's clay-based soil also results in many mosquitoes during wetter years.
### Climate
Winnipeg's location in the Canadian Prairies gives it a warm-summer humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb), with warm, humid summers, and long, severely cold winters. Summers have a July mean average of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F). Winters are the coldest time of year, with the January mean average around −16.4 °C (2.5 °F) and total winter precipitation (December through February) averaging 55.2 mm (2.17 in). Temperatures occasionally drop below −40 °C (−40 °F).
On average there are 317.8 days per year with measurable sunshine, with July seeing the most on average. With 2353 hours of sunshine per year, Winnipeg is the second sunniest city in Canada. Total annual precipitation (both rain and snow) is just over 521 mm (20.5 in). Thunderstorms are very common during summer, and sometimes severe enough to produce tornadoes. Low wind chill values are a common occurrence in the local climate. The wind chill has gone down as low as −57.1 °C (−70.8 °F) and on average there are twelve days of the year that can reach a wind chill below −40 °C (−40 °F).
The highest temperature ever recorded in Winnipeg was during the 1936 North American heat wave. The temperature reached 42.2 °C (108.0 °F) on 11 July 1936 while the highest minimum temperature, recorded on the following day, 12 July 1936, was 28.3 °C (82.9 °F). The apparent heat can be even more extreme due to bursts of humidity, and on 25 July 2007 a humidex reading of 47.3 °C (117.1 °F) was measured.
The frost-free season is comparatively long for a location with such severe winters. The last spring frost is on average around 23 May, while the first fall frost is on 22 September.
### Cityscape
There are officially 236 neighbourhoods in Winnipeg. Downtown Winnipeg, the city's financial heart and economic core, is centred on the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street and covers about 2.6 km<sup>2</sup> (1 sq mi). More than 72,000 people work downtown, and over 40,000 students attend classes at its universities and colleges.
Downtown Winnipeg's Exchange District is named after the area's original grain exchange, which operated from 1880 to 1913. The 30-block district received National Historic Site of Canada status in 1997; it includes North America's most extensive collection of early 20th-century terracotta and cut stone architecture, Stephen Juba Park, and Old Market Square. Other major downtown areas are The Forks, Central Park, Broadway-Assiniboine and Chinatown. Many of Downtown Winnipeg's major buildings are linked with the Winnipeg Walkway. Residential neighbourhoods surround the downtown in all directions; expansion is greatest to the south and west, although several areas remain underdeveloped. The city's largest park, Assiniboine Park, houses the Assiniboine Park Zoo and the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden. Other large city parks include Kildonan Park and St. Vital Park. The city's major commercial areas are Polo Park, Kildonan Crossing, South St. Vital, Garden City (West Kildonan), Pembina Strip, Kenaston Smart Centre, Osborne Village, and the Corydon strip. The main cultural and nightlife areas are the Exchange District, The Forks, Osborne Village and Corydon Village (both in Fort Rouge), Sargent and Ellice Avenues (West End) and Old St. Boniface. Osborne Village is Winnipeg's most densely populated neighbourhood and one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Western Canada.
## Demographics
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Winnipeg had a population of 749,607 living in 300,431 of its 315,465 total private dwellings, a change of 6.3% from its 2016 population of 705,244. With a land area of 461.78 km<sup>2</sup> (178.29 sq mi), it had a population density of in 2021. As of the 2021 census, 16.6 percent of residents were 14 years old or younger, 66.4 percent were between 15 and 64 years old, and 17.0 percent were 65 or over. The average age of a Winnipegger was 40.3.
At the census metropolitan area (CMA) level in the 2021 census, the Winnipeg CMA had a population of 834,678 living in 330,326 of its 347,144 total private dwellings, a change of 6.6% from its 2016 population of 783,099. With a land area of 5,285.46 km<sup>2</sup> (2,040.73 sq mi), it had a population density of in 2021.
Winnipeg represents 54.9% of the population of the province of Manitoba, the highest population concentration in one city of any province in Canada. Apart from the city of Winnipeg, the Winnipeg CMA includes the rural municipalities of Springfield, St. Clements, Taché, East St. Paul, Macdonald, Ritchot, West St. Paul, Headingley, the Brokenhead 4 reserve, Rosser and St. François Xavier. Statistics Canada's estimate of the Winnipeg CMA population as of 1 July 2020 is 850,056, making it the 7th largest CMA in Canada.
Winnipeg has a significant and increasing Indigenous population, with both the highest percentage of Indigenous peoples (12.4%) for any major Canadian city, and the highest total number of Indigenous peoples (90,995) for any single non-reserve municipality. The Aboriginal population grew by 22% between 2001 and 2006, compared to an increase of 3% for the city as a whole; this population tends to be younger and less wealthy than non-Aboriginal residents. Winnipeg also has the highest Métis population in both percentage (6.5%) and numbers (47,915); the growth rate for this population between 2001 and 2006 was 30%.
The 2021 census reported that immigrants comprise 201,040 persons or 27.3% of the total population of Winnipeg. Of the total immigrant population, the top countries of origin were the Philippines (62,100 persons or 30.9%), India (27,605 persons or 13.7%), and China (8,900 persons or 4.4%). The city receives over 10,000 net international immigrants per year. Winnipeg has the greatest percentage of Filipino residents (11.3%) of any major Canadian city, although Toronto has more Filipinos by total population. As of 2021, 34% of residents were of a visible minority.
More than a hundred languages are spoken in Winnipeg, of which the most common is English: 95 percent of Winnipeggers speak English as their first language, and 2.8 percent have a first language of French (Canada's other official language). Other languages spoken as a mother tongue in Winnipeg include Tagalog (6.0%), Punjabi (4.1%), and Mandarin (1.5%). Several Indigenous languages are also spoken, such as Ojibwe (0.2%) and Cree (0.1%).
The 2021 Census reported the religious make-up of Winnipeg as: 50.4% Christian, including 24.0% Catholic, 4.0% United Church, and 2.7% Anglican; 4.4% Sikh; 3.3% Muslim; 2.0% Hindu; 1.5% Jewish; 0.9% Buddhist; 0.4% traditional (aboriginal) spirituality; 0.7% other; and 36.4% no religious affiliation.
## Economy
Winnipeg is an economic base and regional centre. It has a diversified economy, with major employment in the health care and social assistance (14%), retail (11%), manufacturing (8%), and public administration (8%) sectors. There were approximately 450,500 jobs in the city as of 2019. Some of Winnipeg's largest employers are government and government-funded institutions, including the Province of Manitoba, the University of Manitoba, the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba Hydro, and Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Corporation. Major private-sector employers include Canad Corporation of Manitoba, Canada Life Assurance Company, StandardAero, and SkipTheDishes.
According to the Conference Board of Canada, Winnipeg was projected to experience a real GDP growth of 1.9 percent in 2019. Gross Domestic Product was \$43.3 Billion in 2018.
The city had an unemployment rate of 5.3% in 2019, compared to a national rate of 5.7%. Household income per capita was \$47,824, compared to \$49,744 nationally.
The Royal Canadian Mint, established in 1976, produces all circulating coinage in Canada. The facility, located in southeastern Winnipeg, also produces coins for many other countries.
In 2012, Winnipeg was ranked by KPMG as the least expensive location to do business in western Canada. Like many prairie cities, Winnipeg has a relatively low cost of living. The average house price in Winnipeg was \$301,518 as of 2018. As of May 2014, the Consumer Price Index was 125.8 relative to 2002 prices, reflecting consumer costs at the Canadian average.
## Culture
Winnipeg was named the Cultural Capital of Canada in 2010 by Canadian Heritage. As of 2021, there are 26 National Historic Sites of Canada in Winnipeg. One of these, The Forks, attracts four million visitors a year. It is home to the City television studio, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, the Winnipeg International Children's Festival, and the Manitoba Children's Museum. It also features a 2,800 m<sup>2</sup> (30,000 sq ft) skate plaza, a 790 m<sup>2</sup> (8,500 sq ft) bowl complex, which features a mural of Winnipeg skateboarding pioneer Jai Pereira, the Esplanade Riel bridge, a river walkway, Shaw Park, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The Winnipeg Public Library is a public library network with 20 branches throughout the city, including the main Millennium Library.
Winnipeg the Bear, which would become the inspiration for part of the name of Winnie-the-Pooh, was purchased in Ontario by Lieutenant Harry Colebourn of the Fort Garry Horse. He named the bear after the regiment's home town of Winnipeg. A. A. Milne later wrote a series of books featuring the fictional Winnie-the-Pooh. The series' illustrator, Ernest H. Shepard, created the only known oil painting of Winnipeg's adopted fictional bear, displayed in Assiniboine Park.
The city has developed many distinct dishes and cooking styles, notably in the areas of confectionery and hot-smoked fish. Both the First Nations and more recent Eastern Canadian, European, and Asian immigrants have helped shape Winnipeg's dining scene, giving birth to dishes such as the desserts schmoo torte and wafer pie.
The Winnipeg Art Gallery is Western Canada's oldest public art gallery, founded in 1912. It is the sixth-largest in the country and includes the world's largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art. Since the late 1970s Winnipeg has also had an active artist run centre culture.
Winnipeg's three largest performing arts venues, the Centennial Concert Hall, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and the Pantages Playhouse Theatre, are downtown. The Royal Manitoba is Canada's oldest English-language regional theatre, with over 250 performances yearly. The Pantages Playhouse Theatre opened as a vaudeville house in 1913. Other city theatres include the Burton Cummings Theatre (a National Historic Site of Canada built in 1906) and Prairie Theatre Exchange. Le Cercle Molière, based in St Boniface, is Canada's oldest theatre company; it was founded in 1925. Rainbow Stage is a musical theatre production company based in Kildonan Park that produces professional, live Broadway musical shows and is Canada's longest-surviving outdoor theatre. The Manitoba Theatre for Young People at The Forks is one of only two Theatres for Young Audiences in Canada with a permanent residence and the only Theatre for Young Audiences that offers a full season of plays for teenagers. The Winnipeg Jewish Theatre is the only professional theatre in Canada dedicated to Jewish themes. Shakespeare in the Ruins (SIR) presents adaptations of Shakespeare plays.
Winnipeg has hosted numerous Hollywood productions: Shall We Dance? (2004), Capote (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and A Dog's Purpose (2017), among others were filmed in the city. The Winnipeg Film Group has produced numerous award-winning films. There are several TV and film production companies in Winnipeg: the most prominent are Farpoint Films, Frantic Films, Buffalo Gal Pictures, and Les Productions Rivard. Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, an independent film released in 2008, is a comedic rumination on the city's history.
The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra is the largest and oldest professional musical ensemble in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Chamber Orchestra runs a series of chamber orchestral concerts each year. Manitoba Opera is Manitoba's only full-time professional opera company. Among the most notable musical acts associated with Winnipeg are Bachman–Turner Overdrive, The Guess Who, Neil Young, The Weakerthans, the Crash Test Dummies, Propagandhi, Bif Naked, and The Watchmen among many others. Winnipeg also has a significant place in Canadian jazz history, being the location of Canada's first jazz concert in 1914 at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre.
The Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) is Canada's oldest ballet company and the longest continuously operating ballet company in North America. It was the first organization to be granted a royal title by Queen Elizabeth II, and has included notable dancers such as Evelyn Hart and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The RWB also runs a full-time classical dance school.
The Manitoba Museum, the city's largest museum, depicts the history of the city and province. The full-size replica of the ship Nonsuch is the museum's showcase piece. The Manitoba Children's Museum is a nonprofit children's museum at The Forks that features twelve permanent galleries. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is the only Canadian national museum for human rights and the only national museum west of Ottawa. The federal government contributed \$100 million towards the estimated \$311-million project. Construction of the museum began on 1 April 2008, and the museum opened to the public 27 September 2014.
The Western Canada Aviation Museum, in a hangar at Winnipeg's James Richardson International Airport, features military jets, commercial aircraft, Canada's first helicopter, the "flying saucer" Avrocar, flight simulators, and a Black Brant rocket built in Manitoba by Bristol Aerospace. The Winnipeg Railway Museum at Via Rail Station has a variety of locomotives, notably the Countess of Dufferin, the first steam locomotive in Western Canada.
### Festivals
Festival du Voyageur, Western Canada's largest winter festival, celebrates the early French explorers of the Red River Valley. Folklorama is the largest and longest-running cultural celebration festival in the world. The Jazz Winnipeg Festival and the Winnipeg Folk Festival both celebrate Winnipeg's music community. The Winnipeg Music Festival offers a competition venue to amateur musicians. The Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival is the second-largest alternative theatre festival in North America. The Winnipeg International Writers Festival (also called THIN AIR) brings writers to Winnipeg for workshops and readings. The LGBT community in the city is served by Pride Winnipeg, an annual gay pride festival and parade, and Reel Pride, a film festival of LGBT-themed films.
### Sports
Winnipeg has been home to several professional hockey teams. The Winnipeg Jets of the National Hockey League (NHL) have called the city home since 2011. The original Winnipeg Jets, the city's former NHL team, left for Phoenix, Arizona after the 1995–96 season due to mounting financial troubles, despite a campaign effort to "Save the Jets". The new Jets play at Canada Life Centre, which is ranked the world's 19th-busiest arena among non-sporting touring events, 13th-busiest among facilities in North America, and 3rd-busiest in Canada as of 2009.
Past hockey teams based in Winnipeg include the Winnipeg Maroons, Winnipeg Warriors, three time Stanley Cup Champion Winnipeg Victorias and the Winnipeg Falcons, who were the first ever Gold Medal Olympians, representing Canada in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium. Another professional ice hockey team in Winnipeg is the Manitoba Moose, the American Hockey League primary affiliate of the Winnipeg Jets that are owned by the same group. On the international stage, Winnipeg has hosted national and world hockey championships on a number of occasions, most notably the 1999 World Junior Hockey Championship and 2007 Women's World Hockey Championship. The city is also home to the Manitoba Herd National Ringette League team.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers play in the Canadian Football League. They are twelve-time Grey Cup champions, their last championship coming in 2021. From 1953 to 2012, the Blue Bombers called Canad Inns Stadium home; they have since moved to IG Field, which opened in 2013. The \$200-million facility is also the home to U Sports' University of Manitoba Bisons and the Winnipeg Rifles of the Canadian Junior Football League. Winnipeg is the only city with two women's football teams in the Western Women's Canadian Football League: the Manitoba Fearless and the Winnipeg Wolfpack. The University of Manitoba Bisons and the University of Winnipeg Wesmen represent the city in university-level sports. In soccer, it is represented by both Valour FC in the new Canadian Premier League and FC Manitoba in the USL League Two. Winnipeg has been home to several professional baseball teams, most recently the Winnipeg Goldeyes since 1994. The Goldeyes play at Shaw Park, which was completed in 1999. The team had led the Northern League for ten straight years in average attendance through 2010, with more than 300,000 annual fan visits, until the league collapsed and merged into the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball.
Winnipeg was the first Canadian city to host the Pan American Games, and the second city to host the event twice, in 1967 and again in 1999. The Pan Am Pool, built for the 1967 Pan Am Games, hosts aquatic events, including diving, speed swimming, synchronized swimming and water polo. Other notable sporting events hosted by Winnipeg include the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup (co-hosted with Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Moncton) the 2017 Canada Summer Games and the 2023 World Police and Fire Games.
## Local media
Winnipeg has two daily newspapers: the Winnipeg Free Press and the Winnipeg Sun. There are also several ethnic weekly newspapers.
Radio broadcasting in Winnipeg began in 1922; by 1923, government-owned CKY held a monopoly position that lasted until after the Second World War. Winnipeg is home to 33 AM and FM radio stations, two of which are French-language stations. CBC Radio One and CBC Radio 2 broadcast local and national programming in the city. NCI is devoted to Indigenous programming.
Television broadcasting in Winnipeg started in 1954. The federal government refused to license any private broadcaster until the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had created a national network. In May 1954, CBWT went on the air with four hours of broadcasting per day. There are now five English-language stations and one French-language station based in Winnipeg. Additionally, some American network affiliates are available over-the-air.
## Law and government
Since 1992, the city of Winnipeg has been represented by 15 city councillors and a mayor, both elected every four years. The present mayor, Scott Gillingham, was first elected to office in 2022. The city is a single-tier municipality, governed by a mayor-council system. The structure of the municipal government is set by the provincial legislature in the City of Winnipeg Charter Act, which replaced the old City of Winnipeg Act in 2003. The mayor is elected by direct popular vote to serve as the chief executive of the city. At Council meetings, the mayor has one of 16 votes. The city governance functions off the "strong-mayor" model which allows for a "two tiered system" or voting block between the councillors who are on or not on the Executive Policy Committee. The City Council is a unicameral legislative body, representing geographical wards throughout the city. In provincial politics, Winnipeg is represented by 32 of the 57 provincial Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in the 42nd Manitoba Legislature. As of 2019, Winnipeg districts are represented by 15 members of the Progressive Conservative Party, 14 by the New Democratic Party (NDP), and 3 by the Liberal Party.
In federal politics, as of 2019 Winnipeg is represented by eight Members of Parliament: four Liberals, two Conservatives and two New Democrat. There are five Senators representing Manitoba in Ottawa (plus one seat vacant as of April 2021).
### Crime
From 2007 to 2011, Winnipeg was the "murder capital" of Canada, with the highest per-capita rate of homicides; as of 2022, with a homicide rate of 7.2 per 100,000, it is in second place, behind Thunder Bay (13.7 per 100,000). In 2019, Winnipeg had the 13th-highest violent crime index in Canada, and the highest robbery rate. Winnipeg was the "violent crime capital" of Canada in 2020 according to the Statistics Canada police-reported violent crime severity index. Despite high overall violent crime rates, crime in Winnipeg is mostly concentrated in the inner city, which makes up only 19% of the population but was the site of 86.4% of the city's shootings, 66.5% of the robberies, 63.3% of the homicides and 59.5% of the sexual assaults in 2012.
From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, Winnipeg had a significant auto-theft problem, with the rate peaking at 2,165.0 per 100,000 residents in 2006 compared to 487 auto-thefts per 100,000 residents for Canada as a whole. To combat auto theft, Manitoba Public Insurance established financial incentives for motor vehicle owners to install ignition immobilizers in their vehicles, and now requires owners of high-risk vehicles to install immobilizers. These initiatives resulted in an 80% decrease in auto thefts between 2006 and 2011.
As of 2018, the Winnipeg Police Service had 1,914 police officers, which is one officer per 551 city residents, and cost taxpayers \$290,564,015. In November 2013, the national police union reviewed the Winnipeg Police Force and found high average response times for several categories of calls. In 2017, the city started to deal with an increasingly large methamphetamine problem, fuelling violent crime.
## Education
Winnipeg has seven school divisions: Winnipeg School Division, St. James-Assiniboia School Division, Pembina Trails School Division, Seven Oaks School Division, Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine, River East Transcona School Division, and Louis Riel School Division. Winnipeg also has several religious and secular private schools.
The University of Manitoba is the largest university in Manitoba. It was founded in 1877, making it Western Canada's first university. In a typical year, the university has 26,500 undergraduate students and 3,800 graduate students. Université de Saint-Boniface is the city's French-language university. The University of Winnipeg received its charter in 1967. Until 2007, it was an undergraduate institution that offered some joint graduate studies programs; it now offers independent graduate programs. The Canadian Mennonite University is a private Mennonite undergraduate university established in 1999.
Winnipeg also has two independent colleges: Red River College Polytechnic and Booth University College. Red River College offers diploma, certificate, and apprenticeship programs and, starting in 2009, began offering some degree programs. Booth University College is a private Christian Salvation Army university college established in 1982. It offers mostly arts and seminary training.
## Infrastructure
### Transportation
Winnipeg has had public transit since 1882, starting with horse-drawn streetcars. They were replaced by electric trolley cars. The trolley cars ran from 1892 to 1955, supplemented by motor buses after 1918, and electric trolleybuses from 1938 to 1970. Winnipeg Transit now runs diesel buses on its routes.
Winnipeg is a railway hub and is served by Via Rail at Union Station for passenger rail, and Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Manitoba, and the Central Manitoba Railway for freight rail. It is the only major city between Vancouver and Thunder Bay with direct US connections by rail.
Winnipeg is the largest and best connected city within Manitoba, and has highways leading in all directions from the city. To the south, Winnipeg is connected to the United States via Provincial Trunk Highway 75 (PTH 75) (a continuation of I-29 and US 75, known as Pembina Highway or Route 42 within Winnipeg). The highway runs 107 km (66 mi) to Emerson, Manitoba, and is the busiest Canada–United States border crossing on the Prairies. The four-lane Perimeter Highway, built in 1969, serves as a Ring Road, with at-grade intersections and a few interchanges. It allows travellers on the Trans-Canada Highway to bypass the city. The Trans-Canada Highway runs east to west through the city (city route), or circles around the city on the Perimeter Highway (beltway). Some of the city's major arterial roads include Route 80 (Waverley St.), Route 155 (McGillivray Blvd), Route 165 (Bishop Grandin Blvd.), Route 17 (Chief Peguis Trail), and Route 90 (Brookside Blvd., Oak Point Hwy., King Edward St., Century St., Kenaston Blvd.).
The Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport completed a \$585-million redevelopment in October 2011. The development brought a new terminal, a four-level parking facility, and other infrastructure improvements. Winnipeg Bus Terminal, at Winnipeg International Airport, previously served by Greyhound Canada (through its subsidiary Grey Goose Bus Lines), Winnipeg Shuttle Service and Brandon Air Shuttle. Since Greyhound's exit from Western Canada, very few remaining routes still serve the terminal.
Approximately 8,100 ha (20,000 acres) of land to the north and west of the airport has been designated as an inland port, CentrePort Canada, and is Canada's first Foreign Trade Zone. It is a private sector initiative to develop the infrastructure for Manitoba's trucking, air, rail and sea industries. In 2009, construction began on a \$212-million four-lane freeway to connect CentrePort with the Perimeter Highway. Named CentrePort Canada Way, it opened in November 2013.
Several taxi companies serve Winnipeg, the largest being Unicity, Duffy's Taxi and Spring Taxi. Ride sharing was legalized in March 2018 and services including Uber operate in Winnipeg. Cycling is popular in Winnipeg, and there are many bicycle trails and lanes around the city. Winnipeg holds an annual Bike-to-Work Day and Cyclovia, and bicycle commuters may be seen year-round, even in the winter. Active living infrastructure in Winnipeg includes bike lanes and sharrows.
### Medical centres and hospitals
Winnipeg's major hospitals include Health Sciences Centre, Concordia Hospital, Deer Lodge Centre, Grace Hospital, Saint Boniface General Hospital, Seven Oaks General Hospital, Victoria General Hospital, and The Children's Hospital of Winnipeg.
The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg is one of only a handful of biosafety level 4 microbiology laboratories in the world. The NML houses laboratories of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, in the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease collocated in the same facility. Research facilities are also operated through hospitals and private biotechnology companies in the city.
### Utilities
Water and sewage services are provided by the city. The city draws its water via an aqueduct from Shoal Lake, treating and fluoridating it at the Deacon Reservoir just outside the city prior to pumping it into the Winnipeg system. The city's system has over 2,500 km (1,600 mi) of underground water mains, which are subject to breakage due to corrosion and pressure from extreme dry, wet, or cold soil conditions.
Electricity and natural gas are provided by Manitoba Hydro, a provincial crown corporation headquartered in the city; it uses primarily hydroelectric power. The primary telecommunications carrier is Bell MTS, although other corporations offer telephone, cellular, television and internet services.
Winnipeg contracts out several services to private companies, including garbage and recycling collection and street plowing and snow removal. This practice represents a significant budget expenditure. The services have faced numerous complaints from residents about missed service.
## Military
Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg, co-located at the airport, is home to many flight operations support divisions and several training schools. It is also the headquarters of 1 Canadian Air Division and the Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Region, as well as the home base of 17 Wing of the Canadian Forces. The Wing comprises three squadrons and six schools; it also provides support to the Central Flying School. Excluding the three levels of government, 17 Wing is the fourth largest employer in the city. The Wing supports 113 units, stretching from Thunder Bay to the Saskatchewan–Alberta border, and from the 49th parallel to the high Arctic. 17 Wing also acts as a deployed operating base for CF-18 Hornet fighter-bombers assigned to the Canadian NORAD Region.
There are two squadrons based in the city. The 402 "City of Winnipeg" Squadron flies the Canadian-designed and produced de Havilland CT-142 Dash 8 navigation trainer. The 435 "Chinthe" Transport and Rescue Squadron flies the Lockheed CC-130 Hercules in airlift search and rescue roles. In addition, 435 Squadron is the only Royal Canadian Air Force squadron equipped and trained to conduct tactical air-to-air refuelling of fighter aircraft.
There are several units of the Canadian Army Primary Reserve based in Winnipeg. These include The Royal Winnipeg Rifles, The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada, 38 Service Battalion, 38 Combat Engineer Regiment, 38 Signal Regiment, and The Fort Garry Horse. HMCS Chippawa is a Royal Canadian Navy reserve division in Winnipeg.
For many years, Winnipeg was the home of the Second Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Initially, the battalion was based at the Fort Osborne Barracks, now the location of the Rady Jewish Community Centre. They eventually moved to the Kapyong Barracks between River Heights and Tuxedo. Since 2004, the battalion has operated out of CFB Shilo near Brandon.
## See also
- List of people from Winnipeg
- Municipal waste management in Winnipeg
- Winnipeg (automobile)
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Early life and military career of John McCain
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Events in the life of McCain from 1936 to 1981
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The early life and military career of John Sidney McCain III spans the first forty-five years of his life (1936–1981). McCain's father and grandfather were admirals in the United States Navy. McCain was born on August 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, and attended many schools growing up as his family moved among naval facilities. McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He married the former Carol Shepp in 1965; he adopted two children from her previous marriage and they had another child together.
As a naval aviator, McCain flew attack aircraft from carriers. During the Vietnam War, he narrowly escaped death in the 1967 Forrestal fire. On his twenty-third bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder in October 1967, he was shot down over Hanoi and badly injured. He subsequently endured five and a half years as a prisoner of war, including periods of torture. In 1968, he refused a North Vietnamese offer of early release, because it would have meant leaving before other prisoners who had been held longer. He was released in 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords.
Upon his return, McCain studied at the National War College, commanded a large training squadron in Florida, and was appointed the Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate. He divorced his wife Carol in 1980 and married the former Cindy Hensley shortly thereafter. He retired from the Navy in 1981 as a captain.
## Early years and education
### Family heritage
John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936, at a United States Navy hospital at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, which at that time was considered to be among the unincorporated territories of the United States. His parents were Navy officer John S. "Jack" McCain, Jr. (1911–1981) and Roberta (Wright) McCain (1912-2020). McCain was of Scots-Irish and English ancestry.
John McCain's grandparents were natives of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas, and much of his ancestry was Southern on both his mother's side and father's side. The McCain family's patrilineal ancestral home is in Mississippi's Carroll County; they owned and ran a 2,000-acre (8.1 km<sup>2</sup>) plantation in Teoc from 1848 until 1952. The plantation had slaves before the American Civil War – some of whose descendants share the surname and call themselves the "black McCains" – and sharecroppers afterward; influential blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt was born on the plantation to one of the latter.
The McCain family tree has a long heritage of American military service, with ancestors fighting as soldiers in the Indian Wars, American Revolutionary War (due to which McCain maintained a membership with the Sons of the American Revolution), War of 1812, for the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War, and in World War I. The tree also includes roguish behavior and economic success. John McCain's maternal grandfather, Archibald Wright (1875–1971), was a Mississippi native who migrated to Muskogee, Oklahoma, in his twenties, ran afoul of the law with several gambling and bootlegging charges, then became a strong-willed wildcatter who prospered on land deals during the early statehood years and struck oil in the Southwest. Rich by age forty, he never worked again and became a stay-at-home father. Raising a family in Oklahoma and Southern California, he instilled in Roberta and her twin sister Rowena a lifelong habit of travel and adventure. There is also independent-minded behavior in the family tree: Jack McCain and Roberta Wright eloped and married in a bar in Tijuana, Mexico, when Archibald Wright's wife Myrtle objected to Roberta's association with a sailor.
McCain's father and paternal grandfather eventually became Navy admirals, and were the first father–son pair to achieve four-star admiral rank. His grandfather, Admiral John S. "Slew" McCain, Sr. (1884–1945), was a pioneer of aircraft carrier operations who in 1942 commanded all land-based air operations in support of the Guadalcanal Campaign, and who ultimately in 1944–1945 aggressively led the Fast Carrier Task Force in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II. His operations off the Philippines and Okinawa, and air strikes against Formosa and the Japanese home islands, caused tremendous destruction of Japanese naval and air forces in the closing period of the war. His death four days after the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay was front-page news. Jack McCain was a submarine commander in several theaters of operation in World War II and was decorated with both the Silver Star Medal and Bronze Star Medal.
### Early life
For his first ten years, "Johnny" McCain (the nickname he was given as part of a family tradition of distinguishing the generations) was frequently uprooted as his family, including older sister Sandy (1934–2019) and younger brother Joe (born 1942), followed his father to New London, Connecticut, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and other stations in the Pacific Ocean. Summer vacations were sometimes spent at the family's Teoc plantation, but McCain always felt his heritage was military, not Southern. McCain attended whatever naval base school was available, often to the detriment of his education, as schools were sometimes substandard and their curricula often erratic. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, his father was absent for long stretches. His formal education was supplemented by the efforts of his mother, who took advantage of the family's many long-distance travels to expose him to historical and cultural sites. He later wrote, "She taught me to find so much pleasure in life that misfortune could not rob me of the joy of living." A Republican, she also made sure that he followed current events, although his parents avoided outward partisan affiliations due to his father's military career.
After World War II ended, his father stayed in the Navy, sometimes working political liaison posts. The family settled in Northern Virginia, and McCain attended the educationally stronger St. Stephen's School in Alexandria from 1946 to 1949. To his family, McCain had long been quiet, dependable, and courteous, while at St. Stephen's he began to develop an unruly, defiant streak. Another two years were then spent following his father to naval stations; altogether he attended about twenty schools during his youth. He was frequently disciplined in school for fighting. He later wrote, "The repeated farewells to friends rank among the saddest regrets of a childhood constantly disrupted by the demands of my father's career... At each new school I arrived eager to make, by means of my insolent attitude, new friends to compensate for the loss of others. At each new school I grew more determined to assert my crude individualism. At each new school I became a more unrepentant pain in the neck."
In 1951, McCain enrolled at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, an academically superior, all-male private boarding school with a rigorous honor code, tradition of hazing, and spartan living environment. Most of the children there were sons of wealthy Southerners, from whom McCain got a glimpse of life and career aspirations outside the Navy culture. Nicknamed "Punk" and "McNasty" due to his combative, fiery disposition, McCain enjoyed and cultivated a tough guy image; he also made a few friends. McCain earned two varsity letters in wrestling, excelling in the lighter weight classes. He also played on the junior varsity football team and the tennis team, and participated in the student newspaper, yearbook, and drama club. English teacher William Bee Ravenel III, who was also his football coach, became a great influence towards his sense of learning, honor, and self-image. With what he later termed an "undistinguished, but acceptable" academic record, McCain graduated from high school in 1954.
### Naval Academy
Having done well on its entrance exams, McCain entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in June 1954, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He had neither been ordered to go there by his parents nor discussed alternatives; as he later wrote, "I remember simply recognizing my eventual enrollment at the Academy as an immutable fact of life, and accepting it without comment."
Ambivalent about his presence there, McCain chose not to conform to the Academy's rules and some of its traditions. Each year he was given over a hundred demerits – earning him membership in the "Century Club" – for offenses such as shoes not being shined, formation faults, room in disorder, and talking out of place. His father came to the Academy to reprimand him on his behavior a number of times. He hated "plebe year", the trial by ordeal and hazing of entering midshipmen that would eventually weed out one quarter of the class. He did not take well to those of higher rank arbitrarily wielding power over him – "It was bullshit, and I resented the hell out of it" – and occasionally intervened when he saw it being done to others. At 5-foot 7 inches and 127 pounds (1.70 m and 58 kg), he competed as a lightweight boxer for three years, where he lacked skills but was fearless and "didn't have a reverse gear". In his final year, he managed the battalion boxing team to a brigade championship.
Possessed of a strong intelligence, McCain did well in a few subjects that interested him, such as English literature, history, and government. There was a fixed Bachelor of Science curriculum taken by all midshipmen; McCain's classmates were impressed by his cramming abilities on mathematics, science, and engineering courses and thought his low grades were by inclination and not ability, while McCain would later acknowledge that those courses were a struggle for him. His class rank was further lowered by poor grades for conduct and leadership, which reflected his sloppy appearance, rebellious attitude, and poor relations with his company officer. Despite his low standing, McCain was popular and a leader among his fellow midshipmen, in what writer Robert Timberg, in his acclaimed 1995 work The Nightingale's Song, called a "manic, intuitive, highly idiosyncratic way". Good at attracting women, McCain was famed for organizing off-Yard activities with a group who called themselves "the Bad Bunch"; one classmate said that "being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck." Other midshipmen were annoyed by his behavior. A June 1957 training cruise aboard the destroyer USS Hunt found McCain showing good skills at the conn, and the destination stop in Rio de Janeiro led to a dream-like romance with Brazilian fashion model and ballerina Maria Gracinda that persisted through a Christmastime reunion.
McCain graduated from the Naval Academy in June 1958; he was fifth from the bottom in class rank, 894th out of 899. Despite his difficulties, McCain later wrote that he never defamed the more compelling traditions of the Academy – courage, resilience, honor, and sacrifice for one's country – and he never wavered in his desire to show his father and family that he was of the same mettle as his naval forebears. Indeed, Slew and Jack McCain had not had sterling records at the Academy themselves, finishing in the bottom third and bottom twentieth respectively. McCain realized later that the Academy had taught him that "to sustain my self-respect for a lifetime it would be necessary for me to have the honor of serving something greater than my self-interest", a lesson that he would need to carry him through a "desperate and uncertain" time a decade later.
## Military career
### Naval training, early assignments, first marriage, and children
McCain was commissioned an ensign on June 4, 1958. He spent two years as a naval aviator in training, first at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida through September 1959, and then at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, during which time he was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. He earned a reputation as a party man, as he drove a Corvette, dated an exotic dancer named "Marie the Flame of Florida", spent all his free time on the beach or in a Bachelor Officer Quarters room turned bar and friendly gambling den, and, as he later said, "generally misused my good health and youth". He began as a sub-par flier: he had limited patience for studying aviation manuals, and spent study time reading history books instead. He was not assigned to the elite units flying fighter aircraft, and instead became a pilot of attack aircraft. During a March 1960 practice run in Texas, he lost track of his altitude and speed, and his single-seat, single-engine, piston-driven AD-6 Skyraider crashed into Corpus Christi Bay and sank to the bottom. Although momentarily knocked unconscious by the impact, he squeezed out of the cockpit and swam ten feet to the surface, escaping without major injuries. He graduated from flight school at Corpus Christi in May 1960. He joined squadron VA-42 at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia for five months of further training on the Skyraider.
Starting in November 1960, McCain flew Skyraiders with the VA-65 "World Famous Fighting Tigers" squadron on the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and USS Enterprise. The carriers were based at Naval Station Norfolk and cruised in the Caribbean and in several deployments to the Mediterranean. His aviation skills improved, but around December 1961 he collided with power lines while flying recklessly low over southern Spain. The area suffered a power outage, but McCain was able to return his damaged Skyraider to Intrepid.
On board for Enterprise'''s maiden voyage in January 1962, McCain gained visibility with the captain and shipboard publicity that fellow sailors and aviators attributed to his famous last name. McCain was made a lieutenant in June 1962, and was on alert duty on Enterprise when it helped enforce the naval quarantine of Cuba during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In November 1963, he was rotated back to shore duty, serving nine months on the staff of the Naval Air Basic Training Command at Pensacola. In September 1964, he became a flight instructor with the VT-7 training squadron at Naval Air Station Meridian in Mississippi, where McCain Field had been named for his grandfather.
During the 1964 stint at Pensacola, McCain began a relationship with Carol Shepp, a successful swimwear and runway model originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They had known each other at the Naval Academy and she had married and then divorced one of his classmates. McCain told her he wanted to do something important with his life, so he would be recorded in history. On July 3, 1965, McCain married Shepp in Philadelphia. She already had two children, Douglas and Andrew, born in 1959 and 1962 respectively; he adopted them in 1966. Carol and he then had a daughter named Sidney in September 1966.
In the summer of 1965, McCain appeared as a contestant on the television quiz show Jeopardy! (during the Art Fleming era). McCain won the first day, but lost on the second day. He later recalled Final Jeopardy making the difference, where the clue was "Cathy loves him, but she married Edgar Linton instead". McCain knew the novel in question, writing down "What is Wuthering Heights?", but the clue was looking for the specific character, "Who is Heathcliff?"
In November 1965, he had his third accident when apparent engine failure in his T-2 Buckeye trainer jet over the Eastern Shore of Virginia led to his ejecting safely before his plane crashed. While at Meridian, McCain requested a combat assignment. In October 1966, he was slated for upcoming Vietnam War duty, and so reported to the VA-44 Replacement Air Group squadron at Naval Air Station Cecil Field in Florida for training on the A-4 Skyhawk, a single-seat jet attack aircraft. There McCain was seen as a good pilot, albeit one who tended to "push the envelope" in his flying. Promoted to lieutenant commander in January 1967, McCain joined the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal by May 1967, flying Skyhawks with the VA-46 "Clansmen" squadron. Forrestal conducted training exercises in the Atlantic early in the year, then set sail for the Pacific in June. By this time, Jack McCain had risen in the ranks, making rear admiral in 1958 and vice admiral in 1963; in May 1967, he was promoted to four-star admiral, and became Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, stationed in London.
### Vietnam operations
On July 25, 1967, Forrestal reached Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin and joined Operation Rolling Thunder, the 1965–68 air interdiction and strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. By the end of 1966, Rolling Thunder was not meeting its most important goals. Accordingly, for 1967 an emphasized focus was placed on strategic industrial and resupply targets such as power plants, port facilities, and the like, including some targets that had previously been deemed too politically sensitive to attack. In particular, the alpha strikes flown from Forrestal were against specific, pre-selected targets such as arms depots, factories, and bridges. The flights were quite dangerous, due to the strength of the North Vietnamese air defenses, which used Soviet-designed and -supplied surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, and MiG jet interceptors. McCain's first five attack missions over North Vietnam went without incident, and while still unconcerned with minor Navy regulations, McCain had garnered the reputation of a serious aviator. McCain and his fellow pilots were frustrated by the micromanagement of Rolling Thunder from Washington; he later wrote, "The target list was so restricted that we had to go back and hit the same targets over and over again... Most of our pilots flying the missions believed that our targets were virtually worthless. In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn't have the least notion of what it took to win the war."
McCain was almost killed on board Forrestal on July 29, 1967. While the air wing was preparing to launch attacks, a Zuni rocket from an F-4 Phantom accidentally fired across the carrier's deck. The rocket struck either McCain's A-4E Skyhawk or one near it. The impact ruptured the Skyhawk's fuel tank, which ignited the fuel and knocked two bombs loose. McCain later said, "I thought my aircraft exploded. Flames were everywhere." McCain escaped from his jet by climbing out of the cockpit, working himself to the nose of the jet, and jumping off its refueling probe onto the burning deck. His flight suit caught on fire as he rolled through the flames, but he was able to put it out. He went to help another pilot trying to escape the fire when the first bomb exploded; McCain was thrown backwards ten feet (three meters) and suffered minor wounds when struck in the legs and chest by fragments. McCain helped crewmen throw unexploded bombs overboard off the hangar deck elevator, then went to Forrestal's ready room and with other pilots watched the ensuing fire and the fire-fighting efforts on the room's closed-circuit television. The fire killed 134 sailors, injured scores of others, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and took 24 hours to control. In Saigon a day after the conflagration, McCain praised the heroism of enlisted men who gave their lives trying to save the pilots on deck, and told The New York Times reporter R. W. Apple Jr., "It's a difficult thing to say. But now that I've seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." But such a change of course was unlikely; as McCain added, "I always wanted to be in the Navy. I was born into it and I never really considered another profession. But I always had trouble with the regimentation."
As Forrestal headed to port for repairs, McCain volunteered to join the undermanned VA-163 "Saints" squadron on board the USS Oriskany. This carrier had earlier endured its own deck fire disaster and its squadrons had suffered some of the heaviest losses during Rolling Thunder. The Saints had a reputation for aggressive, daring attacks, but paid the price: in 1967, one-third of their pilots were killed or captured, and all of their original fifteen A-4s had been destroyed. After taking some leave in Europe and back home in Orange Park, Florida, McCain joined Oriskany on September 30, 1967, for a tour he expected would finish early the next summer. He volunteered to fly the squadron's most dangerous missions right away, rather than work his way up to them. During October 1967, the pilots operated in constant twelve-hour on, twelve-hour off shifts. McCain would be awarded a Navy Commendation Medal for leading his air section through heavy enemy fire during an October 18 raid on the Lac Trai shipyard in Haiphong. On October 25, McCain successfully attacked the Phúc Yên Air Base north of Hanoi through a barrage of anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile fire; credited with destroying one aircraft on the ground and damaging two, the raid would garner him the Air Medal. Air defenses around Hanoi were at this point the strongest they would be during the entire war.
### Prisoner of war
#### Arrival
On October 26, 1967, McCain was flying his twenty-third mission, part of a twenty-plane strike force against the Yen Phu thermal power plant in central Hanoi that previously had almost always been off-limits to U.S. raids due to the possibility of collateral damage. Arriving just before noon, McCain dove from 9,000 to 4,000 feet on his approach; as he neared the target, warning systems in McCain's A-4E Skyhawk alerted him that he was being tracked by enemy fire-control radar. Like other U.S. pilots in similar situations, he did not break off the bombing run, and he held his dive until he released his bombs at about 3,500 feet (1,000 m). As he started to pull up, the Skyhawk's wing was blown off by a Soviet-made SA-2 anti-aircraft missile fired by the North Vietnamese Air Defense Command's 61st Battalion, commanded by Captain Nguyen Lan assisted by fire control officer Lieutenant Nguyen Xuan Dai. (McCain was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for this day, while Nguyen Xuan Dai was awarded the title Hero of the People's Armed Forces. Decades later, Soviet Army Lieutenant Yuri Trushechkin claimed that he had been the missile guidance officer who had shot McCain down. In any case, the raid was a failure, as the power plant was not damaged and three of the attacking planes were shot down.)
McCain's plane went into a vertical inverted spin. McCain bailed out upside down at high speed; the force of the ejection fractured his right arm in three places, his left arm, and his right leg at the knee, and knocked him unconscious. McCain nearly drowned after parachuting into Trúc Bạch Lake in Hanoi; the weight of his equipment was pulling him down, and as he regained consciousness, he could not use his arms. Eventually, he was able to inflate his life vest using his teeth. Several Vietnamese, possibly led by Department of Industry clerk Mai Van On, pulled him ashore. A mob gathered around, spat on him, kicked him, and stripped him of his clothes; his left shoulder was crushed with the butt of a rifle and he was bayoneted in his left foot and left groin area. He was then transported to Hanoi's main Hỏa Lò Prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by American POWs.
McCain reached Hỏa Lò in as bad a physical condition as any prisoner during the war. His captors refused to give him medical care unless he gave them military information; they beat and interrogated him, but McCain only offered his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth (the only information he was required to provide under the Geneva Conventions and permitted to give under the U.S. Code of Conduct). Soon thinking he was near death, McCain said he would give them more information if taken to the hospital, hoping he could then put his interrogators off once he was treated. A prison doctor came and said it was too late, as McCain was about to die anyway. Only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a high-ranking admiral did they give him medical care, calling him "the crown prince". Two days after McCain's plane went down, that event and his status as a POW made the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Interrogation and beatings resumed in the hospital; McCain gave the North Vietnamese his ship's name, squadron's name, and the attack's intended target. This information, along with personal details of McCain's life and purported statements by McCain about the war's progress, would appear over the next two weeks in the North Vietnamese official newspaper Nhân Dân as well as in dispatches from outlets such as the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Disclosing the military information was in violation of the Code of Conduct, which McCain later wrote he regretted, although he saw the information as being of no practical use to the North Vietnamese. Further coerced to give future targets, he named cities that had already been bombed, and responding to demands for the names of his squadron's members, he supplied instead the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line.
McCain spent six weeks in the hospital, receiving marginal care in a dirty, wet environment. A prolonged attempt to set the fractures on his right arm, done without anesthetic, was unsuccessful; he received an operation on his broken leg but no treatment for his broken left arm. He was temporarily taken to a clean room and interviewed by a French journalist, François Chalais, whose report was carried on the French television program Panorama in January 1968 and later in the U.S. on the CBS Evening News. The film footage of McCain lying in the bed, in a cast, smoking cigarettes and speaking haltingly, would become one of the most widely distributed images of McCain's imprisonment. McCain was observed by a variety of North Vietnamese, including renowned Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Tuân and Defense Minister and Army commander-in-chief General Võ Nguyên Giáp. Many of the North Vietnamese observers assumed that McCain must be part of America's political-military-economic elite. Now having lost fifty pounds (twenty-three kilograms), in a chest cast, covered in grime and eyes full of fever, and with his hair turned white, in early December 1967 McCain was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Hanoi nicknamed "the Plantation". He was placed in a cell with George "Bud" Day, a badly injured and tortured Air Force pilot (later awarded the Medal of Honor) and Norris Overly, another Air Force pilot; they did not expect McCain to live another week. Overly, and subsequently Day, nursed McCain and kept him alive; Day later recalled that McCain had "a fantastic will to live".
#### Solitary
In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he remained for two years. Unknown to the POWs, in April 1968, Jack McCain was named Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC) effective in July, stationed in Honolulu and commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater. In mid-June, Major Bai, commander of the North Vietnamese prison camp system, offered McCain a chance to return home early. The North Vietnamese wanted to score a worldwide propaganda coup by appearing merciful, and also wanted to show other POWs that members of the elite like McCain were willing to be treated preferentially. McCain turned down the offer of release, due to the POWs' "first in, first out" interpretation of the U.S. Code of Conduct: he would only accept the offer if every man captured before him was released as well. McCain's refusal to be released was remarked upon by North Vietnamese senior negotiator Lê Đức Thọ to U.S. envoy Averell Harriman, during the ongoing Paris Peace Talks. Enraged by his declining of the offer, Bai and his assistant told McCain that things would get very bad for him.
In late August 1968, a program of vigorous torture methods began on McCain. The North Vietnamese used rope bindings to put him into prolonged, painful positions and severely beat him every two hours, all while he was suffering from dysentery. His right leg was reinjured, his ribs were cracked, some teeth were broken at the gumline, and his left arm was re-fractured. Lying in his own waste, his spirit was broken; the beginnings of a suicide attempt were stopped by guards. After four days of this, McCain signed and taped an anti-American propaganda "confession" that said, in part, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors." He used stilted Communist jargon and ungrammatical language to signal that the statement was forced. McCain was haunted then and since with the belief that he had dishonored his country, his family, his comrades and himself by his statement, but as he later wrote, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine." Two weeks later his captors tried to force him to sign a second statement; his will to resist restored, he refused. He sometimes received two to three beatings per week because of his continued resistance; the sustained mistreatment went on for over a year. His refusals to cooperate, laced with loud obscenities directed towards his guards, were often heard by other POWs. His boxing experience from his Naval Academy days helped him withstand the battering, and the North Vietnamese did not break him again.
Other American POWs were similarly tortured and maltreated in order to extract "confessions" and propaganda statements. Many, especially among those who had been captured earlier and imprisoned longer – such as those in the "Alcatraz Gang" – endured even worse treatment than McCain. Under extreme duress, virtually all the POWs eventually yielded something to their captors. There were momentary exceptions: on one occasion, a guard surreptitiously loosened McCain's painful rope bindings for a night; when, months later, the guard later saw McCain on Christmas Day, he stood next to McCain and silently drew a cross in the dirt with his foot. In October 1968, McCain's isolation was partly relieved when Ernest C. Brace was placed in the cell next to him; he taught Brace the tap code the prisoners used to communicate. On Christmas Eve 1968, a church service for the POWs was staged for photographers and film cameras; McCain defied North Vietnamese instructions to be quiet, speaking out details of his treatment then shouting "Fu-u-u-u-ck you, you son of a bitch!" and giving the finger whenever a camera was pointed at him. McCain refused to meet with various anti-Vietnam War peace groups coming to Hanoi, such as those led by David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis, not wanting to give either them or the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory based on his connection to his father. McCain was still badly hobbled by his injuries, earning the nickname "Crip" among the other POWs, but despite his physical condition, continued beatings and isolation, he was one of the key players in the Plantation's resistance efforts.
In May 1969, U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird began publicly questioning North Vietnamese treatment of U.S. prisoners. On June 6, 1969, a United Press International report described a Radio Hanoi broadcast, made on June 2, that denied any such mistreatment. The transmission, one of a series of North Vietnamese propaganda broadcasts on the subject of prisoners, used excerpts from McCain's spoken, forced "confession" of a year before, including statements such as: "I have bombed the cities, towns and villages and caused injuries and even death for the people of North Vietnam. After I was captured, I was taken to a hospital in Hanoi where I received very good medical treatment. I was given an operation on my leg which enabled me to walk again and a cast on my right arm, which was badly broken in three places. The doctors are very good and they knew a great deal about medicine." (The broadcast was picked up and recorded by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and copies of it are available from the National Archives and Records Administration, as a 2016 newspaper story confirmed.)
Starting in late 1969, treatment of McCain and the other POWs suddenly improved. North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh had died the previous month, possibly causing a change in policy towards POWs. Also, a badly beaten and weakened POW who had been released that summer disclosed to the world press the conditions to which they were being subjected, and the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which included McCain's brother Joe, heightened awareness of the POWs' plight. In December 1969, McCain was transferred back to the Hỏa Lò, "Hanoi Hilton"; his solitary confinement ended in March 1970. When the prisoners talked about what they wanted to do once they got out, McCain said he wanted to become President. McCain consented to a January 1970 interview outside Hỏa Lò with Spanish-born, Cuban psychologist , that was published in the official Cuban newspaper Granma. McCain talked about his life and expressed no remorse for his bombing North Vietnam, and Barral proclaimed him "an insensitive individual without human depth." The POWs issued an edict forbidding any further such interviews, and despite pressure from his captors, McCain subsequently refused to see any anti-war groups or journalists sympathetic to the North Vietnamese regime.
#### Release
McCain and other prisoners were moved around to different camps at times, but conditions over the next several years were generally more tolerable than they had been before. Unknown to them, during each year that Jack McCain was CINCPAC he paid a Christmastime visit to the American troops in South Vietnam serving closest to the DMZ; he would stand alone and look north, to be as close to his son as he could get. By 1971, some 30–50 percent of the POWs had become disillusioned about the war, both because of the apparent lack of military progress and what they heard of the growing anti-war movement in the U.S., and some of them were less reluctant to make propaganda statements for the North Vietnamese. McCain was not among them: he participated in a defiant church service and led an effort to write letters home that only portrayed the camp in a negative light, and as a result spent much of the year in a camp reserved for "bad attitude" cases.
Back at the "Hanoi Hilton" from November 1971 onward, McCain and the other POWs cheered the resumed bombing of the north starting in April 1972, whose targets included the Hanoi area and whose daily orders were issued by Jack McCain, knowing his son was in the vicinity. Jack McCain's tour as CINCPAC ended in September 1972, despite his desire to have it extended so he could see the war to its conclusion. The old-time POWs cheered even more during the intense "Christmas Bombing" campaign of December 1972, when Hanoi was subjected for the first time to repeated B-52 Stratofortress raids. Although its explosions lit the night sky and shook the walls of the camp, scaring some of the newer POWs, most saw it as a forceful measure to compel North Vietnam to finally come to terms.
The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, ending direct U.S. involvement in the war, but the Operation Homecoming arrangements for the 591 American POWs took longer. McCain was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973, being taken by bus to Gia Lam Airport, transferred to U.S. custody, and flown by C-141 to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. (After the last of the POWs had been released, McCain's forced "confession", along with similar statements from other POWs, was aired again during a Voice of Vietnam broadcast on April 10, 1973, as the North Vietnamese sought to refute the returning prisoners' tales of having been tortured.)
Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years, nearly five of them after his refusal to accept the out-of-sequence repatriation offer. His wartime injuries left him permanently incapable of raising either arm more than 80 degrees. For his actions as a POW, McCain was awarded the Silver Star Medal, the Legion of Merit, three Bronze Star Medals, another instance of the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Purple Heart Medal. He also gained an appreciation, from experiencing the mutual help and organized resistance of the POWs, that his earlier individualism needed to be tempered by a belief in causes greater than self-interest.
### Return to United States
Upon his return to the United States a few days later, McCain was reunited with his wife Carol and his family. She had suffered her own crippling, near-death ordeal during his captivity, due to an automobile accident in December 1969 that left her hospitalized for six months and facing twenty-three operations and ongoing physical therapy. (Businessman and POW advocate Ross Perot had paid for her medical care.) By the time McCain saw her, she was four inches (ten centimeters) shorter, on crutches, and substantially heavier.
As a returned POW, McCain became a celebrity of sorts: The New York Times ran a story and front-page photo of him getting off the plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines; he authored a thirteen-page cover story describing his ordeal and his support for the Nixon administration's handling of the war in U.S. News & World Report''; he participated in parades in Orange Park and elsewhere and made personal appearances before groups, where he showed strong speaking skills; and he was given the key to the city of Jacksonville, Florida.
McCain also found high-level political visibility. On April 14, four returned POWs were in attendance and honored at the White House Correspondents' dinner; McCain was one of them and shook hands with President Richard Nixon. Then Nixon gave an address to former POWs in an auditorium at the State Department during the day of May 24. McCain had undergone surgery earlier in the month for leg injuries suffered during his shoot-down, and a photograph of him on crutches shaking the hand of President Nixon became iconic. That evening, 600 ex-POWs and their families were honored at a gala dinner on the lawn of The White House. The McCains became frequent guests of honor at dinners hosted by Governor of California Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy Reagan, and John McCain made a strong impression speaking at a large prayer breakfast hosted by the governor. McCain had admired Ronald Reagan while in captivity and afterwards, believing him to be a man who saw honor in Vietnam service and a potential leader who would not lead the nation into a war it was unwilling to win.
McCain underwent three operations in total and other treatment for his injuries, spending three months at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Jacksonville. Psychological tests, given to all the returning POWs, showed that McCain had "adjusted exceptionally well to repatriation" and had "an ambitious, striving, successful pattern of adjustment". McCain told examiners that he withstood his ordeal by having "Faith in country, United States Navy, family, and God". Unlike many veterans, McCain did not experience flashbacks or nightmares of his Vietnam experience, although due to the association with prison guards, the sound of keys rattling would cause him to "tense up".
McCain was promoted to commander effective July 1973 and attended the National War College in Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. during the 1973–1974 academic year. (Former POWs were given latitude in choosing their next assignment. Navy officials objected to McCain's choice of the National War College, as he was not yet a commander, the minimum rank needed to qualify; McCain had earned the rank but it had not yet become official. McCain appealed to Secretary of the Navy John Warner, a friend of his father's, and gained admission.) There he intensively studied the history of Vietnam and the French and American wars there, and wrote "The Code of Conduct and the Vietnam Prisoners of War", a long paper on the Vietnam POW experience as a test of the U.S. Code of Conduct.
By the time he graduated, McCain concluded that mistakes by American political and military leaders had doomed the war effort. (The particular operation that had led to his downing, Rolling Thunder, had been stopped in 1968, and while it had caused the North Vietnamese some logistical and resource difficulties, it had not succeeded in altering any of the fundamental equations involved in eventually determining the war's outcome.) McCain accepted the right of the anti-war movement in the U.S. to have exercised their freedom to protest, and he adopted a live-and-let-live attitude towards those who had evaded the draft. Nor did the vast changes in American social mores that had taken place during his absence bother him, as it did many other former POWs. McCain returned to Saigon in November 1974; he and a couple of other former POWs received the National Order of Vietnam, that country's highest honor. He also spoke at the South Vietnamese war college, five months before Saigon fell.
McCain resolved not to become a "professional POW" but to move forward and rebuild his life. Few thought McCain could fly again, and if he could not meet the medical requirements to remain a naval aviator he said he would consider a career in the United States Foreign Service. But he was determined to try, and during this time he engaged in nine months of grueling, painful physical therapy, especially to get his knees to bend again.
### Commanding officer
McCain recuperated just enough to pass his flight physical and have his flight status reinstated. In August 1974, he was assigned to the Replacement Air Group VA-174 "Hellrazors". This was an A-7 Corsair II training squadron located at Naval Air Station Cecil Field in Jacksonville and the largest aviation squadron in the Navy. He became its executive officer in 1975, and on July 1, 1976, he was made VA-174's commanding officer. This last assignment was controversial, as he did not have the required experience of having commanded a smaller squadron first (something that he now had too high a rank to do). While some senior officers resented McCain's presence as favoritism due to his father, junior officers rallied to him and helped him qualify for A-7 carrier landings.
As commanding officer, McCain relied upon a relatively unorthodox leadership style based upon the force of his personality. He removed personnel he thought ineffective, and sought to improve morale and productivity by establishing an informal rapport with enlisted men. Dealing with limited post-Vietnam defense budgets and parts shortages, he was forceful in demanding that respect be given to the female officers just beginning to arrive into the unit. McCain's leadership abilities were credited with improving the unit's aircraft readiness; for the first time, all fifty of its aircraft were able to fly. Although some operational metrics declined during the period, the pilot safety improved to the point of having zero accidents. The squadron was awarded its first-ever Meritorious Unit Commendation, while McCain received a Meritorious Service Medal. McCain later stated that being commanding officer of VA-174 was the most rewarding assignment of his naval career. When his stint ended in July 1977, the change of command ceremony was attended by his father and the rest of his family, as well as some of his fellow POWs; speaker Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Jr. said that John had joined Jack and Slew McCain in a place of honor in Navy tradition, a tribute that deeply moved McCain.
During their time in Jacksonville, the McCains' marriage began to falter. McCain had extramarital affairs; he was seen with other women in social settings and developed a reputation among his colleagues for womanizing. Some of McCain's activity with other women occurred when he was off-duty after routine flights to Marine Corps Air Station Yuma and Naval Air Facility El Centro. Marital difficulties were in fact quite common among the returned POWs. However, McCain later said, "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine." His wife Carol later stated that the failure was not due to her accident or Vietnam and that "I attribute [the breakup of our marriage] more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else." Writer and Vietnam veteran Robert Timberg believes that "Vietnam did play a part, perhaps not the major part, but more than a walk-on." According to John McCain, "I had changed, she had changed. People who have been apart that much change."
### Senate liaison, divorce, and second marriage
McCain had thought about entering politics since his return from Vietnam, although 1964 had been the only time in his life he had ever voted. In 1976, he briefly thought of running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida; he had the support of some local figures in Jacksonville, but was convinced by other Republican Party leaders that he did not have sufficient political experience, funding, or popular support to defeat longtime Democratic incumbent Charles E. Bennett. Instead, he worked so hard for Ronald Reagan's 1976 Republican primary campaign that his base commander reprimanded him for being too politically active for his naval position.
As his tenure with VA-174 was ending, McCain was assigned to a low-profile desk job within the Naval Air Systems Command. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III thought this assignment a waste of McCain's social talents, and instead in July 1977 McCain was appointed to the Senate Liaison Office within the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs (an assignment Jack McCain had once held). The office's role mostly consisted of providing constituent service and acting as a facilitator among legislators, the Department of Defense, and lobbyists. McCain later said the liaison job represented "[my] real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant". McCain's lively personality and knowledge of military matters made his post in the Russell Senate Office Building a popular gathering spot for senators and staff. He also frequently escorted congressional delegations on overseas trips, where he arranged entertaining side escapades. McCain was influenced by senators of both parties, and formed an especially strong bond with John Tower of Texas, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. During 1978 and 1979, McCain played a key behind-the-scenes role in gaining congressional funding for a new supercarrier against the wishes of the Carter administration and Navy Secretary W. Graham Claytor Jr. In August 1979, McCain was promoted to naval captain, and became Director of the Senate Liaison Office. During McCain's time there, the Senate Liaison Office enjoyed one of its few periods of high influence.
McCain and his wife Carol had been briefly separated soon after returning to Washington, but then reunited and remained married. In April 1979, while attending a military reception for senators in Hawaii, McCain met Cindy Lou Hensley, eighteen years his junior, a teacher from Phoenix, Arizona, and the daughter of James Willis Hensley, a wealthy Anheuser-Busch beer distributor, and Marguerite "Smitty" Hensley. They began dating, travelling between Arizona and Washington to see each other, and John McCain urged his wife Carol to accept a divorce. The McCains stopped cohabiting in January 1980, and John McCain filed for divorce in February, which Carol McCain accepted at that time. After she did not respond to court summonses, the uncontested divorce became official in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on April 2, 1980. McCain gave Carol a settlement that included full custody of their children, alimony, child support including college tuition, houses in Virginia and Florida, and lifelong financial support for her ongoing medical treatments resulting from the 1969 automobile accident; they would remain on good terms. McCain and Hensley were married on May 17, 1980, in Phoenix, with Senators William Cohen and Gary Hart as best man and groomsman. McCain's children were upset with him and did not attend the wedding, but after several years they reconciled with him and Cindy. Carol McCain became a personal assistant to Nancy Reagan and later Director of the White House Visitors Office. The Reagans were stunned by the divorce; Nancy Reagan's relationship with John McCain turned cold for a while following it, but eventually the two renewed their friendship. The same happened with most of McCain's other friends, who were eventually won over by the force of his personality and his frequent expressions of guilt over what had happened.
Around the end of 1980, McCain decided to retire from the Navy. He had not been given a major sea command, and his physical condition had deteriorated, causing him to fail the flight physical required for any carrier command position (in addition to his limited arm movement, certain weather would always cause him to walk with a limp). McCain thought he might make rear admiral, but probably not vice admiral, and never become a four-star admiral as his grandfather and father had been. McCain later wrote that he did not anguish over his decision, although it pained his mother, who thought congressional careers paled in comparison to top naval ones. He was excited by the idea of being a member of Congress and was soon recruiting a campaign manager that Cohen knew, for a planned run at a House seat from Arizona. In early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, who did not want to see McCain leave the liaison post, told McCain that he was still on the path to be selected for one-star rear admiral. McCain told Lehman that he was leaving the Navy and that he could "do more good" in Congress.
McCain retired with an effective date of April 1, 1981, the rank of captain, and a disability pension due to his wartime injuries. For his service in the Senate liaison office, McCain was awarded a gold star in lieu of a second award of the Legion of Merit. Jack McCain died on March 22, 1981. On March 27, 1981, McCain attended his father's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, wearing his uniform for the last time before signing his discharge papers, and later that day flew to Phoenix with his wife Cindy to begin his new life.
## Military awards
McCain's military decorations and awards include:
|
49,552,837 |
Coropuna
| 1,169,984,488 |
Volcano in Peru
|
[
"Andean Volcanic Belt",
"Holocene stratovolcanoes",
"Mountains of Arequipa Region",
"Mountains of Peru",
"Neogene Peru",
"Piacenzian",
"Pleistocene Peru",
"Pleistocene stratovolcanoes",
"Pliocene stratovolcanoes",
"Six-thousanders of the Andes",
"Stratovolcanoes of Peru",
"Subduction volcanoes",
"Zanclean"
] |
Coropuna is a dormant compound volcano located in the Andes mountains of southeast-central Peru. The upper reaches of Coropuna consist of several perennially snowbound conical summits, lending it the name Nevado Coropuna in Spanish. The complex extends over an area of 240 square kilometres (93 sq mi) and its highest summit reaches an altitude of 6,377 metres (20,922 ft) above sea level. This makes the Coropuna complex the third-highest of Peru. Its thick ice cap is the most extensive in Earth's tropical zone, with several outlet glaciers stretching out to lower altitudes. Below an elevation of 5,000 metres (16,000 ft), there are various vegetation belts which include trees, peat bogs, grasses and also agricultural areas and pastures.
The Coropuna complex consists of several stratovolcanoes. These are composed chiefly of ignimbrites and lava flows on a basement formed by Middle Miocene ignimbrites and lava flows. The Coropuna complex has been active for at least five million years, with the bulk of the current cone having been formed during the Quaternary. Coropuna has had two or three Holocene eruptions 2,100 ± 200 and either 1,100 ± 100 or 700 ± 200 years ago which generated lava flows, plus an additional eruption which may have taken place some 6,000 years ago. Current activity occurs exclusively in the form of hot springs.
Coropuna is located 150 kilometres (93 mi) northwest of the city of Arequipa. People have lived on the slopes of Coropuna for millennia. The mountain was regarded as sacred by the Inca, and several archaeological sites have been discovered there, including the Inca sites of Maucallacta and Acchaymarca. The mountain was considered one of the most important Inca religious sites in their realm; human sacrifices were performed on its slopes, Coropuna forms part of many local legends and the mountain is worshiped to the present day.
The ice cap of Coropuna, which during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) had expanded to over 500 km<sup>2</sup> (190 sq mi), has been in retreat since at least 1850. Estimates published in 2018 imply that the ice cap will persist until about 2120. The retreat of the Coropuna glaciers threatens the water supply of tens of thousands of people relying upon its watershed, and interaction between volcanic activity and glacial effects has generated mudflows that could be hazardous to surrounding populations. Because of this, the Peruvian geological agency, INGEMMET, monitors Coropuna and has published a hazard map for the volcano.
## Name and etymology
In Quechua, puna means "plateau", and coro is a common component of toponyms such as with Coro Coro, Bolivia, though its etymology is unclear. The name may mean Qoripuna, "Puna of Gold", "golden mountain", "cold, snowy" or "cut off at the top". The name is also spelled Qhuru Puna. The mountain is also called Nevado Coropuna; "Nevado" is the Spanish word for "snowy". There is another volcano in the Andahua volcanic field which has the same name, but is completely separate.
## Geography and geomorphology
Coropuna lies in the Andes of Peru, on the border between the Castilla and Condesuyos Provinces of the Arequipa Department. Towns around the volcano belong to the Chuquibamba, Machaguay, Pampacolca and Viraco Districts. The volcano can be reached on paved roads through the town of Andahua, either from Arequipa or through Aplao from the Pan-American Highway. Roads also pass along the northern and western sides of the volcano.
### Regional
The Andes stretch along the western coast of South America from Tierra del Fuego northwards to Venezuela, forming the longest mountain chain in the world. More regionally, the volcano is in the Cordillera Ampato [es], a mountain range which lies at an average of 100 kilometres (62 mi) from the Pacific coastline, and contains nearly one hundred glaciers.
Coropuna is in the Central Volcanic Zone of the Andes, which contains 44 stratovolcanoes – including many of the world's highest – and several glaciated volcanoes. Besides Coropuna, some of the latter are Sara Sara, Solimana, Mismi, Ampato, Hualca Hualca, Sabancaya, Chachani, Misti, Ubinas, Huaynaputina, Tutupaca, Yucamane and Casiri. Also found nearby are Neogene-age calderas. Sixteen volcanoes in Peru are active or potentially active.
There is no habitation on Coropuna above 5,200 metres (17,100 ft), but numerous villages dot the lower slopes. Agriculture and animal husbandry are the most common economic activities; there are copper and gold mines as well. The city of Arequipa lies 150 km (93 mi) to the southeast.
### Local
#### General outline
Seen from above, Coropuna has a pear-shaped outline and is a 20 km (12 mi) east–west ridge that features four summits that are separated by broad saddles. In addition, there is another summit north of the east–west trend. A 5,558 m (18,235 ft) high subsidiary peak named Cerro Cuncaicha lies east of Coropuna; it is a stratovolcano. Coropuna covers a surface area of 240 square kilometres (93 sq mi) and its various main summits rise about three kilometres (1.9 mi) above the surrounding plateau.
The volcano is formed from alternating layers of ignimbrite and lava, and consists of coalesced stratovolcanoes and seven separate coulees. Ice cover makes discerning its structure difficult, but about six separate peaks as well as six not readily recognisable summit craters have been counted. Additional lava domes form a southeastward trending line on the southwestern side of the volcano and dikes crop out close to Lake Pallarcocha. Coropuna overlies the margin of a buried caldera.
The higher elevations of Coropuna consist of an ice cap and glaciated terrain but old lava flows with gentle slopes and blocky lava crop out from underneath the ice. Regions of hydrothermally altered rocks, lava flows, pyroclastic flows and areas covered by volcanic ash occur all around the mountain. Glacial activity has eroded these volcanic rocks, carving valleys into them or removing them altogether. This process created U-shaped valleys such as Buenavista, Cospanja and Tuilaqui on the southern flank, and glacial valleys such as Chaque, Mapa Mayo, Río Blanco, Torcom and Ullulo on the northern slopes. Glacial valleys of Coropuna are up to 300 m (980 ft) deep and seven km (4.3 mi) long.
There are several collapse scarps on the mountain, especially around its central sector. A sector collapse took place on the southwestern flank and formed a landslide deposit as well as a horseshoe-shaped valley that was later filled by glaciers. Also on the southern side, mud-water flow deposits have been found in the Capiza River valley and appear to relate to Coropuna; at least eight such debris flows have been identified. Lahars (mudflows) have reached the Colca River valley. Lahars are dangerous phenomena owing to their high speed and density, causing large scale destruction and fatalities, and can be generated both by volcanic and meteorological processes.
#### Lakes and rivers
Lakes lie on the flanks of the volcano. These include Lake Pallarcocha on the southwestern flank on formerly glaciated terrain, Laguna Pucaylla on Coropuna's northeastern side and Laguna Caracara on the southeastern side. A number of streams and rivers originate on the mountain. Clockwise around Coropuna, these include Quebrada Chauqui-Huayco, Rio Amayani on the northern side, Quebrada Chinchina/Infernillo, Quebrada Jollpa, Quebrada Caspanja with the lake Laguna Caracara, Quebrada Buena Vista, Quebrada Tuallqui, Rio Testane on the southern flank, Rio de Huayllaura on the southwestern flank, Quebrada del Apacheta, Quebrada Sigue Chico and Quebrada Sepulturayoc on the western flank. The Rio Blanco and Rio Amayani eventually form the Rio Arma, while the Rio Capiza discharges water from Coropuna to the Colca River. During the winter dry season, most of these rivers do not carry substantial discharge.
The volcano is situated on a drainage divide. To the west, the Rio Arma is a tributary of the Ocoña River, while to the east, the Colca River is part of the Majes River watershed. An endorheic area that receives meltwater from the volcano also exists northeast from Coropuna, on Pampa Pucaylla where the lake of the same name lies.
#### Surrounding terrain
Coropuna rises two km (1.2 mi) above the surrounding terrain from a base elevation of 4,500 m (14,800 ft), and about 3.5 km (2.2 mi) on the southern side where the Rio Llacllaja has incised the underlying basement almost to the foot of the volcano, forming sharp, amphitheatre-like valleys. In general, many deep valleys cut into the flanks of the volcano and give the mountain an "impressive topographic relief".
The region is characterised by high plateaus separated by deep canyons, including some of the world's deepest gorges that reach depths of 600–3,000 m (2,000–9,800 ft). Apart from river erosion, giant landslides have affected the Altiplano below Coropuna, such as the Chuquibamba landslide, which took place over the last 120,000 years in the form of multiple collapse events within a fault-controlled basin.
Geomorphologically, Coropuna lies at the edge of the Altiplano high plateau on the Western Cordillera mountain range; in the Central Andes this mountain chain is split into two ranges – the western and the eastern Cordillera – separated by the Altiplano. The Pucuncho Basin and Firura volcano lie north of Coropuna, while Solimana volcano is northwest from Coropuna. Sara Sara is another volcano in the area. A large lava dome lies northwest of Coropuna while Cerro Pumaranra, a 5,089 m (16,696 ft) eroded volcano, is to the northeast. 19 km (12 mi) west-southwest from Coropuna lies the 4,855 m (15,928 ft) high Antapuna, while the Andahua "Valley of the Volcanoes" is 20 km (12 mi) east-northeast of Coropuna.
### Elevation and size
Coropuna is the largest and highest volcano in Peru, the highest peak of the Cordillera Ampato and the third-highest mountain in Peru. The highest point of Coropuna is the northwestern dome named Coropuna Casulla, with 6,377 metres (20,922 ft) elevation. Mountaineering sources also cite an elevation of 6,425 m (21,079 ft) for the El Toro summit, which would make Coropuna the 22nd highest mountain in the Andes.
Estimates on the height of Coropuna have changed over time. In the 19th century, it was one of the candidates for "highest mountain in Peru", with the Mapa del Perú (Map of Peru) of Antonio Raimondi giving an estimated height of 6,949 m (22,799 ft); other candidates were peaks in the Cordillera Blanca. In 1910 it was believed that the volcano was over 7,000 m (23,000 ft) high and thus the highest mountain in South America, ahead of Aconcagua, although a North American expedition during the preceding year had determined that Coropuna was not the highest, as they only found an elevation of 6,615 m (21,703 ft), and Huascaran is higher than this. Varying snow elevations might also lead to varying height estimates.
Coropuna has several summits (up to ten overall according to one count) which exceed 6,000 m (20,000 ft) elevation, plus a 5,623 m (18,448 ft) northern summit. Those with individual names are the northwestern Coropuna Casulla at 6,377 m (20,922 ft), El Toro, the western Nevado Pallacocha at 6,171 m (20,246 ft), the central Coropuna Central II at 6,161 m (20,213 ft), Escalera at 6,171 m (20,246 ft) in the western sector of the volcano, Paiche at 6,330 m (20,770 ft) in the central sector, and Coropuna Este and Yana Ranra at 6,305 m (20,686 ft) in the eastern sector.
## Ice cap
Coropuna features the largest ice cap of the tropics. As of 2014 it was 8.5 km (5.3 mi) wide and eleven km (6.8 mi) long. It is larger than the Quelccaya Ice Cap 250 km (160 mi) farther northeast, which was considered to be the largest, but has since shrunk to a size less than Coropuna's. A subsidiary peak named Cerro Cuncaicha, east of Coropuna, has a small ice cap as well. In general, Peruvian glaciers form the bulk of the world's tropical glaciers. The ice cap consists of three ice domes and many glaciers. Perennial snow fields are present on Coropuna, sometimes making it hard to measure the true extent of glaciation or glacier retreat.
On average, the ice cap of Coropuna is about 80.8 m (265 ft) thick, with maximum thicknesses exceeding 180 m (590 ft). In 2003–2004 the ice cap had a volume of about 3.69 cubic kilometres (0.89 cu mi) snow water equivalents. Ice cores have been taken from the Coropuna ice cap and from a summit crater; one of these ice cores covers a timespan beginning from 20,000 years ago.
Penitentes reaching heights of two m (6 ft 7 in) and seracs (blocks of ice in glaciers delimited by cracks) occur on the glaciers, while debris cover is rare. Mudflows (lahars) originated from the ice cap and left deposits at the bottom of valleys.
### Glaciers and periglacial phenomena
A number of glaciers flow down from the ice cap, their number variously estimated to be 15, 17 and 23. Some glaciers have been named; on the southwestern flank two glaciers are known as Azufrioc 1 and 2, three Rio Blanco 1 through 3 and six Tuialqui 1 through 6. Eighteen separate accumulation areas have been found as well. There are no substantive valley glaciers presently on Coropuna and some glaciers, especially in the eastern side, emanate from cirques. The ongoing downward movement of the ice on Coropuna produces icequakes.
Glaciers descend to elevations of about 5,100 to 5,300 m (16,700 to 17,400 ft) on the southern flank, and to about 5,500 to 5,800 m (18,000 to 19,000 ft) on the northern flank. This is higher than the freezing level, owing to the dry climate; the freezing level at Coropuna lies at about 4,900 m (16,100 ft) elevation. In 2001, the ice limits were located at elevations of 5,300 m (17,400 ft) on the southern and at 5,600 m (18,400 ft) on the northern flank.
Moraines are mostly found on Coropuna's northern and southern side and reach lengths of three to eight km (1.9 to 5.0 mi), with longer moraines on the northern flank. In general, moraines on Coropuna are steep and have prominent crests as they are little eroded. Grey-coloured, fresh moraines up to 500 m (1,600 ft) from the ice cap may reflect the position of the glaciers before the onset of glacier retreat which has left small mounds that often contain ice between these moraines and the ice cap and small, discontinuous moraines.
Apart from normal glaciers, 78 rock glaciers have been counted on Coropuna, but only 11 of them are considered to be active. Permafrost occurs at elevations exceeding 5,100 metres (16,700 ft) on the southern and 5,750 metres (18,860 ft) on the northern flank. Cryoturbation, gelifluction, patterned grounds, solifluction and other periglacial landforms are noticeable at over 4,500 m (14,800 ft) elevation.
#### Recent area and retreat
Measuring the surface area of Coropuna's ice cap is difficult as seasonal snow can be mistaken for ice, and different studies come to various conclusions about the retreat rate, due to the use of different time periods and methodological practices. However, all studies conclude that the net retreat trend is obvious and that the ice cap is diminishing. Retreat rates shortly before 2009 reached 13 per cent in only 21 years. Between 1980 and 2014 the ice cap shrank at a rate of 0.409 km<sup>2</sup>/a (0.158 sq mi/a) with a 2015 estimate amounting to 0.5 km<sup>2</sup>/a (0.19 sq mi/a), and a brief slowdown observed during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Total shrinkage has been estimated to amount to 26 per cent between 1962 and 2000, and by 18 per cent between 1955 and 2007. Retreat is faster on the northern side of the mountain.
The Coropuna ice cap retreat follows the pattern recorded elsewhere in Peru such as in the Cordillera Blanca, Cordillera Vilcanota and the mountains Ampato, Quelccaya and Sabancaya. All of this retreat is attributed to global warming, and tends to increase during El Niño years owing to a drier climate. The glaciers lose mass through both sublimation and melting. Ablation occurs year-round and is diurnal. This meltwater rarely forms streams, though some do exist. The Quebrada Ullulo on the northern side is the largest such meltwater stream. Recently deglaciated terrain is covered by rock debris.
### Glacial history
Before the first human settlement of the area, the ice cap on Coropuna was much larger than today, with its surface exceeding 500 km<sup>2</sup> (190 sq mi) and its glaciers descending to much lower elevations. Additionally, glaciers also expanded from the mountains Pumaranra, Pucaylla and Cuncaicha to the east of Coropuna. They covered the Pampa Pucaylla northeast from Coropuna and descended the Jellojello valley and other valleys to the east. Glacial valleys radiate from Coropuna, and glaciofluvial landforms are associated with moraines.
Regional climate oscillations are recorded in the ice masses of Coropuna. The glacial history of the volcano has been reconstructed with tephrochronology (using dated tephra layers such as those from the 1600 Huaynaputina eruption), radiocarbon dating and surface exposure dating using helium-3. Three separate moraine generations and about five separate glacial stages have been recorded on the volcano. Glacial advances on Coropuna appear to be synchronous to advances of the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. Glaciers developed on other mountains in the region as well.
#### Last glacial maximum
During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 25,000–20,000 years ago, valley glaciers on Coropuna were considerably longer than today. The longest glacier, at 12 km (7.5 mi), was in the Quebrada Ullulo. The glaciers had a cover of boulders and gravel and formed tall moraines, and both lateral and terminal moraines where outlet glaciers ended. At the crest, these moraines were as much as 100 m (330 ft) high, eight km (5.0 mi) long, and five–ten m (16–33 ft) wide. On the northern flank, moraine systems have been observed in the Santiago, Ullulo, Keaña, Queñua Ranra, Cuncaicha, Pommulca and Huajra Huire valleys, while the southeastern flank was covered by glaciers in the Yanaorco, Viques, Cospanja, Buena Vista Este, Buena Vista Oeste and Huasi valleys. Rock bars occur in some glacial valleys on the southern and southwestern side of the volcano. There are large cirques around Cerro Cuncaicha.
The LGM ice cap had an area of at least 365 km<sup>2</sup> (141 sq mi), with glaciers descending to 3,780–4,540 m (12,400–14,900 ft) elevation. Glacier ends were lower on the northern and western sides, probably due to airflow-mediated variations in sublimation. The growth of the ice cap has been explained by a decrease of the equilibrium line altitude of about 750 m (2,460 ft). Assuming constant precipitation, temperatures may have decreased by 4.5–5.5 °C (8.1–9.9 °F). The glaciers began to retreat between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago.
#### Other glacial periods
Ice has been present on Coropuna for at least 80,000 years. At least two pre-LGM advances spread beyond the area that was covered with ice during the LGM, with an expansion occurring in particular in the eastern sector of the volcano. Moraines older than marine isotope stage 2 are widespread. Those close to the village of Viraco may date back 40,000–45,000 years and thus be part of an earlier glaciation, and old dates of 47,000–31,000 and 61,000–37,000 years ago in the Huayllaura and Sigue Chico valleys could reflect even larger glacier expansions during marine isotope stage 3 or 4.
Glaciers retreated after the end of the last glacial maximum 20,000–18,000 years ago and then re-expanded. During the Late Glacial, a group of moraines formed between the position of the LGM moraines and the position of the recent moraines, with one lateglacial advance dated to either 13,400–10,000 or 13,900–11,900 years ago. Full glacial conditions lasted until 10,000–9,000 years ago; minor advances took place about 13,000–9,000 years ago, and again some 6,000 years ago. The late glacial advances coincide with similar glacier expansions worldwide and some of them may correlate with the Younger Dryas cold period or the Antarctic Cold Reversal. During the Little Ice Age, glaciers on Coropuna did not expand much, although some rock glaciers might have formed during that time. The glaciers descended to 4,900 m (16,100 ft) elevation.
### Importance as a source of water
Glaciers in Peru are important sources of water for local communities and for hydropower generation, especially during the dry season; their shrinkage is thus of concern. A 2003 study by Bryan G. Mark and Geoffrey O. Seltzer estimated that about 30 per cent of the dry season runoff in the Cordillera Blanca comes from glaciers. Meltwater from the glaciers on Coropuna sustains the baseflow of the rivers during dry periods; Coropuna is an important source of water for the valleys of the surrounding areas and for the desert-like piedmont, with an estimated 38,000 people depending directly or indirectly on water originating from it. This water supply is threatened by the retreat of the glaciers and would require costly mitigation measures to compensate for its reduction. The Peruvian government is making preparations for Coropuna ceasing to be a contributor to the local water supply by 2025; a 2018 study and re-evaluation of past data concluded that the ice cap should persist until about 2120, and recommends that greater in situ monitoring of Coropuna's glaciers is needed to aid future planning and mitigation. Glacial meltwater has a low content of regulated metals while springs sometimes have very high concentrations.
## Geology
### Regional setting
Off the coast of Peru, the Nazca Plate subducts beneath the South American Plate at a rate of five–seven centimetres per year (2.0–2.8 in/year) or nine centimetres per year (3.5 in/year). This subduction process, along with the subduction of the Antarctic Plate also underneath the South American Plate, is responsible for the volcanism in the Andes and the uplift of the mountain chain. In the Cordillera Occidental (Western Cordillera) uplift commenced about 50 million years ago in the Eocene, paused until 25 million years ago in the Oligocene, and increased substantially after about 10 million years ago in the Miocene. Andean uplift in the area of Coropuna is ongoing.
Coropuna is part of the volcanic arc of southern Peru and is considered to be a member of the Barroso volcanic arc. There are over six hundred volcanoes in southern Peru, and the entire Cordillera Occidental from southern Peru to northern Chile is covered with volcanic rocks, although present-day volcanic activity is scarce. Many of the older volcanoes are deeply eroded by glaciation, while younger volcanoes often still resemble cones.
Volcanic activity in the Andes occurred during three eras. The first was between 195 and 190 million years ago in the Early Jurassic, and generated the Chocolate Formation. The second between 78 and 50 million years ago (Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene) generated the Toquepala Formation and the Andean batholiths. Volcanic activity in southern Peru commenced about 13 million years ago in the Miocene. One volcanic unit – after being folded and eroded – was covered by a second lava and tuff unit, which in turn was followed by the emplacement of large volcanoes. Ignimbrites and stratovolcano activity, at times subdivided into a "rhyolitic" and an "andesitic" formation, alternated.
### Basement
Coropuna is constructed atop of 14 million year old ignimbrites and lava flows of Neogene age. Individual ignimbrites crop out mainly in valleys; on the highlands they are buried beneath more recent volcanic products. The volcanic basement includes the Miocene to Plio-Pleistocene Tacaza, Huaylillas, Sencca and Barroso Formations; the latter formation includes Coropuna itself. Below these formations lie the sedimentary Murco and Socosani formations and the Yura Group, which are sediments of Jurassic-Cretaceous age with intruded plutons of the same age; finally there is a Basal Complex of Precambrian age.
### Faults and lineaments
The basement is cut by faults and lineaments such as the Viraco-San Antonio Fault that crosses the edifice, Pampacolca Fault on the southern side of the volcano and the Pumaranra and Cerro Casulla lineaments, which trend southeast–northwest and northeast–southwest, respectively. One east–west lineament may have influenced the recent volcanism; the alignment of Coropuna with Sara Sara, Solimana and El Misti may indicate a tectonic control on the volcano in general. On the southern flank, Holocene normal faults have offset lava flows and streams.
### Composition
The rocks released by Coropuna are dark brown to black and porphyritic. They consist of andesite, dacite, rhyodacite, rhyolite, trachy-basaltic andesite, trachyandesite and trachydacite. The more recent lava flows have been dacitic or trachydacitic. Phenocryst phases include amphibole, biotite, plagioclase, pyroxene and titanomagnetite. Aside from the volcanic rocks, deposits of salts, sulfur and travertine produced by hot springs are found on the southern flank.
The volcanic rocks define a calc-alkaline potassium-rich suite which resembles that of Chilean and Peruvian volcanoes such as Tutupaca. They contain large amounts of rubidium, strontium and barium. Complicated processes of crystallisation and interaction with Earth's crust appear to have produced the magma.
## Eruption history
The beginning of Coropuna's growth has variously been placed over 5 million years ago, during the Pliocene or late Miocene, but most of its structure developed during the Quaternary. Volcanic activity has been subdivided into two stages: explosive eruptions during the now mostly eroded Coropuna I stage produced volcanic ash, pyroclastic flows and pumice but also lava flows, while Coropuna II above 6,000 m (20,000 ft) elevation erupted lava flows from the now snow-covered vents. The existence of a Coropuna III sequence has been proposed. The most recent eruption products have been described as the "Andahua Group". About 5.3 million years ago, the Sunjillpa volcano was active southwest from Coropuna, while Cunciacha east of Coropuna is of lower Pleistocene and Pumaranra of Pliocene to Quaternary age.
A major ignimbrite eruption took place about 2 million years ago at Coropuna; its deposits have been identified west of the volcano and it led to the destruction of the edifice, which later re-formed on the remains of the old volcano. The occurrence of explosive eruptions during a mostly effusive activity has been found at Chachani and Sara Sara as well.
In addition, the Upper Sencca Ignimbrite, the Lower Sencca Ignimbrite and the Chuquibamba (Huaylillas) Ignimbrite may have originated here as well; the latter was produced by a volcanic explosivity index 7 class "super-eruption" between 14.3 and 13.2 million years ago in the Middle Miocene. The Upper Sencca Ignimbrites are a 2.09–1.76 million years old composite ignimbrite which form a 10–30 m (33–98 ft) thick apron around Coropuna and other regional volcanoes; Coropuna appears to have formed on top of one of the Upper Sencca Ignimbrite vents.
After a hiatus, volcanic activity continued into the Pleistocene. Several lava flows on the western and central sides of Coropuna have been dated, yielding ages ranging from 410,000 ± 9,000 to 62,600 ± 4,300 years ago. During the last glacial maximum, Coropuna was inactive and moraines buried its lava flows. However, one or two tephra layers on a moraine close to the village of Viraco on the southern side have been dated to be about 41,000 and 30,000 – 31,000 years old. These ages correspond to radiocarbon ages of 37,370 ± 1,160 and 27,200 ± 300 years. These tephras may have originated in fissure eruptions associated with the three recent lava flows. In postglacial times lava bombs, lapilli and volcanic ash were deposited on previously glaciated terrain. Pumice deposits may have formed during the Holocene.
### Holocene
No eruptions of Coropuna during historical or modern times are known, and the volcano was considered to be long-extinct. However, young-looking ʻaʻā lava or block lava flows erupted during the Holocene and in part overlie late-glacial moraines. Their vents are now hidden beneath glacier ice, and the flows have been affected by later glacial advances. These lava flows are found on the west–northwest, south–southeast and northeast side of the mountain:
- A northwesterly lava flow – Coropuna's longest at 8.5 km (5.3 mi) – occupies the Cerro Sepulturayoc valley. It has been dated to about 6,000 years ago, but research published in 2019 has suggested it may have erupted somewhat earlier, during the Late Glacial period.
- A southeasterly flow lies in the Cospanja valley and is either 1,100 ± 100 or 700 ± 200 years old, the latter age being derived from cosmogenic isotope dating. It was probably formed during a single eruption and is four kilometres (2.5 mi) long.
- A dark, young-looking lava flow runs northeasterly in the Queñua Ranra valley and is five kilometres (3.1 mi) long. The eruption took place about 2,100 ± 200 years ago according to cosmogenic isotope dating. Its deposition was preceded by the eruption of lava bombs that cover the valley and by the production of a lahar that advanced 14 km (8.7 mi) from its source. Whether a secondary lava flow in the same valley occurred at the same time or later is not clear, as that flow has not yet been dated.
The ages of the flows indicate an eastward shift in activity. The southeasterly and northeasterly flows may have been erupted within 500 years from the same fissure, while the eruption of the northwesterly flow might be a consequence of the retreat of the ice cap. These lava flows are the most recent manifestation of volcanic activity and they imply that Coropuna is still active; it is thus considered to be a dormant volcano, rather than an extinct one. There is no evidence of Holocene tephras in peat bog drill cores and volcanism at Coropuna since the last ice age has been primarily effusive.
### Present day status
The volcano is still hydrothermally active. Six hot springs are found on Coropuna, mostly on the southeastern foot, such as at Acopallpa, Antaura/Antauro, Viques, Ccollpa/Collpa, Buena Vista and Aguas Calientes and, on its northern flank, at Huamaní Loma. Their water temperatures range between 18 and 51 °C (64 and 124 °F). With the exception of the last two, which are situated in glacial terrain, these hot springs rise within valleys via rock fractures. Geochemical analyses of the water from these springs published in 2015 show no major variations in composition, implying a stable volcanic system. Whether solfataric or fumarolic activity occurs at Coropuna is unclear, and the thick glaciation indicates that the summit craters have no thermal activity. A lahar took place on the southeastern flank on 22 December 2016, causing damage to water infrastructure and pastures below the volcano.
Some of the hot springs on Coropuna are used for bathing. The volcano had been considered a potential site for geothermal power production, but research published in 1998 concluded that the available energy of the Coropuna area was insufficient.
The first volcano activity report published in 2018 noted ongoing seismic activity involving volcano-tectonic earthquakes. Seismic swarms were observed at Coropuna after the 2001 southern Peru earthquake and were possibly triggered by that earthquake. Observations of deformation of the volcanic edifice have shown that gravitational instability and soil water absorption result in movements of part of the volcano but, as a whole, Coropuna shows no evidence of volcanic deformation.
### Hazards and monitoring
The Peruvian Instituto Geológico Minero y Metalúrgico (INGEMMET) monitors Coropuna for activity. It uses data such as the composition of hot spring waters and the shape of the volcano as estimated by satellite images, GPS and geodesy, as well as information from five seismic stations. Seismic monitoring of the volcano began in 2008-2010 and was supplemented with geophysical monitoring in 2018. A volcanic hazard map and scenarios of lahar generation have been published, the Peruvian government publishes regular status reports. The Peruvian Geophysical Institute considers Coropuna a "high risk" volcano; about 90,000 people live in risk areas, and the sites most in danger are towns in the steep southern valleys.
Together with El Misti, Sabancaya and Ubinas, Coropuna is considered to be one of Peru's most dangerous volcanoes. The presence of a large ice cap, and therefore the risk of incandescent volcanic rocks melting that ice, creates a hazard of lahars, or mudflows, such as those that in 1985 killed over 23,000 people at Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia. The risk to life is further increased by Coropuna's steep slopes and by the concentration of people in nearby valleys. The terrain around the volcano has one of the greatest topographic reliefs in the world and a number of towns lie on the floor of the Majes valley, right down to the Pacific Ocean where the district capital Camaná with 20,000 inhabitants is situated. Although there is no evidence of past mudflows of such size, lahars could reach as far as the coast, affecting a number of towns and infrastructure such as roads, antennas and small hydropower plants in the provinces Condesuyos, Castilla and Camaná. According to the 2007 census, 110,481 people lived in the provinces that span Coropuna and lie downstream of it.
Lava flows are also a potential danger at Coropuna. Other hazards with lesser probabilities are directed volcanic blasts, lava dome collapses, fast-moving massive pyroclastic flows and flows of pumice and volcanic ash, lava bombs and shock waves from volcanic explosions.
## Climate
### Precipitation
Coropuna lies between the semi-humid Altiplano and the arid western slope of the Andes. Its climate is semi-arid, with precipitation at 6,080 m (19,950 ft) elevation reaching 390 millimetres per year (15 in/year). Other reported precipitation values range between 700 mm/a (28 in/year) and 1,000 mm/a (39 in/year). Lower down the mountain, at altitudes between at 3,000 and 4,000 m (9,800 and 13,100 ft), annual precipitation levels increase to between 226 and 560 mm/a (8.9 and 22.0 in/year) (semi-humid). Even further down, at altitudes around 2,000–3,000 m (6,600–9,800 ft), they decrease again to 98–227 mm/a (3.9–8.9 in/year) (desert). Cold water brought from Antarctica along the Pacific Ocean by the Humboldt Current, the presence of a stable anticyclone and of a temperature inversion over the Pacific, and the Andean rainshadow are all responsible for this dryness.
Most precipitation falls as hail or snow. This happens mostly during the summer wet season, between December and March, when the ITCZ moves south and a summer monsoon is active over South America. Most precipitation is brought by easterly winds coming from the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, whereas the westerly winds that dominate during the dry season do not carry much moisture. Thus, humidity generally decreases in a westward direction.
The amount of precipitation is modulated by the El Niño Southern Oscillation. During phases of El Niño, the weather is drier, snow cover smaller and glacier retreat increases. Over longer timespans, precipitation in the region increases whenever iceberg discharge and cooling occur in the North Atlantic. This was the case during the Heinrich events and the Younger Dryas when lakes formed on the Bolivian Altiplano: The Sajsi formed about 25,000–19,000 years ago, Tauca about 18,000–14,000 and Coipasa 13,000–11,000 years ago. Cold periods in the Southern Hemisphere such as the Antarctic Cold Reversal between 14,500 and 12,900 years ago may have pushed the polar front north and increased precipitation as well. That increased precipitation may have delayed the retreat of Coropuna's glaciers after the end of the last glacial maximum. Coropuna experienced moist conditions during the early Holocene, whereas the late Holocene beginning 5,200 years ago was drier there, with a pronounced dry period lasting from 5,200 to 3,000 years ago.
### Temperature
Temperatures decrease with altitude gain, and at lower elevations around 2,000–3,000 m (6,600–9,800 ft) they average 12–17 °C (54–63 °F). Between 3,000 and 4,000 m (9,800 and 13,100 ft) they average 7.8 °C (46.0 °F) and at 4,000–5,200 m (13,100–17,100 ft) elevation they average 0–6 °C (32–43 °F). At altitudes above 5,200 m (17,100 ft) they remain below freezing. Temperatures fluctuate more over daily timescales than over seasonal ones when measured close to the glaciers. Southerly cold waves can sometimes reach Coropuna, leaving traces in ice cores in the form of southern pollen. During the Little Ice Age, at 5,000–5,200 m (16,400–17,100 ft) elevation temperatures decreased to −5 to −7 °C (23 to 19 °F). Warm fluctuations between about 2,200 and 900 years ago, plus a cold fluctuation between around 970 to 1010 AD, are also recorded.
## Vegetation, fauna and agriculture
Most of the region is covered by puna grassland, with the exception of isolated Polylepis woods to the southwest of the volcano, plus other different vegetation types to the west and southeast. Peat bogs are present on the southern and southwestern sides of Coropuna, and some of these have been drilled to obtain sediment cores. There are several private conservation areas around the volcano. Elsewhere, agriculture is widespread around Coropuna. Insects such as beetles and hymenopterans, birds such as the Andean condor, fish, and mammals such as the alpaca, llama and vicuña occur in the region. Several new species of butterfly have been discovered there.
The mountain has several distinct vegetation belts:
- Between 800 and 2,500 m (2,600 and 8,200 ft) lies steppe vegetation with Ambrosia shrubs and cacti. Irrigation permits the cultivation of garlic, olive, onion, potato, rice, sugar cane and wheat. Pastures are also present.
- The steppe vegetation is also present between 2,500 and 3,500 m (8,200 and 11,500 ft) in the "pre-Puna", but it is denser here and includes shrubs of the family Asteraceae, such as Ambrosia, Diplostephium and Senecio. Crops grown here include alfalfa, but there is also some dairy farming and the planting of eucalyptus and pine trees as a wood supply for the local population.
- Between 3,000 and 4,000 m (9,800 and 13,100 ft) lies a so-called "supra-tropical facies" on soils overlying lava flows. It includes shrubs and thorny vegetation in very wet and very dry areas, respectively. Agriculture is practised here, including the growing of kiwicha, maize, quinoa and vegetables on anthropogenic soils and terraced fields. Dominant natural plants between 3,500 and 4,000 m (11,500 and 13,100 ft) include herbaceous plants of the families Fabaceae and Solanaceae, as well as shrubs of the Asteraceae.
- Between 4,000 and 4,800 m (13,100 and 15,700 ft) vegetation is found in marshes and peat bogs where sufficient water is available, in the form of relic Polylepis woodlands as well as herbaceous puna vegetation which is particularly prolific during the wet season. These areas are used for pasture of alpacas and llamas, and for fishing in wetlands and Polylepis woods; hamlets are found close to wetlands and forests. Plant genera found here include Baccharis, Calamagrostis, Chuquiraga, Festuca, Parastrephia, Senecio and Stipa.
- Above 4,800 m (15,700 ft) lies the so-called "Puna brava", with herbs and deep-rooted plants that have all adapted to withstand permafrost conditions. The cushion plant, yareta, which is used as a fuel source, is the dominant plant in this belt. Other plants from the Apiaceae and Asteraceae also occur. Vegetation, including ichu grass and yareta, exist up to about five km (3.1 mi) elevation; higher elevations are unvegetated.
## Archaeology and religious importance
Numerous archaeological sites lie on Coropuna, especially at the southern and northern bases of the volcano and on its western slope. Among these are funerary towers known as chullpas. Some of these western sites are on the ice cap. Proposals have been made to make the area of Coropuna including these archaeological sites into a protected area.
The coastal regions of Peru were first occupied 11,000 and 9,000 years BC. Evidence of the presence of hunter-gatherers near Coropuna first appear in the archaeological record in the caves of Cavalca and Pintasayoc, respectively north and south of the volcano. In the latter cave, rock paintings interpreted as dating to 7,000 – 3,000 years BC have been found. The first human activity at Coropuna in the Cuncaicha cave north of the volcano began 12,300 – 11,100 years ago, shortly after the final retreat of glaciers from the mountain. The region around the volcano was settled over the last 4,000 years.
### Inca times
A larger number of archaeological sites go back to the 2nd Intermediate Period and during the Inca era. The Inca expanded preexisting irrigation and terrace systems which are in part still existing today. These include the highest irrigation system in the world, which was possibly constructed on Coropuna to allow the cultivation of bitter potatoes. Inca sites are often found at higher elevations than the sites left by preceding civilisations; the highest one is located at 5,700 m (18,700 ft) elevation, and there is evidence of Inca presence to 6,200 m (20,300 ft) elevation. In addition, an important branch of the Inca road system passes by the western foot of Coropuna. The region was densely populated; the close location of the mountains and favourable climatic conditions facilitated its settlement.
As noted by Spanish chroniclers such as Pedro Cieza de León, Coropuna played an important role in Inca religion, and an important temple was situated there, possibly at Maucallacta. Pedro Cieza de León considered Coropuna to be the fifth most important holy site of the Inca empire. One archaeological site on the volcano may have been a stopover for religious ceremonies to its summit. Capacocha, a form of human sacrifice, were offered to the mountain; reportedly, in 1965, a mummy was found there.
#### Maucallacta and Acchaymarca
Among the archaeological sites at Coropuna is the important Inca site of Maucallacta, on the southwestern flank of the mountain. Some of the structures there were built to evoke the appearance of the mountain. A royal residence, an oracle and a political unit were associated with Maucallacta, and the oracle of Coropuna would have answered the rulers' queries all year round. The Maucallacta site was probably the most important one at Coropuna; the western summit today known as "La Niña" was apparently also significant.
Another important site associated with Coropuna is Acchaymarca, to the west of the mountain, where about 280 Inca stone structures have been found. It is likely that many pilgrims came there for ceremonies honouring the apus of Coropuna and Solimana.
## Mythology, religion and legends
In the Inca Empire, Coropuna was a sacred mountain, especially for the people of Cotahuasi. It was regarded as the apu of the southern region, and the second-most important in the cosmology of the Andes. The mountain was considered to be an abode of the dead – a large village where holy people received the souls of the departed, who lived there in the afterlife, and that could be accessed through caves. In different mythologies Coropuna is instead the starting point for the deceased on a journey to Surimana. Coropuna and Solimana are often paired. Sometimes Coropuna is seen as a male entity while Solimana volcano is seen as a female one. Local people continue to observe these ancient mortuary rites today.
An enduring Franciscan influence from a colonial-era Cusco friary, the "pious among today's Peruvian peasantry" revere a "Flying" St Francis of Assisi, who is believed to await the souls of the dead on top of Coropuna. Other poorly recorded legends are associated with Coropuna. One story narrates how a brother tried to deceive Coropuna and other mountains, and was turned into a deer. Another legend tells of a conflict between Coropuna and other local mountains against an interloping Inca. A third story states that a troupe was transporting precious metals for Coropuna and Solimana when the animal leading it was shot by a hunter; the mountains then castrated the hunter.
## Climbing
The archaeological findings made on Coropuna indicate that the Inca may have reached the summit. Annie Peck and Hiram Bingham III each reached a summit of Coropuna in 1911; Peck raised a banner saying "Votes for Women" on the summit she had ascended, which was slightly lower than the one reached by Bingham. This banner action was part of the women's suffrage campaigns that were taking place at that time, and meant to illustrate that women were just as capable as men of physical deeds. Since then, other summits of the mountain have been ascended as well.
The rugged area offers mountaineering opportunities. Coropuna is normally ascended from Laguna Pallarcocha, from where a route along the western rib and glacier slopes leads up to a fore-summit and then to the main summit. Along this way, a high camp can be set up at 5,600–5,800 m (18,400–19,000 ft) elevation. An ascent of Coropuna would normally be a three-day trip, and on the French adjectival climbing scale the route is graded as Facile (F). Pallarcocha itself can be reached from a road that begins in the town of Chuquibamba.
|
61,603,168 |
Betsy Bakker-Nort
| 1,171,096,243 |
Politics and law (1874–1946)
|
[
"1874 births",
"1946 deaths",
"20th-century Dutch lawyers",
"20th-century Dutch women",
"20th-century women lawyers",
"Dutch feminists",
"Dutch people of Jewish descent",
"Dutch women lawyers",
"Free-thinking Democratic League politicians",
"Members of the House of Representatives (Netherlands)",
"Politicians from Groningen (city)",
"Theresienstadt Ghetto survivors",
"Westerbork transit camp survivors"
] |
Bertha "Betsy" Bakker-Nort (8 May 1874 – 23 May 1946) was a Dutch lawyer and politician who served as a member of the House of Representatives for the Free-thinking Democratic League (VDB) from 1922 to 1942.
Born in Groningen, she became involved with the feminist movement in 1894, joining the Dutch Association for Women's Suffrage (VVVK), where she was mentored by Aletta Jacobs, one of the pioneering activists of the 19th century.
At age 34, Bakker-Nort started studying law at the University of Groningen after realising that fighting for women's rights required a thorough understanding of the law. In the 1922 general election, the first in which women were allowed to vote, she was elected to parliament and became the VDB's first female representative. She was re-elected four times and, during her time in the chamber, mainly argued the case for more women's rights concerning marriage and labour law. She was also active internationally, taking a leading role in preparing the International Woman Suffrage Alliance's actions for the 1930 League of Nations conference on international law. In 1933, she acted as a judge in a counter-trial in London of the arson case of the Reichstag fire.
After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, Bakker-Nort did not return to parliament. From December 1942, she was interned at Westerbork transit camp and Camp Barneveld before the Germans moved her in September 1944 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Bohemia. She was liberated in June 1945. She died the following year. According to VDB chairman Pieter Oud, Bakker-Nort had accomplished the task Jacobs had given her: leading the women's movement.
## Early life
Bertha "Betsy" Nort was born on 8 May 1874 in Groningen, Netherlands, the youngest of four daughters of a non-religious Jewish couple, Joseph Nort and Wilhelmina van der Wijk. Her father, a merchant, died when she was very young. She grew up mostly around women, including two maids. She later said that, as a young girl, it struck her as unfair that her independent mother was not allowed to vote in local council elections, "yet each man was, no matter how dumb". After finishing secondary school, she travelled to Sweden to study Scandinavian languages. She translated around 40 Danish, Norwegian and Swedish works, including feminist novels and children's books, into Dutch. She observed that in Scandinavia, a woman's position in society was much better than in the Netherlands.
## Activism
After returning to the Netherlands in 1894, Nort became actively involved in the first wave of Dutch feminism. She joined the Dutch Association for Women's Suffrage (VVVK), and helped start its local Groningen chapter. Together with Aletta Jacobs, she went door to door to recruit new members. Jacobs, a fellow Groninger who was 20 years Nort's senior, was the first female student at a Dutch university and was one of the founders of the VVVK. She became Nort's mentor. In his 2007 history of the Free-thinking Democratic League (VDB), Meine Henk Klijnsma wrote that Jacobs likely recruited Nort for the VDB. They went from town to town to advocate for women's rights in speeches. In 1899 Nort started writing about women's issues, drawing upon her Scandinavian experience; her early work was published as columns in the feminist magazine Belang en Recht ("The Importance of the Law"). The historian Marianne Braun wrote that this early work showed her calm and determined approach and social-liberal orientation. In 1904, she married Gerrid Bakker, who was a grain merchant, translator, and fellow member of the VVVK, and changed her name to Bakker-Nort. They had no children.
In 1908, at age 34, Bakker-Nort started studying law at the University of Groningen after realising that the fight for women's rights required comprehensive legal knowledge. She said that the husband's marital power was solely based on his ability to vote and elect policymakers. She was the 14th woman to enrol at the University of Groningen. Bakker-Nort finished her degree in 1912. Two years later, she earned a doctorate from the University of Utrecht for her thesis on the legal position of married women across Western Europe. Bakker-Nort was the first woman to earn a doctorate in law at a Dutch university based on a fully-fledged research study. From her comparative study, she concluded that the position of Dutch married women was most unfavourable, not because the laws were that different, but because the Dutch courts interpreted them in a stricter way. Unable to restrict herself to comparisons, she added a reasoned plea for abolishing the part of the marital law that declared married women "incompetent to act". As described in the 1838 civil code, the status of married women was legally similar to that of minors and people with severe mental health problems. This meant that married women could not open a bank account, apply for a mortgage or insurance, or sign a labour agreement without their husbands' permission. Similar laws existed in other countries. After completing her thesis Bakker-Nort started to work as a lawyer and attorney, first in Groningen and, from 1930 onwards, in the Hague. She acted as the main legal expert for the VVVK.
Bakker-Nort considered getting women the right to vote to be a principal means to achieve the overhaul of marriage law, a standard view among first wave feminists. She said that getting the vote was essential to make progress on women's issues and that it was a fundamental right for women to have a say in all matters. In 1917 Dutch women obtained the right to stand in elections (passive suffrage), though they could not vote (active suffrage). Bakker-Nort continued to campaign with the VVVK for active suffrage. The women's suffrage campaign was won in 1919, when the women's right to vote became law, instigated by the VDB's Henri Marchant. Once the VVVK had achieved its goal, it changed its name to Association of Women Citizens (VVS) and widened its scope to gain more rights for women. Bakker-Nort co-authored a report for the VVS outlining provisions she thought should be included in a modern marriage law and wrote in a column in its monthly magazine that the old laws, which made married women legally incapacitated, denied them any say over their children and property and thus needed to be reformed. She singled out women's legal status of "incompetent to act", calling it humiliating. She joined the Association of Women with Higher Education [nl] (VVAO), a more conservative group than the VVVK which did not always appreciate her progressive ideas and, for example, did not include her in their legal committee, despite her expertise.
## Political career
### 1918–1924
By 1918, Bakker-Nort was one of two female board members of the VDB, Mien van Itallie-Van Embden being the other. In the 1918 general elections, the VDB reserved two spots for women on their candidate list and assigned them to Bakker-Nort and her mentor Jacobs. Both Bakker-Nort and Jacobs failed to be elected. However, Suze Groeneweg of the Social Democratic Workers' Party did succeed and became the first female member of the House of Representatives.
For the 1922 election, the first one in which women could vote, the VDB decided that a woman should be assigned the second position on its list of candidates, behind Marchant, whose bill had given women the vote. Due to serious illness, Jacobs could not take the position. Instead, it was given to Bakker-Nort, whom Jacobs saw as her successor. The party's election campaign focussed on legal reform, including the abolition of the Senate, the introduction of referendums, and the strengthening of the legal position of women. The VDB retained its five seats, and Bakker-Nort was elected member of the House of Representatives in July 1922 as the party's first female representative. She was one of seven women elected altogether out of 100 members. In her maiden speech, she introduced parliament to her views of the "scandalous" marriage law.
In her first year, Bakker-Nort introduced a bill for a so-called "sister-pension", to entitle sisters who had lived with and looked after widowed brothers to the right to their pension once they died. The bill passed in the House but failed in the Senate. Also, in her first year, she tried to amend the Ruijs de Beerenbrouck government's proposed legislation to make minor changes to the marriage law, proposing more comprehensive reform with equal rights for women. However, the three Christian parties of the coalition government rejected her amendment. Within the VDB, she was a role model for younger female party members Corry Tendeloo and Nancy Zeelenberg.
### 1925–1928
In the run-up to the 1925 election, Bakker-Nort argued the case in parliament against a government bill to allow councils to fire female teachers at state schools once they married, but with the majority of the House being members of Christian parties and opposing this, her arguments to stop the bill failed. Moreover, she considered it morally unacceptable that the state forced women into economic dependency on their husbands, adding that the husband and wife themselves should decide, not the state. Nevertheless, Bakker-Nort was re-elected, and the VDB went from holding five to seven parliamentary seats.
Soon after the First De Geer cabinet was formed, Bakker-Nort planned a new bill to reform marriage law. To that end, she created a broader platform and organised a cross-party committee consisting of members of the Liberal State Party, the Democratic Party, and the VDB. She appointed a male, Samuel van Houten, an 89-year-old veteran of Dutch politics, as the committee's president. Throughout 1927, members of the local chapters of the parties involved made and discussed proposals. However, in 1928, Bakker-Nort again made a plea in parliament to end the legal incompetency of married women, but it was rejected by the Christian majority.
### 1929–1933
In the 1929 election, Bakker-Nort kept her seat and was joined by van Itallie-Van Embden as the second female member of the VDB. At the end of the 1920s, Bakker-Nort was moderately optimistic about the future of women's rights in the Netherlands. While she expressed dismay at the fact that women still were banned from taking up public offices such as judge, notary, or mayor, she observed that women within the Catholic organisations were slowly taking up more feminist viewpoints, and she welcomed the first female member of parliament for any Christian party, Frida Katz. However, her optimism soon disappeared when the Great Depression led to fast-rising unemployment, and married women were fired to make way for male job-seekers. Nevertheless, she said that for the VDB, the economic downturn did not alter the principle of the individual’s right of self-determination, of equal pay for equal work, and of equal rights generally.
Bakker-Nort took a leading role in preparing the International Woman Suffrage Alliance's actions for the 1930 League of Nations conference on international law. Women from 35 countries were present at the conference at the Peace Palace in the Hague, though they were not formally invited. The Alliance's main focus was nationality law, as, despite decades-long protests against laws that made married women automatically lose their nationality and take on their husbands, in many countries, little progress had been made towards achieving equality.
The women staged protest marches, carrying their national flags and wearing dresses ranging from white (equality) to black (absolutely unequal). The different dress shades symbolically reflected the gap between the nationality law demanded by the Alliance and the law of the land they represented. Bakker-Nort said the black dresses of the Dutch women amidst colourful ones of other nations created a "rather painful situation" for the hosts and showed how far behind the Netherlands was, as its laws were "still based on the obsolete principle of subjection of women to men". The activists were able to get meetings with the League of Nations delegates but eventually antagonised the conference president so much that he ordered the police to remove the women from the Peace Palace. The Hague Convention resulted in little progress, only preventing women from becoming stateless. Bakker-Nort continued to fight for the right of a married woman to choose to keep her nationality.
During parliamentary debates on retracting the ban on women being appointed mayor, Bakker-Nort ridiculed those who said women lacked physical power by suggesting that, if required, the minister should organise boxing or wrestling matches to appoint suitable candidates. She also pointed out how female mayors performed flawlessly in neighboring countries. Following a vote, the ban was lifted. In 1931, she introduced a bill to remove restrictions on women being appointed notaries, a cause she had been arguing for as early as 1917 but was voted down.
In 1933 Bakker-Nort accepted an invitation from German communist leader Willi Münzenberg to travel to London and join an international commission of foreign legal experts participating in a counter-trial of the arson case of the Reichstag fire. Five men, all communists, were about to go on trial in Leipzig, but it was feared the Nazis would not give them a fair trial. So, for one week, Bakker-Nort and the other acting judges went through the evidence and concluded that the defendants were innocent and the Nazis were behind the fire.
When the Leipzig judge invited committee members to the proceedings in Germany, Bakker-Nort declined. She denied allegations of bias by critics of the counter-trial and explained that she had taken part because the defendants lacked legal support in Germany, as many lawyers who had defended communists had been imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, deterring others. After the Leipzig trial found one of the defendants, the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, guilty, and the Nazis executed him, Bakker-Nort lamented the unfair trial, particularly the unlawfulness of applying the death penalty based on a law adopted only after the Reichstag fire. She urged the Dutch people to value the freedom and justice that democracy provided and to fight all who aimed to curtail them.
### 1934–1936
As the economic crisis continued, the government intervened in the labour market. Where city councils previously had been allowed to fire female teachers who married, they were now required to do so. This erosion of women's rights was particularly painful for Bakker-Nort because it happened during the Second Colijn cabinet, of which the VDB was one of the coalition parties. She had tried to make the firing of married teachers temporary, but her amendment failed. According to Klijnsma, the VDB had made a mistake in not negotiating the protection of women's rights during the formation of the coalition.
At a parliamentary budget review in 1935, Bakker-Nort condemned Germany's new marriage law, called the German Blood Protection Law, which banned Aryans, a now-obsolete historical race concept describing people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping, from marrying Jews. Both the Netherlands and Germany had signed the 1902 Hague Marriage Convention, which laid out the rules for recognising the validity of international marriages. The new German law caused the Dutch parliament to debate how to apply the rules of the convention to marriages involving German nationals. Bakker-Nort argued that because it was impossible to determine who was Jewish and who was Aryan, the rules of the treaty did not apply, and the Dutch would not have to revoke the convention's agreement. However, she asked Minister Josef van Schaik to revoke it anyway as a sign of protest. Van Schaik agreed with her that the German law would not apply to Dutch Jews but decided not to revoke the agreement.
### 1937–1940
In 1937 Bakker-Nort wrote a piece about fascism in the election issue of the VDB's monthly magazine entitled "Democracy or Dictatorship", in which she attacked the fascist party the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB) in an unusually sarcastic way. For the 1937 election, the NSB used the image of its leader Anton Mussert and the slogan, "Without this man, the Netherlands does not have a future." Bakker-Nort argued it should say, "With this man, the Netherlands does not have a future, especially the women." The NSB won four seats in parliament, fewer than expected; the VDB retained its six seats and did not return to the new coalition government, the Fourth Colijn cabinet. The election results did not disappoint Bakker-Nort; she said voters had not punished the VDB and had understood why the party had to allow some women's rights to erode. In early 1938 Minister Carl Romme prepared a bill to ban paid work for married women altogether. This rejuvenated the feminists inside the VDB, both in parliament and in the local chapters. They were spurred on by the activities of the VVGS, whose youth committee's president Tendeloo and other feminists such as Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot organised protests across the country. Bakker-Nort said Romme pretended to base his exclusion of married women from the workforce on principle grounds that the husband was the breadwinner and the wife had to look after the family, but illogically did not apply this principle when companies needed the women. The feminists' efforts did not go unrewarded: Romme never introduced his bill. In a later debate on labour issues, Bakker-Nort asked the government to address the widespread sexual harassment to which female factory workers were subjected. In 1939 her husband Gerrid died.
The late 1930s saw a rise in antisemitism in the Netherlands. The VDB attacked the NSB for condoning the Nazis' aggression toward German Jews during and following the Kristallnacht. They did, however, argue against the formal banning of the NSB, admitting that in a true democracy, even despicable voices should be allowed to be heard. Bakker-Nort said in 1938, "We can not allow democracy to be murdered by its adversaries." When in early 1940, fear of a German invasion increased, parliament debated a possible new law for treason. According to her, Bakker-Nort argued against the death penalty; traitors should be deported. In May 1940, just days before the German invasion of the Netherlands, Bakker-Nort announced she would not stand again in the 1941 election, leaving it to the next generation. Party members suggested Tendeloo would be a good candidate. Her last day in parliament was 9 May 1940, when she debated the bill for the punishment of treason and espionage. The next day Germany invaded the Netherlands. Within a week, the Dutch were defeated, and the German occupation began. The House and Senate no longer sat, and the occupiers dissolved parliament officially on 25 June 1940. Bakker-Nort had spent eighteen years in the House, addressing parliament mainly on the issues of justice, education, and labour, and for the majority of her stay, was on the Standing Committee for Private and Criminal Law.
## Imprisonment
As the German occupiers started to arrest and deport some Jewish Dutch citizens in the summer of 1940, Bakker-Nort must have felt threatened, according to Klijnsma. She had never belonged to a Jewish denomination and had renounced her Jewishness, but she did value Jewish traditions. In 1942, she was one of the few members of parliament who accepted an offer to resign and take their pension. However, this did not prevent her from being arrested by the Germans and imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast of the Netherlands in December 1942.
Following an intervention, possibly by VDB leader Dolf Joekes, Bakker-Nort was made part of Plan Frederiks and moved to Camp Barneveld in February 1943; Plan Frederiks was an agreement civil servant Karel Frederiks had made with the occupiers to keep a small group of Dutch Jews in the Netherlands and exclude them from deportation to the concentration camps. However, in April 1944, the Germans moved all Jews from Barneveld back to Westerbork and then in September 1944 onwards to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic. After the defeat of the Germans, Bakker-Nort was found alive at the camp in June 1945 by a Dutch repatriation mission, together with 400 other Dutch survivors. She moved to Utrecht and did not return to parliament. Her seat for the VDB was taken by Tendeloo.
## Death and legacy
Bakker-Nort died in Utrecht on 23 May 1946, aged 72. While the national newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad published only a short notice of her death, Tendeloo and former VDB chairman Pieter Oud wrote obituaries. According to Oud, Bakker-Nort had successfully accomplished the task Jacobs had given her: of leading the women's movement. He praised her drive to get women the vote, without the militant aspects of the English suffragettes, and her tireless efforts to reform marital law and labour laws. He urged the country's young women to realise how much they owed to the pioneers of the women's movement, of whom Bakker-Nort was one of the most prominent. In his 1968 memoirs, Oud wrote that her dedication to public office was equal to none and that although he did not consider her oratory skills the best, she quickly became a competent parliamentarian through her high work rate. Her successor Tendeloo was instrumental in ending married women's incompetency to act.
Braun wrote in 2013 that in the 21st century, Bakker-Nort is seen as a transition figure who was part of the first wave of feminism in the Netherlands that got women the vote but continued the fight for more rights. Once women's suffrage was achieved, the strength of activism had significantly reduced: member numbers for groups such as the VVS dwindled. The newly acquired right to study at university quickly became standard, and the fight was almost forgotten. Despite the political climate in the 1920s and 1930s being dominated by Christian parties that aimed to reduce women's rights based on their interpretation of the Bible, Bakker-Nort's efforts, in and outside parliament, were relentless.
In 2003, many lost papers, notes, photos, pamphlets, and lectures that Bakker-Nort had kept resurfaced. At some point in the 1930s, she donated her documents to the International Archives for the Women's Movement in Amsterdam. The archives also housed personal documents of, among others, Jacobs and Rosa Manus and documents of women's organizations and journal issues. In July 1940, the Germans transported the entire archives to Germany. After the Soviet Red Army took Berlin in 1945, they moved all these stolen materials to Moscow. In 1992, the feminists' materials were identified in the Russian Military State Archives and recorded on microfilm, and ten years later returned to the International Archives of the Women's Movement. A lack of archives or access to them impacts how history is presented and whether women's stories can be uncovered. For example, the retrieval of the IAV records led to new biographies of Jacobs and Manus.
## Publications
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63,953,395 |
Hitler's prophecy
| 1,173,664,966 |
Adolf Hitler's speech on 30 January 1939
|
[
"Antisemitic propaganda",
"Antisemitism in Germany",
"Incitement to genocide",
"Nazi propaganda",
"Political quotes",
"Prophecy"
] |
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
> If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
These words were similar to comments that Hitler had previously made to foreign politicians in private meetings after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. The speech was made in the context of Nazi attempts to increase Jewish emigration from Germany, before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
Allusions to "Hitler's prophecy" by Nazi leaders and in Nazi propaganda were common after 30 January 1941, when Hitler mentioned it again in a speech. The prophecy took on new meaning with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the German declaration of war against the United States that December, both of which facilitated an acceleration of the systematic mass murder of Jews. In late 1941, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels stated that the prophecy was being fulfilled while justifying the mass deportation of Jews from Germany. On 30 September 1942, Hitler referenced the prophecy in another speech, which was adapted into a November issue of Parole der Woche titled "They Will Stop Laughing!!!" Hitler continued to invoke the prophecy as the war went against Germany and referenced it in his last will and testament. Frequently used by Nazi leaders when alluding to their systematic murder of Jews, the prophecy became a leitmotif of the Final Solution and it is perhaps the best-known phrase from Hitler's speeches.
The historical significance of the prophecy is debated between the schools of functionalism and intentionalism: intentionalists view it as proof of Hitler's previously developed master plan to systematically murder the European Jews, while functionalists argue that "annihilation" was not meant or understood to mean mass murder, at least initially. The prophecy is cited by historians as an example of Nazi belief in an international Jewish conspiracy that supposedly started the war. Additionally, despite its vagueness—not explaining how the annihilation would come about—the prophecy is cited as evidence that Germans were aware that Jews were being exterminated.
## Background
According to historian Ian Kershaw, upon Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler's seizure of power on 30 January 1933, the Nazi mass movement was already "proto-genocidal" and "held together by the utopian vision of national salvation, to be achieved through racial cleansing at the core of which was the 'removal' of the Jews". In April 1933, the one-day Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was announced and the SA (the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party) was posted around Jewish businesses to enforce the boycott. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 400 anti-Jewish laws and decrees were enacted. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws defined Jews by their ancestry rather than religion, formalized their exclusion from society, and outlawed marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and "German-blooded" people. Other laws banned Jews from owning property or earning a living.
Hitler had associated the Jews and war in several speeches before 1939. In 1931, Hitler said in the event of war, the Jews would be "crushed by the wheels of history"; he also characterized the 1933 anti-Nazi boycott as a Jewish declaration of war against Germany. According to historian Claudia Koonz, between taking power in 1933 and his prophecy speech in January 1939, Hitler only overtly voiced his hatred of Jews on two occasions: in a 1935 speech announcing the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, and at the Nuremberg Rally in September 1937. Although race was not prominent in his discourse in the 1930s, Hitler found subtle ways to signal antisemitism to his core followers while maintaining a moderate public image. In discussions of the proper solution to the Jewish Question in the 1930s, extermination was often discussed as an option by SS officials, although it was usually discarded.
### Kristallnacht
In November 1938, the Nazi leadership organized and incited the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews, in part to bleed off excess antisemitic sentiment from party activists that had been suppressed for diplomatic reasons during the Munich crisis. The pogrom involved unprecedented public violence against German Jews, including the burning of synagogues, looting of Jewish-owned stores and residences, and assaults on Jews, which (according to official figures) caused 91 deaths. Hitler personally approved the arrest of 30,000 Jews and their incarceration in concentration camps. Many Germans were disgusted by the violence, although few overtly opposed the government. Kristallnacht was also denounced abroad, endangering the German government's efforts to organize and facilitate the emigration of German Jews.
Kristallnacht radicalized the anti-Jewish discourse in German society. The Nazi Party conducted a propaganda campaign from November 1938 to January 1939 to justify the pogrom to the German people. The idea of exterminating Jews became more common. On 12 November, Hermann Göring convened a meeting of Nazi leaders in Hitler's name. Göring stated that "it goes without question" that Germany would consider "carrying out a great reckoning with the Jews" in the event of war. Historian Yehuda Bauer writes that this statement is "very similar" to what Hitler said on 30 January 1939. On 24 November, the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, reflecting on the meeting of 12 November, printed the following statement: "This stage of development [of the Jews] will impose on us the vital necessity to exterminate the Jewish subhumanity as we exterminate all criminals in our law-abiding state: with fire and sword! The outcome will be the actual and final end to Jewry in Germany, its total annihilation." This language reflected the radicalization in party circles, and the writers were aware that it aligned with Hitler's view.
### Statements to diplomats
On 21 November 1938, Hitler met with the South African defense minister Oswald Pirow and told him that the Jews would be killed if war broke out. The same month, an official of Hitler's chancellery told a British diplomat of German plans "to get rid of [German] Jews, either by emigration or if necessary by starving or killing them" to avoid "having such a hostile minority in the country in the event of war". He also said that Germany "intended to expel or kill off the Jews in Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine" after invading those countries. On 16 January 1939, Hitler met with István Csáky, the foreign minister of Hungary. Csáky recalled that "he was sure of only one thing, the Jews would have to disappear from Germany to the last man".
On 21 January, Hitler told František Chvalkovský, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia: "Our Jews will be annihilated. The Jews did not perpetrate 9 November 1918 for nothing; this day will be avenged." Hitler added that the Jews were also poisoning Czechoslovakia, prompting an antisemitic diatribe from Chvalkovský. In the same meeting, Hitler threatened the "annihilation" of Czechoslovakia if it did not conform to German demands. According to historian Hans Mommsen, Hitler was referring to destroying the influence of the Jews rather than calling for their physical destruction. Historian Peter Longerich interprets "annihilation" to refer to emigration or expulsion of Jews leading to "the end of their collective existence in Germany". Kershaw argues that, while Hitler was not announcing his intentions to Chvalkovský, "the sentiments were not merely rhetoric or propaganda".
## Speech of 30 January 1939
Although the Évian Conference in July 1938 had failed to open other countries to Jewish emigrants, the Nazis still attempted to hasten the emigration of Jews from Germany. At the time of the speech, discussions were ongoing between Göring and George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels helped write the speech, which was delivered in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. The speech lasted two or two-and-a-half hours and dealt with both the foreign and domestic policies of the Nazi government. Hitler expressed his desire for additional "living space" and discussed the Munich crisis, admitting that he had planned a military invasion in the event that Czechoslovakia did not capitulate to his demand to surrender the Sudetenland. He maintained that the Sudetenland had been secured by German willingness to resort to war, rather than by diplomacy.
In the part of the speech dealing with the Jewish question, Hitler complained that there was enough space in the world for German Jews to go, and contended that Europe could "not become pacified before the Jewish question has been settled". In a long rant against Jews, Hitler first mocked them, then said that it was time to "wrestle the Jewish world enemy to the ground", and that the German government was completely determined "to get rid of these people". He asserted that Jews would have to stop "liv[ing] off the body and productive work of other nations", or else they would "succumb to a crisis of unimaginable severity". He claimed that the Jews were trying to incite "millions among the masses of people into a conflict that is utterly senseless for them and serves only Jewish interests". Hitler then arrived at his main point:
> I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided. At the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who only greeted with laughter my prophecies that I would someday take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people of Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has already stuck in its throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
### Dissemination and reactions
The speech was broadcast live on radio and Hitler's prediction about the Jews was reprinted in the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and in a dedicated pamphlet. According to Goebbels' explicit instructions to Fritz Hippler, the part of the speech that included Hitler's threat against the Jews was recorded simultaneously in audio and video (a difficult technical achievement at the time) and included in the weekly UFA Wochenschau newsreel after Hitler personally approved it. Newsreels typically played down the exclusionary aspect of the people's community; January 1939 was the first time that Nazi policies towards the Jews were directly connected to the party leader on newsreels. Historian Richard J. Evans writes that the threat "could not have been more public".
At the time of the speech, Jews and non-Jews inside and outside Germany were paying close attention to Hitler's statements because of Kristallnacht and the possibility of war. In the following days, the speech attracted significant commentary in Germany. The German-Jewish diarists Luise Solmitz and Victor Klemperer mentioned the speech in their diaries but paid little attention to Hitler's threat. Outside Germany, coverage of the speech focused on the geopolitical implications of Hitler's discussion of foreign policy, while the threat to Jews went unremarked. The New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts printed a headline referencing Hitler's threat against the Jews, but the article below it only discussed the threat of war and Hitler's alliances with Italy and Japan. The Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt discussed the speech in several issues beginning on 31 January, but did not emphasize the prophecy. On 31 January, it printed the main points of the speech without mentioning the prophecy; in an analysis of the speech published the next day, columnist Moshe Yustman discussed appeasement and other foreign policy issues.
## References to the prophecy
Hitler made over a dozen references to his threat both publicly and privately. At the height of the Holocaust in 1942, Hitler publicly referenced his prophecy on at least four occasions. At the same time, Hitler's rhetoric became much harsher as he changed from speaking of "annihilating" (vernichten) Jews to "exterminating" (ausrotten) them. He consistently, and probably intentionally, misdated the prophecy to 1 September 1939, when the German invasion of Poland began. By emphasizing the link between the war and the persecution of the Jews, the persecution could be construed as a justified response to an attack on Germany. Hitler always referenced the prophecy when discussing the extermination of the Jews. From late 1941, Nazi propagandists consistently avoided discussion of concrete anti-Jewish actions, such as deportations, instead relying on the prophecy's generality.
Besides Nazi leaders, army propaganda and ordinary soldiers also referred to the prophecy. In a letter dated 5 October 1941, police lieutenant and Holocaust perpetrator Walter Mattner wrote to his wife justifying the murder of Jewish children and referencing Hitler's prophecy. Jews were also aware of the prophecy; Warsaw Ghetto diarist Chaim Kaplan wrote on 1 September 1939 that, since war would break out, Polish Jews might face the fate that Hitler had foretold. On 2 February 1942, Kaplan wrote that Hitler "boasted that his prophecy is beginning to come true: had he not said that if a war would break out in Europe the Jewish people would be annihilated? This process has already begun and will continue until the end is reached." "Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe" was referenced in the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations on 17 December 1942.
### The Eternal Jew
Footage of Hitler making the threat was included in the 1940 film The Eternal Jew. According to historian Bill Niven, the film makes the case to Germans that they were fighting a race war and life-or-death struggle against Jews. The film was a flop and a month after its release was only being shown in one cinema in Berlin. Historian Alon Confino writes that Germans rejected the film because its scenes, shot in German-occupied Poland, were too explicit in showing what "annihilation" might actually entail.
### 30 January 1941 speech
Hitler mentioned the prophecy at a 30 January 1941 speech in the Sportpalast. Kershaw suggests that although Hitler may have had his threat in mind during the intervening years or was reminded of it by a subordinate, it was most likely the clip from The Eternal Jew that reminded him. Hitler then expressed his hope that the Western nations at war with Germany would realize that their greatest enemy was "international Jewish exploitation and the corruption of nations!" In the speech, Hitler implied that his previous threats against German Jews had caused the international Jewish community to influence Western powers into appeasement of Germany, and renewed threats would induce the Jews to convince the British government to make peace. Under the headline "The Jew will be exterminated", the speech was published in German and translated for international media companies. The editors of The New York Times (believed by the Nazis to be at the center of the "Jewish press") wrote that Hitler did not have a record of following through on promises or threats.
At the time of the January 1941 speech, the Nazi leadership was already planning the invasion of the Soviet Union and considering deporting Jews to the conquered territories after a victory. Therefore, Kershaw argues, Hitler's crusade against Jewish Bolshevism "was taking concrete shape in his mind" and by referencing the prophecy, he implied that a reckoning with the Jewish enemy was imminent. Kershaw also wrote that the reference hinted at something like the Madagascar Plan and "a repeat of the blackmail ploy that he held the Jews in his power as hostages".
### Invasion of the Soviet Union
On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union; by August, the campaign was not proceeding as well as Nazi leaders hoped. Goebbels published the essay "Mimicry" in Das Reich on 20 July 1941. It was one of his most influential extended attacks on the Jews, in which he elaborated on Hitler's prophecy. Goebbels argued that the Jews practiced "mimicry" by infiltrating nations and secretly controlling the Allied governments; they were using their power to prolong the war so that Europe would bleed out and be too weak to resist the "Bolshevization" that Jews intended to inflict upon it. He claimed that the Nazis were able to "unmask" them by ignoring historical contingency (the method which historians use to explain events) and threatened a terrible punishment for their alleged guilt.
In mid-August 1941, Goebbels received a report of a mass shooting of Jews in the Baltics and connected the killing to Hitler's prophecy. According to Goebbels' diary entry on 19 August, Hitler mentioned the prophecy when granting Goebbels' request to force Jews in Germany to wear yellow stars. Hitler said that the Jews were paying the price for the war, and that they "will not have much cause to laugh in [the] future". Hitler indicated his certainty that his prophecy would come true in weeks to months, which historian Tobias Jersak [de] interprets as evidence that the order for the Final Solution had been issued. According to Longerich, Hitler was willing to authorize harsher measures against Jews in Germany because of the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union that he had ordered. The diary entry indicates that both Hitler and Goebbels drew a causal connection between the war and the extermination of the Jews.
The Nazi Party printed the prophecy on one of its weekly quotation posters (Wochenspruch der NSDAP) to be displayed on 7–13 September 1941. These posters were sent to all of the Nazi Party's local branches and displayed prominently throughout Germany. According to Jersak, the true meaning of the posters may not have been obvious to ordinary Germans. In mid-September, Hitler made the decision to deport German Jews to the occupied Soviet Union; historians highlight the temporal proximity to the display of the posters. In the lead article on 15 October from the periodical Die Judenfrage in Politik, Recht, Kultur und Wirtschaft titled "The War Guilt of the Jews", a series of quotes from various Jews is joined together in an effort to prove that the Jews declared war against Germany; the prophecy is mentioned at the end of the article.
On 25 October, referring to attempts to drown Jewish women in the Pripet marshes, Hitler mentioned his prophecy that asserted the "criminal race", supposedly responsible for German casualties in World War I and "now again hundreds of thousands", would be destroyed. On 8 November 1941, Hitler referred to the prophecy in his annual speech at the Löwenbräukeller in Munich to commemorate the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler said that all measures would be taken so that "November 1918 will never happen again". The speech was reported in the Nazi media, Völkischer Beobachter running the story under the headline "The Jewish Enemy" and concluding that "the war against the Jewish international is a life and death struggle that must be ruthlessly fought to the end". According to Longerich, Hitler intended to cement his leadership role: "All bridges had been burnt and the 'people' had no alternative but to entrust themselves to Hitler’s purportedly superhuman leadership qualities and support his conduct of the war until victory had been achieved."
### "The Jews are Guilty"
On 16 November 1941, Goebbels wrote an article titled "The Jews are Guilty" in Das Reich, aiming to justify the ongoing deportation of the Jews. It was one of the most vehemently antisemitic writings that Goebbels published. Kershaw suggests that Goebbels probably discussed the article with Hitler before publication. Goebbels wrote:
> The historical guilt of world Jewry for the outbreak and expansion of this war has been so extensively demonstrated that there is no need to waste any more words on it. The Jews wanted their war, and now they have it ... At present we are experiencing the realization of this prophecy and so the Jews are meeting with a fate that may be harsh but is also more than deserved. In this case pity or regret is completely inappropriate. In unleashing this war, world Jewry completely misjudged the forces at its disposal. Now it is suffering a gradual process of extermination that it had intended for us and that it would have unleashed against us without hesitation if it had the power to do so. It is now perishing as a result of its own law: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth... In this historical dispute every Jew is our enemy, whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or scrapes out his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows war trumpets in New York or Washington. Owing to their birth and race, all Jews belong to an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They wish for its defeat and annihilation and do everything in their power to help to bring it about.
The article referred explicitly to Hitler's approval for the annihilation and listed actions that Germans should take against Jews ("enemy of the people") and anyone who associated with them, who was to be "regarded and treated as a Jew". Historian Heinrich August Winkler argues that it was primarily intended as a warning to Germans who disagreed with Nazi antisemitism. The article was the first time a Nazi leader had announced that the annihilation of European Jews had gone from threat to reality. According to historian Jeffrey Herf, Goebbels presented the international Jewish conspiracy "on the offensive against an innocent, victimized German object". Goebbels had recycled the article title from a 1932 article he wrote for Der Angriff. In both cases, Jews were blamed for the failure of the Nazis to achieve their goals, which led to an increase in anti-Jewish aggression. At the time, Das Reich had a circulation above one million, and the article was broadcast on the German Home Service. Goebbels ordered the article to be distributed to soldiers on the Eastern Front. According to the public opinion reports prepared by the Security Service (SD), the article "found a strong echo" among Germans, although some churchgoers were critical of it. Historians have argued that the article gave a clear answer as to the fate of the Jews.
### Friedrich-Wilhelm University speech
Goebbels presented the narrative to German elites in a speech at Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin on 1 December. "We are now experiencing the implementation of this prophecy. . . . [Jewry] is now suffering a gradual process of extermination". The Reich Press Office ordered newspapers to report the speech as a front-page story, and it was widely broadcast on the radio. Goebbels justified the violence towards the Jews as a preemptive strike against the extreme violence that they supposedly planned to unleash upon Germany. Characteristically for Nazi propaganda, the justification of mass killing was combined with absence of information on how it was being carried out. Goebbels used the word extermination (Vernichtung) to refer to what the Soviet Union intended to do if it won the war, referring to the murder of the German intelligentsia. A few minutes later, he used the same word to refer to what the Germans were doing to the Jews. Herf suggests that some listeners interpreted "gradual process" to mean death from starvation or exposure, rather than immediate murder by shooting or in death camps.
### War against the United States
On 11 December 1941, Germany declared war on the United States in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. The next day, Hitler gave a speech in the Reich Chancellery to Nazi Party leaders. Hitler discussed the Pearl Harbor attack and the Nazi war on the Eastern Front, expressing his expectation of a glorious future after Germany's eventual victory. Then he referenced his prophecy, saying:
> Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to settle the matter once and for all. He prophesied that if the Jews once again brought about a world war, they would experience their extermination. This was not an empty phrase. The world war is here. The extermination of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. This question must be viewed without any sentimentality. We are here not to express sympathy for the Jews, but only to express sympathy for our own German people. As the German people again has sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the originators of this conflict must pay with their own lives.
Kershaw writes that Hitler's tone was "more menacing and vengeful than ever". Herf notes that the speech further emphasized the causal connection between the war and the Holocaust. According to Longerich, Hitler intended to indicate that the systematic murder of Jews that was already underway in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Serbia, should be continued and extended. Historian Christian Gerlach writes that Hitler "never before [referred to his prophecy] as clearly, as unambiguously"; Gerlach argues that this meeting was Hitler's announcement of his decision to murder all of the Jews in Europe. According to Evans, the theory that Hitler gave the order at this point has been rejected in favor of the theory that Nazi decision-making evolved gradually over time. Browning writes that "Hitler gave no explicit order but made unmistakably clear that his prophecy... had to be taken utterly literally".
On 16 December, Nazi official Hans Frank repeated the prophecy in similar words to those Hitler had used five days earlier, adding: "What is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe they’ll be accommodated in village settlements in the Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? ... Liquidate them yourselves!... We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them." According to Frank, the war could not be considered a complete success unless the Jews were exterminated. Without receiving a written order from Hitler, he understood that the Jews were to be exterminated, although the details had not been worked out at that time.
### 30 January 1942 speech
Ten days after the Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was discussed, Hitler spoke at the Sportpalast for the ninth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power. He characterized the war as a "fight for the whole of Europe and, thereby, for the whole of civilized humanity" and a race war between Jews and "Aryans" before referencing the prophecy and added, "The hour will come, when the most evil enemy of the world of all time will have played his last part in Europe for at least a thousand years." The speech was widely covered in the press and, according to Security Service reports, was understood to mean that "the Führer’s fight against the Jews is being fought mercilessly to the end, and that soon the last Jews will have been driven from European soil". The reports also indicate that Germans had a stronger reaction to other issues raised in the speech than the prophecy. Winkler writes that the speech is a paraphrase of Revelation 20 "to convince the Germans of the greatness of their mission in history" in saving Europe from the Jews. According to Longerich, Hitler intended to emphasize that the fate of the Jews would be inextricably connected to the progress of the war.
### 24 February 1942 speech
On 24 February, the anniversary of the founding of the Nazi Party, Hitler was not present for the ceremony. He instructed Gauleiter Adolf Wagner to read a statement, in which Hitler implied that even if the war was lost, his prophecy would be fulfilled. A paragraph was quoted in Niedersächsische Tageszeitung [de] the next day, under the heading "The Jew is being exterminated". On 27 February, a related article appeared in Völkische Beobachter under the heading "The Jew will be exterminated!" The article opens by referring to Hitler's prophecy, and accuses Jews, the "eternal murderers of world peace", of plotting the destruction of the German people. The speech was quoted in a Der Stürmer article of 19 March 1942 titled "The Coming End – the Führer's Prophecy", which explained that the prophecy made clear how the Jewish question would be resolved. The article coincided with the third and fourth waves of deportations of Jews from Germany that occurred very publicly from March to June 1942 and effectively eliminated the Jewish presence in Germany.
### Goebbels diary entry
In March 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary about the gassing of Jews in the Lublin District of occupied Poland. It was the most detail that he ever devoted to the murder of Jews. Goebbels wrote that Jews under German rule were paying for the war effort of the Allied powers:
> A judgment is being visited upon the Jews which, barbaric as it is, they have fully deserved. The Führer’s prophecy of the fate in store for them if they started another world war is beginning to come true in the most terrible manner. In these matters, one must not give way to sentimentality. If we did not fight them, the Jews would destroy us. It is a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.
In a closed-door meeting with party leaders in the Reich Chancellery on 23 May, Hitler said (according to Goebbels) "that the Jews are determined under all circumstances to bring this war to victory for them, since they know that defeat also means for them personal liquidation". Kershaw writes that this is a more direct version of the prophecy and Hitler was "unmistakably and explicitly linking [the prophecy]... with the physical liquidation of the Jews".
### "They Will Stop Laughing!!!"
On 30 September 1942, Hitler delivered another speech at the Sportpalast. He reassured his audience that the worst of the war was over. In "the most menacing phrases he had so far used", Hitler stated that the extermination of Jews was revenge for Allied bombing. He added:
> The Jews in Germany once laughed about my prophecies. I don’t know if they are laughing today or if the laughter has already gone out of them. I can promise only one thing. They will stop laughing everywhere. And with this prophecy as well I will be proved right.
The audience responded with enthusiasm; Herf contends that Nazi loyalists realized that the speech referred to the systematic murder of Jews. As for Hitler's reference to the Jews not laughing anymore, Herf argues that "[a]ny benign interpretation... strains credulity". Herf stated that the audience may have understood Hitler's addition of "everywhere" to his promise to end Jewish laughter to mean the globalization of the Final Solution. He concludes that "all indicated that he had ordered and was then implementing the destruction of the Jews". The speech was broadcast on the radio, reported to the army, and featured prominently in the press.
Six weeks later, quotes from the speech were reproduced in an article titled "They Will Stop Laughing!!!" in Parole der Woche, a wall newspaper which frequently printed antisemitic content. The newspaper emphasized a laughing Franklin Roosevelt and his supposed Jewish advisers; "They will stop laughing everywhere!!" was reproduced in large type at the bottom of the page. About 125,000 copies of the newspaper were printed and posted in public places to be viewed by millions of people. Herf acknowledges that there is no reliable evidence as to "how many people had the intellectual curiosity, political acumen, and moral courage to conclude that this wall newspaper was an announcement of mass murder".
### 8 November 1942 speech
On 8 November, during Hitler's annual speech for the Nazi Party old guard to commemorate the Beer Hall Putsch, he discussed the war in which Germany had recently suffered reversals (at Stalingrad and in Africa), and stated that there would be no negotiated peace. He referenced his prophecy and said that the result of the war would be "the extermination of Jewry in Europe". Hitler said that the enemy was the same one that Nazis had faced under the Weimar Republic. He argued that Germany lost World War I because it did not understand the great danger posed by internal enemies and the Jews; Nazi Germany would win its war against the "half-Jew Roosevelt" because it had been enlightened. Hitler's rhetoric was out of touch with reality, and had only a superficial effect on listeners according to Security Service reports. Herf argues that what Hitler meant was evident to listeners: "The Jews had intended to 'exterminate'—that is, to kill—the Europeans" and in return the "Nazi regime was in the process of exterminating—that is, killing—the Jews". In Herf's opinion, the most believable interpretation of the Jews no longer laughing was that "something of a catastrophic nature was being done to them". The applause indicated that the audience approved of Hitler's "justified retaliation against Germany’s greatest enemy".
### 1943
On 18 February 1943, Goebbels delivered the total war speech at the Sportpalast. According to Herf, the enthusiastic audience reception to Goebbels' calls for total war against the Jewish–Bolshevik enemy indicated that Nazi loyalists still agreed with the prophecy.
On 8 May 1943, Goebbels wrote an article titled "The War and the Jews":
> None of the Führer’s prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will take time. But it cannot be halted.
The article reached thousands of readers and millions of radio listeners. According to Herf, the piece "repeated and elaborated on the essential projection mechanism of Nazi propaganda"—that Jews were plotting the extermination of Germans. Goebbels interwove the actual systematic murder of the Jewish population with a big lie of an international Jewish conspiracy which controlled the Allies and had started the war. Goebbels wrote that he was satisfied with the reception of the article and planned to increase the use of antisemitism as a propaganda tactic, as he found it second only to Bolshevism in effectiveness. On 18 May, the propaganda ministry delivered copies of "Twilight for the Jews All over the World!" to Nazi officials. The article cited Goebbels' repetition of Hitler's prophecy, adding that antisemitism was rising throughout the world because people had begun to understand that "all the suffering, privations, and deprivation of this war are exclusively due to the Jews, that the war itself is the work of Juda."
### 1944–45
Hitler continued to refer to his prophecy as the war went against Germany and used it to justify the conflict and its catastrophic consequences. Hitler's comments on the Final Solution also became more explicit; on 3 January 1944, he said that the outcome of the war was unresolved but the end of Jewish life in Europe was "beyond any doubt". On 26 May 1944, after the German invasion of Hungary, he addressed high-ranking army officers at the Berghof and said that if the opponents of Nazism prevailed, "Bolshevism would slaughter millions and millions and millions of our intellectuals. Anyone not dying through a shot in the neck would be deported. The children of the upper classes would be taken away and eliminated. This entire bestiality has been organized by the Jews." He described the bombing of Hamburg and dubbed the Hungarian Jewish community as "a seamless web of agents and spies" that undermined its country. Hitler declared that the Jews would be destroyed, just as he had predicted, and this was received well by the audience.
Hitler mentioned his prophecy in his brief New Year's speech, broadcast on the radio shortly after midnight on 1 January 1945, during a diatribe against the "Jewish international war conspiracy". According to historian Nicholas Stargardt, the speech did not comfort its listeners but stoked their fear that there would not be a negotiated peace. On 13 February, Hitler reportedly said "I have fought openly against the Jews. I gave them a last warning at the outbreak of war. I never left them in uncertainty that if they were to plunge the world into war again they would this time not be spared—that the vermin in Europe would be finally eradicated." In his last will and testament, signed shortly before his suicide, Hitler wrote that the true meaning of his prophecy of 1939 was "to exterminate the vermin throughout Europe".
## Analysis
### Reception by Germans
The threat to annihilate the Jews is the best-known phrase from Hitler's speeches. Kershaw writes that during the Holocaust (between 1941 and 1945), all Nazi leaders were aware of Hitler's prophecy, which was a "key metaphor for the 'Final Solution'". Confino writes that "There was only one prophecy in wartime German society, and it meant one thing"; the prophecy emerged as "a common, shared, universal idiom among Germans and Jews" for the ongoing genocide. He argues that the prophecy reflected the antisemitism already prevalent in German society. Koonz writes that Hitler's public prediction of the extermination of Jews in January 1939 indicated his belief that the public would acquiesce to draconian methods against the Jews. She argues that his assessment was correct.
### "Annihilation"
The interpretation of the prophecy is debated between the schools of functionalism and intentionalism, which differ in the degree to which they hold that the Holocaust was planned in advance by Hitler versus emerging from the Nazi bureaucracy. Early historians of Nazi Germany, such as Helmut Krausnick and Gerald Reitlinger, were convinced that Hitler had already plotted the genocide since the 1920s, and it was therefore unnecessary to prove a direct connection between the speech and the killings. In the 1960s, the school of functionalism emerged, which characterized Hitler as a weak dictator and argued that anti-Jewish policy emerged from Nazi functionaries as the war continued. In the 1990s, attention shifted back to Hitler's role, but this time arguing that he made the decision in 1941.
A key issue is what was meant, or understood, by "annihilation" (Vernichtung) in 1939. Historian Sarah Gordon suggests that Hitler chose the word (also translated "the end" or "destruction") for its vagueness, as he wanted to frighten the Jews into emigrating without explicitly calling for murder, which the reaction to Kristallnacht indicated that the German public opposed. Confino writes that "no one in Germany knew exactly what the word meant or how this metaphor of 'annihilation' would come to pass". He suggests that it evoked Kristallnacht and its burning synagogues, not the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the mass graves at Babi Yar (which did not exist yet). Confino contends that although not even Hitler knew what he meant by "annihilation", the speech demonstrated that Hitler and his listeners already envisioned "a world in which extreme violence was applied to get rid of Jews and eliminate Judaism".
#### Genocide
Intentionalists emphasize the importance of the speech and cite it as proof that the genocide had been planned before the war and did not gradually emerge. Lucy Dawidowicz highlighted the speech as Hitler's decision to commence the genocide, and argued that the German people should have understood it as a prior announcement of the Final Solution. Historian Stefan Kley notes that if Hitler had indeed expressed in 1939 a decisive intention to commit genocide, this would confirm intentionalist assumptions about Hitler's decisive role and rebut functionalist arguments.
Herf believes that the prophecy was Hitler's "first unequivocal public threat to exterminate (that is, murder)—not merely to remove, deport, or defeat"—Europe's Jews. Historian Shlomo Aronson described the statement as a public threat to murder the Jews and a declaration of his intention to do so, as he was already planning the war. Historian Gerhard Weinberg argues that "the murder of Jews would be an integral part of the war on which [Hitler] had already decided". Historian Daniel Goldhagen views the speech as a declaration of Hitler's aspiration and his intent, if he had the opportunity but not a defined program that would immediately be operational. Historian Robert Wistrich argues that the prophecy "was an extraordinary outburst from the leader of a great power and can hardly be reduced to a mere 'metaphor' or a piece of Utopian rhetoric... The vehemence with which Hitler delivered this particular section of his speech, and the frenzied applause of the Reichstag delegates, makes it plain that it was a deadly serious threat."
#### Emigration or expulsion
Functionalist scholars tend to emphasize the tactical implications of the speech in holding the Jews in Germany hostage against the behavior of the United States during the coming war, although they acknowledge that the speech establishes a mental connection between war and annihilation. One indication against this interpretation is that Hitler referred to "European Jews" rather than "German Jews".
The historian Christopher Browning said in an interview that during the 1939 speech Hitler intended to tell his followers that in the event of war, the Jews would be expelled from Europe. Browning said that the speech has to be considered in light of the anti-Jewish policies of the next two years, rather than with the retrospective knowledge of Auschwitz. Browning also wrote that the anti-Jewish policies pursued by the Nazis from 1939 to early 1941 (before the Final Solution), would have resulted in a great reduction in the Jewish population and argues that this would have been viewed as fulfilling the prophecy. The historian Mark Roseman contends that "there is no evidence that mass extermination was being planned in 1939" and points out that Hitler did not emphasize his prophecy in 1940. He asserts that it is impossible to know what Hitler's intent was in 1939 based on the prophecy. He also argues that it is unclear whether "annihilation" referred to expulsion or mass murder and points out that Hitler repeatedly spoke of the forcible banishment of the Jews from Germany.
Koonz writes that Germans at the time may have thought that the prophecy's "annihilation" was no more than a metaphor, "as in to 'smash' or 'wipe out' a rival". Bytwerk argues that it is neither necessary or reasonable to conclude that Hitler's prophecy, taken in context, referred to literal killings. Mommsen describes the prophecy as no more than "a rhetorical gesture designed to put pressure on the international community" to allow the immigration of German Jews: "At that time it was highly unlikely that either the German or the international public could have interpreted his statement as an ill-concealed declaration of a serious intention to liquidate the Jews under German rule in the event of war."
#### Multiple meanings
Bauer interprets the prophecy as expressing Hitler's determination to get rid of the German Jews. His first choice to resolve the situation was by international agreement that would lead to emigration, then a forcible, violent expulsion. A war, which the Nazi leadership was planning at the time, was another way that Jews might be eliminated. Bauer concludes that "while the Nazi aim was fixed—no Jews in the expanding Reich—the means could be varied" and that although Nazi leaders may have considered physical extermination as a means, there was no concrete plan to that effect in 1939.
Jersak argues that "Hitler planned to expel the Jews from Germany before he planned to conquer Lebensraum": Hitler issued orders from 1937 to 1939 aimed at speeding Jewish emigration. Jersak argues that if Germany became involved in a world war, Hitler recognized that the Axis would not emerge victorious. Therefore, he considered the systematic killing of Jews a "radical alternative" in case he did not get his way in the war. In this situation, "war would serve as a cover for extermination and the fighting would conceal the real war aim"—the murder of the Jews. Jersak cites Hitler's 1939 statement "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" as evidence that Hitler believed that crimes committed during wartime would be overlooked. Longerich writes that Hitler's prophecy "had several potential layers of meaning", of which the first was Hitler's tactical desire to frighten Jews into emigration.
### War
#### Jewish conspiracy
> Hitler's "prophecy" of January 30, 1939, comprised the core of Nazism’s narrative of World War II. A historical subject called "international Jewry" had launched World War II with the intent of bringing about the "Bolshevization" of the world. It would fail. Instead, Nazi Germany would retaliate for this aggression and annihilate the Jews. It would wage a "war" against the Jews in response to the "war" the Jews had started. This reversed logic of self-righteous retaliation constituted the core of Nazi antisemitic propaganda between 1939 and 1945.
Longerich views the 1939 speech as part of a long-term strategy to blame the upcoming war on the Jews. In February 1939, Himmler advanced the timing for the upcoming world war, estimating that it would occur soon rather than in the next decade because of the backlash to Kristallnacht. In notes for a speech, he wrote, "Radical solution of the Jewish problem is prompting Jewry to fight us, if necessary by unleashing a world war." Longerich sees a clear link to Hitler's speech. Gerlach wrote that the prophecy was self-fulfilling because in Hitler's nationalistic mindset, any opposition to Nazism was viewed as the work of an international Jewish conspiracy. Hitler and Nazi leaders believed that the Jewish conspiracy was real. The prophecy was also believed literally by many Germans. Victor Klemperer was confronted by Germans, even non-Nazis, who told him that Jews had started the war and deserved their fate.
Herf notes that as Hitler plotted war in 1939, "he ordered his propagandists to assert that exactly the opposite was taking place". Herf also writes, "Invisible to those lacking the insight provided by Nazi ideology, this conspiracy was perceived by Hitler and his henchmen as the driving force of modern history... When the major powers opposed Nazi Germany, they were doing so as Judenknechte, or servants of the Jews." This conspiracy theory violates chronology and causality and makes contradictory claims of a master race dominating the world versus the Germans as innocent victims attacked by a powerful Jewish conspiracy. Historian Antony Beevor writes that the prophecy's "breathtaking confusion of cause and effect lay at the heart of Hitler's network of lies and self-deception".
#### Strategic considerations
Historian David Reynolds argues that Hitler may well have been thinking partly of Roosevelt when he made the 1939 speech. At the time, the United States president was trying to persuade Americans to abandon isolationism and was promoting the emigration of Jews from Europe. Weinberg contends that, at the time of the prophecy speech, Hitler regretted allowing Neville Chamberlain to avert war in 1938, and was determined to go to war before 1940. According to Weinberg, Hitler already planned to use the war to cause a worldwide demographic revolution, of which the systematic murder of Jews was to be a crucial part. Herf argues that in his speeches referencing the prophecy, Hitler made it clear that he saw a "causal and inherent, not a contingent or accidental, connection with his intent to exterminate the Jews". Kershaw writes that "the 'prophecy' denoted the indelible link in [Hitler's] mind between war and revenge against the Jews". Koonz writes that in his 1939 speech, "Hitler posed as the sole moral arbiter of his Volk [nation] at war on two fronts: racial and geopolitical".
#### Hostages
According to Longerich, Hitler's reference to "international Jewish financiers" envisioned circumstances that the United States and other western powers intervened to prevent German expansionism in Europe, to which Hitler was already committed. If that happened, the "international Jewish financiers" would be blamed for the resulting war and Jews remaining in Germany would be held as hostages threatened with annihilation. If emigration failed and the Western powers prevented Hitler from pursuing irredentism, or joined a continental European war, all options were being kept open for further intensification of the Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Evans cites the Nazi belief in an international Jewish conspiracy to argue that Hitler's aim was to hold the Jews hostage to prevent American entry into the war. If America did so, the Jews throughout Europe would be murdered.
According to Mommsen, because Nazis believed in an international Jewish conspiracy that supposedly controlled the world's governments, it made sense to threaten the Jews in Germany to obtain the compliance of other countries. Aronson also views the threat as "aimed at the West", where the Jews were held hostage to ensure that Hitler could deal with each of the countries separately. Roseman writes that Hitler hoped that by holding German Jews hostage, their brethren in other countries could be controlled. Kershaw states that the prophecy was in part aimed at preventing United States entry into the war "through the threat of what would then happen to the Jews of Europe". Jersak argues that the speech served as an "early warning to the US not to interfere in Europe. The idea that American Jews in Germany could serve as hostages against another US participation in a possible European war was probably also born at this time." Stargardt writes that the idea of controlling the United States with Jewish hostages was in play as late as September 1941, when the Wochenspruch poster was issued. When the United States entered the war, the Jews lost their value as hostages and could be killed with impunity.
#### World war
Bauer writes "the war that Hitler wanted"—to ally with Poland in an invasion of the Soviet Union—"was not the one he got in September 1939". Even after concluding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler attempted to avoid a two-front war by keeping the United Kingdom, United States, and possibly France out of the war. At the time, Germans used the phrase "world war" for any major conflict between the European powers.
Goldhagen writes that the invasion of the Soviet Union was an opportunity for Hitler "to make good on his promise" in the prophecy. Bytwerk writes that in wartime "the word 'destruction' takes on a physical connotation missing in peace". By invoking the prophecy during the war, Hitler made it clear "that he was absolutely serious about his threat to destroy the Jews". Jersak argues that "the campaign against the Soviet Union turned into a war against the Jews" at the same time as prospects for German victory dimmed; from September 1941, anti-Jewish actions were not just justified but also motivated by fear of the Jewish conspiracy. Kershaw writes that the war and Hitler's mission to get rid of Jews "reached its fateful point of convergence in the conception of the 'war of annihilation' against the Soviet Union".
Kershaw writes that the prophecy "was evidently never far from [Hitler's] mind" during the winter campaign of 1941–42 and it was "at the forefront of his thoughts in the wake of Pearl Harbor". According to Jersak, around the same time, Hitler decided to murder "the last Jew on European soil", which Nazis believed "would break the 'subversive power' of 'International Jewry'". Browning argues against this explanation, noting that the systematic murder of Jews was already taking place in the Soviet Union and Hitler's prophecy was not "tied to a 'world war' defined by American involvement". Longerich writes that Hitler's speech of 12 December 1941 "appears to contain nothing really new" but, as Germany was now engaged in a world war, the "'prophecy' inevitably came closer to its realization".
#### Blame for war destruction
By the winter of 1941–1942, Allied military action, especially strategic bombing, was killing an increasing number of German soldiers and civilians. In Nazi propaganda—and, Herf argues, the opinion of many Germans—the Jews were held responsible for each death and they would be made to pay in kind. Herf argues that "for millions of Germans, the abstract slogan 'The Jews are guilty' assumed direct emotional significance." According to Kershaw, Hitler viewed the genocide of the Jews as "natural revenge for the destruction caused by the Jews – above all in the war which he saw as their work." When the Allies became aware of the systematic murder of Jews and denounced it, Hitler and other Nazi propagandists did not deny the reports. Instead, states Herf, they preferred to "present the Nazi attack on the Jews as a justified act of self-defense, retaliation, and revenge in response to the misfortunes the Jews had inflicted and were at that moment inflicting on Germany."
### Communication
#### Hitler's role in the Holocaust
Hitler was the primary decision maker in the Holocaust but no written order to that effect has been discovered, and most historians argue that it never existed. Instead, Hitler probably gave verbal authorizations to important decisions regarding the Final Solution.
Kershaw contends that both intentionalist and functionalist interpretations of the prophecy are wrong. Although the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people was not fully realized until years later, he argues that the 1939 speech is crucial for understanding Hitler's role in the Final Solution and the prophecy is "a key both to Hitler’s mentality, and to the ways he provided 'directions for action'". He argues that Hitler's actions were mostly confined to the realm of propaganda, especially the prophecy, as it was "neither his style, nor his inclination" to involve himself with day-to-day details. The prophecy served as "the transmission belt between Hitler’s own inner conviction" that the war would result in the genocide of Europe's Jews and the murders carried out by his subordinates. Party insiders understood the invocation of the prophecy as a call to radical action against the Jews without explicit instructions. Kershaw argues that the repetition of the prophecy in mass media helped to "condition the general population against humanitarian sympathy" and signaled the intensification of the mass murder.
Jersak argues that "the hypothesis of an order for the murder of the European Jews unrelated to that prophecy assumes... that Hitler, who repeatedly referred to his prophecy, did not mean what he said". Historian Eberhard Jäckel writes that the repetition of the prophecy is "truly astounding and its motivation is not readily apparent". Jäckel speculates that Hitler's motivation may have been to indicate his approval of the mass murder or to "have the final solution put on the record". According to Roseman, Hitler's rhetoric, including the frequently repeated prophecy, let Holocaust perpetrators know that Hitler approved of their actions.
#### Vagueness
Historian David Bankier notes that the prophecy "lacked a space or time frame and gave no details on how the Final Solution would be implemented. In his 'prophecy' the Jews would disappear without an agent". Beevor writes that "[d]espite his apocalyptic diatribes against the Jews" and efforts to promote violence, Hitler was "remarkably reluctant to hear details of mass killings". Herf describes Goebbels' article "The Jews are Guilty" as "a paradigm of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda" because "the extremist language went along with a total absence of revealing details about where, when, and how this mass murder was taking place". In other words, it "left enough ambiguity and absence of detail to promote plausible deniability".
Kershaw writes that despite the "dark hints that his 'prophecy' was being fulfilled", Hitler tried to conceal his direct involvement in the Holocaust. Kershaw speculates "even at the height of his own power he feared theirs, and the possibility one day of their 'revenge'." Or, perhaps, Hitler believed that "German people were not ready to learn the deadly secret". Kershaw notes that when referring to the mass murder of Jews, Hitler either stated things that were no longer true, or otherwise "alluding to the removal of Jews from Europe (often in the context of his 'prophecy') at some distant point in the future". Kershaw adds that Hitler wanted to "lay claim to his place in 'the glorious secret of our history' while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of mass killing". Therefore, he never made any statement like Himmler's Posen speeches, even in private with other Nazi leaders. Hitler also wanted to avoid opposition from the bureaucracy or the judicial system, which he encountered after he signed an order for the euthanasia program. Himmler used the same strategy of vagueness when communicating about the fate of the Jews.
#### Knowledge of the Holocaust
After the war, many Germans claimed ignorance of the Nazi regime's crimes and argued that references to the "annihilation" of Jews had not been understood literally. Historians have disputed these claims. Koonz writes that the prophecy was one reason why "no bystander could deny the intention of the Nazi leadership to eradicate Jews, one way or another". References to the prophecy in mass media spread "an awareness, while avoiding detailed or explicit information, that the destruction of the Jews was inexorably taking place", according to Kershaw. Bankier writes that the prophecy "left no possible doubts that, in one way or another, the fate of the Jews would be physical obliteration". He adds that in openly declaring their aims, the Nazi leadership aimed to test the loyalty of ordinary Germans to the regime. Confino argues that Germans knew in general terms about the extermination of Europe's Jews, even if they did not know the details. Herf argues that when Hitler's prophecy was referenced in German mass media during the war, readers understood that the Jews had been declared "guilty" for the war and that the Nazi regime was carrying out its previously announced threat to exterminate them.
At the International Military Tribunal (1945–1946), Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity based on his "incitement to murder and extermination" of Jews. The judgment against him cited a January 1943 article he wrote praising Hitler for fulfilling his prophecy to extirpate the Jews.
|
70,783,354 |
R2K: The Concert
| 1,154,512,375 |
2000 concert by Regine Velasquez
|
[
"2000 in the Philippines",
"Regine Velasquez concert tours"
] |
R2K: The Concert was the first arena concert by Filipino entertainer Regine Velasquez, held on April 7 and 8, 2000, at the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City. It was a part of Velasquez's promotion of her tenth studio album, R2K (1999). It was exclusively promoted by Viva Concerts, with beauty brands Pond's and Sunsilk as sponsors. Velasquez served as the stage and creative director for the show, which featured Ogie Alcasid, Gabby Eigenmann, Janno Gibbs, Jaya, and KC Montero as guest acts.
The concert's production and staging featured a 360-degree configuration with a semi-circular plexiglass stage, four large video screens, and an automated flying rig used during Velasquez's aerial performance of "On the Wings of Love" and "Butterfly". She collaborated on outfits with designer Rajo Laurel, who drew inspiration from Dolce & Gabbana's "print-on-print" collection. The set list included songs predominantly taken from R2K and various covers of pop hits from 1999 and 2000; these included "Larger than Life" by the Backstreet Boys and a medley of "If You Had My Love", "Waiting for Tonight", and "Let's Get Loud" by Jennifer Lopez, which she performed as part of the opening set.
R2K: The Concert received generally positive reviews from music critics, who praised Velasquez's showmanship and vocal abilities, as well as the stage production. Critics also lauded the costumes and her look during the concert. For her work, Velasquez was awarded Best Female Major Concert Act at the 13th Aliw Awards. The show was broadcast in its entirety on June 21, 2000, on Viva TV.
## Background and development
Regine Velasquez released her tenth studio album, R2K, on November 27, 1999. A cover album, it contains remakes of pop music from the 1970s and 1980s, issued with a bonus Video CD (VCD) of six music videos for its tracks, including Bread's "Lost Without Your Love" and George Benson's "In Your Eyes". Velasquez became the first Filipino artist to release an album with an accompanying VCD. The album was a commercial success, selling over 40,000 copies in the second week of release and earning a platinum certification from the Philippine Association of the Record Industry. As part of the album's promotion, Velasquez performed in small venues, which included a three-day event at the Music Museum called Regine 2000. In January 2000, Velasquez's publicist Hanzel Villafuerte revealed that she was planning a headlining concert in April. The following month, it was announced that Velasquez would perform two dates on April 7–8, at the Araneta Coliseum. The show's producers, Viva Concerts, officially named it R2K: The Concert, and partnered with beauty brands Pond's and Sunsilk as sponsors. Velasquez and her team selected Ogie Alcasid, Gabby Eigenmann, Janno Gibbs, Jaya, and KC Montero as special guests.
Unlike Velasquez's previous concerts—which were staged at the Folk Arts Theater, a 9,000-seat music venue—the concert was her first performance in a large-scale indoor arena. Velasquez stated that she was excited, yet nervous about the show: "It's my first time to perform at such a big venue. For the longest time, my manager wanted me to do it, but I felt I wasn't ready yet." Velasquez was heavily involved in planning and production, and revealed that rehearsals and preparations for it made her anxious. The Philippine Daily Inquirer previewed that it would be her "biggest and most expensive concert to date", adding that her main objective was to deliver performances that "range from pop, ballads, rock and even rap". She asserted, "I do this mainly to entertain ... I'm not out to prove anything. I just hope the public enjoys my performance". Velasquez served as stage and creative director, while Marc Lopez and Louie Ignacio were chosen as musical and television directors, respectively.
The show featured a 360-degree configuration with an end-stage setup and four large video screens. The two-tiered stage design included a semi-circular plexiglass main platform, which connected to the upper stage by twin staircases. The central area of the stage was spaced for the musicians and background vocalists. The concert included elements of pyrotechnics and aerial suspension. Velasquez had been toying with the idea of doing an aerial performance after seeing Paula Abdul's Under My Spell Tour (1992) in Manila, and took inspiration from Abdul being transported by wires during a performance of "Spellbound". Velasquez presented the concept to her team and had an automated flying rig custom-built to be used for "On the Wings of Love".
Velasquez commissioned Rajo Laurel to create all her costumes during the show. The designer was inspired by Dolce & Gabbana's "print-on-print" collection, paying attention to "postmodern outfits" that embodied "elegance and high style". The opening outfit consisted of a black leather bodysuit with a monochromatic opera coat and accompanying knee high boots. For a quick costume change after the opening segment, Laurel produced a gold metallic spaghetti-strapped top, incorporating a psychedelic micro-mini skirt over animal print tights. Another piece worn by Velasquez during her aerial number was a yellow gown embellished with butterfly appliqués, which was accentuated with long skirt panels, and a black backless long gown patterned with sheer fabrics that bared the singer's midriff, upper thighs, and legs.
## Concert synopsis
The concert opened with a video montage showing images of Velasquez and footage from her music videos, films, and past live performances. As two female dancers lifted by wires performed aerial acrobatics, Velasquez sang excerpts from the chorus of the Backstreet Boys's "Larger than Life" (1999), before disappearing offstage. She reappeared on the upper stage and continued the song while dancing. After a costume change, Velasquez began a medley of Jennifer Lopez's "If You Had My Love", "Waiting for Tonight", and "Let's Get Loud". She then sat centerstage for a performance of the Carpenters' "One Love" (1971), transitioning directly into Dionne Warwick's "I'll Never Love This Way Again" (1979). The next segment opened with Velasquez performing ABBA's "Dancing Queen" (1976), which was mashed with Orleans's "Dance With Me" (1974). It was followed with a performance of "I Believe" (1953) and "The Prayer" (1999) alongside Ogie Alcasid and Janno Gibbs.
During the performance of "On the Wings of Love" (1982), Velasquez was lifted by wires, revealing long skirt panels adorned with butterfly appliqués that billowed out around her as if she was flying towards the audience. At the end of the performance, she sat down and spoke to the crowd about falling out of love, before performing Marvin Hamlisch's "Fallin" (1978). She closed the segment with Mariah Carey's "Butterfly" (1997), during which she was taken back to the upper stage by wires.
The setlist continued with the Isley Brothers' "For the Love of You" (1975), where Velasquez was joined by Eigenmann and Montero. The duo added a rap routine to the number. She then sang a duet of "Habang May Buhay" (1994) with Jaya, which was followed by a debut performance of "Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw", the main theme song of Velasquez's film of the same name. After confessing how she enjoyed recording love themes for films, Velasquez stated, "I never realized that one day, I would be able to sing the theme songs of my own movies", before she sang a medley of her film soundtracks. She then sat by the staircase for an acoustic performance of "Sana Maulit Mulit", before continuing with Celine Dion's "That's the Way It Is" (1999).
For the final act, Velasquez sang a ballad version of Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" (1998) with a brief pyrotechnics display at the conclusion of the number. After the song ended, she thanked the audience before exiting the stage. She performed "Written in the Sand" for the encore, which she had introduced as a song she interpreted during the millennium television special 2000 Today. She closed the show with a medley of 1980s music: "Fame", "Flashdance... What a Feeling", "Build Me Up Buttercup", and "Here Comes the Rain Again".
## Reception and recordings
The concert was met with positive responses from critics, who praised Velasquez's showmanship and vocal abilities. Ricky Lo of The Philippine Star described the show as a "fully loaded electrifying concert" and complimented Velasquez's "boundless energy and creativity". He appreciated how much work went into preparing for the show. Ramil Gulle, also from The Philippine Star, acknowledged that Velasquez's concert lived up to expectations, writing: "She put up a show that quite no other Filipino pop artist has." He commended her maturity and favored her ability to sing with "proper nuances" and "more heart", asserting that the show was a reminder of Velasquez's theatrics and vocal talents. Writing for the Manila Standard, Isah Red considered its production and vocal performances a benchmark against which other Philippine concerts can be measured.
Critics agreed that the highlight of the night was Velasquez's aerial performance. Lo termed it a "decidedly daring or risky action", while in a 2017 retrospective, Elvin Luciano from CNN Philippines argued that it was one of Velasquez's most memorable moments. Her fashion during the show also received praise. Red described Velasquez's costumes as "grand and lavish", adding that "the colors and the cuts made our eyes look and appreciate the designs". Alex Vergara of the Philippine Daily Inquirer commented that the outfits "did dazzle the audience and suit [Velasquez's] unique flair onstage". Although critics were appreciative of Velasquez's vocals, some were critical of her spiels; Red wrote, "They just didn't work ... the script was confused in capturing [Velasquez's] character. Similarly, Vergara said, "We're clueless on who wrote the script ... was there one at all?"
Velasquez received the Best Female Major Concert Act award at the 13th Aliw Awards for the production. Segments from the concert were filmed for the opening scenes of Velasquez's romantic film Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw (2000). The film featured multiple snippets of live performances from the show, including "On the Wings of Love". The concert was also aired as a television special on June 21, 2000, on Viva TV.
## Set list
This set list is representative of the second performance on April 8, 2000.
1. "Larger than Life"
2. "If You Had My Love" / "Waiting for Tonight" / "Let's Get Loud"
3. "One Love"
4. "I'll Never Love This Way Again"
5. "Dancing Queen" / "Dance With Me"
6. "The Prayer"/ "I Believe" (with Ogie Alcasid and Janno Gibbs)
7. "On the Wings of Love"
8. "Fallin"
9. "Butterfly"
10. "For the Love of You" (with Gabby Eigenmann and KC Montero)
11. "Habang May Buhay" (with Jaya)
12. "Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw"
13. "You Are My Song" / "I Can" / "Tunay na Ligaya" / "Ikaw"
14. "Sana Maulit Muli"
15. "That's the Way It Is"
16. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"
Encore
1. <li value=17>
"Written in the Sand"
2. <li value=18>
"Fame" / "Flashdance... What a Feeling" / "Build Me Up Buttercup" / "Here Comes the Rain Again"
## Personnel
Credits and personnel are adapted from R2K:The Concert television special.
Show
- Regine Velasquez – show direction, staging
- Louie Ignacio – television director
- Marc Lopez – musical director
- Rajo Laurel – costume design
- Jay Feliciano – hair and make-up
- Patty Mayoralgo – production manager
- Peggy Sangco – assistant production manager
- John Batalla – lighting
- Willy Munji – sound engineer
- Epoy Isorena – stage manager
- Ed Murillo – assistant stage manager
- Jo Tecson – stage design
Band
- Marvin Querido – keyboards
- Rica Arambulo – keyboards
- Cesar Aguas – guitars
- Noel Mendez – guitars
- Sonny Azurin – guitars
- Niño Regalado – drums
- Bo Razon – percussion
- Romy Francisco – brass
- Boogie Abarico – brass
- Dix Lucero – brass
- Ronnie Marquese – brass
- Babsie Molina – background vocalist
- Kitchie Molina – background vocalist
- Sylvia Macaraeg – background vocalist
- Rene Martinez – background vocalist
- Cecile Aurellado – background vocalist
- Sushi Reyes – background vocalist
- Manolo Tanquilot – background vocalist
- Zebedee Zuñiga – background vocalist
Executive producer
- Vic del Rosario
Dancers
- Hotlegs
## See also
- List of Regine Velasquez live performances
|
57,519,959 |
John Thirtle
| 1,155,746,337 |
English landscape painter (1777–1839)
|
[
"1777 births",
"1839 deaths",
"19th-century English male artists",
"19th-century English painters",
"19th-century deaths from tuberculosis",
"Artists from Norwich",
"Burials in Norfolk",
"English landscape painters",
"English male painters",
"English watercolourists",
"Tuberculosis deaths in England"
] |
John Thirtle (baptised 22 June 1777 – 30 September 1839) was an English watercolour artist and frame-maker. Born in Norwich, where he lived for most of his life, he was a leading member of the Norwich School of painters.
Much of Thirtle's life is undocumented. After working as an apprentice to a London frame-maker, he returned to Norwich to establish his own frame-making business. During his career he also worked as a drawing-master, a printseller and a looking glass maker. He produced frames for paintings by several members of the Norwich School, including John Crome and John Sell Cotman. Throughout his working life he continued to paint. In 1812 he married Elizabeth Miles, the sister of Cotman's wife Ann. Thirtle suffered from tuberculosis during the last two decades of his life, and his worsening health reduced his artistic output up to his death in 1839. His Manuscript Treatise on Watercolour, unpublished before 1977, was probably for his own use, and he exhibited fewer than 100 paintings. A member of the Norwich Society of Artists, he briefly served as its vice-president, but in 1816 was one of the artists who seceded from the Society to form a separate association, the Norfolk and Norwich Society of Artists, which dissolved after three years.
The majority of Thirtle's watercolours are of Norwich and the surrounding Norfolk countryside, many being riverside scenes. His style, influenced by Thomas Girtin, Crome and (to a lesser extent) Cotman, was technically accomplished. His earlier landscapes were painted with a restricted range of buffs, blues and grey-browns, but he later developed a brilliancy of colour, producing works that included angular block forms. The quality of several of his watercolours has deteriorated owing to the fading of the indigo pigment that he used extensively.
## Life
### Family, early life and apprenticeship
Much of the biographical detail about John Thirtle is undocumented, and little is known of his life. The son of John Thirtle and his wife Susanna Lincoln, he was probably born in a house close to St Saviour's Church, Norwich, and was baptised at that church on 22 June 1777. A sister, Rachel, was baptised on 13 August 1780 and a younger brother named James was baptised in 1785. His parents were well-known members of the local community. His father, who worked in Elephant Yard off Magdalen Street as a bootmaker and an overseer of the poor, was a churchwarden at St Saviour's. Few details are known of Thirtle's boyhood or education.
In 1790, the 13-year-old John was apprenticed to Benjamin Jagger of Norwich, the leading carver, gilder, picture dealer and printmaker in the city. In about 1799 Thirtle moved to London to serve an apprenticeship to make picture frames, possibly under a Mr. Allwood. During this apprenticeship he studied the pictures of John Sell Cotman at Rudolph Ackermann's print shop at 96, The Strand.
### Return to Norwich and subsequent career
#### Frame-making business
On the successful completion of his apprenticeship in 1805, Thirtle returned to Norwich, where he showed five paintings at an exhibition of the Norwich Society of Artists, and set himself up to produce picture frames and prints in a shop in Magdalen Street. During what appears to have been a mainly uneventful life, he rarely left his home city again. In 1806, when he had already established himself as a picture framer and gilder in Norwich, he described himself in the Society's catalogue as a "Miniature Painter and Drawing Master". His business activities, and particularly the production of his decorative picture frames, led to his becoming one of the more financially successful members of the Norwich School of painters, despite strong competition from Jeremiah and William Freeman, who dominated the Norwich framing market during this period.
Paintings by members of the Norwich School were framed by Thirtle, including those by Cotman, John Crome, Thomas Lound, James Sillett, and Joseph Stannard. When Thirtle framed George Vincent's oil painting Trowse Meadows, near Norwich (first exhibited in 1828), he made a watercolour version of it. His trade label took several forms, ranging from the early 'Thirtle, Miniature Painter, & Drawing Master' to the elaborate 'Carver, Gilder, Picture Frame and Looking Glass Manufacturer, Wholesale and Retail', used in the 1830s.
Paintings still in Thirtle's frames can be dated from before 1839, the year he died. William Boswell, who took over the business that year, initially included 'Late Thirtle' in brackets on his labels. In 1922, W. Boswell & Son acknowledged in one of their publications that "Thirtle was a well-known frame-maker, and the maker of the now famous swept frame, which has never been equalled, he also was, and still is an artist of no small repute."
#### Artistic career
The art historian Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton charted Thirtle's development as an artist into four periods. During the first period, c.1803 – 1808, he produced few works, and his style fluctuated; the following period from 1808 to 1813 is marked by the strong influence of Cotman. During his third period, from 1813 to 1819, when his article style returned to being more conventional and less realistic, he produced outdoors what the art historian Andrew Hemingway has described as "wonderfully spontaneous and sure sketches". After 1819 he produced few works.
Thirtle's earliest known work is his landscape The Windmill (1800), an unusual subject matter for him, as he first exhibited works that were not landscapes, but portraits and paintings of other subjects. By 1806 he had begun to increase his output of landscapes, and to stand out as a master of the genre of watercolour painting. In 1803, Crome and Robert Ladbrooke formed the Norwich Society of Artists, which included Vincent, Charles Hodgson, Daniel Coppin, James Stark and Robert Dixon. Their first exhibition, in 1805, marked the start of the Norwich School of painters, the first British art movement created outside London. Thirtle exhibited five paintings as one of the five featured artists.
Thirtle was a major figure within the Norwich School of painters. He was probably a founding member of the Norwich Society of Artists, but his membership of the society was only first recorded three years after it was founded. He exhibited during the first years of the society, showing only miniatures. After he became a landscape artist, depicting scenes of thunderstorms and the rivers Yare and Wensum, the nature of his exhibited works changed. Crome, Cotman and Thirtle were sources of inspiration for the artists of the Norwich School. Thirtle served as vice-president of the society from 1806 to 1812. His output of exhibited works declined from a peak of 17 (produced in 1806) until he exhibited only six works in 1817, and none the year after that, making a total of 97. He exhibited only once outside Norwich, at the Royal Academy in London in 1808. His business responsibilities prevented him from working as a full-time artist, and he abandoned painting during his final illness.
#### Marriage
On 26 October 1812 Thirtle married Elizabeth Miles of Felbrigg, from a minor landowning family in north Norfolk; her sister Ann had married Cotman three years previously. Thirtle and Elizabeth were married at St Saviour's, the church in Norwich where he had been baptised 35 years previously. The marriage produced a close association with Cotman that influenced Thirtle's artistic style. The two artists probably worked together when Cotman was producing drawings of the interior of Norwich Cathedral in around 1808, as similar drawings by Thirtle from this time have survived. The two Miles sisters were themselves amateur painters, having shown their work at the Norwich Society of Artists exhibition of 1811. The marriage was probably childless.
#### Secession from the Norwich Society of Artists
In 1814 Thirtle was elected President of the Norwich Society of Artists, but he was one of three leading artists to secede from the Society in 1816 to form the Norfolk and Norwich Society of Artists. The secession was caused by a disagreement over how the profits of the exhibitions should be used. It led to Ladbrooke, Sillett, Joseph Clover, Stannard and Thirtle renting part of the Shakespeare Tavern on Theatre Plain and holding their own exhibition, The Twelfth Exhibition of the Norfolk and Norwich Society of Artists, to rival the original Society's exhibition in Sir Benjamin's Wrench's Court.
Thirtle's decline in output from 1806 was reported by the local press, whose disappointment was expressed in 1811: "We lament exceedingly that Mr. Thirtle, who made up the seceding triumvirate, should not have found time for a single drawing. His occupation is doubly to be regretted, because he stands highest and alone in the particular and beautiful department of watercolours in which he has evinced so much decided excellence." Although Thirtle continued to paint, he exhibited nothing from 1818 to 1828.
At some time, while Cotman was contributing drawings for the Excursions in the County of Norfolk (1818), Thirtle went to Great Yarmouth to help his brother-in-law, but none of his drawings appeared in the published work and he probably assisted Cotman by relieving him of his teaching activities.
### Later life
By 1824 Thirtle was taking on pupils: he was employed by Thomas Blofield to instruct his daughter Mary Catherine and he also taught James Pattison Cockburn. Thirtle's mother died in 1823; an inheritance from his father, who died in 1825, may have given him some financial security for the remainder of his life, as 1825 is the first year in which he is known to have independently owned property.
After the dissolution of the Norwich Society of Artists in 1833, its main artists, including Thirtle, remained active. He continued to produce picture frames as well as to paint river scenes, reminiscent of the works of Peter De Wint. His drawings and paintings were collected by Lound, a prolific water colourist and etcher who owned 70 of Thirtle's works at the time of his own death in 1861. Lound's etching of Devil's Tower – Looking towards Carrow Bridge (1832) created a rendition of Thirtle's original watercolour "that perfectly convey the tonal balance that Thirtle had established".
Thirtle is known to have suffered from tuberculosis for many years. This greatly interfered with his work output, although the art historian Derek Clifford has commented on the stronger and more freely expressed manner of these later drawings. Thirtle died of tuberculosis in Norwich on 30 September 1839, and was buried in the Rosary Cemetery in Norwich. The tomb-chest of Thirtle and his wife can be found in Section E (Reference E759 Sq(uare)). After his death, the framing business was taken over by William Boswell. In Thirtle's short will, made in 1838 and proved in December 1839, he described himself as both a carver and a gilder. He left the sum of to his wife Elizabeth. She outlived him by many years, dying in 1882 at the age of 95.
## Style and technique
John Thirtle exhibited 79 works in Norwich, the majority of which were of the city or the Norfolk countryside. His style was influenced by the English watercolourist Thomas Girtin, as well as fellow members of the Norwich School, such as Crome and Cotman. Thirtle responded to Cotman by producing works that were technically accomplished. Walpole notes that they were produced by "a very independent spirit, answerable to no-one". The artist Henry Ladbrooke, who was a contemporary of Thirtle's, wrote: "As a man of genius, Cotman was much Crome's superior and, as a colourist, Thirtle far surpassed them both." Thirtle's watercolours can easily be distinguished from those of Cotman and only occasionally show his influence, as with his undated watercolour Old Waterside Cottage, Norwich; he typically did not use the kind of flat washes that Cotman used regularly. The large finished drawing The Boatyard, near The Cow Tower, Norwich (1812) is independent of Cotman's influence and has more naturalism, as it relies to a greater extent on carefully observed light effects.
Although Thirtle attempted to paint in oils, he is known for his watercolours. The Times, announcing an exhibition of works by lesser known members of the Norwich School in July 1886, described him as "a good portrait painter and a charming landscapist in watercolour, his drawings being full of observation and treated with a freedom, breadth and delicacy that are really remarkable". He surpassed both Crome and Cotman as a watercolourist of outdoor phenomena. His earlier landscapes, from 1808 to 1813, were painted mainly with a restricted range of buffs, blues and grey-browns, as exemplified by Interior of Binham Abbey (1808), now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
With his later paintings (produced during the period 1814–1819) he reached his peak, and according to the art historian Margorie Allthorpe-Guyton, his scenes were painted with "limpid, silvery tonality and broad assured washes". He went on to paint with greater brilliancy of colour, producing works that included angular block forms. Clifford praised Thirtle's ability to organise his subjects harmoniously in an unforced and unselfconscious way, but noted how he was less able than Crome to "give the impression of an unaffected, unselected chunk of nature". Hemingway, who describes Thirtle as "an outstanding if variable" watercolour artist to be ranked alongside De Wint and Joshua Cristall, describes Thirtle's ability to create the feeling of space as "exceptional". His pictures of riverside landscapes of Norfolk have a trait that was peculiar to his style—a boat gliding along on the water from the left.
Thirtle's Manuscript Treatise on Watercolour, written no earlier than 1810, is now in the Norwich Castle Museum. It was more a reference manual for his own use than a means of perpetuating his ideas for the future. Nothing written by Thirtle other than his Treatise is known to have survived. The treatise is an important document for art historians that provides documentary evidence of Thirtle's approach to his work as an artist. Allthorpe-Guyton dates it to no earlier than 1810, referring to pigments introduced early in the 19th century, such as purple and brown madder. It consists of an unorganised collection of technical instructions and observations, possibly made from paraphrases of published works such as Ackermann's New Drawing Book (1809). Thirtle's list of pigments is longer than Ackermann's and that given by William Henry Pyne, in his Rudiments of Landscape Drawing (1812). Both Pyne and Thirtle describe the use of indigo and provide schemes for colouring skies, buildings and trees. In the treatise, Thirtle shows his interest in depicting the weather, and his opposition towards contemporary ideas of painting in a picturesque way. It contains what Hemingway describes as "undertones of a classical aesthetic", also to be found in John Berney Crome's lecture Painting and Poetry.
### Use of indigo
Thirtle used a natural indigo pigment for producing fine greys, obtained from indigofera tinctoria, a species of the bean family. He may have used a cheap form of indigo sold by a local dealer in Norwich. Those watercolours where the pigment was used have deteriorated because the pigment faded to red when exposed to light. This characteristic of his paintings cannot be applied to them all, but it is sometimes assumed that Thirtle's works are all permanently ruined in this way. Equally, the use of indigo by other painters has meant that their works were sometimes incorrectly attributed to Thirtle.
An example of such a work is his River Scene with laden Wherries and Figures, an undated pencil and watercolour, in which the pink glow of the sky and the sea have been unintentionally caused by the fading away of the original greyish blue colours. The original colours produced by Thirtle can still be seen around the edges of the painting, where there was much less exposure to light. A section in Thirtle's treatise describes how he used indigo when painting his skies, without any mention of its fading effect:
> Occasionally you may use Black on the sky, do it with care or you will make it earthy—Venetian Red and Indigo, the red predominating, will do for the first wash of your clouds, as it will appear warm. Let your next shadow have more Indigo, making a Grey. The third, make the Maddar Purple and Indigo, you'll have a fine tone in the clouds.
## Legacy
Thirtle was praised in the local press for his work, but was criticised for not exhibiting his works more regularly. During the second half of the 19th century, he lapsed into obscurity, which Allthorpe-Guyton attributes to his lack of success in becoming better known outside Norwich.
An exhibition of Thirtle's paintings was first held by the Norwich Art Circle in 1886. To celebrate the centenary of his death, some of his works were shown in an exhibition in Norwich Castle in 1939, but it was forced to close because of the outset of the Second World War.
A biennial show of paintings by Thirtle and his contemporaries was held in Norwich Castle in 1977; his treatise on watercolour painting was published for the first time in the accompanying exhibition catalogue.
## Gallery
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Hurricane Elena
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Category 3 Atlantic hurricane in 1985
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[
"1985 Atlantic hurricane season",
"1985 natural disasters in the United States",
"Category 3 Atlantic hurricanes",
"Hurricanes in Alabama",
"Hurricanes in Florida",
"Hurricanes in Louisiana",
"Hurricanes in Mississippi",
"Retired Atlantic hurricanes",
"Tropical cyclones in 1985"
] |
Hurricane Elena was a strong and destructive tropical cyclone that affected eastern and central portions of the United States Gulf Coast in late August and early September 1985. Threatening popular tourist destinations during Labor Day weekend, Elena repeatedly deviated from its forecast path, triggering evacuations of unprecedented extent. The hurricane wrought havoc to property and the environment between southwestern Florida and eastern Louisiana, though lesser effects were felt well beyond those areas. Elena developed on August 28 near Cuba, and after traveling lengthwise across the island with little impact, it entered the Gulf of Mexico and continued to strengthen. Initially projected to strike the central Gulf Coast, the hurricane unexpectedly veered toward the east on August 30, then stalled just 50 mi (80 km) west of Cedar Key, Florida. Despite predictions that Elena would continue eastward across Florida, the cyclone remained nearly stationary for about 48 hours, causing damage all along the eastern gulf with high winds and waves, before slowly moving northwest and ultimately making landfall near Biloxi, Mississippi, on September 2 as a Category 3 major hurricane. The storm quickly weakened upon moving ashore and dissipated on September 4.
The hurricane's unpredictable shifts in direction created what was considered the largest peacetime evacuation in the nation's history. Evacuations occurred in sequence to follow the storm's forecast positions, and many residents and tourists along portions of the Gulf Coast were forced to leave twice in a matter of days. Preparations were generally timely and efficient, though accommodations and resources at storm shelters were stretched thin, and many refugees tried to return home against officials' orders. About 1.25 million people fled the storm in Florida alone, contributing to a region-wide total of nearly 2 million evacuees. Tropical cyclone warnings and watches were continuously issued and adjusted, and forecasters stressed the storm's destructive potential for days.
Elena's slow movement off western Florida resulted in severe beach erosion and damage to coastal buildings, roads, and seawalls, especially to those of old or inadequate construction. Destruction was greatest near the shore and on islands such as Cedar Key and Dog Island, though tornadoes spawned by the hurricane swept through communities and mobile home parks well inland. The hurricane devastated the Apalachicola Bay shellfish industry, killing large quantities of oysters, destroying their reefs, and leaving thousands of workers unemployed. Farther west, Dauphin Island in Alabama endured wind gusts as high as 130 mph (210 km/h) and a significant storm surge. The island sustained some of the most significant damage inflicted by Elena, including several hundred damaged or demolished homes. The rest of the state's coast also sustained considerable damage, and the inland pecan and soybean crops were severely diminished in Alabama and Mississippi.
Over 13,000 homes were damaged in Mississippi, and 200 were destroyed. Cities close to the Alabama border—including Pascagoula—experienced widespread damage to residences, schools, and businesses, and the community of Gautier was effectively isolated from the outside world. Several apparent but unconfirmed tornadoes appear to have exacerbated the damage in the Gulfport area. Wind damage extended into portions of eastern Louisiana. Overall, nine people died as a result of the hurricane: two in Texas due to drownings in rip currents, three in Florida, two in Louisiana, one in Arkansas, and one in a maritime accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Damage totaled about \$1.3 billion, and power outages from the storm affected 550,000 people. In Elena's wake, President Ronald Reagan declared parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida federal disaster areas, making storm victims eligible for financial aid and temporary housing. The name Elena was later retired from the cyclical list of Atlantic hurricane names because of the storm's effects.
## Meteorological history
The origins of Hurricane Elena trace to an easterly tropical wave that was first identified off the western coast of Africa on August 23, 1985. The system sped westward across the Atlantic at up to 35 mph (56 km/h). Its rapid motion, combined with the presence of an unusually hostile Saharan Air Layer, prevented tropical cyclogenesis for several days. Driven by a strong subtropical ridge to its north, the wave quickly approached North America as it began to show signs of organization. At 00:00 UTC on August 28, the disturbance developed into a tropical depression while over the Windward Passage. The newly designated depression began to track west-northwestward over Cuba, which is known to disrupt tropical cyclone development. Despite that, its central barometric pressure continued to deepen, and reconnaissance aircraft found winds exceeding 50 mph (80 km/h) near the center. In response, the National Hurricane Center upgraded the depression to Tropical Storm Elena over northern Cuba later on August 28.
After passing north of Havana, Cuba, Elena emerged into the Gulf of Mexico. At 12:00 UTC on August 29, Elena intensified into a Category 1 hurricane. Analysis of steering currents through the morning of August 30 suggested that Elena would continue on its northwestward track, striking the area between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi, within 30 hours. Unexpectedly, a mid-to-upper-level trough of low pressure diving in from the northwest created a weakness in the easterly currents, allowing Elena to recurve and slow drastically in forward speed. Roughly 24 hours after attaining hurricane intensity, the storm abruptly turned east in response to the trough. Having defied initial forecasts, Hurricane Elena drifted on its new course toward the coast of northwest Florida. Forecasters now called for the trough to direct the hurricane across the Florida Peninsula and into the western Atlantic. However, the relatively weak trough moved rapidly, and instead of fully engaging Elena, its axis passed over the storm's center. Further, post-storm analysis of water vapor imagery suggested that the hurricane split the trough into two distinct segments.
Extrapolation from the storm's eastward progress yielded a projected landfall location near Levy County. However, after the passage of the upper-level system early on August 31, steering currents slackened, and Elena became nearly stationary in the extreme northeastern Gulf of Mexico. At its closest, the center of the storm was around 50 mi (80 km) from Cedar Key, Florida, with maximum sustained winds estimated at 105 mph (170 km/h). Elena's intensity remained consistent, and the cyclone was able to continue strengthening as soon as movement resumed. Early on September 1, Elena reached Category 3 major hurricane status. An area of high pressure soon began to build over the eastern United States, causing Elena to slowly retrograde westward. For much of September 1, the center of the hurricane was within range of the WSR-57 radar station in Apalachicola, Florida, enabling extensive study of small features within the eye and surrounding eyewall. During that period of observation, the previously unobstructed eye became cloud-filled.
The hurricane accelerated on a trajectory toward the central U.S. Gulf Coast, sliding south of the Florida Panhandle. During the afternoon of September 1, the hurricane attained its peak intensity, with winds of 125 mph (205 km/h) as confirmed by reconnaissance aircraft. On the morning of September 2, Elena approached coastal Mississippi from the east-southeast, still at major hurricane status. It came ashore close to Biloxi, which was coincidentally within the hurricane's first forecast destination range before its extended detour. Once inland, the hurricane immediately deteriorated, weakening to a tropical storm just hours after landfall, and its center rapidly filled. The system curved northwestward over Mississippi and Louisiana, and despite weakening, it continued to ignite thunderstorm activity which spawned heavy rains. Elena persisted for several days before degenerating into a remnant area of low pressure on September 4. Its associated cloud structure became distorted on September 5, and dissipated over Kentucky that same night.
## Preparations
The unpredictable nature of the hurricane, in conjunction with its arrival at popular tourist destinations on the Labor Day holiday weekend, severely complicated preparations along the Gulf Coast. Evacuations and the hoisting of weather advisories inadvertently occurred in stages to keep up with Elena's shifts in direction; hurricane warnings were in effect at one point or another for every coastal location between Morgan City, Louisiana, and Sarasota, Florida. Much of the northern Gulf Coast was under a hurricane warning on two separate occasions for two different trajectories of the storm. Evacuations of residents and vacationers also overlapped in many cases. Collectively, this led to the "largest number of people ever evacuated", according to Robert Case. Some evacuees moved inland to meet relatives, but many stayed relatively local, filling hotels and designated shelters such as schools and churches. Despite the unusually fluid scenario, officials were well aware of the storm's destructive power days before its actual landfall. National Hurricane Center hurricane expert Bob Sheets cautioned on August 30 that Elena "will be over a \$1 billion storm".
During Elena's initial approach, the first series of hurricane warnings were issued between Grand Isle, Louisiana, and Apalachicola, Florida. The storm's projected path quickly nudged westward, prompting the warnings to be extended to Morgan City, Louisiana, and truncated to Pensacola, Florida on their eastern reach. Heeding the advisories, nearly one million residents and vacationers fled the storm's path. Personnel on offshore oil rigs in the northern Gulf of Mexico began leaving as early as August 29. The governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida declared states of emergency by August 30. Huge crowds formed at stores as individuals searched for emergency supplies, and simultaneously, lines grew at gas stations. Due to the impending danger, many businesses closed and fortified their buildings. Across the Gulf Coast, classes at schools were cancelled, and residents in the New Orleans area were particularly wary of what was being called the first serious hurricane threat in 20 years (Hurricane Betsy caused catastrophic flooding in and around New Orleans in 1965). In Mississippi, the mass exodus created bumper-to-bumper traffic on crucial highways, such as the west–east U.S. Route 90. In Florida, then-Governor Bob Graham activated 250 National Guard troops on August 30 to facilitate efficient evacuations, stating that 1,600 more were on standby. By that time, it became evident that Elena would head farther east than initially expected, stirring more concern for the eastern Gulf Coast. Accordingly, hurricane warnings were dropped for coastal Louisiana west of Grand Isle and replaced eastward to Apalachicola, Florida.
By the evening of August 30, after Elena's sharp turn to the east, hurricane warnings along most of the northern Gulf Coast were discontinued. In accordance, evacuees between Louisiana and the four westernmost counties of the Florida Panhandle returned home as shelters closed. With the storm's new course, the area of highest threat translated east to the remainder of the Panhandle and the western Florida Peninsula. As such, Governor Graham recommended evacuations south to the Tampa area late on August 30. A mandatory evacuation was then issued overnight for ten more coastal counties, encompassing 573,000 affected individuals. On August 31, Governor Graham advised residents in vulnerable areas of 15 inland counties to find safer ground. In response to the heightening danger, most of the National Guard troops previously on standby were sent to block access to certain areas, and an additional 3,000 were placed on standby.
In the greater St. Petersburg, Pinellas County, area alone, 320,000 people evacuated ahead of the storm in what was a national record for the largest evacuation of a single county in history. The large number of refugees from the storm put a strain on facilities, highways, and contingencies. Although the number of people required to leave far exceeded the capacity of Pinellas County shelters, only 120,000 of the 300,000 or more refugees made use of the shelters. Still, official shelter usage was considered to be higher than average, possibly due to shortened lead times limiting the ability of individuals to make arrangements with friends and relatives, or increased awareness of available resources. Post-storm phone surveys indicated that evacuation order compliance rates were as high as 90% in Pinellas County, and the entire evacuation there took just 9 hours, rather than the expected 15. With over 200,000 individuals recorded to be in more than 120 shelters along the coast of west-central Florida, evacuees became restless as a result of the duration of the storm. Supplies such as food ran short, and many people ignored orders and tried to return home prematurely. The threat of Hurricane Elena also triggered an unprecedented mass transfer of medical and nursing home patients. Tampa General Hospital, at 84% of patient capacity, was evacuated; four more hospitals and around 19 nursing homes in Pinellas County were also cleared. Overall, nearly 2,000 nursing home patients were transported to safety. Although successful, the process encountered issues such as time constraints and staffing shortages.
Late on September 1, when the storm began to retrograde, hurricane warnings were reinstated westward along the coast to Grand Isle, Louisiana, as advisories along the west coast of the Florida Peninsula were allowed to expire. By the time officials lifted evacuation orders, the number of evacuees staying in shelters already decreased significantly due to the rampant eagerness and anxiety. Roughly 250,000 people in the Florida Panhandle, 175,000 in Alabama, 70,000 in Mississippi, and 50,000 in Louisiana—a total of 545,000—were ordered to leave. Several hundred thousand of the people affected by the new string of evacuation orders had also been forced to leave just days earlier, and in extreme cases had one day or less reprieve. Governor Graham's office reported that during the entire storm event, 1.25 million people from Florida evacuated at some point, and state police in Louisiana estimated that figure in their state to be around 400,000. In total, nearly 2 million people fled the storm over its entire course.
## Impact
According to the Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Hurricane Elena produced Category 3 winds (111 mph (179 km/h) or greater) in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. The American Red Cross reported that in addition to the hundreds of single-family homes demolished by the hurricane, over 17,000 sustained some degree of damage; thousands of mobile homes, apartments, and condominiums were also damaged or destroyed. A forecaster at the National Hurricane Center determined the worst of the hurricane's effects were focused around Dauphin Island, Alabama, and Pascagoula, Mississippi, though noteworthy damage occurred across large areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, with effects documented as far west as South Padre Island, Texas, and as far north as Kentucky. Nine deaths were attributed to the hurricane in four states and on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and 134 people along Elena's path were hospitalized, many of them due to storm-related stress. Power outages plagued the entire region, affecting about 550,000 customers. The National Climatic Data Center compiled a total monetary damage figure of \$1.3 billion.
In addition to its effects over land, Elena also affected offshore interests. When a cargo ship close to the hurricane's center rolled in high seas on August 29, two unsecured storage containers collided, crushing a man to death. An oil platform operated by Exxon and anchored off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, was ripped from its moorings and reported missing on September 2. The oil rig drifted 14 mi (23 km) away before it was spotted by a Coast Guard aircraft. Exxon previously evacuated the platform after rough seas snapped the first two of its eight anchoring cables. Damage was reported on four other offshore platforms, and a 6 in (150 mm) oil pipeline broke during the hurricane at an estimated cost of \$1.6 million (the same pipeline broke two more times during the 1985 hurricane season).
A large aspect of the hurricane's devastation was the havoc it wrought on the eastern Gulf of Mexico oyster industry, particularly in the Apalachicola Bay area and off the coast of Alabama. Elena subjected the Apalachicola Bay reefs to high winds, strong tidal action, and moderate to heavy rainfall, churning up huge quantities of silt and mud which suffocated up to 90% of live oysters and virtually destroyed the most important harvesting sites. Commercial harvesting was suspended until May 1986, at which time some of the prominent reefs of the eastern Apalachicola Bay system were deemed able to sustain oyster-catching. Low astronomical tides amplified the effects of severe turbulence in the water. Thousands of individuals relying on the Apalachicola Bay oyster industry soon found themselves struggling to make a living; losses in production at two major reefs were expected to surpass \$30 million. All of Alabama's major reefs were affected by the hurricane, and its most productive was nearly destroyed. The problem was later confounded in November by Hurricane Kate, which, according to the National Hurricane Center, "[dealt] the final blow" to certain oyster beds.
### Florida
The storm began affecting Florida late on August 28 and early on August 29. In Key West, on the east side of Elena's strengthening center, wind gusts exceeded 50 mph (80 km/h), accompanied by 1.8 in (46 mm) of rain and higher-than-normal tides. Several boats washed ashore at Smathers Beach. Similarly adverse conditions occurred throughout rest of the Keys and across the southern Florida Peninsula; 60 mph (100 km/h) wind gusts and modest rainfall stretched as far east as the Miami area. Easterly winds produced significant wave heights of 5.2 ft (1.6 m) at West Palm Beach and 10.5 ft (3.2 m) at Jacksonville, along the Atlantic coast of Florida, by August 31.
Outer rainbands of the large hurricane produced squally weather over parts of northern Florida as early as the morning of August 30. By then, the low-lying coastline near Apalachicola already began to flood. Elena would continue to affect the state for several days as it meandered offshore, resulting in moderate to heavy rainfall. Upwards of 10 in (250 mm) accumulated in many locations, peaking at 15.67 in (398 mm) near Cross City and reaching 11.31 in (287 mm) at Apalachicola. Farther south in the Tampa area, the precipitation was less significant, exceeding 5 in (130 mm) at Clearwater. Parts of the state's northeastern coast—farther away from the hurricane's center—also saw formidable rainfall, with a local maximum of 10.57 in (268 mm) at Jacksonville. Still, those totals represented a relatively dry storm, considering its long duration. Despite initial hopes that the hurricane would help alleviate drought conditions across interior portions of southern Florida, precipitation there was generally inconsequential.
Storm-heightened tides extended along the Florida coast as far south as Sarasota and generally ran a modest 3 to 6 ft (0.91 to 1.83 m) above normal, though their duration and extent proved noteworthy. The highest recorded storm surge associated with the hurricane was 10 ft (3.0 m) at Apalachicola. The combination of raised water levels and strong waves resulted in severe erosion along many beaches. Many homes near the water were destroyed by the surge, and shoreline structures such as docks, causeways, bridges, low-lying roads, and seawalls sustained substantial damage. Several large fishing piers were either partially or totally destroyed; notably, the city pier at Cedar Key and the popular 1,500 ft (460 m) Big Indian Rocks Fishing Pier were both demolished by the hurricane. Debris from the Big Indian Rocks Fishing Pier drifted northward toward Clearwater Pass and accumulated along private beaches at Belleair Shore.
The storm's strongest winds remained largely over open waters, although severe gusts still brushed coastal cities and barrier islands. The strongest winds were observed in two areas of the coast: from Cedar Key to Clearwater, and from Apalachicola to Pensacola. Official gust reports included 75 mph (121 km/h) at Cedar Key and nearly 70 mph (110 km/h) at Clearwater; later, on September 2, a gust of 90 mph (140 km/h) was observed at Pensacola along the Florida Panhandle, with sustained winds exceeding 50 mph (80 km/h). Winds in Franklin County approached 125 mph (201 km/h) by unofficial estimates. The storm's effects were not limited to the shore, however, as fallen trees in the inland Tallahassee area damaged around 50 vehicles.
Although Hurricane Elena never crossed Florida's coast, its drawn-out interaction with land agitated large swaths of the state's western shore. Winds along and around the Pinellas County coast generally blew from the south or southwest for several days, creating persistent onshore flow that built up heavy seas. Near Clearwater, waves reached 8.2 ft (2.5 m) in height, marked by a period of 13 seconds on August 31. One study determined that the storm removed an average of 10 cubic yards of coastal material per linear foot of shoreline in Escambia County, Gulf, Franklin, and Pinellas counties, with values peaking at 15.6 cubic yards per foot. Along the predominantly marshy coasts of Pasco, Hernando, and Citrus counties, erosion and structural damage were much more limited, partly due to the local southerly or southeasterly wind direction.
In some cases, the hurricane left quasi-permanent alterations on beaches and small islands. For example, North Bunces Key—an island of southern Pinellas County—lost most of its vegetation to the storm, and overwashing shifted the southern part of the island up to 330 ft (100 m) from its original settlement. More extensive changes were seen on and near Caladesi Island, which formed in 1921 after a hurricane split a larger barrier island into two by a new channel. The inlet became dominant over Dunedin Pass to the south, which grew narrower very gradually until Elena rearranged the dynamics of the beach, allowing Dunedin Pass to fill completely with sand within a couple years of the hurricane's passage. As a result, Clearwater Beach became connected to Caladesi Island. Elena also created a new inlet known as Willy's Cut, which existed until 1991. Interest in artificially reopening Dunedin Pass prompted an official study in 1994 on the engineering and financial merits of such a project. Due to the high cost of dredging and the likelihood of nearly continuous maintenance, no action was taken.
The hurricane tore two barges from their moorings in Tampa Bay and blew them into Gandy Bridge, leaving the bridge with unspecified damage. Throughout the area, rising waters inundated streets, washed boats ashore, and destroyed numerous homes along the coast. At low-lying Cedar Key to the north, storm surge exceeded 9 ft (2.7 m). There, and at Alligator Point to the northwest, the surge values represented return periods of 25 to 30 years; elsewhere, they were equivalent to about 10-year events. Floodwaters in Cedar Key rose to 8 ft (2.4 m) in depth, with 2 ft (0.61 m) waves atop the standing water. The extent of structural damage was largely dependent on construction type, as newer, elevated buildings fared much better than older structures nearer sea level. Waterfront restaurants were especially susceptible; winds blew out several large sliding-glass doors at one establishment, allowing both the winds and the tide to enter its interior. Elena severed the sole bridge to Cedar Key, temporarily isolating the city and stranding several residents. The Florida Department of Transportation hurriedly worked to make the bridge passable long enough to rescue the stranded individuals. The hurricane compromised several other roads, destroying a 75 ft (23 m) section of State Road 24. Monetary losses in Cedar Key alone were estimated at \$2 million, and all major aspects of local infrastructure were severely affected, initially preventing residents from returning home to the island. At least 34 homes and businesses on the island were damaged or destroyed.
Pinellas County suffered some of the worst damage from Hurricane Elena in Florida. At the height of the storm, over 500,000 of its residents were without electricity. Forty-four single-family homes were destroyed, 31 more were damaged, and several condominiums, townhouses, and commercial buildings were damaged or destroyed. The hurricane also wrecked or irreparably compromised nearly 2.7 mi (4.3 km) of coastal bulkheads and inflicted minor damage on 2.15 mi (3.46 km) more. Most of the affected seawalls were degrading or poorly reinforced. Seawalls with higher standards of construction generally remained intact, though even in those cases, overwash from the Gulf of Mexico topped the barriers and deposited large volumes of sand. The hurricane cost roughly \$100 million in Pinellas County.
Elena's track parallel to the Florida Panhandle subjected the coastline between Apalachicola and Pensacola Beach to particularly severe conditions that resulted in "significant" property damage there. In Apalachicola proper, winds tore large roofs off buildings, and data from Florida's Department of Natural Resources indicate that 20 residences and one community building in Franklin County were damaged or destroyed. Structural failure was prevalent along the county's waterfront and on islands such as Dog Island; however, it was mainly limited to poorly constructed buildings. Several miles of roadways in the county sustained significant damage, and about 1⁄2 mile (800 m) of bulkhead was destroyed. Low seawalls allowed crucial points of the causeway to St. George Island to erode, causing it to fail. In Escambia County, the hurricane left \$2 million in damages. Throughout much of the remainder of the Florida Panhandle, structural damage was limited, though 100,000 people in the Pensacola area lost power. The configuration of the southern tip of Cape San Blas in Gulf County was changed by the storm. The hurricane wiped out eagle nests, generated freshwater fish kills, and affected other species of wildlife at the St. Vincent and St. Marks National Wildlife Refuges. St. George Island and Honeymoon Island State Parks were heavily affected, with appreciable but lesser damage in numerous other protected areas. U.S. Route 98, which closely follows the coast in this region, required extensive repairs after being undermined in nearly two dozen locations.
When tropical cyclones move over land, they often produce the wind shear and atmospheric instability required for the development of weak, embedded supercell thunderstorms, which can produce tornadoes. These tornadoes are usually weak and short-lived, but still capable of producing significant damage. While centered over the Gulf of Mexico, the eastern side of Hurricane Elena's circulation spawned several such tornadoes over central Florida. A tornado struck just east of Leesburg on September 1, destroying 64 single-family houses and mobile homes, and damaging another 118; seven people were treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Later that same day, another tornado touched down over downtown Leesburg, with much less damage. In nearby Marion County, tornadic activity destroyed six mobile homes, compromised another 50 residences, and inflicted as much as \$500,000 in total losses, though only minor injuries were reported. At Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 in Cape Canaveral, a weak tornado struck two vehicles near the location where Space Shuttle Atlantis was being prepared for its first flight. A tornado in New Port Richey tore parts of the roof off at least one building and brought down trees, and tornadic activity was also identified in Sumter County.
The hurricane took one life in the state and indirectly contributed to two additional deaths. In Daytona Beach, a tree struck a parked vehicle, killing a person inside. The exact cause of the tree's uprooting was unknown, although it may have been hit by lightning or a short-lived tornado. Elsewhere, two individuals died of heart attacks: one while installing storm shutters on his home, and another at a designated shelter.
### Alabama
The center of Elena passed 30 mi (50 km) south of mainland Alabama as it accelerated toward the Gulf Coast, affecting the state's two-county coast and offshore islands. Wind gusts at Dauphin Island, situated much closer to the hurricane's eye, were estimated to have reached 130 mph (210 km/h); these velocities represented some of the highest experienced on land from the storm, and were strong enough to snap hundreds of large pine trees. Dauphin Island received an 8.4 ft (2.6 m) storm surge that resulted in substantial flooding and areas of total overwash. Rainfall amounted to just 3 in (76 mm) on the island.
With its location close to the storm's center, Dauphin Island saw the greatest damage in Alabama. Access to the island was shut down during and immediately after the hurricane, slowing the progression of damage assessments. Additionally, the storm cut power and phone services. Post-storm surveys revealed discernible patterns in structural damage on the island; these included a nearly complete lack of destruction on the heavily wooded eastern end, and damage concentrated closer to the western side and along areas exposed to strong easterly winds. First-hand accounts relayed that in the most severe cases, entire elevated homes were torn from their pilings and swept into the Gulf of Mexico. The number of homes demolished in that manner was informally placed at 50, though such total building collapses were typically confined to poorly secured buildings. In total, the hurricane destroyed 190 residences on Dauphin Island, accounting for nearly 25% of all homes, and a further 235 sustained substantial damage. An unofficial and early estimate of losses on the island was \$30 million.
Windspeeds were markedly lower over mainland Alabama; Mobile recorded winds of over 50 mph (80 km/h), with gusts as high as 84 mph (135 km/h). The storm's angle of approach created strong offshore winds along the mainland, which depressed water levels and limited the extent of positive surge once winds shifted to onshore. Winds from the hurricane took a toll on crops, ruining 8,000,000 lb (3,600,000 kg) of pecans and reducing soybean production by 10%. Farms were still in the process of recovering from Hurricane Frederic in 1979 when Elena struck.
Wave action took a toll on the foundations of waterfront structures along the coasts of Baldwin and Mobile counties, where Elena inflicted about \$715,000 worth of damage to roadways. Most damage was concentrated near the shore, where extensive erosion took place, and on islands and minor peninsulas. Farther inland, Elena's impact was generally limited to downed trees and power lines. The storm destroyed the city boardwalk at Gulf Shores, with the cost of rebuilding expected to approach \$300,000. Alabama Power reported extensive power outages affecting up to 100,000 customers. According to the Insurance Information Institute, storm-related damages in Alabama totaled about \$100 million. An estimated 300 homes in the state were destroyed by Hurricane Elena, and another 1,345 sustained lighter damage.
### Mississippi
Along the coast of Mississippi, where Elena made landfall, the most significant effects of the storm stemmed from its strong winds gusting to over 120 mph (190 km/h). Recorded gusts included 121 mph (195 km/h) at Gulfport, 115 mph (185 km/h) at Pascagoula, and 90 mph (140 km/h) at Biloxi. Several other weather stations clocked sustained winds at over 90 mph (140 km/h). Consistent with the storm's dry nature, rainfall in the state was mainly light and confined to southern and western areas. Gulfport picked up more than 4.5 in (110 mm), while just over 3 in (75 mm) of rain fell at Natchez. Some streets in Gulfport and Biloxi flooded at the height of the storm. The highest tides ran 6 to 8 ft (1.8 to 2.4 m) above normal along the coast, reaching 7.9 ft (2.4 m) above average at Pascagoula and Ocean Springs. As in Alabama, negative surge values were recorded at the storm's onset. The tide gauge at Gulfport recorded a water level of 5.6 ft (1.7 m) below average early on September 2, before quickly swelling to 5.43 ft (1.66 m) above normal. Air pressure reportedly fell so rapidly at Pascagoula that car windows began to shatter. The barometer there bottomed out at 953 mb, the lowest pressure recorded on land in association with the cyclone.
The worst of the damage occurred along a 40 mi (64 km) stretch of coastline, centered on the Pascagoula area. Elena's winds damaged most of the schools in Jackson County, and more specifically, every school in Pascagoula was structurally compromised to some degree. Damages to schools in Ocean Springs totaled \$3 million. In the same city, the overall conditions following the hurricane were described as worse than those in the prior hurricanes Frederic or Camille. Elena destroyed 20 houses and two supermarkets in Ocean Springs, and several buildings on every city block sustained severe roof damage due to fallen trees. Two shopping centers were destroyed in nearby Gautier, possibly by short-lived tornadoes. A fire captain in Gautier remarked immediately after the storm that he had not yet seen an unharmed building in the city. The community became essentially isolated from the outside world, and quickly began to run short of food, clean water, and gasoline supplies. Initial reports from Pascagoula also indicated that most, or all, of that city's buildings were damaged. Nearly every business in the city was damaged to the extent that none were able to open when the storm cleared. A post-storm assessment by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency revealed over 900 businesses in Jackson County sustained damage, contributing to a total of nearly 1,500 in the state's three coastal counties.
Harrison and Hancock counties were generally not affected quite as severely as communities closer to the Alabama border, but the entire area still suffered extensively. In sections of Gulfport, large fires were sparked by downed power lines and fed by broken natural gas pipes. Debris on roadways prevented firefighters from reaching the fires, allowing them to spread. Similar destruction was seen to the east at Biloxi, where the hurricane's winds tore the roofs off many buildings. Beachfront communities were in a state of disarray, with large trees uprooted, debris littering the ground, and accumulations of sand on parts of roads like U.S. 90. Damage to schools in Harrison County—particularly in Gulfport and Biloxi—was extensive. Most homes in the area survived the storm, which was locally estimated to have been a once-in-50-year event, with relatively little damage. Several buildings along the coast in the Biloxi area sustained severe damage, but many of the older houses near the Gulf of Mexico there fared remarkably well. Winds brought down large highway signs, in some cases striking nearby buildings. Along the coast, Elena caused beach erosion, damaged coastal structures and recreational beach facilities, and dislocated navigational buoys and markers in various ports, several of which were closed pending Coast Guard inspection. Winds over inland Pearl River County damaged 350 permanent and mobile homes, and as in Alabama, the hurricane took a large toll on pecan and soybean crops and farms.
There were numerous reports in southern Mississippi of embedded tornadoes that exacerbated the hurricane's effects. Reports in Gulfport indicated that three schools actively being used as hurricane shelters were struck and damaged by tornadoes. At one location, almost 400 people being housed in a school had to rush to safety before part of its roof collapsed. Another apparent tornado sideswiped a senior citizens' center, endangering nearly 200 people in a structure that sustained damage to windows, doors, and part of its roof; about 20 people required rescue by paramedics. Only minor injuries occurred in association with the possible tornadoes. Teams of experts tasked with reviewing the validity of tornado reports were largely unable to prove that a significant portion of the damage in southern Mississippi had been done by tornadoes. As a result, few tornadoes were confirmed, and it is likely that most of the damage in the region resulted from squall-like winds that are part of an intense hurricane's nature, or potentially localized microbursts. Any unconfirmed tornadoes would have been no stronger than the hurricane's synoptic winds.
The storm left 80,000 Mississippi Power Company customers without electricity; most of Jackson County's 126,000 residents were affected by the outage. Operations at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula were halted due to the power outage and widespread damage to the shipyard's buildings and cranes, and at least two other shipyards in the state were affected by the hurricane. Additionally, the storm forced the temporary closure of the Chevron USA refinery at Pascagoula. Facilities at Horn Island in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, Buccaneer State Park, and the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge required repairs following the storm; at the latter, damages included the cost of healing a Florida sandhill crane's injured leg. Thirty seafood processing plants were damaged, and one was destroyed. The Red Cross estimated that 200 single-family houses in the state were destroyed, and some 13,200 were damaged, 1,200 of them heavily. Additionally, the hurricane demolished 390 mobile homes and damaged another 2,290. The overall cost of damage in Mississippi alone approached \$1 billion.
### Louisiana
After moving inland, the storm's northwestward track brought it over the Louisiana border on two separate occasions, first reaching Washington Parish as a minimal hurricane. Winds there were strong enough to bring down hundreds of trees, damaging houses and knocking out power to over 15,000 customers in the process. The hurricane also overturned mobile homes and strew debris throughout communities such as Bogalusa and Franklinton in Washington Parish, the hardest-hit area in the state. Downed trees caused damage to 200 homes and another 200 businesses, chiefly near Bogalusa.
Winds across the rest of the state were moderate, gusting to around 50 mph (80 km/h) at Slidell on the northeastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, so damage outside of Washington Parish was sporadic. Throughout the state, at least 40,000 electric customers lost power. Located southwest of the storm's core, New Orleans escaped with little damage and relatively benign weather conditions; still, the hurricane triggered minor flooding and brought down tree limbs around the city. Levees along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain were able to contain the lake's large waves, despite initial fears to the contrary. Still, the adverse conditions forced the temporary closure of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. The storm led to the deaths of two individuals in the state: one due to a drowning in St. Tammany Parish and another in a traffic accident attributed to the weather. Insured and uninsured damages were worth near \$17 million combined, with an additional \$500,000 in agricultural losses.
Elena subjected the Chandeleur Islands to a 6.5 ft (2.0 m) or greater storm surge. The island chain is an important buffer to parts of mainland Louisiana against storms, but is frequently reshaped or shrunken by intense hurricanes. Hurricane Danny and Hurricane Juan also affected the islands in 1985. Elena eroded away at least 20% and possibly up to 40% of the Chandeleur Islands' total land mass and cut 30 significant channels into the island chain. Parts of the islands left intact suffered extensive loss of vegetation. The hurricane, along with Danny and Juan, also affected several other barrier islands, and Elena itself removed as much as 112 ft (34 m) of beach along the island of Grand Isle, Louisiana.
### Elsewhere
Precipitation from Hurricane Elena reached into southern Georgia and parts of South Carolina, with little impact aside from meager drought relief. For several days after landfall, the weakening tropical cyclone produced moderate to heavy rainfall across portions of central and northern Arkansas. Rainfall totals were generally 2 to 4 in (51 to 102 mm), with locally higher amounts; Mountain Home, Arkansas received 8.95 in (227 mm) of rain, including 6.6 in (170 mm) in just three hours on September 4. Clinton to the south recorded 8.6 in (220 mm). At the state capital of Little Rock, under 3 in (76 mm) of liquid fell. Listed by the National Weather Service among "some of the most significant tropical cyclones to affect Arkansas", the remnants of Elena triggered flash flooding in parts of four counties; 2 ft (0.61 m) of standing water submerged streets in downtown Hot Springs. In Mountain Home, floodwaters forced 10 families to evacuate their homes, and one person died after a swollen creek swept her car off a bridge spanning it.
Significant rainfall also occurred over parts of western Kentucky, with lighter precipitation in several adjacent states. Over 8 in (200 mm) fell at Paducah, where urban streets and low-lying terrain experienced freshwater flooding Floodwaters 4 ft (1.2 m) deep submerged cars to their windows and infiltrated 40 homes, several businesses, a hotel, and a high school. Localized evacuations and road closures were required, and a person wading in an active creek had to be rescued after the creek swept him downstream. Around 10,000 customers lost electric service for a short period due to the storm. Shelters were opened to those displaced by the flooding, but scarcely used.
Early in its formative stages, Elena triggered rainshowers and thunderstorms over parts of Cuba, The Bahamas, and Hispaniola. Later, the mature hurricane generated strong rip currents as far away as South Padre Island, Texas, where two swimmers drowned in separate incidents over the Labor Day weekend. Both victims were male Texas residents.
## Aftermath
Hurricane Elena has a multifaceted legacy; it is remembered not only for its severe impacts, but also for its unpredictability and the wide extent of pre-storm preparations. Due to its notoriety, the name Elena was retired from the cyclical list of Atlantic hurricane names in the spring of 1986. Consequently, it will never again be used for an Atlantic hurricane. The name was replaced by Erika, which was first used during the 1991 season and retired after the 2015 season.
### Florida
The state of Florida received a federal Major Disaster Declaration on September 12. Franklin, Levy, Manatee, and Pinellas counties—where the storm left 5,000 individuals without work—became eligible for federal aid after President Ronald Reagan visited the state and determined that residents in those areas would benefit from assistance such as temporary housing, low-interest loans for rebuilding efforts, and monetary grants. Disaster centers were opened in those four counties as centralized locations for federal, state, and volunteer agencies to operate relief programs. President Reagan later included Hillsborough, Wakulla, and Dixie counties, bringing the total number of Florida counties eligible for federal aid to seven. The deadline for residents of all seven counties to apply for either state or federal assistance was set for November 12. Several major corporations—including Texaco, Exxon, and J.C. Penney—contacted customers in the affected areas and offered to make special arrangements for their monthly payments if they had been financially affected by the storm. While only a small number of customers took advantage of the assistance, the companies' actions were met with highly positive feedback.
In the days following the storm, residents of Cedar Key were forbidden from returning to their homes and businesses while washed-out roadways underwent repairs and debris was cleared. Portable toilets were delivered and clean water trucked in for use while the city's infrastructure was being stabilized. After the city of Cedar Key dropped its participation in the National Flood Insurance Program in early 1984, leaving residents unable to purchase flood insurance for their property, the city council voted unanimously to return to the program after Hurricane Elena. Tourism decreased significantly in some areas due to prospective travelers' concerns about the extent of the damage. The hurricane created a 13% drop in visitors between October 1984 and October 1985 in Pinellas County, marking an early end to the annual "tourist season", which generally ends after Labor Day weekend; tourist spending fell accordingly.
After the storm, residents were allowed to return to their neighborhoods on a by-town basis. Once authorized to enter their communities, many individuals inadvertently gained access to other municipalities in the area that were not ready for the return of civilians. In turn, dangerous situations arose amid preliminary cleanup operations. In Pinellas County, laws were proposed to unify the municipal decisions to accept residents after future disasters. As part of the proposed laws, the county sheriff, as opposed to local officials, would become responsible for allowing cities to reopen. Despite extensive resistance, county commissioners approved the change, giving the sitting sheriff power to override municipal evacuation orders. An additional ordinance was proposed to allow banning of alcohol sales during emergencies. During Hurricane Elena, intoxicated individuals created disorder at shelters and impeded evacuations by refusing to leave hurricane parties.
To help the Apalachicola Bay shellfish industry recover, special regulations were put in place to monitor harvests, and \$2 million was designated toward rehabilitation efforts. Using a portion of the funds, out-of-work oyster catchers were employed to repopulate crucial reefs. The state of Florida also issued a grant to help individuals in the crippled seafood industry make necessary payments. Efforts to help newly unemployed individuals in the shellfish industry continued in the months following the storm; local Tallahassee musicians organized a benefit concert in January 1986 to raise money for families of oystermen in Franklin County.
On September 1 and 2, Florida Power Company received help from Gulf Coast companies to return power to 170,000 customers before the assisting companies' home areas were struck by the hurricane. Power was restored to most areas by September 4, with an exception being St. George's Island; service was expected to be restored after several additional days. More broadly, owners of heavily damaged homes in the state faced new regulations on coastal construction in the state, which went into effect less than a month after the storm. The new rules entailed more rigorous study of factors such as a property's prior history and surrounding buildings before approval to rebuild a demolished structure would be granted. Governor Graham preliminarily advised that houses more than halfway destroyed not be rebuilt. Recovery efforts after Hurricane Elena continued to a small degree for years after its passage; for example, beach replenishment at Indian Rocks Beach in Pinellas County began in the summer of 1990.
### Central Gulf Coast
Power companies from several states sent workers to help restore service to the hardest-hit areas of the Gulf Coast. Most of Alabama Power's affected customers had power within 24 hours of the storm, though restoration of service to Dauphin Island took significantly longer. Power was fully restored to Central Louisiana Electric customers by September 4. Alabama's two coastal counties were declared federal disaster areas on September 7. Special loan assistance was made available by the Small Business Administration and the Farmers Home Administration, the latter of which sought to help commercial growers who lost their crops to the storm.
Mississippi Governor William Allain sent 500 members of the National Guard to partner with 200 law enforcement officers along Mississippi's coast in minimizing crime, and nighttime curfews were established in several cities. On September 4, President Reagan declared Mississippi's coastal counties a Major Disaster area. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimated that as many as 3,000 homes in the state were uninhabitable, their occupants forced to find temporary living arrangements. The Small Business Administration approved special loans up to \$500,000 for owners of damaged businesses. Mississippi Power Company's system was the hardest-hit, and restoration of service was slow; 50,000 of 80,000 customers were still without electricity by September 5.
By September 5, the Salvation Army, Red Cross, and other organizations had served 100,000 meals to those displaced by the hurricane in Mississippi, and federal food stocks became available for the state to distribute to storm victims. Still, resources such as food and ice started to run short in the hardest-hit locations, and long lines formed at the first few stores and gas stations to reopen. With dwindling supplies, the Salvation Army had to procure food from other parts of the region to serve to victims. In the days after the hurricane, an increase in heart attack deaths in the Harrison County area was noted.
## See also
- List of Category 3 Atlantic hurricanes
- List of United States hurricanes
- List of Florida hurricanes (1975–1999)
- List of retired Atlantic hurricane names
- List of tropical cyclone-spawned tornadoes
- Hurricane Sally (2020) – A category 2 hurricane that also stalled in the Gulf of Mexico
|
17,706,372 |
Faryl Smith
| 1,171,866,567 |
British soprano (born 1995)
|
[
"1995 births",
"21st-century English singers",
"21st-century English women singers",
"Britain's Got Talent contestants",
"English child singers",
"English mezzo-sopranos",
"Living people",
"Musicians from Northamptonshire",
"People from Kettering",
"Universal Music Group artists"
] |
Faryl Smith (born 23 July 1995) is a British soprano whose performance repertoire includes opera, classical and classical crossover. Her diverse concerts draw a wide range of audiences, and she particularly enjoys introducing new audiences to classical music. Faryl has released two albums with Decca Records both in the UK and the US and works frequently with many different charities.
Faryl rose to fame after appearing on the second series of the ITV television talent show Britain's Got Talent in 2008. After the show, she, unlike other finalists, did not sign with the judge Simon Cowell's record label Syco. Smith signed a contract with Universal Classics and Jazz for a £2.3 million advance in December 2008, the largest ever granted to a schoolgirl. Her debut album, Faryl, was recorded from December 2008 to January 2009 and released in March 2009. Faryl became the fastest-selling solo classical album in British chart history, selling 29,200 copies in the first week. It debuted at number six and rose to number four the following week, making Smith the third Britain's Got Talent contestant to have a top ten album. In 2010, on account of Faryl, Smith was nominated for two Classical BRIT Awards and became the youngest artist ever to receive a double nomination.
Smith's second album, Wonderland, was released in November 2009. A concept album based on Alice in Wonderland, the album was well received by critics. In addition to releasing her two albums, she was featured on a charity cover of "The Prayer", released in March 2010, and has performed at numerous events, including the 2009 Royal Variety Performance. In 2015, Smith began studying music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She continues to perform regularly, including at major sporting events, such as a Six Nations match at Twickenham Stadium in February 2019.
## Career
### Britain's Got Talent
Before her appearance on television, Smith had performed competitively in the Kettering, Northamptonshire Eisteddfod and the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod. She auditioned for the second series of the ITV reality television programme Britain's Got Talent, giving what Jon O'Brien, of Allmusic, called a "mature" performance of "Ave Maria", and was put through to the live shows. Simon Cowell described her audition as "the best audition [he had] heard in years". Before performing live, she was a favourite to win. She won her semi-final by the public vote, performing a cover of Sarah McLachlan's "Angel". This placed her in the final, and left her as the favourite to win. During her first live show, Cowell described her as "literally one in a million". She then performed in the live final. Sampson eventually won the show as a result of the phone-in. As a result of her final performance of "Ave Maria", Smith was invited to be a guest singer at a songwriting awards ceremony in London. She then went on to perform in the Britain's Got Talent Live Tour with other contestants.
While Smith was competing in Britain's Got Talent, Cowell arranged for her to receive singing lessons from the leading vocal coach Yvie Burnett, who had previously coached Paul Potts, an earlier winner of Britain's Got Talent, as well as Leona Lewis, a winner of The X Factor. The story was broken by The Sunday Mirror; writing for the paper, Lara Gould characterised the lessons as "secret". During her participation in the competition, Smith was offered record deals, but she and her family turned them down. Her father, Tony Smith, said "We have had offers from people interested in Faryl. But when Simon Cowell, says your daughter is special, you listen." Cowell described Smith's potential career during the show, saying "I know she says Katherine [Jenkins] is her idol but she is far better than her. She is by far the most talented youngster I've ever heard. When she opens her mouth her voice is just incredible."
### Record deal
The day after the Britain's Got Talent finals, Max Clifford, speaking for Simon Cowell, said that it was "quite possible" that Cowell would be signing some of the finalists, including Smith.
In December 2008, Smith had signed a £2.3 million, multi-album deal with Universal Music Group. Neil Fisher, writing for The Times, described Smith as "heir apparent" to Jenkins; the pair had first met when Smith won a competition at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod. By 2009, Jenkins was acting as a mentor to Smith.
In January 2009 plans were released for Smith to perform with Plácido Domingo, an idea originally suggested by him. In an interview with the Metro, Smith talked about her future plans, insisting that she did not wish to be dubbed as the next Charlotte Church. She has also spoken of her desire to appear in films on top of her musical career. She said "Films and movies are something I'd really like to do. I've always wanted to act, so doing a film would be amazing."
### Faryl
Smith's first album, Faryl, was recorded at Air Studios, London, in December 2008, during Smith's Christmas holiday; it was completed on 3 January 2009 and features a 60-piece orchestra. Smith said that her favourite song on the album was her version of the Welsh hymn "Calon Lân". Other songs include Smith's version of "Amazing Grace", a cover of John Denver's "Annie's Song", and a version of "The Way Old Friends Do", rewritten for Smith by Björn Ulvaeus. Smith described the song by saying that "[i]t was about divorce ... They didn't think it was appropriate for me to sing about that, so Björn changed the lyrics so it's about friendship." The album was produced by Jon Cohen, who had previously worked with artists including the Operababes and Vanessa Mae.
Promotion began in January, with performances at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and appearances at the debut of 2009 London revival of Oliver!. A television advert and music video for "River of Light" were recorded to further publicise the release, and Smith appeared on the cover of April's Classic FM Magazine. More promotional appearances in the weeks leading up to the release of Faryl included Loose Women, The Paul O'Grady Show, BBC Radio 4, Radio Five Live and BBC Breakfast. She also appeared at the Children's Champion Awards and met Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street. On the day of the release, there was an album signing in Smith's hometown of Kettering, at the HMV branch. Smith said "I definitely want to be at home for the launch. I want to be surrounded by my friends and family because obviously, it's a big deal for me."
Pete Paphides, writing for The Times, said that the songs were performed "with power and restraint" and that the "arrangements by Jon Cohen suggest some kind of aesthetic endeavour beyond the basic thing for which they exist". He compared it favourably to three other Mothering Sunday releases: Lionel Richie's Just Go, Ronan Keating's Songs for My Mother, and Barry Manilow's The Greatest Songs of the Eighties. He awarded Faryl the highest rating of the four. On the day of the release the album was at the number one spot on the UK Albums Chart, based on presales alone. The album became the fastest-selling classical solo album in British history, selling 20,000 copies in the first four days. The previous record holder had been Hayley Westenra's Pure. The first week resulted in sales of 29,200 copies, which is higher than any other debut album of a classical singer. Faryl officially entered the charts at number six and rose to fourth place the next week. The success of the album left Smith the third Britain's Got Talent contestant to achieve a top ten album.
In April 2009, Smith travelled to Los Angeles to begin her promotion of Faryl in the United States. She appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in early May as part of her promotional tour. Faryl was released in the US on 5 May. Smith said before the release that she did not expect it to sell as well as it did in the UK. She said that "in the US it's a lot harder because I'm not as well-known". Smith travelled back to the UK in early May, and, on 23 May, Faryl peaked at sixth place on the Classical Albums chart, remaining in the charts for one and 17 weeks respectively. Smith opened the 2009 Classical BRIT Awards, where, according to Elisa Roche of the Daily Express, she "captivated the best names in classical music". On 30 May, Smith became the youngest person to sing the English national anthem, "God Save The Queen", at an FA Cup final when she performed during the opening ceremony at the 2009 final, held in the Wembley Stadium. In June, Smith performed a duet with José Carreras at the Hampton Court Palace Festival, and in July, she attended the O2 Silver Clef Awards, winning the Classical Award.
In February 2010, after the release of Smith's second album, Faryl was nominated for a Classical BRIT Award in the album category. The category is voted for by the public, and the shortlist comprises the ten best-selling classical albums of the previous year. Smith became the youngest artist ever to receive a double nomination. In November, Smith was awarded the best classical award at the 2009 Variety Club awards, the youngest recipient in the awards' history.
### Wonderland
In July 2009, it was announced that Smith was hoping to release her second album later in the year. In an interview, she expressed surprise and pleasure that the label wanted her to record another album so soon after the first. In September, further details about the album were released, including its name, Wonderland, and planned release date, 30 November. Smith claimed that Faryl "was an introduction to me and an introduction for me to recording", while Cohen, producer of both Faryl and Wonderland, said Smith had "matured as an artist since the first album and I have no doubt that once again, people will be astonished and moved by her performances". The album, which was recorded at Sarm Studios in Notting Hill, London, was completed in early October, and is loosely based on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Wonderland was released on 30 November. To publicise the album, Smith appeared on numerous radio shows, as well as making television appearances including on Ready Steady Cook, Blue Peter, the BBC News Channel, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Sky News Sunrise.
Wonderland was well received by critics; Paul Callan, reviewing the album for the Daily Express, described it as "a joy". He compared it to other Christmas albums, saying that "[t]oo many are tired, much-repeated carol selections". He described Smith's "control, tone and warmth" as "very moving". Andy Gill, reviewing Wonderland for The Independent, praised the arrangements of "Adiemus", "Barcarolle", "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence" and "Blow The Wind Southerly". After Wonderland, Smith's contract with Universal ended, she described the break with the label as mainly her decision, as she needed to focus on her A Levels, which would allow her to get to university.
Smith performed at the 2009 Royal Variety Performance in front of Queen Elizabeth II, where she sang "God Save the Queen" with The Soldiers. She later said that the experience, including subsequently meeting the Queen, was the highlight of her year. Smith also performed elsewhere with The Soldiers, including at St Paul's Cathedral and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.
### After Universal
In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Smith and 22 other classical musicians from the UK recorded a cover version of "The Prayer", which was released for download on 14 March. The proceeds of the single went to the Disasters Emergency Committee. Smith said "It's a real honour to be a part of something that is being done for the first time, and I hope that all music lovers get involved and help raise money for the campaign. I really hope that we can make a difference together to help the horrible situation that Haiti is in at the moment." The group, dubbed "Classical Band Aid", recorded the track at Metropolis Studios and were backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Each vocalist in the group performed their own solo lines, and the entire group came together for the finale.
In mid-2010, Smith performed at various festivals and events. Her father stated that "because she is still so young, we don't want her doing complete shows on her own and we don't want her doing too much". Appearances included the Mercedes-Benz World Summer Concert in Weybridge on 4 July, That Glorious Noise charity concert against muscular dystrophy in Cleethorpes on 17 July, and the Last Night of the Kenwood Proms on 21 August, as well as the wedding of Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford. Smith also opened the Serenata festival. Angela Young, reviewing the festival for the Bournemouth Daily Echo, said "Faryl Smith was my personal highlight of the Thursday night line-up, her bizarrely powerful voice (considering her diminutive size and age) taking my breath away and it contrasted so well with her naivete as she said 'at least it's not raining' – just as the heavens opened."
In October, Smith performed for the first time in Ireland, at the National Concert Hall, Dublin. She continued to perform publicly throughout 2011. In May, she performed at a Help for Heroes charity concert and in both June and October, she performed at concerts to celebrate the 90th year of the Royal British Legion. She again appeared at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in July, where she sang with Russell Watson. Smith described the appearance as "like a homecoming", due to her previous appearance at the competition. In further charitable events later in the year, she raised £2,700 for a hospice in Cransley, and performed in aid of the Salvation Army in Portsmouth. During the Christmas period, Smith performed for the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity in their annual Christmas carol concert, and at the North Wales Choral Festival at Llandudno. She also appeared as a guest on Rhydian Roberts's talent show on S4C in December. In 2012, she performed with the Mousehole Male Voice Choir in Penzance,
From 2012–13, Smith performed several times with the International Harp Ensemble, a Surrey-based group of harpists who produce a variety of different styles of harp music, including appearing with the group on a September episode of Songs of Praise. Smith began training with vocal coach Joy Mammen, who also teaches Lesley Garrett, as well as learning German and Italian, with the intention of moving from classical crossover towards opera.
Smith continued to perform publicly, appearing at assorted sporting, charitable, and other events. Sporting events at which Smith performed included the FA Community Shield match in 2015 at Wembley, the Checkatrade Trophy at Wembley in 2018, and a Six Nations match at Twickenham in 2019.
## Personal life
Smith was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, England, on 23 July 1995. She was a student at Southfield School for Girls. where she completed her GCSEs in 2011, and she studied for her A levels, with the intention of going to university afterwards. In 2015, aged 20, she started to study music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Faryl is now on the opera course at The Guildhall.
## Discography
### Studio albums
|
884,813 |
U.S. Route 8
| 1,171,440,351 |
U.S. Highway in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan
|
[
"Transportation in Barron County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Chisago County, Minnesota",
"Transportation in Dickinson County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Forest County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Lincoln County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Marinette County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Oneida County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Polk County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Price County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Rusk County, Wisconsin",
"Transportation in Washington County, Minnesota",
"U.S. Highways in Michigan",
"U.S. Highways in Minnesota",
"U.S. Highways in Wisconsin",
"United States Numbered Highway System"
] |
U.S. Highway 8 (US 8) is a United States Numbered Highway that runs primarily east–west for 280 miles (451 km), mostly within the state of Wisconsin. It connects Interstate 35 (I-35) in Forest Lake, Minnesota, to US 2 at Norway in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near the border with Wisconsin. Except for the short freeway segment near Forest Lake, and sections near the St. Croix River bridge and Rhinelander, Wisconsin, it is mostly an undivided surface road. As a state highway in the three states, US 8 is maintained by the Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan departments of transportation (MnDOT, WisDOT, and MDOT, respectively).
The highway was originally commissioned on November 11, 1926, with the rest of the original U.S. Highway System. At the time, it ran between Forest Lake, Minnesota, and Pembine, Wisconsin, with a planned continuation to Powers, Michigan. Several changes have been made to the routing of the highway since then. The western end was extended south to Minneapolis before it was truncated back to Forest Lake. Other changes on the east end have moved that terminus from the originally planned end location at Powers to the current location in Norway. Internal WisDOT and MDOT map files at various times have shown plans to reroute the highway to connect to the original planned 1926 terminus. US 8's course through the three states has also been shifted to follow different alignments over the years.
WisDOT built a bypass around the city of Rhinelander in the 1990s and created a business loop along the old highway through the town. This loop was a locally maintained route through the central business district in Rhinelander. The signage for the loop was removed in 2005.
## Route description
### Forest Lake to St. Croix Falls
US 8 begins at an interchange with I-35 in Forest Lake. This interchange is incomplete: traffic can only access US 8 directly from northbound I-35, and westbound traffic on US 8 merges onto southbound I-35. The first one-mile (1.6 km) segment of roadway to Forest Lake is a freeway, with an interchange at US 61. East of this junction, the highway follows Lake Boulevard North around Forest Lake and continues northeasterly through the community to cross the Washington–Chisago county line. The highway continues to the northeast along farmland and the shore of Green Lake to Chisago City, where it meets up with County State-Aid Highway 22 (CSAH 22). US 8 follows Lake Boulevard through Chisago City along the isthmus between the larger Chisago Lake and the smaller Wallmark Lake on the eastern side of town. The highway turns along a more easterly path in Lindström between North and South Lindström lakes. East of those lakes, US 8 crosses into the town of Center City.
In Center City, US 8 runs between North and South Center lakes, curving around the north shore of South Center Lake. On the eastern edge of town, it turns due east for several miles and runs through Shafer. US 8 merges with Minnesota State Highway 95 (MN 95) at a roundabout about two miles (3.2 km) southwest of Taylors Falls. The two highways concurrently turn northeast along the St. Croix River, entering town. At this point, MN 95 continues north along the river while US 8 turns east to cross the St. Croix River, exiting the state of Minnesota into Wisconsin.
Legally, the Minnesota section of US 8 is defined as Constitutional Route 46 and Legislative Route 98 in the Minnesota Statutes §§161.114(2) and 161.115(29); the roadway is not marked with those numbers. The section of US 8 in Chisago County was officially designated the Moberg Trail in 1990.
### St. Croix Falls to Rhinelander
US 8 enters Polk County at St. Croix Falls as a multilane roadway. It joins State Trunk Highway 35 (WIS 35) at a diamond interchange located approximately one mile (1.6 km) from the state line. The two highways run concurrently for four miles (6.4 km) before WIS 35 turns off to the north at a location in the Town of St. Croix Falls west of Deer Lake. US 8 continues eastward through forest lands, and WIS 46 joins from the north for a four-mile (6.4 km) concurrency before splitting off to the south. Continuing eastward, US 8 passes through Range and crosses into Barron County at Turtle Lake. US 63 merges from the south near Turtle Lake and departs to the north in the downtown area. The roadway passes through Poskin and intersects WIS 25 in Barron. East of Barron, US 8 meets US 53 at a mixed diamond/cloverleaf interchange and turns north into Cameron, then turns east in downtown to leave the latter community. After a nine-mile (14 km) straightaway, the highway crosses into Rusk County, and then it continues due east for an additional five miles (8.0 km) before turning northeast and passing through Weyerhaeuser. Continuing northeasterly, the roadway crosses WIS 40 in Bruce. East of town, the highway continues through rural Rusk County, and US 8 meets WIS 27 in downtown Ladysmith.
Upon leaving Ladysmith, US 8 passes through the communities of Tony, Glen Flora, Ingram (where it meets the northern terminus of WIS 73) and Hawkins on its way out of Rusk County. In Price County, US 8 passes through Kennan and Catawba. WIS 111 terminates at its south end on US 8 just east of Catawba. US 8 meets WIS 13 at a diamond interchange northwest of Prentice and passes north of the city. The highway passes through Brantwood and enters Lincoln County at Clifford. Further east, US 8 crosses Tripoli and McCord and runs north of Tomahawk as it passes through the Lake Nokomis area. US 51 crosses US 8 northeast of Tomahawk. US 8 turns northeast into Oneida County and onto a twisting northeasterly alignment. The highway passes through Woodboro and expands to a divided highway into Rhinelander. It merges with WIS 47 on the southwest side of Rhinelander. WIS 17 north joins the highways one-half mile (0.80 km) to the southeast, creating a wrong-way concurrency with WIS 47; along this section of highway, eastbound US 8 is also southbound WIS 47 and northbound WIS 17 and vice versa. WIS 17 turns to the north two miles (3.2 km) southeast of there, and US 8 and WIS 47 head eastbound out of the Rhinelander area.
### Rhinelander to Norway
US 8 intersects US 45 south in Monico, and WIS 47 splits from US 8 to follow US 45 south. Immediately east of the same intersection, US 45 north follows US 8 for one mile (1.6 km) before splitting to the north. US 8 enters Forest County five miles (8.0 km) east of Monico. Seven miles (11 km) into the county, the highway merges with WIS 32 from the north in Crandon and the two highways head east to Laona where US 8 turns north and WIS 32 turns south. US 8 turns east again at Cavour and passes through the community of Armstrong Creek one mile (1.6 km) from the Marinette County line. The highway passes through Goodman and Dunbar as it meanders through the county and joins US 141 at Pembine. The two routes split 10 miles (16 km) further north near Niagara; after the split, US 8 heads east. The highway takes a northward turn and heads across the Menominee River into Michigan near Pier's Gorge Park.
Entering Michigan south of Norway at the Menominee River crossing in Norway Township, US 8 proceeds north into the city where it ends at US 2. US 8 in Michigan is 2.322 miles (3.737 km) long; in this segment, the road passes by the Dickinson County fairgrounds and Norway Speedway.
## History
### 20th century
Starting in 1918, the Wisconsin Highway Commission erected highway numbers along state-maintained roadways. The highway across the state from St. Croix Falls to Armstrong Creek was numbered WIS 14 at that time. The remainder of what is now US 8 was unnumbered secondary highways, and WIS 14 continued north of Armstrong Creek to Florence. When Michigan numbered its highway system the following year, the future US 8 was not included in the system. In Minnesota, US 8 would follow what was Constitutional Route 46, which was designated in a state constitutional amendment adopted on November 2, 1920; that roadway originally ran between Forest Lake and Chisago City through Wyoming.
The first changes to the routings of the predecessor highways were made by Wisconsin by 1920. A series of curves were added between Turtle Lake and Barron adding "stair steps" to the routing while similar jogs were removed near Cameron, Weyerhauser, Hawkins and Prentice. WIS 14 was rerouted between Rhinelander and Pelican Lake to run via Monico, and WIS 38 (the future US 141) was extended northward from Wausaukee to terminate at the state line near Niagara. The realignment between Rhinelander and Pelican Lake was shown as reversed by 1922. By 1925, the highway in that area was again rerouted to run directly from Rhinelander to Monico, but instead of turning south to Pelican Lake, it was run directly to Crandon. That same year, WIS 14 was extended eastward from Armstrong Creek to Pembine and northward to Niagara. The north–south section, previously numbered WIS 38, was also redesignated as part of WIS 57.
US 8 was created with the beginnings of the United States Numbered Highway System on November 26, 1926. The highway was originally shown on maps running between Forest Lake, Minnesota and Powers, Michigan. At the time, its planned routing was not previously designated as part of the State Trunkline Highway System in Michigan. The trunkline connection from Quinnesec south into Wisconsin was part of M-57, which met WIS 57 at the state line. US 8 ended at WIS 57 in Pembine at the time, with no connection into Michigan shown on official maps. A map by the American Automobile Association does show the highway continuing east through Faithorn and Hermansville in Michigan to end at US 2. The Wisconsin Highway Commission previously indicated an unnumbered state highway on their 1925 state map that connected Pembine with the Menominee River near Hermansville. A later extension in 1927 moved US 8 to run along US 141, which had replaced WIS 57 and M-57, ending in Quinnesec at US 2. By the next year, the highway was shifted to end in Norway, utilizing a separate crossing of the Menominee River to enter Michigan.
In 1931, US 8 was extended south from Forest Lake into downtown Minneapolis. West of the Rhinelander area, US 8 and US 51 overlapped for about eight miles (13 km) as US 8 jogged northward along US 51. This concurrency was altered in 1934, and two years later the short east–west section of US 8/US 51 was removed when changes to US 51's routing were finished in the area. A jog in the routing near Almena was removed in 1937 when Wisconsin rerouted the highway to a more direct alignment in the area.
The last segment of US 8 in Wisconsin was paved in 1937 between Cavour and Armstrong Creek; the highway in Minnesota was paved in its entirety by 1940. Near Hawkins, a pair of sharp curves near the Rusk–Price county line were removed as the State Highway Commission realigned the highway to follow a straighter course. The US 8/US 51 concurrency was altered the next year to a shorter overlap running southward near Heafford Junction. The former routing of US 8 was redesignated County Trunk Highway K (CTH-K) after it was transferred back to county control.
Starting around the year 1955, US 8 was moved to a more direct routing between Forest Lake and Chisago City; US 8 replaced MN 98 along Legislative Route 98. The former routing between Wyoming and Chisago City along Constitutional Route 46 was then redesignated MN 98 until it was decommissioned in the late 1990s.
As late as 1959, the Michigan State Highway Department still had plans to build the section of US 8 west of Hermansville to the Menominee River. The control section atlas published on January 1, 1959, showed this segment of highway on the Menominee County map, complete with a control section number. The section of highway is shown as "proposed" or "under construction". However, a new bridge was built over the Menominee River to carry the highway across the Michigan–Wisconsin state line near Norway in 1966. WisDOT still shows the section of highway needed in their state to extend US 8 to the original eastern terminus in Michigan on internal maps. The December 31, 2004, edition of their Official State Trunk Highway System Maps shows this section as a "mapped corridor".
In the late 1970s, with ongoing construction and completion of the I-35W freeway in Minnesota, US 8 was routed along I-35W; US 8 was truncated again by 1981 to its current terminus in Forest Lake. The section in New Brighton is currently known as Old Highway 8.
WisDOT built a bypass of the city of Rhinelander during the early 1990s; the new highway was constructed south of town as a new two-lane highway that opened to traffic by 1993. The former route through downtown Rhinelander and near Clear and George lakes was redesignated as Business US 8 (Bus. US 8).
### 21st century
In 2002, US 8 was widened from two lanes to four lanes with a grass median between North Rifle Road and WIS 47 near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. At the time, officials with WisDOT had plans to extend the four-lane divided highway as far west as US 51 near Tomahawk. Problems related to wetlands in the construction area and bad weather pushed completion of the project back almost a year. Contractors had to install metal sheeting to stabilize the marshy ground. Originally scheduled to end in late 2002, the project did not finish until August 2003. The delays and additional work increased the price tag of the project from the original \$4.5 million (equivalent to \$ in ) to \$6.0 million (equivalent to \$ in ). A section of the project was only designed for 45-mile-per-hour (72 km/h) speeds for safety reasons. The design also allowed planners to limit the amount of land needed for the expansion.
Bill and Jerri Osberg sued the state and seven other parties in April 2003 over runoff from the construction, claiming that it killed hundreds of trees and polluted ponds on their property. Later investigation uncovered damage to wildlife habitat in the Wisconsin River. Included in the original lawsuit were six individual WisDOT employees, the primary contractor and a local pet supply company. The court of appeals partially upheld a ruling by the district court dismissing the employees and the contractor from the lawsuit in March 2006. The pet supply company was reinstated in the case by the appeals court. The couple settled their claims, and the state pursued the matter against Pagel Construction in a related lawsuit. WisDOT alleged that the contractor did not follow proper erosion controls and failed to remediate the erosion damage to the Osbergs' property. The state wanted the construction company to forfeit their \$70,000 retainer (equivalent to \$ in ) and pay damages of \$150,000 (equivalent to \$ in ). Pagel Construction faulted WisDOT's erosion control plan and said that the state's engineers controlled the project and was seeking the return of its retainer. In September 2007, a jury ruled in favor of Pagel Construction and awarded them \$70,898.13 in damages (equivalent to \$ in ).
## Future
WisDOT has completed the environmental studies of bypasses of Barron and Cameron in Barron County. These bypasses would form a continuous expressway through the area. No funding has been identified to complete the projects. The entire length of US 8 in the state has been classified as a North Country Corridor in the Connections 2030 Plan by the department. This designation marks the highway as a priority in "continued safety, enhanced mobility and efficiency" as well as "modernization to correct outdated infrastructure design".
## Major intersections
## Business route
Business U.S. Highway 8 (Bus. US 8) in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, was a locally maintained business loop highway routing through the central business district of the city. The route was designated when US 8 was shifted to a bypass of downtown in 1992. The former routing of US 8 through the area was designated as a business loop, and it was turned over to the city and county for maintenance. The local authorities erected signs along this route to designate it as a business loop of the main highway south of town. The signs along the road were scheduled to be removed on July 1, 2005, when the business loop was to be redesignated CTH-P.
Before the signage was removed, Bus. US 8 started at the western junction of US 8 and WIS 47. The business loop ran east from this intersection along Kemp Street, crossing the Wisconsin River north of the convergence with the Pelican River. The loop jogged north along Oneida Street for three blocks and turned east again on Lincoln Street. East of town, Bus. US 8 intersected WIS 17 and turned to the southeast. Outside of town, the business loop ran through wooded terrain and turned south near Clear Lake. Near the larger George Lake, the roadway curved back east along the lake's southern shore, running parallel to the main highway before turning south to connect to the main highway. At this intersection with US 8/WIS 47, the business loop ended after a total run of 7.1 miles (11.4 km).
## See also
- U.S. Highway 208
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228,798 |
Iguanodon
| 1,172,193,694 |
Ornithopod dinosaur genus from Early Cretaceous period
|
[
"Camarillas Formation",
"Early Cretaceous dinosaurs of Europe",
"Early Cretaceous genus extinctions",
"Early Cretaceous genus first appearances",
"Fossil taxa described in 1825",
"Fossils of Belgium",
"Fossils of Spain",
"Iguanodonts",
"Ornithischian genera",
"Taxa named by Gideon Mantell"
] |
Iguanodon (/ɪˈɡwɑːnədɒn/ i-GWAH-nə-don; meaning 'iguana-tooth'), named in 1825, is a genus of iguanodontian dinosaur. While many species found worldwide have been classified in the genus Iguanodon, dating from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, taxonomic revision in the early 21st century has defined Iguanodon to be based on one well-substantiated species: I. bernissartensis, which lived during the Barremian to early Aptian ages of the Early Cretaceous in Belgium, Germany, England, and Spain, between about 126 and 122 million years ago. Iguanodon was a large, bulky herbivore, measuring up to 9–11 metres (30–36 ft) in length and 4.5 metric tons (5.0 short tons) in body mass. Distinctive features include large thumb spikes, which were possibly used for defense against predators, combined with long prehensile fifth fingers able to forage for food.
The genus was named in 1825 by English geologist Gideon Mantell but discovered by William Harding Bensted, based on fossil specimens found in England and was given the species name I. anglicus. Iguanodon was the second type of dinosaur formally named based on fossil specimens, after Megalosaurus. Together with Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, it was one of the three genera originally used to define Dinosauria. The genus Iguanodon belongs to the larger group Iguanodontia, along with the duck-billed hadrosaurs. The taxonomy of this genus continues to be a topic of study as new species are named or long-standing ones reassigned to other genera. In 1878 new, far more complete remains of Iguanodon were discovered in Belgium and studied by Louis Dollo. These were given the new species I. bernissartensis. In the early 21st century it became understood that the remains referred to as Iguanodon in England belonged to four different species (including I. bernissartensis) that were not closely related to each other, which were subsequently split off into Mantellisaurus, Barilium and Hypselospinus. It was also found that the originally described type species of Iguanodon, I. anglicus is now a nomen dubium, and not valid. Thus the name "Iguanodon" became fixed around the well known species based primarily on the Belgian specimens. In 2015, a second valid species, I. galvensis, was named, based on fossils found in the Iberian Peninsula.
Scientific understanding of Iguanodon has evolved over time as new information has been obtained from fossils. The numerous specimens of this genus, including nearly complete skeletons from two well-known bone beds, have allowed researchers to make informed hypotheses regarding many aspects of the living animal, including feeding, movement, and social behaviour. As one of the first scientifically well-known dinosaurs, Iguanodon has occupied a small but notable place in the public's perception of dinosaurs, its artistic representation changing significantly in response to new interpretations of its remains.
## Discovery and history
### Gideon Mantell, Sir Richard Owen, and the discovery of dinosaurs
The discovery of Iguanodon has long been accompanied by a popular legend. The story goes that Gideon Mantell's wife, Mary Ann, discovered the first teeth of an Iguanodon in the strata of Tilgate Forest in Whitemans Green, Cuckfield, Sussex, England, in 1822 while her husband was visiting a patient. However, there is no evidence that Mantell took his wife with him while seeing patients. Furthermore, he admitted in 1851 that he himself had found the teeth, although he had previously stated in 1827 and 1833 that Mrs. Mantell had indeed found the first of the teeth later named Iguanodon. Other later authors agree that the story is not certainly false. It is known from his notebooks that Mantell first acquired large fossil bones from the quarry at Whitemans Green in 1820. Because also theropod teeth were found, thus belonging to carnivores, he at first interpreted these bones, which he tried to combine into a partial skeleton, as those of a giant crocodile. In 1821 Mantell mentioned the find of herbivorous teeth and began to consider the possibility that a large herbivorous reptile was present in the strata. However, in his 1822 publication Fossils of the South Downs he as yet did not dare to suggest a connection between the teeth and his very incomplete skeleton, presuming that his finds presented two large forms, one carnivorous ("an animal of the Lizard Tribe of enormous magnitude"), the other herbivorous.
In May 1822 he first presented the herbivorous teeth to the Royal Society of London but the members, among them William Buckland, dismissed them as fish teeth or the incisors of a rhinoceros from a Tertiary stratum. On 23 June 1823 Charles Lyell showed some to Georges Cuvier, during a soiree in Paris, but the famous French naturalist at once dismissed them as those of a rhinoceros. Though the very next day Cuvier retracted, Lyell reported only the dismissal to Mantell, who became rather diffident about the issue. In 1824 Buckland described Megalosaurus and was on that occasion invited to visit Mantell's collection. Seeing the bones on 6 March he agreed that these were of some giant saurian—though still denying it was a herbivore. Emboldened nevertheless, Mantell again sent some teeth to Cuvier, who answered on 22 June 1824 that he had determined that they were reptilian and quite possibly belonged to a giant herbivore. In a new edition that year of his Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles Cuvier admitted his earlier mistake, leading to an immediate acceptance of Mantell, and his new saurian, in scientific circles. Mantell tried to corroborate his theory further by finding a modern-day parallel among extant reptiles. In September 1824 he visited the Royal College of Surgeons but at first failed to find comparable teeth. However, assistant-curator Samuel Stutchbury recognised that they resembled those of an iguana he had recently prepared, albeit twenty times longer.
In recognition of the resemblance of the teeth to those of the iguana, Mantell decided to name his new animal Iguanodon or 'iguana-tooth', from iguana and the Greek word ὀδών (odon, odontos or 'tooth'). Based on isometric scaling, he estimated that the creature might have been up to 18 metres (59 feet) long, more than the 12-metre (39 ft) length of Megalosaurus. His initial idea for a name was Iguana-saurus ('Iguana lizard'), but his friend William Daniel Conybeare suggested that that name was more applicable to the iguana itself, so a better name would be Iguanoides ('Iguana-like') or Iguanodon. He neglected to add a specific name to form a proper binomial, but one was supplied in 1829 by Friedrich Holl: I. anglicum, which was later emended to I. anglicus.
Mantell sent a letter detailing his discovery to the local Portsmouth Philosophical Society in December 1824, several weeks after settling on a name for the fossil creature. The letter was read to members of the Society at a meeting on 17 December, and a report was published in the Hampshire Telegraph the following Monday, 20 December, which announced the name, misspelled as "Iguanadon". Mantell formally published his findings on 10 February 1825, when he presented a paper on the remains to the Royal Society of London.
A more complete specimen of a similar animal was discovered in a quarry in Maidstone, Kent, in 1834 (lower Lower Greensand Formation), which Mantell soon acquired. He was led to identify it as an Iguanodon based on its distinctive teeth. The Maidstone slab was utilized in the first skeletal reconstructions and artistic renderings of Iguanodon, but due to its incompleteness, Mantell made some mistakes, the most famous of which was the placement of what he thought was a horn on the nose. The discovery of much better specimens in later years revealed that the horn was actually a modified thumb. Still encased in rock, the Maidstone skeleton is currently displayed at the Natural History Museum in London. The borough of Maidstone commemorated this find by adding an Iguanodon as a supporter to their coat of arms in 1949. This specimen has become linked with the name I. mantelli, a species named in 1832 by Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer in place of I. anglicus, but it actually comes from a different formation than the original I. mantelli/I. anglicus material. The Maidstone specimen, also known as Gideon Mantell's "Mantel-piece", and formally labelled NHMUK 3741 was subsequently excluded from Iguanodon. It is classified as cf. Mantellisaurus by McDonald (2012); as cf. Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis by Norman (2012); and made the holotype of a separate species Mantellodon carpenteri by Paul (2012), but this is considered dubious and it is generally considered a specimen of Mantellisaurus
At the same time, tension began to build between Mantell and Richard Owen, an ambitious scientist with much better funding and society connections in the turbulent worlds of Reform Act-era British politics and science. Owen, a firm creationist, opposed the early versions of evolutionary science ("transmutationism") then being debated and used what he would soon coin as dinosaurs as a weapon in this conflict. With the paper describing Dinosauria, he scaled down dinosaurs from lengths of over 61 metres (200 feet), determined that they were not simply giant lizards, and put forward that they were advanced and mammal-like, characteristics given to them by God; according to the understanding of the time, they could not have been "transmuted" from reptiles to mammal-like creatures.
In 1849, a few years before his death in 1852, Mantell realised that iguanodonts were not heavy, pachyderm-like animals, as Owen was putting forward, but had slender forelimbs; however, his passing left him unable to participate in the creation of the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures, and so Owen's vision of the dinosaurs became that seen by the public for decades. With Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, he had nearly two dozen lifesize sculptures of various prehistoric animals built out of concrete sculpted over a steel and brick framework; two iguanodonts (based on the Maidstone specimen), one standing and one resting on its belly, were included. Before the sculpture of the standing iguanodont was completed, he held a banquet for twenty inside it.
### Bernissart mine discoveries and Dollo's new reconstruction
The largest find of Iguanodon remains to that date occurred on 28 February 1878 in a coal mine at Bernissart in Belgium, at a depth of 322 m (1,056 ft), when two mineworkers, Jules Créteur and Alphonse Blanchard, accidentally hit on a skeleton that they initially took for petrified wood. With the encouragement of Alphonse Briart, supervisor of mines at nearby Morlanwelz, Louis de Pauw on 15 May 1878 started to excavate the skeletons and in 1882 Louis Dollo reconstructed them. At least 38 Iguanodon individuals were uncovered, most of which were adults. In 1882, the holotype specimen of I. bernissartensis became one of the first ever dinosaur skeletons mounted for display. It was put together in a chapel at the Palace of Charles of Lorraine using a series of adjustable ropes attached to scaffolding so that a lifelike pose could be achieved during the mounting process. This specimen, along with several others, first opened for public viewing in an inner courtyard of the palace in July 1883. In 1891 they were moved to the Royal Museum of Natural History, where they are still on display; nine are displayed as standing mounts, and nineteen more are still in the Museum's basement. The exhibit makes an impressive display in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, in Brussels. A replica of one of these is on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. Most of the remains were referred to a new species, I. bernissartensis, a larger and much more robust animal than the English remains had yet revealed. One specimen, IRSNB 1551, was at first referred to the nebulous, gracile I. mantelli, but is currently referred to Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis. The skeletons were some of the first complete dinosaur skeletons known. Found with the dinosaur skeletons were the remains of plants, fish, and other reptiles, including the crocodyliform Bernissartia.
The science of conserving fossil remains was in its infancy, and new techniques had to be improvised to deal with what soon became known as "pyrite disease". Crystalline pyrite in the bones was being oxidized to iron sulphate, accompanied by an increase in volume that caused the remains to crack and crumble. When in the ground, the bones were isolated by anoxic moist clay that prevented this from happening, but when removed into the drier open air, the natural chemical conversion began to occur. To limit this effect, De Pauw immediately, in the mine-gallery, re-covered the dug-out fossils with wet clay, sealing them with paper and plaster reinforced by iron rings, forming in total about six hundred transportable blocks with a combined weight of a hundred and thirty tons. In Brussels after opening the plaster he impregnated the bones with boiling gelatine mixed with oil of cloves as a preservative. Removing most of the visible pyrite he then hardened them with hide glue, finishing with a final layer of tin foil. Damage was repaired with papier-mâché. This treatment had the unintended effect of sealing in moisture and extending the period of damage. In 1932 museum director Victor van Straelen decided that the specimens had to be completely restored again to safeguard their preservation. From December 1935 to August 1936 the staff at the museum in Brussels treated the problem with a combination of alcohol, arsenic, and 390 kilograms of shellac. This combination was intended to simultaneously penetrate the fossils (with alcohol), prevent the development of mold (with arsenic), and harden them (with shellac). The fossils entered a third round of conservation from 2003 until May 2007, when the shellac, hide glue and gelatine were removed and impregnated with polyvinyl acetate and cyanoacrylate and epoxy glues. Modern treatments of this problem typically involve either monitoring the humidity of fossil storage, or, for fresh specimens, preparing a special coating of polyethylene glycol that is then heated in a vacuum pump, so that moisture is immediately removed and pore spaces are infiltrated with polyethylene glycol to seal and strengthen the fossil.
Dollo's specimens allowed him to show that Owen's prehistoric pachyderms were not correct for Iguanodon. He instead modelled the skeletal mounts after the cassowary and wallaby, and put the spike that had been on the nose firmly on the thumb. His reconstruction would prevail for a long period of time, but would later be discounted.
Excavations at the quarry were stopped in 1881, although it was not exhausted of fossils, as recent drilling operations have shown. During World War I, when the town was occupied by German forces, preparations were made to reopen the mine for palaeontology, and Otto Jaekel was sent from Berlin to supervise. Just as the first fossiliferous layer was about to be uncovered, however, the German army surrendered and had to withdraw. Further attempts to reopen the mine were hindered by financial problems and were stopped altogether in 1921 when the mine flooded.
### Turn of the century and the Dinosaur Renaissance
Research on Iguanodon decreased during the early part of the 20th century as World Wars and the Great Depression enveloped Europe. A new species that would become the subject of much study and taxonomic controversy, I. atherfieldensis, was named in 1925 by R. W. Hooley, for a specimen collected at Atherfield Point on the Isle of Wight.
Iguanodon was not part of the initial work of the dinosaur renaissance that began with the description of Deinonychus in 1969, but it was not neglected for long. David B. Weishampel's work on ornithopod feeding mechanisms provided a better understanding of how it fed, and David B. Norman's work on numerous aspects of the genus has made it one of the best-known dinosaurs. In addition, a further find of numerous disarticulated Iguanodon bones in Nehden, Nordrhein-Westphalen, Germany, has provided evidence for gregariousness in this genus, as the animals in this areally restricted find appear to have been killed by flash floods. At least 15 individuals, from 2 to 8 metres (6 ft 7 in to 26 ft 3 in) long, have been found here, most of the individuals belong to the related Mantellisaurus (described as I. atherfieldensis, at that time believed to be another species of Iguanodon). but some are of I. bernissartensis.
One major revision to Iguanodon brought by the Renaissance would be another re-thinking of how to reconstruct the animal. A major flaw with Dollo's reconstruction was the bend he introduced into the tail. This organ was more or less straight, as shown by the skeletons he was excavating, and the presence of ossified tendons. In fact, to get the bend in the tail for a more wallaby or kangaroo-like posture, the tail would have had to be broken. With its correct, straight tail and back, the animal would have walked with its body held horizontal to the ground, arms in place to support the body if needed.
### 21st century research and the splitting of the genus
In the 21st century, Iguanodon material has been used in the search for dinosaur biomolecules. In research by Graham Embery et al., Iguanodon bones were processed to look for remnant proteins. In this research, identifiable remains of typical bone proteins, such as phosphoproteins and proteoglycans, were found in a rib. In 2007, Gregory S. Paul split I. atherfieldensis into a new, separate genus, Mantellisaurus which has been generally accepted. In 2009 fragmentary iguanodontid material was described from upper Barremian Paris Basin deposits in Auxerre, Burgundy. While not definitively diagnosable to the genus/species level, the specimen shares "obvious morphological and dimensional affinities" with I. bernissartensis.
In 2010, David Norman split the Valanginian species I. dawsoni and I. fittoni into Barilium and Hypselospinus respectively. After Norman 2010, over half a dozen new genera were named off English "Iguanodon" material. Carpenter and Ishida in 2010 named Proplanicoxa, Torilion and Sellacoxa while Gregory S. Paul in 2012 named Darwinsaurus, Huxleysaurus and Mantellodon and Macdonald et al. in 2012 named Kukufeldia. These species named after Norman 2010 are not considered valid and are considered various junior synonyms of Mantellisaurus, Barilium and Hypselospinus.
In 2011, a new genus Delapparentia was named for a specimen in Spain that was originally thought to belong to I. bernissartensis. The previous identification was subsequently reaffirmed in a new analysis of individual variation in the Belgian specimens, finding that the Delapparentia specimen was within the range of I. bernissartensis. In 2015 a new species of Iguanodon, I. galvensis, was named based on material including 13 juvenile (perinate) individuals found in the Camarillas Formation near Galve, Spain. In 2017 a new study was done of I. galvensis, with further evidence of distinctiveness from I. bernissartensis including several new autapomorphies. It was also found that the Delapparentia holotype (which is also from the Camarillas Formation) was not distinguishable from either I. bernissartensis or I. galvensis.
## Description
Iguanodon were bulky herbivores that could shift from bipedality to quadrupedality. The only well-supported species, I. bernissartensis, is estimated to have measured about 9 metres (30 feet) long as an adult, with some specimens possibly as long as 13 metres (43 feet), although this is likely an overestimate, given that the maximum body length of I. bernissartensis is reported to be 11 m (36 ft). Although Gregory S. Paul suggested a body mass of 3.08 metric tons (3.40 short tons) on average, constructing a 3D mathematical model and employing allomery-based estimate suggests an I. bernissartensis close to 8 m (26 ft) long (smaller than average) weighs close to 3.8 metric tons (4.2 short tons) in body mass. Specimens of relatively large individuals have been reported in the 2020s: a specimen referred to as I. cf. galvensis was measured up to 9–10 m (30–33 ft) in length, while a new specimen of I. bernissartensis from the upper Barremian of the Iberian Peninsula was measured up to 11 m (36 ft) in length. Such large individuals would have weighed approximately 4.5 metric tons (5.0 short tons).The arms of I. bernissartensis were long (up to 75% the length of the legs) and robust, with rather inflexible hands built so that the three central fingers could bear weight. The thumbs were conical spikes that stuck out away from the three main digits. In early restorations, the spike was placed on the animal's nose. Later fossils revealed the true nature of the thumb spikes, although their exact function is still debated. They could have been used for defense, or for foraging for food. The little finger was elongated and dextrous, and could have been used to manipulate objects. The phalangeal formula is 2-3-3-2-4, meaning that the innermost finger (phalange) has two bones, the next has three, etc. The legs were powerful, but not built for running, and each foot had three toes. The backbone and tail were supported and stiffened by ossified tendons, which were tendons that turned to bone during life (these rod-like bones are usually omitted from skeletal mounts and drawings).
These animals had large, tall but narrow skulls, with toothless beaks probably covered with keratin, and teeth like those of iguanas, as the name suggests, but much larger and more closely packed. Unlike hadrosaurids, which had columns of replacement teeth, Iguanodon only had one replacement tooth at a time for each position. The upper jaw held up to 29 teeth per side, with none at the front of the jaw, and the lower jaw 25; the numbers differ because teeth in the lower jaw are broader than those in the upper. Because the tooth rows are deeply inset from the outside of the jaws, and because of other anatomical details, it is believed that, as with most other ornithischians, Iguanodon had some sort of cheek-like structure, muscular or non-muscular, to retain food in the mouth.
## Classification and evolution
Iguanodon gives its name to the unranked clade Iguanodontia, a very populous group of ornithopods with many species known from the Middle Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous. Aside from Iguanodon, the best-known members of the clade include Dryosaurus, Camptosaurus, Ouranosaurus, and the duck-bills, or hadrosaurs. In older sources, Iguanodontidae was shown as a distinct family. This family traditionally has been something of a wastebasket taxon, including ornithopods that were neither hypsilophodontids or hadrosaurids. In practice, animals like Callovosaurus, Camptosaurus, Craspedodon, Kangnasaurus, Mochlodon, Muttaburrasaurus, Ouranosaurus, and Probactrosaurus were usually assigned to this family.
With the advent of cladistic analyses, Iguanodontidae as traditionally construed was shown to be paraphyletic, and these animals are recognised to fall at different points in relation to hadrosaurs on a cladogram, instead of in a single distinct clade. Essentially, the modern concept of Iguanodontidae currently includes only Iguanodon. Groups like Iguanodontoidea are still used as unranked clades in the scientific literature, though many traditional iguanodontids are now included in the superfamily Hadrosauroidea. Iguanodon lies between Camptosaurus and Ouranosaurus in cladograms, and is probably descended from a camptosaur-like animal. At one point, Jack Horner suggested, based mostly on skull features, that hadrosaurids actually formed two more distantly related groups, with Iguanodon on the line to the flat-headed hadrosaurines, and Ouranosaurus on the line to the crested lambeosaurines, but his proposal has been rejected.
The cladogram below follows an analysis by Andrew McDonald, 2012.
## Species
Because Iguanodon is one of the first dinosaur genera to have been named, numerous species have been assigned to it. While never becoming the wastebasket taxon several other early genera of dinosaurs (such as Megalosaurus) became, Iguanodon has had a complicated history, and its taxonomy continues to undergo revisions. Although Gregory Paul recommended restricting I. bernissartensis to the famous sample from Bernissart, ornithopod workers like Norman and McDonald have disagreed with Paul's recommendations, except exercising caution when accepting records of Iguanodon from France and Spain as valid.
I. anglicus was the original type species, but the lectotype was based on a single tooth and only partial remains of the species have been recovered since. In March 2000, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature changed the type species to the much better known I. bernissartensis, with the new holotype being IRSNB 1534. The original Iguanodon tooth is held at Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum of New Zealand in Wellington, although it is not on display. The fossil arrived in New Zealand following the move of Gideon Mantell's son Walter there; after the elder Mantell's death, his fossils went to Walter.
### Species currently accepted as valid
Only two species assigned to Iguanodon are still considered to be valid.
- I. bernissartensis, described by George Albert Boulenger in 1881, is the type species for the genus. This species is best known for the many skeletons discovered in the Sainte-Barbe Clays Formation at Bernissart, but is also known from remains across Europe.
- Delapparentia turolensis, named in 2011 based on a specimen previously assigned to Iguanodon bernissartensis, was argued to be distinct from the latter based on the relative height of its neural spines. However, a 2017 study noted that this is easily within the range of individual variation, and that the difference may also arise from D. turolensis being an adult older than other specimens of I. bernissartensis.
- I. seelyi (also incorrectly spelled I. seeleyi), described by John Hulke in 1882, has also been synonymised with Iguanodon bernissartensis, though this is not universally accepted. It was discovered in Brook, on the Isle of Wight, and named after Charles Seely MP, Liberal politician and philanthropist, on whose estate it was found.
- David Norman has suggested that I. bernissartensis includes the dubious Mongolian I. orientalis (see also below), but this has not been followed by other researchers.
- I. galvensis, described in 2015, is based on adult and juvenile remains found in Barremian-age deposits in Teruel, Spain.
### Reassigned species of Iguanodon
- I. albinus (or Albisaurus scutifer), described by Czech palaeontologist Antonin Fritsch in 1893, is a dubious nondinosaurian reptile now known as Albisaurus albinus.
- I. atherfieldensis, described by R.W. Hooley in 1925, was smaller and less robust than I. bernissartensis, with longer neural spines. It was renamed Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis in 2007. The Bernissart specimen RBINS 1551 was described as Dollodon bampingi in 2008, but McDonald and Norman returned Dollodon to synonymy with Mantellisaurus.
- I. dawsoni, described by Lydekker in 1888, is known from two partial skeletons found in East Sussex, England, from the middle Valanginian-age Lower Cretaceous Wadhurst Clay. It is now the type species of Barilium.
- I. exogyrarum was described by Fritsch in 1878. It is a nomen dubium based on very poor material and was renamed Ponerosteus in 2000.
- I. fittoni was described by Lydekker in 1889. Like I. dawsoni, this species was described from the Wadhurst Clay of East Sussex. It is now the type species of Hypselospinus.
- I. hilli, coined by Edwin Tully Newton in 1892 for a tooth from the early Cenomanian Upper Cretaceous Lower Chalk of Hertfordshire, has been considered an early hadrosaurid of some sort. However, recent work places it as indeterminate beyond Hadrosauroidea outside Hadrosauridae.
- I. hoggi (also spelled I. boggii or hoggii), named by Owen for a lower jaw from the Tithonian–Berriasian-age Upper Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous Purbeck Beds of Dorset in 1874, has been reassigned to its own genus, Owenodon.
- I. hollingtoniensis (also spelled I. hollingtonensis), described by Lydekker in 1889, has variously been considered a synonym of Hypselospinus fittoni or a distinct species assigned to the genus Huxleysaurus. A specimen from the Valanginian Wadhurst Clay Formation, variously assigned to I. hollingtoniensis and I. mantelli over the years, has an unusual combination of hadrosaurid-like lower jaw and very robust forelimb; Norman (2010) assigned this specimen to the species Hypselospinus fittoni, while Paul (2012) made it the holotype of a separate species Darwinsaurus evolutionis.
- I. lakotaensis was described by David B. Weishampel and Philip R. Bjork in 1989. The only well-accepted North American species of Iguanodon, I. lakotaensis was described from a partial skull from the Barremian-age Lower Cretaceous Lakota Formation of South Dakota. Its assignment has been controversial. Some researchers suggest that it was more basal than I. bernissartensis, and related to Theiophytalia, but David Norman has suggested that it was a synonym of I. bernissartensis. Gregory S. Paul has since given the species its own genus, Dakotadon.
- I. mantelli described by Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer in 1832, was based on the same material as I. anglicus and is an objective junior synonym of the latter. Several taxa, including the holotype of Mantellisaurus and Mantellodon, but also the dubious hadrosauroid Trachodon cantabrigiensis the hypsilophodont Hypsilophodon, and Valdosaurus, were previously mis-assigned to I. mantelli.
- "I. mongolensis" is a nomen nudum from a photo caption in a book by Whitfield in 1992 of remains that would later be named Altirhinus.
- I. orientalis, described by A. K. Rozhdestvensky in 1952, was based on poor material, but a skull with a distinctive arched snout that had been assigned to it was renamed Altirhinus kurzanovi in 1998. At the same time, I. orientalis was considered to be a nomen dubium because it cannot be compared to I. bernissartensis.
- I. phillipsi was described by Harry Seeley in 1869, but he later reassigned it to Priodontognathus.
- I. praecursor (also spelled I. precursor), described by E. Sauvage in 1876 from teeth from an unnamed Kimmeridgian (Late Jurassic) formation in Pas-de-Calais, France, is actually a sauropod, sometimes assigned to Neosodon, although the two come from different formations.
- I. prestwichii (also spelled I. prestwichi), described by John Hulke in 1880, has been reassigned to Camptosaurus prestwichii or to its own genus Cumnoria.
- I. suessii, described by Emanuel Bunzel in 1871, has been reassigned to Mochlodon suessi.
### Species reassigned to Iguanodon
- I. foxii (also spelled I. foxi) was originally described by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 as the type species of Hypsilophodon; Owen (1873 or 1874) reassigned it to Iguanodon, but his assignment was soon overturned.
- I. gracilis, named by Lydekker in 1888 as the type species of Sphenospondylus and assigned to Iguanodon in 1969 by Rodney Steel, has been suggested to be a synonym of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, but is considered dubious nowadays.
- I. major, a species named by Justin Delair in 1966, based on vertebrae from the Isle of Wight and Sussex originally described by Owen in 1842 as a species of Streptospondylus, S. major, is a nomen dubium.
- I. valdensis, a renaming of Vectisaurus valdensis by Ernst van den Broeck in 1900. Originally named by Hulke as a distinct genus in 1879 based on vertebral and pelvic remains, it was from the Barremian stage of the Isle of Wight. It was considered a juvenile specimen of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, or an undetermined species of Mantellisaurus, but is indeterminate beyond Iguanodontia.
- The nomen nudum "Proiguanodon" (van den Broeck, 1900) also belongs here.
### Dubious species
- I. anglicus, described by Friedrich Holl in 1829, is the original type species of Iguanodon, but, as discussed above, was replaced by I. bernissartensis. In the past, it has been spelled as I. angelicus (Lessem and Glut, 1993) and I. anglicum (Holl, 1829 emend. Bronn, 1850). It is possible teeth ascribed to this species belong to the genus now called Barilium. The name Therosaurus (Fitzinger, 1840), is a junior objective synonym, a later name for the material of I. anglicus.
- I. ottingeri, described by Peter Galton and James A. Jensen in 1979, is a nomen dubium based on teeth from the possibly Aptian-age lower Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah.
## Palaeobiology
### Feeding
One of the first details noted about Iguanodon was that it had the teeth of a herbivorous reptile, although there has not always been consensus on how it ate. As Mantell noted, the remains he was working with were unlike any modern reptile, especially in the toothless, scoop-shaped form of the lower jaw symphysis, which he found best compared to that of the two-toed sloth and the extinct ground sloth Mylodon. He also suggested that Iguanodon had a prehensile tongue which could be used to gather food, like a giraffe. More complete remains have shown this to be an error; for example, the hyoid bones that supported the tongue are heavily built, implying a muscular, non-prehensile tongue used for moving food around in the mouth. The giraffe-tongue idea has also been incorrectly attributed to Dollo via a broken lower jaw.
The skull was structured in such a way that as it closed, the bones holding the teeth in the upper jaw would bow out. This would cause the lower surfaces of the upper jaw teeth to rub against the upper surface of the lower jaw's teeth, grinding anything caught in between and providing an action that is the rough equivalent of mammalian chewing. Because the teeth were always replaced, the animal could have used this mechanism throughout its life, and could eat tough plant material. Additionally, the front ends of the animal's jaws were toothless and tipped with bony nodes, both upper and lower, providing a rough margin that was likely covered and lengthened by a keratinous material to form a cropping beak for biting off twigs and shoots. Its food gathering would have been aided by its flexible little finger, which could have been used to manipulate objects, unlike the other fingers.
Exactly what Iguanodon ate with its well-developed jaws is not known. The size of the larger species, such as I. bernissartensis, would have allowed them access to food from ground level to tree foliage at 4–5 metres (13–16 ft) high. A diet of horsetails, cycads, and conifers was suggested by David Norman, although iguanodonts in general have been tied to the advance of angiosperm plants in the Cretaceous due to the dinosaurs' inferred low-browsing habits. Angiosperm growth, according to this hypothesis, would have been encouraged by iguanodont feeding because gymnosperms would be removed, allowing more space for the weed-like early angiosperms to grow. The evidence is not conclusive, though. Whatever its exact diet, due to its size and abundance, Iguanodon is regarded as a dominant medium to large herbivore for its ecological communities. In England, this included the small predator Aristosuchus, larger predators Eotyrannus, Baryonyx, and Neovenator, low-feeding herbivores Hypsilophodon and Valdosaurus, fellow "iguanodontid" Mantellisaurus, the armoured herbivore Polacanthus, and sauropods like Pelorosaurus.
### Posture and movement
Early fossil remains were fragmentary, which led to much speculation on the posture and nature of Iguanodon. Iguanodon was initially portrayed as a quadrupedal horn-nosed beast. However, as more bones were discovered, Mantell observed that the forelimbs were much smaller than the hindlimbs. His rival Owen was of the opinion it was a stumpy creature with four pillar-like legs. The job of overseeing the first lifesize reconstruction of dinosaurs was initially offered to Mantell, who declined due to poor health, and Owen's vision subsequently formed the basis on which the sculptures took shape. Its bipedal nature was revealed with the discovery of the Bernissart skeletons. However, it was depicted in an upright posture, with the tail dragging along the ground, acting as the third leg of a tripod.
During his re-examination of Iguanodon, David Norman was able to show that this posture was unlikely, because the long tail was stiffened with ossified tendons. To get the tripodal pose, the tail would literally have to be broken. Putting the animal in a horizontal posture makes many aspects of the arms and pectoral girdle more understandable. For example, the hand is relatively immobile, with the three central fingers grouped together, bearing hoof-like phalanges, and able to hyperextend. This would have allowed them to bear weight. The wrist is also relatively immobile, and the arms and shoulder bones robust. These features all suggest that the animal spent time on all fours.
Furthermore, it appears that Iguanodon became more quadrupedal as it got older and heavier; juvenile I. bernissartensis have shorter arms than adults (60% of hindlimb length versus 70% for adults). When walking as a quadruped, the animal's hands would have been held so that the palms faced each other, as shown by iguanodontian trackways and the anatomy of this genus's arms and hands. The three-toed pes (foot) of Iguanodon was relatively long, and when walking, both the hand and the foot would have been used in a digitigrade fashion (walking on the fingers and toes). The maximum speed of Iguanodon has been estimated at 24 km/h (15 mph), which would have been as a biped; it would not have been able to gallop as a quadruped.
Large three-toed footprints are known in Early Cretaceous rocks of England, particularly Wealden beds on the Isle of Wight, and these trace fossils were originally difficult to interpret. Some authors associated them with dinosaurs early on. In 1846, E. Tagert went so far as to assign them to an ichnogenus he named Iguanodon, and Samuel Beckles noted in 1854 that they looked like bird tracks, but might have come from dinosaurs. The identity of the trackmakers was greatly clarified upon the discovery in 1857 of the hind leg of a young Iguanodon, with distinctly three-toed feet, showing that such dinosaurs could have made the tracks. Despite the lack of direct evidence, these tracks are often attributed to Iguanodon. A trackway in England shows what may be an Iguanodon moving on all fours, but the foot prints are poor, making a direct connection difficult. Tracks assigned to the ichnogenus Iguanodon are known from locations including places in Europe where the body fossil Iguanodon is known, to Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway.
### Thumb spike
The thumb spike is one of the best-known features of Iguanodon. Although it was originally placed on the animal's nose by Mantell, the complete Bernissart specimens allowed Dollo to place it correctly on the hand, as a modified thumb. (This would not be the last time a dinosaur's modified thumb claw would be misinterpreted; Noasaurus, Baryonyx, and Megaraptor are examples since the 1980s where an enlarged thumb claw was first put on the foot, as in dromaeosaurids.)
This thumb is typically interpreted as a close-quarter stiletto-like weapon against predators, although it could also have been used to break into seeds and fruits, or against other Iguanodon. One author has suggested that the spike was attached to a venom gland, but this has not been accepted, as the spike was not hollow, nor were there any grooves on the spike for conducting venom.
### Possible social behaviour
Although sometimes interpreted as the result of a single catastrophe, the Bernissart finds instead are now interpreted as recording multiple events. According to this interpretation, at least three occasions of mortality are recorded, and though numerous individuals would have died in a geologically short time span (?10–100 years), this does not necessarily mean these Iguanodon were herding animals.
An argument against herding is that juvenile remains are very uncommon at this site, unlike modern cases with herd mortality. They more likely were the periodic victims of flash floods whose carcasses accumulated in a lake or marshy setting. The Nehden find, however, with its greater span of individual ages, more even mix of Dollodon or Mantellisaurus to Iguanodon bernissartensis, and confined geographic nature, may record mortality of herding animals migrating through rivers.
There is no evidence that Iguanodon was sexually dimorphic (with one sex appreciably different from the other). At one time, it was suggested that the Bernissart I. "mantelli", or I. atherfieldensis (Dollodon and Mantellisaurus, respectively) represented a sex, possibly female, of the larger and more robust, possibly male, I. bernissartensis. However, this is not supported today. A 2017 analysis showed that I. bernissartensis does exhibit a large level of individual variation in both its limbs (scapula, humerus, thumb claw, ilium, ischium, femur, tibia) and spinal column (axis, sacrum, tail vertebrae). Additionally, this analysis found that individuals of I. bernissartensis generally seemed to fall into two categories based on whether their tail vertebrae bore a furrow on the bottom, and whether their thumb claws were large or small.
### Paleopathology
Evidence of a fractured hip bone was found in a specimen of Iguanodon, which had an injury to its ischium. Two other individuals were observed with signs of osteoarthritis as evidenced by bone overgrowths in their anklebones which are called osteophytes.
## In popular culture
Since its description in 1825, Iguanodon has been a feature of worldwide popular culture. Two lifesize reconstructions of Mantellodon (considered Iguanodon at the time) built at the Crystal Palace in London in 1852 greatly contributed to the popularity of the genus. Their thumb spikes were mistaken for horns, and they were depicted as elephant-like quadrupeds, yet this was the first time an attempt was made at constructing full-size dinosaur models. In 1910 Heinrich Harder portrayed a group of Iguanodon in the classic German collecting cards about extinct and prehistoric animals "Tiere der Urwelt".
Several motion pictures have featured Iguanodon. In the 2000 Disney animated film Dinosaur, an Iguanodon named Aladar served as the protagonist with three other iguanodonts as other main and minor characters are Neera, Kron and Bruton. A loosely related ride of the same name at Disney's Animal Kingdom is based around bringing an Iguanodon back to the present. Iguanodon is one of the three dinosaur genera that inspired Godzilla; the other two were Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus. Iguanodon has also made appearances in some of the many The Land Before Time films, as well as episodes of the television series.
Aside from appearances in movies, Iguanodon has also been featured on the television documentary miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) produced by the BBC (along with then-undescribed Dakotadon lakotaensis) and played a starring role in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book, The Lost World as well as featuring in the 2015 documentary Dinosaur Britain. It also was present in Bob Bakker's Raptor Red (1995), as a Utahraptor prey item. A main belt asteroid, , has been named 9941 Iguanodon in honour of the genus.
Because it is both one of the first dinosaurs described and one of the best-known dinosaurs, Iguanodon has been well-placed as a barometer of changing public and scientific perceptions on dinosaurs. Its reconstructions have gone through three stages: the elephantine quadrupedal horn-snouted reptile satisfied the Victorians, then a bipedal but still fundamentally reptilian animal using its tail to prop itself up dominated the early 20th century, but was slowly overturned during the 1960s by its current, more agile and dynamic representation, able to shift from two legs to all fours.
|
1,139,725 |
38th (Welsh) Infantry Division
| 1,137,115,864 |
Division of the British Army
|
[
"1914 establishments in the United Kingdom",
"Infantry divisions of the British Army in World War I",
"Infantry divisions of the British Army in World War II",
"Kitchener's Army divisions",
"Military units and formations disestablished in 1919",
"Military units and formations disestablished in 1944",
"Military units and formations disestablished in 1945",
"Military units and formations established in 1914",
"Military units and formations established in 1939"
] |
The 38th (Welsh) Division (initially the 43rd Division, later the 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division and then the 38th Infantry (Reserve) Division) of the British Army was active during both the First and Second World Wars. In 1914, the division was raised as the 43rd Division of Herbert Kitchener's New Army, and was originally intended to form part of a 50,000-strong Welsh Army Corps that had been championed by David Lloyd George; the assignment of Welsh recruits to other formations meant that this concept was never realised. The 43rd was renamed the 38th (Welsh) Division on 29 April 1915, and shipped to France later that year. It arrived in France with a poor reputation, seen as a political formation that was ill-trained and poorly led. The division's baptism by fire came in the first days of the Battle of the Somme, where it captured Mametz Wood at the loss of nearly 4,000 men. This strongly held German position needed to be secured in order to facilitate the next phase of the Somme offensive, the Battle of Bazentin Ridge. Despite securing its objective, the division's reputation was adversely affected by miscommunication among senior officers.
A year later the division made a successful attack in the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, the opening of the Third Battle of Ypres. This action redeemed the division in the eyes of the upper hierarchy of the British military. In 1918, during the German spring offensive and the subsequent Allied Hundred Days Offensive, the division attacked several fortified German positions. It crossed the Ancre River, broke through the Hindenburg Line and German positions on the River Selle, ended the war on the Belgian frontier, and was considered one of the Army's elite units. The division was not chosen to be part of the Occupation of the Rhineland after the war, and was demobilised over several months. It ceased to exist by March 1919.
In March 1939, following the reemergence of Germany and its occupation of Czechoslovakia, the British army increased the number of divisions within the Territorial Army by duplicating existing units. On paper, the division was recreated as the 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division, a duplicate of the 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division. It was formed in September 1939, however it was never deployed overseas as a division, having been restricted to home defence duties around the United Kingdom. In 1944, it was disbanded and its units were either deployed or broken up to reinforce the 21st Army Group in Normandy during Operation Overlord. The 38th Division was recreated on 1 September 1944 as the 38th Infantry (Reserve) Division, a training formation that took over the role previously occupied by the 80th Infantry (Reserve) Division. In this form, the division completed the training of recruits, who were then dispatched overseas as reinforcements. At the end of the war, the division was again stood down.
## First World War
### Formation and training
On 28 July 1914, the First World War began; on 4 August, Germany invaded Belgium and the United Kingdom entered the war to uphold the Treaty of London (1839). Britain faced a continental war it was not prepared to fight; the Expeditionary Force was dispatched but the country lacked the forces required for the protracted war envisioned by the military leadership.
On 5 August, Herbert Kitchener was appointed Secretary of State for War. This position allowed Kitchener a largely independent role within the war cabinet. His first act, the next day, was to request parliamentary approval to increase the strength of the British Army by 500,000 men. Over the following days, the Army Council laid out plans for Kitchener's proposed expansion: traditional recruitment would be used to expand the regular army, bypassing the county associations and thus avoiding expanding the Territorial Force. The first wave, originally termed the New Expeditionary Force, became the First New Army. Historian Peter Simkins wrote that Kitchener held the Territorial Force in disdain, calling it an ill-trained "Town Clerk's Army", and this was partially why he set up a parallel recruitment system. Simkins noted that it would be a "gross oversimplification to ascribe Kitchener's decision merely to prejudice and ignorance". Had the Territorial Force been used as the basis for expansion it would have been "swamped" and "rendered temporarily incapable of carrying out any function at all", when a "viable home defence force" was needed due to the threat of a German invasion.
On 19 September 1914, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George stated publicly that he "should like to see a Welsh Army in the field". This thought quickly picked up support from politicians and from Kitchener; a Welsh Army Corps of two divisions totalling 50,000 men was approved on 10 October. The recruits were to be drawn from Wales as well as Monmouthshire and from Welshmen living in Liverpool, London and Manchester. The creation of the corps soon became a source of dispute between Lloyd George and Kitchener and was never realised due to a lack of potential recruits. Llewelyn Wyn Griffith, an officer within the 38th (Welsh) Division, commented that "the population of Wales was not sufficient to raise two full divisions and all the corps units required". By the end of 1914, it had been decided that only one division would be raised. The 10,000 men, who had since joined the Welsh Army Corps, were formed into the 43rd Division of Kitchener's Fifth New Army. The division comprised the 113th, 114th and 115th Brigades, and was made up of battalions from the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (RWF), the South Wales Borderers (SWB) and the Welsh Regiment (Welsh). On 19 January 1915, Major-General Ivor Philipps was assigned as the first divisional commander. By March, 20,000 men had been enlisted and over the coming months the first units reached full strength. Despite steady recruitment, by 30 June 1915, 20 per cent of recruits had been removed, having been discharged primarily for medical reasons or transferred to other units leaving 27,836 men within the ostensible Welsh Army Corps. The division was made up predominately of Welshmen, but it included soldiers from the rest of the United Kingdom and several other nations.
On Saint David's Day (1 March 1915), the new division was inspected by Lloyd George. During April, the Fourth New Army was broken up to provide reinforcements for deployed combat units. The Fifth New Army, in turn, was renamed the Fourth New Army. As part of this re-organisation, the 38th Division became the 31st Division. On 29 April, the 43rd was renamed the 38th (Welsh) Division. The division spent most of 1915 dispersed, with the majority located across North Wales with units training at Pwllheli, Colwyn Bay, Llandudno and Rhyl; some units were based in the south at Abergavenny. At these locations, the men undertook basic training, were drilled, and trained for open warfare. On 19 August, the division moved to Winchester, England, where it assembled for the first time as a coherent single unit. Final training took place and limited instruction was given on tactics for trench warfare, on the assumption that practical experience would be easier to gain in France. Following training, it took until November for the division to be fully equipped with rifles. To be declared fit for overseas service, the division's soldiers had to fire 24 rounds on a rifle range. On 29 November, the division was inspected for the last time before its deployment; Queen Mary and Princess Mary reviewed the troops at Crawley Down.
Prior to its deployment, the division was roughly 18,500 men strong. During November, the division departed from Southampton and by 5 December it had arrived in France at Le Havre. The division's artillery initially remained behind to conduct live fire exercises at Larkhill, but had re-joined the division by the end of December.
The initial reaction by the regular army to the division was one of hostility. The division was seen as lacking experience and training; the latter was a criticism levelled at all New Army divisions. Questions were also raised about the divisional leadership and about securing officer commissions through influence. Historian Clive Hughes wrote, "regulars professed disgust at the blatantly political character" of the division. The prime example of this concern was Philipps himself. He had retired from the Indian Army in 1903 as a Major, and then joined the Pembroke Yeomanry becoming the regiment's Colonel in 1908. Prior to the war, Philipps was elected a member of parliament, and was part of Lloyd George's Liberal Party. Following the outbreak of the war, he was promoted to Brigadier-General and given a command of a brigade. He was then posted to Lloyd George's Minister of Munitions, before being given command of the 38th ahead of regular army officers who held seniority. Hughes commented that Philipps's political appointment "can hardly have improved his standing" and that he was viewed as a "jumped-up ex-Indian Army major who had no right to a divisional command", who had received his position via his association with Lloyd George.
### Initial actions and the Battle of the Somme
Once in France, the division joined XI Corps and was placed in reserve, relieving the 46th (North Midland) Division. The first casualties were soon suffered due to training accidents with grenades. The division was then temporarily split up and spent time attached to the Guards Division and 19th (Western) Division, to gain experience in trench warfare. It relieved the 19th (Western) Division and until the summer manned the front in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. It was rotated along the XI Corps sector, and spent time in Festubert, Givenchy, La Gorgue, Laventie and Neuve Chapelle. Units of the division took turns on the front line, maintained positions, conducted trench raids and were subjected to German bombardments, all of which allowed the men to gain experience of active service conditions. During this period Captain Goronwy Owen of the 15th RWF carried out a trench raid into no man's land, where he located a party of German soldiers who had just finished laying barbed wire. Owen followed the Germans back to their trench and ambushed them. The divisional history comments that "the greater portion [of the German party] were killed" and the raid was considered by the Army to be "the third best ... carried out so far" in the war. For his actions, Owen was mentioned in dispatches.
During 10–11 June 1916, the division was relieved by the 61st (2nd South Midland) Division and moved into reserve. It then moved south and joined XVII Corps of the Third Army to train for the Battle of the Somme. New trenches were dug and the division made practice attacks on them using novel tactics: attacking in waves in conjunction with artillery and machine gun fire. Towards the end of the month, the division moved further south to the Somme valley. They then joined II Corps and were placed in reserve. The division was allocated to the second wave, which was intended to exploit the expected success of both the Third and Fourth Armies. After the breach of the German lines, the Reserve Army cavalry divisions would capture Bapaume. The 38th (Welsh) Division would then move forward to relieve the cavalry and secure the town, to allow the cavalry to advance north towards Arras.
1 July was the first day on the Somme and although it was behind the lines in reserve, the division suffered its first casualty of the battle due to German artillery fire. The 1 July attack was a disaster on the Fourth Army front, and total British losses amounted to 57,470 largely north of the Albert–Bapaume road. In particular, XV Corps attacked the villages of Fricourt and Mametz. Throughout the day, the 7th Division assaulted and captured Mametz. The 21st Division pushed into the German lines and flanked Fricourt to the north. Due to this move and the capture of Mametz, the Germans abandoned Fricourt; the two divisions advanced up to 2,500 yards (2,300 m) and suffered 7,500 casualties. Between these two villages were the entrenched German positions in Mametz Wood. These needed to be captured to allow XV Corps to advance further into German territory. More ground was gained in subsequent attacks, but German defences and rain hindered moves to clear Mametz Wood. Following casualties within the 7th Division, the 38th (Welsh) Division was attached to XV Corps to relieve the division and clear the wood.
Mametz Wood was defended by elements of the German Lehr Infantry Regiment and 163rd Infantry Regiment. These units were entrenched within the wood; the German second line was only 300 yards (270 m) behind, allowing the position to be reinforced easily. From 6–9 July, the 38th Division conducted reconnaissance and probing attacks, to determine the strength of the German position.
On 7 July, the division launched two battalions upon the wood after a brief preliminary bombardment. At 08:00, the 16th Welsh and 10th SWB attacked. As soon as the advance began it became obvious that the preliminary bombardment had failed to silence the German machine gun positions and German shells started to fall upon the attackers and the trenches they had left, resulting in a temporary communication breakdown. Caught between machine gun fire from their front and their flanks, the attack bogged down within 200 yards (180 m) of the wood. Unable to move further, the troops were ordered to dig in to await a renewed British bombardment. At 11:00 the troops tried again but were unable to push further forward. A proposed third attack in the afternoon was called off. The 16th Welsh Battalion historian wrote that "'[c]ut to Ribbons' would be an apt description" as casualties amounted to 276 men. The 10th SWB suffered 180 casualties.
During the evening, the 14th RWF launched a minor trench raid. On 8 July, this was supposed to develop into an attack on the southern tip of the wood. While the division prepared to launch a battalion-sized attack, XV Corps commander Lieutenant General Henry Horne ordered a smaller attack by a platoon. The day was spent in confusion; conflicting orders were issued and Horne travelled to the division to clarify his intentions. In the end, no attack was launched.
When Horne found out that the 14th RWF had not moved and that their attack had been pushed back to 8 July, he summoned Ivor Philipps to Corps Headquarters and sacked him. General Douglas Haig, commander of the BEF, noted this event in his diary. He wrote: "visited HQ XV Corps and saw General Horne. He was very disappointed with the work of the ... 38th Welsh Div". Haig further commented that Philipps was relieved of his command as the majority of the division had "never entered" the woods despite the "most adequate ... bombard[ment]", had suffered "under 150 casualties" during their attack and that: "a few bold men [who had] entered the Wood found little opposition". Historian Don Farr wrote that Haig's entries are at odds with the facts and that he relied heavily on what Horne had told him. Farr states that Horne's account to Haig was self-serving, did no justice "to the difficulties confronting the troops on the ground", and did not acknowledge the failure of the bombardment. He also suggests that the sacking of Philipps may have been political, by a distrusting officer corps towards a perceived political appointee.
Hughes quoted a regular officer who was attached to the division who described Philipps as "an excellent administrator" who was "valued [for] his service with the division". Historian Tim Travers wrote that "perhaps Philipps was a poor commander" but the opening attacks on Mametz Wood demonstrated the faults of the entire command structure, not just of Philipps, as there was pressure from the top down to get results. Farr wrote that "there is evidence that ... Philipps ... balked at sending waves of [his] men unprotected against machine guns" and Travers wrote that Philipps had shown moral courage in cancelling unprepared attacks and for giving his troops "instructions not to press the attack if machine-gun fire was met". Horne had intended to replace Philipps with Major-General Charles Blackader but was overruled by Haig who ordered that Herbert Watts, commander of the 7th Division, was to take temporary command. During 9 July, the decision was made that the division would launch a full-scale attack the next day. At 03:30 on 10 July, the preliminary bombardment began.
The initial bombardment lasted for 45 minutes, striking the German front line positions; the shelling was also temporarily halted to attempt to lure the German defenders back into the front line. At 04:15, the division launched its attack. Advancing behind a creeping barrage were the 13th Welsh (on the right flank), the 14th Welsh (in the centre) and the 16th RWF (on the left flank). A smoke screen had been laid down on either flank, which succeeded in drawing German fire away from the assault. The divisional history called this attack "one of the most magnificent sights of the war ... wave after wave of men were seen advancing without hesitation and without a break over a distance which in some places was nearly 500 yards".
The 14th Welsh rapidly entered the wood and cleared the German positions with bayonets and rifle fire. In the face of determined German resistance and flanking machine gun fire, the 13th Welsh suffered many casualties and their attack stalled. The division reinforced the right flank by committing the 15th Welsh who were able to push through into the wood. Before they could link up and aid the 13th, German troops infiltrated the gap between the two battalions, got behind the 15th Welsh and almost wiped out a company. These troops had to fight their way out, and just seven returned . Despite the losses, the three battalions of the Welsh regiment were able to form a cohesive line defending the edge of the wood and repulsed strong German counter-attacks. The 16th RWF, which had fallen behind the creeping barrage, were met with determined German resistance which repulsed two assaults. The 15th RWF was sent to reinforce and both battalions were then able to push their way into the wood where German resistance, including a machine gun, prevented a further advance.
The 10th Welsh moved up to cover the gap between the five battalions already engaged and the 13th RWF were deployed to clear the German position in front of their sister battalions; divisional engineers arrived to dig trenches and lay wire. During the afternoon, the 10th SWB and 17th RWF were committed to the wood. At 16:00, another attack began and met with little resistance. The 10th SWB captured the eastern stretches of the wood and inflicted many casualties on the Germans. The 15th Welsh, along with the 15th and 17th RWF, fought north through the wood and made it to within 40 yards (37 m) of the northern edge when they were thrown back by German fire. A further attack during the evening was called off and the troops were pulled back up to 300 yards (270 m) and ordered to dig in for the night.
During the night, the 113th and 114th Infantry Brigades were ordered out of the wood and the 115th Brigade assembled in their place. The next day, the 115th Brigade prepared an assault to clear out the Germans. The 115th Brigade's commanding officer, Brigadier-General H. J. Evans, wanted to launch a surprise attack but was overruled. The subsequent bombardment to support the attack fell short in places, hitting British troops and provoking German artillery fire. As well as the friendly fire, the barrage also caught German troops in the open as they fled from the wood. The remaining Germans offered determined resistance and the 16th Welsh were held up by machine gun fire and the use of a flamethrower. Despite this, the brigade was able to clear Mametz Wood by the end of the day. The German second line position was on higher ground which dominated the edge of the wood and, coupled with artillery fire, resulted in the brigade pulling back to its start line to avoid further casualties.
That evening, the 21st Division relieved the 38th Division who moved near Gommecourt and relieved the 48th (South Midland) Division. On 12 July, Watts returned to the 7th Division and Blackader assumed command of the 38th. The division had suffered 3,993 casualties during the six days it had fought on the Somme, with over 600 men killed. Although it had captured 400 prisoners and Mametz Wood (the largest wood on the Somme), paving the way for the assault on Bazentin Ridge, the reputation of the division had been further hindered by inaccuracies. The failure of the first attack harmed the division's reputation, as the comparably few casualties were seen as evidence of a lack of determination by the men. The 113th Brigade's commander, Brigadier-General Price-Davies, made things worse by reporting panic among the men and refusals of orders. Price-Davies later wrote: "I may not have given my brigade full credit for what they did", but the damage had been done. The difficulty of wood fighting was not appreciated at the time, and Farr wrote that the reputation of the division suffered due to the repeated interference by Horne in matters best left to the divisional or brigade staff and his "inexperience of battlefield command at this level".
### Ypres Salient
At the end of August 1916, the division was deployed to the Ypres Salient where it remained for the next ten months seeing no major action. The division spent its time rebuilding and consolidating washed out trenches and raiding German positions. For the former, the division was commended by their Corps commander Rudolph Lambart (XIV Corps). In November, elements of the 14th Welsh launched a large raid on a German position known as High Command Redoubt, a fortified position on a slight rise that overlooked the British lines. From this redoubt, the Germans had been able to direct artillery fire and snipe the British positions. The 14th Welsh raided the position, killing 50 defenders in hand-to-hand combat and taking 20 more as prisoners.
In June, the division was withdrawn into reserve to conduct training exercises for the Ypres offensive. Replicas of the German positions on Pilckem Ridge were built and attacks rehearsed. On 20 July, the division returned to the front taking over from the 29th Division. Until the end of the month, the division was subjected to German artillery fire. These shells, a mixture of high explosive and mustard gas, inflicted serious losses. At the same time, aerial reconnaissance and infantry patrols by the division confirmed that the British preliminary barrage had forced the Germans back to their second line positions.
At 03:50 on 31 July, the Battle of Pilckem Ridge began. The division was ordered to capture the German front line, the second line positions based on Pilckem Ridge, a low ridge that also contained the heavily shelled village of Pilckem, followed by Iron Cross Ridge which lay to the east, before storming down the other side and across a small stream known as the Steenbeck. The division would be opposed primarily by the German 3rd Guards Infantry Division, along with elements of the 3rd Reserve Division and 111th Division, dug-in among trench lines and 280 concrete pillboxes and bunkers. To secure these various objectives, the division planned to attack in waves, with fresh troops constantly moving forward to tackle the next objective.
Due to the Royal Artillery gas bombardments, the German artillery had been largely silenced and played little part in the initial fighting. The 10th and 13th Welsh (advancing on the right) and half the 13th and 16th RWF (on the left), were able to take the German forward positions rapidly, capturing several Germans who had remained behind. The 13th and 14th Welsh then pushed beyond their sister battalions up the ridge, along with the remaining half of the 13th and 16th RWF. Based in the village and Marsouin and Stray Farms, the German resistance was more determined, resulting in increasing British losses. Arthur Conan Doyle, in his history of the war, described the scene:
> The Germans poured bullets upon the advancing infantry, who slipped from shell-hole to shell-hole, taking such cover as they could but resolutely pushing onwards.
It was during this stage of the fighting that James Llewellyn Davies earned the Victoria Cross (VC). Davies, alone, attacked a German machine gun position after previously failed efforts had resulted in numerous British deaths. He killed one German and captured another as well as the gun. Although he was wounded, he then led an attack to kill a sniper who had been harassing his unit. Davies subsequently died of his wounds.
Where concrete bunkers were encountered, the troops worked their way around them, cutting the German troops off and forcing them to surrender. Despite their resistance, the German second line was captured without delay. Half of the 13th and 14th Welsh, along with the 15th RWF, then pushed towards Iron Cross Ridge. German troops holding Rudolphe Farm, in the area allocated to the 51st (Highland) Division which had not yet advanced as far, were able to fire into the flanks of the advancing troops. A platoon from 15th Welsh was diverted and assaulted the farm, capturing 15 men and killing or scattering the rest, securing the flank of the advance. The 14th Welsh then rushed Iron Cross Ridge and engaged in hand-to-hand combat to seize the position, before pushing on to capture a dressing station. Their charge had resulted in heavy losses, but yielded 78 prisoners and three machine guns. The 15th RWF had fallen behind the protective creeping barrage to their front and came under fire from a German position known as Battery Copse. Despite many losses, they pushed forward and were able to secure their portion of Iron Cross Ridge.
With Iron Cross Ridge in British hands, the 11th SWB and 17th RWF pushed forward for the Steenbeck. Despite German resistance, based in more concrete defences, these positions were cleared and the river reached, and the two battalions dug-in on the opposite side. Helping to clear German positions during the advance, resulted in Ivor Rees being awarded the VC. Rees silenced one German machine gun position, before going on to clear a concrete bunker with grenades resulting in the death of five Germans and the surrender of 30 more and the capture of a machine gun. Due to the casualties taken, elements of the 16th Welsh and 10th SWB were moved forward to reinforce the newly gained position. At 15:10, the German infantry launched a counter-attack. Fighting continued throughout the day, with the forward British battalions forced to pull back beyond the Steenbeck; German attempts to retake further territory were thwarted. During the afternoon, heavy rain began to fall and did so for three days, hindering future operations. The fighting broke the 3rd Guards Division, which the Welsh divisional history notes "had to be withdrawn immediately after the battle". During the day, the division took nearly 700 prisoners. Conan Doyle places the division's losses at 1,300 men. Other than an exchange of artillery fire, no further fighting took place and the division was withdrawn from the line on 6 August.
Historian Toby Thacker wrote that "the attack on the Pilckem Ridge was considered a great success by Haig and has been similarly viewed by historians". He continues: "in Haig's eyes the Welsh Division had redeemed its reputation after what he had perceived as its poor showing at Mametz Wood". Haig went on to write that the division had "achieved the highest level of soldierly achievement". Historian Steven John wrote that the division "regained the honour which it had unjustly lost after their supposed tardiness in the capture of Mametz".
The division returned to the front line on 20 August. On 27 August, elements of the division attacked. Throughout the day, heavy rain had fallen saturating the ground. The divisional history described the scene: "the men who had been lying in shell-holes which were gradually filling with water found great difficulty in getting out and advancing and keeping up with the barrage". As the infantry waded through mud, they lost the creeping barrage. Elements of the division reached the German line, in what the historian of the 16 Welsh called "a gallant but hopeless endeavour". The division remained on the line, subjected to German artillery bombardments, until it was withdrawn on 13 September to take up new positions at Armentières.
### Raiding and reorganisation
Until early 1918, the division manned various sections of the front line, at times occupying as much as ten miles of the front. During this period, the division worked to improve the trenches they inherited and conducted raids on the German lines. On the night of 7/8 November, the 10th SWB conducted a 300-strong raid on the German lines. Having penetrated 200 yards (180 m) into German territory, the battalion destroyed three concrete dugouts, inflicted at least 50 casualties and took 15 prisoners, for a loss of 50 casualties. In addition to raiding, the division helped train the newly arrived 1st Portuguese Division by having a battalion assigned one at a time for tutoring. During the winter, the British realised that the Germans intended to begin an offensive in 1918 (the Spring Offensive) and the division spent the following months improving the front line positions, as well as constructing rear-line defences from the Armentières region to the northern bank of River Lys, laying what the divisional history described as an: "inconceivable amount of concrete and barbed wire".
By 1918, the number of front line infantry within the British Army in France had decreased, leading to a manpower crisis. In an attempt to consolidate manpower and to increase the number of machine guns and artillery support available to the infantry, the number of battalions in a division was cut from twelve to nine. This had the effect of reducing the establishment of a division from 18,825 men to 16,035. In addition, to ease reinforcement, an attempt was made to consolidate as many battalions from the same regiment within the same brigade. These changes impacted the division, resulting in the 15th RWF, 11th SWB and 10th and 16th Welsh being disbanded and the 2nd RWF joining from the 33rd Division. These changes to the division also saw the machine gun companies consolidated into a single battalion, one medium mortar battery broken up and absorbed by the remaining two batteries and the heavy mortar battery leaving the division to become a Corps asset.
After a short break to train and rest, the division returned to the front line in mid-February and recommenced raiding the German lines. On 15 March, the 16th RWF conducted a raid on a similar scale, and with similar success, to the one conducted by the 10th SWB in November. During the same period, the Germans raided the British lines but managed to capture only two men. In addition, the division's snipers were able to gain the upper hand over their German rivals. The divisional history notes that its patrols had gained "control of No Man's Land". Using what had been learned "thorough previous reconnaissance", in addition to sniping, it was "possible to move about unmolested in exposed trenches or even in the open" in front of the German lines.
### German Spring Offensive
On 21 March, Germany launched Operation Michael. This attack, which became the opening salvo of their Spring Offensive, aimed to deliver a single, decisive, war winning blow. The Germans intended to strike the southern British flank, to separate the British and French armies and then move north to engage the bulk of the British forces in France in a vernichtungsschlacht (battle of annihilation). The aim was to inflict such a defeat upon the British armies that the country would abandon the war, which in turn would force the French to sue for peace. After the first ten days of the German offensive, the casualties suffered by the 2nd and the 47th (London) Divisions were such that the 38th was ordered south to take up positions near Albert to relieve the two formations. The infantry moved south, and the divisional artillery remained at Armentières to support the 34th Division and subsequently took part in the Battle of the Lys. During this battle, the artillery went on to aid French forces before being transferred temporarily to the British 25th Division and conducting a fighting withdrawal. Its actions with both divisions earned the men of the divisional artillery plaudits from both divisional commanders.
Near Albert, the division had been kept in reserve until the night 11/12 April, when the division relieved the 12th (Eastern) Division. The Germans had captured high ground near Bouzincourt and Aveluy, overlooking the British lines. The division was ordered to retake this to deny the Germans the ability to observe the British positions and to gain observation positions overlooking the German lines in the Ancre valley. At 19:30 on 22 April, elements of the 113th and 115th Brigades attacked with support from Australian artillery. The German infantry, supported by a large number of machine guns and much artillery support, resisted the attack. Unable to drive the German infantry off all of the high ground, the division gained 250 yards (230 m) on a 1,000-yard (910 m) front, which achieved the objective. The 13th RWF managed to push further ahead and secured a section of high ground overlooking the German lines, fought off several German counter-attacks and took captive 85 Germans and six machine guns. The attack was costly, with the 13th RWF suffering over 400 wounded. The Germans made repeated attempts to push back the British and a big attack was repulsed on 9 May. The division attempted an abortive attack on another German-held ridge and conducted several raids on the German lines, before they were withdrawn for a short break on 20 May.
At this point, Major-General Charles Blackader left the division on medical grounds and was replaced by Major-General Thomas Cubitt. The division received replacements for casualties, disbanded the sniper company and engaged in rifle training. Once back on the line, the division returned to its previous routine of static warfare: conducting patrols and raids, as well as being subjected to raids and artillery bombardments.
### Final battles
The division returned to the front, on 5 August, and took up position at Aveluy Wood. Shortly after, the Allied armies launched the Battle of Amiens, which led to the start of the Hundred Days Offensive, the culminating offensive of the war. In the 38th Division sector, the Fourth Army pushed the Germans back from their gains and onto the eastern bank of the Ancre. The 38th Division was assigned to cross the river and clear the German-held Thiepval ridge north of Albert.
On 21/22 August, elements of the 114th Brigade crossed the Ancre near Beaumont-Hamel, established a bridgehead, constructed a bridge and fought off German counter-attacks. The next day, further elements of the brigade crossed, securing a further bridgehead and repulsed more German attacks. The 113th Brigade crossed the river via bridges in Albert and assaulted Unsa Hill 1 mile (1.6 km) to the north-east, taking 194 prisoners, three artillery pieces and seven machine guns. The 115th Brigade crossed the river and cleared several German positions facing them, took at least 30 prisoners and captured 15 machine guns. The rest of the division crossed the following day, either wading or using the new bridges. During the early hours, the 114th Brigade launched an attack on Thiepval ridge while the other two brigades attacked Ovillers-la-Boisselle. By the end of the day, in heavy fighting, the division had seized the ridge, pushed the Germans back around Ovillers and taken 634 prisoners. The division history also records the capture of "143 machine guns".
The division then advanced across the old Somme battlefield, as part of the Second Battle of the Somme. On 25 August, the 113th Brigade cleared Mametz Wood, and the 115th seized Bazentin le Petit. The following day, the 113th Brigade reached the outskirts of Longueval. During the fighting, Henry Weale was ordered to suppress German machine gun positions with his Lewis Gun. The gun jammed, and on his own initiative he rushed the German position killing the crew before charging another that resulted in the German crew fleeing. His actions, which earned him the VC, helped the brigade secure its position. The brigade then fought off numerous counter-attacks while the 115th Brigade surrounded and cleared High Wood (near Bazentin le Petit). Divisional casualties amounted to around 800, and at least 100 prisoners were taken along with the capture of 15 machine guns. The next day saw heavy fighting outside Longueval as the 113th and 114th Brigades attempted to advance, but they were halted by determined German resistance and repeated counter-attacks. The following days saw an exchange of artillery fire and further German counter-attacks repulsed. Longueval was seized late on 28 August after a partial German withdrawal. The division continued its advance, overcame German resistance and counter-attacks to capture Ginchy, Deville Wood and Lesbœufs but were held up by determined resistance at Morval. Following a day-long barrage, Morval was captured on 1 September after heavy fighting and the division pushed on to take Sailly-Saillisel and Étricourt-Manancourt. In an effort to halt the British advance, the Germans had dug in on the far side of the Canal du Nord and, in the words of the divisional history, "smothered the Canal valley with gas shells". On 3 September, having noticed a weakness in the German positions, elements of the 13th and 14th Welsh stormed across the canal and cleared the eastern bank allowing the rest of the 114th Brigade to cross. On 5 September, the division was relieved and placed in reserve. During August and the beginning of September, the artillery had fired over 300,000 rounds in support of the fighting, 3,614 casualties had been suffered and 1,915 German prisoners taken.
On 11 September, the division returned to the line near Gouzeaucourt; the Germans had dug in along a ridge line from Épehy to Trescault intending to delay the British from reaching the Hindenburg Line. The Fourth Army was tasked with clearing these positions. On 18 September, the Battle of Épehy was fought. The division attacked at 05:40 with the 113th and 114th Brigades. For his role during the assault, William Allison White earned the VC. Alone, he assaulted a machine gun post that was hindering the advance, killing the defenders and capturing the gun. He then launched a second attack, accompanied by two others who were killed, to seize another German machine gun position killing a further five and again capturing the gun. In a third action, White led a small group to overwhelm a German defensive position that was also holding up the advance. He proceeded to organise the defence of the position, and fought off a German counterattack with heavy losses using captured machine guns. Both brigades were able to reach their objectives despite flanking fire, and fought off numerous counter-attacks. Despite this, the Germans were able to cling on to Gouzeaucourt. The battle cleared the German outposts in front of the Hindenburg Line, preparing the way for future operations. On 20 September, the division was pulled off the line for a period of rest.
Eight days later, the division returned in preparation for assaulting the Hindenburg Line. The division advanced, along with the Fourth Army, pressing the retreating Germans before halting at the Hindenburg support line, also known as the Le Catelet-Nauroy Line, due to determined German resistance. On 5 October, the line was breached by the division after the Germans evacuated it for their main position (Siegfried II Stellung, otherwise known as the Masnières-Beaurevoir line) near Villers-Outréaux. The German positions lay behind dense lines of barbed wire, supported by concrete pillboxes and machine gun positions hidden in small woods providing excellent fields of fire over otherwise open countryside. Faced with this level of defence, the division was halted and spent the following days reconnoitring the German positions preparing for an assault.
The division's plan of attack was for the 115th Brigade to envelop Villers-Outréaux during dark and assault the village during daylight with tank support, while the 113th Brigade would clear the nearby Mortho Wood. The 114th Brigade would be held in reserve initially but brought up to exploit the success and push deeper into the German defensive belt. At 01:00 on 8 October, the attack began. The initial attack by the 115th Brigade failed, in turn impeding the 113th Brigade, which was unable to approach Mortho Wood due to concentrated German machine gun fire. It was during this first attack, that Jack Williams earned his VC. Elements of the 10th SWB had come under heavy German machine gun fire and suffered numerous casualties. Williams directed a Lewis gunner to suppress the German position, while he assaulted it single-handedly. Rushing the position, he took the surrender of 15 Germans. When they realised Williams was alone they attempted to kill him and re-man their positions. After a brief clash, in which five Germans were bayoneted, the survivors again surrendered to Williams. In silencing the position, he alleviated the danger to his unit and allowed the battalion to resume the advance. The entire 115th Brigade soon rallied, and achieved their initial objective while the 113th were able to gain a foothold near theirs. At 05:00, the 2nd RWF – following a friendly fire incident – assaulted Villers-Outréaux and cleared the village with tank support. At 08:00, the 114th Brigade was committed to the battle as orders to delay the advance arrived late. The troops were held up by undetected barbed wire and heavy German fire until 11:30, when they disengaged and pressed forward exploiting the success of the 115th Brigade. The divisional history commented that the attack "progressed rapidly and resulted in a complete rout of the enemy" and that the brigade was able to achieve its final objective on the Prémont–Esnes road. Meanwhile, the 113th Brigade engaged in heavy fighting to clear the German trenches around Mortho Wood. During this action, the division suffered 1,290 casualties and took 380 prisoners. The divisional history noted that 8 October was "perhaps ... the stiffest fighting of the whole advance".
After the assault, the 33rd Division pursued the retreating German forces, while the 38th stayed close behind ready to take over the advance or assault strongly-held German positions as needed. On 9 October, Clary was liberated and the next day the divisional artillery was firing in support of the 33rd which had made contact with German forces. Over the next few days, the 33rd Division pursued the Germans to the River Selle and launched a bloody assault on the defended eastern bank during the opening stages of the Battle of the Selle. While a bridgehead was secured, it was abandoned due to losses and the 38th Division was moved forward. On the night of 13/14 October, the division took over the line near Troisvilles and Bertry. Over the next six days, the division prepared itself: conducting reconnaissance, constructing bridges and moving up heavy artillery. During these preparations, the Germans bombarded elements of the division's artillery with gas shells.
On the night of 19/20 October, the division attacked. The footbridges were brought forward and the river crossed with ease but, the divisional history commented, the "railway embankment on the far side was a much greater natural obstacle" due to heavy rain and was "heavily wired" and defended. The 113th and 114th Brigades crossed the river, each supported by a tank, while the 115th was held in reserve to deal with German counter-attacks. Despite heavy German resistance and the tanks becoming bogged down in mud, the troops were able to seize the rail line by 02:30. The divisional history commended the 14th Welsh for their efforts during this action, the first to secure a bridgehead and then rolling up the German line to secure the right flank of the attack. Major-General Cubitt described the attack: having "formed up in boggy ground, [the men] crossed a difficult river (for the fourth time since 21st August), attacked up a glacis swept by machine gun fire, stormed a precipitous railway embankment 40 to 50 feet high and in pouring rain, very slippery and deep going, in the hours of darkness, established [themselves] on the final objective". Elements of the division's pioneers joined in the assault on the heights beyond the river and aided in the capture of the position. Despite several counter-attacks, the division held the high ground. The attack inflicted at least 225 casualties and resulted in the capture of 212 prisoners, a battery of artillery pieces and mortars.
With a bridgehead across the Selle secured, the 33rd Division (again supported by the 38th's artillery) continued the advance with the 38th close behind. During this time, elements of the division supply train were stricken by an outbreak of Spanish flu. Following the 33rd, the division passed through the village of Forest, Croix-Caluyau and Englefontaine, before halting in front of the Forêt de Mormal. Here the division paused until 4 November and was subjected to artillery and aerial bombardments as well as minor skirmishes with German infantry. At 06:15 on 4 November, over a 2,000-yard (1,800 m) front, the 115th Brigade pushed forward subjected to a heavy German artillery bombardment. The brigade cleared fenced-off orchards before pushing 500 yards (460 m) into the forest against stiff resistance. They were followed by the 113th Brigade, who then leapfrogged ahead to achieve the division's second objective inside the forest. A lull in the fighting followed as the artillery was moved forward. Afterwards, the 114th Brigade attacked reaching the division's final objective, a road running through the forest, before nightfall. In heavy rain and complete darkness, the 13th Welsh carried on the advance. They surrounded the hamlets of Sarbaras and Tete Noir, capturing a garrison of 65 men, before pushing on towards Berliamont and taking 60 more prisoners. The division had breached the forest, allowing the 33rd Division to continue again advancing eastwards – this time to cross the Sambre. During this 24-hour period, the division had advanced 11.5 miles (18.5 km), 4 miles (6.4 km) further than the flanking divisions, taken 522 prisoners, captured 23 artillery pieces and suffered at least 411 casualties.
On 7 November, the division relieved the 33rd in the pursuit of the Germans. Taking over the line near Dourlers, the division pushed east. By 11:00 on 11 November, the leading brigade was east of Dimechaux with advanced patrols in contact with German forces at Hestrud on the Belgian border. From the start of the Hundred Day Offensive until the signing of the armistice on 11 November, the division had advanced 60 miles (97 km), taken 3,102 prisoners, seized 520 machine guns and captured 50 mortars and 43 artillery pieces. The division's own losses during this period amounted to 8,681 men.
Historian Gary Sheffield commented that, since the division was "employed on trench-holding duties from September 1917 to July 1918", it likely "was not regarded by GHQ as an elite 'storm' formation". He noted, "judged by the results of their attacks during the Hundred Days" the division "was in a select band of elite divisions" akin to the Australian, Canadian and a limited number of other British formations. Sheffield credited Cubitt, "a hard-bitten, ruthless 'fire-eater'", for the improved performance of the division during this period, along with the various breaks the division had away from the line when they were able to train and assimilate new knowledge that resulted in "devolution of command" which allowed command flexibility among lower ranks. In addition, Sheffield cited improved staff work and tactical doctrine and high morale, which had led to the ability of the division to carry out effective combined arms operations.
### Epilogue
After the conclusion of fighting, the division was based around Aulnoye-Aymeries in France. The division was not chosen to be part of the British Army of the Rhine, the British occupation force to be based in the Rhineland. Instead, it was demobilised over a period of months. The first 3,000 soldiers were sent home during December, and the division ceased to exist by March 1919. Prior to the division's disbandment, the remaining men were visited by Edward Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII).
During the course of the war, 4,419 of the division's men were killed, 23,268 were wounded, and 1,693 reported missing. For acts of valour, five soldiers were (in some instances posthumously) awarded the Victoria Cross. In addition, the following awards (in several cases, multiple times) were bestowed: 86 Distinguished Service Orders, 447 Military Crosses, 254 Distinguished Conduct Medals, and 1,150 Military Medals; 453 men were mentioned in dispatches.
### Battle Insignia
The practice of wearing battalion specific insignia (often called battle patches) in the B.E.F. began in mid 1915 with the arrival of units of Kitchener's Armies and was widespread after the Somme Battles of 1916. The patches shown were adopted by the division during late 1917, and were designed to a brigade scheme of a simple shape for each brigade and a colour for the battalion (the colours and design changed for the 115th brigade). Originally worn at the top of both sleeves, the battle patch was retained on the left when the division sign began to be worn on the right.
## Second World War
### Background
During the 1930s, tensions increased between Germany and the United Kingdom and its allies. In late 1937 and throughout 1938, German demands for the annexation of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia led to an international crisis. To avoid war, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in September and brokered the Munich Agreement. The agreement averted a war and allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland. Although Chamberlain had intended the agreement to lead to further peaceful resolution of issues, relations between both countries soon deteriorated. On 15 March 1939, Germany breached the terms of the agreement by invading and occupying the remnants of the Czech state.
On 29 March, British Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha announced plans to increase the Territorial Army (TA), the reserve of the regular army made up of part-time volunteers, from 130,000 to 340,000 men and double the number of TA divisions. The plan was for existing units to recruit over their establishments, aided by an increase in pay for Territorials, the removal of restrictions on promotion which had hindered recruiting, the construction of better-quality barracks, and an increase in supper rations. The units would then form second-line divisions from cadres which could be increased. The 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division was created as a Second-Line unit, a duplicate of the First-Line 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division. In April, limited conscription was introduced. This resulted in 34,500 20-year-old militiamen being conscripted into the regular army, initially to be trained for six months before deployment to the forming second-line units. It was envisioned that the duplicating process and recruiting the required numbers of men would take no more than six months. Some TA divisions had made little progress by the time the Second World War began; others were able to complete this work within a matter of weeks. Issues arose from the lack of central guidance, in addition to the lack of facilities, equipment, and instructors.
### Formation and home defence
The 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division became active on 18 September 1939; its constituent units had already formed and had been administered by the 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division. The 38th was again composed of the 113th, 114th and 115th Infantry Brigades, and was placed under the initial command of Major-General Geoffrey Raikes.
In May, Major-General A. E. Williams assumed command. The division was initially assigned to Western Command, and by early 1940 was spread out along the River Severn in England and Wales. By summer, the division was under the command of III Corps and was based in North West England, around Liverpool, to conduct manoeuvres and training.
The war-time deployment of the Territorial Army envisioned it being deployed piecemeal, to reinforce the regular army already deployed to the European mainland, as equipment became available. The plan envisioned the deployment of the whole force in waves, as divisions completed their training, with the final divisions being deployed a year after the outbreak of war. As a result, the division did not leave the United Kingdom as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated from France during May and June 1940. On 28 October, Major-General Noel Irwin, who had commanded the 2nd Infantry Division during the latter stages of the fighting in France, was given command of the 38th.
In April 1941, the division was assigned to IV Corps and had moved to Sussex, the 18th Infantry Division having replaced them around Liverpool. In Sussex, the division was held in reserve and placed behind the 47th (London) Infantry Division and the 55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division which were defending the coast between Bognor Regis – in the west – to Beachy Head in the east. Michael Glover and Jonathan Riley note that while in reserve, the Royal Welch Fusiliers battalions of the 115th Brigade took part in coastal defence duties.
On 15 November 1941, Major-General Arthur Dowler took command of the division. On 1 December 1941, the division was placed on the lower establishment, having been earmarked for a static home defence role. During 1942, the division was assigned to V Corps and had shifted west to defend the Dorset coastline. On 27 and 28 February, the anti-aircraft platoon of the 4th Battalion, Monmouthshire Regiment, supported Operation Biting, the commando raid on Bruneval, France. On 23 April 1942, Major-General D. C. Butterworth was given command of the division. In July, the division lost the 10th Royal Welch Fusiliers to the Parachute Regiment. The division spent 1943 and early 1944 moving around the country spending time in Kent, Hertfordshire and Northumberland, and were assigned to II and XII Corps. In February 1944, 38th Division provided part of the 'enemy' force in Exercise Eagle, a 12-day pre-invasion training exercise held on the Yorkshire Wolds for VIII Corps, which was to form part of 21st Army Group in the forthcoming Allied invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord). By March, the 115th Infantry Brigade had formed "'B' Marshalling Area" and was aiding the movement of troops in preparation for Overlord.
By 1944, there were five lower establishment divisions allocated to home defence duties: the 38th, the 45th, the 47th (London), the 55th (West Lancashire) and the 61st Infantry divisions. These five divisions had a combined total of 17,845 men. Of this number, around 13,000 were available as replacements for the 21st Army Group fighting in France. The remaining 4,800 men were considered ineligible for service abroad at that time for a variety of reasons, including a lack of training, or being medically unfit. Over the next six months, up to 75 per cent of these men would be deployed to reinforce 21st Army Group after the completion of their training and certification of fitness. Specifically, the vast majority of the 1st Brecknockshire Battalion, South Wales Borderers were deployed to Normandy at the end of June as replacements to reinforce 21st Army Group, and by mid-July so had the 2nd Battalion, Herefordshire Light Infantry, resulting in that battalion being disbanded. Historian Stephen Hart commented that, by September, 21st Army Group "had bled Home Forces dry of draftable riflemen" after the losses suffered during the Battle of Normandy, leaving the army in Britain, with the exception of the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, with just "young lads, old men and the unfit".
Compounding the loss of men to reinforce 21st Army Group, on 3 July the 115th Infantry Brigade was withdrawn from the division. The brigade was earmarked for an operation to liberate the Channel Islands and was re-designated Force 135. Ultimately such an operation did not take place and the brigade was deployed to mainland Europe. During August, the 38th (Welsh) Infantry Division began to disperse. On 15 August, the divisional headquarters ceased commanding any subordinate units and by the end of the month the division was disbanded.
### Training
During 1944, the British Army suffered a severe shortage of manpower. In an effort to downsize the army and consolidate as many men within as few formations as possible to maintain fighting strength and efficiency, the War Office began disbanding divisions, including the 80th Infantry (Reserve) Division. As part of this restructure, the decision was made to retain division numbers familiar to the British public. On 1 September 1944, the 38th Division was recreated as the 38th Infantry (Reserve) Division to replace the 80th as Western Command's training formation. The new 38th Division was commanded by Major-General Lionel Howard Cox, who had previously commanded the 80th Division. At this point, the divisional insignia was worn only by the permanent members of the division.
The 38th, along with the 45th Holding, the 47th Infantry (Reserve) and the 48th Infantry (Reserve) Division, were used to complete the training of new army recruits. At the division, the soldiers were given five weeks of further training at the section, platoon and company level, before undertaking a final three-day exercise. Troops would then be ready to be sent overseas to join other formations.
Undertaking this role, for example, the 5th Battalion, King's Shropshire Light Infantry – between 1944 and 1945 – trained over 4,000 replacements for other battalions within the regiment as well as the North Staffordshire Regiment. Having fulfilled its purpose, the division was disbanded at the end of the war. When the TA was reformed in 1947, the division was not re-raised.
## General officers commanding
The division had the following commanders during the First World War:
The division had the following commanders during the Second World War:
## Orders of battle
## See also
- British Army Order of Battle (September 1939)
- Independent Company
- David Jones – poet and author of In Parenthesis based on his war-time experiences.
- Mametz Wood Memorial
- Johnnie Williams – captain of the Welsh rugby union team who was killed during the fighting at Mametz Wood.
- Hedd Wyn – poet who was killed during the Battle of Passchendaele.
|
14,352,868 |
Lionel Matthews
| 1,169,443,691 |
Australian George Cross recipient (1912–1944)
|
[
"1912 births",
"1944 deaths",
"20th-century executions by Japan",
"Australian Army officers",
"Australian Army personnel of World War II",
"Australian military personnel killed in World War II",
"Australian people executed abroad",
"Australian prisoners of war",
"Australian recipients of the George Cross",
"Australian recipients of the Military Cross",
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Lionel Colin Matthews, (15 August 1912 – 2 March 1944) was an Australian Army officer in World War II. He was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the highest award for heroism or courage not in the face of the enemy, that could be awarded to a member of the Australian armed forces at the time. Matthews was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and was schooled there before moving to Victoria. He trained as a signalman in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve before joining the Militia in April 1939. Commissioned as an officer in the Australian Corps of Signals, Matthews transferred to the 8th Division of the Second Australian Imperial Force after the outbreak of World War II.
Sent to Singapore with the rest of the 8th Division, Matthews served as the brigade signals officer of the 27th Brigade during the Malayan campaign and the Battle of Singapore, and at the surrender of Singapore he became a prisoner of war (POW). While in captivity he was awarded the Military Cross for displaying a high standard of courage, energy and ability while maintaining communications under fire in the earlier fighting. In July 1942, he was a member of a group of POWs sent to the Sandakan POW camp in British North Borneo. There, Matthews established an intelligence network, collecting information, weapons, medical supplies and radio parts, and made contact with organisations outside the camp, including Filipino guerrillas who assisted POWs to escape.
In July 1943, members of his organisation were betrayed, and Matthews and others were arrested, beaten, tortured and starved by their Japanese captors. Matthews refused to provide any information on his organisation or its members to the Kenpeitai, and was executed by firing squad at Kuching, Sarawak, in March 1944. After the war, he was posthumously awarded the George Cross in recognition of his gallant and distinguished services while a POW in Japanese hands.
## Early life and career
Lionel Colin Matthews was born in the Adelaide inner north-eastern suburb of Stepney on 15 August 1912, the third child of Edgar Roy Matthews, a plumber, and his wife Ann Elizabeth née Jeffery. He attended East Adelaide Public School and Norwood High School. After graduation, he started work as a salesman in a department store. In his spare time, he was an assistant scoutmaster at 1st Kensington Sea Scouts from 1931, and excelled at swimming and was a handy amateur boxer. In 1930 he enlisted in the part-time Militia and served with the 10th Battalion; then transferred to the Royal Australian Naval Reserve and trained as a signalman. On 26 December 1935 he married (Lorna) Myrtle Lane at St Matthew's Church, Kensington. Lorna was 21 at the time, and working as a packer. In 1937–1938, Matthews was engaged in social work at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne, a role sponsored by the Boy Scout Association. After they moved to Melbourne, Matthews transferred back to the Militia and was posted to the 3rd Division Signals in April 1939. Lionel and Lorna had one child, Lionel David (known as David).
## World War II
After the outbreak of World War II, Matthews was promoted to lieutenant on 18 January 1940. He transferred from the Militia to the all-volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force (Second AIF) at Caulfield, Victoria, on 10 June and was allocated to the 8th Division Signals. He was formally appointed as a lieutenant in the Second AIF on 1 July. Matthews underwent training in Victoria and later in New South Wales, including a course at the Army School of Signals. The 8th Division Signals embarked aboard the converted ocean liner for Singapore on 3 February 1941, arriving on 18 February.
### Malayan campaign
Matthews wore a clipped moustache, and was nicknamed "The Duke" because of his physical resemblance to Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. He was posted as the signals officer for the 27th Brigade, which arrived in Malaya in August. The Australians formed part of a defensive garrison that had been established due to growing concerns about a possible war with Japan. Under the command of Brigadier Duncan Maxwell, the brigade moved to Jemaluang, as part of the 8th Division under Major General Gordon Bennett. Consisting of only two brigades, the division was tasked with securing the eastern part of Johore. Bennett pushed the 22nd Brigade forward around Mersing and held the 27th Brigade back as his reserve. In December 1941 the Japanese invaded Malaya, and the 27th Brigade was committed to the Allied resistance in the Malayan campaign, although the initial stages of the fighting were in the north, away from the Australians' area of responsibility.
As the Japanese quickly advanced down the Malay Peninsula, the Australian force was reorganised. While the 22nd Brigade assumed control of eastern Johore, the 27th moved to the west where it was joined by several British and Indian units to create an ad hoc formation called "Westforce" under Bennett's command. Throughout January 1942, the brigade fought delaying actions around the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, including the Battle of Gemas and the wider Battle of Muar, as the Allies were pushed back towards Singapore. The Japanese advance continued, and eventually the 27th Brigade withdrew to Simpang Renggam through Yong Peng and Ayer Hitam. As efforts were made to delay the Japanese, the brigade headquarters temporarily took several British units under its command. The brigade carried out delaying actions before withdrawing to Yong Peng, and then fought to maintain control of the crossroad around Ayer Hitam. Matthews was promoted to captain on 21 January. On 28 January, further fighting occurred around the Namazie rubber plantation, where a strong Japanese attack was repelled, forcing the Japanese to carry out a flanking action that exploited a gap in the line to the west. This nearly rolled through the 27th Brigade, forcing it to withdraw. By the end of January the Allied forces were withdrawn to Singapore and defensive preparations began to repel a Japanese assault across the Johore Strait.
### Battle of Singapore
After the Malayan campaign, the 27th Brigade initially took part in the defence of Singapore by defending the Causeway area. The Japanese assault began on the night of 8/9 February, and fell largely on the 22nd Brigade's sector, where two Japanese divisions landed during the Battle of Sarimbun Beach. The brigade's troops managed to hold their area, fending off some flanking efforts by the Japanese along the Kranji River, and the 2/29th Battalion was sent south to help bolster the 22nd Brigade. The following night, another Japanese landing fell in the 27th Brigade's area, and heavy fighting took place during the Battle of Kranji. The Japanese suffered heavy casualties from the defenders' machine guns and mortars, as well as burning oil that had been sluiced across the water. The attacking troops managed to establish a beachhead and the 27th Brigade's headquarters was subsequently cut off from its battalions, as the Allies were pushed back towards the centre of the island. As the Allied perimeter continued to shrink around the town, the 8th Division units were brought together around Tanglin Barracks, where they remained until the garrison surrendered on 15 February.
### Prisoner of war
Matthews was initially interned in the Changi prisoner-of-war camp on Singapore. In May, captured elements of Malaya Command authorised the award of the Military Cross to Matthews for his actions at Gemas and on Singapore. The citation, which was not officially gazetted until 8 January 1946, read:
> During operations at Gemas this officer succeeded in maintaining cable communications between his Brigade HQ and units under heavy artillery and mortar fire and aerial bombardment, displaying a high standard of courage, energy and ability in doing so. Later during the operation on Singapore Island Capt Matthews succeeded in laying a cable over ground strongly patrolled by the enemy and thus restoring communication between his Divisional HQ and the HQ of a Brigade at a critical period.
In July, "B" Force, consisting of nearly 1,500 Australian prisoners-of-war (POWs), including Matthews, was sent to the Sandakan POW camp in occupied British North Borneo. Once they arrived, Matthews set up a complex intelligence-gathering network that was linked to several key figures, including J. P. Taylor, an Australian doctor in charge of the local hospital, as well as Europeans interned on nearby Berhala Island. Matthews and his second-in-command, Lieutenant R. G. Wells, also established links with Asians, some of whom were Chinese, along with members of the British North Borneo Constabulary, which was operating under Japanese supervision. The police passed them information, maps, a revolver, radio parts and medical supplies. Their smuggling of medical supplies saved dozens of lives.
By September 1942, Matthews and Wells had consolidated and expanded their organisation. All intelligence gathered was passed to Matthews and collated. He managed to make contact with Filipino resistance fighters operating on the Sulu Archipelago in the south-west Philippines, who assisted Australian POWs to escape. The Japanese transferred the civilian internees from Berhala Island to the Batu Lintang camp near Kuching in Sarawak in January 1943. Matthews had gained the trust of the Governor of North Borneo, Robert Smith, who had been interned nearby and, when the civilian internees departed he was placed in effective command of the British North Borneo Constabulary despite being a POW. While he had several opportunities to escape, Matthews decided to remain with his fellow POWs and continue running his covert organisation at great risk to himself. He made plans to rise up against the Japanese if the Allies landed in Borneo, and initiated the building of a radio transmitter.
In July 1943, four Chinese members of Matthews' intelligence network were betrayed to the Japanese. Tortured, they confessed to providing radio parts. The Japanese then arrested Matthews, Wells, Taylor and other members of the organisation. They were beaten, tortured and starved as part of their interrogation, then transported to Kuching. Matthews was sentenced to death, along with two members of the British North Borneo Constabulary and six other Asians. Throughout their confinement, Matthews had encouraged the other suspects, and had refused to divulge any information about their activities. Matthews was executed by a firing squad on 2 March 1944, refusing the offer of a blindfold.
As well as the Military Cross, he was entitled to the 1939–1945 Star, the Pacific Star, the Defence Medal, the War Medal 1939–1945, and the Australia Service Medal 1939–1945. Matthews' body was later exhumed and reinterred in the Labuan War Cemetery. Matthews' older brother Geoffrey commanded the 9th Battalion in the latter stages of World War II, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
## George Cross
After the war, on 25 November 1947, Matthews was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his actions while a POW. The citation read:
> Captain Matthews was a prisoner of war held by the Japanese in Sandakan, Borneo between August 1942 and March 1944.
>
> During this period although in captivity he directed personally an underground intelligence organization. By sheer determination and organization he arranged through native contacts for the delivery of sorely needed medical supplies, food and money into the camp – factors which not only kept up the morale and courage of the prisoners but undoubtedly saved many lives.
>
> He was instrumental in arranging a radio link with the outside world and was able to send weekly news bulletins to the civil internees on Berhala Island. He was also responsible for arranging for the delivery of fire arms to a secret rendezvous for future use.
>
> Captain Matthews gained the confidence of H.E. the Governor of British North Borneo – himself an internee in that area – and was appointed to Command (although still a PW) the North British Armed Constabulary. At great danger he organised that body in readiness for a rising against the Japanese and also organised a movement amongst the loyal native population in Sandakan for a similar purpose. He gained contact with the Guerrilla Forces in the Philippines and successfully organised escape parties. His ultimate object was to link up with outside forces and to stage eventually a resistance movement and insurrection at the first opportunity.
>
> These activities of Captain Matthews were carried out at the greatest peril to himself at all times. His contact with the natives was on a doubtful basis and he was in constant danger of betrayal and death. He accepted these risks fearlessly and showed the greatest courage and enterprise, although beaten and tortured by the Japanese.
>
> He was in a position where he could have escaped on numerous occasions by means of the help of an organisation set up by the Chinese but he declined, electing to remain where his efforts could alleviate the sufferings of his fellow prisoners.
>
> He displayed the greatest gallantry in circumstances of the gravest danger. His leadership conduct, unflagging optimism and imperturbability were an inspiration to all closely associated with him in the resistance organisation and to his fellow prisoners.
>
> After his arrest by the Kempei Tai Capt. Matthews showed courage of the highest order. He steadfastly refused to make admissions under brutal torture, beatings and starvation to implicate or endanger the lives of his associates. His conduct at all times was that of a very brave and courageous gentleman and he worthily upheld the highest tradition of an Australian Officer.
Matthews' Military Cross was received by his nine-year-old son, David, from the Governor-General, William McKell, at Government House, Adelaide, in late November. David also received his George Cross from the Governor of South Australia, Lieutenant General Sir Willoughby Norrie, in Adelaide on 4 October 1949. A fund was established to pay for David's education. Matthews' George Cross, Military Cross and service medals are displayed in the Hall of Valour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
|
5,275,653 |
Erin Phillips
| 1,173,908,323 |
Australian rules footballer
|
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"Women's National Basketball League players"
] |
Erin Victoria Phillips OAM (born 19 May 1985) is an Australian rules footballer for the Port Adelaide Football Club in the AFL Women's (AFLW) competition, a radio host, and a former professional basketball player. She played nine seasons in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) for five different teams and is a two-time WNBA champion. She also represented Australia on the women's national basketball team, winning a gold medal at the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women and serving as a co-vice captain at the 2016 Summer Olympics. Additionally, Phillips has played five seasons in the AFLW with the Adelaide Football Club, in which she is a three-time premiership player and two-time league best and fairest.
Phillips's father Greg played professional Australian rules football for , where he was an eight-time premiership player and earned an induction into the Australian Football Hall of Fame. Phillips played only Australian rules football until age 13, switching to basketball because of the lack of professional opportunities for female footballers at the time. She made her debut in the Women's National Basketball League (WNBL) for the Adelaide Lightning, her hometown team, at the age of 17 and was named to the All-WNBL Team three times by the age of 22, finally winning a WNBL championship in 2008 in her last year with the team. Phillips was drafted into the WNBA in 2005 by the Connecticut Sun. With the Indiana Fever, she established herself as a starter and won her first WNBA title in 2012. She won another WNBA title two years later with the Phoenix Mercury. During her basketball career, Phillips played both point guard and shooting guard, excelling at three-pointers and employing a physical style of play. Following her retirement from the WNBA, she was also an assistant coach for the Dallas Wings, the last team she played for in the league.
With the launch of the AFLW in 2017, Phillips began her football career at age 31 as a co-captain of Adelaide. Despite not having played competitive football in nearly 18 years, she quickly emerged as the league's best player and one of its biggest stars. She won the AFLW best and fairest award by a wide margin in both 2017 and 2019, as well as the AFLW Grand Final best on ground as a member of Adelaide's premiership teams in both years. Phillips plays as a midfielder and is also one of the leading goal scorers in the competition.
## Early life and background
Erin Victoria Phillips was born on 19 May 1985 in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton to Julie and Greg Phillips. She grew up with her two older sisters Rachel and Amy in Adelaide. Her father was a professional Australian rules football defender who played most of his career with the Port Adelaide Football Club in the South Australian National Football League (SANFL), where he served as captain for three years, was an eight-time premiership player, and was named to the club's all-time Greatest Team in 2000. He also competed in the Victorian Football League (VFL), which was later renamed as the modern Australian Football League (AFL), as a member of the Collingwood Football Club. Her father was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2020.
Phillips has said she "wanted to be an AFL footballer since [she] could walk and talk, and wanted to be exactly like [her] dad". Her father was impressed with her athleticism at a young age, commenting, "Some kids who are born with this gift just stand out and you could always see that with Erin." Phillips began competing in football with the SMOSH West Lakes Football Club (then known as the St. Michael's Old Scholars and Hindmarsh Football Club) under-9 side, where she was the only girl on the team. Her under-11 team won the grand final. She was also named the best and fairest player on her under-13 team. John Cahill, one of her father's coaches at Port Adelaide, praised Phillips's ability, saying she was "as good a 14-year old as I've ever seen play football" in comparison to Port Adelaide Hall of Famers such as her father, Russell Ebert, and Gavin Wanganeen. Phillips had the opportunity to train with Port Adelaide on occasion while growing up.
Phillips began playing basketball at the age of 13. She decided to switch her sporting focus from football to basketball at the age of 14 due to the lack of opportunities at the time for female footballers to play professionally. Her father had also introduced her to Rachael Sporn, a member of the Australian national basketball team, around this time. As a junior, Phillips played for the West Adelaide Bearcats. She represented South Australia Metro in the under-16 and under-18 Australian national championships, winning the Norma Connolly Trophy as a member of the under-16 championship team in 1999. Phillips was also a member of the South Australia under-20 championship team in 2004, where she won the Bob Staunton Award as the most outstanding player in the women's tournament.
## Basketball career
### WNBL
#### Adelaide Lightning (2002–08): Three All-WNBL Teams, WNBL champion
Phillips made her professional basketball debut with the Adelaide Lightning in the Women's National Basketball League (WNBL) in 2002 at age 17. She played six consecutive seasons with the team through 2008. Adelaide made the finals in all six of those years. Phillips had earned an Australian Institute of Sport scholarship to join their WNBL team in 2003, but never played for them after being replaced before the start of that season. Phillips emerged as a breakout star in her third year and was named to the All-WNBL Team (then known as the WNBL All-Star Five) at the end of the 2004–05 season. Averaging 15.0 points, 8.6 rebounds, and 5.3 assists per game that season, she was second in the league in assists behind only her teammate Jennifer Screen who had 5.9 per game. Phillips was also fourth in the league in offensive rebounds with 3.1 per game and fifth in steals with 5.1 per game. Adelaide finished fourth on the ladder and lost their semifinal to the Sydney Uni Flames 94–93 in overtime. Before the game, the Adelaide team had been involved in a car accident that injured some of the players and delayed the start of the game. Phillips had 40 points in the loss. This was the third consecutive year that Sydney eliminated Adelaide in the finals.
Phillips continued to be one of the best players in the league through the remainder of her WNBL career. She was named to the All-WNBL Team again in 2006 and 2007. During the 2005–06 season, she averaged 15.7 points, 7.5 rebounds, and a league-leading 4.9 assists per game. She was also fifth in free throw percentage at 80.0%. Adelaide finished in a three-way tie for first with a 14–7 record and entered the finals in the second position based on the tiebreak criteria. They lost both of their finals, which were against the Dandenong Rangers and the Canberra Capitals, the two other teams with the same record as them. The second loss to Canberra, who were led by Lauren Jackson, in the preliminary final again came in overtime and was highlighted by Phillips scoring 23 points. Phillips's 2006–07 season ended early after 17 games when she tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her right knee during a collision with Canberra player Tully Bevilaqua. She finished the season with a career-high 16.5 points per game to go along with 7.2 rebounds and 4.9 assists per game. This was the second consecutive season she led the league in assists per game. For the second year in a row, Adelaide lost to Canberra in the preliminary final.
The 2007–08 season was Phillips's last that she played in the WNBL. She was not ready to return from her ACL injury at the start of the year and ended up playing only 17 out of 24 games during the regular season. Although Phillips did not make the All-WNBL Team, her teammates Tracy Gahan and Jessica Foley were named to the team as they led Adelaide to a 21–3 record, earning them the minor premiership. Phillips had slight drops in her averages, finishing the year with 14.6 points, 5.4 rebounds, and 3.3 assists per game. After Adelaide lost the semifinal to Sydney Uni, they defeated Dandenong to set up a rematch with Sydney Uni in the WNBL Grand Final. Adelaide won the grand final 92–82 for Phillips's first and only WNBL championship. Phillips scored 16 points in the game, second on her team behind Renae Camino who had 32 and was named Grand Final MVP.
Seven years later, Phillips planned to return to the WNBL for the 2015–16 season. After originally wanting to return to the Adelaide Lightning, she became the first player to sign with the South East Queensland Stars, a new WNBL franchise. However, Phillips never played for the team due to injury and the franchise dissolved at the end of their first season due to financial difficulties. Phillips ranks in the top ten all-time for the Adelaide Lightning in points, assists, rebounds, and steals as of 2019. She is tenth in points with 1498, sixth in assists with 423, seventh in rebounds with 731, and ninth in steals with 139.
### WNBA
#### Connecticut Sun (2006–09): Debut at 21 years old
The Connecticut Sun of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) selected Phillips in the second round of the 2005 WNBA draft with the 21st overall pick. She was the only player taken in the draft who did not play college basketball in the United States and one of two international players drafted along with fifth overall pick Sancho Lyttle. She did not play during the 2005 WNBA season, instead choosing to play on tours and in training camps with the national team in Australia to increase her chances of making the team.
Phillips decided to join the Sun for the 2006 season despite national team coach Jan Stirling's saying it would hurt her chances of playing in the FIBA World Championship later that year, which was scheduled to begin just a week after the end of the WNBA Finals. Phillips played in all 34 games in her debut season. She was named a starter in the 22nd game of the season after an injury to Nykesha Sales and ended up starting the last 13 games. The Sun won their first eleven games with Phillips as a starter as part of a franchise-record twelve-game win streak. She recorded a season-high six assists in her first game as a starter, and then had season-bests of 19 points and 6 rebounds a few games later. Overall, Phillips averaged 5.4 points and 2.5 assists per game. She was also ninth in the league in free throw shooting percentage at 88.0%. Led by their top scorer Katie Douglas and point guard Lindsay Whalen, the Sun finished the regular season with the best record in the WNBA at 26–8. With Sales back from injury, Phillips returned to the bench for the playoffs, where the Sun swept the Washington Mystics 2–0 in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. However, they were eliminated in the Eastern Conference Finals 2–1 by the Detroit Shock, the eventual champions. Phillips's only start in the playoffs came in the first game of that series, a loss on the road.
Phillips missed the entire 2007 season while recovering from an ACL injury suffered during the offseason while playing in the WNBL in Australia. She did not return to the WNBA until the second half of the 2008 season after missing the first half of the season to train with the Australian national team for the Olympics, which took place in August in the middle of the WNBA season. Phillips played in eight regular season games, all off the bench. In the last game of the season, she scored 18 points and recorded a career-high eight rebounds. Overall, she shot a career-high field goal percentage of 46.4%. Although the Sun finished second in the Eastern Conference, they were eliminated in the Eastern Conference Semifinals by the third-place New York Liberty, losing the decisive third game of the series at home by four points.
Phillips began the 2009 season as a starter. After starting the first 18 games of the season, Phillips and Amber Holt lost their starting roles to bench players and fellow guards Anete Jēkabsone-Žogota and Tan White. As a starter, she averaged 9.3 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 1.9 assists per game. She finished the season with a low three-point field goal percentage of 29.3%, shooting just 20.9% off the bench. The Sun did not make the playoffs that season due to the tiebreak criteria, despite finishing tied for fourth with the Mystics and Chicago Sky. The Sun attempted to trade Phillips before the start of the 2010 season. She was at risk of losing playing time after the team signed experienced guards Renee Montgomery and Kara Lawson to complement Jēkabsone-Žogota and White. They were unable to find a trade and did not sign her to the team roster. Phillips ultimately did not play the 2010 WNBA season.
#### Indiana Fever (2011–13): First WNBA title
Before the start of the 2011 WNBA season, Phillips and fellow Australian Belinda Snell signed with the Seattle Storm. Less than three months later, however, Phillips was traded to the Indiana Fever in April as part of a three-team deal that sent Katie Smith to the Storm from the Mystics, a trade Smith had requested. The Fever were led by team veteran forward Tamika Catchings as well as Phillips's former Sun teammate Katie Douglas. After beginning the season coming off the bench, Phillips won a starting role following a season-ending injury to point guard Briann January ten games into the season. She started a career-best 22 games that year, and averaged a career-best 8.6 points per game to go along with 2.8 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. Phillips was also eighth in the league in three-point field goal percentage, shooting 42.6%. She scored a career-high 21 points on two separate occasions, both losses to the Atlanta Dream. The Fever entered the playoffs as the top seed in the Eastern Conference. They defeated the New York Liberty 2–1 in the Conference Semifinals before losing to the Atlanta Dream 2–1 in the Conference Finals. Phillips's best playoff game was the winner-take-all Game 3 of the Conference Semifinals in which she scored 12 points and recorded five steals in the Fever's 10-point victory.
After beginning the 2012 season as a starter, Phillips was moved to the bench after five games, but ended up receiving more playing time coming off the bench. She also started the last three games of the season with January and Shavonte Zellous both missing a week due to concussion-like symptoms. The final two games were two of Phillips's best of the season, as she scored 19 and 21 points. Although both players returned for the playoffs for the second-seeded Fever, Phillips started every game in the playoffs except for the first. She saw an increased role on the team after an ankle injury kept Katie Douglas out of the rest of the playoffs following Game 2 of the Conference Finals. The Fever defeated the Dream in the Conference Semifinals and then Phillips's former team, the Sun, in the Conference Finals, both in three games. In the WNBA Finals, the Fever defeated the defending champion Minnesota Lynx 3–1 for the WNBA title. Phillips scored at least 10 points in all five games Douglas missed, including 15 points in the winner-take-all game of the Conference Semifinals and 18 points and 8 rebounds in the series-clinching Game 4 of the WNBA Finals. Overall in the WNBA Finals, she averaged 13.5 points in 35 minutes per game while compiling a 46.7% three-point field goal percentage. Winning the WNBA title vindicated Phillips, who was left off the 2012 Australian Olympic team roster for choosing to play the entire WNBA season instead of sitting out the first half like some of her compatriots in the league. She also finished the regular season third in the league in three-point field goal percentage, shooting 43.8%.
Just before the start of the 2013 season in late May, Phillips tore her meniscus in her right knee, an injury that kept her out until early July. She ended up playing only 18 games, starting just six of them. Phillips made a career-high five three-pointers in her first start of the year in mid-August. She finished the season second in the WNBA in three-point field goal percentage, shooting 47.9%. Despite having a losing record, the Fever made the playoffs and swept the top-seeded Chicago Sky in the Conference Semifinals. Their season came to an end when they were swept by the Atlanta Dream in the Conference Finals.
#### One-year stints (2014–16): Second WNBA title
Two months before the start of the 2014 season, Phillips was traded to the Phoenix Mercury with a second-round draft pick in return for forward Lynetta Kizer and a first-round draft pick. She joined two of her compatriots on the team, fellow guard Penny Taylor and new coach Sandy Brondello. Led by a five-time WNBA scoring champion in Diana Taurasi and a perennial league leader in blocks in Brittney Griner, the Mercury finished the season with the best record in the WNBA at 29–5, leading the league in both offensive and defensive rating. Phillips missed only one game during the season. After beginning the year as a starter for the first nine games, she lost her starting role to Taylor. She started only one more game the rest of the season, matching her career-high with 21 points. Phillips led the WNBA in three-point field goal percentage, shooting 44.9%. The Mercury dominated the playoffs, defeating the Los Angeles Sparks, the Minnesota Lynx, and the Chicago Sky to win the WNBA title. The only game they lost in the playoffs was Game 2 of the Conference Finals to the defending champion Lynx. Six of the team's eight playoff wins were by at least 14 points. Phillips's best games in the playoffs were the Game 2 loss in the Conference Finals in which she had 10 points and 4 assists, and Game 2 of the WNBA Finals in which she had 7 points and 3 assists.
Phillips signed with the Los Angeles Sparks in the offseason. She played only 12 games during the 2015 season due to knee issues both early and late in the season. She finished the year with a career-low 26.7% three-point field goal percentage. Phillips missed the playoffs, where the fourth-seeded Sparks were eliminated in the first round by the Minnesota Lynx. During the offseason, Phillips was traded to the Dallas Wings for Riquna Williams and the sixth overall pick in the 2016 WNBA draft. She was named a co-captain of the new team, which had just relocated and was known as the Tulsa Shock in previous years. Phillips also ended up scoring the first points in Dallas Wings' history. She began the season as a starter before settling into a bench role for much of the rest of the season, averaging only 14.6 minutes per game, the second-lowest of her WNBA career. The Wings finished the season with an 11–23 record and did not make the playoffs. A week before the start of the 2017 season, the Wings waived Phillips. She retired from the WNBA several days later.
#### WNBA statistics
Regular season
\|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2006 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Connecticut \| 34 \|\| 13 \|\| 18.1 \|\| .393 \|\| .343 \|\| .880 \|\| 2.1 \|\| 2.4 \|\| .9 \|\| .1 \|\| 5.4 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2008 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Connecticut \| 8 \|\| 0 \|\| 10.8 \|\| .464 \|\| .500 \|\| .818 \|\| 2.1 \|\| .4 \|\| .5 \|\| .1 \|\| 5.1 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2009 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Connecticut \| 32 \|\| 18 \|\| 23.1 \|\| .382 \|\| .293 \|\| .813 \|\| 3.2 \|\| 2.1 \|\| 1.3 \|\| .1 \|\| 8.1 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2011 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 31 \|\| 22 \|\| 22.2 \|\| .462 \|\| .426 \|\| .833 \|\| 2.8 \|\| 2.4 \|\| 1.0 \|\| .0 \|\| 8.6 \|- \| style="text-align:left;background:#afe6ba;"\| 2012<sup>†</sup> \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 29 \|\| 8 \|\| 21.4 \|\| .390 \|\| .438 \|\| .862 \|\| 2.8 \|\| 2.2 \|\| .8 \|\| .1 \|\| 6.1 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2013 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 18 \|\| 6 \|\| 21.3 \|\| .367 \|\| .479 \|\| .750 \|\| 1.1 \|\| 1.6 \|\| .8 \|\| .1 \|\| 5.9 \|- \| style="text-align:left;background:#afe6ba;"\| 2014<sup>†</sup> \| style="text-align:left;"\| Phoenix \| 33 \|\| 10 \|\| 18.7 \|\| .435 \|\| style="background:#D3D3D3"\|.449° \|\| .844 \|\| 1.6 \|\| 2.2 \|\| .7 \|\| .0 \|\| 5.8 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2015 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Los Angeles \| 12 \|\| 12 \|\| 30.9 \|\| .286 \|\| .267 \|\| .850 \|\| 3.0 \|\| 3.1 \|\| .9 \|\| .2 \|\| 6.8 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2016 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Dallas \| 32 \|\| 12 \|\| 14.6 \|\| .438 \|\| .383 \|\| .906 \|\| 1.2 \|\| 1.2 \|\| .2 \|\| .1 \|\| 4.7 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| Career \| style="text-align:left;"\|9 years, 5 teams \| 229 \|\| 101 \|\| 20.0 \|\| .403 \|\| .381 \|\| .844 \|\| 2.2 \|\| 2.0 \|\| .8 \|\| .1 \|\| 6.3
Playoffs
\|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2006 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Connecticut \| 5 \|\| 1 \|\| 20.2 \|\| .455 \|\| .538 \|\| .750 \|\| 1.4 \|\| 1.4 \|\| .8 \|\| .2 \|\| 6.6 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2008 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Connecticut \| 3 \|\| 0 \|\| 12.0 \|\| .273 \|\| .500 \|\| – \|\| 2.1 \|\| .7 \|\| .0 \|\| .3 \|\| 3.0 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2011 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 6 \|\| 6 \|\| 26.7 \|\| .375 \|\| .000 \|\| .818 \|\| 2.3 \|\| 3.0 \|\| 1.5 \|\| .2 \|\| 6.5 \|- \| style="text-align:left;background:#afe6ba;"\| 2012<sup>†</sup> \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 10 \|\| 9 \|\| 30.1 \|\| .475 \|\| .517 \|\| .714 \|\| 2.2 \|\| 1.6 \|\| .6 \|\| .1 \|\| 10.1 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| 2013 \| style="text-align:left;"\| Indiana \| 4 \|\| 0 \|\| 21.8 \|\| .438 \|\| .400 \|\| 1.000 \|\| 1.3 \|\| 1.3 \|\| .8 \|\| .0 \|\| 5.5 \|- \| style="text-align:left;background:#afe6ba;"\| 2014<sup>†</sup> \| style="text-align:left;"\| Phoenix \| 8 \|\| 0 \|\| 15.3 \|\| .323 \|\| .231 \|\| 1.000 \|\| 2.5 \|\| 2.4 \|\| .9 \|\| .1 \|\| 3.5 \|- \| style="text-align:left;"\| Career \| style="text-align:left;"\|6 years, 3 teams \| 36 \|\| 16 \|\| 22.4 \|\| .415 \|\| .405 \|\| .810 \|\| 1.9 \|\| 1.9 \|\| .8 \|\| .1 \|\| 6.4
### Other professional leagues
#### Israeli Ligat ha'Al (2008–09)
Phillips joined Ramat Hasharon in the Israeli Ligat ha'Al following the end of the 2008 WNBA season. This was the first year she did not return to the WNBL in Australia during the offseason. Phillips played only the first half of the season for Ramat Hasharon, averaging 11.6 points, 5.3 assists, and 2.8 rebounds per game in 10 regular season games. In the middle of the season, she injured her right knee during the second quarter of the Israeli Cup final in late December. Although she did not require surgery, Phillips returned to Australia for physical therapy and did not play another game with the team. Ramat Hasharon lost the Israeli Cup final.
#### Polish PLKK (2009–14): Three-time champion
Phillips began playing in the Polska Liga Koszykówki Kobiet (PLKK) in the 2009–10 WNBA offseason following her last year with the Connecticut Sun. She joined Lotos Gdynia in her first PLKK season, playing nearly the entire year. In 30 games, she averaged 10.9 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game, with a three-point field goal percentage of 44.1%. The team won the league championship after finishing second in the regular season. Gdynia also competed in EuroLeague Women, where Phillips was named an All-Star for the Rest of the World team against Europe.
The following offseason, Phillips signed with Wisła Can-Pack Kraków, where she played for the next four seasons. In her first two seasons, she won both the regular season and the league championships. In EuroLeague Women, they were eliminated in the quarterfinals during the 2010–11 season and finished in eighth place during the 2011–12 season. Phillips led the team in scoring in the EuroLeague during her first season in Kraków with 14.9 points per game. She was also named a PLKK All-Star in her first two seasons with Kraków.
#### Slovak Extraliga (2014–15)
Phillips moved to the Slovak Women's Basketball Extraliga for the 2014–15 season, playing for perennial league champions Good Angels Košice. The team won the league title as part of their stretch of 15 consecutive titles from 2004 through 2018. Phillips played seven games in both the Extraliga and the EuroLeague, averaging 7.4 points, 3.4 rebounds, and 3.4 assists per game in the Extraliga, as well as 10.4 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 3.3 assists per game during the EuroLeague season.
### National team
#### 2005–06: Commonwealth and World Championship gold medals
Phillips began training with the Australian women's national basketball team, the Opals, in 2005. She chose to participate in training camps and tours with the national team instead of joining the Connecticut Sun in the WNBA, who had drafted her in May of that year. She played several exhibition tournaments in China in July, and then helped the Opals qualify for the following year's World Championships in August with their victory in the Oceania Qualifying Series against the hosts New Zealand in August. Phillips's first major senior international tournament was the Commonwealth Games in March 2006, which were hosted by Melbourne and were including basketball for the first time. At home in Australia, the Opals won the gold medal in the women's basketball event, defeating New Zealand in the final by a lopsided margin. Phillips played an important role in the semifinal win against England. The following month, the national team hosted the Opals World Challenge in Canberra, where they defeated the United States women's national basketball team, who had not lost a game in seven years, for the first time since 1998.
After the World Challenge event, Phillips decided to forgo training with the Opals that summer to begin her WNBA career. National team coach Jan Stirling was against her decision, saying, "Erin has made a call which will obviously adversely affect her chances for a world championship berth." Nonetheless, Stirling ended up naming Phillips to the national team for the FIBA World Championship for Women in Brazil that September after praising her performance in her first WNBA season. Stirling commented, "Erin's been ... playing very, very well. She is definitely a young developing player we've got earmarked for Beijing and to get a worlds under her belt is a bonus when you move the clock forward to [the Olympics]." Australia went undefeated and won the gold medal at the World Championship, their first gold medal at any major international competition. They defeated the hosts Brazil in the semifinals and then Russia in the final after Russia had upset the United States in the semifinals. Phillips had a minor role on the team during the tournament, averaging 2.0 points and 1.1 assists in 7.4 minutes per game.
#### 2008–10: Olympic silver medal in Beijing
Despite being unable to play for the Opals in 2007 due to an ACL injury, Phillips was assured a place on the national team in their preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She returned to play with the national team in April 2008 and missed the first half of the WNBA season to continue training with them up until and through the Olympics in August. In addition to exhibitions against New Zealand, Russia, and Chinese Taipei, Phillips was with the team for the Good Luck Beijing event, a warm-up tournament to help Beijing prepare their operations. Without their full team, Australia won only two out of six games. The Opals regrouped for the Olympics. They swept their round robin group, winning all five of those games by more than 15 points. They then won both their quarterfinal game against the Czech Republic and their semifinal game against China by more than 30 points. Nonetheless, Australia finished as silver medallists after losing the gold medal match to the United States 92–65 in a lopsided game, their third consecutive runner-up finish to the United States at the Olympics.
After the Connecticut Sun could not trade Phillips for the 2010 WNBA season, she instead trained with the national team, winning exhibition tournaments in Hungary during July and in Spain during September. The 2010 international season culminated with the FIBA World Championship for Women in the Czech Republic. Although Australia's only round robin loss was to the United States, they were defeated in the quarterfinals by the Czech Republic, the tournament hosts. Australia finished in fifth place after winning the 5th-to-8th-place consolation bracket. Phillips had more playing time in the tournament than in the previous World Championship, averaging 4.1 points, 2.7 rebounds, and 1.3 assists in 13.6 minutes per game.
#### 2012–16: Olympic absence and return, World Championship bronze
Although Phillips participated in training camps with the national team in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, she was not named to the team. The Australian press and the WNBA regarded her omission as a surprise. Nonetheless, Phillips knew she was hurting her chances of making the team by playing the full WNBA season instead of skipping the first half of the year to keep training with the Opals like Lauren Jackson. She decided to play the full season because she thought it was better preparation and she wanted to honour her contract with the Indiana Fever. The Opals won the bronze medal in London, and Phillips ended up winning her first WNBA title.
Phillips returned to the national team as one of 33 players selected to prepare for the 2014 FIBA World Championship for Women in Turkey. She was named to the team for the World Championship, having won the WNBA Finals just 15 days before the Opals' first game in the tournament. Australia swept their round robin group and won their quarterfinal game against Canada. After a 12-point semifinal loss to the United States, the Opals defeated the hosts Turkey for the bronze medal. Unlike her previous two World Championships where she had little playing time off the bench, Phillips established herself in the team's regular starting lineup, leading the team in minutes per game, and was third in scoring and second in assists. Overall, she averaged 8.7 points, 4.0 assists, and 4.0 rebounds in 26.2 minutes per game. In the loss against the United States, she led the team in scoring with a game-high 19 points and made her only three three-pointers of the tournament on six such shots.
The last major international tournament of Phillips's career was the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Phillips and Laura Hodges were voted co-vice captains by their teammates, while Penny Taylor was voted captain. Despite sweeping their round robin group, Australia were upset in the quarterfinals 73–71 by Serbia in a game where the Opals had 26 turnovers. Phillips had 10 points and 4 assists in the loss. Overall, she averaged 4.7 points, 3.2 assists, and 2.0 rebounds in 23.5 minutes per game while playing as a starter. The loss to Serbia ended the Opals' streak of five consecutive Olympics with a medal. Phillips officially retired from competitive basketball in January 2018.
### Playing style
Phillips was a guard, and could play both the point guard and shooting guard positions. Her versatility allowed her to play as a combo guard between both of those positions. Phillips's first WNBA coach Mike Thibault compared her to Women's Basketball Hall of Famer Michele Timms, another Australian point guard. He also said she was "one of the best rebounding guards we've had". With her background in the much more physical sport of Australian rules football, Phillips had a physical style of play in basketball as well. Thibault commended her ability to take contact while driving to the basket, comparing her to then-teammate Lindsay Whalen in that regard. Phillips also excelled at taking offensive charges while on defence and was a good perimeter defender.
Phillips was one of the best three-point shooters in the WNBA during her career, ranking top ten in the league in three-point field goal percentage five times in the eight seasons where she played enough to qualify for the rankings. Her best rankings in three-point field goal percentage came in three consecutive years when she finished third in 2012, second in 2013, and first in 2014. Although she did not lead the league in 2013, her 47.9% three-point field goal percentage that year ranks 13th overall in WNBA history as of 2020. Phillips's career three-point field goal percentage of 38.1% ranks 34th all-time as of 2020. Phillips was also an excellent free-throw shooter. Her 84.4% career free throw percentage ranks 33rd all-time in the WNBA as of 2020.
### Coaching
Following her release by the Dallas Wings and retirement from the WNBA immediately before the start of the 2017 WNBA season, Phillips was named the Wings' director of player and franchise development a week later. Shortly after the end of the season, Phillips was promoted to assistant coach of the team for 2018, replacing Bridget Pettis. She coached alongside fellow assistant coach Taj McWilliams-Franklin and under head coach Fred Williams, who had been the team's head coach in Phillips's last year as a player in the WNBA as well. She retained her position the following year as the Wings hired new head coach Brian Agler. She had turned down the opportunity to interview for that head coaching vacancy in order to return to Australian rules football in the AFLW during the offseason. Phillips left the coaching staff following the 2019 WNBA season in search of opportunities in Australia.
## Australian rules football career
### Adelaide Football Club (2017–2022)
With the AFL planning to launch a national Australian rules football women's competition in 2017, Phillips agreed to become a marquee signing for , her father's club in the SANFL, if they received a licence for the inaugural AFL Women's (AFLW) season. By March 2016, however, Port Adelaide decided not to bid for a licence for 2017 in order to focus on their plan to play the first AFL game in China that same year.
As a result, Phillips instead ended up signing with the Adelaide Football Club as a rookie, a spot reserved for footballers coming from other sports. She had previously stated it was "highly unlikely" that she would join Adelaide if Port Adelaide were not granted a licence. Phillips later reneged, saying, "When the Adelaide Crows contacted me I was just so blown away how professional they were and how committed they were, not only just in getting me to play but how committed they were to the women's game itself." She also commented that she thought "[her] time had passed at playing football" when Port Adelaide did not pursue a licence.
Phillips had not played in a football match since participating in the Little Heroes Slowdown in 2004, a charity match featuring retired AFL and SANFL players as well as celebrities. She was named best on ground in that game. Before she returned to training in 2016, the last time she had played football in a competitive league was 17 years earlier at 13 years old.
#### 2017: Inaugural best and fairest, and AFLW premiership
Phillips was named as a co-captain of Adelaide for the inaugural 2017 AFLW season, along with Chelsea Randall, one of the club's marquee signings. Although Phillips received approval from the Dallas Wings to play in the AFLW during the WNBA offseason, medical insurance on her WNBA contract did not cover any injuries from playing Australian rules football. Despite the possibility of an injury voiding her WNBA contract or the fact that her salary was about ten times higher in the WNBA compared to the AFLW, Phillips decided to play in the league at her own risk.
The 2017 AFLW competition consisted of eight teams playing a home-and-away schedule of seven games, one against each of the other teams. At the end of the season, the top two teams on the ladder would contest the Grand Final. Adelaide had a strong start to the season, winning their first two games with the largest margin of victory in each week. Phillips was awarded best on ground in both games, receiving the maximum three votes that were to be tallied at the end of the season to decide the competition's best and fairest. She led the Crows in goals in the first game of the season with three. Although Adelaide trailed at three-quarter time against in Round 3, Phillips led her team to victory with the only goal of the final term, which she kicked from a long distance of 60 metres. Phillips was awarded best on ground for the third and final time during the home-and-away season in Adelaide's Round 4 win, leading the Crows with 18 disposals.
Adelaide and the entered their Round 5 encounter as the only remaining unbeaten teams in the competition, even though the press had not expected either team to be top two on the ladder. After Adelaide led at three-quarter time, they lost the game after conceding the only goal of the final term. This was the only game of the season that Phillips did not receive any votes as one of the three best players on the ground. She received an additional two votes in both of the last two games of the season. Adelaide lost their next game as well to , who were led by Daisy Pearce. With the loss, the Crows were left with the same number of wins as Melbourne and retained the second position on the ladder only by virtue of their much better points percentage. After Melbourne began the last round with a win, Adelaide needed to win their game against to finish second on the ladder. Although Adelaide trailed by seven points entering the final term, they won the game with the only five goals in the last quarter, the first two from Sarah Perkins who had four in total and the next two from Phillips who kicked three in total.
The inaugural 2017 AFLW Grand Final was a rematch of Adelaide's Round 5 loss to Brisbane, who won the right to host the match as minor premiers. Adelaide won by a score of 4.11 (35) to 4.5 (29), never trailing in the match. Phillips won best on ground, having recorded 28 disposals, 7 marks, and 7 tackles, all personal season-bests and team-highs in the game. She also kicked both of Adelaide's goals in the second half. Phillips ended the year as the third-leading goalkicker in the AFLW with ten goals. At the AFLW Awards, Phillips was named the inaugural AFLW best and fairest, finishing the season with 14 votes, four ahead of the ' Ellie Blackburn and Melbourne's Karen Paxman. Her match-winner from Round 3 against Carlton was also named the AFLW Goal of the Year. She was also a finalist for AFLW Mark of the Year for an on-the-shoulders mark that she took against Melbourne, losing the award to Darcy Vescio. Phillips also won the AFLW Players' Most Valuable Player Award and was named to the All-Australian team.
#### 2018: Struggle with injuries
Phillips struggled with a right quad injury through much of the 2018 season. She first injured the quad in the preseason and then aggravated it the day before the start of the season, keeping her out for the first two games. Adelaide lost both of the those games without Phillips, which were against Brisbane and Melbourne. When Phillips returned, Adelaide resumed winning as Phillips starred with four of Adelaide's six goals and two of their five behinds, earning best on ground. However, this was the only game of the year where Phillips earned any votes. After a draw against in heavy rain, Adelaide won their next two games in Round 5 and Round 6. Phillips's quad injury forced her to miss the second half of the Round 5 win. She recovered to kick three goals the following week. Just like in 2017, Adelaide entered their Round 7 game against Collingwood needing a win to make the AFLW Grand Final. This time, however, Adelaide squandered a 17-point lead in the second quarter and lost the game after defender Chelsea Randall missed the second half due to a concussion.
#### 2019: Another best and fairest, and second AFLW premiership
With the expansion of the AFLW to 10 teams for the 2019 season, the league was restructured into two conferences. The number of home-and-away games was kept at seven, and the finals system was expanded to include one pair of preliminary finals before the grand final. Adelaide opened the season with a one-point loss to the Western Bulldogs, the reigning premiers, largely as a result of kicking an inaccurate 1.11 (17). Despite the loss, Phillips earned two votes with 18 disposals and two behinds. From the next game on, Phillips and the Adelaide Crows dominated the rest of the season. They did not lose another game, and Phillips received three votes for best on ground in five of the six remaining games. After their 13-point Round 2 win against Carlton, Adelaide won each of their last five home-and-away games by at least 29 points. They won the minor premiership after finishing tied with with six wins, but had a markedly better percentage in part due to defeating them by 42 points in Round 4 in Fremantle's only loss. Phillips had a season-high 25 disposals as well as two goals in that win against Fremantle. She kicked a season-high three goals one week earlier against .
Adelaide continued their dominance into the finals, winning their preliminary final against Geelong by a season-high margin of 66 points and keeping their opponents scoreless through three-quarter time. They held Geelong to just seven points, the lowest score in AFLW history at the time. Phillips had 23 disposals in the game, trailing only her teammate Ebony Marinoff who had 27. Adelaide faced Carlton in the 2019 AFLW Grand Final. In front of 53,034 fans, a record for a standalone women's sporting event in Australia, Adelaide won convincingly by a score of 10.3 (63) to 2.6 (18). Despite not playing the final quarter after tearing the ACL in her left knee late in the third quarter, Phillips was named AFLW Grand Final best on ground for the second time. She had 18 disposals and kicked two goals before leaving the game. She received a standing ovation when she was taken off the field on a stretcher. At the end of the season, Phillips won her second AFLW best and fairest award. She accumulated 19 out of 21 possible votes from her seven matches, and finished eight votes ahead of Fremantle's Dana Hooker. Like in 2017, she was the third-leading goalkicker in the AFLW, this time behind teammates Stevie-Lee Thompson and Danielle Ponter. Phillips made the All-Australian team for the second time, and was also named captain of the team. She again won the AFLW Players' Most Valuable Player Award.
#### 2020–22: Return from injury and third premiership
For the 2020 season, the league expanded to 14 teams and the season was extended to eight games. An additional round of finals was added, allowing three of the seven teams from each conference and six in total to make the finals. Phillips was not ready to return from her ACL injury until Round 4. In her return, Adelaide lost to Carlton in a rematch of the previous year's grand final. Phillips had 13 disposals in the loss. After missing Round 5 due to soreness resulting from not playing for 11 months, Phillips played one more game the following week. After Round 6, the AFLW cancelled the remainder of the home-and-away season in favour of starting the finals early due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the finals were also expanded from six to eight teams, Adelaide did not qualify with just two wins in their first six matches. Ultimately, the finals series was cancelled due to the pandemic after only the first round was played.
Before the start of the 2021 season, Phillips relinquished her role as co-captain with Randall, setting up Randall to be appointed sole captain of the team. The league was restructured back to a single ladder in which the top six teams made the finals and the top two teams received byes into the preliminary finals. Adelaide entered the last round third on the ladder behind Brisbane and Collingwood. Although they were never in the top two because of losses to Fremantle and Melbourne, they were able to finish on top of the ladder by defeating Collingwood after Brisbane's loss earlier in the round. Phillips played better in the first half of the season, being named best on ground twice, first in Round 1 against and then in Round 4 against Brisbane. She also earned one vote in each of her team's next two games, including against when Adelaide scored 85 points, the second-highest total in AFLW history at the time. She kicked at least one goal in the first six games of the season, highlighted by four of her team's six goals against Brisbane, tying her career high for goals in a game. In the second half of the season, Phillips struggled with an injury to her left knee that was first aggravated in Round 5 and not publicly disclosed until after the season ended. After Round 6, she did not receive any more votes. Although Phillips scored two goals in Adelaide's preliminary final win against Melbourne, she did not reach ten disposals in either of her finals games, despite tallying at least fourteen in all of her home-and-away games. Adelaide lost the 2021 AFLW Grand Final to Brisbane. Phillips had minor surgery on her left knee a week later. Overall, she was named to her third All-Australian team and finished the season as Adelaide's leading goalkicker for the second time.
Phillips played 11 games in the 2022 season, and averaged some of the highest playing statistics of her career in tackles, marks and disposals. She predominantly played up forward and rotated through the midfield during the season, kicking a goal in the Crows' 13-point premiership victory over at Adelaide Oval, her third premiership in the league. She finished fourth in the club's best and fairest count.
### Port Adelaide Football Club (2022–present)
The other South Australian AFL club, , was granted a license to compete in the AFLW in the league's seventh season, held between August and November 2022. Though she reportedly considered retiring from the game, Phillips elected to become Port's first marquee signing ahead of the season, and play for the club her father won eight SANFL premierships with. She was appointed the club's inaugural captain, with Angela Foley her vice-captain.
### Style of play
Phillips plays primarily as a midfielder who is also a goal-scoring threat like a forward. She excels at being able to read plays in order to capitalize on opportunities, such as creating set shots for her teammates off of free kicks. Phillips was the all-time AFLW leading goalkicker at the end of 2019, having kicked 28 goals in the league's first three seasons. She is capable of kicking goals in a variety of ways. She can kick from long distances such as her 60-metre AFLW Goal of the Year in 2017, or from sharp angles in the pocket. In addition to scoring goals, Phillips is prolific at score involvements, leading the league in that statistic by wide margins in 2017, 2019, and 2021. Although Phillips is not one of the bigger players in the competition, she is tough and physical – useful traits for taking marks either in the air or after bodying off defenders to establish positioning. She is not considered one of the faster players in the league due to her relative age compared to other players.
### AFLW statistics
Statistics are correct to the end of the 2021 season.
\|- style=background:#EAEAEA \| scope=row bgcolor=F0E68C \| 2017<sup>\#</sup> \|\| \|\| 13 \| 8 \|\| 10 \|\| 8 \|\| bgcolor=CAE1FF \| 124<sup>†</sup> \|\| 36 \|\| bgcolor=CAE1FF \| 160<sup>†</sup> \|\| 23 \|\| 30 \|\| 1.3 \|\| 1.0 \|\| bgcolor=CAE1FF \| 15.5<sup>†</sup> \|\| 4.5 \|\| 20.0 \|\| 2.9 \|\| 3.8 \|\| bgcolor=98FB98 \| 14<sup>±</sup> \|- \| scope=row \| 2018 \|\| \|\| 13 \| 5 \|\| 7 \|\| 3 \|\| 46 \|\| 14 \|\| 60 \|\| 8 \|\| 11 \|\| 1.4 \|\| 0.6 \|\| 9.2 \|\| 2.8 \|\| 12.0 \|\| 1.6 \|\| 2.2 \|\| 3 \|- style=background:#EAEAEA \| scope=row bgcolor=F0E68C \| 2019<sup>\#</sup> \|\| \|\| 13 \| 9 \|\| 11 \|\| bgcolor=CAE1FF \| 11<sup>†</sup> \|\| 129 \|\| 64 \|\| 193 \|\| 31 \|\| 29 \|\| 1.2 \|\| bgcolor=CAE1FF \| 1.2<sup>†</sup> \|\| 14.3 \|\| 7.1 \|\| 21.4 \|\| 3.4 \|\| 3.6 \|\| bgcolor=98FB98 \| 19<sup>±</sup> \|- \| scope=row \| 2020 \|\| \|\| 13 \| 2 \|\| 0 \|\| 1 \|\| 21 \|\| 5 \|\| 26 \|\| 4 \|\| 5 \|\| 0.0 \|\| 0.5 \|\| 10.5 \|\| 2.5 \|\| 13.0 \|\| 2.0 \|\| 2.5 \|\| 0 \|- style=background:#EAEAEA \| scope=row \| 2021 \|\| \|\| 13 \| 11 \|\| 14 \|\| 9 \|\| 128 \|\| 54 \|\| 182 \|\| 50 \|\| 24 \|\| 1.3 \|\| 0.8 \|\| 11.6 \|\| 4.9 \|\| 16.5 \|\| 4.5 \|\| 2.2 \|\| 8 \|- class=sortbottom ! colspan=3 \| Career ! 35 !! 42 !! 32 !! 448 !! 173 !! 621 !! 116 !! 99 !! 1.2 !! 0.9 !! 12.8 !! 4.9 !! 17.7 !! 3.3 !! 2.8 !! 44
## Personal life
Phillips is married to American former basketball player Tracy Gahan. The two of them met when they became teammates on the Adelaide Lightning in the WNBL in 2006, and became a couple the following year. They married in 2014 in the United States before same-sex marriage was legalised in Australia. They have three children: son and daughter twins born in 2016, and a second son born in 2019. Phillips and Gahan have split their time between living in Texas and Adelaide.
Phillips was one of many female athletes in Australia who advocated for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the lead-up to the nationwide marriage law postal survey in late 2017. The positive support found in the survey led to its legalisation before the end of that year. While Phillips does not see herself as a leading advocate for LGBT rights, she has presented her marriage openly and wants to be seen as a role model to others in this respect, in particular to young girls and both male and female athletes.
Phillips has also been the co-host of a weekday Adelaide morning radio show with Mark Soderstrom on the Mix 102.3 station. The show is eponymously named Erin Phillips & Soda in the Morning. She began hosting permanently in December 2020 after Jodie Oddy departed from the show. Phillips had previously co-hosted on a temporary basis when Oddy was on maternity leave.
Phillips's sister Amy is married to Australian rules footballer Shaun Burgoyne, who has played for Port Adelaide and . Phillips also played on the same football team as Burgoyne's younger brother Phil when they were children.
Phillips was the Adelaide Lightning's WNBL Ambassador during the 2005–06 season as part of a program to promote the league's athletes as role models. She has also served as a club ambassador for Port Adelaide, and has participated in their Community Youth program to educate primary school students on physical and mental health.
In 2008, "provocative pictures" from a photo shoot of Phillips were published in Alpha magazine. This was during the lead up to the 2008 Olympics, and Phillips was quoted as saying, "We're not going to be team USA's little bitch."
Phillips was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours, for "service to Australian rules football, and to basketball".
## See also
- List of Australian WNBA players
- List of Olympic medalists in basketball
- List of AFL Women's best and fairest winners
- List of AFL Women's premiership captains and coaches
|
6,853,840 |
Imagination (magazine)
| 1,160,169,984 |
American fantasy and science fiction magazine
|
[
"1950 establishments in the United States",
"1958 disestablishments in the United States",
"Bimonthly magazines published in the United States",
"Defunct science fiction magazines published in the United States",
"Magazines disestablished in 1958",
"Magazines established in 1950",
"Monthly magazines published in the United States",
"Science fiction magazines established in the 1950s"
] |
Imagination was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in October 1950 by Raymond Palmer's Clark Publishing Company. The magazine was sold almost immediately to Greenleaf Publishing Company, owned by William Hamling, who published and edited it from the third issue, February 1951, for the rest of the magazine's life. Hamling launched a sister magazine, Imaginative Tales, in 1954; both ceased publication at the end of 1958 in the aftermath of major changes in US magazine distribution due to the liquidation of American News Company.
The magazine was more successful than most of the numerous science fiction titles launched in the late 1940s and early 1950s, lasting a total of 63 issues. Despite this success, the magazine had a reputation for low-quality space opera and adventure fiction, and modern literary historians refer to it in dismissive terms. Hamling consciously adopted an editorial policy oriented toward entertainment, asserting in an early issue that "science fiction was never meant to be an educational tour de force". Few of the stories from Imagination have received recognition, but it did publish Robert Sheckley's first professional sale, "Final Examination", in the May 1952 issue, and also printed fiction by Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and John Wyndham.
## History
American science fiction magazines first appeared in the 1920s with the appearance of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine published by Hugo Gernsback. The beginnings of science fiction as a separately marketed genre can be traced to this time, and by the end of the 1930s the field was undergoing its first boom, but World War II and its attendant paper shortages led to the demise of several titles. By the late 1940s the market began to recover again. From a low of eight active magazines in 1946, the field expanded to 20 in 1950, and a further 22 had commenced publication by 1954. Imagination was launched in the middle of this publishing boom.
The groundwork was laid in 1947, when Clark Publishing, the company that would publish the first issue of Imagination, was incorporated in Evanston, Illinois, by Raymond Palmer. He worked for Ziff-Davis as the editor of Amazing Stories and did not leave until the end of 1949, but he launched two magazines under the Clark name before that date: Fate, in the spring of 1948, and Other Worlds, the first issue of which was dated November 1949. Both of these magazines listed their editor as "Robert N. Webster", a pseudonym Palmer adopted while he was still at Ziff-Davis because of the conflict of interest. The second issue of Other Worlds reported that Webster and Palmer were going to edit together; by the third issue, dated March 1950, the pretense had been dropped and although there was no masthead listing the editor, the editorial was simply signed "Rap" (for "Raymond A. Palmer"). At the 1949 World Science Fiction Convention in Cincinnati, held over the weekend of 3–5 September, Palmer announced that he had left Ziff-Davis and described his plans for Clark Publishing. He also met and hired Bea Mahaffey, a 21-year-old science fiction fan attending her first convention, as his assistant editor.
With Fate and Other Worlds launched, Palmer began to plan for a new magazine, to be called Imagination. Material for the first two issues had been assembled by mid-1950, but in the early summer Palmer fell down his basement stairs and was left paralyzed from the waist down. While he was hospitalized, much of the work of editing both Other Worlds and Imagination was done by Mahaffey, who coped well, despite her inexperience. An assistant, Marge Budwig Saunder, was hired to read the slush pile and help out. The magazine's first issue, dated October 1950 on a planned bi-monthly schedule, appeared on news stands 1 August 1950. However, in September that year, Ziff-Davis made the decision to move to New York from Chicago; Palmer promptly contacted William Hamling, who did not want to relocate and suggested that Hamling take over Imagination. Like Palmer, Hamling had made preparations to leave Ziff-Davis by establishing a separate publishing company, Greenleaf Publishing, and in November 1950 Hamling left Ziff-Davis and became Imagination'''s editor and publisher.
In 1954 Hamling started a companion magazine, Imaginative Tales; in addition, his company Greenleaf Publishing was the publisher of Rogue, a men's magazine modelled after Playboy. In 1957 the liquidation of American News Company, a major distributor, meant that many magazines had to scramble to find new distributors. Independent distributors often required that the magazines be monthly, and that they be in a larger format than the digest-size common in science fiction magazines. The larger format required higher revenue to be profitable, but in many cases it proved impossible to attract the additional advertising income that would have kept the magazines afloat. By the end of 1958, many titles had disappeared as a result, with Imagination one of the victims; Hamling closed down both Imagination and its sister magazine to invest the money in Rogue instead. The last issue of Imagination was October 1958, the 63rd issue, while Imaginative Tales, retitled Space Travel, ceased with the November 1958 issue. There was no indication in either magazine that the end had come, though the last issue of Imagination omitted its letter, book review and pen-pal columns, all of which had appeared regularly in prior issues.
Circulation figures were not required to be published annually until the 1960s, so the actual circulation figures are not known. For comparison, the more successful Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had been launched the previous year, is known to have had a circulation of just under 60,000 copies for its first issue, dated Fall 1949.
## Contents and reception
The cover story for the first issue was "The Soul Stealers" by Chester S. Geier, a regular in the Ziff-Davis magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. The story was a science fantasy tale of Leeta, a beautiful woman from another dimension stealing the souls of men to try to save her father. The cover illustration, by Hannes Bok, showed Leeta on her flying steed. Other contributors included Rog Phillips, another prolific magazine author, and Kris Neville, whose first story had been published only the year before. Neville's work appeared regularly in the first few years of the magazine; other prolific contributors included Dwight V. Swain, Daniel F. Galouye and Milton Lesser. Edmond Hamilton's work also appeared frequently towards the end of the magazine's life. The magazine often contained a long novel as the lead attraction.
In addition to less well-known regulars, some more prominent writers occasionally appeared. Ray Bradbury's "The Fire Balloons" was published in the April 1951 issue, under the title "'...In This Sign'"; the story was later incorporated into Bradbury's fixups, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Robert Sheckley's first story, "Final Examination", appeared in the May 1952 issue. Other well-known authors who were published in Imagination include Poul Anderson, John Wyndham (as "John Beynon"), James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Robert Silverberg.
Imagination is generally thought of by historians of science fiction as one of the weaker magazines of the 1950s, despite its relative longevity. Donald Tuck, in his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, dismissed the novels it published, saying, "not many were noteworthy, most being in the interplanetary/space opera/adventure field", and Brian Stableford, a science fiction writer and critic, described it as dealing "primarily in routine space opera." James Blish, writing under the pseudonym "William Atheling, Jr.", which he used for some of his critical writing, remarked that it was a "widely unread" magazine. Hamling's editorial policy was consciously slanted against intellectualism. In the November 1951 issue he commented that "science fiction was never meant to be an educational tour de force. The so-called adult story is nothing more than an attempt to show the reader how dumb he is and how smart the editor is." Imagination's approach, he said, was to publish entertainment: "What we need is a little relaxation. And entertaining reading is one way to get it." Some readers agreed with Hamling; a 1952 issue of Rhodomagnetic Digest, a fanzine, contains approving commentary on Hamling's editorial by Gregg Calkins, a fan of the period.
Starting with the April 1951 issue, a regular column on science fiction fandom began, titled "Fandora's Box". It was written by Mari Wolf, an active fan, for five years, and was taken over by Robert Bloch from June 1956 through the end. The column had an excellent reputation, and was one of the few such columns in the American science fiction professional magazines. Every issue carried an editorial, and a letter column appeared in every issue but the very last. A book review column began in June 1953, and appeared in every issue except the last one. It was initially by Mark Reinsberg, and was taken over by Henry Bott in May 1954 after two months in which both reviewers contributed to the column. A "Cosmic Pen Club" column, where fans could post requests for pen-pals, began in February 1957; as with the book reviews it appeared regularly, excepting only the last issue. Beginning in September 1951, the inside front cover was often used for an "Introducing the Author" feature, with short pieces by and about a writer or artist who appeared in the issue. These included photographs of the authors in question, a feature not typically found in other magazines. Among the authors featured were Heinlein, Evan Hunter and Philip K. Dick. "Introducing the Author" skipped four issues from October 1954 to January 1955, and ceased altogether with the April 1956 issue. One issue, May 1953, included pictures from that year's World Science Fiction in Chicago, rather than a feature about an author. The most frequently appearing cover artists were Harold W. McCauley, Lloyd Rognan, Malcolm Smith and William Terry.
## Bibliographic details
Imagination was digest size (7.5 × 5.5 inches (19.1 × 14.0 cm)) for its first 17 issues, and then shrank slightly to a short digest size (7.25 × 5.5 inches or 18.4 × 14.0 cm) for the rest of its run, a further 46 issues. The volume number rose by one at the start of each calendar year, regardless of the number of issues. Volume 1, 1950, contained only two issues; subsequent volumes contained five to twelve issues, depending on frequency of publication. The overall issue number was printed on the spine (an unusual practice) along with the volume number. The first issue had a publication date of October 1950, and the schedule was bimonthly through the September 1952 issue except that June 1951 was followed by September 1951. The next four issues were dated October 1952, December 1952, January 1953 and February 1953, and then a monthly run began with April 1953 that lasted without a break until the July 1955 issue. The next issue was October 1955, which inaugurated another bimonthly period that ran with perfect regularity until the last issue, October 1958. The price remained at 35 cents throughout.
The title of the magazine was initially "Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy"; it changed with the October 1955 issue to "Imagination: Science Fiction", though this change was only on the cover and spine and was never reflected on the masthead.
The first 28 issues were 166 pages long. The page count dropped to 134 with the April 1954 issue and stayed at that length for the remainder of the run. The cover layout initially strongly resembled that of Other Worlds but was changed with the fifth issue, June 1951, to have a white background banner for the title. This format was retained for the rest of the magazine's life, with occasional slight variations such as using a different color for the banner background. The spine also changed from a colored spine with pale lettering, which was similar to the spine style used by Other Worlds'', to a white spine with red or blue lettering.
The publisher was Clark Publishing Company for the first two issues. The editor for those issues was Raymond Palmer, but as he was hospitalized much of the work was done by Bea Mahaffey. As a result, these two issues are sometimes indexed with Mahaffey as editor. With the third issue, Greenleaf Publishing Company became the publisher and William Hamling took over as editor, a position he retained throughout the magazine's life.
|
1,008,284 |
Pride and Prejudice (1995 TV series)
| 1,173,805,972 |
1995 British television drama series
|
[
"1990s British drama television series",
"1990s British romance television series",
"1990s British television miniseries",
"1995 British television series debuts",
"1995 British television series endings",
"BBC television dramas",
"Costume drama television series",
"English-language television shows",
"Peabody Award-winning television programs",
"Television series based on Pride and Prejudice",
"Television series set in the 19th century",
"Television shows set in England",
"Television shows written by Andrew Davies"
] |
Pride and Prejudice is a six-episode 1995 British television drama, adapted by Andrew Davies from Jane Austen's 1813 novel of the same name. Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth starred as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, respectively. Produced by Sue Birtwistle and directed by Simon Langton, the serial was a BBC production with additional funding from the American A&E Network. BBC1 originally broadcast the 55-minute episodes from 24 September to 29 October 1995. The A&E Network aired the series in double episodes on three consecutive nights beginning 14 January 1996.
Critically acclaimed and a popular success, Pride and Prejudice was honoured with several awards, including a BAFTA Television Award for Jennifer Ehle for "Best Actress" and an Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Costume Design for a Miniseries or a Special". The role of Mr Darcy elevated Colin Firth to stardom. A scene showing Firth in a wet shirt was recognised as "one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history". The New York Times called the adaptation "a witty mix of love stories and social conniving, cleverly wrapped in the ambitions and illusions of a provincial gentry". The series inspired author Helen Fielding to write the popular Bridget Jones novels, and their screen adaptations subsequently featured Firth as Bridget's love interest, Mark Darcy.
## Plot
### Episode one
Mr. Charles Bingley, a wealthy gentleman from the north of England, settles down at Netherfield estate near Meryton village in Hertfordshire for the autumn. Mrs. Bennet, unlike her husband, is excited at the prospect of marrying off one of her five daughters (Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia) to the newcomer. Mr. Bennet claims to have no intention of calling on Mr. Bingley; unless he does so, his wife and daughters will be unable to socialise with Mr. Bingley. Mrs. Bennett, perturbed at Mr. Bennett's refusal to make Bingley's acquaintance, declares that she wishes the girls would stop talking about Mr. Bingley all together, as they will never meet him anyway. Mr. Bennet replies that he wishes he had known that earlier, as he has already paid Mr. Bingley a visit. Mrs. Bennett and the younger girls are shocked and ecstatic. Bingley takes an immediate liking to Jane at a local country dance, while his best friend Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, rumoured to be twice as rich as Bingley, declines to dance with anyone, including Elizabeth. Elizabeth's poor impression of his character is confirmed at a later gathering at Lucas Lodge, and she and Darcy verbally clash on the two nights she spends at Netherfield, caring for the sick Jane who fell ill after riding in the rain.
### Episode two
Mr William Collins, a sycophantic and somewhat dimwitted clergyman, visits his cousins, the Bennets. As Mr and Mrs Bennett do not have a son, he will be the entailed heir of their home and estate, Longbourn. He intends to marry a Bennet daughter as an act of benign goodwill, to reassure Mrs Bennet that she and her unwed daughters would not be rendered homeless once Mr Collins inherits the estate. He therefore invites himself for a two-week visit to get to know the Bennets better and select a daughter to marry. However, the Bennet girls judge Mr Collins to be a rather ridiculous man, an "oddity" with many peculiarities of speech and deportment. They nevertheless treat him civilly and take him to balls and social events in Meryton. One day, while on a walk around Meryton village, they meet members of a newly arrived militia regiment, including Mr George Wickham. At a social event, Wickham befriends Elizabeth and says that his father was the steward for Darcy's late father, and that he originally planned to join the clergy. However, Darcy denied Wickham the "living" (a curacy) that Mr Darcy's father had promised him. At a ball at Netherfield, Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance, which she grudgingly but politely accepts. Mrs Bennet tells Mr Collins that she expects Jane to soon be engaged, so he instead proposes to Elizabeth. She firmly rejects him. While Mrs Bennet reacts angrily to Elizabeth's decision, her close friend, Charlotte Lucas, invites Mr Collins to visit at Lucas Lodge.
### Episode three
Elizabeth is stunned and appalled to learn that Charlotte Lucas has accepted Mr Collins' marriage proposal. When the Netherfield party departs for London in autumn, Jane stays with her middle-class London relatives, the Gardiners, but she soon notices that the Bingleys ignore her. After befriending Mr Wickham, Elizabeth departs for the Collins' home in Kent in the spring to visit Charlotte. They live near Rosings, the estate of the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy's aunt. Elizabeth meets Darcy several times. Elizabeth learns of Darcy's direct responsibility for Jane and Bingley's separation. Soon after, Darcy unexpectedly tells her that he admires her and loves her, so much that in spite of her inferior social standing, he proposes marriage. Elizabeth flatly rejects him, noting his arrogant, disagreeable, and proud character, and for his part in her sister's failed romance and Mr Wickham's misfortune.
### Episode four
Darcy justifies his previous actions in a long letter to Elizabeth: he misjudged Jane's affection for Bingley, and he exposes Wickham as a gambler who once attempted to elope with Darcy's young sister, Georgiana, to obtain her inheritance. Back at Longbourn, Mr Bennet allows Lydia to accompany the militia to Brighton as a personal friend of the militia colonel's wife. Elizabeth joins the Gardiners on a sightseeing trip to Derbyshire and visits Pemberley, Darcy's estate, during his absence. Greatly impressed by the immense scale and richness of the estate, Elizabeth listens to the housekeeper's earnest tales of her master's lifelong goodness, to the Gardiners' surprise. Meanwhile, Darcy refreshes from his unannounced journey home by taking a swim in a pond. After an unexpected and awkward encounter with Elizabeth, Darcy is able to prevent the party's premature departure with an unusual degree of friendliness and politeness.
### Episode five
Elizabeth and the Gardiners receive an invitation to Pemberley, where she befriends Georgiana and Darcy and Elizabeth share significant glances. The next morning, Elizabeth receives two letters from Jane, revealing that Lydia has eloped from Brighton with Wickham. As Elizabeth prepares to return to Longbourn, Darcy arrives and offers help, but upon hearing the bad news about Lydia, becomes disturbed and leaves in haste. Elizabeth supposes she will never see him again. The Bennets are all dismayed by the scandal and unable to locate Lydia, until Mr Gardiner writes that Lydia and Wickham have been found. They are not married, but soon will be under the Gardiners' care. The Bennets are relieved, but Mr Bennet wonders what it cost Mr Gardiner to get Wickham to marry a girl with no fortune. Elizabeth tells Jane of her last meeting with Darcy, including her ambivalent feelings for him.
### Episode six
After Lydia carelessly mentions Darcy's involvement in her wedding, Mrs Gardiner enlightens Elizabeth: Darcy found the errant couple and paid for everything, including a large payoff to Wickham. When Bingley and Darcy return to Netherfield in the autumn, Darcy apologises to Bingley for interfering in his relationship with Jane and gives his blessing for the couple to wed. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who has long intended for Darcy to marry her sickly daughter Anne, has heard rumours of an engagement between Darcy and Elizabeth. She calls on Elizabeth, demanding that she deny the engagement and renounce Darcy forever. Elizabeth confirms that there is no engagement, but refuses any pledge for the future. When Elizabeth thanks Darcy for his role in Lydia's marriage, he says that Lady Catherine's story had encouraged him to reconfirm his feelings for Elizabeth. Elizabeth admits the complete transformation of her feelings and agrees to an engagement, taking her family by surprise. The series ends with a double winter wedding: Jane to Bingley, and Elizabeth to Darcy.
## Cast
- Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet
- Colin Firth as Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy
- Adrian Lukis as Mr George Wickham
- Alison Steadman as Mrs Bennet
- Benjamin Whitrow as Mr Bennet
- David Bamber as Mr William Collins
- Susannah Harker as Jane Bennet
- Julia Sawalha as Lydia Bennet
- Polly Maberly as Catherine (Kitty) Bennet
- Lucy Briers as Mary Bennet
- Crispin Bonham-Carter as Mr Charles Bingley
- Lucy Scott as Charlotte Lucas
- Anna Chancellor as Caroline Bingley
- Lucy Robinson as Mrs Hurst
- Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Lady Catherine de Bourgh
- Anthony Calf as Colonel Fitzwilliam
- Joanna David as Mrs Gardiner
- Tim Wylton as Mr Gardiner
- Emilia Fox as Georgiana Darcy
- Bridget Turner as Mrs Reynolds
- David Bark-Jones as Lt Denny
- Lynn Farleigh as Mrs Phillips
- Lucy Davis as Maria Lucas
- Christopher Benjamin as Sir William Lucas
- Rupert Vansittart as Mr Hurst
- Marlene Sidaway as Hill
- Roger Barclay as Capt Carter
- Kate O'Malley as Sarah, the maid
- Norma Streader as Lady Lucas
- Paul Moriarty as Col Forster
- Victoria Hamilton as Mrs Forster
- Nadia Chambers as Anne de Bourgh
- Sarah Legg as Hannah
- Christopher Staines as Lt Sanderson
- Tom Ward as Lt Chamberlayne
- Alexandra Howerd as Mary King
- Peter Needham as Fencing Master
- Sam Beazley as Vicar at Longbourne
## Casting
When casting the many characters of Pride and Prejudice, the producer Sue Birtwistle and director Simon Langton were looking for actors with wit, charm and charisma, who could play the Regency period. Their choices for the protagonists, 20-year-old Elizabeth Bennet and 28-year-old Mr Darcy, determined the other actors cast. Hundreds of actresses between 15 and 28 auditioned for the younger female characters, and those with the right presence were screen-tested, performing several prepared scenes in period costumes and makeup in a television studio. Straight offers were made to several established actors.
Jennifer Ehle was chosen from six serious candidates to play Elizabeth, the second Bennet daughter, the brightest girl, and her father's favourite. At the time in her mid-20s, Ehle had read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 12 and was the only actor to be present throughout the whole filming schedule. Sue Birtwistle particularly wanted Colin Firth, a relatively unknown British actor in his mid-30s at the time, to play the wealthy and aloof Mr Darcy. Birtwistle had worked with him on the mid-1980s comedy film Dutch Girls, but he repeatedly turned down her offer as he neither felt attracted to Austen's feminine perspective nor believed himself to be right for the role. Birtwistle's persistent coaxing and his deeper examination of the Darcy character finally convinced him to accept the role. Firth and Ehle began a romantic relationship during the filming of the series, which received media attention only after the couple's separation.
Benjamin Whitrow was cast to play Mr Bennet, Elizabeth's distinguished but financially imprudent and occasionally indulgent gentry father. BAFTA-nominated Alison Steadman was cast to play the parvenu Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth's mortifyingly affected social-climbing mother. Steadman was offered the role without auditions or screen tests. Elizabeth's four sisters, whose ages ranged between 15 and 22, were cast to look dissimilar from each other. Susannah Harker portrayed Elizabeth's beautiful older sister Jane, who desires to only see good in others. Lucy Briers, Polly Maberly, and Julia Sawalha played Elizabeth's younger sisters – the plain Mary, the good-natured but flighty and susceptible Kitty, and frivolous and headstrong Lydia. Being 10 years older than 15-year-old Lydia, Julia Sawalha, of Absolutely Fabulous fame, had enough acting experience to get the role without screen tests. Joanna David and Tim Wylton appeared as the Gardiners, Elizabeth's maternal aunt and uncle. David Bamber played the unctuous clergyman, Mr Collins, a cousin of Mr Bennet. Lucy Scott portrayed Elizabeth's best friend and Mr Collins's wife, Charlotte Lucas, and David Bark-Jones portrayed Lt Denny.
The producers found Crispin Bonham-Carter to have the best physical contrast to Firth's Darcy and gave him his first major television role as the good-natured and wealthy Mr Charles Bingley. Bonham-Carter had originally auditioned for the part of Mr George Wickham, a handsome militia lieutenant whose charm conceals his licentiousness and greed, but Adrian Lukis was cast instead. Anna Chancellor, of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, played Mr Bingley's sister Caroline Bingley. (Chancellor is also Jane Austen's six-times-great-niece) Mr Bingley's other sister and his brother-in-law were played by Lucy Robinson (Louisa Hurst) and Rupert Vansittart (Mr Hurst). Casting the role of Darcy's young sister, Georgiana, proved hard as the producers were looking for a young actress who appeared innocent, proud and yet shy, had class and could also play the piano. After auditioning over 70 actresses, Simon Langton suggested Emilia Fox, the real-life daughter of Joanna David (Mrs Gardiner), for the part. Barbara Leigh-Hunt was cast as Darcy's meddling aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, without auditions or screen tests.
## Production
### Conception and adaptation
Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice had already been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, including BBC television versions in 1938, 1952, 1958, 1967 and 1980. In the autumn of 1986, after watching a preview of Austen's Northanger Abbey, Sue Birtwistle and Andrew Davies agreed to adapt Pride and Prejudice, one of their favourite books, for television. Birtwistle in particular felt that a new adaptation on film would serve the drama better than the previous videotaped Pride and Prejudice television adaptations, which looked too "undernourished" and "unpoetic". The needs of TV scheduling forced Davies to change his original plan of a five-episode adaptation to six. Birtwistle and Davies then offered the first three scripts to ITV in late 1986 to build on the guaranteed BBC audience, but the recent TV adaptation led to a delay. When ITV announced its renewed interest in 1993, Michael Wearing of the BBC commissioned the final scripts with co-funding from the American A&E Network. Director Simon Langton and the art department joined pre-production in January and February 1994.
Although Birtwistle and Davies wished to remain true to the tone and spirit of the novel, they wanted to produce "a fresh, lively story about real people", not an "old studio-bound BBC drama that was shown in the Sunday teatime slot". Emphasising sex and money as the themes of the story, Davies shifted the focus from Elizabeth to Elizabeth and Darcy and foreshadowed Darcy's role in the narrative resolution. To portray the characters as real human beings, Davies added short backstage scenes such as the Bennet girls dressing up to advertise themselves in the marriage market. New scenes where men pursue their hobbies with their peers departed from Jane Austen's focus on women. The biggest technical difficulty proved to be adapting the long letters in the second half of the story. Davies employed techniques such as voice-overs, flashbacks, and having the characters read the letters to themselves and to each other. Davies added some dialogue to clarify events from the novel to a modern audience but left much of the novel's dialogue intact.
### Filming
Director of photography John Kenway used Super 16mm film, which has a slightly smaller widescreen aspect ratio than 16:9, but the series was originally broadcast 4:3 pan and scan.
The budget of about £1 million per episode (totalling US\$9.6 million) allowed 20 shooting weeks of five days to film six 55-minute episodes. Production aimed for 10.5-hour shooting days plus time for costume and make-up. Two weeks before filming began, about 70 of the cast and crew gathered for the script read-through, followed by rehearsals, lessons for dancing, horse-riding, fencing, and other skills that needed to be ready ahead of the actual filming. Filming took place between June 1994 and 1 November 1994 to reflect the changing seasons in the plot, followed by post-production until mid-May 1995. Scenes in the same place were grouped in the filming schedule.
Twenty-four locations, most of them owned by the National Trust, and eight studio sets were used for filming. Reflecting the wealth differences between the main characters, the filming location for Longbourn showed the comfortable family house of the Bennet family, whereas Darcy's Pemberley needed to look like the "most beautiful place", showing good taste and the history of the aristocracy.
The first location that the producers agreed on was Lacock in Wiltshire to represent the village of Meryton. Luckington Court nearby served as the interior and exterior of Longbourn. Lyme Hall in Cheshire was chosen as Pemberley but management problems forced production to film Pemberley's interiors at Sudbury Hall in Sudbury, Derbyshire.
The producers found Belton House in Grantham, Lincolnshire the best match for Rosings, Lady Catherine de Bourgh's estate, which needed to appear "over-the-top" to reflect her disagreeableness. Old Rectory at Teigh in Rutland was chosen as Hunsford parsonage, Mr Collins's home. Edgcote House in south-west Northamptonshire served as the interior and exterior of Bingley's Netherfield, along with Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire as the Netherfield ballroom. The London streets were filmed in Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick, Warwickshire. Wickham's and Georgiana's planned elopement in Ramsgate was filmed in the English seaside resort Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. Wickham's wedding takes place in St Paul's in Deptford, London.
### Costumes and make-up
Because Pride and Prejudice was a period drama, the design required more research than contemporary films. The personality and wealth of the characters were reflected in their costumes; the wealthy Bingley sisters were never shown in print dresses and they wore big feathers in their hair. As the BBC's stock of early 19th century costumes was limited, costume designer Dinah Collin designed most of the costumes, visiting museums for inspiration while trying to make the clothes attractive to a modern audience (although some costumes, mostly worn by extras, were re-used from earlier BBC productions or hired). Elizabeth's clothes had earthy tones and were fitted to allow easy and natural movements in line with the character's activity and liveliness. In contrast, Collin chose pale or creamy white colours for the clothes of the other Bennet girls to highlight their innocence and simplicity and richer colours for Bingley's sisters and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Colin Firth participated in the wardrobe decisions and wanted his character to wear darker colours, leaving the warmer colours for Bingley.
The producers imagined Darcy to be dark despite no such references in the novel and asked Firth to dye black his light-brown hair, eyebrows and lashes; they instructed all male actors to let their hair grow before filming and shave off their moustaches. Three brunette wigs were made to cover Ehle's short, blonde hair and one wig for Alison Steadman (Mrs. Bennet) because of her thick, heavy hair. Susannah Harker's (Jane) hair was slightly lightened to contrast with Elizabeth's and was arranged in a classic Greek style to highlight the character's beauty. Mary's plainness was achieved by painting spots on Lucy Briers's face; her hair was greased to suggest an unwashed appearance and was arranged to emphasise the actress's protruding ears. As Kitty and Lydia were too young and wild to have their hair done by the maids, the actresses' hair was not changed much. Makeup artist Caroline Noble had always considered Mr Collins a sweaty character with a moist upper lip; she also greased David Bamber's hair and gave him a low parting to suggest baldness.
### Music and choreography
Carl Davis had been writing scores for BBC adaptations of classic novels since the mid-1970s and approached Sue Birtwistle during pre-production. Aiming to communicate the wit and vitality of the novel and its theme of marriage and love in a small town in the early 19th century, he used contemporary classical music as inspiration, in particular a popular Beethoven septet of the period, as well as a theme strongly reminiscent of the finale of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. For control over the sound, the music was recorded in six hours by a group of up to 18 musicians and was then fed into tiny earpieces of the screen musicians, who mimed playing the instruments. The actresses whose characters played the piano, Lucy Briers (Mary) and Emilia Fox (Georgiana), were already accomplished pianists and were given the opportunity to practice weeks ahead of filming. Among the songs and movements that were played in the serial were Handel's "Air con Variazioni" from Suite No. 5 in E Major HWV 430 and "Slumber, Dear Maid" from his opera Xerxes (in 1813 these works by Handel would have been considered quite old-fashioned, adding to the perception that Mary's tastes are a bit out of fashion), Mozart's "Rondo alla turca", "Voi che sapete" and other music from his operas The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Beethoven's Andante favori, the second movement from Muzio Clementi's Sonatina No.4 and the traditional folk song "The Barley Mow". A soundtrack with Davis's themes was released on CD in 1995. The text of Mozart's "Voi, che sapete"(sung in an English translation) is a particularly meaningful choice: the original Italian is a love song, including the words "You, who know what love is, tell me, is that what I feel in my heart?" Lizzie sings this, and soon after, she graciously "saves" Georgiana from embarrassment at the mention of Wickham, and Darcy further realizes her good heart. This musical theme is soon echoed, after that episode, as Darcy walks along the hall; tell me, is love what I feel in my heart?
Many scenes in the book were set at dances or balls. Jane Gibson based her choreography on The Apted Book of Country Dances (1966) by W.S. Porter, which had several late-18th-century dances by Charles and Samuel Thompson such as "The Shrewsbury Lasses", "A Trip to Highgate" and "Mr. Beveridge's Maggot". Although these dances gave the story an impression of authenticity, they were anachronistic, being out of fashion by the time of the story. Some fifteen dances were choreographed and rehearsed before filming. Polly Maberly and Julia Sawalha, the dance-mad Kitty and Lydia, had three days to learn the dances. Three days were allotted for the filming of the ball at Netherfield, whose pace and style concentrated on elegance rather than the community enjoying themselves as at the dance at Meryton. The musicians and dancers had earpieces with music playing to allow dialogue recording. Many wide-shots of Elizabeth's and Darcy's dance at Netherfield later turned out to be unusable because of a hair in front of a lens so the editors resorted to close-up shots and material provided by a steadicam.
## Themes and style
The adaptation received praise for its faithfulness to the novel, which highlights the importance of environment and upbringing on peoples' development, although privilege is not necessarily advantageous. Describing the adaptation as "a witty mix of love stories and social conniving, cleverly wrapped in the ambitions and illusions of a provincial gentry", critics noted that Davies's focus on sex and money and Austen's wry, incisive humour and the "deft" characterisation, prevented the television adaptation from "descending into the realm of a nicely-costumed, brilliantly-photographed melodrama".
To avoid a narrator, the serial delegates the novel's first ironic sentence to Elizabeth in an early scene. The adaptation opens with a view of Darcy's and Bingley's horses as they race across a field toward the Netherfield estate, expressing vitality; Elizabeth watches them before breaking into a run. While the novel indicates Elizabeth's independence and energy in her three-mile trek to Netherfield, the adaptation of this scene also shows her rebelliousness and love of nature.
In what is "perhaps the most radical revision of Austen's text", the BBC drama departs from a late 18th-century vision of emotional restraint and portrays emotions in a "modern" interpretation of the story. The novel leaves Elizabeth and the reader uncertain of Darcy's emotions and the adaptation uses additional scenes to hint at Darcy's inability to physically contain or verbally express his emotional turmoil. On the other hand, whereas the climax of the novel describes Darcy expressing his ardent love for Elizabeth at length (though Austen leaves his actual words to the reader's imagination), the adaptation elides this moment and passes directly to the next lines of dialogue. Scholars argue that activities such as billiards, bathing, fencing and swimming (see the lake scene) offer Darcy to a female gaze; he is often presented in profile by a window or a fireplace when his friends discuss Elizabeth. Many passages relating to appearance or characters' viewpoints were lifted from the novel.
The novel shows irony with "unmistakable strains of cynicism, ... laughing at human nature without any real hope of changing it". Laughter in the story, which ranges from irresponsible laughter to laughter at people and laughter of amusement and relief, can also be linked to the sexual tensions among the different characters. Despite their appeal to modern audiences, laughter and wit were seen as vulgar and irreverent in Austen's time. The BBC drama made changes "with a view to exposing a character, or adding humour or irony to a situation". The adaptation comically exaggerates the characters of Mrs Bennet, Miss Bingley and Mr Collins, even showing Mrs Bennet on the verge of hysteria in many of the early scenes.
The serial expands on Austen's metaphorical use of landscapes, reinforcing beauty and authenticity. Elizabeth takes every opportunity to enjoy nature and to escape exposure to Mr Collins and Lady Catherine. The most symbolic use of nature in the novel is Elizabeth and the Gardiners' visit to Pemberley in Derbyshire, where Elizabeth becomes conscious of her love for Darcy. The story makes nature integral in the form of Old England. Elizabeth's appreciation of the beauties of Derbyshire elevates Darcy in her and her relatives' opinion. Darcy's gaze through the window works as a movie screen, projecting Elizabeth's actions for him and the viewer. His participation in the English landscape is his redemption.
## Reception
### Broadcast
Between 10 and 11 million people watched the original six-episode broadcast on BBC One on Sunday evenings from 24 September to 29 October 1995. The episodes were repeated each week on BBC Two. The final episode of Pride and Prejudice had a market share of about 40 per cent in Britain, by which time eight foreign countries had bought the rights to the serial. 3.7 million Americans watched the first broadcast on the A&E Network, which aired the serial in double episodes on three consecutive evenings beginning 14 January 1996.
### Home media and merchandise
The serial was released on VHS in the UK in the week running up to the original transmission of the final episode. The entire first run of 12,000 copies of the double-video set sold out within two hours of release. 70,000 copies had been sold by the end of the first week of sales, increasing to 200,000 sold units within the first year of the original airing. A BBC spokeswoman called the initial sale results "a huge phenomenon", as "it is unheard of for a video to sell even half as well, especially when viewers are able to tape the episodes at home for free". The CD soundtrack was also popular, and 20,000 copies of an official making-of book were sold within days. The serial was released on DVD four times, initially in 2000, as a digitally remastered "Tenth Anniversary Edition" in September 2005, and in April 2007 as part of a "Classic Drama DVD" magazine collection. A high-definition transfer was produced from the original negatives and released as a Blu-ray in October 2008. The HD version has not been broadcast on television; the BBC refuses to broadcast anything shot in 16 mm in HD. The same restored version was released on DVD in March 2009. The Blu-ray was released on 14 April 2009.
A 2010 Remastered Edition and a 2014 Keepsake Edition have the same footage, time lengths, and format. The 2014 Keepsake Edition has improved colors. The 2010 Remastered Edition begins with piracy warnings and then movie begins playing. The 2014 Keepsake Edition begins with five compulsory previews which can only be bypassed by skipping forward through each individual preview. The second disc of the Keepsake set also begins with the same five compulsory previews. The 2014 Keepsake Edition has 50" of new bonus materials plus the 1'45" of bonus materials that was presented in the 2010 Remastered Edition. These bonus materials include interviews with the producer, screenwriter, director, musical composer, and cast members. The cast interviews in both editions do not include interviews with the two main characters, Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy) and Jennifer Ehle (Elizabeth Bennet).
### Critical reception
The critical response to Pride and Prejudice was overwhelmingly positive. Gerard Gilbert of The Independent recommended the opening episode of the serial one day before the British premiere, saying the television adaptation is "probably as good as it [can get for a literary classic]. The casting in particular deserves a tilt at a BAFTA, Firth not being in the slightest bit soft and fluffy – and Jennifer Ehle showing the right brand of spirited intelligence as Elizabeth." He considered Benjamin Whitrow a "real scene-stealer with his Mr Bennet", but was undecided about Alison Steadman's portrayal of Mrs Bennet. Reviewing the first episode for the same newspaper on the day after transmission, Jim White praised Andrew Davies for "injecting into the proceedings a pace and energy which at last provides a visual setting to do justice to the wit of the book. With everyone slinging themselves about at high speed (the dances, in a first for the genre, actually involve a bit of sweat), it looks like people are doing something you would never have suspected they did in Austen's time: having fun."
A few days before the American premiere, Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times considered the adaptation "decidedly agreeable" despite its incidental liberties with Austen's novel, and named Elizabeth's parents and Mr Collins as the main source of humour. John O'Connor of The New York Times lauded the serial as a "splendid adaptation, with a remarkably faithful and sensitively nuanced script". He commented on Jennifer Ehle's ability to make Elizabeth "strikingly intelligent and authoritative without being overbearing", and noted how Firth "brilliantly captures Mr Darcy's snobbish pride while conveying, largely through intense stares, that he is falling in love despite himself". O'Connor praised Barbara Leigh-Hunt's portrayal of Lady Catherine as "a marvellously imperious witch" and considered her scenes with David Bamber (Mr Collins) "hilarious".
However, O'Connor remarked that American audiences might find the "languorous walks across meadows" and "ornately choreographed dances" of the British production too slow. In one of the most negative reviews, People Magazine considered the adaptation "a good deal more thorough than necessary" and "not the best Austen on the suddenly crowded market". Although the reviewer thought Firth "magnificent", he rebuked the casting of Jennifer Ehle as her oval face made her "look like Anaïs Nin in period clothes, and that ain't right". The official A&E Network magazine summarised a year later that "critics praised the lavish production, audiences adored it, and women everywhere swooned over Darcy. So much, in fact, that newspapers began to joke about 'Darcy fever.'" Commendation for the serial continued in the years following its original transmission.
### Awards and nominations
Pride and Prejudice received BAFTA Television Award nominations for "Best Drama Serial", "Best Costume Design", and "Best Make Up/Hair" in 1996. Jennifer Ehle was honoured with a BAFTA for "Best Actress", while Colin Firth and Benjamin Whitrow, nominated for "Best Actor", lost to Robbie Coltrane of Cracker. Firth won the 1996 Broadcasting Press Guild Award for "Best Actor", complemented by the same award for "Best Drama Series/Serial". The serial was recognised in the United States with an Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Costume Design for a Miniseries or a Special", and was Emmy-nominated for its achievements as an "Outstanding Miniseries" as well as for choreography and writing. Among other awards and nominations, Pride and Prejudice received a Peabody Award, a Television Critics Association Award, and a Golden Satellite Award nomination for outstanding achievements as a serial.
## Influence and legacy
As one of the BBC's and A&E's most popular presentations ever, the serial was "a cultural phenomenon, inspiring hundreds of newspaper articles and making the novel a commuter favourite". With the 1995 and 1996 films Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, the serial was part of a wave of Jane Austen enthusiasm which caused the membership of the Jane Austen Society of North America to jump fifty per cent in 1996 and to over 4,000 members in the autumn of 1997. Some newspapers like The Wall Street Journal explained this "Austen-mania" as a commercial move of the television and film industry, whereas others attributed Austen's popularity to escapism.
While Jennifer Ehle refused to capitalise on the success of the serial and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, the role of Mr. Darcy unexpectedly elevated Colin Firth to stardom. Although Firth did not mind being recognised as "a romantic idol as a Darcy with smouldering sex appeal" in a role that "officially turned him into a heart-throb", he expressed the wish to not be associated with Pride and Prejudice forever and was reluctant to accept similar roles. He took on diverse roles and co-starred in productions such as The English Patient (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001 – although this film is essentially an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which Firth effectively reprises the role of Darcy), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Love Actually (2003) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).
Pride and Prejudice continued to be honoured years later. A 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute ranked the serial at 99 in the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, which the BFI attributed to its "managing to combine faithfulness to the novel with a freshness that appealed across the generations". Radio Times included the serial in their list of "40 greatest TV programmes ever made" in 2003. It was also named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 20 best miniseries of all time. In 2007, the UK Film Council declared Pride and Prejudice one of the television dramas that have become "virtual brochures" for British history and society. Lyme Hall, Cheshire, which had served as the exterior of Pemberley, experienced a tripling in its visitor numbers after the series' broadcast and is still a popular travel destination.
### Lake scene
The adaptation is famous for a scene in its fourth episode where a fully dressed Darcy, having emerged from a swim in a lake at Pemberley, accidentally encounters Elizabeth. While many critics attributed the scene's appeal to Firth's sexual attractiveness, Andrew Davies thought that it unwittingly "rerobed, not disrobed, Austen". When Davies wrote the scene (it was not part of Austen's novel), he did not intend a sexual connection between Elizabeth and Darcy but to create "an amusing moment in which Darcy tries to maintain his dignity while improperly dressed and sopping wet". The BBC opposed Davies's plan to have Darcy naked but the producers discarded the alternative of using underpants as fatuous. According to Davies, Firth had "a bit of the usual tension about getting [his] kit off", the scene was filmed with Firth in linen shirt, breeches and boots. A stuntman, who appears in midair in a very brief shot, was hired because of the risk of infection with Weil's disease at Lyme Park. A short underwater segment was filmed separately with Firth in a tank at Ealing Studios in west London.
The Guardian declared the lake scene "one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history". The sequence also appeared in Channel 4's Top 100 TV Moments in 1999, between the controversial programme Death on the Rock and the Gulf War. The New York Times compared the scene to Marlon Brando shouting "Stella!" in his undershirt in A Streetcar Named Desire and Firth's projects began alluding to it – screenwriter-director Richard Curtis added in-joke moments of Firth's characters falling into the water to Love Actually and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Firth's character from the 2007 film St Trinian's emerges from a fountain in a soaking wet shirt before meeting up with an old love. The creators of the 2008 ITV production Lost in Austen emulated the lake scene in their Pride and Prejudice through their contemporary heroine who cajoles Darcy into recreating the moment.
Cheryl L. Nixon suggested in Jane Austen in Hollywood that Darcy's dive is a "revelation of his emotional capabilities", expressing a "Romantic bond with nature, a celebration of his home where he can 'strip down' to his essential self, a cleansing of social prejudices from his mind, or ... a rebirth of his love for Elizabeth". Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield wrote that the scene "tells us more about our current decade's obsession with physical perfection and acceptance of gratuitous nudity than it does about Austen's Darcy, but the image carves a new facet into the text".
### Bridget Jones
The fictional journalist Bridget Jones (in reality Helen Fielding of The Independent) wrote of her love of the serial in the paper's Bridget Jones's Diary column during the original British broadcast, mentioning her "simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth" and regarding the couple as her "chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship". Fielding loosely reworked the plot of Pride and Prejudice in her 1996 novel of the column, naming Bridget's uptight love interest "Mark Darcy" and describing him exactly like Colin Firth. Following a first meeting with Firth during his filming of Fever Pitch in 1996, Fielding asked Firth to collaborate in what would become a multi-page interview between Bridget Jones and Firth in her 1999 sequel novel, The Edge of Reason. Conducting the real interview with Firth in Rome, Fielding lapsed into Bridget Jones mode and obsessed over Darcy in his wet shirt for the fictional interview. Firth participated in the editing of what critics called "one of the funniest sequences in the diary's sequel". Both novels make various other references to the BBC serial.
Andrew Davies collaborated on the screenplays for the 2001 and 2004 Bridget Jones films, in which Crispin Bonham-Carter (Mr. Bingley) and Lucy Robinson (Mrs. Hurst) appeared in minor roles. The self-referential in-joke between the projects convinced Colin Firth to accept the role of Mark Darcy, as it gave him an opportunity to ridicule and liberate himself from his Pride and Prejudice character. Film critic James Berardinelli would later state that Firth "plays this part [of Mark Darcy] exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same". The producers never found a way to incorporate the Jones-Firth interview in the second film but shot a spoof interview with Firth as himself and Renée Zellweger staying in character as Bridget Jones after a day's wrap. The scene, which extended Bridget's Darcy obsession to cover Firth's lake scene in Love Actually, is available as a bonus feature on the DVD.
### Other adaptations
For almost a decade, the 1995 TV serial was considered "so dominant, so universally adored, [that] it has lingered in the public consciousness as a cinematic standard". Comparing six Pride and Prejudice adaptations in 2005, the Daily Mirror gave 9/10 to the 1995 serial ("what may be the ultimate adaptation") and the 2005 film adaptation, leaving the other adaptations such as the 1940 film behind with six or fewer points. The 2005 film was "obviously [not as] daring or revisionist" as the 1995 adaptation but the youth of the film's leads, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was mentioned favourably over the 1995 cast, as Jennifer Ehle had formerly been "a little too 'heavy' for the role". The president of the Jane Austen Society of North America noted in an otherwise positive review that the casting of the 2005 leads was "arguably a little more callow than Firth and Ehle" and that "Knightley is better looking than Lizzy should strictly be". The critical reception of Macfadyen's Darcy, whose casting had proven difficult because "Colin Firth cast a very long shadow", ranged from praise to pleasant surprise and dislike. Several critics did not observe any significant impact of Macfadyen's Darcy in the following years. Garth Pearce of The Sunday Times noted in 2007 that "Colin Firth will forever be remembered as the perfect Mr. Darcy", and Gene Seymour stated in a 2008 Newsday article that Firth was "'universally acknowledged' as the definitive Mr. Darcy".
|
2,706,807 |
Archie Jackson
| 1,165,736,633 |
Australian cricketer
|
[
"1909 births",
"1933 deaths",
"20th-century deaths from tuberculosis",
"Australia Test cricketers",
"Australian Methodists",
"Australian cricketers",
"Cricketers from Sydney",
"Cricketers who made a century on Test debut",
"Infectious disease deaths in Queensland",
"New South Wales cricketers",
"Scottish emigrants to Australia",
"Tuberculosis deaths in Australia"
] |
Archibald Jackson (5 September 1909 – 16 February 1933), occasionally known as Archibald Alexander Jackson, was an Australian international cricketer who played eight Test matches as a specialist batsman between 1929 and 1931. A teenage prodigy, he played first grade cricket at only 15 years of age and was selected for New South Wales at 17. In 1929, aged 19, Jackson made his Test debut against England, scoring 164 runs in the first innings to become the youngest player to score a Test century.
Renowned for his elegant batting style, he played in a manner similar to the great Australian batsmen Victor Trumper, and Alan Kippax, Jackson's friend and mentor. His Test and first-class career coincided with the early playing years of Don Bradman, with whom he was often compared. Before the two departed for England as part of the 1930 Australian team, some observers considered Jackson the better batsman, capable of opening the batting or coming in down the order. Jackson's career was dogged by poor health; illness and his unfamiliarity with local conditions hampered his tour of England, only playing two of the five Test matches. Later in the year, in the series against the West Indies, Jackson was successful in the first Test in Adelaide, scoring 70 not out before a poor run of form led to his omission from the fifth Test.
Early in the 1931–32 season, Jackson coughed blood and collapsed before the start of play in a Sheffield Shield match against Queensland. Subsequently, admitted to a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Jackson was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In an attempt to improve his health and to be closer to his girlfriend, Jackson moved to Brisbane. Ignoring medical advice, Jackson returned to cricket with a local team; however, his health continued to deteriorate and he died at the age of just 23. It is speculated that, had he lived, he may have rivalled Don Bradman as a batsman.
## Early life and career
### Childhood
Jackson, the first son and third child of Alexander and Margaret Jackson, was born in 1909 at Rutherglen, a small town near Glasgow in Scotland. His father had spent part of his childhood in Australia and returned with his family to settle in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, in 1913.
Raised as a Methodist, Jackson was a lifelong teetotaller and non-smoker. He attended Birchgrove Public and Rozelle Junior Technical schools and represented New South Wales Schoolboys at football and cricket. Football talent ran in the family: his uncles Andrew and Jimmy and cousins Archie, Andy and James were professional footballers in Scotland and England, the latter captaining Liverpool.
Growing up near the home ground of Balmain District Cricket Club, Jackson joined the club in his mid-teens where he quickly came to the attention of the captain, Test bowler Arthur Mailey. The Labor politician "Doc" Evatt, a noted benefactor of young cricketers, helped Jackson's career by purchasing suitable cricket equipment for him. At the age of 15 years and one month, he made his first grade début for Balmain; cricket historian David Frith believes that Jackson is the youngest cricketer to play at this level.
Jackson left school at this time and worked for a warehouse firm called Jackson & McDonald (unrelated) until the demands of cricket compelled him to resign. The Test batsman Alan Kippax employed Jackson in his sporting goods store and became his mentor. In 1925–26, his second season with Balmain, Jackson led the grade cricket competition's batting averages and won selection for the New South Wales Second XI to play Victoria.
### Selection for New South Wales
Jackson began the 1926–27 season with scores of 111 against St George, 198 against Western Suburbs and 106 against Mosman. As a result, he made his first-class début for New South Wales (NSW) against Queensland at Brisbane and scored 86 in the second innings. He posted a century in the return match against the Queenslanders at the SCG. On NSW's tour of the southern states, Jackson made a century in a non first-class fixture against Northern Tasmania and then hit 104 not out against South Australia. These performances prompted the former Australian captain Clem Hill to describe Jackson as "... the biggest find since Ponsford."
No Test matches were scheduled for 1927–28, although the New Zealand team briefly toured Australia on their return journey from playing in England. Jackson scored 104 against the visiting side and shared a century partnership with Kippax, scored in just over 30 minutes. After a brief run of low scores, a boil on Jackson's knee forced his withdrawal from the match against South Australia at Adelaide. His replacement was another rising teenage batsman, Donald Bradman, who made his first-class début in the match. On his return to the team, Jackson was promoted to open the batting and scored a century in both innings in the return match against South Australia. At the end of the season, he toured New Zealand with an Australian second XI, while Bradman missed out. The side consisted of a few established Test players mixed with promising youngsters. Australia were unbeaten on the tour and Jackson scored 198 runs in four matches at an average of 49.50.
## Test cricket
### Test selection
During the 1928–29 season, a strong England team captained by Percy Chapman toured Australia for a five-Test Ashes series. Seeking selection in the Australian Test side, Jackson failed twice in a match designated as a Test trial in Melbourne. In the next match, against the English for New South Wales, he scored 4 and 40 while his teammates Bradman and Kippax both made centuries. Both Bradman and Kippax were selected for the First Test at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground, Jackson missed out. Keeping his name in front of the selectors, he scored 162 and 90 against South Australia. After Australia lost the first three Tests and the Ashes, the selectors gave Jackson his opportunity, selecting him for his Test début in the fourth Test at the Adelaide Oval. Arthur Mailey, his club captain and the only other Test player from Balmain CC to that time, ran from his office at the Sydney Sun to Kippax's sports store in Martin Place to tell Jackson the good news.
England batted first and made 334. In reply, Jackson opened the batting with Bill Woodfull. Before the Test, the Australian skipper, Jack Ryder, approached Kippax for his opinion about such a young player as Jackson being given the responsibility of opening the batting. Kippax replied, "I am sure he expects to open." After Australia lost three wickets for 19 runs, Ryder joined Jackson at the wicket. Playing in an unhurried manner, Jackson looked confident against the pace of Harold Larwood and punished Maurice Tate when his bowling strayed down the leg side. In 105 minutes, Jackson and Ryder added 100 runs. Jackson reached his half century, followed by Ryder and at stumps on the second day, Australia's total was 3/131.
The exertion had left Jackson exhausted. His teammate "Stork" Hendry said that Jackson was limp when he returned to the dressing room. "We had to mop him with cold towels", he said. Early the next day, Ryder was dismissed and Jackson was joined by Bradman. The two young batsmen shared a long partnership, with Jackson on 97 at the end of the session. As they returned to the wicket after the interval, Bradman advised his younger colleague to play carefully to secure his century. Jackson made no reply, but responded by hitting the first ball from Larwood to the point boundary for four runs, the ball rebounding back on to the field in front of a cheering crowd in the Members' Stand. After this, he cut loose, with deft glances from the faster balls and cut shots reminiscent of Charlie Macartney. Jackson was eventually dismissed for 164, making him the youngest Australian batsman to score a Test century, a record beaten by Neil Harvey in 1948. It is still the second highest score on Test début by an Australian, only one run fewer than Charles Bannerman's 165 not out in the first-ever Test in 1877. This innings saw Jackson hailed as a national hero and he was showered with tributes including a public meeting called in his honour by the Mayor of Balmain.
In 1929–30, ill-health restricted Jackson to just five first-class matches and five innings for Balmain. Despite his health, Jackson had a successful season, and scored 168 not out against Arthur Gilligan's English team, which toured Australia briefly en route to New Zealand. He was seen as an automatic selection for the 1930 Ashes tour of England. He confirmed his selection with 182 in a Test trial, an innings regarded by many as the best he had ever played. Another scare with illness saw him hospitalised in Adelaide after the Christmas match against South Australia, missing the next two state matches. His health problems continued after an operation to remove his tonsils; a procedure that was arranged by the Australian Board of Control despite Jackson never having previously suffered any problems with his tonsils. Bill Ponsford had suffered from tonsillitis during the previous tour and the Board were anxious to avoid similar occurrences. Complications resulting from the operation saw Jackson lose a stone (6.4 kilograms) in weight.
### Ashes tour of England
Jackson was included in the Australian squad to tour England in 1930. The bonus for Australia from England's 1928–29 visit was the emergence of Jackson and Don Bradman and now much was expected of them in a rebuilt Australian squad that retained only four players from the 1926 tour of England. But Jackson was frequently ill and his unfamiliarity with English pitches resulted in patchy form. Even so, he was described at the time by former England player Cecil Parkin as, "a better bat than Bradman". He was left out of the team for the First Test at Trent Bridge, the only defeat suffered by the Australians all tour. After the Second Test at Lord's, Jackson recovered some form. Ponsford and Fairfax both fell ill and as a result Jackson was included in the team for the Third Test at Leeds. He scored one run in his only innings while Bradman made a then-record Test score of 334. Jackson was omitted for the Fourth Test, but a century against Somerset helped him to force his way back into the side for the Fifth and deciding Test at The Oval.
In this match Jackson, batting down the order, played a brave innings on a dangerous wicket facing hostile bowling from Larwood. He took repeated blows on the body while scoring a valuable 73 runs. He shared a stand of 243 with Bradman, who scored 232, and Australia won the Test by an innings and 39 runs to regain The Ashes. Overall, Jackson's tour was modest, scoring 1,097 runs at an average of 34.28 with only one hundred, made against Somerset. Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, in its report on the 1930 Australians, described Jackson as the "... great disappointment of the team ... with [his] well-deserved reputation for grace of style ... at no time did people in England see the real Jackson."
On return to Australia for the 1930–31 season, Jackson was selected for the first four Tests against the West Indies. After scoring 70 not out in the First Test in Adelaide, his form tapered away and managed only 124 runs at an average of 31.00 for the first four Tests, resulting in his omission for the Fifth and final Test in Sydney. In Jackson's absence, the West Indies defeated Australia for the first time in a Test. The West Indies captain Jackie Grant, in a daring move, declared his team's innings closed twice in order to catch the home team on a "sticky wicket". Jackson, in his capacity as twelfth man, came in as a runner for an injured batsman on the final afternoon, making what was to be his final appearance in first-class cricket.
It was during this Australian season, during a match in Brisbane, that Jackson was introduced to Phyllis Thomas, a trained ballet dancer, who later became his fiancée. In March 1931, Jackson felt his health had recovered sufficiently to join an exhibition tour of Far North Queensland, led by Alan Kippax. He found the tour exhausting, with arduous travel and damp weather, but played well enough to top the aggregate with over 1,100 runs at an average of 93.00. In a letter to his childhood friend and New South Wales teammate, Bill Hunt, he wrote, "Our tour of North Queensland has now concluded and thank goodness! ... I would never make this trip again unless I was guaranteed £100, and that's not enough!"
## Illness and death
Jackson began the 1931–32 season in form and seemingly in good health, scoring 183 for Balmain in grade cricket against Gordon. He was selected for the NSW team to play Queensland in Brisbane. Before the match commenced, Jackson collapsed after coughing up blood and was rushed to hospital. Jackson believed he was suffering from influenza and he was discharged after five days, when he returned to Sydney. Within a week of his return, the Board of Control arranged for Jackson to be admitted to a sanatorium at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains. After a few months at the sanatorium, Jackson moved into a cottage at nearby Leura to be cared for by his sister.
### Tuberculosis
Seeking treatment for psoriasis, Jackson travelled to Adelaide in July 1932. During his time there, he felt well enough to have an occasional training session in the nets. At the same time, a confidential report was sent to the New South Wales Cricket Association confirming that Jackson had, "... pneumonary tuberculosis with fairly extensive involvement of the lungs." He returned to Leura and made plans to move to Brisbane, in the belief that the warmer climate would aid his recovery and to be closer to Phyllis.
In Brisbane, Jackson offered his services to grade club Northern Suburbs, against the advice of his doctors. Despite suffering from a chronic shortness of breath, he averaged 159.66 over seven innings and drew record crowds to the club's matches. The media and public were keen to see him selected for the early tour matches against the touring English team; however, medical advice prevented his inclusion. Jackson took work as a sales assistant at a sports depot and wrote a column for the Brisbane Mail. He wrote extensively on the Bodyline tactics employed by the English team during the summer. Jackson insisted that Bodyline was legitimate, held no threat to the game, and that it could be combatted—a minority view in Australia at that time.
### Death
In early February 1933, Jackson collapsed after playing cricket and was admitted to hospital. Aware of the serious nature of his illness and the possibility of his death, Jackson and Phyllis announced their engagement. As the Brisbane Test between Australia and England began, Jackson suffered a severe pulmonary hemorrhage. His parents made their way to Brisbane to see him and many members of the English and Australian teams visited him in hospital during his last days. On 16 February 1933, Jackson became the youngest Test cricketer to die until Manjural Rana in 2007.
Jackson's body was transported back to Sydney by train, which also carried the Australia and England teams for the next Test. Thousands of mourners lined the streets of Sydney for his funeral and the pallbearers were Woodfull, Ponsford, McCabe, Bert Oldfield, Vic Richardson and Bradman. He was buried at the Field of Mars cemetery and a public subscription was raised to install a headstone on his gravesite. The headstone, reading simply He played the game, was unveiled by the Premier of New South Wales Bertram Stevens.
## Style
Jackson was seen as a stylish and elegant batsman, with a genius for timing and placement. His footwork was light and his supple wrists allowed him to steer the ball square and late. He held the bat high on the handle and his cover drive was executed with balletic grace. He was seen as possessing the comely movement and keenness of eye of the great batsman of cricket's Golden Age, Victor Trumper. Bradman described Jackson as "tall and slim, rather lethargic and graceful in his movements". Jackson professed a love of applying the maximum velocity to the ball with a minimum of effort. His one identifiable fault was an occasional failing outside off-stump, being prone to unnecessarily dab at away-swingers and being caught in the slips cordon.
His contemporaries noted his classical style. The journalist A.R.B. Palmer described his cover drive as "... perfectly balanced and true ... the bat seems a whip in his hands." Clem Hill, the former Australian captain, noted Jackson's sparkling footwork, watching close enough to notice that his toes turned in as he walked. Like Kippax, whose style was uncannily similar, Jackson wore his shirt-sleeves almost down to his wrists. This was not in imitation but to conceal the blemishes on his arms caused by psoriasis. Kippax was not seen by some as the best person to imitate, with Charles Kelleway critical of Jackson's flourishes, wishing he would not be so, "... cramped in copying other batsman's styles".
Inevitably, he was compared to his New South Wales and Australian teammate, Bradman. In contrast to Jackson, Bradman made not even a pretence of being a stylist. A writer, comparing the two after Jackson's Test début, stated that Bradman had "forced his way to the top by sheer natural ability, a straight bat, cool cheerful temperament, determination and enterprise", but Jackson was "the finished batsman, the batsman who knows one stroke for each ball ... [and] executes that stroke with an artistry that has no parallel to this day". Before the 1930 tour of England, experts such as Frank Woolley, Percy Fender and Maurice Tate rated Jackson as more likely to succeed in English conditions; Bradman was seen as too unorthodox or even cross-batted for softer English wickets.
## See also
- List of Test cricketers born in non-Test playing nations
- List of New South Wales representative cricketers
|
1,018,087 |
California State Route 52
| 1,171,610,354 |
Highway in California
|
[
"Roads in San Diego County, California",
"Southern California freeways",
"State Scenic Highway System (California)",
"State highways in California",
"Transportation in San Diego"
] |
State Route 52 (SR 52) is a state highway in San Diego County, California, that extends from La Jolla Parkway at Interstate 5 (I-5) in La Jolla, San Diego, to SR 67 in Santee. It is a freeway for its entire length and serves as a major east–west route through the northern part of the city of San Diego. The road connects the major north–south freeways of the county, including I-5, I-805, SR 163, I-15, SR 125, and SR 67. SR 52 passes north of the Rose Canyon Fault before traversing Marine Corps Air Station Miramar (MCAS Miramar). East of Santo Road and west of SR 125, the highway goes through Mission Trails Regional Park, a large open preserve. SR 52 is also known as the Soledad Freeway and the San Clemente Canyon Freeway.
Plans for a route between La Jolla and Santee date from 1959, and SR 52 was officially designated in the 1964 state highway renumbering. Construction began in 1966 at the I-5 interchange with Ardath Road leading to La Jolla. It continued with the building of San Clemente Canyon Road, which was later widened to become SR 52. The freeway was completed east to I-805 in 1970, and was built in two stages from there to Santo Road east of I-15; the last phase was completed in 1988.
The freeway east of Santo Road encountered delays from environmentalists over the endangered least Bell's vireo, a songbird which faced habitat destruction, as well as those concerned with the destruction of homes and businesses for the freeway right-of-way. The extension to Mission Gorge Road opened in 1993, and SR 52 was completed to SR 125 in 1998. Funding issues delayed the completion of the entire route until 2011, more than fifty years after construction began; until then, the city of Santee faced traffic snarls. A widening project was completed in 2007 between Santo Road and Mast Boulevard; further expansion has been put on hold due to state budget concerns.
## Route description
SR 52 begins just west of I-5 at the eastern end of La Jolla Parkway. Before entering San Clemente Canyon, part of Marian Bear Natural Park, the road becomes a freeway as it intersects I-5. The freeway runs north of the Rose Canyon Fault, composed of Late Cretaceous rock estimated to be 90 million years old, and Mount Soledad. Following exits with Clairemont Mesa Boulevard / Regents Road and Genesee Avenue, SR 52 intersects I-805 before exiting the canyon and traveling along the southern edge of the MCAS Miramar military base.
From I-805 to SR 163, the highway goes through an area with visible Pliocene sedimentary rocks estimated to be 10 million years old. After passing the Miramar Recycling Center and an interchange with Convoy Street, SR 52 intersects SR 163, a freeway heading towards downtown San Diego. SR 52 intersects Kearny Villa Road before an interchange with I-15. A collector-distributor road serves these three interchanges.
After this interchange, the freeway leaves the edge of the military base and enters the San Diego neighborhood of Tierrasanta, where there is a junction with Santo Road, before traversing Mission Trails Regional Park, an open space preserve, for a few miles. The freeway ascends to Mission Trails Pass, north of the 1,230-foot (370 m) summit of Fortuna Mountain. The mountain is part of the Peninsular Range; the highway cuts through Eocene rocks estimated to be 50 million years old and marine fossils. The road on the eastern side of the mountain is carved out of "igneous granitic rocks" that are thought to be 150 million years old, an unusual formation compared to the Eocene layer.
A dedicated two-way bicycle path exists on the northern side of the roadway between Santo Road and Mast Boulevard, with access possible from both termini. East of the Mast Boulevard interchange, SR 52 crosses and begins to parallel the San Diego River. The freeway enters the city of Santee, where SR 52 was built alongside Mission Gorge Road. SR 52 intersects the northern end of SR 125, where SR 52 traffic can exit south onto SR 125. The freeway continues east through Santee, with interchanges at Fanita Drive, Cuyamaca Street, and Magnolia Avenue, before it comes to an end at SR 67.
SR 52 is part of the California Freeway and Expressway System and is eligible for the State Scenic Highway System. In 2016, Caltrans officially designated the segment adjacent to Mission Trails Regional Park between Santo Road and Mast Boulevard as a scenic highway. SR 52 is also part of the National Highway System, a network of highways that are considered essential to the country's economy, defense, and mobility by the Federal Highway Administration. The entire route is known as both the Soledad Freeway and the San Clemente Canyon Freeway. In 2013, SR 52 had an annual average daily traffic (AADT) of 69,000 at the eastern terminus with SR 67, and 103,000 between Convoy Street and SR 163, the lowest and the highest AADT for the highway, respectively.
## History
In 1959, Legislative Route 279 was designated as a highway from La Jolla to Santee and incorporated into the California Freeway and Expressway System. In the 1964 state highway renumbering, this became SR 52. However, SR 52 took more than fifty years to be constructed, due to delays in the planning and construction phases.
### I-5 to I-805
A public hearing on Legislative Route 279 and on the Ardath Road connection to La Jolla was held on November 15, 1961. At the hearing, there were concerns expressed regarding destruction of vegetation. City and state officials indicated that the Soledad Freeway would be constructed in the northern part of the canyon to minimize environmental damage. On November 9, 1966, the I-5 interchange with Ardath Road opened at the western end of what would become SR 52. The original goal was to connect the interchange with San Clemente Canyon Road, which served as a predecessor to SR 52; plans were to widen the road to four lanes and designate it as SR 52. The connecting ramps were not opened that day because the aluminum guard rails had not been delivered on time. Estimates indicated that each resident of La Jolla would save 80 hours per year by using Ardath Road. A ramp from southbound I-5 to westbound Ardath Road was never completed because of a hairpin turn that would be necessary due to the towering cliff on the west side of I-5 that Ardath Road ascends as it continues to La Jolla. On November 18, San Clemente Canyon Road was connected to I-5 when the aluminum guard rails arrived and were subsequently installed. San Clemente Canyon Road was not fully opened until 1967. That year, citizens expressed opposition to the construction of the Soledad Freeway because some wanted the land to be used for a park, and did not view the freeway as "necessary."
Formal bids began in February 1969 for the first section of SR 52 between I-5 and I-805. The state ordered the construction of this section on April 28, 1969. On Thursday, May 28, 1970, the Soledad Freeway opened, connecting Regents Road and Genesee Avenue with I-5; however, it did not connect to the unopened I-805. The road was built by Kasler, Ball and Yeager for \$3.9 million (about \$ in dollars). The construction firm deposited dirt into "an unnamed finger canyon" against the conditions of the city permit, and the city ordered the firm to remove it. The section of I-805 from SR 52 to El Cajon Boulevard was scheduled to be dedicated on March 20, 1972.
Ardath Road was renamed La Jolla Parkway on October 15, 2002, for two reasons: a nearby residential street was also named Ardath Road, and there was a desire to draw attention to this primary route to downtown La Jolla. This required the city of San Diego to pay \$20,000 (about \$ in dollars) to replace the signs on SR 52.
### I-805 to Santo Road
The second phase of SR 52 from I-805 to 1.1 miles (1.8 km) past U.S. Route 395 (which became I-15 in 1974) was projected to cost \$29.4 million (about \$ in dollars). The new freeway was to provide access to Tierrasanta and reduce the traffic on I-8. The U.S. Navy was consulted in the planning process due to the road's proposed routing through MCAS Miramar that would provide a delineation against further urban development. There were no concerns expressed at the public hearing on November 17, 1970; however, construction did not begin for more than ten years, as California governor Jerry Brown stalled the construction of SR 52 from Santo Road to SR 67. In 1977, the county supervisor, a San Diego City councilman, and the mayors of La Mesa and National City wrote a letter to Brown to ask for the construction of this portion of SR 125 and other freeways, due to concerns about the types of congestion seen in Los Angeles coming to San Diego due to the incomplete freeway system. San Diego City Councilman Tom Gade wrote a telegram to Caltrans Director Adriana Gianturco about the possible deletions; in response, Gianturco clarified that the plans were only being reconsidered and had not been removed, and a CHC member criticized the tone of the original telegram, calling it "intemperate". In 1984, Leo Trombatore, the Caltrans Director under California governor George Deukmejian, requested to the California Transportation Commission (CTC) that "formal studies toward this end be initiated immediately. Route 52 has a high statewide priority." The CTC followed the director's wishes, approving the studies.
The first part of this phase, from I-805 to Convoy Street, began construction in December 1986. It was dedicated at a community celebration on July 11, 1987, and was scheduled to open to traffic a few weeks later. The first callboxes in San Diego County were installed on SR 52 near Convoy Street on June 20, 1988. On June 30, 1988, SR 52 from Convoy Street to Santo Road opened to traffic. The I-15 interchange was built with state funds from the CTC.
In 2000, Hazard Construction Company added a single westbound lane on SR 52 from SR 163 to I-805, a distance of 2.5 miles (4.0 km), at a cost of \$1.7 million (about \$ in dollars). In 2006, the Metropolitan Transit System, in cooperation with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), Caltrans, and the California Highway Patrol, began a pilot program to run transit buses along the shoulders of SR 52 between Kearny Villa Road and I-805. During rush hour, buses were able to use these shoulders to bypass slow traffic in the main lanes. The trial was considered successful as more than 99 percent of trips arrived on time, customer feedback was favorable and no safety concerns were encountered. On May 9, 2007, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a story which raised reader concerns about a dangerous dip in the freeway. The dip had developed in a section of the highway constructed on top of the Miramar Landfill, and had been caused by trash settling; it was repaired by the next day.
### Planning for eastern portion
The planning process for the remainder of SR 52 began as early as 1970, when the initial plan was to route the freeway through the city of Santee along Mission Gorge Road and the San Diego River. Planning was delayed until 1984, along with the construction of the I-805 to Santo Road segment. The City of Santee opposed the original plans, hoping to route the freeway on Prospect Avenue or north of the San Diego River. By April 1985, a second route along Prospect Avenue, proposed by Caltrans, earned the support of the City Council; however, the required demolition of many small businesses led many of those affected to start a petition against this route. On the other hand, there were objections about the "river route" costing approximately \$15 million more (about \$ in dollars) and cutting through a future "Town Center development". The Lakeside Chamber of Commerce preferred the route along the San Diego River, citing the proximity to that city. The environmental impact report was found to be deficient by the Federal Highway Administration in late 1986.
In January 1987, the Santee City Council voted to commence a study of a more northern route, even though local residents and workers objected that this would postpone construction. In March, the study, done by BSI Inc., supported the Caltrans decision to abandon plans for the northern path due to the increased cost from the "mountainous, undeveloped" terrain. The council voted to support a southern alignment through the town, with both the Prospect Avenue and San Diego River alternatives still viable. In the same month, the mayor of La Mesa, Fred Nagel, started a petition drive supporting the extension of the freeway due to the recurring traffic on I-8. The Caltrans environmental impact report indicated that the Prospect Avenue route would cost \$89 million (about \$ in dollars), compared to the river route's \$121 million (about \$ in dollars). The city council of El Cajon publicly supported the Prospect Avenue routing; however, some employees of the City of Santee, including some city planners and engineers, were concerned that portions of the report were "outdated." The petitions were given to the CTC in May, when San Diego officials made several arguments in support of the construction.
In June 1987, the CTC staff initially recommended against allocating money for the SR 52 segment; however, SANDAG agreed to fund the project with \$1 million (about \$ in dollars). Residents of Santee opposed the possible routes through the city at a public forum on June 10 because of the necessary destruction of homes to build on those routes. In late June, Caltrans considered making small modifications to the Prospect Avenue alignment to destroy fewer homes, including those in mobile home parks. On June 25, 1987, the CTC voted to support the SR 52 extension, with the requirement that \$4.8 million (about \$ in dollars) come from local funding sources. Finally, on September 23, the City of Santee recommended the Prospect Avenue Route to the CTC.
In July 1987, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expressed concerns that construction near the San Diego River crossing might result in the destruction of the endangered least Bell's vireo habitat. Two of the four alternative routes considered by Caltrans passed through the Carlton Hills golf course, which the public opposed. In April 1988, the Sierra Club denounced the Prospect Avenue route; federal negotiators recommended shifting the route from Hollins Lake towards the golf course. Environmental concerns raised in June 1988 related to the least Bell's vireo included decrease of insects, a darker environment after overpasses are constructed, and the fragmenting of habitat. Nevertheless, Caltrans still desired the Prospect Avenue route over concerns of a more expensive and less traveled northern route. Upset because of the delays, the Santee City Council wrote to U.S. senators Pete Wilson and Alan Cranston, asking for their assistance. Councilman Jim Bartell alleged that the issue would affect the city council elections.
In March 1989, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to the project, on the conditions of altering the route to cross the San Diego River and pass east of the center of the town, and constructing 44 acres of additional habitat as mitigation. SANDAG voted against building a full bicycle lane along the route in July 1989, citing the high costs. Finally, on July 27, the final routing of SR 52 was determined, running along Prospect Avenue. In May 1990, Santee councilman Roy Woodward was censured for having a conflict of interest in voting to support the proposals for the freeway because he "held interests" in three properties that would benefit from the freeway, thus violating the Political Reform Act as these interests exceeded \$10,000. One of the holdings was near Cuyamaca Street, the location of an offramp on a path that he voted to support. He was fined \$2,000 (about \$ in dollars) for each property, for a total of \$6,000 (about \$ in dollars).
### Santo Road to Mission Gorge Road
In April 1990, the Santee City Council agreed to begin purchasing land, over the environmental concerns of Councilman Jim Bartell. Construction finally began on the four-lane section of SR 52 between Santo Road and Mission Gorge Road on July 19, 1991. The work was projected to cost \$52 million (about \$ in dollars). For environmental mitigation, a new 45-acre (0.070 sq mi) songbird habitat was constructed that cost \$8.3 million (about \$ in dollars). Fossils of "small foraging mammals" were discovered during construction in late 1991. The construction company, HDB Construction, was required to keep noise below 61 decibels to protect the birds. The project was funded primarily with revenue from a voter-approved sales tax in 1987. The opening of this portion was scheduled for December 16, 1993. This new segment ended just southeast of the Mast Boulevard interchange, after the San Diego River overpass.
The opening of this stretch of SR 52 had many effects on the transportation of the East County region. Traffic decreased significantly on I-8 in early 1994, with an estimated 30,000 commuters switching from I-8 to SR 52. Fewer cars traveled on the western part of Mission Gorge Road, leading to a decrease in revenue for businesses located along that road. On Mast Boulevard and Mission Gorge Road in Santee, much more traffic was present, leading to residents complaining to the city. In 1998, the city began to widen Mission Gorge Road between Carlton Hills Drive and Fanita Road to handle the extra traffic from the incomplete SR 52.
The year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the military erected a fence to block a deer tunnel underneath the freeway that connected the base and Mission Trails Regional Park, since the tunnel could be used to gain unauthorized access to the base. In 2006, construction began to add a third lane on westbound SR 52 between Mast Boulevard and Santo Road. The expansion cost \$3.4 million (about \$ in dollars) and was funded by the state and the county TransNet sales tax. The new lane opened on May 8, 2007; however, the widening generated complaints from angry commuters facing a "bottleneck" at Santo Road. Because the additional lane was constructed in portions, the opening of the third lane between Santo Road and the existing third lane closer to I-15 was delayed; however, construction for the missing 2,100 feet (640 m) was approved in April 2007. The extension opened on July 20, 2007.
### Mission Gorge Road to SR 67
Construction on the next portion of SR 52, from Mission Gorge Road to SR 125, was scheduled to begin in late 1995, at a total cost of \$60 million (about \$ in dollars) for the entire project. Property acquisition began in 1994, with many property owners along the south side of Mission Gorge Road being forced to move out of the way of the freeway and subsequent road construction, as Mission Gorge Road was moved south to accommodate the new freeway. About \$40 million (\$ in dollars) was spent on the property acquisition. After weather-related construction delays due to the El Niño season of the winter of 1997–1998, the extension of SR 52 between Mission Gorge Road and SR 125 was dedicated on May 9, 1998. The eastbound lanes were scheduled to be opened a few days later, and the westbound lanes were to be opened in mid-July of that year. L.R. Hubbard Construction Company built the portion for \$17 million (about \$ in dollars).
The city of Santee faced problems in the construction of the freeway from SR 125 to SR 67. As early as 1995, it was clear that the environmental impact report was delayed and that there would be funding difficulties. SANDAG allocated \$23 million dollars (about \$ in dollars) in 1999 to purchase properties needed for the right-of-way. In 2001, SANDAG gave \$138 million (about \$ in dollars) to the expansion of SR 52 to SR 67, which was necessary for extending the freeway past Cuyamaca Street. But by 2003, the transportation committee of SANDAG voted to delay the project due to decreased state funding. The city of Santee was required to make improvements to Forester Creek to accommodate potential flooding, which cost \$30 million (about \$ in dollars); the work began in May 2006. Funding issues were finally resolved in 2006 with voter-approved statewide transportation bonds. In 2007, highway construction costs increased; that year, the SANDAG transportation committee voted to fund the construction, taking money from a planned reversible lanes project on SR 52.
"Heavy construction" of SR 52 from SR 125 eastward to SR 67 began in February 2008. More than 360 properties were acquired to build the freeway; at least 60 were mobile homes. This portion was divided into three construction projects: from SR 125 to Cuyamaca Street, from there to Magnolia Avenue, and the interchange with SR 67, which began construction in mid-June 2008. The middle project had to be shut down briefly in February 2009 due to funding issues. Completion was scheduled for 2010, but was postponed to early 2011 due to weather-related delays. This new portion was opened to traffic on March 29, 2011. The cost of this project was \$525 million, funded with state and federal funds as well as TransNet revenue. The opening was predicted to reduce traffic on I-8 as well as Mission Gorge Road and other Santee thoroughfares. The official "ribbon cutting" ceremony took place on March 19, 2011 on the freeway at the Cuyamaca Street interchange.
Reactions to the extension between SR 125 and SR 67 were mixed. There were reports of faster transportation through the East County area, yet commuters noted a rush hour backup at SR 125 headed westbound because there were only two lanes traveling west through the interchange. Traffic along Mission Gorge Road was reported to have decreased by 20 percent.
## Future
There are plans to add one lane in each direction, as well as two reversible lanes, from I-15 to SR 125. These plans were put on hold in 2008 due to a budget shortfall. Completion is scheduled to take place by 2040. Caltrans recommends adding two more lanes between I-5 and I-805, and two HOV lanes between I-805 and I-15.
## Exit list
## See also
- San Clemente Canyon—Marian Bear Memorial Park
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David Bowie
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English musician and actor (1947–2016)
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David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie (/ˈboʊi/ BOH-ee), was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, and his music and stagecraft had a significant impact on popular music.
Bowie developed an interest in music from an early age. He studied art, music and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. He released a string of unsuccessful singles with local bands and a solo album before achieving his first top five entry on the UK Singles Chart with "Space Oddity", released in 1969. After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded by the success of "Starman" and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity. In 1975, Bowie's style shifted towards a sound he characterised as "plastic soul", initially alienating many of his UK fans but garnering him his first major US crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the album Young Americans. In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth and released Station to Station. In 1977, he again changed direction with the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that came to be known as the Berlin Trilogy. "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979) followed; each album reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise.
After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had three number-one hits: the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes", its album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and "Under Pressure" (a 1981 collaboration with Queen). He achieved his greatest commercial success in the 1980s with Let's Dance (1983). Between 1988 and 1992, he fronted the hard rock band Tin Machine before resuming his solo career in 1993. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting; his roles included Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos. He stopped touring after 2004 and his last live performance was at a charity event in 2006. He returned from a decade-long recording hiatus in 2013 with The Next Day and remained musically active until his death from liver cancer in 2016. He died two days after both his 69th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar.
During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at over 100 million records worldwide, made him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. In the UK, he was awarded ten platinum, eleven gold and eight silver album certifications, and released 11 number-one albums. In the US, he received five platinum and nine gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Rolling Stone ranked him among the greatest artists in history. As of 2022, Bowie was the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21st century.
## Early life
David Robert Jones was born on 8 January 1947 in Brixton, London. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns; 2 October 1913 – 2 April 2001), was born at Shorncliffe Army Camp near Cheriton, Kent. Her paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants who had settled in Manchester. She worked as a waitress at a cinema in Royal Tunbridge Wells. His father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones (21 November 1912 – 5 August 1969), was from Doncaster, Yorkshire, and worked as a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, on the boundary between Brixton and Stockwell in the south London borough of Lambeth. Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.
From 1953, Bowie moved with his family to Bickley and then Bromley Common, before settling in Sundridge Park in 1955 where he attended Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and he demonstrated above-average abilities in playing the recorder. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including the Teenagers, the Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Upon listening to Little Richard's song "Tutti Frutti", Bowie later said that he had "heard God".
Bowie was first impressed with Presley when he saw his cousin Kristina dance to "Hound Dog" soon after its release in 1956. According to Kristina, she and David "danced like possessed elves" to records of various artists. By the end of the following year, Bowie had taken up the ukulele and tea-chest bass, begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile, his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet". Having encouraged his son to follow his dreams of being an entertainer since he was a toddler, in the late 1950s David's father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance, introducing him to Alma Cogan and Tommy Steele. After taking his eleven-plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie went to Bromley Technical High School. It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford wrote:
> Despite its status it was, by the time David arrived in 1958, as rich in arcane ritual as any [English] public school. There were houses named after eighteenth-century statesmen like Pitt and Wilberforce. There was a uniform and an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. There was also an accent on languages, science and particularly design, where a collegiate atmosphere flourished under the tutorship of Owen Frampton. In David's account, Frampton led through force of personality, not intellect; his colleagues at Bromley Tech were famous for neither and yielded the school's most gifted pupils to the arts, a regime so liberal that Frampton actively encouraged his own son, Peter, to pursue a musical career with David, a partnership briefly intact thirty years later.
Bowie's maternal half-brother, Terry Burns, was a substantial influence on his early life. Burns, who was 10 years older than Bowie, had schizophrenia and seizures, and lived alternately at home and in psychiatric wards; while living with Bowie, he introduced the younger man to many of his lifelong influences, such as modern jazz, Buddhism, Beat poetry and the occult. In addition to Burns, a significant proportion of Bowie's extended family members had schizophrenia spectrum disorders, including an aunt who was institutionalised and another who underwent a lobotomy; this has been labelled as an influence on his early work.
Bowie studied art, music and design, including layout and typesetting. After Burns introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a Grafton saxophone in 1961. He was soon receiving lessons from baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross.
He received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. After a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation, his doctors determined that the damage could not be fully repaired and Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and anisocoria (a permanently dilated pupil), which gave a false impression of a change in the iris' colour, erroneously suggesting he had heterochromia iridum (one iris a different colour to the other); his eye later became one of Bowie's most recognisable features. Despite their altercation, Bowie remained on good terms with Underwood, who went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.
## Music career
### 1962–1967: Early career to debut album
Bowie formed his first band, the Konrads, in 1962 at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his bandmates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.
Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. His debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones with the King Bees, was not commercially successful. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon covers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul—"I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", he recalled. Their cover of Bobby Bland's "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by the Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop music world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, helped secure him a contract with Pye Records. Publicist Tony Hatch signed Bowie on the basis that he wrote his own songs. Dissatisfied with Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees, he took on the stage name David Bowie after the 19th-century American pioneer James Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His first release under the name was the January 1966 single "Can't Help Thinking About Me", recorded with the Lower Third. It flopped like its predecessors.
Bowie departed the Lower Third after the single's release, partly due to Horton's influence, and released two more singles for Pye, "Do Anything You Say" and "I Dig Everything", both of which featured a new band called the Buzz, before signing with Deram Records. Around this time Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included one of Bowie's original songs and material by the Velvet Underground, went unreleased. Kenneth Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", on which speeded-up and high-pitched vocals were used to portray the gnome, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia and music hall, met the same fate. It was his last release for two years. In September, Bowie recorded "Let Me Sleep Beside You" and "Karma Man", both rejected by Deram and left unreleased until 1970. The tracks marked the beginning of Bowie's working relationship with producer Tony Visconti which, with large gaps, lasted for the rest of Bowie's career.
### 1968–1971: Space Oddity to Hunky Dory
Studying the dramatic arts under Lindsay Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, his composition "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie song, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year. Playing acoustic guitar, Hermione Farthingale formed a group with Bowie and guitarist John Hutchinson named Feathers; between September 1968 and early 1969 the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.
After the break-up with Farthingale, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. In February and March 1969, he undertook a short tour with Marc Bolan's duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, as third on the bill, performing a mime act. Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street. The club was influenced by the Arts Lab movement, developing into the Beckenham Arts Lab and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, the subject of his song "Memory of a Free Festival".
Pitt attempted to introduce Bowie to a larger audience with the Love You till Tuesday film, which went unreleased until 1984. Feeling alienated over his unsuccessful career and deeply affected by his break-up, Bowie wrote "Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut named Major Tom. The song earned him a contract with Mercury Records and its UK subsidiary Philips, who issued "Space Oddity" as a single on 11 July 1969, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch. Reaching the top five in the UK, it was his first and last hit for three years. Bowie's second album followed in November; originally issued in the UK as David Bowie, it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the US release was instead titled Man of Words/Man of Music; it was reissued internationally in 1972 by RCA Records as Space Oddity. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.
Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They married within a year. Her impact on him was immediate—he wrote his 1970 single "The Prettiest Star" for her—and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence which he found frustrating. Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie desired a full-time band he could record with and could relate to personally. The band Bowie assembled comprised John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. Known as Hype, the bandmates created characters for themselves and wore elaborate costumes that prefigured the glam style of the Spiders from Mars. After a disastrous opening gig at the London Roundhouse, they reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist. Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style, leading to his replacement by Mick Woodmansey. Not long after, Bowie fired his manager and replaced him with Tony Defries. This resulted in years of litigation that concluded with Bowie having to pay Pitt compensation.
The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), which contained references to schizophrenia, paranoia and delusion. It represented a departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by his second album, to a more hard rock sound. To promote it in the US, Mercury financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour across America in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later depicted Bowie wearing a dress. He took the dress with him and wore it during interviews, to the approval of critics – including Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn, who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall".
During the tour, Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that eventually found form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol". A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars". The "Stardust" surname was a tribute to the "Legendary Stardust Cowboy", whose record he was given during the tour. Bowie later covered "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Space Ship" on 2002's Heathen.
Hunky Dory (1971) found Visconti supplanted in both roles by Ken Scott producing and Trevor Bolder on bass. It again featured a stylistic shift towards art pop and melodic pop rock, with light fare tracks such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. Elsewhere, the album explored more serious subjects, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol" and "Queen Bitch", the latter a Velvet Underground pastiche. His first release through RCA, it was a commercial failure, partly due lack of promotion from the label. Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits covered the album's track "Oh! You Pretty Things", which reached number 12 in the UK.
### 1972–1974: Glam rock era
Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed reddish-brown, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth in Kingston upon Thames on 10 February 1972. The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the next six months and creating, as described by David Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), combining the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock and pop of Hunky Dory, was released in June and was considered one of the defining albums of glam rock. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July Top of the Pops performance of the song. The album, which remained in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old Hunky Dory. At the same time, the non-album single "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, were successful in the UK. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.
Bowie contributed backing vocals, keyboards and guitar to Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough Transformer, co-producing the album with Ronson. The following year, Bowie co-produced and mixed the Stooges' album Raw Power alongside Iggy Pop. His own Aladdin Sane (1973) was his first UK number-one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the US during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".
Bowie's love of acting led to his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was incorporated for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which premiered in 1979 and commercially released in 1983.
After breaking up the Spiders, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought after: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with Space Oddity. Hunky Dory's "Life on Mars?" was released in June 1973 and peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart. Entering the same chart in September, his 1967 novelty record "The Laughing Gnome" reached number six. Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in his version of the McCoys's "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums concurrently on the UK chart to six.
### 1974–1976: "Plastic soul" and the Thin White Duke
Bowie moved to the US in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. Diamond Dogs (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to music. The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. The supporting Diamond Dogs Tour visited cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, Cracked Actor, featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with his slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems. He later commented that the accompanying live album, David Live, ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory". David Live nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in a cover of Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.
The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans (1975). Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound, which Bowie identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. Young Americans was a commercial success in both the US and the UK and yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", a collaboration with John Lennon. A re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number-one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US. He mimed "Fame" and his November single "Golden Years" on the US variety show Soul Train, earning him the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the programme. The same year, Bowie fired Defries as his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door." Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman, in turn, was awarded substantial compensation when he was fired the following year.
Station to Station (1976), produced by Bowie and Harry Maslin, introduced a new Bowie persona, the Thin White Duke of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year. Developing the funk and soul of Young Americans, Station to Station's synthesiser-heavy arrangements were influenced by electronic and German krautrock. Bowie's cocaine addiction during this period was at its peak; he often did not sleep for three to four days at a time during Station to Station's recording sessions and later said he remembered "only flashes" of its making. His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he referenced the drug directly in the album's ten-minute title track. The album's release was followed by a 3+1⁄2-month-long concert tour, the Isolar Tour, of Europe and North America. The core band that coalesced to record the album and tour—rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis—continued as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. Bowie performed on stage as the Thin White Duke.
The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and was detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, Bowie waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his cocaine addiction, the character of the Thin White Duke and his life living in Los Angeles, a city he later said "should be wiped off the face of the Earth". He later apologised for these statements, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s criticised racism in European politics and the American music industry. Nevertheless, his comments on fascism, as well as Eric Clapton's alcohol-fuelled denunciations of Pakistani immigrants in 1976, led to the establishment of Rock Against Racism.
### 1976–1979: Berlin era
In August 1976, Bowie moved to West Berlin with his old friend Iggy Pop to rid themselves of their respective drug addictions and escape the spotlight. Bowie's interest in German krautrock and the ambient works of multi-instrumentalist Brian Eno culminated in the first of three albums, co-produced with Visconti, that became known as the Berlin Trilogy. The album, Low (1977), was recorded in France and took influence from krautrock and experimental music and featured both short song-fragments and ambient instrumentals. Before its recording, Bowie produced Iggy Pop's debut solo album The Idiot, described by Pegg as "a stepping stone between Station to Station and Low". Low was completed in November, but left unreleased for three months. RCA did not see the album as commercially viable and were expecting another success following Young Americans and Station to Station. Bowie's former manager Tony Defries, who maintained a significant financial interest in Bowie's affairs, also tried to prevent. Upon its release in January 1977, Low yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Bowie himself did not promote it, instead touring with Pop as his keyboardist throughout March and April before recording Pop's follow-up, Lust for Life.
Echoing Low's minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, "Heroes" (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. It was the only album recorded entirely in Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesisers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track was released in both German and French and, though only reached number 24 in the UK singles chart, later became one of his best-known tracks. In contrast to Low, Bowie promoted "Heroes" extensively, performing the title track on Marc Bolan's television show Marc, and again two days later for Bing Crosby's final CBS television Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. RCA belatedly released the recording as a single five years later in 1982, charting in the UK at number three.
After completing Low and "Heroes", Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. ... Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends." Recordings from the tour made up the live album Stage, released the same year. Bowie also recorded narration for an adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev's classical composition Peter and the Wolf, which was released as an album in May 1978.
The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", Lodger (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of its two predecessors, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of new wave and world music, in places incorporating Hijaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from The Idiot's "Sister Midnight". The album was recorded in Switzerland and New York City. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman described it as "a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." Lodger reached number four in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ". Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angie initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980. The three albums were later adapted into classical music symphonies by American composer Philip Glass for his first, fourth and twelfth symphonies in 1992, 1997 and 2019, respectively. Glass praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".
### 1980–1988: New Romantic and pop era
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) produced the number one single "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural guitar-synthesiser work of Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time. While Scary Monsters used principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Fripp and Pete Townshend. Topping the UK Albums Chart for the first time since Diamond Dogs, Buckley writes that with Scary Monsters, Bowie achieved "the perfect balance" of creativity and mainstream success.
Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number-one single. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1982 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play was released as Baal. In March 1982, Bowie's title song for Paul Schrader's film Cat People was released as a single. A collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, it became a minor US hit and charted in the UK top 30. The same year, he departed RCA, having grown increasingly dissatisfied with them, and signed a new contract with EMI America Records for a reported \$17 million. His 1975 severance settlement with Defries also ended in September.
Bowie reached his peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top 20 hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" each made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of "absorbing" music videos that Buckley said "activated key archetypes in the pop world... 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aboriginal couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially censored) beach lovemaking scene... was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV". Then-unknown Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan guested on the album, featuring prominently on the title track. Let's Dance was followed by the six-month Serious Moonlight Tour, which was extremely successful. At the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards Bowie received two awards including the inaugural Video Vanguard Award.
Tonight (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Pop and Tina Turner. Co-produced by Hugh Padgham, it included a number of cover songs, including three Pop covers and the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top 10 hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for the Julien Temple-directed short film Jazzin' for Blue Jean, in which Bowie played the dual roles of romantic protagonist Vic and arrogant rock star Screaming Lord Byron. The short won Bowie his only non-posthumous Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video. In early 1985, Bowie's collaboration with the Pat Metheny Group, "This Is Not America", for the soundtrack of The Falcon and the Snowman, was released as a single and became a top 40 hit in the UK and US. In July that year, Bowie performed at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. Bowie and Mick Jagger duetted on a cover of Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" as a fundraising single, which went to number one in the UK and number seven in the US; its video premiered during Live Aid.
Bowie took an acting role in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners, and his title song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also worked with composer Trevor Jones and wrote five original songs for the 1986 film Labyrinth, which he starred in. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead combining pop rock with a harder rock sound. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In Day-Out", "Time Will Crawl" and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album". He supported the album on the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour. The backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Contemporary critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing, although in later years critics acknowledged the tour's strengths and influence on concert tours by other artists, such as Prince, Madonna and U2.
### 1989–1991: Tin Machine
Wanting to completely rejuvenate himself following the critical failures of Tonight and Never Let Me Down, Bowie placed his solo career on hold after meeting guitarist Reeves Gabrels and formed the hard rock quartet Tin Machine. The line-up was completed by bassist and drummer Tony and Hunt Sales, who had played with Bowie on Iggy Pop's Lust for Life in 1977. Although he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making. The band's 1989 self-titled debut album received mixed reviews and, according to author Paul Trynka, was quickly dismissed as "pompous, dogmatic and dull". EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production". It reached number three in the UK and was supported by a twelve-date tour.
The tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but recording halted while Bowie conducted the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, which brought him commercial success and acclaim.
In October 1990, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. He recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They married in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine II (1991) was Bowie's first album to miss the UK top 20 in nearly twenty years, and was controversial for its cover art. Depicting four ancient nude Kouroi statues, the new record label, Victory, deemed the cover "a show of wrong, obscene images" and airbrushed the statues' genitalia for the American release. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby (1992) failed commercially, Bowie dissolved the band and resumed his solo career. He continued to collaborate with Gabrels for the rest of the 1990s.
### 1992–1998: Electronic period
On 20 April 1992, Bowie appeared at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen singer's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes'" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part; during his appearance, Bowie knelt and recited the Lord's Prayer at Wembley Stadium. Four days later, Bowie and Iman married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.
In 1993, Bowie released his first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, topping the UK chart and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 single "Jump They Say". Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), which began as a soundtrack album for the BBC television adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel of the same name before turning into a full album; only the title track was used in the programme. Referencing his 1970s works with pop, jazz, ambient and experimental material, it received a low-key release, had almost no promotion and flopped commercially, reaching number 87 in the UK. Nevertheless, it later received critical praise as Bowie's "lost great album".
Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial Outside (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved UK and US chart success and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reactions from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February 1996, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist. On 7 January 1997, Bowie celebrated his half century with a 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden at which he was joined in playing his songs and those of his guests, Lou Reed, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters, Robert Smith of the Cure, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Black Francis of the Pixies and Sonic Youth.
Incorporating experiments in jungle and drum 'n' bass, Earthling (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album—"Little Wonder" and "Dead Man Walking"—became UK top 40 hits. The song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100. Bowie received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 12 February 1997. The Earthling Tour took place in Europe and North America between June and November. In November, Bowie performed on the BBC's Children in Need charity single "Perfect Day", which reached number one in the UK. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for The Rugrats Movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it was later re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'. The reunion led to other collaborations with his old producer, including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing" with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.
### 1999–2012: Neoclassicist era
Bowie, with Gabrels, created the soundtrack for Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also voiced characters based on their likenesses. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album Hours featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant. Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica. Hours and a performance on VH1 Storytellers in mid-1999 represented the end of Gabrels' association with Bowie as a performer and songwriter. Sessions for Toy, a planned collection of remakes of tracks from Bowie's 1960s period, commenced in 2000, but was shelved due to EMI/Virgin's lack of faith in its commercial appeal. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen.
On 25 June 2000, Bowie made his second appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in England, playing almost 30 years after his first. The performance was released as a live album in November 2018. On 27 June, he performed a concert at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, which was released on the compilation album Bowie at the Beeb; this also featured BBC recording sessions from 1968 to 1972. Bowie and Iman's daughter, Alexandra, was born on 15 August. His interest in Buddhism led him to support the Tibetan cause by performing at the February 2001 and February 2003 concerts to support Tibet House US at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In October 2001, Bowie opened the Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes'". 2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking place in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and the Dandy Warhols. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low era. Reality (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. On 13 June, Bowie headlined the last night of the Isle of Wight Festival 2004. On 25 June, he experienced chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked coronary artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining fourteen dates of the tour were cancelled.
In the years following his recuperation from the heart attack, Bowie reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1971 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film Shrek 2. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film Stealth. He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed backing vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album Return to Cookie Mountain, and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace.
Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006. In April, he announced, "I'm taking a year off—no touring, no albums." He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a benefit event for Keep a Child Alive at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. The performance marked the last time Bowie performed his music on stage.
Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival. The musicians and artists he selected for the Manhattan event included electronic pop duo AIR, surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and English comedian Ricky Gervais. Bowie performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head. In June 2008, a live album was released of a Ziggy Stardust-era concert from 1972. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. A live album from the A Reality Tour was released in January 2010.
In late March 2011, Toy, Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for Heathen and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.
### 2013–2016: Final years
On 8 January 2013, his 66th birthday, his website announced a new studio album—his first in a decade—to be titled The Next Day and scheduled for release in March; the announcement was accompanied by the immediate release of the single "Where Are We Now?". A music video for the single was released onto Vimeo the same day, directed by New York artist Tony Oursler. The single topped the UK iTunes Chart within hours of its release, and debuted in the UK Singles Chart at number six, his first single to enter the Top 10 for two decades (since "Jump They Say" in 1993). A second single and video, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", were released at the end of February. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, it stars Bowie and Tilda Swinton as a married couple.
Recorded in secret between 2011 and 2012, 29 songs were recorded during the album's sessions, of which 22 saw official release in 2013, including fourteen on the standard album. Three bonus tracks were later packaged with seven outtakes and remixes on The Next Day Extra, released in November. On 1 March, the album was made available to stream for free through iTunes. Debuting at number one on the UK Albums Chart, The Next Day was his first album to top the chart since Black Tie White Noise, and was the fastest-selling album of 2013 at the time. The music video for the song "The Next Day" created some controversy due to its Christian themes and messages, initially being removed from YouTube for terms-of-service violation, then restored with a warning recommending viewing only by those 18 or over.
According to The Times, Bowie ruled out ever giving an interview again. Later in 2013, he was featured in a cameo vocal in the Arcade Fire song "Reflektor". A poll carried out by BBC History Magazine in October 2013 named Bowie as the best-dressed Briton in history. In mid-2014, Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer, which he kept private. A new compilation album, Nothing Has Changed, was released in November. The album featured rare tracks and old material from his catalogue in addition to a new song, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)".
Bowie continued working throughout 2015, secretly recording his final album Blackstar in New York between January and May. In August, it was announced that he was writing songs for a Broadway musical based on the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon series; the final production included a retooled version of "No Control" from Outside. He also wrote and recorded the opening title song to the television series The Last Panthers, which aired in November. The theme that was used for The Last Panthers was also the title track for Blackstar. On 7 December, Bowie's musical Lazarus debuted in New York; he made his final public appearance at its opening night.
Blackstar was released on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday, and was met with critical acclaim. He died two days later, after which Visconti revealed that Bowie had planned the album to be his swan song, and a "parting gift" for his fans before his death. Several reporters and critics subsequently noted that most of the lyrics on the album seem to revolve around his impending death, with CNN noting that the album "reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality". Visconti also said that he had been planning a follow-up album, and had written and recorded demos of five songs in his final weeks, suggesting he believed he had a few months left. The day following his death, online viewing of Bowie's music skyrocketed, breaking the record for Vevo's most viewed artist in a single day. Blackstar debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart; nineteen of his albums were in the UK Top 100 Albums Chart, and thirteen singles were in the UK Top 100 Singles Chart. Blackstar also debuted at number one on album charts around the world, including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the US Billboard 200.
### Posthumous releases
In September 2016, a box set Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976) was released covering Bowie's mid-1970s soul period; it included The Gouster, a previously unreleased 1974 album. An EP, No Plan, was released on 8 January 2017, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday. Apart from "Lazarus", the EP includes three songs that Bowie recorded during the Blackstar sessions, but were left off the album and appeared on the soundtrack album for the Lazarus musical in October 2016. A music video for the title track was also released. 2017 and 2018 also saw the release of a series of posthumous live albums, Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles '74), Live Nassau Coliseum '76 and Welcome to the Blackout (Live London '78). In the two years following his death, Bowie sold five million records in the UK alone. In their top 10 list for the Global Recording Artist of the Year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry named Bowie the second-bestselling artist worldwide in 2016, behind Drake.
At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in 2017, Bowie won all five nominated awards: Best Rock Performance; Best Alternative Music Album; Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; Best Recording Package; and Best Rock Song. They were Bowie's first Grammy wins in musical categories. On 8 January 2020, on what would have been Bowie's 73rd birthday, a previously unreleased version of "The Man Who Sold the World" was released and two releases were announced: a streaming-only EP, Is It Any Wonder?, and an album, ChangesNowBowie, released in November 2020 for Record Store Day. In August, another series of live shows were released, including sets from Dallas in 1995 and Paris in 1999. These and other shows, part of a series of live concerts spanning his tours from 1995 to 1999, was released in late 2020 and early 2021 as part of the box set Brilliant Live Adventures. In September 2021, Bowie's estate signed a distribution deal with Warner Music Group, beginning in 2023, covering Bowie's recordings from 2000 through 2016. Bowie's album Toy, recorded in 2000, was released on what would have been Bowie's 75th birthday. On 3 January 2022, Variety reported that Bowie's estate had sold his publishing catalogue to Warner Chappell Music, "for a price upwards of \$250 million".
## Acting career
In addition to music, Bowie took acting roles throughout his career, appearing in over 30 films, television shows and theatrical productions. His acting career was "productively selective", largely eschewing starring roles for cameos and supporting parts; he once described his film career as "splashing in the kids' pool". He mostly chose projects with arthouse directors that he felt were outside the Hollywood mainstream, commenting in 2000: "One cameo for Scorsese to me brings so much more satisfaction that, say, a James Bond." Critics have believed that, had he not chosen to pursue music, he could have found great success as an actor. Others have felt that, while his screen presence was singular, his best contributions to film were the use of his songs in films such as Lost Highway, A Knight's Tale, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Inglourious Basterds.
### 1960s and 1970s
Bowie's acting career predated his commercial breakthrough as a musician. His first film was a short fourteen-minute black-and-white film called The Image, shot in September 1967. Concerning a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him, Bowie later called the film "awful". From December 1967 to March 1968, Bowie acted in mime Lindsay Kemp's theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, during which he performed several songs from his self-titled debut album. The production was later adapted into the 1970 television film The Looking Glass Murders. In late January 1968, Bowie filmed a walk-on role for the BBC drama series Theatre 625 that aired in May. He also appeared as a walk-on extra in the 1969 film adaptation of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers.
Bowie's first major film role was in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which he portrayed Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from a dying planet. The actor's severe cocaine addiction at the time left him in such a fragile state of mind that he barely understood the film; he later said in 1993: "My one snapshot of that film is not having to act. Just being me as I was, was perfectly adequate for the role. I wasn't of this earth at that particular time." Bowie's role was particularly singled out for praise by film critics both on release and in later decades; Pegg argues it stands as Bowie's most significant role. In 1978, Bowie had a starring role in Just a Gigolo, directed by David Hemmings, portraying Prussian officer Paul von Przygodski, who, returning from World War I, discovers life has changed and becomes a gigolo employed by a Baroness, playing by Marlene Dietrich. The film was a critical and commercial failure, and Bowie expressed disappointment in the finished product.
### 1980s
From July 1980 to January 1981, Bowie played Joseph Merrick in the Broadway theatre production The Elephant Man, which he undertook wearing no stage make-up, earning critical praise for his performance. Christiane F., a 1981 biographical film focusing on a young girl's drug addiction in West Berlin, featured Bowie in a cameo appearance as himself at a concert in Germany. Its soundtrack album, Christiane F. (1981), featured much material from his Berlin albums. The following year, he starred in the titular role in a BBC adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play Baal. Bowie made three on-screen appearances in 1983, the first as a vampire in Tony Scott's erotic horror film The Hunger, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. Bowie later said that he felt "very uncomfortable" with the role, but was happy to work with Scott. The second was in Nagisa Ōshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, in which he played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. While the film itself received mixed reviews, Bowie's performance was praised. Pegg places it amongst his finest acting performances. Bowie's third role in 1983 was a small cameo in Mel Damski's pirate comedy Yellowbeard, heralded by several members of the Monty Python group. Bowie also filmed a 30-second introduction to the animated film The Snowman, based on Raymond Briggs's book of the same name.
In 1985, Bowie had a supporting role as hitman Colin in John Landis's Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985). Bowie reteamed with Julian Temple for Absolute Beginners, a rock musical film adapted from Colin MacInnes's book of the same name about life in late 1950s London, in a supporting role as ad man Vendice Partners. The same year, Jim Henson's dark musical fantasy Labyrinth cast him as Jareth, the villainous Goblin King. Despite initially performing poorly, the film grew in popularity and became a cult film. Two years later, he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed biblical epic The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Despite only appearing for a three-minute sequence, Pegg writes that Bowie "acquits himself well with a thoughtful, unshowy performance."
### 1990s
In 1991, Bowie reteamed with Landis for an episode of the HBO sitcom Dream On and played a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguini Incident. Bowie portrayed the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). The prequel to the television series was poorly received at the time of its release, but has since been critically reevaluated. He took a small but pivotal role as his friend Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, another artist he considered a friend and colleague. Bowie co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western Il Mio West (1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine (1999, released in the US as B.U.S.T.E.D.), and appeared as the host in the second season of the television horror anthology series The Hunger. Despite having several episodes which focus on vampires and Bowie's involvement, the show had no plot connection to the 1983 film of the same name. In 1999, Bowie voiced two characters in the Sega Dreamcast game Omikron: The Nomad Soul, his only appearance in a video game.
### 2000s and posthumous notes
In Mr. Rice's Secret (2000), Bowie played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill 12-year-old boy. Bowie appeared as himself in the 2001 Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander, judging a "walk-off" between rival male models, and in Eric Idle's 2002 mockumentary The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch. In 2005, he filmed a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio. Bowie portrayed a fictionalised version of physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige (2006), which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the late 19th century. Nolan later claimed that Bowie was his only preference to play Tesla, and that he personally appealed to Bowie to take the role after he initially passed. In the same year, he voice-acted in Luc Besson's animated film Arthur and the Invisibles as the powerful villain Maltazard, and appeared as himself in an episode of the Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant television series Extras. In 2007, he lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis television film. In the 2008 film August, directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, a "ruthless venture capitalist." Bowie's final film appearance was a cameo as himself in the 2009 teen comedy Bandslam.
In a 2017 interview with Consequence of Sound, director Denis Villeneuve revealed his intention to cast Bowie in Blade Runner 2049 as the lead villain, Niander Wallace, but when news broke of Bowie's death in January of the same year, Villeneuve was forced to look for talent with similar "rock star" qualities. He eventually cast actor and lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars, Jared Leto. Talking about the casting process, Villeneuve said: "Our first thought [for the character] had been David Bowie, who had influenced Blade Runner in many ways. When we learned the sad news, we looked around for someone like that. He [Bowie] embodied the Blade Runner spirit." David Lynch also hoped to have Bowie reprise his Fire Walk With Me character for Twin Peaks: The Return but Bowie's illness prevented this. His character was portrayed via archival footage. At Bowie's request, Lynch overdubbed Bowie's original dialogue with a different actor's voice, as Bowie was unhappy with his Cajun accent in the original film.
## Other works
### Painter and art collector
Bowie was a painter and artist. He moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use decreased and he found time for other pursuits outside his musical career. He devoted more time to his painting, and produced a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. ... Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography."
One of Bowie's paintings sold at auction in late 1990 for \$500, and the cover for his 1995 album Outside is a close-up of a self-portrait (from a series of five) he painted that same year. His first solo show, titled New Afro/Pagan and Work: 1975–1995, was in 1995 at The Gallery in Cork Street, London. In 1997, he founded the publishing company 21 Publishing, whose first title was Blimey! – From Bohemia to Britpop: London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst by Matthew Collings. A year later, Bowie was invited to join the editorial board of the journal Modern Painters, and participated in the Nat Tate art hoax later that year. The same year, during an interview with Michael Kimmelman for The New York Times, he said "Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own." Subsequently, in a 1999 interview for the BBC, he said "The only thing I buy obsessively and addictively is art". His art collection, which included works by Damien Hirst, Derek Boshier, Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore, and Jean-Michel Basquiat among others, was valued at over £10 million in mid-2016.
After his death, his family decided to sell most of the collection because they "didn't have the space" to store it. On 10 and 11 November, three auctions were held at Sotheby's in London, first with 47 lots and second with 208 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, third with 100 design lots. The items on sale represented about 65 per cent of the collection. Exhibition of the works in the auction attracted 51,470 visitors, the auction itself was attended by 1,750 bidders, with over 1,000 more bidding online. The auctions has overall sale total £32.9 million (app. \$41.5 million), while the highest-selling item, Basquiat's graffiti-inspired painting Air Power, sold for £7.09 million.
### Writings
Outside of music, Bowie dabbled in several forms of writings during his life. In the late 1990s, Bowie was commissioned for writings of various media, including an essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat for the 2001 anthology book Writers on Artists and forewords to Jo Levin's 2001 publication GQ Cool, Mick Rock's 2001 photography portfolio Blood and Glitter, his wife Iman's 2001 book I Am Iman, Q magazine's 2002 special The 100 Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Photographs and Jonathan Barnbrook's artwork portfolio Barnbrook Bible: The Graphic Design of Jonathan Barnbrook. He also heavily contributed to the 2002 Genesis Publications memoir of the Ziggy Stardust years, Moonage Daydream, which was rereleased in 2022.
Bowie also wrote liner notes for several albums, including Too Many Fish in the Sea by Robin Clark, the wife of his guitarist Carlos Alomar, Stevie Ray Vaughan's posthumous Live at Montreux 1982 & 1985 (2002), the Spinners' compilation The Chrome Collection (2003), the tenth anniversary reissue of Placebo's debut album (2006) and Neu!'s Vinyl Box (2010). Bowie also wrote an appreciation piece in Rolling Stone for Nine Inch Nails in 2005 and an essay for the booklet accompanying Iggy Pop's A Million in Prizes: The Anthology the same year.
### Bowie Bonds
"Bowie Bonds", the first modern example of celebrity bonds, were asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the 25 albums (287 songs) that Bowie recorded before 1990. Issued in 1997, the bonds were bought for US\$55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company of America. Royalties from the 25 albums generated the cash flow that secured the bonds' interest payments. By forfeiting 10 years worth of royalties, Bowie received a payment of US\$55 million up front. Bowie used this income to buy songs owned by Defries. The bonds liquidated in 2007 and the rights to the income from the songs reverted to Bowie.
### Websites
Bowie launched two personal websites during his lifetime. The first, an Internet service provider titled BowieNet, was developed in conjunction with Robert Goodale and Ron Roy and launched in September 1998. Subscribers to the dial-up service were offered exclusive content as well as a BowieNet email address and Internet access. The service was closed by 2006. The second, www.bowieart.com, offered fans the opportunity to view and purchase selected paintings, prints and sculptures from his private collection. The service, which ran from 2000 to 2008, also offered a showcase for young art students, in Bowie's words, "to show and sell their work without having to go through a dealer. Therefore, they really make the money they deserve for their paintings."
## Musicianship
From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced by rock and roll singers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and also the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, David Bowie (to the disgust of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher). Bowie's fascination with music hall continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop.
Musicologist James E. Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in "Space Oddity", and later in "Heroes'" to dramatic effect; the author writes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register ... his voice has an almost crooner-like richness". Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive". Authors Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect." Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, Bowie's roleplaying is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them ... His voice changes dramatically from section to section." In addition to the guitar, Bowie also played a variety of keyboards, including piano, Mellotron, Chamberlin, and synthesisers; harmonica; alto and baritone saxophones; stylophone; viola; cello; koto (on the "Heroes" track "Moss Garden"); thumb piano; drums (on the Heathen track "Cactus"), and various percussion instruments.
## Personal life
### Family
Bowie married his first wife, Mary Angela Barnett, on 19 March 1970 at Bromley Register Office in Bromley, London. Their son Duncan, born on 30 May 1971, was at first known as Zowie. They had an open marriage and dated other people during it: David had relationships with model Cyrinda Foxe and Young Americans backing singer Ava Cherry; Angie had encounters with Stooges members Ron Asheton and James Williamson, and Ziggy Stardust Tour bodyguard Anton Jones. Angie later described their union as a marriage of convenience. "We got married so that I could [get a permit to] work. I didn't think it would last and David said, before we got married, 'I'm not really in love with you' and I thought that's probably a good thing", she said. Bowie said about Angie that "living with her is like living with a blow torch." The couple divorced on 8 February 1980 in Switzerland; David received custody of Duncan. After the gag order that was part of their divorce agreement ended, Angie wrote a memoir of their turbulent marriage, titled Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie.
David met Somali-American model Iman in Los Angeles following the Sound+Vision Tour in October 1990. They married in a private ceremony in Lausanne on 24 April 1992. The wedding was later solemnised on 6 June in Florence. The couple's marriage influenced the content of Black Tie White Noise, particularly on tracks such as "The Wedding"/"The Wedding Song" and "Miracle Goodnight". They had one daughter, Alexandria "Lexi" Zahra Jones, born on 15 August 2000. The couple resided primarily in New York City and London as well as owning an apartment in Sydney's Elizabeth Bay and Britannia Bay House on the island of Mustique. Following Bowie's death, Iman expressed gratitude that the two were able to maintain separate identities during their marriage.
### Other relationships
Bowie met dancer Lindsay Kemp in 1967 and enrolled in his dance class at the London Dance Centre. He commented in 1972 that meeting Kemp was when his interest in image "really blossomed". "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus." In January 1968, Kemp choreographed a dance scene for a BBC play, The Pistol Shot, in the Theatre 625 series, and used Bowie with a dancer, Hermione Farthingale; the pair began dating and moved into a London flat together. Bowie and Farthingale broke up in early 1969 when she went to Norway to take part in a film, Song of Norway; this affected him, and several songs, such as "Letter to Hermione" and "An Occasional Dream", reference her; and, for the video accompanying "Where Are We Now?", he wore a T-shirt with the words "m/s Song of Norway". Bowie blamed himself for their break-up, saying in 2002 that he "was totally unfaithful and couldn't for the life of me keep it zipped." Farthingale, who spoke of deep affection for him in an interview with Pegg, said they last saw each other in 1970.
In 1983, Bowie briefly dated New Zealand model Geeling Ng, who had starred in the video for "China Girl". While filming The Hunger the same year, Bowie reportedly had a sexual relationship with his co-star Susan Sarandon. In an interview with The Guardian in 2014, the actress said, "He's worth idolising. He's extraordinary." For three years between 1987 and 1990, Bowie dated Glass Spider Tour dancer Melissa Hurley. The two began their relationship at the end of the tour when she was only 22 years old. Bowie's Tin Machine collaborator Kevin Armstrong remembered her as "a genuinely kind, sweet person". They announced their engagement in May 1989 but never married; Bowie broke the relationship off during the latter half of the Sound+Vision Tour, primarily due to the age difference—he was 43 at the time. He later said spoke of Hurley as "such a wonderful, lovely, vibrant girl".
### Sexuality
Bowie's sexuality has been the subject of debate. While married to Angie, he famously declared himself gay in a 1972 interview with Melody Maker journalist Michael Watts, which generated publicity in both America and Britain; Bowie was adopted as a gay icon in both countries. According to Buckley, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality." He affirmed his stance in a 1976 interview with Playboy, stating: "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me." His claim of bisexuality has been supported by Angie.
In 1983, Bowie told Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder that his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made" and "I was always a closet heterosexual". On other occasions, he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than of his own feelings. Blender asked Bowie in 2002 whether he still believed his public declaration was his biggest mistake. After a long pause, he said, "I don't think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners nor be a representative of any group of people." Bowie said he wanted to be a songwriter and performer rather than a headline for his bisexuality, and in "puritanical" America, "I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do."
Buckley wrote that Bowie "mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock." According to Mary Finnigan—a brief girlfriend of Bowie's in 1969—David and Angie "created their bisexual fantasy". Sandford wrote that David "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' ... Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter." The BBC's Mark Easton stated in 2016 that Britain was "far more tolerant of difference", and that gay rights (such as same-sex marriage) and gender equality would not have "enjoyed the broad support they do today without Bowie's androgynous challenge all those years ago".
### Spirituality and religion
Over the years, Bowie made numerous references to religions and to his evolving spirituality. Beginning in 1967 from the influence of his half-brother, he became interested in Buddhism and, with commercial success eluding him, he considered becoming a Buddhist monk. Biographer Marc Spitz states that the religion reminded the young artist that other goals in life existed outside fame and material gain and one can learn about themselves through meditation and chanting. After a few months' study at Tibet House in London, he was told by his Lama, Chime Rinpoche, "You don't want to be Buddhist. ... You should follow music." By 1975, Bowie admitted, "I felt totally, absolutely alone. And I probably was alone because I pretty much had abandoned God." In his will, Bowie stipulated that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in Bali "in accordance with the Buddhist rituals".
After Bowie married Iman in a private ceremony in 1992, he said they knew that their "real marriage, sanctified by God, had to happen in a church in Florence". Earlier that year, he knelt on stage at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert and recited the Lord's Prayer before a television audience. In 1993, Bowie said he had an "undying" belief in the "unquestionable" existence of God. In a separate 1993 interview, while describing the genesis of the music for his album Black Tie White Noise, he said " ... it was important for me to find something [musically] that also had no sort of representation of institutionalized and organized religion, of which I'm not a believer, I must make that clear." Interviewed in 2005, Bowie said whether God exists "is not a question that can be answered. ... I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months. ... I've nearly got it right.'" He had a tattoo of the Serenity Prayer in Japanese on his left calf.
Bowie stated that "questioning [his] spiritual life [was] always ... germane" to his songwriting. The song "Station to Station" is "very much concerned with the Stations of the Cross"; the song also specifically references Kabbalah. Bowie called the album "extremely dark ... the nearest album to a magick treatise that I've written". Earthling showed "the abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of gnosticism ... What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise." Hours boasted overtly Christian themes, with its artwork inspired by the Pietà. Blackstar's "Lazarus" began with the words, "Look up here, I'm in Heaven" while the rest of the album deals with other matters of mysticism and mortality.
### Political views
As a seventeen-year-old still known as Davy Jones, he was a cofounder and spokesman for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men in response to members of the Manish Boys being asked to cut their hair before a television appearance on the BBC. He and his bandmates were interviewed on the network's 12 November 1964 instalment of Tonight to champion their cause. He stated on the programme, "I think we all like long hair and we don't see why other people should persecute us because of it."
In 1976, speaking as the Thin White Duke persona and "at least partially tongue-in-cheek", he made statements that expressed support for fascism and perceived admiration for Adolf Hitler in interviews with Playboy, NME and a Swedish publication. Bowie was quoted as saying: "Britain is ready for a fascist leader ... I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism... I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership." He was also quoted as saying: "Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars" and "You've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up." Bowie later retracted these comments in an interview with Melody Maker in October 1977, blaming them on mental instability caused by his drug problems at the time, saying: "I was out of my mind, totally, completely crazed." In the same interview, Bowie described himself as "apolitical", stating "The more I travel and the less sure I am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable. The more government systems I see, the less enticed I am to give my allegiance to any set of people, so it would be disastrous for me to adopt a definitive point of view, or to adopt a party of people and say 'these are my people'."
In the 1980s and 1990s, Bowie's public statements shifted sharply towards anti-racism and anti-fascism. In an interview with MTV anchor Mark Goodman in 1983, Bowie criticised the channel for not providing enough coverage of Black musicians, becoming visibly uncomfortable when Goodman suggested that the network's fear of backlash from the American Midwest was one reason for such a lack of coverage. The music videos for "China Girl" and "Let's Dance" were described by Bowie as a "very simple, very direct" statement against racism. The album Tin Machine took a more direct stance against fascism and neo-Nazism, and was criticised for being too preachy. In 1993 he released the single "Black Tie White Noise" which dealt with the 1992 LA riots. In 2007 Bowie donated 10,000 dollars to the defence fund for the Jena Six saying, "there is clearly a separate and unequal judicial process going on in the town of Jena".
At the 2014 Brit Awards, Bowie became the oldest recipient of a Brit Award in the ceremony's history when he won the award for British Male Solo Artist, which was collected on his behalf by Kate Moss. His speech read: "I'm completely delighted to have a Brit for being the best male – but I am, aren't I Kate? Yes. I think it's a great way to end the day. Thank you very, very much and Scotland stay with us." Bowie's reference to the forthcoming September 2014 Scottish independence referendum garnered a significant reaction throughout the UK on social media.
In 2016, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore said he had wanted to use "Panic in Detroit" for his 1998 documentary The Big One. Denied at first, Moore was given the rights after calling Bowie personally, recalling: "I've read stuff since his death saying that he wasn't that political and he stayed away from politics. But that wasn't the conversation that I had with him."
### Philanthropy
Bowie was involved in philanthropic and charitable efforts for HIV/AIDS research in Africa, as well as other humanitarian projects helping disadvantaged children and developing nations, ending poverty and hunger, promoting human rights, and providing education and health care to children affected by war. A portion of the proceeds from the Pay-per-view showing of Bowie's 50th birthday concert in 1997 was donated to the Save the Children charity.
## Death
Bowie died of liver cancer in his New York City apartment on 10 January 2016. He had been diagnosed eighteen months earlier but had not made his condition public. The Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove, who had worked with Bowie on his off-Broadway musical Lazarus, explained that he was unable to attend rehearsals due to the progression of the disease. He noted that Bowie had kept working during the illness.
Visconti wrote:
> He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was no different from his life – a work of art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn't, however, prepared for it. He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry.
Following Bowie's death, fans gathered at impromptu street shrines. At the mural of Bowie in his birthplace of Brixton, south London, which shows him in his Aladdin Sane character, fans laid flowers and sang his songs. Other memorial sites included Berlin, Los Angeles, and outside his apartment in New York. After news of his death, sales of his albums and singles soared. Bowie had insisted that he did not want a funeral, and according to his death certificate he was cremated in New Jersey on 12 January. As he wished in his will, his ashes were scattered in a Buddhist ceremony in Bali, Indonesia.
## Legacy and influence
Bowie's songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. Schinder and Schwartz credit Bowie and Bolan as the founders of the glam rock genre. At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock movement. When punk musicians were "noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance", Buckley wrote that "Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation". RCA promoted his status during the campaign for "Heroes" with the slogan, "There's old wave, there's new wave, and there's David Bowie". His work with Tin Machine, though critically maligned, was later acknowledged as featuring styles of grunge and alternative rock before those styles became popular. He was dubbed the "chameleon of rock" by numerous publications and biographers due to his constant reinvention throughout his career.
Perone credited Bowie with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledged the intellectual depth of his work and influence. The BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz likened Bowie to Pablo Picasso, writing that he was "an innovative, visionary, restless artist who synthesised complex avant garde concepts into beautifully coherent works that touched the hearts and minds of millions".
Broadcaster John Peel contrasted Bowie with his progressive rock contemporaries, arguing that Bowie was "an interesting kind of fringe figure... on the outskirts of things". Peel said he "liked the idea of him reinventing himself... the one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change". Buckley called the era "bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied"; then Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star".
> After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. ... The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom.
Buckley called Bowie "both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced ... has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. ... His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."
Through continual reinvention, his influence broadened and extended. Biographer Thomas Forget added, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie." In 2000, Bowie was voted by other music stars as the "most influential artist of all time" in a poll by NME. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that Bowie was confirmed by 1980 to be "the most important and influential artist since the Beatles". Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph stated that Bowie had "one of the supreme careers in popular music, art and culture of the 20th century" and "he was too inventive, too mercurial, too strange for all but his most devoted fans to keep up with". The BBC's Mark Easton argued that Bowie provided fuel for "the creative powerhouse that Britain has become" by challenging future generations "to aim high, to be ambitious and provocative, to take risks". Easton concluded that Bowie had "changed the way the world sees Britain. And the way Britain sees itself". In 2006, Bowie was voted the fourth greatest living British icon in a poll held by the BBC's Culture Show. Annie Zaleski of Alternative Press wrote, "Every band or solo artist who's decided to rip up their playbook and start again owes a debt to Bowie".
Numerous figures from the music industry whose careers Bowie had influenced paid tribute to him following his death; panegyrics on Twitter (tweets about him peaked at 20,000 a minute an hour after the announcement of his death) also came from outside the entertainment industry and pop culture, such as those from the Vatican, namely Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who quoted "Space Oddity", and the German Federal Foreign Office, which thanked Bowie for his part in the fall of the Berlin Wall and referenced "Heroes'".
Belgian amateur astronomers at the MIRA Public Observatory in conjunction with Studio Brussel created a "Bowie asterism" in homage to him in January 2016; it depicts the lightning bolt of Aladdin Sane using the stars Sigma Librae, Spica, Zeta Centauri, SAO 204132, Sigma Octantis, SAO 241641 and Beta Trianguli Australis which were near Mars at the time of Bowie's death.
On 7 January 2017, the BBC broadcast the 90-minute documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years. A day later, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday, a charity concert in his birthplace of Brixton was hosted by close friend and actor Gary Oldman. A David Bowie walking tour through Brixton was also launched, and other events marking his birthday weekend included concerts in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Tokyo.
On 6 February 2018, the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carried Elon Musk's personal Tesla Roadster and a mannequin affectionately named Starman into space. "Space Oddity" and "Life on Mars?" were looping on the car's sound system during the launch.
### David Bowie Is
An exhibition of Bowie artefacts, called David Bowie Is, was organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and shown there in 2013. The London exhibit was visited by over 300,000 people, making it one of the most successful exhibitions ever staged at the museum. Later that year the exhibition began a world tour which started in Toronto and included stops in Chicago, Paris, Melbourne, Groningen and Brooklyn, New York where the exhibit ended in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition hosted around 2,000,000 visitors over the entire course of its run.
### Stardust biopic
A biopic, Stardust, was announced on 31 January 2019, with musician and actor Johnny Flynn as Bowie, Jena Malone as his wife Angie and Marc Maron as his publicist. The film follows Bowie on his first trip to the United States in 1971. The film was written by Christopher Bell and directed by Gabriel Range. Bowie's son Duncan Jones spoke out against the film, saying he was not consulted and that the film would not have permission to use Bowie's music. The film was set to premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, but the festival was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It received generally unfavourable reviews from critics.
### Moonage Daydream
A film based on Bowie's musical journey throughout his career was announced on 23 May 2022. Titled Moonage Daydream, after the song of the same name, the film is written and directed by Brett Morgen and features never-before-seen footage, performances and music framed by Bowie's own narration. Morgan stated that "Bowie cannot be defined, he can be experienced... That is why we crafted 'Moonage Daydream' to be a unique cinematic experience." The documentary is the first posthumous film about Bowie to be approved by his estate. After spending five years in production, the film premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and was released theatrically in the US in IMAX on 16 September. It received positive reviews.
## Awards and achievements
Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality. For his performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth, he won the Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he was honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, six Grammy Awards and four Brit Awards—winning Best British Male Artist twice; the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 1996; and the Brits Icon award for his "lasting impact on British culture", given posthumously in 2016.
In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year. He declined the royal honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2000, and turned down a knighthood in 2003. Bowie later stated "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."
During his lifetime, Bowie sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists. In the United Kingdom, he was awarded nine platinum, eleven gold and eight silver albums, and in the United States, five platinum and nine gold. Since 2015, Parlophone has remastered Bowie's back catalogue through the "Era" box set series, starting with Five Years (1969–1973). Bowie was announced as the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21st century in 2022.
The 2020 revision of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list includes The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at number 40, Station to Station at number 52, Hunky Dory at number 88, Low at number 206, and Scary Monsters at number 443. On the 2021 revision of the same magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, Bowie's songs include "Heroes'" at number 23, "Life on Mars?" at number 105, "Space Oddity" at number 189, "Changes" at number 200, "Young Americans" at number 204, "Station to Station" at number 400, and "Under Pressure" at number 429. Four of his songs are included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was ranked 29. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013. Days after Bowie's death, Rolling Stone contributor Rob Sheffield proclaimed him "the greatest rock star ever". The magazine also listed him as the 39th greatest songwriter of all time. In 2022, Sky Arts ranked him the most influential artist in Britain of the last 50 years "owing to his transcendent influence on British culture". He ranked 32nd on the 2023 Rolling Stone list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
In 2008, the spider Heteropoda davidbowie was named in Bowie's honour. In 2011, his image was chosen by popular vote for the B£10m note of the local currency of his birthplace, the Brixton Pound. On 5 January 2015, a main-belt asteroid was named 342843 Davidbowie. On 13 January 2016, Belgian amateur astronomers at MIRA Public Observatory created a "Bowie asterism" of seven stars which had been in the vicinity of Mars at the time of Bowie's death; the "constellation" forms the lightning bolt on Bowie's face from the cover of his Aladdin Sane album. In March 2017, Bowie featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail. On 25 March 2018, a statue of Bowie was unveiled in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the town where he debuted Ziggy Stardust. The statue features a likeness of Bowie in 2002 accompanied with various characters and looks from over his career, with Ziggy Stardust at the front.
## Discography
- David Bowie (1967)
- David Bowie (1969)
- The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
- Hunky Dory (1971)
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
- Aladdin Sane (1973)
- Pin Ups (1973)
- Diamond Dogs (1974)
- Young Americans (1975)
- Station to Station (1976)
- Low (1977)
- "Heroes" (1977)
- Lodger (1979)
- Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)
- Let's Dance (1983)
- Tonight (1984)
- Never Let Me Down (1987)
- Black Tie White Noise (1993)
- The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
- Outside (1995)
- Earthling (1997)
- Hours (1999)
- Heathen (2002)
- Reality (2003)
- The Next Day (2013)
- Blackstar (2016)
|
367,154 |
Sale, Greater Manchester
| 1,171,050,947 |
Town in Greater Manchester, England
|
[
"Geography of Trafford",
"Populated places established in the 1st millennium",
"Sale, Greater Manchester",
"Towns in Greater Manchester",
"Unparished areas in Greater Manchester"
] |
Sale is a town in Trafford, Greater Manchester, England, in the historic county of Cheshire on the south bank of the River Mersey, 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Stretford, 3 miles (4.8 km) northeast of Altrincham, and 5 miles (8.0 km) southwest of Manchester. In 2021, it had a population of 54,515.
Evidence of Stone Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon activity has previously been discovered locally. In the Middle Ages, Sale was a rural township, linked ecclesiastically with neighbouring Ashton upon Mersey, whose fields and meadows were used for crop and cattle farming. By the 17th century, Sale had a cottage industry manufacturing garthweb, the woven material from which horses' saddle girths were made.
The Bridgewater Canal reached the town in 1765, stimulating Sale's urbanisation. The arrival of the railway in 1849 triggered Sale's growth as an important town and place for people who wanted to travel to and from Manchester, leading to an influx of middle class residents; by the end of the 19th century, the town's population had more than tripled. Agriculture gradually declined as service industries boomed.
Sale's urban growth resulted in a merger with neighbouring Ashton upon Mersey, following the Local Government Act 1929. The increase in population led to the granting of a charter in 1935, giving Sale honorific borough status. Since then, Sale has continued to thrive as one of the main urban centres of Trafford due to its proximity to the M60 motorway and the connections to Manchester and other areas by the Manchester Metrolink network.
## History
### Founding
A flint arrowhead discovered in Sale suggests a prehistoric human presence at the location, but there is no further evidence of activity in the area until the Roman period. A 4th-century hoard of 46 Roman coins was discovered in Ashton upon Mersey, one of four known hoards dating from that period discovered within the Mersey basin. Sale lies along the line of the Roman road which runs between the fortresses at Chester (Deva Victrix) and York (Eboracum), via the fort at Manchester (Mamucium); the present-day A56 follows the route of the road through the town. After the Roman departure from Britain in the early-5th century, Britain was invaded by the Anglo-Saxons.
Some local field and road names, and the name of Sale itself, are Anglo-Saxon in origin, which indicates the town was founded in the 7th or 8th centuries. The Old English salh, from which "Sale" is derived, means "at the sallow tree", and Ashton upon Mersey means "village or farm near the ash trees". Although the townships of Sale and Ashton upon Mersey were not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, that may be because only a partial survey was taken. The first recorded occurrences of Sale and Ashton upon Mersey are in 1199–1216 and 1260 respectively. The settlements were referred to as townships rather than manors, which suggests further evidence of Anglo-Saxon origins as townships were developed by the Saxons.
### Early history
The manor of Sale was one of 30 held by William FitzNigel, a powerful 12th century baron in north Cheshire. He divided it between Thomas de Sale and Adam de Carrington, who acted as Lords of the Manor on FitzNigel's behalf. On de Sale's death, his land passed to his son-in-law, John Holt; de Carrington's land passed into the ownership of Richard de Massey, a member of the Masseys who were Barons of Dunham. Sale descended through the Holt and Massey families until the 17th century, when their respective lands were sold. Sale Old Hall was built in about 1603 for James Massey, probably to replace a medieval manor house, and was one of the first buildings in northwest England to be made of brick. It was rebuilt in 1840 and demolished in 1920, but two buildings in its grounds have survived: its dovecote, now in Walkden Gardens, and its lodge, the latter now occupied by Sale Golf Club.
In 1745, Crossford Bridge – which dated back to at least 1367 – was torn down. It was one of a series of bridges crossing the River Mersey destroyed by order of the government, to slow the advance of Jacobite forces during the Jacobite rising. The Jacobites repaired the bridge upon reaching Manchester, and used it to send a small force into Sale and Altrincham. Their intention was to deceive the authorities into believing that the Jacobites were heading for Chester. The feint was successful and the main Jacobite army later marched south through Cheadle and Stockport instead.
The extension of the Bridgewater Canal to Runcorn was completed as far as Sale by 1765, and transformed the town's economy by providing a quick and cheap route into Manchester for fresh produce. Farmers who took their wares to market in Manchester brought back night soil to fertilise the fields. Not everyone benefited from the canal however; several yeomen claimed that their crops were damaged by flooding from the Barfoot Bridge aqueduct. A 1777 map shows the village of Cross Street, on the site of the road now of the same name, divided between the townships of Sale and Ashton upon Mersey. The village was first referred to in 1586 and is believed to have originated around this time. The map also shows that Sale was spread out, mainly consisting of farmhouses around Dane Road, Fairy Lane, and Old Hall Road. Sale absorbed Cross Street as it expanded.
About 300 acres (120 ha) of "wasteland" known as Sale Moor was enclosed in 1807, to be divided between the landowners in Sale. This was part of a nationwide initiative to begin cultivation of common land to lessen the food shortage caused by the Napoleonic Wars. Records of poor relief in the town start in 1808, a time when the region was in the grip of an economic depression. Poorhouses, where paupers could stay rent-free, were built in the early-19th century, reflecting the poor state of the local economy. In 1829, Samuel Brooks acquired 515 acres (208 ha) of land in Sale – about a quarter of the township – from George Grey, 6th Earl of Stamford. The area later became known as Brooklands after the land owner.
### Development
The Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway opened in 1849, and led to the middle classes using Sale as a commuter town, a residence away from their place of work. This resulted in Sale's population more than tripling by the end of the 19th century. The land in Sale Moor was the cheapest in the town because the soil was poor and difficult to cultivate, which was part of the reason the area was common land until the early 19th century. However, when the railway opened, Sale Moor was close to the station and became the most expensive area in Sale. Villas were built in Sale Moor, and a few in Ashton upon Mersey as the demand for land increased. They were often decorated with stained glass or different coloured bricks in an attempt to make them "mansions in miniature" for the aspiring middle class.
Pressure from an increasing population led to the town being supplied with amenities such as sewers, which were built in 1875–1880; and Sale was connected to the telephone network in 1888. As in the late-19th century, the early-20th century saw a great deal of construction work in Sale. The town's first swimming baths were built in 1914, and its first cinema, the Palace, was opened during the First World War. The end of the war in 1918 resulted in a rush of marriages, which highlighted a shortage of housing. The local councils of Sale and Ashton upon Mersey took the initiative of building council housing, and rented it to the local population at below market rates. By the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Sale had 594 council houses. The building programme was interrupted by the start of the war. additional private housing development brought the total of inter-war houses built in Sale to around 900, including large housing estates like Woodheys Hall estate in Ashton.
Sale was never officially evacuated during the war, and even received families from evacuated areas, although it was not considered far enough from likely targets to be an official destination for evacuees. The town's proximity to Manchester, an industrial centre directed towards the war effort, did result in a number of bombing raids. Incendiaries dropped on Sale in September 1940 caused no casualties, but did damage two houses on Norman Road. In a bombing incident the following November, four people were injured and a school was damaged; on 22 December 1940, twelve people were injured by bombs. On the night of 23 December, much of Manchester suffered heavy bombing in what became known as the Manchester Blitz. Six hundred incendiary bombs were dropped on Sale in three hours. There were no injuries, but Sale Town Hall was severely damaged. On 3 August 1943, at 11:50 pm, a Wellington Bomber on a training exercise crashed in Walton Park in the south-west of the town. Of the six-man crew, consisting of five members of the Royal Australian Air Force and one member of the Royal Air Force, the pilot and the bomb-aimer were killed.
Sale's shopping centre was redeveloped during the 1960s, as part of the town's post-war regeneration. In 1973, the shopping precinct in the town centre, which had grown up in the mid-19th century, was also redeveloped and pedestrianised in an attempt to increase trade. The construction of the M63 motorway (subsequently renamed the M60) in 1972 led to the creation of Sale Water Park. To minimise the risk of flooding, the new road was built on an embankment, for which the necessary gravel was extracted from what is today an artificial lake and water-sports centre. Opportunities for leisure were increased when the old swimming baths, demolished in 1971, were replaced in 1973 by a new complex built on the same site.
## Governance
Historically, Sale was a township in the ancient parish of Ashton upon Mersey in the hundred of Bucklow and county of Cheshire. Throughout the Middle Ages it was governed by the Lord of the Manor. Following the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, Sale was joined with the Altrincham Poor Law Union, an inter-parish unit established to provide social security. The unit changed its name to Bucklow Poor Law Union in 1895. Sale adopted the Local Government Act 1858 in November 1866, and Sale Local Board was formed to govern the township at the beginning of 1867. Members were elected to the local board by the town's ratepayers. A household had one vote for every £10 (£ as of ) of rateable value. Under the Local Government Act 1888 Sale became an urban district of the administrative county of Cheshire. The local board was replaced by Sale Urban District Council in 1894. The parish of Ashton upon Mersey became an urban district in 1895. In 1930, the Ashton upon Mersey UD was merged into Sale UD under a county review order.
In December 1933, Sale Urban District submitted a petition to the Privy Council in an attempt to gain a charter of incorporation. At the time, Sale UD had the largest population and highest rateable value of any urban district in the country. The petition was successful and on 21 September 1935 Sale UD was granted borough status, and became the Municipal Borough of Sale. Following the Local Government Act 1972, on 1 April 1974 the Municipal Borough of Sale was abolished. Sale became an unparished area of the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, a local government district of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester. The town's education, town planning, waste collection, health, social care and other services are administered by Trafford Council.
For national elections, Sale was in the parliamentary constituency of Altrincham and Sale from 1945 until 1997, when it was split between Altrincham and Sale West and Wythenshawe and Sale East. The Altrincham and Sale West constituency is one of the Conservative Party's two seats in Greater Manchester. The Sale area consists of five electoral wards, which between them have 15 of the 63 seats on the council. The wards from 2023 are Ashton upon Mersey, Brooklands, Sale Central, Sale Moor, and Manor. As of the 2023 local elections, the Labour Party held twelve of the wards and the Conservative Party held nine.
## Geography
At (53.4246, −2.322), Sale lies respectively to the north and south of the neighbouring towns of Altrincham and Stretford, and 5 miles (8 km) south-west of Manchester city centre. The district of Wythenshawe is to the southeast. Sale is in the Mersey Valley, about 100 feet (30 m) above sea level on generally flat ground. The River Mersey, which runs just north of the town, is prone to flooding during heavy rains, so the Sale Water Park, close to the town's northern boundary, acts as an emergency flood basin. The man-made, and thus more controllable, Bridgewater Canal runs through the centre of the town.
Sale's local drift geology consists of sand and gravel deposited about 10,000 years ago, during the last ice age. The bedrock is Bunter sandstone in the west and Triassic waterstone in the east. United Utilities obtains the town's drinking water from the Lake District. Sale's climate is generally temperate, like the rest of Greater Manchester. The mean highest and lowest temperatures (13.2 °C (55.8 °F) and 6.4 °C (43.5 °F)) are slightly above the national average, while the annual rainfall (806.6 millimetres (31.76 in)) and average hours of sunshine (1394.5 hours) are respectively above and below the national averages.
The town's main districts are Ashton upon Mersey in the northwest, Sale Moor in the southeast, and Brooklands in the southwest. The main commercial area is Sale town centre, in the central northern area of the town, but smaller commercial centres are also found in Ashton upon Mersey and Sale Moor. Brooklands is the most densely populated area. Most of the parks, including Worthington and Walton, are in the central and southern areas, leaving Ashton upon Mersey and Sale Moor with a shortage of accessible green space.
Sale's built environment is varied, with a mixture of modern and old buildings. Some terraces, semi-detached houses and villas, survive from the Victorian period, although many of the larger houses have been converted into flats. Many semi-detached houses survive from the 1930s, when there was a need for new housing in the town as a result of a growing population and an increasingly wealthy middle class. Interspersed with these older structures are newer housing developments, such as the estates built in Ashton upon Mersey and the east of Sale during the 1970s.
## Demography
As of the 2001 UK census, Sale had a population of 55,234. The 2001 population density was 12,727 inhabitants per square mile (4,914/km<sup>2</sup>), with a 100 to 94.2 female-to-male ratio. Of those over 16 years old, 30.0% were single (never married), 51.3% married and 7.8% divorced. Although the proportion of divorced people was similar to that of Trafford and England, the rates of those who were single and married were significantly different from the national and Trafford averages (Trafford: 44.3% single, 35.6% married; England: 44.3% single, 34.7% married). Sale's 24,027 households included 32.2% one-person, 37.8% married couples living together, 8.3% were co-habiting couples, and 8.5% single parents with their children, these figures were similar to those of Trafford and England. Of those aged 16–74, 22.3% had no academic qualifications, similar to that of 24.7% in all of Trafford but significantly lower than 28.9% in all of England. Sale had a much higher percentage of adults with a diploma or degree than Greater Manchester as a whole. Of Sale residents aged 16–74, 26.7% had an educational qualification such as first degree, higher degree, qualified teacher status, qualified medical doctor, qualified dentist, qualified nurse, midwife, or health visitor, compared to 20% nationwide.
Originally a working class town, there was an influx of middle class people in the mid-19th century when businessmen began using Sale as a commuter town. Since then, Sale has had a greater proportion of middle class residents than the national average. In 1931, 22.7% of Sale's population was middle class compared with 14% in England and Wales, and by 1971, this had increased to 36.3% compared with 24% nationally. Parallel to this increase in the middle classes of Sale was the decline of the working class population. In 1931, 20.3% were working class compared with 36% in England and Wales; by 1971, this had decreased to 15.4% in Sale and 26% nationwide. The rest of the population was made up of clerical workers and skilled manual workers. The change in social structure in the town was at a similar rate to that of the rest of the nation but was biased towards the middle classes, transforming Sale into the middle class town it is today.
### Population change
According to the hearth tax returns of 1664, the township of Sale had a population of about 365. Parish registers show that the area experienced steady population growth during the 17th and 18th centuries, more so during the latter half of the 19th century (due to the Industrial Revolution). This later growth was less rapid than that seen in neighbouring areas such as Altrincham, Bowdon or Stretford. The increase in growth in the latter half of the 19th century also coincides with the arrival of the railway, indicative of Sale's growth as a commuter town. A huge increase in population in 1921–1931 is accounted for by the administrative merger of Sale with Ashton upon Mersey in 1930. Steady growth thereon is evident until 1981, when the decline of industry in Trafford and the Greater Manchester area accounts for a reduction in the town's population. This follows the general population trend for Greater Manchester, with residents relocating to new jobs.
## Economy
During the medieval period, most of the land was used for growing crops and raising livestock such as cattle. The produce from arable farming would have been sufficient to support the local population, but the cattle would have been sold to the ruling classes. Agriculture provided the main source of employment for Sale's residents until the mid-19th century. Industry was slow to develop in the area, as in most of what would become Trafford. This was partly because of the reluctance of the two main land owners in the area, the Stamfords and the de Traffords, to invest. Although weaving was common in Sale during the late 17th and early 18th century, by 1851 only 4% of the population was employed in that industry.
Along with the rest of the region, Sale's economy during the early-19th century was weak, a state of affairs which persisted until the arrival of the railway in the middle of the century. Despite the dominance of agriculture, there was a growing service industry; Sale and Ashton upon Mersey experienced a growth in numbers employed in retail and domestic services in the first half of the 19th century. By 1901, less than 20% of Sale residents were employed in agriculture. Employment was available in workhouses for those who could not find work elsewhere. Sale was part of the Altrincham Union, which ran the nearest work house in Altrincham.
The main shopping centre in Sale, Stanley Square (formerly known as "the Square Shopping Centre"; the name was changed in 2021), was constructed in the 1960s on the site of a former Methodist chapel. Following the Trafford Centre's opening in 1998, it was expected that the centre would suffer, but it has since prospered. In 2003 the Square Shopping Centre underwent a £7 million refurbishment, a major part of the redevelopment of Sale's town centre. It was sold for £40M in 2005, by which time the Square had experienced an increase in trade and demand for tenancy that had led to an increase of 70% in rental income. The town's economy expanded to the extent that in 2007, at a time when the rest of south Manchester was oversupplied with office space, Sale's available office and commercial space was at an all-time low because of high demand.
According to the 2001 UK census, the industry of employment of residents aged 16–74 was 18.4% property and business services, 15.9% retail and wholesale, 11.1% manufacturing, 10.9% health and social work, 9.1% education, 7.8% transport and communications, 6.1% construction, 6.3% finance, 4.5% public administration, 3.8% hotels and restaurants, 0.7% energy and water supply, 0.5% agriculture, 0.2% mining, and 4.7% other. Compared with national figures, the town had a relatively high percentage of residents working in property, business services and finance. The town had a relatively low percentage working in agriculture, public administration, and manufacturing. The census recorded the economic activity of residents aged 16–74, 2.6% students were with jobs, 3.3% students without jobs, 4.9% looking after home or family, 5.2% permanently sick or disabled, and 2.3% economically inactive for other reasons. The 2.4% unemployment rate of Sale was low compared with the national rate of 3.3%.
## Culture
### Landmarks and attractions
Sale has three Grade II\* listed buildings – two churches (St. Martin and St. John the Divine) and Ashton New Hall – and eighteen Grade II listed buildings. The cenotaph outside the town hall was designed by Ashton upon Mersey sculptor Arthur Sherwood Edwards and is a Grade II listed building. It commemorates the 400 men from Sale who died in the First World War and the 300 who died in the Second World War. The memorial consists of a statue of a mourning Saint George on top of a granite pedestal. Costing £600 (£ as of ), it was funded by public subscription and unveiled in May 1925 in front of a crowd of 10,000.
The oldest surviving building in Sale is Eyebrow Cottage. Built around 1670, it was originally a yeoman farmhouse and is one of the earliest brick buildings in the area. Its name is derived from the decorative brickwork above the windows. It was built in Cross Street, which at the time was a separate village from Sale. Of the twenty-one conservation areas in Trafford, two are in Sale: part of Church Lane, Ashton-upon-Mersey, and Brogden Grove.
A bronze bust of James Joule, the physicist who gave his name to the SI unit of energy, is in Worthington Park. Originally a tower was to have been erected in his honour, but lack of donations led to the production of the bust as a substitute; it was unveiled in 1905. Joule moved to Sale in the 1870s for his health; he died at his home at 12 Wardle Road in 1889, and is buried in Brooklands Cemetery.
The area has several parks and green spaces. Worthington Park, originally called Sale Park, was opened in 1900. It features a bandstand, gardens, play areas, and a skate ramp and is maintained by Trafford Council and The Friends of Worthington Park. Opened in 1939, Walton Park is in the southwest of the town and features a miniature railway. Sale Water Park is an artificial lake, created from a 35-metre (115 ft) deep gravel pit left during the construction of the M60. It opened in 1980 and is a venue for water sports, fishing and bird watching. The water park is the site of the Broad Ees Dole wildlife refuge, a local nature reserve that provides a home for migrating birds. Woodheys Park, also known as Pinky Park, consists of a well-maintained pitch and putt course, grass area, a five a side football pitch and other amenities.
### Events and venues
Situated next to the town hall, the Waterside Arts Centre houses a plaza, a library, the Robert Bolt Theatre, the Lauriston Gallery, and the Corridor Gallery. The centre, which was opened in 2004, regularly hosts concerts, exhibitions and other community events. Performers have included comedian Lucy Porter, Midge Ure, Fairport Convention, The Zombies and Sue Perkins. In 2004, the centre received the British Urban Regeneration Association Award for its innovative use of space and for reinvigorating Sale town centre.
Sale has a Gilbert and Sullivan society, formed in 1972, which performs at the Altrincham Garrick Playhouse. The group is directed by Alistair Donkin, a former principal comic for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Members of the group have won several awards at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. Sale Brass is a traditional brass band based in Sale, formed in about 1849 as the Stretford Temperance Band. Its first recorded performance was at the 1849 opening of the railway between Manchester and Altrincham.
### Sport
The rugby union side Sale F.C. has been based in Sale since 1861 and at its present Heywood Road ground since 1905. One of the oldest rugby clubs in the world, its 1865 Minute Book is the oldest existing book containing the rules of the game. The professional Sale Sharks team was originally part of Sale F.C. but split from it in 2003. Sale Sharks now play their matches at Salford City Stadium, although they retain the use of the Heywood Road ground for training and for the staging of home games involving their reserve team, Sale Jets. The town is also home to the Ashton upon Mersey and Trafford Metrovick rugby union clubs.
Sale Harriers Manchester Athletics Club was formed in 1911, it still has its historical home at Crossford Bridge in Sale. The site is shared with Sale United Football club and Old Alts Football Club. The club has produced successful athletes such as Olympic gold medallist Darren Campbell and Commonwealth Games gold medallist Diane Modahl, both former residents of the town.
Sale Sports Club encompasses Sale Cricket Club, Sale Hockey Club, and Sale Lawn Tennis Club. The Brooklands Sports Club is home to Brooklands Cricket Club, Brooklands Manchester University Hockey Club, and Brooklands Hulmeians Lacrosse Club. It also provides facilities for squash, tennis, and bowling.
Sale United FC plays at Crossford Bridge and was recognised as Trafford's Sports Club of the Year in 2004. Sale Golf Club and Ashton on Mersey Golf Club have courses on the outskirts of the town, and a municipal pitch and putt is based at Woodheys Park. Trafford Rowing Club has a boathouse beside the canal. Sale Leisure Centre has badminton and squash courts, a gymnasium and three swimming pools. Walton Park Sports Centre has a sports hall for activities such as 5-a-side football. Tennis, crown-green bowls, golf putting and football facilities are available at the town's parks. Sale Water Ski Club is based at Sale Water Park.
## Education
Sale's first school was built in 1667 and was used until the first half of the 18th century. The second school in Sale was built some time in the 18th century, one of about 30 non-grammar schools founded in Cheshire around this time. By 1831, there were two private schools – with the children's parents paying fees for their education – in Sale and one in Ashton upon Mersey. At the same time, there were also four Sunday schools in Sale and one in Ashton upon Mersey, operated by various religious denominations, including Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians. The first school-chapel built in Sale as part of a school was constructed by Primitive Methodists in 1839, and still survives. The second school-chapel in the town was St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, built in 1866, and was replaced by the current school in 1899.
Trafford maintains a selective education system assessed by the eleven plus exam. Sale has one grammar school, two comprehensives and nineteen primary schools. Sale Grammar School consists of two parts, one for 11- to 16-year-olds and 900 pupils, and the other a sixth form college with 300 students. The school was described in its 2006 Ofsted report as "outstanding with an outstanding sixth form". Ashton-on-Mersey School is an academy school and part of The Dean Trust. It has 1,300 pupils aged 11–16 and 120 students in its sixth form. In its 2019 Ofsted report it was rated "outstanding" for its 16-19 provision and "good" overall. Sale High School, formerly Jeff Joseph Sale Moor Technology College, is a foundation secondary modern school for 11- to 16-year-olds and specialist technology college. It has 1,000 pupils and in its 2006 Ofsted report was rated as "satisfactory". Manor Academy provides secondary education to pupils with special needs. It has 140 students aged 11–16 and 20 members of its sixth form and was rated as "good" in its 2007 Ofsted report.
Sale is a leader within Trafford Council in the area of Childcare and Early education as well. Sale has a broad range of options such as after-school care, breakfast clubs, childminders, day nurseries, holiday schemes, independent school nurseries, pre-school playgroups, school nurseries. In all the areas within Trafford, Sale provides most variety and has maximum number of options in every area. In areas of After School Care, Breakfast Club, Childminder, Holiday Schemes all the providers rated by Ofsted/CQC are either Good or Outstanding. In areas of Day Nurseries (where one is rated Inadequate), Pre-School Groups (where two are rated requires improvement), School Nurseries (where one is rated Requires Improvement) most of the providers who are rated by Ofsted/CQC are again Good/Outstanding. Apart from these Sale also provides one of three Independent School Nursery in Trafford. Sale also provides a lot of options for support for childcare providers in form of advisory forums and childcare training.
## Religion
Sale is a diverse community with a synagogue and Christian churches of various denominations. The church buildings were mostly constructed in the late 19th or early 20th century in the wake of the population boom created by the arrival of the railway in 1849, although records show that the Church of St Martin in Ashton upon Mersey dates back to at least 1304. Before the English Reformation, the inhabitants of Sale were predominantly Catholic, but afterwards were members of the Church of England. Roman Catholics returned to the area in the 19th century in the form of Irish immigrants. Two of the three Grade II\* listed buildings in the town are churches. The Church of St Martin, which was probably originally an early 14th-century timber framed structure, was rebuilt in 1714 after the church had been destroyed in a storm. The Church of St John the Divine was built in 1868, to the design of Alfred Waterhouse. There are three Grade II listed churches in Sale: the Church of St Anne; the Church of St Mary Magdalene; and the Church of St Paul.
As of the 2001 UK census, 78.0% of Sale residents reported themselves as Christian, 1.4% Muslim, 0.7% Hindu, 0.6% Jewish, 0.2% Buddhist and 0.2% Sikh. A further 12.9% had no religion, 0.2% had an alternative religion, and 5.9% did not state their religion. Sale is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Shrewsbury, and the Church of England Diocese of Chester. Sale and District Synagogue is part of United Synagogue under the aegis of the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks. The only mosque in Trafford is the Masjid-E-Noor in Old Trafford, three miles (5 km) away.
## Transport
The Metrolink system connects Sale with other locations in Greater Manchester. Trams depart the town's three stations, including Sale station, least every 12 minutes between 07:00 and 22:30 daily.
The nearest railway station is Navigation Road in Altrincham, from where trains run between Manchester Piccadilly, Stockport and Chester. Services run generally hourly on this line and are provided by Northern Trains.
Bus routes operated by various companies, primarily Arriva North West and Stagecoach Manchester, provide services to Manchester and to Altrincham.
The A56 road runs between Chester and North Yorkshire via Sale, Manchester and Burnley. The M60 motorway, which encircles Manchester, can be accessed via junction 7, just to the north of Sale. The M56, which links Manchester with Chester, and the M62 motorway, between Liverpool to Hull, are about 4 miles (6 km) away. The M6, which runs between Catthorpe Interchange in Leicestershire and Gretna, passes about 7 miles (11 km) to the west.
Manchester Airport, the busiest airport in the UK outside the London area, is located 4 miles (6 km) to the south.
### History of transport in Sale
The first turnpike road in the area was the latter-day A56 Chester Road between Manchester and Crossford Bridge (on the border between Sale and Stretford). Turnpike trusts collected tolls from road users and used the proceeds to maintain the highway. There was a toll booth on the Sale side of Crossford Bridge. Another section of road between Altrincham and Crossford Bridge was turnpiked in 1765.
The commencement of swift packet services on the newly opened Bridgewater Canal in 1776 made commuting from Sale into Manchester both practical and convenient, with boats travelling at a relatively swift 10 mph (16 km/h). However, the arrival of the Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway in 1849 sounded a death-knell for both the canal packet services and turnpike trusts. Many trusts went into terminal decline, mirroring a national trend.
By 1888, almost all roads and highways were the responsibility of the local authority. Sale's railway station, originally named Sale Moor, was renamed to Sale in 1856. Three years later, Brooklands railway station was opened, followed in 1931 by the opening of Dane Road railway station along with the electrification of the entire line. The line was renovated in the early 1990s and is now part of the Metrolink.
Following the completion of a tramway between Manchester and Stretford in 1901, the British Electric Traction Company applied to Parliament for an extension to Sale. The proposal was amended to continue the line further south, into Altrincham. The line through Sale was owned by Sale Urban District Council and leased to the Manchester Corporation. Services to Sale commenced in 1907. A branch along Northenden Road from the line to Sale Moor was created in 1912. Sale Moor's line had only a single track which, in 1925, resulted in a head-on collision between two tramcars, injuring eight passengers.
Bus services were first introduced to the area in the 1920s, but became more widespread in the 1930s. The buses did not suffer the drawback of being limited to tracks and were therefore more practical than the tram services which, from the 1930s, went into decline. The tramlines along Northenden Road were removed between 1932 and 1934, and throughout Sale in the 1940s.
## See also
- Listed buildings in Sale, Greater Manchester
- List of people from Trafford
- Manchester Mummy
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3,993,569 |
Carl Hans Lody
| 1,160,036,268 |
German naval reserve officer; spy
|
[
"1877 births",
"1914 deaths",
"20th-century executions by the United Kingdom",
"Deaths by firearm in London",
"Executed military personnel",
"Executed people from Berlin",
"Executed spies",
"Executions at the Tower of London",
"German military personnel killed in World War I",
"German people executed abroad",
"German people of World War I",
"Imperial German Navy personnel of World War I",
"Military personnel from Berlin",
"People executed by the British military by firing squad",
"People who were court-martialed",
"World War I spies for Germany"
] |
Carl Hans Lody, alias Charles A. Inglis (20 January 1877 – 6 November 1914; name occasionally given as Karl Hans Lody), was a reserve officer of the Imperial German Navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the First World War.
In May 1914, two months before the start of World War 1, Lody was approached by German naval intelligence officials. He agreed to be a peacetime spy in southern France, but after war broke out, in late August he was sent to the United Kingdom with orders to spy on the Royal Navy. Lody had been given no training in espionage, and within only a few days of arriving he was detected by the British authorities. The British counter-espionage agency MI5, then known as MO5(g), allowed him to continue his activities in the hope of learning more about the German spy network. His first two messages were allowed to reach the Germans, but later messages were stopped, as they contained sensitive military information. At the start of October 1914, concern over the increasingly sensitive nature of his messages prompted MO5(g) to order his arrest.
Lody was put on public trial – the only one held for a German spy captured in the UK in either world war – before a military court in London. He was convicted and sentenced to death after a three-day hearing. Four days later, on 6 November 1914, Lody was shot at dawn by a firing squad at the Tower of London in the first execution there in 167 years.
When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, it declared him a national hero. Lody became the subject of memorials, eulogies and commemorations in Germany before and during the Second World War. A destroyer bore his name.
## Early life and career
Carl Hans Lody was born in Berlin on 20 January 1877. His father was a lawyer in government service who served as mayor of Oderberg in 1881. The Lody family subsequently moved to Nordhausen, where they lived at 8 Sedanstrasse (today Rudolf-Breitscheid-Strasse). Lody's father served as deputy mayor there in 1882 but died in June 1883 after a short illness and his mother died in 1885. He was fostered for a time by a couple in Leipzig before entering the orphanage of the Francke Foundations in nearby Halle.
Lody began an apprenticeship at a grocery store in Halle in 1891, before moving to Hamburg two years later to join the crew of the sailing ship Sirius as a cabin boy. He studied at the maritime academy in Geestemünde, qualifying as a helmsman, and immediately afterwards served with the Imperial German Navy for a year between 1900 and 1901. Subsequently joining the First Naval Reserve, he enlisted as an officer on German merchant ships. In 1904 he returned to Geestemünde, where he successfully obtained a captain's licence. He fell seriously ill with what he later said was a stomach abscess, "caused from a very badly cured typhoid attack of fever from which I suffered in Italy on account of the bad water at Genoa." An operation was required, which weakened his left arm and his eyesight. As Lody put it, "Consequently, my career as a seaman was closed as soon as I discovered that, and my doctor told me that I could not go any further."
Lody found alternative employment with the Hamburg America Line, which had inaugurated a personally guided tour service for wealthy travellers going from Europe to America. Lody became a tour guide responsible for looking after these clients, and in this capacity visited European countries, including Britain. During one such tour he met a German-American woman named Louise Storz, the 23-year-old adoptive daughter of a wealthy beer brewer, Gottlieb Storz of Omaha, Nebraska. Louise's tour included several European countries, including Germany; by its conclusion she and Lody were engaged. After visiting Lody's family in Berlin, the couple travelled to the United States. They were married on 29 October 1912 in what the Omaha Daily Bee described as "a 'society' wedding":
> The home was beautifully decorated with chrysanthemums, palms and ferns. The ceremony and the details that preceded it were elaborate. About seventy-five guests attended. After an extended western honeymoon tour Mr. and Mrs. Lody established a residence at the Clarinda.
Despite the high profile of the wedding the couple lived together for only two months. Lody sought to obtain a position in the Storz Brewing Company but he lacked expertise in brewing. As the local Omaha Daily Bee newspaper put it, "Here he was in the United States with a wife to support and no position in sight." He found a job working as a clerk for the Union Pacific Railroad for under \$100 a month. Two months after they were married, Louise brought suit for divorce, charging that Lody had "beat[en] her, inflicting serious wounds to her body." Lody left for Berlin shortly thereafter; over six months later, he unexpectedly returned with a German lawyer to contest the suit in the Douglas County courts. The suit was withdrawn without explanation a few days later; Lody returned to Berlin. The two sides apparently reached an amicable settlement; in February 1914 the divorce suit was reinstated and Lody agreed not to contest it. The divorce was granted the following month.
The military historian Thomas Boghardt suggests that the Storz family did not approve of the match, and may have pressured the couple to separate. Lody said later that his former father-in-law gave him \$10,000, possibly as compensation. The failed marriage had a lasting effect on Lody. He wrote in 1914: "My feelings run riot when I can permit myself to review the dramatic events of the last three years and what is to be the probable climax of it all."
## Beginning of espionage career
On his return to Germany, Lody settled in Berlin, living in what he described as "well to do circumstances". He stayed in the Adlon, the city's most fashionable luxury hotel, while his sister Hanna lived with her doctor husband in the prosperous suburb of Westend in Charlottenburg. As tensions grew across Europe in the first half of 1914, German naval intelligence – the Nachrichten-Abteilung, or "N" – set out to recruit potential agents. Lody already had links with the service. During his time with the Imperial German Navy, Lody had served under Arthur Tapken, who later became N's first director. The German Imperial Admiralty Staff, or Admiralstab, listed Lody as a possible recruitment target before the outbreak of war. The naval authorities regarded Hamburg America Line (HAL) employees such as Lody as ideal recruits because of their expertise in naval matters and presence in ports worldwide. The HAL had collaborated with the Admiralstab since the 1890s. The relationship became so close that in July 1914, just before the outbreak of the war, the HAL's director Albert Ballin told the Admiralstab that he would "place myself and the organisation subordinate to me at your Excellency's disposal as best as possible."
On 8 May 1914, Fritz Prieger, the director of N, contacted Lody to ask whether he was willing to serve as a naval agent. Lody replied that he was "honoured" by Prieger's trust and would serve at Prieger's disposal. Within three weeks Lody had signed a formal agreement to operate as a "tension traveller" in southern France – an agent who would report back to Berlin in times of heightened international tensions. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June and the subsequent July Crisis precipitated the outbreak of World War I on 28 July.
With the United Kingdom declaring war in support of France and Belgium, Prieger sent Lody to Britain as a war agent. Lody was ordered to base himself in the Edinburgh–Leith area and monitor British naval movements. He was to travel along the Scottish coast and report on the warships stationed there; "If or when Mr. Lody comes to know that a naval battle has taken place, he will enquire as much and unobtrusively as possible regarding losses, damage etc." His orders reflected the Admiralstab's belief that the war would be decided by a single major naval battle.
To communicate with his handlers, Lody was instructed to write to certain addresses in Christiania (now Oslo), Stockholm, New York City and Rome. He acquired an American emergency passport in the name of Charles A. Inglis, a genuine document obtained from the US Embassy in Berlin. When Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August, newly imposed restrictions prevented foreigners from leaving Germany without travel documents. Embassies and consulates throughout the country experienced a rush of visitors as foreigners sought emergency passports; these had to be submitted to the German Foreign Ministry to obtain exit permits for neutral Denmark or the Netherlands. One such applicant was the real Charles A. Inglis, whose passport went missing – lost, it was claimed, although in fact the Foreign Ministry had appropriated it for Lody's use. As the passport lacked security features such as the holder's photograph or fingerprints, being merely a single-sheet document, it was well-suited for use by a spy. Lody said later that he had received it in the post from his superiors at N. He was also given £250 in British banknotes, 1,000 Danish krone and 1,000 Norwegian krone to finance his mission to the UK, where he would travel via Denmark and Norway.
Gustav Steinhauer, the head of N's British section, later wrote that he had met Lody shortly before the latter's departure, and spoken with him on a couple of occasions. Steinhauer had been active in Britain shortly before the outbreak of war, and was keen to give Lody advice on the difficulties he would face:
> When you are in England, Lody, you are not in Germany or France with a neutral frontier close at hand to assist your escape. You will have to get through a port, and it will not be easy ... It will mean death if you are in the slightest degree careless. You must remember that all foreigners will be watched everywhere. Your correspondence will be opened and your luggage will be ransacked. They will go over your passport with a microscope to see that it is not forged and they will make you notify every change of address that you have.
To Steinhauer's apparent surprise, Lody appeared nonchalant about the danger that he was about to go into. "Well, after all, one might as well die that way as any other," Lody said, according to Steinhauer; "I shall be rendering the Fatherland a service and no other German can do more than that." At a final meeting at the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, Steinhauer repeated his warnings, but Lody "only laughed at me and told me my fears were groundless." Steinhauer regarded Lody's ability to carry out his mission as "practically nil" and warned the Chief of Naval Intelligence not to send him to the UK, but the warning went unheeded. He recalled that "as he had specially volunteered for the task – and I must admit there were very few people in Berlin just then anxious to accompany him – they allowed him to go."
As Steinhauer noted in his autobiography, the UK was a dangerous environment for a foreign agent. Only five years previously, the country had not had a dedicated counter-espionage organisation. In 1909 a series of spy scares fanned by the press led to the establishment of the Secret Service Bureau, jointly headed by Captain Vernon Kell and Lieutenant-Commander Mansfield Cumming. They soon split their responsibilities; Kell took charge of counter-espionage, while Cumming focused on foreign intelligence. These two divisions of the Secret Service Bureau eventually became two independent intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6. The bureau quickly identified a list of possible German agents in the UK. Just before the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, chief constables across Britain and Ireland were instructed to arrest suspects in their areas. This was done quickly and a number of German agents were caught, crippling German intelligence operations in the UK at a crucial moment in the war. Steinhauer himself had been lucky to escape arrest; he was known by name to the British authorities and he had been spying on the Royal Navy in Scotland as recently as late June 1914.
## Scotland
Lody embarked on his mission "so hastily that he did not even have time to learn a code that might have assisted him to get his messages through", according to Steinhauer Posing as an American tourist, Lody left Berlin on 14 August, travelling via Denmark to the Norwegian port of Bergen. There he boarded a ship that took him to Newcastle, arriving on the evening of 27 August. He took a train to the North British Hotel (now the Balmoral Hotel) adjacent to Edinburgh Waverley railway station. On 30 August, he sent a telegram from Edinburgh's main post office to an Adolf Burchard at 4 Drottninggatan, Stockholm – a cover address for a German agent in Sweden. The message said: "Must cancel Johnson very ill last four days shall leave shortly" and was signed "Charles". As it was an overseas telegram, he had to sign for it with his full (alias) name.
The Secret Service Bureau's counter-espionage section had by now become part of the War Office's Directorate of Military Operations and was known as MO5(g). At the outbreak of war it instituted widespread censorship of letters and telegrams sent abroad. From 4 August all mails from the UK to Norway and Sweden had been brought to London for examination to identify any being sent to suspect addresses. Fatally for Lody, MO5(g) was already aware that the Stockholm address was that of a German agent, and was watching for correspondence using the "Johnson" formula employed in Lody's telegram. "Burchard" was later identified as a German agent by the name of K. Leipziger. After Lody sent his telegram to "Burchard", exposing his "Charles Inglis" alias on the telegram form, MO5(g)'s Letter Interception Unit conducted a back-tracking exercise to find any other messages sent to the same place. One of MO5(g)'s censors later described the scene at Salisbury House in London, where the Letter Interception Unit was based:
> Several names were written on a large blackboard which hung on the wall, plainly visible, and we had to keep a sharp look-out for any mention of these in letters we read. The names were those of persons suspected of sending information to Germany via neutral countries. In addition, a short sentence was scribbled up on this board: 'Johnson is ill'. The Admiralty knew that somewhere in Britain a German officer was travelling about who intended to use this formula to convey the news of certain movements of the British fleet.
The "Johnson" telegram reached its destination and was only identified retrospectively by the British authorities. It was said to have indicated the presence of four British battleships, though the censors took its meaning to be that "he was being watched and in danger & would have to leave Edinburgh which he did later on."
Having inadvertently exposed his assumed identity, Lody's subsequent communications came under close scrutiny by MO5(g). He left his Edinburgh hotel on 1 September, and moved to a boarding-house in Drumsheugh Gardens, where he gave his name as Charles A. Inglis of New York City and paid as a weekly boarder. Three days later he sent a letter in English to the same Stockholm address, enclosing an envelope with a second letter, in German and addressed to Berlin. This was intercepted by the British authorities, opened, photographed, sealed again and sent on to Sweden. A post-war report by MI5, the successor organisation to MO5(g), explains that it was treated this way "in the hope of learning more."
In this instance MO5(g) was happy to let Lody's letters go through as they contained information that was wildly misleading and caused serious (and needless) worry to the German High Command. Lody had heard the widespread rumour that thousands of Russian troops with "snow on their boots" had passed through Scotland en route to the Western Front, and relayed it to his controllers in Berlin:
> Will you kindly communicate with Berlin at once by wire (code or whatever system at your disposal) and inform them that on Sept. 3rd great masses of Russian soldiers have passed through Edinburgh on their way to London and France. Although it must be expected that Berlin has knowledge of these movements, which probably took its start at Archangel, it may be well to forward this information. It is estimated here that 60,000 men have passed, numbers which seem greatly exaggerated. I went to the depot [station] and noticed trains passing through at high speed, blinds down. The landing in Scotland took place at Aberdeen. Yours very truly Charles.
Lody's information was entirely inaccurate and had been gleaned, as he was to admit at his trial, purely from rumours: "I heard it in the boarding-house and I heard it in the barber's shop." His second letter, in German, was addressed to "Herr Stammer" at German naval intelligence in Courbierestrasse, Berlin, and contained details of British naval losses and vessels stationed at Leith and Grangemouth. He had obtained details of the naval vessels simply by climbing Calton Hill in Edinburgh and observing the panorama from the summit, and by taking a promenade along the seafront at Grangemouth, used by thousands of citizens as a popular excursion. He was worried about the risks that he was taking and stated in his letter that he would not go near any place where he could be challenged, or where barricades and restrictions prevented access. His lack of training or preparation meant that these letters, like all of his communications, were written with no attempt at concealment whatsoever – no code or invisible ink – and were composed entirely en clair in ordinary written English or German.
On 7 September, Lody went to a cycle shop at Haymarket Terrace to hire a bicycle. He told the owner's daughter that he was an American from New York who was sojourning in Edinburgh after the outbreak of war had spoiled a holiday in Europe. He was staying there for a few days while he waited for a berth to become available on a ship to America, as all the transatlantic vessels were fully booked with returnees. He said that he wanted to cycle to places around Edinburgh such as Rosyth and Queensferry and arranged to hire a bicycle. The owner's daughter warned him that some roads were now guarded and he should stop immediately if challenged by a sentry, to which he replied, "Oh, I am only going to be cycling about for pleasure!"
For the next week, Lody followed a routine of staying in his room until noon, going out for the afternoon and returning between 5 and 7 pm. He sometimes went out on his bicycle again in the evening. He spent his time looking for information and on 14 September sent a second envelope to Stockholm. This time it was merely a wrapper containing a second envelope, inside which was a letter addressed to the editor of a Berlin newspaper, Ullstein Verlag, in which Lody said:
> Enclosed cutting from the Edinburgh The News of the World. Typical for the English way of causing ill-feeling and at the same time characteristic of the perfect ignorance of journalists in this country regarding the difference between military weapons and military tools. But this does not make any difference, the population here believe everything. Yours truly Nazi.
This too was intercepted and photographed but, as it was a relatively harmless letter, it was forwarded on while the British authorities continued to monitor Lody's communications in the hope of finding out more about the German espionage network. The day after sending it, on 15 September, Lody travelled to London to reconnoitre the city's war preparations. Travelling light, he stayed for two nights at the Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury (now the Bloomsbury Street Hotel) and set to work finding information about the security measures at public buildings. He said later that he had not actually observed the buildings himself but had obtained cuttings from newspapers, which he intended to send to Berlin. He also wrote a report on 16 September, but claimed that he had never sent it – it was never found by the British – as he felt that it was poorly written.
Lody returned to Edinburgh on 17 September, taking the train from King's Cross to Edinburgh. He met a young Scottish woman, Ida McClyment, gave her his card and talked with her a while before going into another carriage to smoke. There he overheard a conversation between two men, one apparently a submariner travelling to the naval base at Rosyth and the other a sailor who talked about Harwich. Lody later professed his surprise at how the two men were "talking in a rather free way, considering the present times". One of the men talked about the difficulties of serving on a submarine, while the other asked Lody: "What country are you? Are you from the other side?" Lody replied, "Yes, I am an American." They began discussing the war and talked about the recent sinking of the cruiser HMS Pathfinder, which had become the first ship ever to be sunk by a torpedo fired by a submarine. The sailor told Lody, "We are going to put out mines as the Germans have done so. We have a big surprise in store for the Germans." Lody was not convinced and, after shaking hands with the sailor, left the smoking car.
Lody went back to his lodgings at Drumsheugh Gardens and continued to walk and cycle around the area. He made the acquaintance of two girls he met on Princes Street and went out with them on a couple of evenings. He gave up cycling after an accident on 25 September, in which he collided with a bicycle being ridden by one of his landlady's friends while riding from Peebles to Edinburgh, causing her "some little injury". He returned his damaged bicycle to the shop where he had rented it.
On 27 September, Lody wrote another letter in German to "Burchard", enclosing press cuttings about the chivalry of British seamen and the sinking of the cruisers HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue. The letter included a good deal of detailed information about naval movements and fortifications, such as the artillery defences of North Berwick, Kinghorn and North and South Queensferry. It was clear by now to Lody that his mission was not going successfully. The decisive naval battle that the German Admiralty had anticipated had not happened, and Lody was becoming increasingly fearful for his personal security. He said later:
> I was in Edinburgh and I had nothing to do, and simply spent my time. I was terribly nervous. I was unaccustomed to it, and I was frightened walking about Edinburgh. I had this suit made. I was frightened to go about.
The environment in Lody's boarding-house was becoming increasingly hostile; his hosts were growing suspicious of him. Their doubts grew as the ongoing espionage scare progressed. He had stayed there for more than three weeks and his evasive answers when questioned about when he expected to leave did not satisfy them. When they said that his accent appeared to be "more German than American", he knew it was time to go. He wrote in his letter of 27 September that "the fear of espionage is very great and every day I see some Germans going to Redford Barracks under the escort of a soldier ... It is advisable for me to vanish for a few days, and to change my place of abode. I can only hope that my telegraphic and letter information have duly arrived." He told his controllers that he would go to Ireland, disembarking at Dublin as it was the only Irish port not closed to foreigners. Despite his hopes, his letter was intercepted by the British; this time it was retained as the information therein was of genuine military value.
## Journey to Ireland and capture
Lody left his boarding-house hastily on the morning of 27 September and stayed overnight at the Roxburgh Hotel in Edinburgh. He left some of his luggage there, telling the manageress that he would be away for about eight days, and travelled the next day to Liverpool, where he took a room at the London and North Western Hotel on Lime Street. He bought a ticket to Ireland and took the SS Munster to Dublin via Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire). It stopped at Holyhead in Anglesey, where an immigration official challenged Lody. His American travel documents proved sufficient to demonstrate his bona fides, and he proceeded on his way.
Lody's controllers realised that his mission was not going according to plan and attempted to get in touch with him to provide assistance. A letter dated 8 September was sent to Charles A. Inglis c/o Thomas Cook, Edinburgh, but he never collected it, and may never have been aware of it. Another German agent, Paul Daelen, was ordered to go to Britain and provide Lody with a new cover address. Daelen reached England too late. Lody had already travelled to Ireland without giving his controllers a means of contacting him.
During his journey to Ireland, Lody met a Minneapolis doctor, John William Lee, who had been studying eye, ear, nose and throat diseases in Vienna before the outbreak of war had compelled him to leave. Lee was planning to travel back to New York aboard the RMS Baltic, leaving Queenstown (now Cobh) on 7 October, and intended to spend a few days exploring Ireland before his departure. Lody asked where Lee was planning to stay in Dublin; Lee told him that it would probably be the Gresham Hotel on Sackville Street, to which Lody replied, "All right, let's go there." They travelled together to the hotel, booked into separate rooms, had dinner together and went to the Empire Theatre. Lody told Lee that he had been based in Germany working for an American adding-machine company. When the conversation turned to the war, Lody opined that the German army was a very well-trained body of strong-bodied and enduring men, and that it would be hard to beat them. The following day they had breakfast together and went for a walk in Phoenix Park.
While Lee was exchanging some money at Thomas Cook on 30 September, Lody wrote a further letter in German to "Burchard", clarifying his reasons for coming to Ireland and describing what he had seen on his journey. He explained:
> I think it is absolutely necessary to disappear for some time because several people have approached me in a disagreeable manner. That does not happen to me only, but several Americans here have told me that they are sharply watched. Fear of espionage is very great and one smells a spy in every stranger.
Lody described anti-Zeppelin precautions he had heard about in London and provided details of the conversions of the Cunard Line steamships RMS Aquitania and Lusitania for their wartime service, which he had seen while in Liverpool. Once again the letter was intercepted by the British and not allowed to go forward to Stockholm. Lody and Lee spent another evening in Dublin before going on a day-trip by coach to Glendalough to see the lough and the surrounding countryside. On 2 October they parted with an agreement to meet again in Killarney the following day. Lee travelled to Drogheda, where he stayed overnight, while Lody went straight to Killarney and found a room at the Great Southern Hotel (now the Malton Hotel).
Lody was unaware that his latest letters had galvanised the British authorities into action. They had hitherto been content with merely monitoring his communications but the militarily significant content of his most recent letters caused them to consider him now to be a serious threat. It did not take them long to catch up with him. His lack of even basic security precautions had left the authorities with a trail of clues that enabled them to track him down in less than a day.
While Lody was travelling to Killarney on the morning of 2 October, an Edinburgh City Police detective was ordered to enquire at hotels for a person named Inglis. The detective found that Lody had stayed at the Roxburgh Hotel and was shown his luggage, which still had a label attached bearing the name and address Charles A. Inglis, Bedford House, 12 Drumsheugh Gardens. An interview with the proprietor of the boarding-house where Lody had stayed enabled the police to reconstruct his movements, while the manageress of the Roxburgh was able to tell them that he had gone to Ireland.
The police sent a report to Lieutenant-Colonel Vernon Kell of MO5(g) on the same day to summarise their findings, and put a constant watch on the Roxburgh in case Lody returned. In the meantime, MO5(g) contacted the Irish Sea ports to find whether Lody had passed through them. Affirmative answers came back from Liverpool and Holyhead. Later that same afternoon MO5(g) sent a telegram to the Assistant Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin, which read:
> Suspected German Agent believed to be passing in name of CHARLES INGLIS as American Subject travelled from Edinburgh after 26 Sept via Liverpool & Holyhead where his passport noted and name taken. Stayed last night Gresham Hotel Dublin believed moving on to Belfast. Should be arrested and all documents seized minutest search necessary probably has code with him. Important to get specimens of his handwriting if possible. Kindly wire result.
The RIC made the investigation a top priority and replied to London at 7.23 pm on 2 October:
> Dr John Lea [sic] of United States arrived in Dublin on 29th with Charles Inglis and stayed at same hotel Inglis has gone to the Country today Lea will join him there tomorrow should he be arrested also description 35 years five feet eight sallow complexion darkened cropped moustache. Had a letter from Austria with him. Inspector General RIC.
At 9.45 pm, District Inspector Cheeseman of the RIC arrived at the Great Southern Hotel in Killarney with a group of constables. He found Lody's name in the visitors' book and went to his room, but did not find him there. Returning to the foyer, Cheeseman saw Lody entering the hotel. He said: "Mr. Inglis, I presume?" to which Lody replied, "Yes, what do you want?" Cheeseman asked him to come to his hotel room and noted that Lody looked upset and frightened. He arrested Lody under the provisions of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 (DORA) as a suspected German agent, prompting Lody to exclaim, "What is this? Me, a German agent? Take care now; I am an American citizen." When he was searched, his American identity documents were found along with £14 in German gold, 705 Norwegian krone and a small notebook. The latter listed British ships that had been sunk in the North Sea, names and addresses in Hamburg and Berlin and a possible cypher key. It also included copies of the four letters that he had sent to Stockholm. His bag contained a jacket that contained a tailor's ticket reading "J. Steinberg, Berlin, C.H. Lody, 8.5.14".
Throughout all this, Lody's demeanour was relatively calm after the initial shock. Cheeseman observed that Lody only appeared uneasy when his notebook was being examined; the inspector later commented that Lody was not the usual class of man he was accustomed to dealing with, but admitted that he had never met a man under precisely similar circumstances. Cheeseman had been educated in Germany, knew the language and felt able to recognise a German accent; he noticed that Lody's American accent slipped from time to time, presumably due to stress, and became convinced that the man was German.
Lee was also arrested but was released without charge after two days when the investigation cleared him of any involvement in Lody's espionage. He complained about his treatment and the British authorities' refusal to let him see an American consul, and promised to take the matter up with the US State Department on his return. An MO5(g) officer named R.H. Price smoothed things over with him on his release on 4 October, explaining what had prompted his arrest and paying his fare back to his hotel. Price reported, "I think he was quite soothed and he shook hands with me on parting." Lee was unaware that the police had already recommended that both he and "Inglis" should be court-martialled and shot if found guilty.
## Legal complications
Lody was taken back to London, where he was detained in Wellington Barracks under the watch of the 3rd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards. A meeting of the Cabinet on 8 October decided to try him for "war treason", a decision that has been described as "legally, very curious" by the legal historian A. W. B. Simpson. He was not charged with espionage under either of the two relevant statutes, the Official Secrets Act 1911 or DORA. The principal reason lay in the wording of the Hague Convention of 1907, which states: "A person can only be considered a spy when, acting clandestinely or on false pretences, he obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party." Lody was operating in the British Isles, outside the zone of operations, and was therefore not covered by this definition. Such circumstances had been anticipated by the most recent edition of the British Manual of Military Law, published in February 1914, which recommended that individuals in such cases should be tried for war treason: "Indeed in every case where it is doubtful whether the act consists of espionage, once the fact is established that an individual has furnished or attempted to furnish information to the enemy, no time need be wasted in examining whether the case corresponds exactly to the definition of espionage."
War treason as defined by the Manual covered a very wide range of offences, including "obtaining, supplying and carrying of information to the enemy" or attempting to do so. Its application in Lody's case, rather than the government relying on DORA, was the result of a misunderstanding by the War Office. It had been misinformed in August 1914 that an unidentified German had been captured with a radio transmitter and interned in Bodmin Prison. In fact, no such person existed, but the story led Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, to ask the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, for advice on how the supposed spy should be dealt with. Haldane stated that the individual should be put before a court martial and executed if found guilty. He wrote:
> If an alien belligerent is caught in this country spying or otherwise waging war he can, in my opinion, be Court Martialled and executed. The mere fact that he is resident here and has what is popularly called a domicile is not enough ... When war breaks out an alien becomes prima facie an outlaw ... if he is a spy or takes up arms ... and he becomes a person without legal rights. By international law he must have a trial before punishment but the trial may be by Court Martial. He cannot invoke the jurisdiction of the civil courts.
This theory was relied upon by the Cabinet and the Army Council, which ordered on 9 August that Lody was to be tried by a court martial. There was some confusion about whether Haldane had really meant a court martial rather than a military tribunal, and the Adjutant General questioned whether DORA had limited the maximum punishment for espionage to penal servitude for life, rather than the death penalty. Further confusion was caused by the fact that Lody's identity had not yet been fully established. If he really was an American citizen, he was not an "alien belligerent" and could not be court martialled.
On 21 October 1914 the Cabinet decided that Lody should be handed over to the civil police and tried by the High Court. After Lody then made a statement voluntarily admitting his real name and his status as a German subject, the Cabinet determined the following day that the original plan would be followed after all. The venue for the court martial was to be the Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square; Major General Lord Cheylesmore would preside, sitting with eight other officers. In hindsight, according to Simpson, it is doubtful whether the charge and eventual sentence were lawful. A later revision of the Manual of Military Law rejected the view that a spy commits a war crime and alluded to the Lody case in suggesting that war treason was not an applicable charge in such cases. Simpson comments that "it is fairly plain that Lody's execution was unlawful under domestic and international law." This objection was not raised during Lody's trial but it would not have done him any good in any case, as there was no appeal for a decision made by a court martial. In the event, Lody's trial was unique. No other spies captured in Britain were tried for war treason under international law. DORA was amended in November 1914 to permit a death sentence to be imposed. All of the subsequent 26 courts martial of accused spies were heard under DORA, resulting in 10 executions.
Another question that arose was whether Lody's trial should be held in public or in camera. Captain Reginald Drake, MO5(g)'s head of counter-espionage, wanted Lody to be tried secretly so that he could implement "an ingenious method for conveying false information to the enemy which depended on their not knowing which of their agents had been caught." He was overruled, as the British Government believed that it would be more advantageous to publicise the threat of German spies to remove any doubt in the public mind that German espionage posed a serious threat in the UK. It was hoped that this would also generate support for the intelligence and censorship apparatus that was rapidly taking shape and would deter possible imitators. In the event, Lody's was the only spy trial in either World War held in public in the UK. In pursuing this policy the government sacrificed the chance to "turn" captured spies and turn them into assets for the British intelligence services. It was an opportunity that was taken in the Second World War when the highly successful Double-Cross System was implemented.
## Trial
The court martial was held over three days between Friday 30 October and Monday 2 November. Lody was charged with two offences of war treason concerning the two letters he had sent from Edinburgh on 27 September and Dublin on 30 September. In both letters, the charge sheet stated that Lody had sought "to convey to a belligerent enemy of Great Britain, namely Germany" information relating to the UK's defences and preparations for war. He pleaded not guilty to both charges. He made an immediate impression on observers when he first appeared in court. The Daily Express reporter described him as:
> a South German in appearance – a short, well-built man of thirty-eight [sic - actually 37], with a broad, low forehead that slopes backward, black hair parted in the middle and brushed backward, a broad, short nose, large, deep-set, dark eyes with a look of keen intelligence in their depths, and tight-set lips.
Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, set out the case for the prosecution. The evidence was overwhelming; the prosecution case highlighted the contents of Lody's notebook and the luggage that he had left at the Roxburgh Hotel, and called a series of witnesses, including the elderly Scottish woman who ran the boarding-house in which he had stayed in Edinburgh and the fashionably dressed Ida McClyment, who caused a stir when she described her meeting with Lody aboard the London to Edinburgh train. Bodkin did not read the incriminating letters aloud, due to the sensitivity of their content, but described them in general terms. The witnesses testified about their interactions with Lody and identified him as the man who had posed as "Charles A. Inglis", though the proprietress of the Edinburgh boarding-house experienced some difficulty. When she "was asked if she could see 'Charles A. Inglis' in court, [she] looked everywhere except at the dock. Lody, who was sitting, stood up and gently waved his hands to attract her attention, while he smiled broadly and almost broke into laughter at the absurdity of the situation."
Late on 30 October, Lody wrote to a friend in Omaha to tell him about his feelings before he began his defence. He told his friend:
> I am prepared to make a clean breast of all this trouble, but I must protect my friends in the Fatherland and avoid as much possible humiliation for those who have been near and dear to me.
>
> I am in the Tower [sic – actually Wellington Barracks]. Hourly while I am confined here an unfriendly guard paces the corridor. My counsellor [George Elliot QC] is an attorney of standing, but I ofttimes feel that he is trying to do his duty to his country rather than defend his client. Next week I shall know my fate, although there can hardly be a doubt as to what it is to be. I have attended to such legal matters as were necessary, but whether my wishes will ever be carried out I do not know.
>
> You may have an opportunity to say a word to some of those for whom I feel an interest. Ask them to judge me not harshly, When they hear of me again, doubtless my body shall have been placed in concrete beneath this old tower, or my bones shall have made a pyre. But I shall have served my country. Maybe some historian will record me among the despised class of war victims ... Doubtless my demise shall be heralded as that of a spy, but I have spiritual consolation. Others have suffered and I must accept the reward of fate.
The second day of the trial was interrupted when a young man whom The Times described as being "of foreign appearance" was arrested and removed from the court on the orders of Captain Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence. The interloper was one Charles Stuart Nairne, an Irishman and former Royal Navy lieutenant whom Hall spotted in the public gallery and considered to be "either a lunatic or a very dangerous person". As Nairne was being removed into military custody, he attempted to shake Lody's hand in the dock.
Lody was then called to give evidence. It was revealed to the public for the first time that he was an officer in the Imperial German Navy and that he had been ordered by a superior officer to spy in Britain. When he was asked for the name of that individual, his composure temporarily deserted him, as The Times' reporter recorded:
> For the space of perhaps half a minute the prisoner hesitated, and then, in a voice broken by gradually deepening emotion, said, "I have pledged my word not to give that name. I cannot do it. Where names are found in my documents I certainly do not feel I have broken my word, but that name I cannot give. I have given my word of honour."
>
> The prisoner sobbed a moment, then turned pale, and gazed before him in a dazed manner. Recovering his self-possession he said, "I beg pardon; my nerves have given way." A glass of water was handed up to the prisoner.
Lody stated that he had been sent to the UK "to remain until the first [naval] encounter had taken place between the two Powers, and to send accurate information as regards the actual losses of the British Fleet", as well as to observe what he could of Fleet movements off the coast. The court martial went into an in camera session while sensitive evidence was being heard. Lody claimed that he had asked in August to be erased from military service on the grounds of poor health and to be allowed to travel to the United States. This was refused, he went on, but a member of naval intelligence whom he had previously never met coaxed him into undertaking a mission in the UK on the condition that he could go to the US afterwards. Lody told the tribunal that he was not pressured but that "I have never been a coward in my life and I certainly would not be a shirker", and that he had persisted with his mission because "once a man has promised to do a thing he does it, that is the understanding." His services were provided "absolutely as an honour and free", while he had never intended to be a spy: "I was pressed for secret service, but not as a spy – oh, no. If that would have been mentioned to me at Berlin I surely would have refused. The word in the sentence, I do not think it goes together." He claimed that he had "pledged my word of honour" not to name his controller.
Little of this was true, but at the time the British had no way of knowing this. The files of the Admiralstab in Berlin show that he was approached by N, rather than volunteering for intelligence service, entered their employment as early as May 1914 (rather than in August as he claimed), received regular pay rather than being unpaid, and intended to return to Berlin on completing his mission. It is unknown whether he really had any intention of going to the US, and there is no indication from the Admiralstab files that he had been asked to keep his controller's name a secret. After hearing Lody's evidence the court martial was adjourned until the following Monday.
On the final day of the court martial, 2 November 1914, the prosecution and defence put forward their final arguments. Lody's counsel argued for mitigation on the grounds that Lody had "[come] to this country actuated by patriotic German motives, entirely paying his own expenses and carrying his life in his hands, to fulfil the mandate of his supporters." As one newspaper report put it,
> He wished to go down to his final fate as a brave man, an honest man, and as an open-hearted man. There was no suggestion of an attempt at pleading for mercy or for favourable treatment. "Englishmen will not deny him respect for the courage he has shown," said Mr. Elliott. "His own grandfather, an old soldier, held a fortress against Napoleon ... He knows that he carried his life in his hands, and he stands before the Court in that spirit ... And he will face the decision of the Court like a man." Lody was asked if he had any statement to make but said, "I have nothing more to say."
The finding of guilt and sentence of death were pronounced in camera, without Lody present, before the court martial was adjourned.
## Execution
No public announcement was made of the court martial's verdict. Instead, the following day, the General Officer Commanding London District, Sir Francis Lloyd, was sent instructions ordering the sentence to be promulgated on 5 November, with Lody being told, and for the sentence to be carried out at least 18 hours later. Great secrecy surrounded the proceedings which, when combined with the short timeframe, caused problems for the GOC in finding a suitable place of execution. He contacted Major-General Henry Pipon, the Major of the Tower of London, to tell him:
> I have been directed to carry out the execution of the German Spy who has been convicted by General Court Martial. The time given me has been short, so short that I have had only a few hours to arrange and have been directed to keep it secret. Under the circumstances the Tower is the only possible place and has been approved by the War Office.
While the Tower may have been "the only possible place", in some respects it was a strange choice. It had not been used as a state prison for many years and the last execution there – that of Lord Lovat, the Jacobite rebel – had taken place in 1747. It was one of London's most popular tourist attractions, recording over 400,000 visitors a year by the end of the 19th century, and remained open to tourists even on the day of Lody's execution. During the Tower's heyday, executions had been carried out in the open air on Tower Hill or Tower Green, but Lody's execution was to take place at the Tower's rifle range located in the eastern part of the Outer Ward between Martin and Constable Towers, behind the Outer Curtain wall and out of public sight. The Tower's custodians, the Yeomen Warders ("Beefeaters"), had long since become tourist guides rather than active-duty soldiers, so eight men were selected from the 3rd Battalion, to carry out the sentence.
Lody was informed of his impending execution on the evening of 5 November and was brought to the Tower in a police van. According to the Daily Express, he "received the news calmly and with no sign of surprise." He was held in the Casemates on the west side of the Tower, an area where the Yeoman Warders now live. His last meal was probably prepared by one of the Warders' wives, as the Tower had no proper accommodation or dining facilities for prisoners. While at the Tower he wrote a couple of final letters. One was addressed to the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Battalion to thank his captors for their care of him:
> Sir,
>
> I feel it my duty as a German officer to express my sincere thanks and appreciation towards the staff of officers and men who were in charge of my person during my confinement.
>
> Their kind and considered treatment has called my highest esteem and admiration as regards good fellowship even towards the enemy and if I may be permitted, I would thank you for making this known to them.
The Guards apparently never saw the letter; the Adjutant General instead directed the letter to be placed in a War Office file rather than being sent to the regiment.
Lody also wrote a letter to his sister, which was published posthumously in the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper, in which he told her and his other relatives:
> My dear ones,
>
> I have trusted in God and He has decided. My hour has come, and I must start on the journey through the Dark Valley like so many of my comrades in this terrible War of Nations. May my life be offered as a humble offering on the altar of the Fatherland.
>
> A hero's death on the battlefield is certainly finer, but such is not to be my lot, and I die here in the Enemy's country silent and unknown, but the consciousness that I die in the service of the Fatherland makes death easy.
>
> The Supreme Court-Martial of London has sentenced me to death for Military Conspiracy. Tomorrow I shall be shot here in the Tower. I have had just Judges, and I shall die as an Officer, not as a spy.
>
> Farewell. God bless you,
>
> Hans.
Lody also left instructions that his ring was to be forwarded to his ex-wife, which was carried out after his execution.
At dawn on the morning of 6 November 1914, in cold, foggy and bleak weather, Lody was fetched from his cell by the Assistant Provost-Marshal, Lord Athlumney. He asked, "I suppose that you will not care to shake hands with a German spy?", to which the reply came, "No. But I will shake hands with a brave man." A small procession formed up for the short journey to the rifle range, comprising Lody and his armed escort, the Tower's Chaplain and the eight-man firing squad. John Fraser, one of the Yeoman Warders, witnessed it and later described it:
> Nobody liked this sort of thing. It was altogether too cold-blooded for an ordinary stomach (particularly that of a soldier, who hates cold-bloodedness) to face with equanimity, and it is not too much to say that, of that sad little procession, the calmest and most composed member was the condemned man himself.
>
> For the Chaplain, in particular, it was a bad time. He had never had a similar experience, and his voice had a shake in it as he intoned the solemn words of the Burial Service over the living form of the man it most concerned . . .
>
> The escort and the firing-party, too, were far from comfortable, and one could see that the slow march suitable to the occasion was getting badly on their nerves. They wanted to hurry over it, and get the beastly business finished.
>
> But the prisoner walked steadily, stiffly upright, and yet as easily and unconcernedly as though he was going to a tea-party, instead of to his death. His eyes were upturned to the gloomy skies, and his nostrils eagerly drank in the precious air that was soon to be denied them. But his face was quite calm and composed – almost expressionless.
At the rifle range Lody was strapped into a chair. He refused to have his eyes bandaged, as he wished to die with his eyes open. A few moments later the inhabitants of the Tower heard "the muffled sound of a single volley". His body was taken away to be buried in an unmarked grave in the East London Cemetery in Plaistow. The War Office issued a terse announcement of the execution a few days later on 10 November: "Sentence is duly confirmed."
## Reaction
Lody's courageous demeanour in court produced widespread sympathy and admiration, a development that neither side had anticipated. Even his captors were captivated; although MO5(g) had recommended his execution as early as 3 October, by the time the trial was over, Kell was said by his wife to have considered Lody a "really fine man" of whom Kell "felt it deeply that so brave a man should have to pay the death penalty for carrying out what he considered to be his duty to his country." Sir Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard commented that "there was some difference of opinion as to whether it was sound policy to execute spies and to begin with a patriotic spy like Lody." According to Robert Jackson, the biographer of Lody's prosecutor Sir Archibald Bodkin, Lody's "bearing and frankness when caught so impressed Britain's spy-catchers and prosecutors that they talked about trying to get the Government to waive the internationally recognised rule that spies caught in wartime automatically are put to death. Only the certainty that Germany would not be as merciful to our own spies made them refrain." Thomson also paid tribute to Lody in his 1937 book The Scene Changes:
> Lody won the respect of all who came into contact with him. In the quiet heroism with which he faced his trial and his execution there was no suspicion of play-acting. He never flinched, he never cringed, but he died as one would wish all Englishmen to die – quietly and undramatically, supported by the proud consciousness of having done his duty.
Lody's conduct was contrasted favourably with the German spies captured after him, many of whom were nationals of neutral countries, who followed him to the execution chair. Lady Constance Kell commented that "most of the agents employed by the Germans worked only for the money they gained and were regarded with utter contempt". Similarly, Thomson described "the scum of neutral spies", of whom he said, "we came to wish that a distinction could have been made between patriotic spies like Lody and the hirelings who pestered us through the ensuing years". Shortly after Lody's death he was described in the House of Commons as "a patriot who had died for his country as much as any soldier who fell in the field."
The British and German publics also took a positive view of Lody. His trial became something of a celebrity occasion; as The New York Times observed, on the first day, "many fashionably dressed women thronged the galleries of the courtroom" and the final day was attended by "many leaders of London society as well as by prominent jurists, politicians, and military and naval men." The Daily Express opined that "one cannot withhold a tribute to his daring resourcefulness and inflexible courage" and called Lody "one of the cleverest spies in Steinhauer's service", though it advised its readers to bear in mind that he was "a most dangerous spy."
Louise Storz, Lody's former wife, received his ring in early December along with a letter from him. She refused to disclose its contents, saying, "It is his last message to me and in no way concerns anyone else. The ring had also been our wedding ring." She spoke of her reaction to his death in an interview in November 1914 with The Kansas City Star while visiting Excelsior Springs, Missouri. She said:
> My nerves are completely upset and I have come to this quiet place where I hope to escape even the loving sympathy of my many friends in Omaha. I want to forget. But the awfulness of such a fate, I fear, I cannot soon erase from my memory ... He was so fine in so many ways. Of fine learning, an accomplished linguist, and of high courage. He used to talk entrancingly of his love and devotion to his country. It must have been a beautiful thing, according to his way of thinking, to die if need be for his Fatherland. But I want to forget. I owe it to myself and my parents to call the chapter closed.
Her father refused to comment, saying that his interest in the Lody case was "only a passing one". A rumour had it that the German government paid Louise Storz \$15,000 in compensation for her ex-husband's death, but she denied this in 1915.
In Germany, Lody's home town of Nordhausen planted an oak tree in his memory. Newspaper commentary was limited; the first article about the case that The Times noted was only published around 19 November, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, in which a pseudonymous columnist suggested that the British might have been tempted to show Lody mercy: "I myself am convinced that the noble manliness with which this strong German composure bore itself before the Court touched the heart of the Judge, that the Judge said "If only we English had many such Hans Lodys!" and that Hans Lody lives ... We shall not forget him, for he staked his country more than his life – his name and his honour." A death notice was published in early December in the Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt, stating that he had "died the hero's death for the Fatherland in England, November 6".
Lody's death produced a low-key response from the German government. The Admiralstab recommended at the end of 1914 that he should be awarded a posthumous Iron Cross, Second Class, and argued that the recruitment of naval agents would be assisted if espionage could be rewarded with such a prestigious medal. The Kaiser agreed, though not without some reluctance.
The bravery Lody exhibited during his trial and execution was praised by many post-war British writers. Sir George Aston, writing in his 1930 book Secret Service, called on his readers to "pay a tribute to a real German spy of the highest type ... Karl Lody", while John Bulloch commented in his 1963 history of MI5 that Lody's bearing made him "something of a hero even in the country against which he was working." E.T. Woodhall, a former detective, collected accounts from officers who had been involved in the investigation and wrote in 1932: "They are unanimous in their admiration for his manly and brazen qualities, but they all criticise his amazing lack of caution ... He was admired by everybody for his bravery and straightforward, patriotic devotion to his country."
Lody may have had more complex motives than simple patriotism. Thomas Boghardt notes the "exceptional" way in which Lody bore himself at his trial, pointing out that "virtually all other German agents accused of espionage understandably tried to deny or minimise their involvement with N". Boghardt had the advantage of being able to review the Admiralstab's files on the case and highlights "small but important changes", or rather discrepancies, between Lody's statements in court and the facts preserved in the case files. As Boghardt puts it,
> All this suggests that Lody was less concerned with averting a harsh sentence than he was with projecting a certain image of himself, that of a patriot who, despite his reluctance to join the secret service, rendered his fatherland a final service before starting a new life in America; in short, a 'man of honour' rather than a traitorous spy. Until his death, Lody conformed superbly to this image ... During the last weeks of his life, Lody tried to shatter the negative image usually attached to spies, and in this regard he was utterly successful.
Lody, suggests Boghardt, "had accepted his trial and probable execution as a form of expiation for events that had occurred long before his becoming a secret agent." He raises the possibility that Lody was motivated by what had happened two years earlier in Omaha, when Lody had responded to the accusations of being a wife-beater by declaring that he would "defend the honour of a gentleman". Boghardt comments that "his eagerness to display his honour may indicate a concern that others doubted this very quality in him. While presenting himself to the world as a man of honour and accepting his fate courageously, Lody may have found comfort and strength in the thought that whoever had doubted his honour previously would now be persuade otherwise."
## From spy to national hero
During the Nazi era, Lody's memory was appropriated by the new regime to promote a more muscular image of German patriotism. An elaborate commemoration of his death was held in Lübeck on 6 November 1934, when flags across the city flew at half-mast and bells tolled between 6.45 and 7 am, the time of his execution. Later that day a memorial was unveiled at the Burgtor gateway near the harbour, depicting a knight in armour with a closed visor (representing Lody), with his hands fettered (representing captivity) and a serpent entwining his feet (representing betrayal). Below it an inscription was set into the gate's brickwork, reading "CARL HANS LODY starb für uns 6.11.1914 im Tower zu London" ("Carl Hans Lody died for us 6.11.1914 in the Tower of London").
During the unveiling ceremony, which was attended by Lody's sister and representatives of the present Reichsmarine and old Imperial German Navy, the road leading from the gateway to the harbour was also renamed "Karl-Hans-Lody-Weg". On the same day, officers from the Hamburg-America Line presented city officials with a ship's bell bearing the inscription "In Memory of Karl Hans Lody", to be rung each 6 November at the time of his death. After World War II, when Lübeck was part of the British Zone of Occupation, the statue was taken down and the niche in which it stood was bricked up, though the inscription was allowed to remain and is still visible today.
Lody was further memorialised in 1937 when the newly launched destroyer Z10 was christened Hans Lody. Other ships in the same class were also given the names of German officers who had died in action. The ship served throughout the Second World War in the Baltic and North Sea theatres, survived the war and was captured by the British in 1945. After a few years in Royal Navy service she was scrapped in Sunderland in 1949.
Lody was also the subject of literary and stage works; a hagiographic biographical account, Lody – Ein Weg um Ehre (Lody – One Way to Honour), was published by Hans Fuchs in 1936 and a play called Lody: vom Leben und Sterben eines deutschen Offiziers (Lody: the life and death of a German officer), by Walter Heuer, premiered on Germany's National Heroes' Day in 1937. It depicts Lody as brave and patriotic but clumsy, leaving a trail of clues behind him as he travels in the UK: wearing clothes marked "Made in Germany", writing naval secrets on the back of a bus ticket which he loses and a Scotland Yard detective finds, coming to attention when an orchestra in London plays the German naval anthem, arousing suspicion when he calls for German wine while writing secret reports to Berlin, and leaving incriminating letters in the pockets of suits which he sends to be pressed. Lody is arrested in London and sentenced to death. Offered a chance to escape, he refuses and drinks a glass of wine with the firing squad, toasting Anglo-German friendship. He is led out to his execution, saying his final words: "I shall see Germany once more – from the stars." The Dundee Evening Telegraph described the storyline as "quaint".
The Lodystraße in Berlin was named in his honour.
## Burial
The 17-year-old Bertolt Brecht wrote a eulogy to Lody in 1915 in which he imagined the purpose behind the spy's death:
> > But that is why you left your life – So one day, in the bright sunshine German songs should pour forth in a rush over your grave, German flags should fly over it in the sun's gold, And German hands should strew flowers over it.
The reality was very different. Lody's body was buried in an unmarked common grave in the East London Cemetery in Plaistow, along with seventeen other men – ten executed spies and seven prisoners who died of ill-health or accidents. It was not until 1924 that the grave received a marker, at the instigation of the German Embassy. Lody's relatives were visiting it once a year and enquired whether his body could be exhumed and buried in a private grave. The War Office agreed, providing that the body could be identified, but the Foreign Office was more reluctant and pointed out that a licence for exhumation would have to be authorised by the Home Office. The Lody family placed a white headstone and kerb on the grave some time around 1934.
In September 1937 the German government again requested that Lody's body be exhumed and moved to a separate grave. This proved impractical for several reasons; he had been buried with seven other men, each coffin had been cemented down and the lapse of time would make identification very difficult. Instead, the British Imperial War Graves Commission suggested that a memorial should be constructed in another part of the cemetery to bear the names of all the German civilians who were buried there. The proposal met with German agreement and the memorial was duly installed. During the Second World War, Lody's original headstone was destroyed by misaimed Luftwaffe bombs. It was replaced in 1974.
One further proposal was made to rebury Lody in the 1960s. In 1959 the British and German governments agreed to move German war dead who had been buried in various locations around the UK to a new central cemetery at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The German War Graves Commission (VDK) asked if it would be possible to disinter Lody's body and move it to Cannock Chase. By that time, the plot had been reused for further common graves, buried above Lody's body. The VDK was told that it would not be possible to disinter the other bodies without the permission of the relatives, which would have been an almost impossible task where common graves were concerned. The proposal was abandoned and Lody's body remains at Plaistow.
|
58,420,325 |
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series
| 1,173,756,894 |
2019 American mockumentary television series
|
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"2010s American LGBT-related drama television series",
"2010s American high school television series",
"2010s American mockumentary television series",
"2010s American romantic comedy television series",
"2010s American teen drama television series",
"2019 American television series debuts",
"2020s American LGBT-related drama television series",
"2020s American high school television series",
"2020s American mockumentary television series",
"2020s American romantic comedy television series",
"2020s American teen drama television series",
"2023 American television series endings",
"American musical television series",
"Disney and LGBT",
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"Gay-related television shows",
"High School Musical: The Musical: The Series",
"Live action television shows based on films",
"Metafictional television series",
"Television productions suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic",
"Television series about teenagers",
"Television series based on Disney films",
"Television shows filmed in Los Angeles",
"Television shows filmed in Utah",
"Television shows set in Utah",
"Works about musical theatre"
] |
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series is an American mockumentary musical drama television series created for Disney+ by Tim Federle, inspired by the High School Musical film series. The series is produced by Chorus Boy and Salty Pictures in association with Disney Channel. Oliver Goldstick served as showrunner for the first four episodes; he was succeeded by Federle for the remainder of the first season and thereafter.
Set at a fictionalized version of East High School, the school at which the original movies were filmed, the first season follows a group of teenage theater enthusiasts who participate in a staging of High School Musical: The Musical as their school production. The series showcases a different featured musical in each following season, and explores the lives of the characters as they navigate friendships, love, interests, identity, and family relationships. The series stars Olivia Rodrigo, Joshua Bassett, Matt Cornett, Sofia Wylie, Larry Saperstein, Julia Lester, Dara Reneé, Frankie Rodriguez, Mark St. Cyr, Kate Reinders, Joe Serafini, Saylor Bell Curda, Adrian Lyles and Liamani Segura. Several cast members from the original film series also appear in guest roles as fictionalized versions of themselves.
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series premiered on Disney Channel, ABC, and Freeform as a preview simulcast on November 8, 2019, ahead of its launch on Disney+ on November 12; its first season consisted of 10 episodes. Before the series debuted, it was renewed by Disney+ for a second season of 12 episodes that premiered in May 2021. The third season consisting of eight episodes premiered in July 2022. The fourth and final season consisting of eight episodes premiered in August 2023. Critical reviews have highlighted the performances of the cast, particularly those of Bassett and Rodrigo, and compared the series to Glee for its music and themes. There has been a mixed reception to the program's mockumentary format. The series won a GLAAD Media Award, five Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, and was nominated for five Children's and Family Emmy Awards.
## Premise
At a fictionalized version of East High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, Miss Jenn begins work as the new drama teacher. The school holds significance as it is where the High School Musical films, a series of Disney Channel original movies, were filmed. Miss Jenn was a former background cast member in the film, and the teacher decides to stage a performance of High School Musical: The Musical for her first winter theater production to celebrate the school's affiliation with the original film. The club members cast in High School Musical: The Musical learn to navigate their interpersonal relationships while overcoming the challenges of the rehearsal process.
During the second season, the theater students of East High stage a production of Beauty and the Beast for the spring musical. Miss Jenn leads the cast in an attempt to win a prestigious local student theater competition while facing off against their rival school, North High. The third season is set outside of the school year and features the students attending a summer theater camp in California, called Camp Shallow Lake. The campers prepare a stage production of Frozen while a documentary series about the rehearsal process is filmed over the summer. The theater students return to East High in the fourth and final season to stage a production based on the film High School Musical 3: Senior Year. They later learn that a fictionalized film sequel entitled High School Musical 4: The Reunion is being filmed at the school, and that they will become extras in the film.
## Cast and characters
### Main
- Olivia Rodrigo as Nini Salazar-Roberts (seasons 1–2, recurring season 3), a musical theater enthusiast. She is cast as Gabriella Montez in the first season and in chorus roles in the second season. In the third season, she embarks on a road trip to California to pursue her career in singing and songwriting.
- Joshua Bassett as Ricky Bowen, a guitarist and skateboarder who previously dated Nini. In the first season, he is cast as Troy Bolton despite his initial lack of interest in musicals. He is cast as the Beast in the second season and Kristoff in the third season. He plays Troy again in the fourth season.
- Matt Cornett as E. J. Caswell (seasons 1–3, recurring season 4), Ashlyn's cousin and a jock theater enthusiast Nini previously met at camp. He is cast as Chad Danforth and the understudy for Troy in the first season. He is cast as Gaston in the second season and Sven in the third season while also directing the camp's production of Frozen. After graduating, he returns to play Coach Bolton for the second act of the production in the fourth season.
- Sofia Wylie as Gina Porter, a transfer student with theater ambitions. She is cast as Taylor McKessie and the understudy for Gabriella in the first season, Babette the Featherduster in the second season, Anna in the third season, and Gabriella Montez in the fourth season. Additionally, she is cast as the lead in High School Musical 4: The Reunion.
- Larry Saperstein as Big Red (seasons 1–2, guest season 3, recurring season 4), Ricky's best friend, who fills in as stage manager for the production whenever Natalie is unavailable, despite his lack of knowledge about theater. He is later shown to have hidden talents in tap dancing and knowledge of electronics. He auditions for the spring musical in the second season and is cast as Le Fou.
- Julia Lester as Ashlyn Caswell, E. J.'s cousin and an aspiring songwriter, who is cast as Ms. Darbus in the first season, as Belle in the second season, in the ensemble in the third season, and as Kelsi Nielsen in the fourth season.
- Dara Reneé as Kourtney Greene, Nini's best friend and a self-proclaimed feminist, who works in the musical's costuming department. She auditions for the musical in the second season and is cast in the role of Mrs. Potts, Elsa in the third season, and Sharpay Evans in the fourth season.
- Frankie Rodriguez as Carlos Rodriguez, the choreographer of the first two East High productions, who works alongside Miss Jenn and is cast as Lumière in the second season, Olaf in the third season, and Ryan Evans in the fourth season.
- Mark St. Cyr as Benjamin Mazzara (seasons 1–2, recurring season 4), East High's STEM teacher, who is initially against the school's support of performing arts. He portrays Coach Bolton in the first act of the fourth season's production.
- Kate Reinders as Miss Jenn (seasons 1–2 and 4, recurring season 3), East High's new drama teacher, who appeared in the original High School Musical film as a background dancer and directs the school's production. She portrays Ms. Darbus in the fourth season's production.
- Joe Serafini as Seb Matthew-Smith (season 2, recurring seasons 1 and 4, guest season 3), a student who is cast in the role of Sharpay Evans in the first season and as Chip in the second season
- Saylor Bell Curda as Maddox (season 3, recurring season 4), Jet's sister, a technology enthusiast and long-term camper who attends Camp Shallow Lake as a counselor-in-training, and is the stage manager for the productions in the third and fourth seasons.
- Adrian Lyles as Jet (season 3, recurring season 4), Maddox's brother, a reluctant new camper at Camp Shallow Lake who is cast as Hans in the camp's production. He is asked to play Chad Danforth in the fourth season.
- Liamani Segura as Emmy (season 4, recurring season 3), an eighth-grade camper who is a new participant in the musical and cast as Young Anna in the third season. She attends East High as a freshman in the fourth season and portrays Taylor McKessie.
### Recurring
- Alexis Nelis as Natalie Bagley (seasons 1–2, guest season 4), the stage manager for the production
- Nicole Sullivan as Carol (season 1, guest season 3), one of Nini's mothers
- Michelle Noh as Dana (season 1, guest season 3), one of Nini's mothers
- Jeanne Sakata as Malou (season 1), Nini's grandmother
- Alex Quijano as Mike Bowen (seasons 1–2 and 4), Ricky's father, whose wife is estranged and currently living in Chicago
- Valente Rodriguez as Principal Gutierrez (seasons 1 and 4), the principal of East High
- Beth Lacke as Lynne Bowen (season 1, guest seasons 2 and 4), Mike's ex-wife and Ricky's mother who returns to announce she and Mike are getting divorced
- Napiera Groves Boykin as Terri Porter (season 4, guest season 1), Gina's mother, who works for FEMA
- Derek Hough as Zack (season 2), Miss Jenn's ex-boyfriend, who teaches drama at North High and is an actor
- Olivia Rose Keegan as Lily (season 2, guest season 3), a competitive and pretentious new student at East High who misses out on a role in the musical and later transfers to North High. She is cast as Belle in their production
- Roman Banks as Howie (season 2), a student who works at Big Red's family pizzeria. He is cast as the Beast in North High's production
- Andrew Barth Feldman as Antoine (season 2, guest season 4), a method actor who poses as a French foreign exchange student at North High. He is cast as Lumière in their production.
- Kimberly Brooks as Michelle Greene (seasons 2–4), Kourtney's mother
- Jason Earles as Dewey Wood (season 3, guest season 4), the camp director of Camp Shallow Lake
- Corbin Bleu as himself (season 3, guest season 4), appearing at Camp Shallow Lake as the host of the documentary. Bleu played Chad Danforth in the original film series.
- Ben Stillwell as Channing (season 3), a camera operator who films a documentary series about the camp production of Frozen
- Meg Donnelly as Val (season 3), a college student who returns to the camp as a Counselor-in-Training and is the choreographer of the camp musical
- Aria Brooks as Alex (season 3), an eighth-grader and newcomer to the camp, who is cast as Young Elsa in the musical
- Matthew Sato as Mack Alana (season 4), a sitcom actor who is cast as Gina's love interest in High School Musical 4: The Reunion
- Kylie Cantrall as Dani (season 4), a popular social media personality who is hired to make her acting debut in High School Musical 4: The Reunion, but is fired soon after. She later portrays Tiara Gold in the school's production of High School Musical 3: Senior Year.
- Caitlin Reilly as Quinn Robbins (season 4), the film director of High School Musical 4: The Reunion
### Guest
- Kaycee Stroh as herself (seasons 1 and 4), a member of the school board. Stroh played Martha Cox in the original film series.
- Lucas Grabeel as himself (seasons 1 and 4). Grabeel played Ryan Evans in the original film series.
- Asher Angel as Jack (season 2), a boy from Denver whom Gina befriends at the airport
- Jordan Fisher as Jamie Porter (season 2), Gina's older brother who is a music producer
- Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Marvin (season 3), a friend and former colleague of Nini's mothers whom she meets again while in California, and discovers is her biological father
- JoJo Siwa as Madison (season 3), a former Camp Shallow Lake attendee who was previously in a relationship with Maddox
- Monique Coleman as herself (season 4). Coleman played Taylor McKessie in the original film series.
- Bart Johnson as himself (season 4). Johnson played Coach Bolton in the original film series.
- Alyson Reed as herself (season 4). Reed played Ms. Darbus in the original film series.
- Vasthy Mompoint as Krystal (season 4), the stand-offish choreographer of High School Musical 4: The Reunion
## Episodes
## Production
### Development
On November 9, 2017, Disney announced the development of a television series adaptation of their High School Musical film series created by Peter Barsocchini. The series was expected to premiere on the upcoming Disney+ streaming service, which was still unnamed at the time. Tim Federle was approached by the company, and he pitched the documentary-style series in January 2018. He went on to draft the pilot together with Disney Channel, who contributed to the production of the series. The series is also produced by companies Chorus Boy and Salty Pictures. Federle was first reported to be serving as a writer and executive producer for the series in May 2018. In September, Disney officially gave the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. Oliver Goldstick was expected to serve as showrunner and an additional executive producer while Julie Ashton would oversee the casting process. Alongside this announcement, the show was described as a mockumentary, and a list of character names and descriptions was released. By May 2019, Goldstick had departed the series over "creative differences", having served as showrunner for the first four episodes. Nellie Andreeva of Deadline Hollywood attributed Goldstick's departure to him wanting to incorporate more mature themes in the series. Federle assumed the position of showrunner for the remainder of the first season.
In October 2019, ahead of the release of the first season, Disney+ renewed the series for a second season. Federle stated that the second season's plot would not revolve around a production of High School Musical 2; in February 2020, the featured production was reported as Beauty and the Beast.
Disney+ renewed the series for a third season in September 2021. For its third season, the story is set at a sleep-away theater camp and takes place over the summer school break. It was teased in November that the featured production would be Frozen, which was confirmed in January 2022.
Ahead of the third-season premiere, Disney+ renewed the series for a fourth season in May 2022. It was announced in September that the featured musical would be based on the film High School Musical 3: Senior Year. In the season, the students return to East High where the filming of a fictionalized film, High School Musical 4: The Reunion, takes place. It was reported in June 2023 that the series would end with its fourth season.
On ending the series, Federle stated that the decision came about midway through production on the fourth season. He wanted to end the series on a positive note while the cast was still comfortable with one another and because the season tonally felt close to the first one. He also felt that he could not "out-meta Season 4", and wanted to end the series before the gimmick became too stale.
### Writing
Federle drew inspiration for the mockumentary style of the series from other films and programs such as Waiting for Guffman and The Office. He was inspired to create a series that depicted music as a central theme, while also drawing on his experience as a former Broadway performer.
The series is inclusive of LGBT representation, three gay characters being featured: Carlos, Seb, and Maddox, as well as two bisexual characters: Ashlyn and Big Red. In an interview with The Advocate, Frankie Rodriguez credited Federle for writing his character Carlos as gay without drawing on the tropes of a typical queer character. The character Seb plays the role of Sharpay in the musical, an example of non-traditional gender casting. The series begins the exploration of a same-sex relationship when Carlos asks Seb to the school dance in the episode "Homecoming". Ashlyn and Big Red come out in the third season; Federle stated that this had been suggested by Julia Lester and Larry Saperstein since the first season. The series further depicts same-sex parenting through Nini's two mothers Carol and Dana. The show also includes themes such as divorce and anxiety.
### Casting
Federle commented on the importance of casting real teenagers in main roles to add authenticity to the high school-based series. Joshua Bassett was cast in the leading role of Ricky in October 2018. The remainder of the cast was made public in February 2019: Olivia Rodrigo as Nini, Kate Reinders as Miss Jenn, Sofia Wylie as Gina, Matt Cornett as E. J., Dara Reneé as Kourtney, Julia Lester as Ashlyn, Frankie Rodriguez as Carlos, Larry Saperstein as Big Red, and Mark St. Cyr as Mr. Mazzara. Federle confirmed in November 2019 that an unnamed cast member from the original film would make a cameo appearance through a fantasy sequence. After being listed as a featured artist on the soundtrack, Lucas Grabeel, who played Ryan Evans, was confirmed to be making an appearance on the series. Grabeel appears in the episode "The Tech Rehearsal" as a fictionalized version of himself, performing in a song alongside Reinders. Kaycee Stroh, who played Martha Cox, also makes a cameo appearance in the episode "What Team?".
In December 2019, it was reported that Joe Serafini, who plays Seb Matthew-Smith, would be promoted to the main cast for the second season. Further additions to the recurring cast were revealed in early 2020: Roman Banks as Howie; Olivia Rose Keegan as Lily; and Derek Hough as Zack, Miss Jenn's ex-boyfriend. In February 2021, Andrew Barth Feldman and Asher Angel joined the cast for the second season in recurring guest roles, as Antoine and Jack respectively. That July, it was revealed that Jordan Fisher would guest star as Jamie Porter in the penultimate episode of the second season.
Time reported in December 2021 that Rodrigo would return for the third season, amidst speculation that she would not due to the success of her solo music career. It was later stated that Rodrigo would return in a recurring role as opposed to the series regular status she maintained in the first two seasons; Federle confirmed that Rodrigo would exit the show after the third season. The casting for the third season was made public in January 2022; Bassett, Cornett, Wylie, Lester, Reneé, and Rodriguez were also confirmed to be returning. Saylor Bell Curda and Adrian Lyles joined the cast as new series regulars, playing Maddox and Jet respectively. Further additions to the guest cast included Jason Earles as Dewey Wood and Meg Donnelly as Val. Corbin Bleu, who starred in the original film series, was also announced as a guest, playing himself. Three further recurring characters were revealed in March: Ben Stillwell, Aria Brooks, and Liamani Segura as Channing, Alex and Emmy respectively. Saperstein, Reinders, Serafini, and Keegan were listed as guests for the third season in May 2022; it was stated that Mark St. Cyr would not return. Two additions to the guest cast were revealed the following month: JoJo Siwa as Madison and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Marvin.
Federle stated in September 2022 that the fourth season would revolve around the characters Ricky, Gina, Ashlyn, Kourtney, and Carlos; it was later confirmed that Bassett, Wylie, Lester, Reneé, and Rodriguez would return. The casting announcement for the fourth season also revealed that Segura had been promoted to the main cast, and Reinders would return as a series regular. Federle confirmed that Rodrigo would not feature in the fourth season, but said that she could return to the series in the future. He said that he was in negotiations for original High School Musical cast members to star as guests in the season; it was announced that Bleu, Grabeel, and Stroh would return, joined by Monique Coleman, Bart Johnson and Alyson Reed, all playing themselves. Further additions to the recurring cast included Kylie Cantrall as Dani, Matthew Sato as Mack, Caitlin Reilly as Quinn, and Vashty Mompoint as Krystal.
### Filming
Production on the first season began on February 15, 2019, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Production on the second season commenced in February 2020, but was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Filming had resumed by November 2020. Filming for the third season began in January 2022 and concluded in April 2022; production of the series relocated from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Production returned to Salt Lake City for the filming of the fourth season, which ran from September to December 2022.
The mockumentary style of the series is achieved through the single-camera setup, with handheld cameras used to create shaky footage and zooming. Talking heads are also used; the characters talk directly to the camera to express their inner thoughts. The scenes containing shaky footage and talking heads represent the "present-day" in the story; flashbacks to Nini and Ricky's past relationship are filmed more similarly to other teen drama series.
### Music
The first season's soundtrack contains nine original songs, and one new composition featured in each episode. The majority of songs are performed live by the actors. Some actors played instruments such as a guitar in their performances. Rodrigo wrote an original song for the series, "All I Want", and co-wrote "Just for a Moment" with Bassett and music producer Dan Book. Federle stated that his original pitch included the idea of developing original songs for the series. Steve Vincent, who worked on the original films, served as the musical supervisor for the series and sourced several composers to write new music. He also received submissions from songwriters based in Los Angeles. The soundtrack for the first season, featuring new songs and renditions of songs from the original film, was released on January 10, 2020, by Walt Disney Records. In the lead-up to the release, selected tracks were made available weekly to correlate with the episodes being released.
An album accompanying the holiday special, High School Musical: The Musical: The Holiday Special, was released on November 20, 2020, which includes Christmas music and selected songs as a preview of the second season. As well as both new songs and new versions of songs from the High School Musical franchise, the second season's soundtrack features songs from Beauty and the Beast, written by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, and Tim Rice. Bassett and Rodrigo both wrote original songs for the second season. The season's soundtrack was released on July 30, 2021, which includes a cover of "Home" by Keegan. The third season's soundtrack features music from the Disney Channel television film Camp Rock as well as the High School Musical franchise and songs from the featured production Frozen. The first song, a cover of "It's On" from Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam, was released as a preview on July 7, 2022, before the season's release. Bassett co-wrote and co-produced an original song, "Finally Free", for the season. Reneé also co-wrote a song for the season, titled "Here I Come", collaborating with songwriters Anthony M. Jones and Steph Jones. The song's lyrics were inspired by her experiences with anxiety. Music from High School Musical 3: Senior Year will feature in the fourth season, as well as original music. Federle stated that the season would see a return to songs being performed live by the actors within the episodes, which had not occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
## Release
The first episode of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series was telecast on Disney Channel, ABC, and Freeform on November 8, 2019, ahead of its launch on the streaming service Disney+ on November 12, 2019, in 4K HDR. The preview simulcast of the first episode was viewed by 2.03 million on ABC, in addition to 474,000 on Disney Channel and 293,000 during its Freeform airing. The broadcast received 2.8 million viewers in total. On the streaming service, episodes were released weekly rather than the binge-watching model of all at once. The first-season finale was released on January 10, 2020. High School Musical: The Musical: The Holiday Special, featuring the cast performing Christmas music, was released December 11, 2020; the 45-minute special featured previews of songs and scenes from the second season. Before the release of the second season, Disney Channel aired the complete first season in a marathon format on May 8, 2021. The first season also airs on Disney Channel in Latin America. The second season premiered on May 14, 2021. The season was originally planned to debut in 2020 but was delayed after the COVID-19 pandemic halted filming. The third season premiered on July 27, 2022; episodes were released weekly. The fourth and final season premiered on August 9, 2023; all episodes were released at once.
## Reception
### Critical response
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 75% approval for the first season with an average rating of 7.38/10 based on 32 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Though fans may find what they've been looking for in its nostalgic stylings, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series follows a little too closely in its predecessor's steps to truly be the start of something new." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 64 out of 100 based on 20 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews" for the series as a whole.
Critics commented on the differences between the series and the film, and there was a mixed reaction to the mockumentary format. Vinnie Mancuso of Collider described the series as "endearingly tongue-in-cheek". Kelly Lawler indicated that the series is a "love letter" to high school theater productions in a review for USA Today. Joel Keller of Decider opined that viewing the series did not require an understanding of the original franchise; Caroline Framke of Variety considered some elements of the program too similar to the original film's "two-dimensional" approach. Insider's Libby Torres said the series lacked the "infectious energy" of the original film and found the premise jarring. Mancuso objected to the mockumentary style of the series, arguing that the format distracted from other humor in the episodes. /Film's Ethan Anderton described the technique as "inorganic and unnecessary". Daniel Toy of Tom's Guide felt the talking heads helped avoid unfamiliarity with characters.
The cast's music and dance performances have been commended by critics. Shannon Miller of The A.V. Club praised the cast's talent, in particular, Rodrigo and Bassett for their musical ability and "handling of dramatic material". Writing for Decider, Kayla Cobb stated that the two leads have significant romantic chemistry. Megan Peters of ComicBook.com praised Rodrigo for her portrayal of Nini's guarded personality, and Keller described her as "especially magnetic". Anderton also applauded the cast and suggested that the series does not feature the same "exaggerated acting style" as the source material. The show's choreography was commended, as well as Wylie for her dance capability. Toy noted Rodriguez's comedic timing in his portrayal of Carlos. Anderton, Peters, and Framke likened Kate Reinders's performance as the exuberant Miss Jenn to Kristin Chenoweth.
The series has been likened to Glee for its themes, as well as its combination of music and drama. Framke described the series as a "sweet and very silly version of Glee", and Peters noted similarities through its "quick cuts and quips". Miller considered that High School Musical uses music more as a literal than the abstract element in the storyline. Reviewing the music, Mancuso and Toy expressed interest in the program continuing to provide new songs to complement the original film's soundtrack. Cobb commended the vocal abilities of the main cast and described Rodrigo as "an especially pronounced talent" with a sweet and sincere voice.
### Accolades
|
41,866,061 |
Socrates Nelson
| 1,170,365,664 |
American politician (1814–1867)
|
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"Minnesota city council members",
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"People from Stillwater, Minnesota",
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Socrates Nelson (January 11, 1814 – May 6, 1867) was an American businessman, politician, and pioneer who served one term as a Minnesota state senator from 1859 to 1861. He was a general store owner, lumberman, and real estate speculator and was associated with numerous companies in the insurance and rail industries. He was involved in the establishment of the community of Stillwater, Minnesota and was an early member of the first Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge in Minnesota. He served on the University of Minnesota's first board of regents before being elected to the Minnesota Senate.
Nelson was a member of an 1848 committee that met in Stillwater to petition the U.S. Congress to create the Minnesota Territory. He took part in the early organization of the Minnesota Democratic Party. He was a county treasurer, territorial auditor, and county commissioner. As a senator, he voted in favor of a failed bill to legalize bringing slaves in to Minnesota temporarily and helped to repeal the Loan Amendment – intended to expedite the creation of railroad infrastructure – from the Minnesota Constitution. He was elected as a delegate for the 1864 Democratic National Convention.
After Nelson died in 1867 from tuberculosis, his achievements in Stillwater were memorialized. The Nelson School was named after him. A plaque at the Washington County Historic Courthouse commemorates his sale of the land on which the courthouse was built.
## Early life and family
Socrates Nelson was born in Conway, Massachusetts, on January 11, 1814, to Socrates Nelson and Dorothy Boyden. He lived in nearby Greenfield and took a partial course at Deerfield Academy before returning to his hometown to become a merchant.
When he was 25, Nelson moved to Illinois on a prospecting tour; he moved again in 1840 to St. Louis, Missouri, to sell goods and collect furs. There, he met his future business partner Levi Churchill.
In early 1844, he traveled up the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Chippewa River in the Wisconsin Territory and opened a trading post at a site known as Nelson's Landing or Nelson's Point, about three miles south of Wabasha, Minnesota. The post was maintained for several years but later washed away. On October 23, he married Betsey D. Bartlett in Hennepin, Illinois.
Later in 1844, Nelson took a steamboat farther north to the recently settled town of Stillwater and opened its first general store, known as Nelson's Warehouse. Betsey joined him soon after. The Churchills remained temporarily in St. Louis and the two parties traded goods via the Mississippi River – Nelson's furs for Churchill's merchandise.
The Nelsons had twin daughters, Emma A. and Ella, on September 22, 1848. Ella died in infancy on October 23, 1849.
Nelson was one of the earliest members of the Minnesota Historical Society, joining in 1849 when the organization was formed. He was among the first members initiated into the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in 1849, which became Minnesota Lodge No. 1 in Stillwater in 1852, when he was a trustee.
## Business ventures
Nelson was an important settler of the St. Croix River valley. When arriving in Stillwater, he initially built a store and established a mercantile business, which he ran for eleven years. Realizing that land development, rather than fur and trading, would be more prosperous, Nelson and Churchill laid claim to large tracts of land near the St. Croix River in 1845 and purchased the land from the General Land Office in 1849. By the summer of 1847, Nelson was shipping rafts of lumber hundreds of miles downriver to St. Louis, and in the summer of 1848, he and Churchill together purchased an area of timberland. Nelson entered the lumber business in earnest on February 7, 1851, as one of the corporators of the St. Croix Boom Company organized by the Minnesota Territorial Legislature. In 1852, Nelson and associates David B. Loomis and Daniel Mears (Nelson, Loomis and Company) platted what is now Bayport. There, they erected a boarding house and a lumber mill, called the S. Nelson Lumber Company. The steam-powered sawmill operated from 1853, the year Nelson left the mercantile business, to November 1858, when the company dissolved, leaving Nelson as the owner. He operated the mill infrequently over the next ten years, and sold the property in 1868.
Riding a boom in real estate speculation and soaring land prices, Nelson and Churchill deeded 40 acres (16 ha) of land in January 1857 to St. Paul real estate salesman Robert F. Slaughter, half of which Slaughter deeded in turn to Hilary B. Hancock. Along with their wives, the four platted the area of nearly 500 lots on June 15, just months before the onset of a worldwide financial crisis known as the Panic of 1857. Amid a collapsing real estate market and with speculation screeching to a halt, the value of the now-platted and mostly unsold land plummeted to practical worthlessness. Months after the Panic began, Levi Churchill died and ceded his estate to his wife Elizabeth. Demoralized by deflated land prices, Slaughter and Hancock forfeited their claim to the lots. In early April 1867, hoping to spur development and drive demand for nearby lots they owned, Nelson and Elizabeth Churchill offered to sell the city of Stillwater an entire block of land for a token amount of \$5 () with no strings attached for the construction of a courthouse. The city accepted, and the courthouse building prompted development of the area, which Nelson would not live to see.
In other business ventures, Nelson was a corporator of the Minnesota Mutual Fire Insurance Company in 1848. In 1853, he became one of the corporators of the Louisiana and Minnesota Railroad Company, the St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, and the Minnesota Western Railroad Company. In 1854, a stock company consisting of Nelson and others published Stillwater's first newspaper, the St. Croix Union – a Democratic-leaning, weekly periodical which was printed until 1857. On January 27, 1867 Nelson became a corporator of the Stillwater & St. Paul Railroad.
## Political career
In 1846, Nelson was elected treasurer for St. Croix County, Wisconsin Territory, and in 1847, he was elected treasurer and county commissioner. That year, he was appointed master in chancery for the county by Territorial Governor Henry Dodge.
When the state of Wisconsin was carved out of the Wisconsin Territory in 1848, some portions of eastern Minnesota (including Stillwater) were not accounted for, and left without representation in Washington, D.C. Nelson was one of a seven-person committee that met at the Stillwater convention on August 26, 1848 and gathered sixty-one signatures for a petition to Congress that led to the 1849 establishment of the Minnesota Territory. A group of citizens organized elections for a congressional representative from the Minnesota Territory, held on October 30, 1848. Henry Hastings Sibley became Minnesota's first representative, with 236 votes; Henry Mower Rice was second, with 122 votes; and Nelson finished third as a write-in candidate, where he received 19 unanimous votes from the precinct in which his lumber camp was located, but no votes from any other precinct.
On October 20, 1849, Nelson was involved with the organization of the Minnesota Democratic Party at a convention held in Saint Paul. That same year, he was elected treasurer for the newly formed Washington County, Minnesota Territory.
From February 1851 to February 1859, Nelson served on the University of Minnesota's first board of regents; he was part of the 1856 building committee that solicited plans for necessary buildings. He was Minnesota Territorial Auditor under Governor Willis A. Gorman from May 15, 1853, to January 17, 1854.
Nelson was a commissioner for Washington County in 1852, 1855, and 1856. In 1858, he organized Baytown Township on the south side of Stillwater. That May, he named the township of Greenfield (later renamed to Grant Township) just east of Stillwater after his former Massachusetts home.
In 1858, Nelson was nominated by the Minnesota Democratic Party as a candidate for state senator. He was elected as a Democrat from the 1st district on October 12, 1858, and served in the Minnesota Senate from 1859 to 1861. During his term in the 2nd Minnesota Legislature, he was on the Railroad and Railroad Bonds Special Committee and the State Prison Committee. As part of the committee on railroads, Nelson co-authored a report with Lucius K. Stannard on February 4, 1860, recommending the expungement of Article IX Section 10 of the Minnesota Constitution – known as the Loan Amendment. The amendment was introduced in 1858 to expedite the development of railway infrastructure and authorized a total of up to \$5 million () in loans for railroad companies. Section 10 was expunged soon thereafter during the 1860 presidential election. On March 5, 1860, he was one of five Democrats in the Minnesota Senate to vote in favor of a failed bill to legalize bringing slaves in to Minnesota temporarily.
On October 12, 1860, the Democratic District Convention met and nominated Nelson for state senator from the 2nd district; Republicans nominated Joel K. Reiner, a physician who had previously served the 1st district in the 1st Minnesota Legislature. Reiner won the election held on November 6, 1860, defeating Nelson as part of a string of legislative gains for Minnesota's Republican Party.
Nelson served on the Stillwater City Council from 1863 to 1865. In 1864, he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, where he voted for George B. McClellan.
## Later life and legacy
Nelson served as president of the Old Settlers Association in 1859 and 1866. (The association accepted as members only persons who were residents of the territory before 1850; Nelson was a charter member when it was founded in 1857.) In 1866, he was a trustee for the local society of Christian universalists.
In 1867, after being ill for several months and bedridden for several weeks, Nelson died of tuberculosis in Stillwater on the morning of May 6 at the age of 53. Most of the city's businesses closed that afternoon in observance of his death.
Nelson's estate was valued at around \$100,000 () when he died. His daughter Emma died in 1880 and Betsey died in 1885; the estate was valued at under \$1,000 () by September 1901 due to extravagant spending by Emma's alcoholic husband.
A plaque on the north portico of the Washington County Historic Courthouse commemorates the date when Nelson and Churchill sold the block of land for its construction. As of 2020, the building was the longest-standing courthouse in Minnesota. Nelson Street, perpendicular to the St. Croix riverfront in Stillwater, is named for him. Nelson's shop was converted into a furniture store but torn down for lumber in March 1911. On September 28, 1885, the Nelson School, named after him, opened in Stillwater.
|
13,597,537 |
Our Song (Taylor Swift song)
| 1,168,957,654 |
2007 single by Taylor Swift
|
[
"2006 songs",
"2007 singles",
"American country music songs",
"Big Machine Records singles",
"Music videos directed by Trey Fanjoy",
"Song recordings produced by Nathan Chapman (record producer)",
"Songs written by Taylor Swift",
"Taylor Swift songs"
] |
"Our Song" is a song by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, taken from her self-titled debut studio album (2006). Swift wrote "Our Song" for a high school talent show during ninth grade; the lyrics are about a young couple using the regular events in their lives to create their own song. She included the song on the track list because it was popular among her classmates. It was released as the album's third single on September 10, 2007, by Big Machine Records. Produced by Nathan Chapman, "Our Song" is an uptempo banjo-driven country track incorporating fiddles and drums.
Music critics lauded Swift's songwriting on "Our Song" for creating conversational lyrics and a memorable hook. It featured on Rolling Stone's 2019 list of the best country songs by female artists since 2000. Peaking atop the Hot Country Songs for six weeks, the single made Swift the youngest person (seventeen at the time) to single-handedly write and sing a Hot Country Songs number one. "Our Song" peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified four times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It also peaked at number 30 on the Canadian Hot 100 and was certified platinum by Music Canada.
Trey Fanjoy directed the song's music video, which premiered on CMT on September 24, 2007, and won Video of the Year at the 2008 CMT Music Awards. Swift performed the song on televised programs and during many festivals, and included it in the set lists of the Fearless Tour (2009–2010) and the Speak Now World Tour (2011–2012). The song was part of Swift's concerts on select dates of the Red Tour (2013–2014), the Reputation Stadium Tour (2018), and the Eras Tour (2023–2024).
## Production and release
In 2004, Pennsylvania-born Taylor Swift moved to Nashville, Tennessee at fourteen to pursue a career in country music. She signed with Sony/ATV in 2004 to become a professional songwriter, and with Big Machine Records in 2005 to become a country-music singer. Near the end of 2005, Swift recorded songs for her self-titled debut album with producer Nathan Chapman. By the time production wrapped, Swift had completed her first year of high school in Hendersonville, Tennessee. She wrote three tracks by herself—"The Outside", "Should've Said No", and "Our Song". "Our Song" is a track Swift wrote for a talent show of her ninth grade. She conceived the song as an upbeat track with lyrics relatable to her classmates, writing it within twenty minutes. On the inspiration, Swift said: "I wrote it about this guy I was dating, and how we didn't have a song. So I went ahead and wrote us one."
Months after the talent show, her classmates came up to her and recited the melody and lyrics, which made her think, "There must be something here!" To this end, she insisted that Big Machine Records executives include it on the track list. Swift envisioned the production in her head before approaching Chapman. According to the album's liner notes, instruments and their corresponding musicians on "Our Song" include acoustic guitar (Swift), banjo and electric guitar (Chapman), Dobro (Bruce Bouton), drums (Nick Buda), percussion (Eric Darken), fiddle (Rob Hajacos), and bass guitar (Tim Marks). The track was recorded by Chad Carlson, assisted by Chapman, at Sound Cottage and Quad Studios in Nashville. It was mixed by Chuck Ainley, assisted by Greg Lawrence, at Masterfonics. Swift chose the song as the album's closing track because she thought the final refrain's lyric, "Play it again," would subliminally suggest the listener to replay the album.
Swift's debut album was released on October 24, 2006, through Big Machine Records. "Our Song" was the third single from the album; Big Machine released the song to US country radio on September 10, 2007, and as a crossover single to US pop radio on March 10, 2008, in partnership with Republic Records. "Our Song" was later included in the international version of Swift's second studio album, Fearless, released in March 2009. Following a public controversy where Swift objected to talent manager Scooter Braun's acquisition of Big Machine and the masters to her back catalog, Big Machine re-released "Our Song" on limited-edition vinyl in October 2019.
## Music and lyrics
"Our Song" has narrative lyrics about a young couple's love life. In the first verse, the narrator and her boyfriend are traveling in a car, "He's got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel, the other on my heart." As they listen to the radio, the narrator tells her boyfriend they do not have a song to call their own. In the refrain, the boyfriend responds that their song consists of sounds drawing from their daily lives that he associates with their relationship. The boyfriend says, "Our song is the slammin' screen door / Sneakin' out late, tappin' on your window;" critics consider the "slammin' screen door" imagery the song's hook and most memorable lyrical detail. The narrator replies, "Our song is the way he laughs / The first date, man, I didn't kiss him when I should have." In the refrain's final lines, she asks God "if he could play it again" when she gets home. The song ends with the lyrics, "I grabbed a pen / And an old napkin / And I wrote down our song," self-referencing Swift's occupation as a songwriter.
Built on a banjo riff, "Our Song" is a country-music track featuring a fiddle solo in the break. Musicologist James E. Perone noted that the production conveys the conversational lyrics by employing repeated pitches in the lower register of Swift's vocals in the verses, where she sings at one pitch for a sustained period. According to the BBC, the verses exemplify Swift's "one-note melody", which effectively conveys the narrative and becomes a staple in many of her subsequent songs. The refrain emphasizes the fifth scale-step with a wider-ranging melody and higher-pitched vocals, which Perone described as upbeat and tuneful. In the song, Swift sings with twangy vocals and uses a Southern accent, brought about by her move from Pennsylvania to Tennessee as a teenager. Swift pronounces the pronoun "I" closer to the monophthong "ah" and sings the words "car" and "heart" with a non-rhotic accent. She plays on the lack of verb agreement in Southern American English in the lyric "your mama don't know".
Critics debated whether "Our Song" is country music. J. Freedom du Lac from The Washington Post and Nick Jones from Vulture noticed influences of hip hop and rhythmic music on the phrasing and the final refrain's compressed drums. Critic Maura Johnston from Pitchfork commented that apart from country-music fiddles and twang, the melody is influenced by "millennial teen pop". Grady Smith from Rolling Stone selected it as one of Swift's "countriest songs", noting the instruments and Southern accent. In an article for JSTOR, linguist Chi Luu argued that Swift employed a Southern accent as a means to signify her authenticity in country music; because Swift came from an upper middle class background, which differentiated her from other female country musicians singing about overcoming hardships and poverty, the Southern accent was an important means for her early image as a country-music artist. Musicologist Nate Sloan pointed to the conversational lyrics drawing on mundane daily-life experience as Swift's embodiment of country-music songwriting tropes.
## Critical reception
"Our Song" was one of the "Award-Winning Songs" at the 2008 BMI Country Awards, which honors the year's best songwriters. It featured on Rolling Stone's 2019 list of the best female country songs from 2000. Jeff Tamarkin of AllMusic and Seija Rankin and Lauren Huff from Entertainment Weekly picked it as a standout on Swift's debut album, and Fiona Chua of MTV Asia selected it as one of the best tracks on the international version of Fearless. Critics praised Swift's songwriting for creating a catchy hook. Nate Jones of Vulture and Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine found the melody and hook captivating, noting them for incorporating pop and hip hop elements. Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone wrote about the song, "The hit that made me a Swift fan, the first moment I heard it in 2007 [...] What a genius hook."
Other critics praised the theme and conversational lyrics. Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker was impressed by the simple phrases "so conversational that on first hearing they fly by without registering" and said the song was Swift's first to "stop [him] in [his] tracks". Billboard's Deborah Evan Price deemed the conversational lyrics appealing to those who want to revisit the "tender memories of uncomplicated young love". In a review for Blender, Sheffield found the narrative full of "personality and poise". In Pitchfork, Johnston selected the track as one of Swift's early songwriting demonstrations for earnestly portraying teenage sentiments. Alexis Petridis from The Guardian said the "snappy, self-referential lyrics" predicated Swift's success beyond country music, and Hannah Mylrea from NME found the lyrics vivid. In a ranking of Swift's discography, Roisin O'Connor of The Independent picked "Our Song" among her five best songs: "[Her] making a song about a song based on sounds from real-life is all kinds of perfect."
## Chart performance
"Our Song" was a success on country radio. It reached number one on the Hot Country Songs chart dated December 15, 2007, giving Swift her first chart topper. The song's jump from number six to number one marked the biggest jump to the top since Tim McGraw's "Just to See You Smile" (1998), which also ascended five spots to the top. With this achievement, Swift became the youngest person—seventeen years old at the time—to single-handedly write and sing a Hot Country Songs number one. It spent six consecutive weeks at number one and 24 weeks in total on the chart. The success of "Our Song" on country radio turned Swift into a rising star in the genre, which had been predominantly dominated by adult male musicians in the early 2000s decade.
On the all-genre Billboard Hot 100, the single peaked at number 16, becoming the third consecutive Hot 100 top-forty single from Swift's debut album. On the Mainstream Top 40 chart, which tracks pop radio in the United States, it peaked at number 18 and was Swift's second crossover appearance, following "Teardrops on My Guitar". The Recording Industry Association of America in August 2014 certified the track four times platinum for surpassing four million units based on sales and streaming. By July 2019, "Our Song" had sold 3.4 million digital copies in the United States.
In Canada, "Our Song" peaked atop the Canada Country chart for four weeks. It peaked at number 30 on the Canadian Hot 100, the best-charting song from Swift's debut album, and was certified platinum by Music Canada for 80,000 digital copies sold. In South Korea, the single peaked at number 104 on the International Singles Chart compiled in 2012 by Gaon.
## Music video
Trey Fanjoy, who had directed the music videos for Swift's past singles, is the director for the video for "Our Song". Compared to the previous videos, "Our Song" does not feature a clear narrative and instead is a compilation of disparate scenes with vibrant colors and symbols. Swift talked about the concept: "[Fanjoy] had this idea for a front porch performance and then a field of flowers for another performance, then a black-and-white performance shot. It all came together in her head. She was able to translate that so well onto film. It just shows what a truly great director she is." The video features Swift's backing band as guest stars. It aired on CMT, CMT Pure, and Great American Country on September 24, 2007, and was included on the DVD reissue of Swift's debut album, released on November 6, 2007.
In the video, Swift performs in different outfits for different settings; in one scene, she performs with a glitter-encrusted guitar. Many of the outfits are associated with mid-2000s fashion, such as pink lip gloss, layered tank tops with Soffe shorts, and black elbow-length arm warmers. Swift had two dresses custom made for the video. Spin observed that "Our Song" was Swift's first music video that incorporates visually stimulating elements: "All the colors fall somewhere between fantastical (like Swift's bright blue fairy dress) and excessive (like the pool of roses she sits in)." Jason Lipshutz from Billboard called it "one of her simplest, sweetest music videos". According to Glamour, Swift's bright and feminine style without using designer clothing in "Our Song" helped shape her relatable image in her early career.
"Our Song" was the number-one video on CMT for seven weeks. It received a nomination for "Number One Streamed Music Video" at the web-hosted 2008 CMT Online Awards, but lost to Carrie Underwood's "All-American Girl". At the 2008 CMT Music Awards, it won Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year.
## Live performances
During promotion of her debut album, Swift included "Our Song" in the set list of a US promotional tour in 2008. The song was part of her set list as the opening act to Brad Paisley's 2007 tour and Rascal Flatts's 2008 tour. She performed the song on televised shows including Live! with Regis and Kelly, Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie Ann, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. On November 7, 2007, Swift performed the song at the Country Music Association Awards, where she won the Horizon Award honoring the best new artist of the year. A performance recorded at an Apple store in SoHo, New York, was released as part of an iTunes-exclusive live extended play on January 15, 2008.
Swift and English band Def Leppard performed "Our Song", among other tracks from each artist's discography, for a CMT Crossroads episode in October 2008; the performance was recorded and released on DVD in 2009. The song was part of the set lists for many festivals Swift headlined, including the Greeley Stampede in 2007, the Stagecoach Festival in 2008, and a round of festivals in 2009 including the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, the Florida Strawberry Festival, the CMA Music Festival, and Craven Country Jamboree. In 2012, Swift sang the song as part of a VH1 Storytellers episode taped at Harvey Mudd College in California.
Swift included "Our Song" on the set list of her first headlining concert tour, the Fearless Tour (2009–2010); she sang the song on a sparkling silver guitar, in a sparkly silver dress and boots. The track was part of the set list for the North American and Oceanic shows for Swift's next tour, the Speak Now World Tour (2011–2012); during the performance, she played the song on a banjo in front of a porch setting, dressed in white. She sang an acoustic version of the song on select dates of her later tours, including the Red Tour (Pittsburgh, July 2013), the Reputation Stadium Tour (Chicago, June 2018), and the Eras Tour (Las Vegas, March 2023; Los Angeles, August 2023). Swift performed it a cappella after a technical malfunction during the Philadelphia concert of the Reputation Stadium Tour on July 14, 2018.
## Credits and personnel
Credits are adapted from the liner notes of Taylor Swift (2006).
- Taylor Swift – vocals, songwriter, guitar, harmony vocals
- Nathan Chapman – producer, banjo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, harmony vocals, additional recording
- Chuck Ainlay – mixing
- Chad Carlson – recording
- Aaron Chmielewski – assistant engineering
- Greg Lawrence – assistant mixing
- Bruce Bouton – Dobro
- Nick Buda – drums
- Eric Darken – percussion
- Rob Hajacos – fiddle
- Tim Marks – bass
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### All-time chart
## Certifications
## Release history
## See also
- List of number-one US country singles of 2007 and 2008
- List of number-one Canadian country singles of 2007 and 2008
|
51,375,424 |
Missouri Centennial half dollar
| 1,138,524,136 |
US commemorative fifty-cent piece (1921)
|
[
"1921 establishments in the United States",
"Cultural depictions of Daniel Boone",
"Currencies introduced in 1921",
"Early United States commemorative coins",
"Fifty-cent coins",
"Missouri culture",
"Native Americans on coins"
] |
The Missouri Centennial half dollar is a commemorative fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Mint in 1921. It was designed by Robert Ingersoll Aitken. The US state of Missouri wanted a commemorative coin to mark its centennial that year. Legislation for such a coin passed through Congress without opposition and was signed by President Warren G. Harding on his inauguration day, March 4, 1921. The federal Commission of Fine Arts hired Aitken to design the coin, which depicted Daniel Boone on both sides. The reverse design, showing Boone with a Native American, has been interpreted as symbolizing the displacement of the Indians by white settlers.
To increase sales, a portion of the issue was produced with the mark 2★4, symbolic of Missouri being the 24th state. Although admired for the design, the coins did not sell as well as hoped, and almost 60 percent were returned to the Philadelphia Mint for melting. There are fewer coins with 2★4 than without, but they remain near-equal in value.
## Legislation
The State of Missouri, admitted to the Union in 1821 as part of the Missouri Compromise, wanted a commemorative coin for sale at the Missouri Centennial Exposition and State Fair, to be held in Sedalia from August 8 to 20, 1921. Legislation for such a half dollar was introduced in the Senate by that state's Selden P. Spencer on January 20, 1921, the bill being designated S. 4893. It was referred to the Committee on Banking and Currency. The bill was reported to the full Senate by Connecticut's George P. McLean on January 25 with an amendment reducing the authorized mintage from 500,000 to 250,000 and a recommendation that it pass. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, who was presiding over the Senate, asked if there was objection to its passage. The Minority Leader, Democrat Oscar Underwood of Alabama, said he did not think there would be objection, but that the bill should be read first. Idaho Senator William E. Borah stated he would object if there was to be discussion of it, as the Senate had not had morning business in ten days. Borah asked McLean if he expected there would be objection to the bill, and McLean reassured the Idahoan. The bill, as amended, passed the Senate without recorded opposition.
An identical bill, H. R. 15767, had been introduced in the House of Representatives on January 17, 1921. On February 10, Indiana Representative Albert Vestal, chairman of the House Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures (to which the bill had been referred) reported it back to the House with an amendment identical to that approved by the Senate, and with a recommendation that the bill pass. S. 4983 had been referred to that committee after its receipt by the House, and on February 24 the Coinage Committee recommended the Senate bill pass the House, noting that the two bills were identical.
S. 4893 was considered by the House of Representatives on March 2, 1921, with two days remaining in the congressional session. Ohio's Warren Gard had asked questions about previous coin bills when they passed through the House. Gard enquired of Vestal whether the Missouri bill was identical to the earlier bills, and whether it contained the same safeguards, and Vestal confirmed these. The bill was passed by the House without recorded objection, and was enacted into law with the signature of the new president, Warren G. Harding, on his inauguration day, March 4, 1921.
## Preparation
While the legislation was still pending in Congress, on January 29, 1921, Senator Spencer wrote to Charles Moore, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), regarding the bill. Moore replied on February 2, advising that one of the few American sculptors capable of designing a coin be hired, and that the resulting work be subjected to the friendly criticism of other artists. Spencer put James Montgomery, chairman of the Missouri Centennial Commission, in touch with Moore, and on February 9, Moore made several proposals for the design, including a "prairie-schooner ... second, the heads of [pioneer Daniel] Boone and [early Missouri politician Thomas Hart] Benton; third, the state seal of Missouri; and fourth, the Indian pointing westward". The hired sculptor could choose among these concepts, Moore suggested, and decide which could be used to best effect, with Montgomery's approval and that of the Fine Arts Commission. Montgomery replied on February 16, proposing a "standing figure of Daniel Boone, coon skin cap, deer skin clothes, with an Indian sitting at his feet, the Missouri River flowing in front, with the bluffs on opposite side, with one star with the figures '24' in center of star. This would signify first, that the white man had supplanted the Indian in Missouri Territory."
Montgomery also proposed that a star with the number "24" (Missouri being the 24th state) be included in the design, but be removed from the die after 5,000 coins were struck. These would boost proceeds, helping to pay the sculptor's fee and the cost of the die, an expense estimated at \$1,750. Montgomery wrote again on March 22, proposing that the words "MISSOURI CENTENNIAL, SEDALIA, 1921" appear on the coins, and if possible the centennial date of August 10 as well.
The Fine Arts Commission hired Robert Ingersoll Aitken, a sculptor best known in numismatic circles for his design for the \$50 Panama Pacific gold pieces. This was apparently not communicated to the Missouri commission as on May 17, James Earle Fraser, a member of the Fine Arts Commission, told Moore that he had heard that someone associated with the Missouri Centennial had made inquiries with the Medallic Art Company of New York, aimed at hiring a sculptor. Whether Moore wrote to Montgomery is unclear, but he wrote to Spencer on May 26, advising the senator that the designs had been preliminarily approved. CFA members had suggested several changes; these were implemented and, on June 9, the CFA approved the design, a decision communicated by letter that day to the Director of the Mint, Raymond T. Baker. To speed production, the Medallic Art Company produced hubs from Aitken's plaster models, from which working dies to strike the coins could be made. These hubs were sent to the Philadelphia Mint on June 29, 1921.
## Design
The bust of frontiersman Daniel Boone, who lived in Missouri for the final quarter century of his life, appears on the obverse. Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their 1988 book on commemorative coins, note speculation that the obverse may have been inspired by Albin Polasek's sculptured bust of Boone in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York City. Boone wears a deerskin jacket and a coonskin cap. The centennial dates, the name of the country and the coin's denomination surround the bust. The reverse depicts Boone with rifle and powder horn, and a Native American—Swiatek and Breen interpret the frontiersman as sending away the Indian, who bears a shield and peace pipe, apparently dramatizing Montgomery's desire to show the white man supplanting the Indian in Missouri; Breen stated "as though this was something to brag about". The 1921 Report of the Director of the Mint describes the interaction as "Daniel Boone, with powder and rifle, directing the attention of an Indian to the westward course of the white man". The Missouri Centennial half dollar, which shows Boone on either side, is one of the few coin designs in United States numismatic history to have the same individual depicted on both sides; other such depictions include Boone himself on the 1934–1938 Daniel Boone Bicentennial half dollar, Lafayette on the 1900-dated Lafayette dollar and the frontiersman on the 1936 Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar.
The 24 stars on the reverse convey the same message that the 2★4 on the obverse of some specimens does—that Missouri was the 24th state to enter the Union. The name SEDALIA, the site of the centennial exposition, appears in exergue. Aitken's stylized monogram, RA, is near the rifle butt. The Missouri piece, and the Columbian half dollar of 1892–1893, are the only US commemorative half dollars to bear none of the patriotic mottoes usually found on US coinage, that is LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST and E PLURIBUS UNUM. The design was liked at the time of issue; several specimens were shown and admired at the 1921 American Numismatic Association convention at Boston in August, soon after the coin's release.
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on US coins and medals, admired Aitken's Missouri piece, writing that Aitken "became the first American medalist to apply the principles of Renaissance medallic design to a coin of the United States and the first such artist to make a frontiersman look like a Medici prince". He suggested that the figures on the reverse stand "like Roman soldiers in an Antonine relief on the Arch of Constantine or Renaissance condottieri in a large fresco of court ceremonials." Vermeule noted that "the lettering on the obverse follows the forms and system of Pisanello" and that "the coin as a whole is a work of art rather than just another way to market a silver fifty-cent piece because all three of the mottoes that usually burden and constrict America's attempts of numismatic art are omitted." The author concluded of Aitken's works, "his imagination in selecting from the past to rephrase the present worked very well in the United States commemorative coinage".
## Production, distribution, and collecting
A total of 50,028 Missouri Centennial half dollars was struck at the Philadelphia Mint in July 1921, 28 being reserved for inspection and testing at the 1922 meeting of the annual Assay Commission. The first coins displayed the 2★4 on the obverse; afterwards, this was ground off the dies and the remainder were struck without it. The Sedalia Trust Company distributed the coins at a price of \$1 on behalf of the centennial commission, selling both varieties by mail and the plain ones at the exposition in August. There had been little advance publicity, and the exposition took place during the Recession of 1921. All of the 2★4 coins sold, but when sales slowed of the plain variety, 29,600 were returned to the mint for melting. Early advertisements for the coin contained sketches prepared by Aitken, showing the obverse as issued, but depicting a reverse bearing the state Seal of Missouri, that Aitken had abandoned when he found it did not work well. Aitken, in a letter published in part in the December 1921 issue of The Numismatist (the journal of the American Numismatic Association) wrote that "The illustration that you published was made from one of several drawings which I submitted to the Federal Art Commission. The Missouri committee was informed that I would work along these lines, though I was given full latitude for any change I might advise. The seal of the State did not work out well, so I developed the reverse with the two standing figures, which met with the instant approval of the Commission in Washington."
The number of coins bearing the 2★4 is uncertain. Swiatek and Breen wrote that 5,000 were struck and were sold, meaning that 15,400 of the plain ones were issued. Swiatek, in his 2012 volume on commemoratives, adhered to these figures. Coin dealer David Bullowa wrote in 1937 that 10,000 of the 2★4 were issued, with which numismatic writer Q. David Bowers concurred, noting that the two varieties are about equal in rarity. The deluxe edition of R. S. Yeoman's A Guide Book of United States Coins, published in 2018, estimates that 9,400 of the 2★4 were issued, and 11,400 of the plain. Both varieties sold at a premium above the issue price by 1925, and at the height of the first commemorative coin boom in 1936, the 2★4 sold for \$25 and the plain for \$28. By 1940, the 2★4 sold for more than the plain, and at the height of the second boom in 1980, the 2★4 brought \$2,600 to the plain's \$2,400. Yeoman's book lists the 2★4 for between \$625 and \$7,250, and the plain for between \$400 and \$6,650, each depending on condition. An exceptional specimen of the plain variety sold at auction in 2015 for \$70,500. At least one specimen in proof condition is known, sold at auction in 1992.
|
20,096,148 |
Riegelmann Boardwalk
| 1,172,049,089 |
Boardwalk in Brooklyn, New York
|
[
"1923 establishments in New York City",
"Beaches of Brooklyn",
"Brighton Beach",
"Coney Island",
"Hiking trails in New York City",
"New York City Designated Landmarks in Brooklyn",
"New York City scenic landmarks",
"Piers in New York City",
"Tourist attractions in Brooklyn"
] |
The Riegelmann Boardwalk (also known as the Coney Island Boardwalk) is a 2.7-mile-long (4.3 km) boardwalk along the southern shore of the Coney Island peninsula in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, facing the Atlantic Ocean. Opened in 1923, the boardwalk runs between West 37th Street at the edge of the Sea Gate neighborhood to the west and Brighton 15th Street in Brighton Beach to the east. It is operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks).
The Riegelmann Boardwalk is primarily made of wooden planks arranged in a chevron pattern. It ranges from 50 to 80 feet (15 to 24 m) wide and is raised slightly above sea level. The boardwalk connects several amusement areas and attractions on Coney Island, including the New York Aquarium, Luna Park, Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, and Maimonides Park. It has become an icon of Coney Island, with numerous appearances in the visual arts, music, and film. After its completion, the boardwalk was considered the most important public works project in Brooklyn since the Brooklyn Bridge, with a comparable impact to the Catskill Watershed and Central Park.
By the mid-19th century, the Coney Island waterfront was divided among several private entities who erected barriers. Plans for a Coney Island boardwalk were first discussed in the late 1890s as a means of uniting the different sections of Coney Island, and as a revitalization project for these areas. The boardwalk, designed by Philip P. Farley, was named after Brooklyn borough president Edward J. Riegelmann, who led its construction. The Riegelmann Boardwalk's first portion opened in 1923, with further extensions in 1926 and 1941, as well as several modifications and repairs throughout the 20th century. After NYC Parks unsuccessfully attempted to repair the boardwalk with concrete in the early 21st century, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Riegelmann Boardwalk a city landmark in 2018. A renovation of the boardwalk was announced in November 2021.
## Description
### Dimensions and materials
The Riegelmann Boardwalk stretches for 2.7 miles (4.3 km) from West 37th Street at the border of Coney Island and Sea Gate to Brighton 15th Street in Brighton Beach. The boardwalk is 80 feet (24 m) wide for most of its length, though portions in Brighton Beach are 50 feet (15 m) wide. It is raised 13 or 14 feet (4.0 or 4.3 m) above sea level to protect against storm surges. According to a speech given in 1923 to the Rotary Club of Brooklyn, the raised boardwalk was designed to "give ample clear space under the boardwalk" both parallel and perpendicular to the deck. Staircases and ramps lead southward to the beach at intervals of 1+1⁄2 blocks or 300 feet (91 m). Ramps also connect the boardwalk to the streets to the north.
The boardwalk has a steel and concrete foundation supporting wood planking for the walkway, though much of this is no longer visible due to the beach having been raised after the boardwalk was constructed. The boardwalk was built using 1,700,000 cubic yards (1,300,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of sand, 120,000 short tons (110,000 long tons) of stone, 7,700 cubic yards (5,900 m<sup>3</sup>) of reinforced concrete, and 3,600,000 feet (1,100,000 m) of timber flooring. To prevent violent waves from crashing against the boardwalk, sixteen rock jetties were built at intervals of 600 feet (183 m). The beaches are not a natural feature; the sand that would naturally replenish Coney Island is cut off by the jetty at Breezy Point, Queens. Following the boardwalk's construction, sand has been redeposited on the beaches via beach nourishment.
The boardwalk is designed to handle a maximum load of 125 pounds per square foot (610 kg/m<sup>2</sup>). To accomplish this, designer Philip Farley installed a precast concrete-girder structure under the boardwalk on the advice of J.W. Hackney, who designed Atlantic City's boardwalk. Pile bents were placed every 20 feet (6 m), with each bent containing two bundles of four reinforced concrete piles. The piles rest on bases that measure 14 inches (36 cm) square and extend downward 20 feet (6 m). The ends of the girder structures are cantilevered outside the piles.
The boardwalk's planks are set in a modified chevron design, running at 45-degree angles between two longitudinal wooden axes. The diagonal pattern was intended to "facilitate ease in walking", according to American Lumberman magazine, while the 6-foot-wide (1.8 m) wooden axes were designed for chairs to be rolled down the boardwalk. The boardwalk was first built using Douglas fir planks from Washington state. By the early 2010s, sturdy hardwoods were added to the boardwalk, as were plastic and concrete. The boardwalk is used as a bike lane between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. each day, except during summers, when cycling is curtailed after 10 a.m.
### Amenities
There are restrooms, benches, and drinking fountains along the boardwalk's length, both atop the deck and beneath it. Five pavilions and five pergolas were completed in 1925 by J. Sarsfield Kennedy. These no longer exist but were designed in the Mediterranean Revival style and contained arched doorways, along with tiled roofs supported by corner piers and Tuscan columns.
There were also "comfort stations", or restrooms, beneath the boardwalk, characterized by ornamental semicircular stairs and rooftop terraces at the same height as the deck. Most of the shade pavilions south of the boardwalk were built in the 2000s and 2010s and are elevated to comply with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) storm-surge regulations, though there are also some historic pavilions from the 20th century. The newer pavilions, designed by Garrison Architects, are modular structures that are installed in pairs. The modular structures contain double-layered stainless-steel facades and are powered by photovoltaic cells. There are four non-functional historic cast iron fountains as well as newer, functioning steel fountains.
The boardwalk's original street furnishings included 170 street lights with twin lamps, similar to those installed on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. These street lights are placed every 80 feet (24 m), as well as at street intersections. Benches that faced the ocean were installed by the J.W. Fiske Ironworks Company, but have since been replaced.
### Attractions
Modern attractions on the boardwalk include Luna Park, Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, and the New York Aquarium. The boardwalk is adjacent to Maimonides Park, which opened in 2001 and is the home stadium of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a Minor League Baseball team. A live performance venue, the Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island, opened on the boardwalk in 2016. Several amusement parks that formerly faced the boardwalk, including Steeplechase Park (1897–1964), the original Luna Park (1903–1944), and Astroland (1962–2008), no longer exist.
There are several officially designated landmarks on the boardwalk. The Childs Restaurants building, a New York City designated landmark that is now the site of the Ford Amphitheater, opened in 1923 at West 21st Street; its terracotta facade was designed to blend in with the boardwalk's appearance. To the east is the Parachute Jump, a defunct parachute tower ride standing 250 feet (76 m) tall, which is both a city landmark and a National Registered Historic Place. The B&B Carousell, directly beside the Parachute Jump, is the last operating carousel in Coney Island and is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Coney Island Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster built in 1927 at West 10th Street, is the only operating coaster on Coney Island from the 20th century, and is both a city and national landmark. Set inland from the boardwalk is the Wonder Wheel (built 1920), an eccentric Ferris wheel which is 150 feet (46 m) tall and recognized as a city landmark. Other attractions on the boardwalk include the Thunderbolt roller coaster and the Abe Stark Recreation Center, as well as small amusement rides, shops, and restaurants.
The First Symphony of the Sea, a wall relief created by Japanese artist Toshio Sasaki, was installed along the boardwalk, outside the New York Aquarium, in 1993. It is 332 feet (101 m) long and 10 feet (3.0 m) tall. The relief contains depictions of waves, fish, and zygotes of marine species in terrazzo and ceramic.
#### Steeplechase Pier
Steeplechase Pier, the only one remaining on Coney Island's beach, extends 1,040 feet (317 m) southward from the boardwalk's intersection with West 17th Street. It is near Steeplechase Park, of which the pier was originally part. The pier had been built by 1904, at which point it was estimated as being 2,000 feet (610 m) long. A newspaper article from that year praised the view from the pier: "There is no more beautiful view around New York than the sight of the twinkling colored lights of Coney Island and its reflection in the water." Steeplechase Pier was originally used by anglers and, until 1932, was used by ferry lines to Coney Island.
The original Steeplechase Pier was erected by builder F. J. Kelly at an unknown date and was completed within 30 days. The pier was ceded to the city in October 1921 just before the boardwalk was constructed, and was reopened in December 1922. Several proposed improvements, such as a widened deck and an auditorium, were never built. In the following years, Steeplechase Pier was damaged multiple times by hurricanes, fires, and boat accidents. The most serious incident was a fire in 1957 that destroyed the pier; a larger replacement opened the next year, with a T-shaped extension at the end. The pier was rebuilt most recently in 2013 after it was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Two years after it reopened, the pier received a \$3.4 million grant for a total reconstruction.
## History
### Context
The Coney Island House, established in the early 19th century, was the first seaside resort on Coney Island. Coney Island could be reached easily from Manhattan, while appearing to be relatively far away. As a result, Coney Island began attracting vacationers in the 1830s and 1840s, and numerous resorts were built. New railroad lines, built after the American Civil War, served Coney Island's restaurants, hotels, bathing pavilions, theaters, the waterfront, and other attractions. A series of fires destroyed the resorts in the 1880s and 1890s. This opened up large tracts of land for the development of theme parks; the first of these was Sea Lion Park, which opened in 1895 and closed eight years later. By the first decade of the 20th century, Coney Island contained three competing amusement parks (Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park), and many independent amusements.
The beach remained largely inaccessible to the public, since it was the private property of beachfront lots. In 1882, the first lots were acquired from the village of Gravesend at unusually low prices and subdivided to private interests. Some portions of the beach contained private boardwalks, but other portions had no infrastructure, and some sections of the beach were enclosed by fences that extended into the water. In the 1890s, a private boardwalk was built to connect the hotels and bungalows in Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach; this walk extended for nearly 1 mile (1.6 km). George C. Tilyou, who operated various amusements in Coney Island and later consolidated them into his Steeplechase Park, built boardwalks in his resorts at Coney Island and Rockaway Beach. Numerous privately owned piers jutted into the water at West 5th, West 8th, and West 17th Streets. Public beach accessibility was considered almost nonexistent; in 1904, it was estimated that there were 1.4 square inches (9.0 cm<sup>2</sup>) of public beachfront on Coney Island for each of the 3.7 million residents of New York City. In 1912, the West End Improvement League of Coney Island noted that only one street, West 23rd Street, had direct public access to the beach from Surf Avenue, the southernmost west–east artery on what was then an island.
### Planning and construction
Interest in creating a public boardwalk increased in the 1890s, when the formerly separate boroughs of New York City were consolidated. The economist Simon Patten, a boardwalk proponent, said that the construction of a similar boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the late 19th century had helped to revitalize the formerly rundown waterfront there. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor took a similar position. In 1897, the Board of Public Improvements and Brooklyn borough president Edward M. Grout proposed a boardwalk along the southern shore of Coney Island, between West 37th and West 5th Streets. The board and Grout expected that property owners would relinquish their waterfront plots to create a 100-foot-wide (30 m) space for a boardwalk. A bill proposed in the New York State Legislature in 1901 would have required property owners to pay half of the boardwalk's \$350,000 construction cost. However, the bill was heavily opposed by organizations who cited the bill's language and the projected property losses as reasons for their disapproval. Ultimately, only one segment was constructed near the Seaside Park resort, between West 5th Street and Ocean Parkway.
Other organizations in the 1900s presented numerous proposals to build a boardwalk, though these mainly entailed building a walkway over the ocean, rather than constructing a beach or clearing the waterfront. In 1912, the West End Improvement League published a 36-page booklet about the benefits of constructing a 60-foot-wide (18 m) boardwalk. This plan was endorsed by the New York City Board of Estimate, which in April 1913 approved a special committee's report on the feasibility of building such a structure. This time, Coney Island residents largely supported the proposed boardwalk, though there were disputes over whether to pay the \$5 million cost through private capital or city funds. Simultaneously, in 1912, New York State sued amusement owners for taking private ownership of Coney Island's beach. A judge ruled the next year that all of the beachfront exposed at low tide belonged to the state. An appellate court affirmed this decision in 1916, with an exception made for part of Steeplechase Park, a plot of land granted by the state prior to the creation of the park. All obstructions on the beachfront were demolished in accordance with the ruling.
The Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue station, completed in 1920, allowed greater access from the rest of New York City. Overcrowding became common, with up to one million people filling the island on the hottest days. In May 1921, the state legislature voted to give the city the right to acquire any uplands facing the Atlantic Ocean on Coney Island, as well as on Queens' Rockaway Peninsula west of Beach 25th Street in Far Rockaway, Queens. In preparation for this action, the city held meetings on the initial boardwalk design in 1919, approved a plan in 1920, and obtained title to the land in October 1921. A groundbreaking ceremony was hosted the same day.
The actual beach improvement and boardwalk construction began in 1922. Construction was overseen by Philip P. Farley, consulting engineer for Brooklyn from 1918 to 1951. The first bents for the boardwalk structure were erected in March 1923, and the last bents were completed ten months later. Initially there was some opposition to the boardwalk's construction, and business owners unsuccessfully attempted to erect fences to prevent construction progress. Concurrently with the boardwalk improvements, Riegelmann petitioned the city to make improvements to the beach and surrounding streets to make the boardwalk easier to access. In accordance with this, sand from the seabed was used to replenish the eroded shorelines. Timber bulkheads, timber groynes, and granite jetties were installed starting in August 1922. The beach could accommodate more than a half-million people when the project was finished.
### Opening and early operation
In April 1923, shortly before the boardwalk was completed, it was named after Edward J. Riegelmann, the Brooklyn borough president. Riegelmann, one of the project's main leaders, had boasted that the boardwalk would raise real estate values on Coney Island. Despite his role in the boardwalk's development, Riegelmann and his assistant commissioner of public works opposed the name, preferring that the project be known as the "Coney Island Boardwalk". Riegelmann stated that, when the boardwalk was completed, "poor people will no longer have to stand with their faces pressed against wire fences looking at the ocean".
The boardwalk was opened in three phases between Ocean Parkway and West 37th Street. The first section of the boardwalk, comprising the eastern section between Ocean Parkway and West 5th Street, opened in October 1922. The boardwalk was extended westward to West 17th Street in December 1922. The final section of the boardwalk, from West 17th to West 37th Street, was officially opened with a ceremony on May 15, 1923. At the time of its opening, the boardwalk was said to be wider and more expensive than the comparable boardwalks at Atlantic City, the Rockaways, and Long Beach on Long Island.
After the boardwalk was completed, Charles L. Craig, the New York City Comptroller, said that it could not be considered a "real boardwalk" without pergolas and restrooms. Accordingly, in June 1924, the New York City Board of Estimate approved the erection of five comfort stations and five beachfront pavilions. The pavilions were completed by early 1925. The Board of Estimate, in December 1922, approved another project to widen, create, or open private streets that led to the boardwalk. The work, which began in 1923, entailed condemning 288 lots, including 175 houses and portions of Steeplechase Park. Eighteen streets, each 60 feet (18 m) wide, were created between West 8th and West 35th Streets. Surf and Stillwell Avenues were widened, and the city took over several private passageways, including West 12th Street. Sewers and sidewalks were installed. Brooklyn public officials believed these changes would revitalize Coney Island's shore and lessen congestion on Surf Avenue. In total, the boardwalk and related improvement projects cost \$20 million (about \$ million in ). Of this cost, 35 percent was paid through taxes, and the remainder was paid by the city.
The Brighton Beach extension of the boardwalk, which would build out the boardwalk from Ocean Parkway eastward to Coney Island Avenue, was formally approved by the city's Board of Estimate in June 1925. The extension was 3,000 to 4,000 feet (910 to 1,220 m) long, and entailed expanding the beach and creating new paths to the boardwalk. Real estate developments were proposed as a result of the extension, which was completed by mid-1926. The \$1 million extension was to be funded via taxes levied on Coney Island property owners. Although some property owners objected to the assessments, they were ultimately forced to pay for the project.
A similar scheme to extend the boardwalk 3,000 feet (910 m) westward, from West 37th Street to Coney Island Light, was opposed by the residents of Sea Gate, the private community through which the boardwalk would have been expanded. In June 1927, borough president James J. Byrne approved the Sea Gate extension and bought land on the Sea Gate waterfront. The following year, the bulkhead lines in Sea Gate were approved for demolition, in anticipation of the boardwalk being extended. The boardwalk extension was slated to connect to a steamship pier operated by the Coney Island Steamship Corporation. However, the company was permanently enjoined from selling stocks and bonds in July 1930. The corporation claimed that the Brooklyn government had allocated \$3 million to extend the boardwalk in December 1929, but borough president Henry Hesterberg denied having done so. The boardwalk was ultimately not extended past the fence on West 37th Street. After a four-block section of the boardwalk was damaged in a July 1932 fire, it was rebuilt and reopened within a month.
### Moses reconstruction
In 1938, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) took over responsibility for the boardwalk's maintenance. Parks commissioner Robert Moses criticized the condition of the Coney Island, Rockaway, and South Beach boardwalks, saying, "These beaches and boardwalks were never properly planned, and cannot under present conditions be properly maintained and operated." In a letter to mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Moses wrote:
> The boardwalk was constructed too near the water without providing any play areas on the north side. [...] When sand was pumped in to increase the width of the beach, instead of obtaining good white material, the contractor was allowed to deposit brown sand on the beach. Streets were cut through which dead-ended at the boardwalk, and which are no good as traffic arteries and are not proper parking spaces. The zoning ordinance was adapted to the wishes of the property owners rather than to the requirements of the public welfare.
Moses unsuccessfully tried to prohibit carnival barkers from the boardwalk. He also announced plans to expand it eastward, to the vicinity of Corbin Place in Brighton Beach, as well as to incorporate another 18 acres (7.3 ha) within Brighton Beach. The expansion would add capacity for 50,000 visitors along the Coney Island Beach. The project involved rebuilding an 800-foot-long (240 m) stretch of the boardwalk, relocating it 300 feet (91 m) inland and straightening its route; this required the condemnation of 20 buildings and the demolition of the Municipal Baths at West 5th Street. City officials announced plans in August 1938 to acquire 18 acres (7.3 ha) along the Brighton Beach shoreline. That October, the city acquired 18 acres (7.3 ha) from developer Joseph P. Day for the eastward extension. The expanded beach in Brighton Beach opened to the public in July 1939, and officials began allowing bicyclists to use the boardwalk that year.
Moses had originally planned to clear another 100 feet (30 m) inland of the boardwalk, but these plans were modified in August 1939 to preserve the amusement area there. The Board of Estimate approved the modified plan for the boardwalk in December; the approval had been delayed by one week after a landowner objected. The following month, the board provided an \$850,000 appropriation for the work, and construction started on the boardwalk extension. To provide easier access to the boardwalk, a new street near West 9th Street was built. As part of the renovations, a two-foot (0.61 m) covering of sand, from the Rockaways and New Jersey, was placed along the entire beachfront. Some portions of the original boardwalk were preserved and moved using cranes. In addition, workers relocated lighting and emergency phone boxes; realigned Surf Avenue; and erected a lifeguard station with restrooms. The relocated boardwalk was completed by May 1940. The same year, gray paving blocks were added at Brighton 2nd and West 2nd, 15th, 21st, 27th, and 33rd Streets, as well as at Stillwell Avenue, creating firebreaks in the boardwalk.
In early 1941, workers started extending the boardwalk 1,500 feet (460 m) from Coney Island Avenue to Brighton 15th Street. The extension, 50 feet (15 m) wide, was narrower than the rest of the boardwalk. Upon completion of the extension, the boardwalk reached its current length of 2.7 miles (4.3 km). In 1955, Moses proposed extending the boardwalk east to the Manhattan Beach Boardwalk. These plans were opposed by Manhattan Beach property owners, who contended that it would bring social degradation to their community. The Board of Estimate ultimately voted against Moses's plan.
### Late 20th century
Further work was undertaken on the boardwalk in the late 20th century. This included the replacement of the original street lights with replicas in the 1960s, and the replacement of benches, drinking fountains, pavilions, and comfort stations. Concrete and brick lifeguard towers were erected in the 1970s.
By the 1960s, Coney Island was in decline because of increased crime, insufficient parking facilities, bad weather, and the post-World War II automotive boom. This culminated in the closure and sale of Steeplechase Park, the area's last major amusement park, in 1965. A newspaper article noted in 1961 that between 5,000 and 10,000 people slept on the beach every night, and that the boardwalk was a common place for purse snatchings and muggings. Since the boardwalk contained a wide-open space underneath, it was a frequent location for such acts as looking up women's skirts, indecent exposure, and kissing. The boardwalk's maintenance was in active decline by the 1970s, although repairs on two sections of boardwalk between Brighton 1st and Brighton 15th Streets were underway by 1975. Local officials, such as then-assemblyman Chuck Schumer, and residents of the surrounding communities petitioned for the Board of Estimate to release \$650,000 in funding for repairs to the boardwalk.
By the 1980s, the boardwalk was in poor condition; several people had been injured after falling through rotted portions of the boardwalk, the restrooms and drinking fountains were not functioning, and the section between West 32nd and West 33rd Street had collapsed completely. In 1983, officials estimated that one-quarter of the planks were not in good shape. The same year, New York City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin rated the boardwalk's quality as "poor" due to holes and nails within the deck, vacant lots adjacent to the boardwalk, broken water fountains, and filthy restrooms. In 1985, a small part of the Coney Island Beach, as well as three other city beaches and Central Park's Sheep Meadow, were designated as "quiet zones" where loud radio playing was prohibited. Subsequent repairs to the boardwalk were completed by 1987.
In the early 1990s, as part of a \$27 million shoreline protection project, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) filled in the area under the boardwalk with sand. Afterward, the space underneath became occupied by persons who were homeless, so in 1996 the city cleared out the encampment and fenced off the space under the boardwalk. Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden said in 1997 that he considered the boardwalk's condition to be "B-plus"; according to Golden, the largest problems were that some rails and signs needed to be fixed. On the other hand, residents had complained the previous year that the boardwalk had loose and cracked boards, holes in the wood, and uneven pilings. City vehicles frequently used the boardwalk despite exceeding the weight limit; furthermore, NYC Parks only had three employees to maintain the boardwalk year-round, as compared to eight in 1990. NYC Parks contended that it had spent \$180,000 on a recent project to repair the boardwalk and that the Brooklyn borough president's office had budgeted \$20 million since 1981 for repairs.
### 21st century
NYC Parks started re-planking the boardwalk with ipe wood in the late 1990s, though this was opposed by environmental groups who objected to the wood being logged from the Amazon rainforest. New comfort stations and shade pavilions were added around 2001.
#### Initial renovations and landmark status
By 2010, the city government was renovating the boardwalk: some sections were receiving new wood planking over concrete supports, while others were being replaced entirely with concrete. The addition of the concrete sections was controversial. Though concrete was cheaper and did not require wood sourced from the Amazon rainforest, many local residents and officials felt that wood would be more authentic. There was no logistical difficulty in securing wood because the Rockaway Boardwalk was simultaneously being rebuilt in that material. After installing two small concrete sections of the boardwalk, NYC Parks proposed using a type of plastic that resembled wood. The rebuild with concrete and plastic was approved in March 2012, though wood advocates later filed a lawsuit to stop the use of concrete. The boardwalk was slightly damaged during Hurricane Sandy that October, and the adjacent amusement parks and aquarium suffered more severe damage, as did Steeplechase Pier. Further comfort stations were added in 2013, with four modular units being delivered to West 8th, West 2nd, Brighton 2nd, and New Brighton Streets.
In late 2014, NYC Parks started repairing the section between Coney Island Avenue and Brighton 15th Street with concrete. The decision to use concrete and plastic was again controversial, but according to NYC Parks, was necessary to repair decades of use and deterioration. That December, after the repairs were announced, City Council members Mark Treyger and Chaim Deutsch suggested designating the boardwalk as a city landmark. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) initially rejected the application, stating that the boardwalk had been too heavily altered. NYC Parks completed the repairs in May 2016. Despite the rejection of landmark status, Treyger continued to advocate for the Riegelmann Boardwalk's preservation. In March 2018, the LPC voted to "calendar" a public hearing to determine whether the boardwalk should be designated. The commission designated the boardwalk as the city's eleventh scenic landmark two months later, on May 15, 2018. The same month, two comfort stations opened at Brighton 15th Street. The city government announced in November 2019 that it would spend \$3.2 million to place anti-terrorism bollards at entrances to the boardwalk, as part of a larger initiative to improve safety in public areas following a deadly 2017 truck attack in Manhattan.
#### Capital renovation project
In November 2021, NYC Parks announced it would renovate the entirety of the Riegelmann Boardwalk for \$114.5 million. The renovation would be conducted in several phases, although only one phase was funded. The boardwalk would remain open during the project. The plans include replacing the hardwood planks with recycled plastic, renovating furniture, and constructing concrete piers to replace deteriorated wooden supports. The plan had to be approved by mayor-elect Eric Adams, who, as borough president, had opposed the previous proposal to replace the wooden deck with plastic and concrete. In mid-2022, city councilman Ari Kagan expressed concerns that the city government did not include any additional funding for the boardwalk's renovation in its 2022 budget. The \$114.5 million grant was only sufficient to fund repairs to a 3-mile (4.8 km) section of the boardwalk.
An investigation by news organization The City found that, from 2012 to 2022, the city government had spent several hundred thousand dollars to settle lawsuits by visitors who had been injured on the boardwalk. WCBS-TV also found that, between 2017 and 2022, thirty-one people claimed to have sustained injuries while on the boardwalk. Although NYC Parks had replaced over a thousand planks in mid-2022, WCBS-TV reported in October 2022 that the renovation project had not started. At the time, USACE was considering raising the boardwalk to 18 feet (5.5 m). If this plan were implemented, the boardwalk-raising project would not be completed until 2030. Alec Brook-Krasny, who was reelected to the New York State Assembly in 2022, proposed funding repairs to the boardwalk if a planned casino on Coney Island were approved.
By early 2023, NYC Parks was planning to rebuild the section from West 24th to West 27th Street for \$11.5 million. Although that section was originally supposed to have been rebuilt by February 2022, work had not even started. Designs for the renovation were supposed to have been completed by April 2023 but were delayed because the city needed to add wheelchair ramps.
## Cultural significance
The boardwalk opened up the beach to the millions who visited Coney Island in its heyday, and it became known as the area's "Main Street", supplanting Surf Avenue in that role. A 1923 guidebook described the area as "the oldest, most densely crowded and most democratic" of all the amusement areas around New York City. The boardwalk increased international visitation to Coney Island. One French observer wrote of the boardwalk, shortly after its opening, "Families which cannot go to the rich watering places come in hordes on Sunday to enjoy the municipal beach. It is like the Promenade des Anglais at Nice turned over to the proletariat." A writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle cited the boardwalk's completion as "a contributing factor in the modernizing of the Coney Island section", saying that its construction had led to the development of apartment buildings on the Coney Island peninsula.
The boardwalk is the setting for two large annual events. The Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest takes place every July 4 outside the original Nathan's Famous location at Surf and Stillwell Avenues near the boardwalk. Nathan's had been one of several hot dog vendors that formerly lined Coney Island. The Coney Island Mermaid Parade has taken place along the boardwalk since 1983. The parade typically occurs every June, and involves floats and costumes and a King Neptune and Queen Mermaid that are crowned at the end of each parade.
As an icon of Coney Island, the Riegelmann Boardwalk has been depicted in the visual arts, music, and film. Several artworks have shown the boardwalk as a focal point, including Harry Roseland's 1930s depictions of the boardwalk and beach, as well as the 1938 lithograph The People Play-Summer by Benton Murdoch Spruance. Films have used the boardwalk as a setting or as a plot narrative, such as Sinners' Holiday (1930), Little Fugitive (1953), Annie Hall (1977), The Warriors (1979), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). The boardwalk has appeared in TV shows, including children's shows such as Dora the Explorer and sitcoms such as Seinfeld. It is also a setting in music videos, such as those by Salt-N-Pepa (1993) and Beyoncé (2013), and albums such as Coney Island Baby (1975).
## Accolades
At the time of its construction, the boardwalk was considered the most important public works project in Brooklyn since the Brooklyn Bridge, which had been completed in 1883. One newspaper described the project thus: "New York scientists and engineers have succeeded where King Canute failed to halt the onward march of the tides." The boardwalk immediately became one of Coney Island's biggest draws after its opening. A columnist for the Brooklyn Times-Union wrote in 1932 that, so powerful was the boardwalk's effect, "the boardwalk and Coney Island are now synonymous".
In 1994, the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association recognized the boardwalk as an "infrastructure accomplishment" comparable to the Catskill Watershed and Central Park. In giving the award, the ASBPA stated that the boardwalk had served people who would otherwise "not have access to exclusive Long Island beaches". The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the boardwalk as one of the city's scenic landmarks in 2018, having previously rejected it for landmark status.
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Last of the Summer Wine
| 1,173,773,895 |
British television sitcom, 1973–2010
|
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"1970s British sitcoms",
"1973 British television series debuts",
"1980s British sitcoms",
"1990s British sitcoms",
"2000s British sitcoms",
"2010 British television series endings",
"2010s British sitcoms",
"BBC high definition shows",
"BBC television sitcoms",
"Comedy Playhouse",
"English-language television shows",
"Fictional trios",
"Holmfirth",
"Last of the Summer Wine",
"Television series about old age",
"Television series by BBC Studios",
"Television series produced at Pinewood Studios",
"Television shows adapted into novels",
"Television shows filmed in the United Kingdom",
"Television shows set in West Yorkshire",
"Television shows shot in Yorkshire"
] |
Last of the Summer Wine is a British sitcom set in Yorkshire created and written by Roy Clarke and originally broadcast by the BBC from 1973 to 2010. It premiered as an episode of Comedy Playhouse on 4 January 1973, and the first series of episodes followed on 12 November 1973. Alan J. W. Bell produced and directed all episodes of the show from late 1981 to 2010. The BBC confirmed on 2 June 2010 that Last of the Summer Wine would no longer be produced and the 31st series would be its last. Subsequently, the final episode was broadcast on 29 August 2010. Since its original release, all 295 episodes, comprising thirty-one series—including the pilot and all films and specials—have been released on DVD. Repeats of the show are broadcast in the UK on BBC One (until 18 July 2010 when the 31st and final series started on 25 July of that year), Gold, Yesterday, and Drama. It is also seen in more than 25 countries, including various PBS stations in the United States and on VisionTV in Canada. With the exception of programmes 'rebooted' after long hiatuses, Last of the Summer Wine is the longest-running TV comedy programme in Britain and the longest-running TV sitcom in the world.
Last of the Summer Wine was set and filmed in and around Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, England, and centred on a trio of elderly men and their youthful misadventures; the members of the trio changed many times over the years. The original trio consisted of Bill Owen as the mischievous and impulsive Compo Simmonite, Peter Sallis as easy-going everyman Norman Clegg, and Michael Bates as uptight and arrogant Cyril Blamire. When Bates dropped out due to illness in 1976 after two series, the role of the third man of the trio was filled in various years up to the 30th series by the quirky war veteran Walter C "Foggy" Dewhurst (Brian Wilde) (who had two lengthy stints), the eccentric inventor and ex-headmaster Seymour Utterthwaite (Michael Aldridge), and former police officer Herbert "Truly of The Yard" Truelove (Frank Thornton). The men never seem to grow up, and they develop a unique perspective on their equally eccentric fellow townspeople through their stunts. Although in its early years the series generally revolved around the exploits of the main trio, with occasional interaction with a few recurring characters, over time the cast grew to include a variety of supporting characters and by later years the series was very much an ensemble piece. Each of these recurring characters contributed their own running jokes and subplots to the show, often becoming reluctantly involved in the schemes of the trio, or on occasion having their own, separate storylines.
After the death of Owen in 1999, Compo was replaced at various times by his real-life son, Tom Owen, as Tom Simmonite, Keith Clifford as Billy Hardcastle, a man who thought of himself as a direct descendant of Robin Hood, and Brian Murphy as the cheeky-chappy Alvin Smedley. Due to the age of the main cast, a new trio was formed during the 30th series, featuring somewhat younger actors. This format was used for the final two instalments of the show. This group consisted of Russ Abbot as Luther Hobdyke, known as Hobbo, a former milkman who fancied himself as a secret agent, Burt Kwouk as the electrical repairman, "Electrical" Entwistle, and Murphy as Alvin Smedley. Sallis and Thornton, both past members of the trio, continued in supporting roles alongside the new actors.
Although many felt that the show's quality had declined over the years, Last of the Summer Wine continued to receive large audiences for the BBC and was praised for its positive portrayal of older people and family-friendly humour. Many members of the royal family enjoyed the show. The programme was nominated for numerous awards and won the National Television Award for Most Popular Comedy Programme in 1999. There were twenty-one Christmas specials, three television films and a documentary film about the series. Last of the Summer Wine inspired other adaptations, including a television prequel, several novelisations, and stage adaptations.
## Production
### History and development
In 1972, Duncan Wood, the BBC's Head of Comedy, watched a comedy on television called The Misfit. Impressed by writer Roy Clarke's ability to inject both comedy and drama into the sitcom, Wood offered Clarke the opportunity to write a sitcom. Clarke nearly turned the job down as he felt that the BBC's idea for a programme about three old men was a dull concept for a half-hour sitcom. Instead, Clarke proposed that the men should all be unmarried, widowed, or divorced and either unemployed or retired, leaving them free to roam around like adolescents in the prime of their lives, unfettered and uninhibited.
Clarke chose the original title, The Last of the Summer Wine, to convey the idea that the characters are not in the autumn of their lives but the summer, even though it may be "the last of the summer". BBC producers hated this at first and insisted that it remain a temporary working title, while the cast worried that viewers would forget the name of the show. The working title was changed later to The Library Mob, a reference to one of the trio's regular haunts early in the show. Clarke switched back to his original preference shortly before production began, a title that was shortened to Last of the Summer Wine after the pilot show.
The Last of the Summer Wine premiered as an episode of BBC's Comedy Playhouse on 4 January 1973. The pilot, "Of Funerals and Fish", received enough positive response that a full series was commissioned to be broadcast before the end of the year. Although the initial series did not do well in the ratings, the BBC ordered a second series in 1975.
### Filming
The site for the exterior shots of Last of the Summer Wine was, in part, suggested by television producer Barry Took, who was familiar with the area. Took had, in the 1950s, toured as a stand-up comic, often appearing at working men's clubs. One such appearance was at Burnlee Working Men's Club, a club in the small West Yorkshire town of Holmfirth, and Took saw Holmfirth's potential as the backdrop of a television show. Twenty years later, he returned to Holmfirth, where he filmed an episode of the BBC documentary series Having a Lovely Time, which turned out to be the highest rated episode of the show. When Took heard that James Gilbert and Roy Clarke were looking for a place with a centre surrounded by hills for their new television programme, he suggested the idea to Duncan Wood, who was at that time filming Comedy Playhouse. Gilbert and Clarke then travelled to Holmfirth and decided to use it as the setting for the pilot episode.
Though the exterior shots were always filmed on location in Holmfirth and the surrounding countryside, the interior shots were, until the early 1990s, filmed in front of a live studio audience at BBC Television Centre in London. The amount of location work increased, however, as studio work became a drain on time and money. Under Alan J. W. Bell, Last of the Summer Wine became the first comedy series to do away with the live studio audience, moving all of the filming to Holmfirth. The episodes were filmed and then shown to preview audiences, whose laughter was recorded and then mixed into each episode's soundtrack to provide a laugh track and avoid the use of canned laughter.
The show used actual businesses and homes in and around Holmfirth, and Nora Batty's house, which is actually a Summer Wine themed holiday cottage where members of the public can stay in a replica of Nora Batty's home. Although this has helped the Holmfirth economy and made it a tourist destination, tensions have occasionally surfaced between Holmfirth residents and the crew. One such incident, regarding compensation to local residents, prompted producer Bell to consider not filming in Holmfirth any more. The situation escalated to the point that Bell filmed a scene in which Nora Batty put her house up for sale.
### Crew
Every episode of Last of the Summer Wine was written by Roy Clarke. The Comedy Playhouse pilot and all episodes of the first series were produced and directed by James Gilbert. Bernard Thompson produced and directed the second series of episodes in 1975. In 1976, Sydney Lotterby took over as producer and director. He directed all but two episodes of the third series – Ray Butt directed "The Great Boarding House Bathroom Caper" and "Cheering up Gordon". Lotterby directed two further series before departing the show in 1979. In 1981, Alan J. W. Bell took over as producer and director. Bell, in an effort to get each scene exactly right, was known for his use of more film and more takes than his predecessors and for using wider angles that feature more of the local Holmfirth landscape.
In 1983, Lotterby returned to the show at the insistence of Brian Wilde, who preferred Lotterby's use of tight shots focused on the trio as they talked rather than Bell's wide-angle scenes. Lotterby produced and directed one additional series before departing again the same year. Bell then returned to the show beginning with the 1983 Christmas special and produced and directed all episodes of the show to the end of the 31st series.
In 2008, Bell announced that he had quit as producer of Last of the Summer Wine. Citing differences with the BBC and his dislike of their indifference towards the series, Bell said, "I have now decided I will not do it again. I have had enough of the BBC's attitude." The announcement came following rumours initiated by Bell that the corporation would not commission another series of episodes following the 30th series and their indecision regarding a possible one-off special. However, on 26 June 2009, the BBC announced that it had recommissioned the show for a 31st series with Bell continuing as producer and director.
### Music
Composer and conductor Ronnie Hazlehurst, who also produced themes for such series as Are You Being Served?, Yes Minister, and The Two Ronnies, created the theme for the show. The BBC initially disliked Hazlehurst's theme, feeling it was not proper for a comedy programme to have such mellow music. He was asked to play the music faster for more comedic effect but eventually his original slower version was accepted. A jauntier, upbeat version was played by a brass band in the episode "Full Steam Behind".
The theme, an instrumental work, featured lyrics three times. The 1981 Christmas special, "Whoops", had two verses of lyrics written by Roy Clarke that were performed over the closing credits. The 1983 film, Getting Sam Home, used those two verses, with an additional two and played them over the opening credits. Another altered version was sung during Compo's funeral in the 2000 episode "Just a Small Funeral". Bill Owen also wrote a different version of the lyrics but this version was never used during an episode of the show.
Composing the score for each episode until his death in 2007, Hazlehurst spent an average of ten hours per episode watching scenes and making notes for music synchronisation. Hazlehurst then recorded the music using an orchestra consisting of a guitar, harmonica, two violins, a viola, cello, accordion, horn, bass, flute, and percussion. The distinctive harmonica was played by Harry Pitch, who had featured in the 1970 one-hit-wonder "Groovin With Mr Bloe".
### Ending
Despite numerous cast and production changes over the years, Last of the Summer Wine continued to be popular with viewers and was renewed year after year despite reports to the contrary. Rumours circulated as early as the 1980s that the BBC wanted to end the show and replace it with a new programme aimed at a younger audience. Its popularity made this decision hard to justify, however, since even repeats sometimes received ratings of as many as five million viewers per episode.
In December 2008, Alan J. W. Bell stated in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that the BBC had not yet commissioned a new series and that bosses at the network told him one would not be produced. Bell criticised this decision, stating that "millions still enjoy the series and the actors love being involved" and that it would be a terrible blow to the shops and businesses in Holmfirth who have come to depend on tourist revenue. The BBC denied these claims, saying that a decision had not yet been reached whether to commission another series or not.
It was confirmed on 26 June 2009 that a 31st series of 6 episodes had been commissioned for transmission in 2010. In June 2010 the BBC announced that it would not renew Last of the Summer Wine after its thirty-first series was broadcast during the summer of 2010. Tom Owen criticised the BBC for not permitting a special final episode. Roy Clarke, however, stated that he was fully aware this was the last series, and preferred the show to have a quiet ending. The final episode of the show, "How Not to Cry at Weddings", was subsequently broadcast on 29 August 2010. The final line was said by Peter Sallis, the longest-serving actor.
## Characters and casting
Initially, the only certain cast member for the show was Peter Sallis. Clarke had already collaborated on a few scripts with him and knew he wanted Sallis on the show. The character of Norman Clegg was created especially for Sallis, who liked the character and agreed to play him. He was soon joined by an actor he had previously worked with, Michael Bates as Cyril Blamire. James Gilbert wanted Bates as Blamire because of his reputation as a comedy actor, and Bates loved the role.
Compo Simmonite was the last role to be cast in the original trio. Gilbert had seen film actor Bill Owen playing northern characters in the Royal Court Theatre and proposed to cast him as Compo. Clarke, who initially saw Owen as an archetypal cockney who could not play as solid a northern character as Compo was meant to be, recognised Owen's potential only after going to London for a read-through with him.
On-screen chemistry with existing players determined the later changes to the cast. Brian Wilde, Michael Aldridge and Frank Thornton each brought a sense of completion to the trio after the departure of the preceding third man. Tom Owen provided a direct link between his father and himself after the death of Bill Owen. Keith Clifford was added following three popular guest appearances on the show. Brian Murphy was chosen as Nora Batty's neighbour because of his work on George and Mildred, where he played the hen-pecked husband to a strong-willed woman.
In 2008, the BBC announced that Russ Abbot would join the cast in series 30 as a relatively youthful actor. Abbot was cast to allow Sallis and Thornton to reduce their role on the show to indoor scenes only. Abbot portrayed Luther "Hobbo" Hobdyke, who formed a new trio with Entwistle and Alvin. Entwistle, played by Burt Kwouk, had been a supporting character brought in to replace Wesley Pegden after the death of actor Gordon Wharmby, but his role on the show steadily increased in the previous two series.
The original cast of Last of the Summer Wine also included a handful of characters with whom the trio regularly interacted. Kathy Staff was chosen to play Compo's neighbour, Nora Batty. Gilbert was initially sceptical about casting Staff but changed his mind after she padded herself to look bigger and read from a scene between her character and Owen's. This group was rounded out by characters at two locations frequented by the trio: John Comer and Jane Freeman as Sid and Ivy, the quarrelling husband-and-wife owners of the local café; and Blake Butler and Rosemary Martin as Mr Wainwright and Mrs Partridge, the librarians having a not-so-secret affair. Butler and Martin, however, were dropped as major characters after the first series. According to Peter Sallis, Roy Clarke felt there was little more he could do with them.
Although the show initially focused on the trio and four to five supporting characters, the cast expanded over the years to include an ensemble of eccentric characters who rounded out the show. The biggest expansion came in 1985 when four characters from the stage adaptation of the show were brought over to the series proper: Howard (Robert Fyfe), Pearl (Juliette Kaplan), Marina (Jean Fergusson), and Ivy's nephew, "Crusher" Milburn (Jonathan Linsley). Further additions came the following year when the film Uncle of the Bride introduced Seymour's sister, Edie, played by veteran actress Thora Hird, and her family, who were brought over to the programme the following series. The only addition with no professional acting experience was the Holmfirth resident Gordon Wharmby, who performed so well during his audition as mechanic Wesley Pegden, that Alan J. W. Bell cast him in one episode. Pegden would make two more appearances before being brought in permanently as Edie's husband and Seymour's brother-in-law after positive audience reception, becoming a regular character starting in Uncle of the Bride. The increasingly large cast ensured a sense of continuity with the changing configuration of the trio, especially following the death of Bill Owen.
During the late 1970s, after the introduction of Foggy, the plots of Last of the Summer Wine moved away from the original dialogue-packed scenes in the pub and the library; guest actors were brought in to interact with the trio in new situations. Although many of these guest appearances lasted for only one episode, some led to a permanent role on the show, as in the cases of Gordon Wharmby, Thora Hird, Jean Alexander, Stephen Lewis, Dora Bryan, Keith Clifford, Brian Murphy, Josephine Tewson, June Whitfield, Barbara Young, and Trevor Bannister. Other noted guests on the programme included John Cleese, Ron Moody, Sir Norman Wisdom, Eric Sykes, Liz Fraser, Stanley Lebor, and Philip Jackson.
## Scenario
Last of the Summer Wine focused on a trio of older men and their youthful antics. The original trio consisted of Compo Simmonite, Norman Clegg, and Cyril Blamire. Blamire left in 1976, when Michael Bates fell ill shortly before filming of the third series, requiring Clarke to hastily rewrite the series with a new third man. The third member of the trio would be recast four times over the next three decades: Foggy Dewhurst in 1976, Seymour Utterthwaite in 1986, Foggy again in 1990, and Truly Truelove in 1997. After Compo died in 1999, his son, Tom Simmonite, filled the gap for the rest of that series, and Billy Hardcastle joined the cast as the third lead character in 2001. The trio became a quartet between 2003 and 2006 when Alvin Smedley moved in next door to Nora Batty, but returned to the usual threesome in 2006 when Billy Hardcastle left the show. The role of supporting character Entwistle steadily grew until the beginning of the 30th series, when he and Alvin were recruited by Hobbo Hobdyke, a former milkman with ties to MI5, to form a new trio of volunteers who respond to any emergency.
The trio explored the world around them, experiencing a second childhood with no wives, jobs, or responsibilities. They passed the time by speculating about their fellow townspeople and testing inventions. Regular subplots in the first decade of the show included: Sid and Ivy bickering over the management of the café, Mr Wainwright and Mrs Partridge having a secret love affair that everyone knows about, Wally trying to get away from Nora's watchful eye, Foggy's exaggerated war stories, and Compo's schemes to win the affections of Nora Batty.
The number of subplots on the show grew as more cast members were added. Regular subplots since the 1980s included: Howard and Marina trying to have an affair without Howard's wife finding out (a variation of the Wainwright-Partridge subplot of the 1970s), the older women meeting for tea and discussing their theories about men and life, the police officers trying not to work, Auntie Wainwright trying to sell unwanted merchandise to unsuspecting customers, Smiler trying to find a woman, Barry trying to better himself (at the insistence of Glenda), and Tom trying to stay one step ahead of the repo man.
## Episodes
Last of the Summer Wine is the longest-running comedy programme in Britain, and the longest running situation comedy in the world. Each series has between six and twelve episodes; most were thirty minutes in length, with some specials running longer. There were 295 episodes and 31 series between 1973 and 2010, counting the pilot, all episodes of the series, specials, and two films.
### Specials
In 1978, the BBC commissioned a Last of the Summer Wine Christmas special instead of a new series. Titled "Small Tune on a Penny Wassail", it was broadcast on 26 December 1978. Other Christmas programmes followed in 1979 and 1981. The 1981 special, "Whoops", gained 17 million viewers and was beaten only by Coronation Street for the number one spot. Christmas shows were produced infrequently thereafter and sometimes were the only new episodes in years without an order for a new series. This happened often during the 1980s when Roy Clarke's commitment to Open All Hours prevented the production of a full series every year. The specials often included well-known guest stars such as John Cleese and June Whitfield.
The first New Year special, "The Man who Nearly Knew Pavarotti", was commissioned in 1994. The hour-long show was broadcast on 1 January 1995 and featured Norman Wisdom as a piano player who had lost the confidence to play. A second New Year programme was produced and broadcast in 2000 to celebrate the new millennium. It featured the second guest appearance by Keith Clifford and a guest appearance by Dora Bryan. Titled "Last Post and Pigeon", the show ran for sixty minutes and dealt with the trio's pilgrimage to visit World War II graves in France. Part of this special was shot on location in France. A third New Year show, titled "I Was a Hitman for Primrose Dairies", was broadcast on 31 December 2008 and introduced Hobbo and the new trio he formed with Entwistle and Alvin.
### Films
In 1983, Bill Owen suggested to a newly returned producer Alan J. W. Bell that Roy Clarke's novelisation of the show should be made into a feature-length special. Other British sitcoms such as Steptoe and Son and Dad's Army had previously produced films made for the cinema, but the BBC were initially sceptical as they had never before commissioned a film based on a comedy programme for original broadcast on television. They nevertheless commissioned a ninety-minute film named Getting Sam Home, which was broadcast on 27 December 1983, and started a trend which would continue with other British sitcoms, including Only Fools and Horses.
Following the success of Getting Sam Home, a second film was made during 1985, and broadcast on 1 January 1986. Titled Uncle of the Bride, the film featured the introduction of Michael Aldridge as Seymour Utterthwaite, the new third man of the trio. The plot centred on the marriage of Seymour's niece, Glenda (Sarah Thomas), to Barry (Mike Grady). Also making her first appearance in the film was Thora Hird as Seymour's sister and Glenda's mother, Edie, as well as re-introducing Gordon Wharmby as Edie's husband Wesley, previously seen in three popular one-off appearances. The second film proved a success and all four new characters were carried over to the show beginning with the ninth series in 1986.
### Documentaries
A documentary film was commissioned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Last of the Summer Wine. Produced and directed by Alan J. W. Bell, it featured interviews with the majority of cast and crew members, outtakes from the show, and a behind-the-scenes look at production. Segments with Duncan Wood and Barry Took explained the origins of the show and how it came to be filmed in Holmfirth. The documentary was broadcast on 30 March 1997.
An updated version of the documentary was commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the series. Broadcast on 13 April 2003, this version featured an expanded interview with Brian Wilde and new interviews with Brian Murphy and Burt Kwouk.
In March 2022, Channel 5 aired a 67-minute special retrospective for their series "30 Years Of Laughs". Cast, crew and celebrities paid tribute to the show.
### DVD releases
In September 2002, Universal Playback (licensed by the BBC) began releasing boxed sets of episodes on DVD for region two. Each set contains two consecutive full series of episodes. The entire series is now available on home video, both in box sets with two series of episodes each, and in a complete collection which features every episode of Last of the Summer Wine plus the pilot, all films, and specials. The entire series is also available for region four from ABC. Like the region two releases, each box set contains two series.
Three "best of" collections as well as sets devoted to individual series have been released for region one. The first, simply titled Last of the Summer Wine, was released in 2003 and includes early episodes from the 1970s and 1980s. The second collection, titled Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1995, followed in 2004 and includes episodes from series seventeen and the 30th anniversary documentary. A 2008 release named Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1976 focuses on the third series of the show and includes bonus interviews with Peter Sallis, Brian Wilde, and Frank Thornton. Subsequently, every episode from the third to the twenty-seventh series has been released on DVD in Vintage collections, many including special features and interviews.
## Other adaptations
### First of the Summer Wine
A spin-off prequel show, First of the Summer Wine, premiered on BBC1 in 1988. The new programme was written by Roy Clarke and used different actors to follow the activities of the principal characters from Last of the Summer Wine in the months leading up to World War II. Unlike its mother show, First of the Summer Wine was not filmed in Holmfirth. Period music was used instead of Ronnie Hazlehurst's score to create a more World War II era atmosphere. New supporting characters were added to those from Last of the Summer Wine. Peter Sallis and Jonathan Linsley were the only actors from the original series to appear in the spin-off: Sallis played the father of his own character from the original show and Linsley appeared during the second series as a different character.
The spin-off show could not build on its early success and was cancelled after two series of thirteen episodes in 1989. Although the BBC has never rerun the show, it has been broadcast on Gold and internationally.
### Cooper and Walsh
In 2014, it was announced that long-time supporting actors Ken Kitson and Louis Emerick had returned to Holmfirth to reprise their roles as Police Constables Cooper and Walsh in the pilot for a new proposed spin-off, Cooper and Walsh. Alan J.W. Bell as well as crew from Last of the Summer Wine were involved in the creation of two short films while Kitson and Emerick appealed for funding through crowd-sourcing sites in the hopes of gaining enough support to produce a feature film featuring the duo or even a television series. Associate Producer Terry Bartlam believed there was enough of a scope with Cooper and Walsh that they could carry their own series and that this spin-off could be the answer to those who believed Last of the Summer Wine should have been given a proper ending.
### Stage adaptations
A live production of Last of the Summer Wine, known informally as the "summer season", was produced in Bournemouth in 1984. While Bill Owen and Peter Sallis reprised their roles as Compo and Clegg, Brian Wilde chose not to take part because of personal differences with Owen. The show focused on the men's interaction with Clegg's new neighbour, Howard (Kenneth Waller), and his wife, Pearl, played by a local actress. The first act built up to the appearance of Marina (Jean Fergusson), who was in correspondence with Howard. At the end of the first act, Marina was revealed to be a blonde sexpot. Howard and Marina's story line was partly based on an early subplot of the television show. In the first series, the librarian, Mr. Wainwright, was having a love affair with his married assistant, Mrs. Partridge. Despite their efforts to keep the plot a secret, especially from Mrs. Partridge's husband, the trio of old men were well aware of the affair. The summer season reversed the roles: Howard became the married partner, and the challenge was to keep the affair secret from his wife.
The summer season proved to be a success and frequently played to packed houses. In 1985, the show was once again produced, first as a two-week tour of Britain, and then as another summer season in Bournemouth. Fergusson returned for the second summer season, once again playing Marina. Robert Fyfe replaced Waller in the role of Howard, and Juliette Kaplan took the role of Pearl for this season. Although the new characters were not originally intended to be carried over to the television programme, Roy Clarke included them in four of the following six episodes of the 1985 series, beginning with the episode "Catching Digby's Donkey". All three characters remained until the end of the sitcom.
An amended version of the show toured across Britain in 1987. Sallis was reluctant to appear in the new production, and his role in the show was rewritten and played by Derek Fowlds. Because Owen was the only member of the television show's trio to appear in the production, it was retitled Compo Plays Cupid. Once again, the summer season was a success.
A new stage adaptation of the show debuted in 2003. Based on Clarke's novel The Moonbather, the play was first performed by the Scunthorpe Little Theatre Club from 7 to 11 October 2003. Using new actors to perform the roles of Compo, Clegg, and Foggy, the play featured the trio as they attempted to get to the bottom of the disturbance created by a near-naked man in the town. The play was later performed in Eastbourne by Eastbourne Theatres from 15 July 2009 to 8 August 2009 before touring the country through November 2009.
In 2010, it was announced that long-time supporting cast members Ken Kitson and Louis Emerick would spin their characters off into their own stage adaptation, titled An Arresting Night. Kitson and Emerick, who appeared together on Last of the Summer Wine as Police Constables Cooper and Walsh from 2003 to 2010, reprised their roles in an improvised stage play. While some elements of the series will be used, the majority of the play was improvised, with Kitson and Emerick each deriving their cues of what to do from the audience. The play was successfully performed in Holmfirth, after which dates were announced in Emerick's hometown on the Wirral Peninsula.
### Other media
Coronet Books released a novelisation of Last of the Summer Wine in 1974. Written by Roy Clarke as an unbroadcast original story, the novel featured Compo, Clegg and Blamire helping their friend, Sam, enjoy one last night with a glam girl. The book became the basis for the Last of the Summer Wine film, Getting Sam Home, with Blamire being replaced by Foggy. In 1983, Granada Books published a slightly different version of the first novel with Foggy in it instead of Blamire. In the late 1980s, Roy Clarke wrote two novels featuring Compo, Clegg, and Seymour. The books were published by Penguin Books under the series heading Summer Wine Chronicles, and were titled Gala Week and The Moonbather. Clarke later adapted The Moonbather into a stage play.
In the early 1980s, a daily comic strip based on the show was drawn by Roger Mahoney and appeared in the Daily Star. A compilation of these strips, published by Express Books, was released in 1983.
In 1993, the Summer Wine Appreciation Society asked their members for their favourite musical themes from Last of the Summer Wine. Ronnie Hazlehurst used the resulting list for an independently released CD collection titled Last of the Summer Wine: Original Music from the TV Series. BBC Radio released audio-only versions of episodes starting in 1995. Peter Sallis provided narration to compensate for the loss of the televised visual elements. All twelve audio episodes were released in CD format.
In 1976, a selection of early scripts from the series was published as Last of the Summer Wine Scripts. A companion guide to the show, Last of the Summer Wine: The Finest Vintage, was released in 2000. The book was written by Morris Bright and Robert Ross and chronicled the show from its inception through the end of the 2000 series. Included were interviews with cast and crew, a character guide, and an episode guide. Both the companion guide and its updated 30th anniversary version are now out of print. A release by journalist Andrew Vine titled Last of the Summer Wine: The Inside Story of the World's Longest-running Comedy Programme covered the entire series, including the story of the final words of the series. It was released on 16 August 2010. On 5 November 2012, a new book titled Last of the Summer Wine - From the Directors Chair was released and written by producer and director Alan J.W. Bell. 2023 saw the publication of 50 Years of Last of the Summer Wine: An Appreciation by author Miles Eaton. The book was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of the sitcom.
## Reception
During its first series, Last of the Summer Wine did not receive a high ratings share. The second series proved to be a success, however, and two episodes made it to the top ten programmes of the week. The programme has since consistently been a favourite in the ratings, peaking at 18.8 million viewers for an episode shown on 10 February 1985. The premiere of the 28th series in 2007 brought in an 18.6 percent share of viewers in the 6:20 time slot with an average of 3.2 million viewers. Last of the Summer Wine'''s audience grew from 2.7 million to 3.4 million over the 30 minutes. The show was beaten for the night only by Channel 4's Big Brother with 3.6 million viewers at 9:00 p.m., although the reality show had a smaller share of viewers for its time slot. The 29th series finale, which was broadcast on 31 August 2008, was watched by 4.2 million people, giving the network a 22.5% share for the night.
`The 31st series continued to bring in over four million viewers, with the series opener pulling in 4.77 million viewers for an overall 21.6% share of the ratings for the night.`
Several members of the royal family were viewers of Last of the Summer Wine. While presenting an OBE to Roy Clarke in 2002, Prince Charles said that his grandmother, the Queen Mother, had introduced him to the show. The Queen told Dame Thora Hird during a 2001 meeting that Last of the Summer Wine was her favourite television programme.
A 2003 survey by Radio Times found that Last of the Summer Wine was the programme readers most wanted to see cancelled. With nearly 12,000 votes in the survey, the show received one-third of the total vote, and twice as many votes as the runner up in the poll, Heartbeat. Alan J. W. Bell responded that Radio Times has always been anti-Last of the Summer Wine, and Roy Clarke remarked that people who dislike the show "shouldn't switch it on" if they are "too idle to turn it off". A 2008 survey by County Life magazine, which named the show the worst thing about Yorkshire, was disputed by members of the Holme Valley Business Association, who said the show was good for business. The BBC wanted to cancel Last of the Summer Wine for years in favour of a new programme aimed at a younger audience, but the show remained too popular for cancellation; even repeats received ratings of as much as five million viewers per episode. The show came 14th in a high-profile 2004 BBC poll to find Britain's Best Sitcom, and was praised for portraying older people in a non-stereotypical, positive, and active manner. It was also praised for its clever and at times philosophical writing, and for being a family-friendly show.
Last of the Summer Wine'' was nominated numerous times for two British television industry awards. The show was proposed five times between 1973 and 1985 for the British Academy Film Awards, twice for the Best Situation Comedy Series award (in 1973 and 1979) and three times for the Best Comedy Series award (in 1982, 1983, and 1985). The show was also considered for the National Television Awards four times since 1999 (in 1999, 2000, 2003, and 2004), each time in the Most Popular Comedy Programme category. In 1999 the show won the National Television Award for Most Popular Comedy Programme.
## See also
- List of British comedy series by episode count
- List of longest-running TV shows by category
- Yorkshire dialect
|
4,933,257 |
1983 World Snooker Championship
| 1,170,902,689 |
Professional snooker tournament, held April to May 1983
|
[
"1983 in English sport",
"1983 in snooker",
"April 1983 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"May 1983 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Sports competitions in Sheffield",
"World Snooker Championships"
] |
The 1983 World Snooker Championship (also known as the 1983 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 16 April and 2 May 1983 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. This was the third and final world ranking event of the 1982–83 snooker season following the 1982 Professional Players Tournament. Sixteen seeded players qualified directly for the event, with an additional sixteen players progressing through a two-round qualification round held at the Romiley Forum in Stockport, and Redwood Lodge in Bristol. The winner of the event received £30,000, and the tournament was sponsored by cigarette company Embassy.
Alex Higgins was the defending champion, having won the 1982 championship, but he lost 5–16 to Steve Davis in the semi-finals. Davis, the 1981 champion, won the event for the second time, defeating Cliff Thorburn 18–6 in the final. A total of 18 century breaks were made during the tournament. The highest was made by Thorburn in the fourth of his second round match against Terry Griffiths, where he compiled a maximum break of 147 points, becoming the first player to make such a break in a World Championship match.
## Overview
The World Snooker Championship is a professional snooker tournament and the game's official world championship. Developed in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India, snooker was popular in the United Kingdom before being introduced to Europe and the Commonwealth. The sport is now played worldwide, especially in East and Southeast Asian nations such as China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
The 1983 Championship was organised and governed by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA). It featured 32 professional players competing in one-on-one single-elimination matches, played over several . The players were selected to take part using a combination of the world snooker rankings and a pre-tournament qualification tournament. The first World Championship, in 1927, was won by Joe Davis in a final at Camkin's Hall in Birmingham, England. Since 1977, the tournament has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The defending champion for 1983 was Alex Higgins, who defeated Ray Reardon 18–15 in the 1982 championship final. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette company Embassy, and broadcast on BBC television.
### Prize fund
The winner of the event received a prize of £30,000, the highest amount ever awarded for a snooker tournament up to that point. A breakdown of prize money for this tournament is shown below:
- Winner: £30,000
- Runner up: £15,000
- Semi-finals: £8,400
- Quarter-finals: £4,450
- Last 16: £2,950
- Last 32: £1,500
- Highest break: £3,000
- Record high break: £5,000
- Maximum break: £10,000
## Summary
### Qualifying
A two-round qualification tournament was held in March and April across three venues: at the Snooker Centre in Sheffield, Romiley Forum in Stockport, and Redwood Lodge, Bristol. In round one, Mario Morra was 4–9 behind Ian Black, but won five frames to equalise at 9–9. In the deciding frame, Morra made a 51 break, but Black replied with a 37 to win the frame and the match with just two balls remaining. Black compiled a 108 break against Paul Medati in the sixth fame of their second qualifying round, and won seven of the next eight frames to qualify for the main draw with a 10–4 win. Eddie Sinclair recorded a 112 break during a decisive 10–2 defeat of Colin Roscoe. In the second round, Sinclair played Eugene Hughes and led 5–4 after making six breaks over 40. He later won the match 10–8 after making breaks of 99 and 54 in the final two frames. Patsy Fagan failed to qualify for the main draw for the first time in his career, losing 8–10 to Mick Fisher. Les Dodd won a long match against Ian Williamson that concluded at 1:10 am with Dodd winning the deciding frame. Dodd had received a walkover in the first qualifying round after John Dunning did not appear for their match.
Snooker veteran Pat Houlihan took a 7–1 lead against Tommy Murphy, but Murphy won seven of the next eight to bring the match to 8–8. Houlihan won the 17th frame, but Murphy took the next two frames with breaks of 52 and 71, allowing him to progress to the next round. Murphy then lost 8–10 to John Virgo after leading 8–7. Virgo made a break of 101 in the 13th frame. Tony Meo defeated Vic Harris 10–0, and then defeated Geoff Foulds 10–4 to qualify. The tournament's promoter, Mike Watterson lost 6–10 to John Campbell. The reigning world billiards champion, Rex Williams, lost just one frame in qualifying, securing a 10–0 whitewash over Mike Darrington and then defeating Fred Davis 10–1.
Mark Wildman won 10–7 against Bob Harris in the first round and qualified directly for the main draw, receiving a walkover as Jim Wych (who had received a bye into the second round) had not travelled from Canada for the match. Cliff Wilson faced Joe Johnson in the second round, a rematch of the 1978 World Amateur Snooker Championship final. In the first round, Wilson had lost only one frame against Clive Everton, whilst Johnson had whitewashed Paul Watchorn. Wilson won against Johnson 10–8.
### First round
The first round was played between 16 and 22 April with best-of-19-frame matches held over two . Steve Davis was Coral bookmakers' favourite to win the event, priced at 11/8 the day before the tournament began. Terry Griffiths was the second-favourite at 7/1, with Reardon and defending champion Higgins at 8/1. Davis had won four individual tournaments during the season leading up to the competition, whilst Reardon had claimed three titles, and Higgins's only notable success had been in the 1983 Irish Professional Championship. Higgins led Dean Reynolds, 5–1 and finished their first session 6–3 ahead. He then increased his lead to 8–3, before he won the match 10–4. Willie Thorne took a 6–3 lead over Virgo and won the first four frames of their second session to complete a 10–3 victory.
Having built a 6–3 advantage over Dave Martin in their first session, Canadian Bill Werbeniuk won 10–4. Jim Meadowcroft made a highest break of just 36 as he was defeated 2–10 by David Taylor. Eddie Charlton completed a 10–7 victory against Dodd after ending their first session 5–3 in front. Three-time former winner John Spencer defeated Mike Hallett 10–7 in a closely contested match. Dennis Taylor wore glasses that he later credited for winning the event two years later. He won the last three frames of his match to defeat Silvino Francisco 10–9. Davis took a 6–0 lead over Williams, but Williams reduced the deficit by winning the next three frames. In their second session, Davis won three of the first four frames to complete a 10–4 victory.
Thorburn had a single-frame lead against Campbell after their first session and won 10–5, despite suffering from influenza symptoms. The 1979 champion Griffiths trailed Wildman 7–8 but won the final three frames to secure a 10–8 victory. In an attacking match, Meo defeated his childhood friend Jimmy White 10–8 having led 6–3 after the first session. White was the only one of the top 16 seeds to lose in the first round. Doug Mountjoy won 10–2 against Wilson, and Kirk Stevens defeated Fisher by the same margin. Reardon, having been 5–4 in front overnight, prevailed 10–7 against Hughes in a match that featured few breaks higher than 30. Perrie Mans and Tony Knowles both progressed with 10–3 wins, over Black and Miles respectively.
### Second round
The second round was played between 21 and 26 April as the best-of-25-frame matches held over three sessions. Higgins lost the first two frames against Thorne, and in the third frame accused Thorne of making a deliberate miss. Thorne commented that Higgins had accused him of being a cheat, which Higgins denied, although he later said Thorne "hadn't been very sporting". Higgins won the frame, and led Thorne 5–3 by the end of the session. Thorne equalised at 7–7 by the end of the second session. From there, Thorne won only one further frame as Higgins took the match 13–8.
David Taylor led Werbeniuk 10–6 after two sessions, but lost 10–13 after Werbeniuk won seven consecutive frames. Dennis Taylor was a frame ahead of Davis, at 4–3 after their first session, but Davis emerged as the winner, 13–11. Stevens compiled a break of 139 in the second frame against Mans, and went on to take a 7–1 lead after the first session and win 13–3 in two sessions. In a session of slow play, Charlton moved from 9–7 against Spencer to take their match 13–11. Knowles led Reardon 9–7 and, after Reardon had equalised at 11–11 and 12–12, defeated him with a break of 66 in the deciding frame. Meo gained a 5–3 lead over Mountjoy after their first session and went on to win 13–11.
The final session of the match between Thorburn and Griffiths lasted more than seven hours and finished at 3:51 am, which, at the end of the 2019 Championship, still stood as the latest finish for a snooker match at the Crucible, and at 6 hours and 25 minutes, the longest session. Thorburn achieved the first maximum break at a World Snooker Championship in the fourth frame. He was only the second player after Davis at the 1982 Classic to make an official maximum. The break started with Thorburn a . While he was completing the break, play stopped on the tournament's second table because his friend and fellow Canadian Werbeniuk wanted to watch.
### Quarter-finals
The quarter-finals were played between 25 and 27 April as the best-of-25 frames held over three sessions. Charlton compiled a break of 115 in his match against Davis, but Davis took a 5–3 lead into their second session, and then won six of the next eight frames. Davis claimed the first two frames of the final session to complete a 13–5 victory.
Higgins made a break of 109 in the first frame against Werbeniuk, and won the next on the final . At 46 points ahead in the third frame, Higgins attempted to play a behind the pink and was annoyed by referee John Williams, who awarded a against him as the cue ball had not touched the pink. After protestations from Higgins, Williams asked the match scorers for a second opinion, and the decision stood. Werbeniuk then made a break of 57 and won the frame. Higgins said that he wanted a change of referee, and threatened to walk out, but following a discussion with tournament promoter Mike Watterson, agreed to return. He won the following two frames, but lost the next after going while playing a shot on the pink. Werbeniuk won that frame and the next, leaving the scores tied at 4–4 at the end of their first session. Werbeniuk took a 9–7 lead by the end on the next session, but Higgins started the third session by winning three consecutive frames. Werbeniuk recorded a break of 109 to level at 11–11, but Higgins won the next two frames to take the match 13–11.
Knowles won the first five frames against Meo and led 6–2 after their first session, before winning 13–9. Thorburn took a 4–0 lead over Stevens, and was 5–3 ahead at the end of their first session. Stevens had led 12–10, but Thorburn won 13–12, with the final session finishing at 2:12 am. As of 2019, this was still the second-longest session (at 6 hours and 11 minutes), and the third-latest finish, since the World Snooker Championship has been held at the Crucible.
### Semi-finals
The semi-finals were played between 28 and 30 April as best-of-31-frame matches scheduled over four sessions. Davis won the first session against Higgins 5–2, and also took the first four frames the following day, making a break of 103 in the opening frame of the second session, to extend his lead to 9–2. At the mid-session interval, the Crucible Theatre was evacuated due to a death threat against Davis that had been telephoned to the venue, saying that he would be shot if he won a tenth frame. After an hour-long police search, the audience was readmitted and the match resumed. Davis was 10–4 ahead at the end of the first day. On the second day of their match, Davis compiled a break of 90 to make his lead 11–4. Higgins replied with a break of 74 to reduce his deficit to 5–11, but Davis then won the next five frames to take the match 16–5.
Knowles led Thorburn 5–3 at the end of their first session before Thorburn levelled the match at both 5–5 and 7–7. Knowles led 8–7 at the end of the second session. Thorburn took the first two frames of the third session, to gain the lead. The players were again equal at 10–10 before Thorburn moved 12–10 ahead at the end of the third session. Knowles won the next two frames after lengthy tactical exchanges, and then took a 13–12 lead with a break of 74. Knowles was within a frame of reaching the final at 15–13, but Thorburn won the next two to force a deciding frame. After Knowles missed a red, Thorburn went on to win the frame, and the match 16–15. Due to the length of the frames, the semi-final finished at 12:45 am.
### Final
The final was played on 1 and 2 May between Thorburn and Davis as the best of 35 frames, scheduled to be held over four sessions. It was Thorburn's third appearance in a World Championship final, after he had been runner-up in 1977 and champion in 1980. For Davis, it was the second world final, two years after his victory in 1981. At 2–2 after the first four frames, Davis won four in a row to lead 6–2. He increased his advantage to 9–2 at the start of the second session as Thorburn made several errors, including missing a pot on a red when using the , an unsuccessful attempt to a red, and an easy half-ball shot. Thorburn then won two frames, but Davis still finished the first day 12–5 ahead.
On the second day, Davis won the first frame on the black ball after Thorburn had missed a shot on the pink to win the frame. Thorburn missed several attempted pots in the second frame of the session, and Davis won this frame too, following it with a break of 59 in winning the third frame, and taking the fourth after another missed pot attempt from Thorburn. After the mid-session interval, Davis compiled a break of 131 in the 22nd frame to leave him one frame from victory at 17–5. Thorburn won one further frame, before Davis achieved victory at 18–6. This was the first final at the Crucible to be completed with a . The concluding frame was won on a . Thorburn was exhausted during the final after winning his last three matches in deciding frames, according to Everton. He played 14 hours more than Davis throughout the tournament. Snooker historian Clive Everton commented that the long matches Thorburn had played earlier in the tournament "left him so drained ... that he was able to offer only token resistance." Davis became the first player to win the event for a second time at the Crucible.
Davis thanked his family in his post-match speech, and said that his father, and his coach Frank Callan, were the only two people that could help him with snooker. An emotional Davis also offered his commiserations to Thorburn, and said that "he has had a lot of hard things happening to him and I want to thank him for a great final." Thorburn commented on the match, "I know what purgatory is like now. I tried like hell, but it was too hard for me to win." The £30,000 prize money brought Davis's winnings from tournaments to more than £80,000 for the season, with his expected earnings for the following year being estimated at £750,000, including income from sponsorship deals, and from charging £3,000 for playing exhibition matches.
## Main draw
Shown below are the results for the tournament. The numbers in brackets are players seedings, whilst those in bold denote match winners.
## Qualifying
Qualifying was played over two rounds both played as the best-of-19 frames in March and April. The 16 players qualifying for the event met a seeded player in the main competition. Players in bold denote match winners.
## Century breaks
There were 18 century breaks compiled during the championship, a record which stood until 1986. The highest of the event was a maximum break of 147 made by Thorburn, earning a £5,000 bonus.
- 147 – Cliff Thorburn
- 139, 105 – Kirk Stevens
- 131, 103 – Steve Davis
- 122, 116 – Ray Reardon
- 118, 115, 104 – Eddie Charlton
- 118, 106 – Doug Mountjoy
- 111 – Jimmy White
- 109, 102 – Alex Higgins
- 109 – Bill Werbeniuk
- 106 – John Spencer
- 102 – Tony Meo
|
22,296,705 |
Simon Hatley
| 1,109,310,747 |
English sailor
|
[
"1685 births",
"18th-century English people",
"Date of death unknown",
"English privateers",
"People from Woodstock, Oxfordshire"
] |
Simon Hatley (27 March 1685 – after 1723) was an English sailor involved in two hazardous privateering voyages to the South Pacific Ocean. On the second voyage, with his ship beset by storms south of Cape Horn, Hatley shot an albatross, an incident immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Born in 1685 in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, Hatley went to sea in 1708 as part of Woodes Rogers's expedition against the Spanish. Rogers circumnavigated the world, but Hatley was captured on the coast of present-day Ecuador and imprisoned in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where he was tortured by the Inquisition. He was released and returned to Great Britain in 1713.
Hatley's second voyage, under George Shelvocke, was the source of the albatross incident, and also ended with his capture by the Spanish. As Hatley had, at Shelvocke's direction, looted a Portuguese vessel on the coast of Brazil, the Spanish this time held him as a pirate, though ultimately they released him again, deciding that Shelvocke was the more culpable party. Hatley returned to Britain in 1723, and sailed to Jamaica to avoid trial for piracy. His fate thereafter is unknown.
In 1797, William Wordsworth, having read Shelvocke's account of that voyage, suggested Hatley's shooting of an albatross as the basis of a contemplated joint work with Coleridge. Wordsworth dropped out of the project soon after, but Coleridge continued, and the poem was published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), containing poems by both men, and assuring Hatley a place in literary history.
## Early life
The oldest child in a family of hatters, Simon Hatley was born on 27 March 1685 in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England during the late Restoration period. His parents were Symon and Mary Hatley. Simon Hatley's mother's name at birth was Mary Herbert and, her son later stated while imprisoned by the Spanish, she was a Catholic. Her faith and name at birth possibly meant she was related to the earls of Pembroke, for they were also Catholic with the family name Herbert. The Hatley family was a prosperous one, owning a large house and three other rental properties on the High Street. The residence was pulled down and rebuilt in 1704, after Simon had left home. According to Simon Hatley's sole biographer, Robert Fowke, in 2010, "fittingly for the family of a son with piratical leanings, it was said to have been built with stone pilfered from the nearby construction site for Blenheim Palace."
Literate in Latin as well as English, young Simon would have attended the Woodstock Grammar School up the road from where he lived. Although as the oldest son of a prosperous merchant, he could probably have followed in his father's trade, some time around 1699 he was apprenticed as a pilot, completing his formal training in Bristol by 1706 at the latest. In this era, the accounts of maritime explorations were widely published and read, and Hatley may have gained a love of adventure from them.
## Career
Much of what is known about Hatley's subsequent life is in connection with the two privateering voyages that he made to the Pacific coast of South America. Privateers were men who sailed in armed merchant ships carrying letters of marque from their government authorising them to plunder foreign enemies, keeping any profits for themselves and their ships' owners. The first such voyage made by Hatley was under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers during the War of the Spanish Succession, which found Britain and Spain on opposing sides. In 1708, at the age of twenty-three, he signed on as third mate (a junior officer position) of the Duchess, the smaller of Rogers's two ships, the other being the Duke.
Rogers's vessels were then being readied in Bristol for a long and difficult journey to the Pacific coast of South America. The purpose of the Rogers expedition was to go around Cape Horn into the South Pacific, to damage Spanish settlements and interests along the South American Pacific coast, and to capture booty for their own profit, including the large treasure galleons that sailed from Manila to Mexico. The two ships were to be crammed with men, supplies to maintain them, and with guns and powder, for the success of the expedition depended on being able to outfight those vessels they sought to capture and plunder.
### Voyage with Rogers
With a war on, finding qualified sailors was difficult, and in July 1708, Hatley was sent to Dublin to fill out the ships' crews, with the aid of an assistant and a Dubliner, Humphry French. The Duke and the Duchess sailed from Bristol on 1 August 1708, and Hatley joined the Duchess when the vessels called at Cork three days later. Many of Hatley's recruits were not sailors, but at the time government regulations limited to one-half the proportion of professional seamen private vessels such as Rogers's could have in their crews, to preserve some for ships of the Royal Navy. A total of 150 men joined at Cork, where the ships remained until the end of August, making good losses of 40 by desertion. When the ships sailed on 1 September, there were 183 in the Duke and 151 in the Duchess.
On 8 September, the ships captured a Swedish vessel bound for Cadiz, but as Britain was not at war with Sweden and searchers could find no contraband aboard, Rogers had to let her go. This provoked a near-mutiny on board the Duke, as the sailors felt they had been cheated of plunder to which they were entitled. Hatley and the Duchess were not directly involved, but he could not have avoided awareness of the problems, as there were tensions aboard the smaller vessel as well. The expedition captured a small Spanish ship off Tenerife, but released her in exchange for supplies. Items taken from that ship were auctioned off among the sailors, and Hatley purchased a pair of silk hose.
After beating their way around Cape Horn, the two vessels stopped at the Juan Fernández Islands, off Chile, for resupply. The islands were believed to be uninhabited, but as the ships approached on 31 January 1709, sailors saw a fire on shore. The landing party were surprised to be met by Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who had been marooned there by his captain more than four years before and who was overjoyed at being rescued. The Duke's pilot, William Dampier, had also been on that earlier cruise with Selkirk, though in a different ship. Rogers made Selkirk second mate of the Duke. The ships lay in Cumberland Bay for almost two weeks, allowing for repair, resupply and some time ashore.
Having resupplied and otherwise prepared, the expedition began to raid Spanish commerce. To assure fairness, the committee of expedition members who advised Rogers decided that the officers and men of each ship would each appoint two agents, one to remain on the vessel, the other to transfer to the other ship. This meant a partisan would be able to monitor what plunder was captured by the other ship. Hatley was elected an agent for Duchess's officers, and transferred to the Duke. Thus, for a time, Hatley, who would inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge's albatross-shooting Ancient Mariner, Selkirk, probably the original for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Dampier, possibly the inspiration for Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver (of Gulliver's Travels), shared the same vessel.
Opportunities for plundering were soon found; they captured several vessels, while negotiating the ransom of the town of Guayaquil in present-day Ecuador by threatening to burn it. Hatley played his part in these exploits, being in the Duchess'''s pinnace as part of a planned boarding party, when the expedition's two ships fought and captured a Spanish vessel known as the Havre de Grace in the Gulf of Guayaquil on 15 April, a sea battle that killed Rogers's brother John. When the main part of the expedition moved to capture Guayaquil on 18 April, Hatley was among those left behind on captured ships to guard the Spanish prisoners. With water becoming short, Hatley and another officer were detailed to command two of the captured ships (Hatley's was a barque) and go to Puna Island to collect water and seek news of the expedition. There they met Rogers and learned that the attack on Guayaquil had been successful, although not as profitable as hoped.
Rogers's expedition ultimately circumnavigated the globe, but Hatley did not make it that far. He remained in command of his barque as the Rogers expedition re-entered the Pacific Ocean proper. With water short and many sailors ill from a disease contracted in Guayaquil, the search for fresh water became increasingly desperate. But Hatley's ship went astray, and despite Rogers's efforts to search for her, was not seen again. Lanterns were hung and guns fired, in the hopes he would perceive them, but to no avail. Hatley had perhaps six sailors under him, and as about the same number of prisoners. It was thought that the prisoners had murdered him and his crew. Wrote Rogers in his account of the expedition, "we all bewailed Mr Hatley and were afraid he was lost."
### First captivity, return to Britain
With food short—one of the prisoners died—Hatley's crew forced him to make for the coast of what is now Ecuador. There, in late May 1709, a native spotted the ship, and Hatley and his crew were captured. The natives abused them, but a priest intervened, probably saving their lives. Hatley and his men were transported south to Lima, now in Peru, where they were confined in the prison on the Plaza Real. He was tortured by the Inquisition, once being taken to a gallows with one of his fellows and half-strangled before being cut down. Hatley arranged to smuggle several letters out, but only one survives, dated 6 November 1709, and addressed to the sponsors of the Rogers voyage, in Bristol. This one reached Britain, and may have been the first news to reach Bristol about the fate of the Rogers expedition. Under the persuasion of the Inquisition, Hatley accepted conversion to Catholicism in 1710, and was freed, though required to remain in Peru, that December. The merchant sponsors of the Rogers expedition petitioned the British Government and, in 1711, Lord Dartmouth instructed the new governor of Jamaica to do what he could for British prisoners in the hands of the Spanish. In 1713, with peace between Spain and Britain restored, Hatley was allowed to leave, and returned to his native land, having learned Spanish. The Rogers expedition had returned in 1711, and the sale of the goods was still ongoing, as was litigation. Hatley was paid £180 10s 2d in August 1713 and later that year an additional forty pounds for his role in the taking of the Havre de Grace.
Symon Hatley had died in 1712, leaving property in Woodstock to his son Simon, though with a life estate to his widow, giving her the income from the rental properties for her lifetime. In 1718, mother and son sold those properties for £140.
### Shelvocke expedition
When the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1717–1720) brought a renewal of hostilities between Britain and Spain, Hatley joined another privateering expedition as second captain of the Speedwell, under George Shelvocke, the expedition leader. As Hatley was already familiar with their South Pacific destination, his knowledge and experience made him a desirable hire for the voyage. The Speedwell was the smaller of the two ships that went on the expedition; the larger was named Success.
Delayed by difficulties over their privateering commissions and a lack of favourable winds, the expedition left Plymouth on 13 February 1719. The ships became separated and sailed independently after that; Shelvocke's conduct in doing so was subsequently the cause of litigation. On 4 June, at Cape Frio in Brazil, the Speedwell encountered a Portuguese ship. In spite of the fact that the Portuguese were allies of Britain, Shelvocke sent Hatley across with an armed crew. They left with gold and other valuables. The ship anchored at the present-day site of Florianópolis, Brazil, from 20 June to mid-August. During that time, the crew repaired the vessel and gathered supplies in preparation for the Cape Horn passage. At the end of July, Shelvocke recorded, the crew demanded new terms for division of the expedition's plunder, saying Rogers's crew had never received the full measure of what was due them. Shelvocke blamed Hatley for this episode, though whether it was a mutiny or done with the leader's connivance is uncertain, as the result left Shelvocke in control of how winnings would be divided and with a greater share of the treasure. Hatley also got into trouble with the locals, insulting one of their leaders, and Shelvocke, in his journal, accused Hatley of abusing the women.
In his journal entry for 1 October 1719 (see adjacent quotation), Shelvocke recorded the incident, the shooting of the albatross, for which Hatley joined his former shipmate Selkirk in being immortalised in literature. This took place about 400 miles (640 km) south of Cape Horn. According to Shelvocke's account, Hatley shot the bird believing it portended ill-luck, and in the hope of fairer winds. Fowke noted that at that time there was no taboo against killing albatrosses, and this was something invented by Coleridge when he wrote of the incident. Sailors sometimes baited them with food, though the oily taste of their flesh was not greatly liked. A biographer of Rogers, Bryan Little, suggested that the harsh treatment of Hatley by the Spanish in Lima may have contributed to the "melancholy fits" during which he shot the albatross. The winds did not calm, but the ship was able to round Cape Horn, battling northward along the coast of Chile, through stormy weather.
Once clear of the weather, the Speedwell began raiding along the coast, capturing several small vessels, of which one, renamed Mercury, Hatley was placed in command. At Hatley's suggestion, since he knew the coast, Shelvocke had him operate independently to capture small vessels near the coast of Peru and Ecuador. On 9 March 1720, the Mercury's crew saw a ship that they initially assumed to be the Speedwell. It was too late to run when they realised it was a Spanish warship, the Brilliant. Hatley sent those sailors who were obviously British in appearance below, trying to make it appear his ship was still under Spanish control. The stratagem failed when three sailors, British by their dress, suddenly emerged from below decks, and the Brilliant fired, slightly wounding Hatley. The British sailors, including Hatley, were captured and landed at Paita, and transported 600 miles (970 km) to Lima.
By this time Britain and Spain were again at peace, and all the prisoners but Hatley were soon released; he was kept chained and in solitary confinement. They accused him of piracy because of the looting of the Portuguese ship at Cape Frio; a purse had been found among his possessions with 96 moidores, and he faced hanging or hard labour in the mines. There was uncertainty as to whether the Lima authorities could try him for a crime against the Portuguese, and with Shelvocke's reputation poor even among the British (he was arrested and briefly imprisoned for the incident upon his return, though acquitted due to lack of witnesses), they decided the expedition commander was probably the responsible party. Hatley was released in 1723.
What became of Hatley after 1723 is uncertain. He faced the possibility of a piracy prosecution in England because of the Cape Frio incident. Immediately upon his return, he sailed for Jamaica, then a den of pirates, without presenting himself to the owners of the Shelvocke expedition. Nothing is known of him thereafter; Fowke speculated he continued as a sailor.
## Literary influence
According to William Wordsworth, the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was conceived while he and Coleridge were walking together in the Quantock Hills of Somerset in November 1797. The two were considering the fate of Cain, condemned to wander the earth for killing his brother Abel, for a contemplated joint poetic work. The discussion turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, Shelvocke's A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea, in which the incident of Hatley shooting the albatross is told. "Much the greatest part of the story was Coleridge's invention", Wordsworth later wrote, though it was Wordsworth's idea that the main plot device of the narrative should involve the killing of an albatross in the South Sea, for which "the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." Wordsworth soon found their poetic styles incompatible and withdrew from the project, but Coleridge continued. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in their joint work, Lyrical Ballads'', in 1798.
Tim Beattie, in his book on the privateering voyages of the early 18th century, deemed Shelvocke an unreliable witness, placing in doubt whether the albatross incident actually occurred, but considered Coleridge's use of it a testimonial to the enduring appeal of the books recounting the sea voyages. Hatley's shooting of an albatross differs in some regards from the Ancient Mariner's. Hatley shot the bird in the hopes of fairer winds; no motive is given for the Mariner's deed. The shooting by the Mariner is followed by retribution, the hanging of the albatross around the Mariner's neck, and other torments. Hatley underwent trials and tribulations after shooting the albatross, but these were at the hands of the Spanish and were not directly connected to the killing of the albatross. The Mariner is subsequently shriven by the Hermit. According to Fowke, there was "no forgiveness for Hatley and clearly there were things to forgive. He took ship for Jamaica fearing a second trial."
|
1,291,829 |
Marchioness disaster
| 1,168,513,110 |
Collision between two ships in London in 1989
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[
"1989 disasters in the United Kingdom",
"1989 in London",
"20th century in the London Borough of Southwark",
"August 1989 events in the United Kingdom",
"History of the City of London",
"History of the River Thames",
"Little Ships of Dunkirk",
"Maritime incidents in 1989",
"Maritime incidents in England",
"Port of London",
"Shipwrecks of the River Thames",
"Transport disasters in London"
] |
The Marchioness disaster was a collision between two vessels on the River Thames in London in the early hours of 20 August 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 51 people. The pleasure boat Marchioness sank after being hit twice by the dredger at about 1:46 am, between Cannon Street railway bridge and Southwark Bridge.
Marchioness had been hired for the evening for a birthday party and had about 130 people on board, four of whom were crew and bar staff. Both vessels were heading downstream, against the tide, Bowbelle travelling faster than the smaller vessel. Although the exact paths taken by the ships, and the precise series of events and their locations, are unknown, the subsequent inquiry considered it likely that Bowbelle struck Marchioness from the rear, causing the latter to turn to port, where she was hit again, then pushed along, turning over and being pushed under Bowbelle's bow. It took thirty seconds for Marchioness to sink; 24 bodies were found within the ship when it was raised.
An investigation by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) blamed a lack of lookouts, but their report was criticised by the families of the victims, as the MAIB had not interviewed anyone on Marchioness or Bowbelle, but relied on police interviews. The government refused to hold an inquiry, despite pressure from the families. Douglas Henderson, the captain of Bowbelle, was charged with failing to have an effective lookout on the vessel, but two cases against him ended with a hung jury. A private prosecution for manslaughter against four directors of South Coast Shipping Company, the owners of Bowbelle, and corporate manslaughter against the company was dismissed because of lack of evidence.
A formal inquiry in 2000 concluded that "The basic cause of the collision is clear. It was poor lookout on both vessels. Neither vessel saw the other in time to take action to avoid the collision." Criticism was also aimed at the owners of both ships, as well as the Department of Transport and the Port of London Authority. The collision and the subsequent reports led to increased safety measures on the Thames, and four new lifeboat stations were installed on the river.
## Background
### Marchioness
The pleasure boat Marchioness was built in 1923 by the Salter Brothers of Oxford for Joseph Mears, a businessman whose interests included running pleasure launches on the River Thames. She was 85.5 ft (26.1 m) long and 14.5 ft (4.4 m) at the beam, and measured 46.19 gross tons. She spent most of her life on the Thames, including when she was requisitioned during the Second World War by the Thames Hospital Emergency Service, when she was stationed in Dagenham. Her service included being one of the little ships that aided in the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. Marchioness was sold to Thames Launches in 1945, when Mears's company was wound up. She was purchased by Tidal Cruises Ltd in 1978 and the upper works were rebuilt to form an upper and lower saloon. The new upper saloon obstructed the vision from the wheelhouse, and there was, the later inquiry established, a lack of easily accessible emergency exits, particularly from the lower decks. Marchioness had seven life rafts—each of which could support twenty people—and seven lifebuoys—each of which could support two people. Registered in London, she was licensed to carry 165 passengers. From the early 1970s there was an increase in the number of boats for evening or night-time parties and discos, and Marchioness was part of this market.
Marchioness carried a crew of two: her captain was Stephen Faldo; the mate was Andrew McGowan. On the night of her sinking, she also carried two members of bar staff. Faldo and McGowan had a business partnership, Top Bar Enterprises, which provided the bar staff and drink for the party. Faldo was 29 at the time of the sinking. He had begun working on the Thames at the age of 17 and had earned his full waterman's river licence in June 1984. He began work at Tidal Cruises in 1986 and became the permanent captain of Marchioness in 1987. He had forgotten to renew his riverman's licence in the run-up to the night of the collision, and was technically not entitled to skipper the vessel that night. A later inquiry considered the lack of licence was "a minor point because he was undoubtedly qualified to do so and could have renewed his licence by paying 50 pence". McGowan, age 21, became an apprentice to a waterman in June 1986. By February 1988 he had completed courses at the Port of London Authority for chartwork and seamanship, and obtained his apprentice licence in May 1988; he joined Marchioness as a crew member around the same time.
### Bowbelle
The aggregate dredger was launched in 1964 by the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company of Troon, Scotland. She was 262 ft (79.9 m) long and 45 ft (13.8 m) at the beam; her deadweight tonnage was 1,850 long tons (1,880 t) and she measured 1,474.72 gross tons. Bowbelle was one of six "Bow" ships owned by East Coast Aggregates Limited; they were managed by South Coast Shipping Company Limited. East Coast Aggregates Limited (ECA) was part of the larger RMC Group, a concrete products company. Bowbelle had a crew of nine: a master, two mates, three engineers, two able seamen and a cook. The ship's captain, Douglas Henderson, aged 31, undertook a Deep Sea apprenticeship until 1978 and joined ECA in November 1987, when he became second mate on Bowsprite. In May 1989 he became the master of Bowbelle.
Vessels from ECA, including Bowbelle, had previously been involved in accidents on the Thames. In July 1981 there was a collision between Bowtrader and the passenger launch Pride of Greenwich; three months later Bowtrader was involved in a collision with Hurlingham, another pleasure cruiser owned by Tidal Cruises. Bowbelle collided with Cannon Street railway bridge in May 1982 and, the following month, was nearly in a collision with a passenger boat.
At the time of the collision with Marchioness, Bowbelle was carrying aggregate and was trimmed down at the stern; this, along with the dredging equipment, limited the forward vision from the bridge. On 19 August 1989 Henderson visited several public houses over a period of three and a half hours and drank six pints (3.4 L; 120 imp fl oz) of lager. He returned to the ship at 6:00 pm for food and a short sleep; one of the ship's company, Terence Blayney, who acted as the forward lookout that night, was with Henderson, and drank seven pints over the same period.
### Jonathan Phang and Antonio de Vasconcellos
Marchioness was hired for a party for the night of 19–20 August 1989. It was organised by Jonathan Phang, a photographic agent, to celebrate the 26th birthday of Antonio de Vasconcellos, who worked in a merchant bank. The pair were good friends and business partners in a photographic agency. Phang paid £695 to hire the boat from 1:00 am to 6:00 am, with extra for the hire of the disco, food and drinks. Many of those at the party were also in their twenties; some were former students and others worked in fashion, journalism, modelling and finance. The plan was for Marchioness to go downriver from the Embankment Pier near Charing Cross railway station to Tower Bridge, then back to Charing Cross to land some of the passengers. Marchioness would then travel down to Greenwich before returning again to Charing Cross, arriving back at 5:45 am.
## 20 August 1989
### 0:00 am – 7:00 am
The night of 19–20 August 1989 was a clear one; it was three days after the full moon and there was good visibility. There was a negligible wind. It was a spring tide, recorded as one of the highest of the year and the river was at half-tide at the time of the collision; it was running upriver at a rate of three knots. There are several versions of the paths taken by the vessels in the approach to Southwark Bridge and beyond, and no agreement on the point when the two ships collided. Much of the evidence gathered in later investigations was inconsistent and any descriptions of the actions of the ships are based on average speeds and likely positions.
At 1:12 am Bowbelle left her berth at the Nine Elms pier near Battersea Power Station and radioed her move by VHF radio to Thames Navigation Service (TNS), based in Woolwich. She reported passing Vauxhall Bridge at 1:20 am and Waterloo Bridge at 1:35 am. In accordance with the usual procedure, TNS radioed all river traffic at 1:15 am and 1:45 am, advising them of Bowbelle's downstream passage. Bowbelle's average speed was about 5.5 knots (6.3 mph; 10.2 km/h) over the ground.
Marchioness was supposed to leave Embankment Pier at 1:00 am, but was delayed until 1:25 am. No count was made of the number of passengers, but the accepted number on board is either 130 or 131. Faldo was in the wheelhouse, where he stayed until the collision. Heading downriver, just before Blackfriars Bridge, Marchioness passed her sister pleasure cruiser Hurlingham—which was also hosting a disco that night, and was also heading in the same direction. Marchioness's average speed was about 3.2 knots (3.7 mph; 5.9 km/h) over the ground. She passed through the central arch of Blackfriars Bridge; at this point she was about 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) in front of Bowbelle. At some point after Blackfriars Bridge, Bowbelle overtook Hurlingham and steered for the central arch of Southwark Bridge. Marchioness also went through the central arch, but probably towards the southern side.
When Bowbelle was within 160 feet (50 m) of Marchioness, the smaller vessel was affected by the forces of interaction—the water being pushed ahead of the large ship. At about 1:46 am, just after Marchioness passed under Southwark Bridge, she was hit twice by Bowbelle's bow. The first impact was 20 feet (6.1 m) from Marchioness's stern, which had the effect of turning the smaller vessel to port. The second impact was 33 feet (10 m) from the stern, and caused the pleasure boat to pivot round the bow of Bowbelle, and turn it on its side, probably to an angle of 120°. The upper superstructure of Marchioness was ripped off by Bowbelle's anchor. The lower saloon was quickly flooded and the lights went out. The weight and momentum of Bowbelle pushed Marchioness underwater and she sank, stern first, within 30 seconds of being hit. McGowan had been thrown from the boat into the water, but climbed back on board to tie open the port side door, which led to the dance floor, to allow several people to escape. One eyewitness to the crash, Keith Fawkes-Underwood, who viewed the incident from the south bank of the Thames, reported:
> The barge collided with the pleasure boat hitting it in about its centre then mounted it, pushing it under the water like a toy boat. Within a matter of about 20 seconds the pleasure boat had totally disappeared underneath the water.
Of the 130 people on board Marchioness, 79 survived and 51 died. The dead included de Vasconcellos and Faldo. No-one on Bowbelle was injured. Marchioness sank so quickly that most people were unable to locate or use the life rafts, buoys or jackets. Survival of those on Marchioness depended partly on their location within the vessel. There were 41 people known to have been on the forward deck and wheelhouse, of whom 9 died and 32 survived, a survival rate of 78%. Of the 13 people known to have been in the lower saloon, 9 died and 4 survived (a 31% survival rate). One of those from the lower saloon who survived was Iain Philpott, who said in his statement to the police:
> I remember turning around to head towards the windows to escape the boat, the water started coming in the boat through the window, I knew at this point the boat was going to go down. Within a matter of seconds the general lights went out, everything was in darkness ... I was then thrown forward by a wall of water, the whole boat filled with water instantly ... When I surfaced I was some distance away from the Marchioness which was partly submerged.
Hurlingham was between 45 and 60 metres (150–200 feet) away from the collision, and those on board were in the best position to be eyewitnesses. George Williams, the vessel's captain, put out a call on VHF radio to the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police Service, based in Wapping: "Woolwich Police, Wapping Police, Wapping Police, Emergency, pleasure boat is sunk, Cannon Street Railway Bridge, all emergency aid please". The call was also picked up by the TNS, who misheard the location as Battersea Bridge; Thames Division only heard part of the call, so TNS informed them that the police should be in attendance at Battersea Bridge.
After colliding with Marchioness, Bowbelle hit one of the piers of Cannon Street Bridge, and radioed TNS at 1:48 am to correct the inaccurate reference to Battersea Bridge; at 1:49 am Henderson reported to TNS:
> I have to get underway now and proceed out through bridges. I believe I have struck a pleasure craft. It has sunk. I am getting clear of the bridges now. I was distracted by flashing lights from another pleasure craft. My vessel was proceeding outward bound just approaching Cannon Street bridge and, well, I just lost steerage, um and I don't know after that, I can't really say anything else sir. Over.
After the radio transmission, Bowbelle travelled downstream to Gallions Reach, where she dropped anchor. Her crew did not deploy the ship's lifebuoys, flotation devices or lifeboat and she did not take part in the attempts to rescue survivors. All ships in the area were instructed to go to the area to assist with the rescue. Hurlingham was already on the scene, and the passengers and crew threw lifebuoys and buoyancy aids to those in the water. Many of those from Marchioness were swept into driftwood collection cages, and Hurlingham picked up several survivors—the passengers climbing out onto the cages to help people out of the water. The vessel then dropped all passengers and 28 survivors at the nearby Waterloo Police Pier (now Tower Lifeboat Station) before it took members of the emergency services back out to the collision site. Waterloo Police Pier was used as the landing point for all casualties and the first responders from the emergency services set up a treatment and processing point there. Police launches rescued more than half the survivors from the river; some reached the river bank themselves.
Less than half an hour after Marchioness was hit, a major incident was declared with an incident room at New Scotland Yard. The police's body recovery team were also deployed, and the first body arrived at Wapping Police Station—where the Thames Division were based—at 6:50 am. The station acted as a holding area for bodies before they were taken to the mortuary in Westminster.
### 7:00 am – 0:00 am
Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, returned home early from her holiday in Austria to be briefed by Michael Portillo, the Minister of State for Transport. His senior in the department, the Secretary of State for Transport Cecil Parkinson, also returned home early in response. Portillo announced that an investigation would be made by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB), but that no decision had yet been made as to whether to hold a public inquiry. Within 24 hours of the collision, the decision was made that there would be no public inquiry, and that the MAIB investigation would be sufficient.
A Port of London (PLA) hydrographic surveyor located the wreckage of Marchioness and, during the late afternoon of 20 August, work began on lifting the vessel. The bodies of 24 party-goers were found on board, 12 of them in the lower saloon. The wreckage was moored against the north bank of the Thames.
While the lifting operation was progressing, police arrested and interviewed Henderson and Kenneth Noble, Bowbelle's second mate who was at the wheel for the collision. Both men were breathalysed; the police announced soon afterwards that alcohol was not a cause of the collision.
## Inquests and inquiries
### 1989 to 1997
On the day following the collision Paul Knapman, the coroner for the City of Westminster, opened and adjourned the inquest into the deaths. In the days after the collision, bodies were still being found and recovered from the water. To help with the identification process, Knapman opted to use several methods, including dental records, identification of personal items and clothing descriptions from descriptions provided by the families, and fingerprints. As part of their approach, Knapman decided that:
> With those bodies which were not recovered from the Marchioness and which would be likely to surface only when putrification and bloating meant that they would float, the following would apply:
During the post-mortem examinations, 25 pairs of hands were removed; no written records were kept of the removal. No guidelines were issued over which hands should be removed and no individual was given responsibility for making the decision. The majority were identified through other means—visual identification of the face, or through identification of clothing or personal items, and only four of the victims were identified through their fingerprints. Families of the victims later complained that they were not told in a timely fashion that bodies had been recovered, that some were denied access to view the bodies of their relatives, and were not told of the processes that would be used—including that the hands would be removed. One family was shown the body of the wrong person, then given the right body, but without the hands; these were sent on later with apologies, and a request not to tell other parents about the need to remove them as this was a 'one-off' mistake.
On 24 August Marchioness was taken from her mooring near Southwark Bridge, and towed downstream to Greenwich, where she was broken up.
The MAIB issued an interim report towards the end of August, with recommendations as to increasing safety on the Thames. These included a requirement that vessels over 130 ft (40 m) had to have a forward lookout in contact with the bridge by radio, and tighter controls on the passage of vessels along the upper Thames. Their investigation continued with a reconstruction of the events on the night of 16–17 September; Bowbelle took part, and a PLA launch was used as a stand-in for Marchioness. This was later criticised by Brian Toft, a disaster and risk-management expert commissioned by the Marchioness Action Group (MAG), as being unsatisfactory. Toft identified that there were several problems, including no second pleasure cruiser, no fare-paying passengers and no disco lights or music included in the re-enactment.
In October 1989 the companies behind Bowbelle and Marchioness agreed to pay up to £6 million in compensation to the families of the victims, without either company admitting any liability for the crash. The sum offered was under a calderbank condition that the offer stood to be withdrawn if a judge awarded a lower amount. A week later a report was compiled for Allan Green, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), which recommended that criminal charges should not be brought against Henderson.
That December, Knapman met the DPP to discuss the progress of the inquests. Green agreed that the first part of the inquest should go ahead—dealing with the causes of death—irrespective of the other investigations of the police and the possibility of later criminal charges. A second part of the inquest—establishing the responsibility of the crash and making safety recommendations—would be discussed at a later stage. When Knapman re-opened the inquest on 23 April 1990, he was critical of the DPP for taking eight months to decide on whether to bring criminal charges against anyone, which meant that a full inquest could not take place in case it prejudiced any future trial. The inquest was, in effect, a series of what the legal scholar Hazel Hartley calls "mini inquests", one each for each of the 51 bodies.
On 26 April the DPP stepped in to stop the inquest, stating that charges would now be brought against Henderson. Because of his decision to stop the inquest, the information on how the collision occurred, who was to blame or what could be done to ensure it could not be repeated, was not considered. Henderson was charged under the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 for failing to have an effective lookout on the vessel. The case against him opened on 4 April 1991 at the Old Bailey and ran to 14 April. The jury failed to reach a decision; the DPP decided that a retrial would be in the public interest. This took place between 17 and 31 July the same year; it again ended with a hung jury.
At the end of July 1991 Ivor Glogg, the husband of one of the victims, began a private prosecution for manslaughter against four directors of South Coast Shipping Company, the owners of Bowbelle, and corporate manslaughter against the South Coast Shipping Company. Two weeks later the Transport Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, took the decision to publish the MAIB Report, repeating that because an appropriate body had undertaken an investigation, there was no requirement to have a public inquiry. Families of the victims were angry with the move, pointing out that Rifkind had delayed publication of the report on the basis that publication could prejudice the case against Henderson, but that the publication could now jeopardise Glogg's private prosecution. The DPP demanded that Glogg hand over the papers for the case, stating he would take it over, then drop it; Glogg refused to comply, stating that it was out of the remit of the DPP, and that it was for a magistrates' court to decide if the case was adequate. The DPP withdrew and allowed Glogg's case to proceed. The case was dismissed after the magistrate stated that there was insufficient evidence.
The MAIB report considered that Marchioness had altered her course to port, which put her in line with Bowbelle's path. The report concluded that:
> 18.3 ... no one in either vessel was aware of the other's presence until very shortly before the collision. No one on the bridge of BOWBELLE was aware of MARCHIONESS until the collision occurred.
>
> 18.4 The principal contributory factors were that:
The families of the victims criticised the MAIB report. They pointed out that the investigation had not directly interviewed anyone on Marchioness or Bowbelle, but relied on the police interviews; they stated that there were errors in methodology, approach and fact within the report. Toft provided a critique of the MAIB's work and concluded that:
> The inconsistencies, contradictions, confusions, conjecture, erroneous conclusions, missing and inappropriate recommendations as well as epistemological, ontological and methodological problems, created by the then current maritime safety culture ... raises serious doubts as to the objectivity of the investigation, the validity of the findings, the judgement of the Department of Transport in holding an inquiry of this type, and as a result whether or not all the appropriate lessons were uncovered during the MAIB's inquiry into this tragedy.
The report was handed to Rifkind, who again declined to open a public inquiry, but commissioned a private one—the Hayes Report, published in July 1992—that looked at health and safety on the Thames, rather than the sinking of Marchioness.
In 1992 the families of the victims became aware that the hands had been removed from many of the bodies. In March that year an account in The Mail on Sunday, "Cover up!", was published; when Knapman met the two journalists to deny the accusation of a cover-up, he advised them not to base reports on what Margaret Lockwood-Croft, the mother of one of the victims, said: he described her as "unhinged". He also showed them photographs of the victims, without discussing the matter with the families. In July, Knapman informed the families that the inquests—suspended since April 1990 because of the case against Henderson—would not be recommenced. The families tried to apply for a judicial review on the basis that "the use of the word 'unhinged' and reference to a number of 'mentally unwell' relatives betrayed an attitude of hostility, however unconscious, towards ... members of the Marchioness Action Group". Initially turned down by High Court, the Court of Appeal then found in favour of the group to allow an appeal. In June 1994 Knapman and his assistant were stood down and replaced by another coroner, John Burton. He was initially dismissive of the concerns of the MAG, accused their solicitor of trying to mislead the Court of Appeal and indicated that he was inclined not to grant any further inquests. Burton was told that another judicial review would be applied for if he refused to hold the inquests, and he subsequently announced that they would go ahead.
The resumed inquest took place in March and April 1995. When questioned about the MAIB report, Captain James de Coverley—one of the report's authors—withdrew the suggestion that Marchioness had steered to port in the last moments before the crash, saying it had never been his intention that the text could be understood that way. In summing up, Burton instructed the coroner's jury that a verdict of unlawful killing could not be applied to anyone who had already been cleared by a court. The jury retired for four hours and returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Burton asked them "Did you understand my Direction?", although the decision stood.
### 1997 to 2001
Following the 1997 election, which brought the Labour Party to power, the MAG petitioned John Prescott, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions and Deputy Prime Minister, to open an inquest. In August 1999 he instructed Lord Justice Clarke to undertake a non-statutory inquiry into safety on the Thames. Clarke reported in February 2000, concluding:
> I was asked to advise
>
> My answer to that question is yes.
Prescott accepted the recommendation and the public inquest took place in October and November 2000, with Clarke chairing proceedings; the report was published in March 2001. Clarke concluded that "The basic cause of the collision is clear. It was poor lookout on both vessels. Neither vessel saw the other in time to take action to avoid the collision." The underlying causes on why neither vessel saw the other were that Henderson did not ensure a proper lookout on Bowbelle; that Blayney the lookout was not equipped with suitable radio equipment to inform his captain; that Faldo had not set up a lookout system on Marchioness, nor did he keep a lookout aft himself. Focusing on Henderson, Clarke wrote "We cannot stress too strongly how much we deprecate Captain Henderson's conduct in drinking so much alcohol before returning to his vessel as master"; Clarke added "but we do not think that it is shown on the balance of probabilities that Captain Henderson would have acted differently if he had not consumed the alcohol or had the amount of sleep which he had". The captain was also criticised for his actions after the collision, when he did not broadcast a mayday call and did not deploy either the lifebuoys or life raft, in contravention of section 422 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894. Clarke also found that the owners and managers of the vessels held some blame. For Bowbelle, the owners "must bear their share of responsibility for the collision for failing properly to instruct their masters and crews and for failing thereafter to monitor them"; the owners of Marchioness gave no instructions about all-round lookouts; and failed to adequately instruct, supervise or monitor their boats' captains.
Clarke also allotted blame to the Department of Transport, who, he said, were "well aware of the problems posed by the limited visibility from the steering positions on both types of vessel" yet failed to deal with the problem. The PLA also failed to act in this regard, and should have issued instructions for the placement of lookouts on such vessels. Clarke found that because no individual's actions could be ascertained as the single cause of the collision, a manslaughter charge would be bound to fail.
### Compensation
English law provides no compensation for fatal accidents, other than for funeral expenses, unless financial dependency at the time of death can be proved. In most cases, the families of the Marchioness victims received little more than the cost of the funeral. Louise Christian, the human rights solicitor who acted for the families of the victims, wrote that "When young unmarried people die in circumstances of gross negligence as here, death comes cheap and the boat owners and their insurance companies suffer little in the way of financial penalties".
Civil claims for compensation were brought on behalf of the victims' families; the amounts received ranged between £3,000 and £190,000. Eileen Dallaglio, the mother of Francesca Dallaglio, one of the victims, reported that she had been awarded £45,000. After the costs of having to go to the Court of Appeal to obtain damages, and the bills for the memorial and funeral service, she was left with £312.14. According to Irwin Mitchell, the solicitors who represented the families, the amounts were "modest" because many of those killed were young, without dependants and had no established careers. Under the Fatal Accidents Act 1976, damages were only paid to certain categories of people, and were based on the economic loss to the victim.
## Aftermath
After recommendations made in the Clarke report relating to the improvement of river safety, the government asked the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), the PLA and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) to work together to set up a dedicated search and rescue service for the Thames. In January 2001 the RNLI agreed to set up four lifeboat stations—at Gravesend, Tower, Chiswick and Teddington—which were opened in January the following year.
Following the report, Prescott ordered the MCA to conduct a competency review into the actions and behaviour of Henderson. This took place in December 2001. The MCA picked up on something that had been raised during the Clarke inquiry: that Henderson had forged certificates and testimonials of his service from 1985–1986. They stated that they "deplored" the forgeries, which Henderson had used to gain his Master's Licence. The MCA concluded that he should be allowed to keep his master's certificate as he met all the service and medical fitness requirements; they stated that the agency "accepted that events which occurred in 1986 have no practical relevance on his current fitness".
In 2001 the Royal Humane Society made nineteen bravery awards to people involved in rescuing the victims of the collision, many of whom were passengers on Hurlingham. Eight policemen on duty that night were given the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's High Commendation.
Following the Clarke report and a subsequent review of emergency planning procedures, the government introduced the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 that provided a coherent framework and guidance for emergency planning and response. Clarke's recommendations to examine the coroner system were a major factor in the overhaul of the system that resulted in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
The events surrounding the sinking of Marchioness have been examined or depicted on television several times, including a documentary on Channel 4's Dispatches in December 1994, a drama-documentary in the BBC Two series Disaster in March 1999 and a 2009 documentary focusing on Jonathan Phang. A drama about the events surrounding the disaster was scheduled for broadcast on ITV in late 2007. Some of the victims' families requested that the programme should not be broadcast, although some thought it positive that it was going to be shown. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival that August, the former ITV Director of Drama Nick Elliot confirmed that the drama would not be shown "in its present form"; it has since been shown on French television.
In September 1989 a black granite memorial stone was uncovered in the nave of Southwark Cathedral, about 400 ft (120 m) from the site of the collision. The stone lists the names and ages of those who died. Memorial services have been held at the cathedral on anniversaries of the sinking.
Bowbelle was sold in 1992 to Sealsands Maritime, operating out of Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; she was renamed Billo. Four years later she was sold to Antonio Pereira & Filhos of Funchal, Madeira, who named the vessel Bom Rei. She broke in two and sank off Madeira the same year with the loss of one crew member.
## See also
- List of disasters in Great Britain and Ireland by death toll
|
1,091,224 |
Al-Mu'tadid
| 1,151,398,543 |
16th Abbasid Caliph (r. 892–902)
|
[
"10th-century Abbasid caliphs",
"902 deaths",
"9th-century Abbasid caliphs",
"9th-century births",
"Arab Muslims",
"Arab people of Greek descent",
"Generals of the Abbasid Caliphate",
"One Thousand and One Nights characters",
"Year of birth uncertain"
] |
Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Ṭalḥa al-Muwaffaq (Arabic: أبو العباس أحمد بن طلحة الموفق), 853/4 or 860/1 – 5 April 902, better known by his regnal name al-Muʿtaḍid bi-llāh (Arabic: المعتضد بالله, "Seeking Support in God"), was the caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate from 892 until his death in 902.
Al-Mu'tadid was the son of al-Muwaffaq, who was the regent and effective ruler of the Abbasid state during the reign of his brother, Caliph al-Mu'tamid. As a prince, the future al-Mu'tadid served under his father during various military campaigns, most notably in the suppression of the Zanj Rebellion, in which he played a major role. When al-Muwaffaq died in June 891 al-Mu'tadid succeeded him as regent. He quickly sidelined his cousin and heir-apparent al-Mufawwid; when al-Mu'tamid died in October 892, he succeeded to the throne. Like his father, al-Mu'tadid's power depended on his close relations with the army. These were first forged during the campaigns against the Zanj and were reinforced in later expeditions which the Caliph led in person: al-Mu'tadid would prove to be the most militarily active of all Abbasid caliphs. Through his energy and ability, he succeeded in restoring to the Abbasid state some of the power and provinces it had lost during the turmoil of the previous decades.
In a series of campaigns he recovered the provinces of Jazira, Thughur, and Jibal, and effected a rapprochement with the Saffarids in the east and the Tulunids in the west that secured their—albeit largely nominal—recognition of caliphal suzerainty. These successes came at the cost of gearing the economy almost exclusively towards the maintenance of the army, which resulted in the expansion and rise to power of the central fiscal bureaucracy and contributed to the Caliph's lasting reputation for avarice. Al-Mu'tadid was renowned for his cruelty when punishing criminals, and subsequent chroniclers recorded his extensive and ingenious use of torture. His reign saw the permanent move of the capital back to Baghdad, where he engaged in major building activities. A firm supporter of Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy, he nevertheless maintained good relations with the Alids, and was interested in natural sciences, renewing caliphal sponsorship of scholars and scientists.
Despite his successes, al-Mu'tadid's reign was ultimately too short to effect a lasting reversal of the Caliphate's fortunes, and the revival that he spearheaded was too dependent on the presence of capable personalities at the helm of the state. The brief reign of his less able son and heir, al-Muktafi, still saw some major gains, notably the annexation of the Tulunid domains, but his later successors lacked his energy, and new enemies appeared in the form of the Qarmatians. In addition, factionalism within the bureaucracy, which had become apparent during the later years of al-Mu'tadid's reign, would debilitate the Abbasid government for decades to come, eventually leading to the subjugation of the Caliphate by a series of military strongmen, culminating in the conquest of Baghdad by the Buyids in 946.
## Early life
Al-Mu'tadid was born Ahmad, the son of Talha, one of the sons of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–861), and a Greek slave named Dirar. The exact date of his birth is unknown; as he is variously recorded as being thirty-eight or thirty-one years old at the time of his accession, he was born around either 854 or 861. In 861, al-Mutawakkil was murdered by his Turkish guards in collusion with his oldest son al-Muntasir (r. 861–862). This began a period of internal turmoil, known as the "Anarchy at Samarra" from the site of the Caliphate's capital, which ended in 870 with the rise to the throne of Ahmad's uncle, al-Mu'tamid (r. 870–892). Real power however, had come to lie with the elite Turkish slave-soldiers (ghilmān) and with Ahmad's own father, Talha, who, as the Caliphate's main military commander, served as the chief intermediary between the caliphal government and the Turks. Assuming the honorific name al-Muwaffaq in the style of the caliphs, Talha soon became the effective ruler of the Caliphate, a position consolidated in 882 after a failed attempt by al-Mu'tamid to flee to Egypt led to his confinement in house arrest.
Caliphal authority in the provinces collapsed during the "Anarchy at Samarra", with the result that by the 870s the central government had lost effective control over most of the Caliphate outside the metropolitan region of Iraq. In the west, Egypt had fallen under the control of the Turkish slave-soldier Ahmad ibn Tulun, who also disputed control of Syria with al-Muwaffaq, while Khurasan and most of the Islamic East had been taken over by the Saffarids, a Persianate dynasty who replaced the Abbasids' loyal clients, the Tahirids. Most of the Arabian peninsula was likewise lost to local potentates, while in Tabaristan a radical Zaydi Shi'a dynasty took power. Even in Iraq, the rebellion of the Zanj, African slaves brought to work in the plantations of Lower Iraq, threatened Baghdad itself, and further south the Qarmatians were a nascent threat. Al-Muwaffaq's regency was thus a continuous struggle to save the tottering Caliphate from collapse. His attempts to recover control of Egypt and Syria from Ibn Tulun failed, with the latter even able to expand his territory and obtain recognition as a hereditary ruler, but he succeeded in preserving the core of the Caliphate in Iraq by repelling a Saffarid invasion aimed at capturing Baghdad, and by subduing the Zanj after a long struggle.
### Campaigns against the Zanj and the Tulunids
It was against the Zanj that the future al-Mu'tadid—at this time usually referred to by his kunya of Abu'l-Abbas—would acquire his first military experience and establish the close army ties that would characterize his reign. Al-Muwaffaq gave his son a military upbringing from an early age, and the young prince became an excellent rider and a solicitous commander, who showed personal attention to the state of his men and their horses.
Within a decade of the outbreak of the revolt in 869, the Zanj had seized most of lower Iraq, including the cities of Basra and Wasit, and expanded into Khuzistan. In 879 the death of the founder of the Saffarid state, Ya'qub al-Saffar, allowed the Abbasid government to fully concentrate its attention against the Zanj rebellion, and Abu'l-Abbas' appointment to command in December 879 at the head of 10,000 troops marks the turning point of the war. In the long and hard struggle that followed, which involved amphibious operations in the Mesopotamian Marshes, Abu'l-Abbas and his own ghilmān—of which the long-serving Zirak al-Turki was the most eminent—played the major role. Although the Abbasid armies eventually swelled with reinforcements, volunteers, and Zanj defectors, it was the few but elite ghilmān who formed the army's backbone, filling its leadership positions and bearing the brunt of the battle, often under the personal command of Abu'l-Abbas. After years of gradually tightening the noose around the Zanj, in August 883 the Abbasid troops stormed their capital of al-Mukhtara, putting an end to the rebellion. A detailed account of the war by a former Zanj rebel, preserved in the history written by al-Tabari, stresses the role of al-Muwaffaq and Abu'l-Abbas as the heroes who, in defence of the embattled Muslim state, suppressed the rebellion; the successful campaign would become a major tool in their propaganda effort to legitimize their de facto usurpation of the caliph's power.
Following the death of Ibn Tulun in May 884, the two caliphal generals Ishaq ibn Kundaj and Ibn Abu'l-Saj sought to take advantage of the situation and attacked the Tulunid domains in Syria, but their initial gains were rapidly reversed. In the spring of 885, Abu'l-Abbas was sent to take charge of the invasion. He soon succeeded in defeating the Tulunids and forcing them to retreat to Palestine, but after a quarrel with Ibn Kundaj and Ibn Abu'l-Saj, the latter two abandoned the campaign and withdrew their forces. In the Battle of Tawahin on 6 April, Abu'l-Abbas confronted Ibn Tulun's son and heir, Khumarawayh, in person. The Abbasid prince was initially victorious, forcing Khumarawayh to flee, but was in turn defeated and fled the battlefield, while much of his army was taken prisoner. After this victory the Tulunids expanded their control over the Jazira and the borderlands (the Thughur) with the Byzantine Empire. A peace agreement followed in 886, whereby al-Muwaffaq was forced to recognize Khumarawayh as hereditary governor over Egypt and Syria for 30 years, in exchange for an annual tribute. Over the next couple of years, Abu'l-Abbas was involved in his father's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to wrest Fars from Saffarid control.
### Imprisonment and rise to the throne
During this period, relations between Abu'l-Abbas and his father deteriorated, although the reason is unclear. Already in 884, Abu'l-Abbas' ghilmān rioted in Baghdad against al-Muwaffaq's vizier, Sa'id ibn Makhlad, possibly over unpaid wages. Eventually, in 889, Abu'l-Abbas was arrested and put in prison on his father's orders, where he remained despite the demonstrations of the ghilmān loyal to him. He apparently remained under arrest until May 891, when al-Muwaffaq returned to Baghdad after two years spent in Jibal.
Al-Muwaffaq, suffering from gout, was clearly close to death; the vizier Isma'il ibn Bulbul and the city commander of Baghdad, Abu'l-Saqr, called al-Mu'tamid and his sons, including the heir-apparent al-Mufawwad, into the city, hoping to exploit the situation for their own purposes. This attempt to sideline Abu'l-Abbas failed due to his popularity with the soldiers and the common people. He was set free to visit his father's deathbed, and was able to immediately assume power when al-Muwaffaq died on 2 June. The Baghdad mob ransacked his opponents' houses, and Ibn Bulbul was dismissed and thrown in prison, where he died from maltreatment after a few months. Similar fates awaited any of Ibn Bulbul's supporters who were caught by Abu'l-Abbas's agents.
Now "all-powerful", Abu'l-Abbas succeeded his father in all his offices, with the title of al-Mu'tadid bi-llah and a position in the line of succession after the Caliph and al-Mufawwad. Within a few months, on 30 April 892, al-Mu'tadid had his cousin removed from the succession altogether. Thus, when al-Mu'tamid died on 14 October 892, al-Mu'tadid took power as caliph.
## Reign
The Orientalist Harold Bowen described al-Mu'tadid at his accession as follows:
> in appearance upright and thin; and on his head was a white mole, which, since white moles were not admired, he used to dye black. His expression was haughty. In character he was brave—a story was told of his killing a lion with only a dagger. [...] he had inherited all his father's energy, and cultivated a reputation of prompt action.
Like his father's, al-Mu'tadid's power rested on his close relations with the military. As the historian Hugh N. Kennedy writes, he "came to the throne, essentially, as a usurper [...] not by any legal right, but because of the support of his ghilmān, who ensured not only that he became caliph, but also that their rivals in the military were humiliated and disbanded". Thus, not surprisingly, military activities consumed his interest, especially as he usually led his army in person on campaign. This secured his reputation as a warrior-caliph and champion of the Islamic faith ghazī); as the historian Michael Bonner comments, "[t]he role of 'ghazī caliph', invented by Harun al-Rashid and enhanced by al-Mu'tasim, now had its greatest performance, in al-Mu'tadid's tireless campaigning".
From the start of his reign, the new Caliph set out to reverse the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate, a goal towards which he worked with a mixture of force and diplomacy. Although an active and enthusiastic campaigner, al-Mu'tadid was also "a skilful diplomat, always prepared to make compromises with those who were too powerful to defeat", according to Kennedy.
### Relations with the Tulunids
This policy became immediately evident in the conciliatory attitude the new Caliph adopted towards his most powerful vassal, the Tulunid regime. In spring 893, al-Mu'tadid recognized and reconfirmed Khumarawayh in his office as autonomous emir over Egypt and Syria, in exchange for an annual tribute of 300,000 dinars and a further 200,000 dinars in arrears, as well as the return to caliphal control of the two Jaziran provinces of Diyar Rabi'a and Diyar Mudar. To seal the pact, Khumarawayh offered his daughter, Qatr al-Nada ("Dew Drop") as bride to one of the Caliph's sons, but al-Mu'tadid chose to marry her himself. The Tulunid princess brought with her a million dinars as her dowry, a "wedding gift that was considered the most sumptuous in medieval Arab history" (Thierry Bianquis). Her arrival in Baghdad was marked by the luxury and extravagance of her retinue, which contrasted starkly with the impoverished caliphal court. According to a story, after a thorough search, al-Mu'tadid's chief eunuch could find only five ornate silver-and-gold candlesticks to decorate the palace, while the princess was accompanied by 150 servants each carrying such a candlestick. Thereupon al-Mu'tadid is said to have remarked "come let us go and hide ourselves, lest we be seen in our poverty".
On the other hand, the whole affair may have been deliberately plotted by al-Mu'tadid as a "financial trap", as the enormous dowry almost bankrupted the Tulunid treasury. Apart from the honour of being linked to the caliphal dynasty, the Tulunids received little in return: Qatr al-Nada died soon after the wedding, and the murder of Khumarawayh in 896 left the Tulunid state in the unsteady hands of Khumarawayh's under-age sons. Al-Mu'tadid swiftly took advantage of this and in 897 extended his control over the border emirates of the Thughur, where, in the words of Michael Bonner, "[he] assumed, after a long hiatus, the old caliphal prerogative of commanding the annual summer expedition and arranging the defence against the Byzantine Empire". In addition, to secure caliphal recognition of his position, the new Tulunid ruler Harun ibn Khumarawayh (r. 896–904) was forced into further concessions, handing back all of Syria north of Homs, and increasing the annual tribute to 450,000 dinars. Over the next few years, increasing domestic turmoil in the remaining Tulunid domains, and the escalation of Qarmatian attacks, encouraged many Tulunid followers to defect to the resurgent Caliphate.
### Jazira, Transcaucasia, and the Byzantine front
In the Jazira the new Caliph struggled against a variety of opponents: alongside an almost thirty-year-old Kharijite rebellion, there were various autonomous local magnates, chiefly the Shaybani ruler of Amid and Diyar Bakr, Ahmad ibn Isa al-Shaybani, and the Taghlibi chief Hamdan ibn Hamdun. In 893, while the Kharijites were distracted by internal quarrels, al-Mu'tadid captured Mosul from the Shayban. In 895 Hamdan ibn Hamdun was evicted from his strongholds, hunted down and captured. Finally, the Kharijite leader Harun ibn Abdallah himself was defeated and captured by Hamdan's son Husayn in 896, before being sent to Baghdad, where he was crucified. This exploit marked the beginning of an illustrious career for Husayn ibn Hamdan in the caliphal armies, and the gradual rise of the Hamdanid family to power in the Jazira. Ahmad al-Shaybani retained Amid until his death in 898, being succeeded by his son Muhammad. In the next year, al-Mu'tadid returned to the Jazira, ousted Muhammad from Amid, and reunified the entire province under central government control by installing his oldest son and heir, Ali al-Muktafi, as governor.
Al-Mu'tadid was unable, however, to restore effective caliphal control north of the Jazira in Transcaucasia, where Armenia and Adharbayjan remained in the hands of virtually independent local dynasties. Ibn Abu'l-Saj, who was now the caliphal governor of Adharbayjan, proclaimed himself independent around 898, although he soon re-recognized the Caliph's suzerainty during his conflicts with the Christian Armenian princes. When he died in 901, he was succeeded by his son Devdad, marking the consolidation of the semi-independent Sajid dynasty in the region. In 900, Ibn Abu'l-Saj was even suspected of plotting to seize Diyar Mudar province with the co-operation of the notables of Tarsus, after which the vengeful Caliph ordered the latter arrested and the city's fleet burned. This decision was a self-inflicted handicap in the centuries-long war against Byzantium; in recent decades the Tarsians and their fleet had played a major role in the raids against the Byzantine frontier provinces. While a Syrian fleet under the Byzantine convert to Islam Damian of Tarsus sacked the port of Demetrias around 900, and Arab fleets would go on to wreak havoc in the Aegean Sea over the next two decades, the Byzantines were strengthened on land by an influx of Armenian refugees, such as Melias. The Byzantines began to expand their control over the border regions, scoring victories and founding new provinces (themes) in the former no-man's land between the two empires.
### The East and the Saffarids
In the Islamic East, the Caliph was forced to acknowledge the reality of the Saffarids' domination and established a modus vivendi with them, perhaps hoping, according to Kennedy, to harness them in a partnership analogous to that which the Tahirids had enjoyed in previous decades. Consequently, the Saffarid ruler Amr ibn al-Layth was recognized in his possession of Khurasan and eastern Persia as well as Fars, while the Abbasids were to exercise direct control over western Persia, namely Jibal, Rayy and Isfahan. This policy gave the Caliph a free hand to recover the territories of the Dulafids, another semi-independent local dynasty, that were centred on Isfahan and Nihavand. When the Dulafid Ahmad ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Abi Dulaf died in 893, al-Mu'tadid moved swiftly to install his son al-Muktafi as governor in Rayy, Qazvin, Qum and Hamadan. The Dulafids were confined to their core region around Karaj and Isfahan, before being deposed outright in 896. Nevertheless, the Abbasid hold over these territories remained precarious, especially due to the proximity of the Zaydi emirate in Tabaristan, and in 897 Rayy was handed over to Saffarid control.
The Abbasid–Saffarid partnership in Iran was most clearly expressed in their joint effort against the general Rafi ibn Harthama, who had made his base in Rayy and posed a threat to both caliphal and Saffarid interests in the region. Al-Mu'tadid sent Ahmad ibn Abd al-Aziz to seize Rayy from Rafi, who fled and made common cause with the Zaydis of Tabaristan in an effort to seize Khurasan from the Saffarids. However, with Amr mobilizing the anti-Alid sentiments of the populace against him and the expected assistance from the Zaydis failing to materialize, Rafi was defeated and killed in Khwarazm in 896. Amr, now at the pinnacle of his power, sent the defeated rebel's head to Baghdad, and in 897 the Caliph transferred control of Rayy to him. The partnership finally collapsed after Mu'tadid appointed Amr as governor of Transoxiana in 898, which was ruled by his rivals, the Samanids. Al-Mu'tamid deliberately encouraged Amr to confront the Samanids, only for Amr to be crushingly defeated and taken prisoner by them in 900. The Samanid ruler, Isma'il ibn Ahmad, sent him in chains to Baghdad, where he was executed in 902, after al-Mu'tadid's death. Al-Mu'tadid in turn conferred Amr's titles and governorships on Isma'il ibn Ahmad. The Caliph also moved to regain Fars and Kirman, but the Saffarid remnant under Amr's grandson Tahir proved sufficiently resilient to thwart the Abbasid attempts to capture these provinces for several years. It was not until 910 that the Abbasids managed to regain the coveted Fars province.
### Rise of sectarianism and fragmentation in the periphery
In the course of the 9th century, a range of new movements emerged, based on Shi'ite doctrines, which replaced Kharijism as the main focus for opposition to the established regimes. They gained their first successes in the periphery of the Abbasid empire: the Zaydi takeover in Tabaristan was repeated in 897 in Yemen. Under al-Mu'tadid, a new danger appeared closer to the Caliphate's metropolitan areas: the Qarmatians. A radical Isma'ili sect founded in Kufa around 874, the Qarmatians were originally a sporadic and minor nuisance in the Sawad (Lower Iraq), but their power grew swiftly to alarming proportions after 897. Under the leadership of Abu Sa'id al-Jannabi, they seized Bahrayn in 899 and in the next year defeated a caliphal army under al-Abbas ibn Amr al-Ghanawi. In the years following al-Mu'tadid's death, the Qarmatians "were to prove the most dangerous enemies the Abbasids had faced since the time of the Zanj" (Kennedy). At the same time, a Kufan Isma'ili missionary, Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i, made contact with the Kutama Berbers during a pilgrimage to Mecca. His proselytization efforts made rapid headway among them, and in 902, he began attacks on the Aghlabid emirate of Ifriqiya, clients of the Abbasids. Its conquest was completed in 909, laying the foundations of the Fatimid Caliphate.
### Domestic government
#### Fiscal policies
The Abbasid army, following the reforms of al-Mu'tasim, was a smaller and more professional fighting force than the caliphal armies of the past. Although it proved effective militarily, it also posed a potential danger to the stability of the Abbasid regime: drawn from Turks and other peoples from the Caliphate's periphery and the lands beyond, it was alienated from the society of the Caliphate's heartlands, with the result that the soldiers were "entirely reliant on the state not just for cash but for their very survival" (Kennedy). As a result, any failure by the central government to provide their pay resulted in a military uprising and a political crisis; this had been repeatedly demonstrated during the Anarchy at Samarra. Consequently, ensuring the regular payment of the army became the prime task of the state. According to Kennedy, based on a treasury document from the time of al-Mu'tadid's accession:
> out of the total expenditure of 7915 dinars per day, some 5121 are entirely military, 1943 in areas (like riding animals and stables) which served both military and non-military and only 851 in areas like the bureaucracy and the harem which can be described as truly civilian (though even in this case, the bureaucrats’ main purpose seems to have been to arrange the payment of the army). It seems reasonable to conclude that something over 80 per cent of recorded government expenditure was devoted to maintaining the army.
At the same time, the Caliphate's fiscal basis had shrunk dramatically after so many tax-paying provinces were lost from the central government's control. The caliphal government was now increasingly reliant on the revenue of the Sawad and the other areas of lower Iraq, which were witnessing a rapid decline in agricultural productivity due to the disruption of the civil wars and neglect of the irrigation network. In the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809) the Sawad had provided an annual revenue of 102,500,000 dirhams, more than double the revenue of Egypt and three times that of Syria; by the early 10th century it was providing less than a third of that figure. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that in the remaining provinces, semi-autonomous governors, grandees and members of the dynasty were able to establish virtual latifundia, aided by the system of muqāṭa'a, a form of tax farming in exchange for a fixed tribute, which they often failed to pay. To maximize their revenue from the territory remaining to them, the Abbasids increased the breadth and complexity of the central bureaucracy, dividing the provinces into smaller tax districts as well as increasing the number of the fiscal departments (dīwāns), which allowed for close oversight of both revenue collection and the activities of the officials themselves.
To combat this fiscal crisis, the Caliph would often personally devote himself to the supervision of revenue, acquiring a reputation, according to F. Malti-Douglas, for "a spirit of economy, verging on avarice"; he was said to "examine petty accounts that a commoner would scorn to consider" (Harold Bowen). Fines and confiscations multiplied under his rule, with the resulting revenue, along with the income from the crown domain and even a portion of the provincial taxation, flowing to the caliphal privy purse (bayt al-māl al-khāṣṣa). The latter now acquired a leading role among the fiscal departments, and it frequently held more money than the public treasury (bayt al-māl al-ʿāmma). By the end of al-Mu'tadid's reign, the once empty privy purse would contain ten million dinars. On the other hand, in a measure aimed to ease the tax burden of the farmers, in 895 the Caliph changed the start of the tax year from the Persian New Year in March to 11 June—which became known as Nayrūz al-Muʿtaḍid, 'al-Mu'tadid's New Year'—so the land tax ('kharāj) was now collected after the harvest instead of the usually unreliable estimates before.
#### Rise of the bureaucracy
During the 9th century, the Abbasid administrative system became increasingly professionalized. The provincial administration became a subject of careful study, with geographical works such as Ibn Khordadbeh providing details on the Caliphate's provinces and their road networks, while men like Ibn Qutayba developed the art of chancery writing into a highly elaborate system. Al-Mu'tadid's fiscal policies further strengthened the position of the civil bureaucracy, which now reached the apogee of its influence, and especially that of the vizier, whom even the army came to respect as the spokesman of the caliph. Al-Mu'tadid also introduced Tuesday and Friday as days of rest for government employees.
In terms of personnel, al-Mu'tadid's reign was marked by continuity among the senior leadership of the state. Ubayd Allah ibn Sulayman ibn Wahb remained vizier from the start of the reign until his death in 901, and was succeeded by his son, al-Qasim, who had from the start been deputizing for his father during the latter's absences from the capital. The freedman Badr, a veteran who had served under al-Muwaffaq and whose daughter married the Caliph's son, remained commander of the army. The fiscal departments, especially of the Sawad, were managed first by the Banu'l-Furat brothers Ahmad and Ali, and after 899 by the Banu'l-Jarrah under Muhammad ibn Dawud and his nephew, Ali ibn Isa. The original administrative team was so effective and harmonious, according to the 11th-century historian Hilal as-Sabi, it was said by subsequent generations that "there had never been such a quartet, Caliph, Vizier, Commander, and chief of the diwāns, as al-Mu'tadid, Ubayd Allah, Badr and Ahmad ibn al-Furat".
On the other hand, as Michel Bonner points out, the later reign of al-Mu'tadid "saw a growth of factionalism within this bureaucracy, observable also in the army and in urban civilian life". The intense rivalry between the two bureaucratic dynasties of the Banu'l-Furat and the Banu'l-Jarrah, with their extensive networks of clients, began at this time. Although a strong caliph and vizier could restrain this antagonism, it would dominate the Abbasid government during the following decades, with the factions alternating in office and often fining and torturing their predecessors to extract money according to the well-established practice known as muṣādara. In addition, al-Qasim ibn Ubayd Allah was of an altogether different character than his father: soon after his appointment to the vizierate, al-Qasim plotted to have al-Mu'tadid assassinated, and tried to involve Badr in his scheming. The general rejected his proposals with indignation, but al-Qasim was saved from discovery and execution by the Caliph's sudden death. The Vizier then tried to dominate al-Muktafi, moved swiftly to have Badr denounced and executed, and was involved in yet more intrigues against the Banu'l-Furat.
#### Return of the capital to Baghdad
Al-Mu'tadid also completed the return of the capital from Samarra to Baghdad, which had already served as his father's main base of operations. The city's centre, however, was relocated on the eastern bank of the Tigris and further downstream from the original Round City founded by al-Mansur (r. 754–775) a century earlier; it has there remained to this day. As the 10th-century historian al-Mas'udi wrote, the Caliph's two main passions were "women and building" ("al-nisāʿ waʿl-banāʿ"), and accordingly he engaged in major building activities in the capital: he restored and expanded the Great Mosque of al-Mansur which had fallen into disuse; enlarged the Hasani Palace; built the new palaces of Thurayya ('Pleiades') and Firdus ('Paradise'); and began work on the Taj ('Crown') Palace, which was completed under al-Muktafi. This marked the creation of a sprawling new caliphal palace complex, the Dar al-Khilafa, which would remain the residence of the Abbasid caliphs until 1258. Al-Mu'tadid also took care to restore the city's irrigation network by clearing the silted-up Dujayl Canal, paying for this with money from those landowners who stood to profit from it.
#### Theological doctrines and promotion of science
In terms of doctrine, al-Mu'tadid sided firmly with Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy from the outset of his reign, forbidding theological works and abolishing the fiscal department responsible for property in escheat, which Hanbali legal opinion regarded as illegal. At the same time he also tried to maintain good relations with the Alids, to the point of seriously considering ordering the official cursing of Mu'awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Caliphate and main opponent of Ali; he was dissuaded only at the last moment by his advisers, who feared any unforeseen consequences such an act might have. Al-Mu'tadid also maintained good relations with the breakaway Zaydi imams of Tabaristan, but his pro-Alid stance failed to prevent the establishment of a second Zaydi state in Yemen in 901.
Al-Mu'tadid also actively promoted the traditions of learning and science that had flourished under his early 9th-century predecessors al-Ma'mun (r. 813–832), al-Mu'tasim, and al-Wathiq (r. 842–847). Court patronage for scientific endeavours had declined under al-Mutawakkil, whose reign had marked a return to Sunni orthodoxy and an aversion to scientific inquiry, while his successors had lacked the luxury to engage in intellectual pursuits. Himself "keenly interested in natural sciences" and able to speak Greek, al-Mu'tadid promoted the career of one of the great translators of Greek texts and mathematicians of the era, Thabit ibn Qurra, and of the grammarians Ibn Durayd and al-Zajjaj, the latter of whom became tutor of the Caliph's children. Other notable figures associated with, and supported by, the Abbasid court at the time were the religious scholar Ibn Abi al-Dunya, who served as the Caliph's advisor and was appointed as tutor for al-Muktafi; the translator Ishaq ibn Hunayn; the physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes), who was named director of the newly established al-Mu'tadidi hospital in Baghdad; and the mathematician and astronomer al-Battani.
One of the leading intellectual figures of the period was al-Mu'tadid's own tutor, Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib al-Sarakhsi, a pupil of the great philosopher al-Kindi. Al-Sarakhsi became a close companion of the Caliph, who appointed him to the lucrative post of market supervisor of Baghdad, but was executed in 896, after angering the Caliph. According to one account, al-Qasim ibn Ubayd Allah—who is frequently featured as the villain in anecdotes of al-Mu'tadid's court—inserted al-Sarakhsi's name in a list of rebels to be executed; the Caliph signed the list, and learned of his mistake only after his old master had been executed.
#### Justice and punishment under al-Mu'tadid
In the dispensation of justice, he was characterized by what Malti-Douglas describes as "severity bordering on sadism". While tolerant of error and not above displays of sentimentality and tenderness, when his wrath was aroused he resorted to torture in the most ingenious ways, and had special torture chambers constructed underneath his palace. Chroniclers such as al-Mas'udi and the Mamluk historian al-Safadi describe in great detail the tortures inflicted by the Caliph on prisoners, as well as his practice of making an example of them by having them publicly displayed in Baghdad. Thus the Caliph is reported to have used bellows to inflate his prisoners, or buried them upside down in pits. At the same time they justify his severity as legitimate, being in the interests of the state. Malti-Douglas remarks that when al-Safadi compared al-Mu'tadid with the founder of the Abbasid state, calling him "al-Saffah the Second", this was not only to emphasize his restoration of the Caliphate's fortunes, but also a direct allusion to the meaning of al-Saffah's name, "the Blood-Shedder".
### Death and legacy
Al-Mu'tadid died at the Hasani Palace on 5 April 902, at the age of either 40 or 47. There were rumours he had been poisoned, but it is more likely that the rigours of his campaigns, coupled with his dissolute life, severely weakened his health. During his final illness, he refused to follow the advice of his physicians, and even kicked one of them to death. He left behind him four sons and several daughters. Of his sons, three—al-Muktafi, al-Muqtadir, and al-Qahir—would rule as caliphs in turn and only one, Harun, did not become caliph. Al-Mu'tadid was the first Abbasid caliph to be buried within the city of Baghdad. Like his sons after him, he was buried in the former Tahirid Palace in the western part of the city, which was now used by the caliphs as a secondary residence.
According to the Orientalist Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen, al-Mu'tadid "had inherited his father's gifts as a ruler and was distinguished alike for his economy and his military ability", becoming "one of the greatest of the Abbasids in spite of his strictness and cruelty". Al-Mu'tadid's capable reign is credited with having arrested the Abbasid Caliphate's decline for a while, but his successes were too dependent on the presence of an energetic ruler at the helm, and ultimately his reign "was too short to reverse long-term trends and re-establish Abbasid power on a long-term basis" (Kennedy).
Al-Mu'tadid had taken care to prepare his son and successor, al-Muktafi, for his role by appointing him as governor in Rayy and the Jazira. Although al-Muktafi tried to follow his father's policies, he lacked his energy. The heavily militarized system of al-Muwaffaq and al-Mu'tadid required the Caliph to actively participate in campaigns, setting a personal example and forming ties of loyalty, reinforced by patronage, between the ruler and the soldiers. Al-Muktafi, on the other hand, did not "in his character and comportment [...], being a sedentary figure, instil much loyalty, let alone inspiration, in the soldiers" (Michael Bonner). The Caliphate was still able to secure major successes over the next few years, including the reincorporation of the Tulunid domains in 904 and victories over the Qarmatians, but with al-Muktafi's death in 908, the so-called "Abbasid restoration" passed its high-water mark, and a new period of crisis began.
Power was now wielded by the senior bureaucrats, who installed the weak and pliable al-Muqtadir on the throne. Over the next decades, the expenditure of both the court and the army increased, while maladministration increased and strife between military and bureaucratic factions intensified. By 932, when al-Muqtadir was assassinated, the Caliphate was effectively bankrupt, and authority soon devolved on a series of military strongmen who competed for control of the caliph and the title of amīr al-umarāʾ. This process culminated in the capture of Baghdad in 946 by the Buyids, who put an end to caliphal independence even in name. Thereafter the caliphs remained as symbolic figureheads, but were divested of any military or political authority or independent financial resources.
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Emma Goldman
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Lithuanian-born anarchist, writer and orator (1869–1940)
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Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Russian-born anarchist, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then within the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—in the so-called Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare and deported to Russia in December 1919. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. She left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. It was published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, in 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.
## Biography
### Family
Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kovno in Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire. Goldman's mother Taube Bienowitch had been married before to a man with whom she had two daughters—Helena in 1860 and Lena in 1862. When her first husband died of tuberculosis, Taube was devastated. Goldman later wrote: "Whatever love she had had died with the young man to whom she had been married at the age of fifteen."
Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Goldman puts it, "mismated from the first". Her second husband, Abraham Goldman, invested Taube's inheritance in a business that quickly failed. The ensuing hardship, combined with the emotional distance between husband and wife, made the household a tense place for the children. When Taube became pregnant, Abraham hoped desperately for a son; a daughter, he believed, would be one more sign of failure. They eventually had three sons, but their first child was Emma.
Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869. Her father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him. He used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious of them. Her mother provided scarce comfort, rarely calling on Abraham to tone down his beatings. Goldman later speculated that her father's furious temper was at least partly a result of sexual frustration.
Goldman's relationships with her elder half-sisters, Helena and Lena, were a study in contrasts. Helena, the oldest, provided the comfort the children lacked from their mother and filled Goldman's childhood with "whatever joy it had". Lena, however, was distant and uncharitable. The three sisters were joined by brothers Louis (who died at the age of six), Herman (born in 1872), and Moishe (born in 1879).
### Adolescence
When Emma Goldman was a young girl, the Goldman family moved to the village of Papilė, where her father ran an inn. While her sisters worked, she became friends with a servant named Petrushka, who excited her "first erotic sensations". Later in Papilė she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout in the street. This event traumatized her and contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority.
At the age of seven, Goldman moved with her family to the Prussian city of Königsberg (then part of the German Empire), and she was enrolled in a Realschule. One teacher punished disobedient students—targeting Goldman in particular—by beating their hands with a ruler. Another teacher tried to molest his female students and was fired when Goldman fought back. She found a sympathetic mentor in her German-language teacher, who loaned her books and took her to an opera. A passionate student, Goldman passed the exam for admission into a gymnasium, but her religion teacher refused to provide a certificate of good behavior and she was unable to attend.
The family moved to the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, where her father opened one unsuccessful store after another. Their poverty forced the children to work, and Goldman took an assortment of jobs, including one in a corset shop. As a teenager Goldman begged her father to allow her to return to school, but instead he threw her French book into the fire and shouted: "Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children."
Goldman pursued an independent education on her own. She studied the political turmoil around her, particularly the Nihilists responsible for assassinating Alexander II of Russia. The ensuing turmoil intrigued Goldman, although she did not fully understand it at the time. When she read Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), she found a role model in the protagonist Vera, who adopts a Nihilist philosophy and escapes her repressive family to live freely and organize a sewing cooperative. The book enthralled Goldman and remained a source of inspiration throughout her life.
Her father, meanwhile, continued to insist on a domestic future for her, and he tried to arrange for her to be married at the age of fifteen. They fought about the issue constantly; he complained that she was becoming a "loose" woman, and she insisted that she would marry for love alone. At the corset shop, she was forced to fend off unwelcome advances from Russian officers and other men. One man took her into a hotel room and committed what Goldman described as "violent contact"; two biographers call it rape. She was stunned by the experience, overcome by "shock at the discovery that the contact between man and woman could be so brutal and painful." Goldman felt that the encounter forever soured her interactions with men.
### Rochester, New York
In 1885, her sister Helena made plans to move to New York in the United States to join her sister Lena and her husband. Goldman wanted to join her sister, but their father refused to allow it. Despite Helena's offer to pay for the trip, Abraham turned a deaf ear to their pleas. Desperate, Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River if she could not go. Their father finally agreed. On December 29, 1885, Helena and Emma arrived at New York City's Castle Garden, the entry for immigrants.
They settled upstate, living in the Rochester home which Lena had made with her husband Samuel. Fleeing the rising antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, their parents and brothers joined them a year later. Goldman began working as a seamstress, sewing overcoats for more than ten hours a day, earning two and a half dollars a week. She asked for a raise and was denied; she quit and took work at a smaller shop nearby.
At her new job, Goldman met a fellow worker named Jacob Kershner, who shared her love for books, dancing, and traveling, as well as her frustration with the monotony of factory work. After four months, they married in February 1887. Once he moved in with Goldman's family, their relationship faltered. On their wedding night she discovered that he was impotent; they became emotionally and physically distant. Before long he became jealous and suspicious and threatened to commit suicide lest she left him. Meanwhile, Goldman was becoming more engaged with the political turmoil around her, particularly the aftermath of executions related to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and the anti-authoritarian political philosophy of anarchism.
Less than a year after the wedding, the couple were divorced; Kershner begged Goldman to return and threatened to poison himself if she did not. They reunited, but after three months she left once again. Her parents considered her behavior "loose" and refused to allow Goldman into their home. Carrying her sewing machine in one hand and a bag with five dollars in the other, she left Rochester and headed southeast to New York City.
### Most and Berkman
On her first day in the city, Goldman met two men who greatly changed her life. At Sachs' Café, a gathering place for radicals, she was introduced to Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who invited her to a public speech that evening. They went to hear Johann Most, editor of a radical publication called Freiheit and an advocate of "propaganda of the deed"—the use of violence to instigate change. She was impressed by his fiery oration, and Most took her under his wing, training her in methods of public speaking. He encouraged her vigorously, telling her that she was "to take my place when I am gone." One of her first public talks in support of "the Cause" was in Rochester. After convincing Helena not to tell their parents of her speech, Goldman found her mind a blank once on stage. She later wrote, suddenly:
> something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime...I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity...The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.
Excited by the experience, Goldman refined her public persona during subsequent engagements. She quickly found herself arguing with Most over her independence. After a momentous speech in Cleveland, she felt as though she had become "a parrot repeating Most's views" and resolved to express herself on the stage. When she returned to New York, Most became furious and told her: "Who is not with me is against me!" She left Freiheit and joined another publication, Die Autonomie.
Meanwhile, Goldman had begun a friendship with Berkman, whom she affectionately called Sasha. Before long they became lovers and moved into a communal apartment with his cousin Modest "Fedya" Stein and Goldman's friend, Helen Minkin, on 42nd Street. Although their relationship had numerous difficulties, Goldman and Berkman would share a close bond for decades, united by their anarchist principles and commitment to personal equality.
In 1892, Goldman joined with Berkman and Stein in opening an ice cream shop in Worcester, Massachusetts. After a few months of operating the shop, Goldman and Berkman were diverted to participate in the Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh.
### Homestead plot
Berkman and Goldman came together through the Homestead Strike. In June 1892, a steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, owned by Andrew Carnegie became the focus of national attention when talks between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) broke down. The factory's manager was Henry Clay Frick, a fierce opponent of the union. When a final round of talks failed at the end of June, management closed the plant and locked out the workers, who immediately went on strike. Strikebreakers were brought in and the company hired Pinkerton guards to protect them. On July 6, a fight broke out between 300 Pinkerton guards and a crowd of armed union workers. During the twelve-hour gunfight, seven guards and nine strikers were killed.
When a majority of the nation's newspapers expressed support of the strikers, Goldman and Berkman resolved to assassinate Frick, an action they expected would inspire the workers to revolt against the capitalist system. Berkman chose to carry out the assassination, and ordered Goldman to stay behind in order to explain his motives after he went to jail. He would be in charge of "the deed"; she of the associated propaganda. Berkman set off for Pittsburgh on his way to Homestead, where he planned to shoot Frick.
Goldman, meanwhile, decided to help fund the scheme through prostitution. Remembering the character of Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), she mused: "She had become a prostitute in order to support her little brothers and sisters...Sensitive Sonya could sell her body; why not I?" Once on the street, Goldman caught the eye of a man who took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, gave her ten dollars, informed her she did not have "the knack," and told her to quit the business. She was "too astounded for speech". She wrote to Helena, claiming illness, and asked her for fifteen dollars.
On July 23, Berkman gained access to Frick's office while carrying a concealed handgun; he shot Frick three times, and stabbed him in the leg. A group of workers—far from joining in his attentat—beat Berkman unconscious, and he was carried away by the police. Berkman was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman suffered during his long absence.
Convinced Goldman was involved in the plot, police raided her apartment. Although they found no evidence, they pressured her landlord into evicting her. Worse, the attentat had failed to rouse the masses: workers and anarchists alike condemned Berkman's action. Johann Most, their former mentor, lashed out at Berkman and the assassination attempt. Furious at these attacks, Goldman brought a toy horsewhip to a public lecture and demanded, onstage, that Most explain his betrayal. He dismissed her, whereupon she struck him with the whip, broke it on her knee, and hurled the pieces at him. She later regretted her assault, confiding to a friend: "At the age of twenty-three, one does not reason."
### "Inciting to riot"
When the Panic of 1893 struck in the following year, the United States suffered one of its worst economic crises. By year's end, the unemployment rate was higher than 20%, and "hunger demonstrations" sometimes gave way to riots. Goldman began speaking to crowds of frustrated men and women in New York City. On August 21, she spoke to a crowd of nearly 3,000 people in Union Square, where she encouraged unemployed workers to take immediate action. Her exact words are unclear: undercover agents insist she ordered the crowd to "take everything ... by force". But Goldman later recounted this message: "Well then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread." Later in court, Detective-Sergeant Charles Jacobs offered yet another version of her speech.
A week later, Goldman was arrested in Philadelphia and returned to New York City for trial, charged with "inciting to riot". During the train ride, Jacobs offered to drop the charges against her if she would inform on other radicals in the area. She responded by throwing a glass of ice water in his face. As she awaited trial, Goldman was visited by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World. She spent two hours talking to Goldman and wrote a positive article about the woman she described as a "modern Joan of Arc."
Despite this positive publicity, the jury was persuaded by Jacobs' testimony and frightened by Goldman's politics. The assistant district attorney questioned Goldman about her anarchism, as well as her atheism; the judge spoke of her as "a dangerous woman". She was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary. Once inside, she suffered an attack of rheumatism and was sent to the infirmary. There, she befriended a visiting doctor and received informal training in nursing, eventually being placed in charge of a 16-bed women's ward in the infirmary. She also read dozens of books, including works by the American activist-writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; poet Walt Whitman, and philosopher John Stuart Mill. When Goldman was released after ten months, a raucous crowd of nearly 3,000 people greeted her at the Thalia Theater in New York City. She soon became swamped with requests for interviews and lectures.
To make money, Goldman decided to continue the medical studies she had started in prison, but her preferred fields of specialization—midwifery and massage—were unavailable to nursing students in the US. She sailed to Europe, lecturing in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. She met with renowned anarchists such as Errico Malatesta, Louise Michel, and Peter Kropotkin. In Vienna, she received two diplomas for midwifery and put them immediately to use back in the US.
Alternating between lectures and midwifery, Goldman conducted the first cross-country tour by an anarchist speaker. In November 1899, she returned to Europe to speak, where she met the Czech anarchist Hippolyte Havel in London. They went together to France and helped organize the 1900 International Anarchist Congress on the outskirts of Paris. Afterward, Havel immigrated to the United States, traveling with Goldman to Chicago. They shared a residence there with friends of Goldman.
### McKinley assassination
On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker and anarchist, shot US President William McKinley twice during a public speaking event in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was hit in the breastbone and stomach, and died eight days later. Czolgosz was arrested, and interrogated around the clock. During interrogation he claimed to be an anarchist and said he had been inspired to act after attending a speech by Goldman. The authorities used this as a pretext to charge Goldman with planning McKinley's assassination. They tracked her to the residence in Chicago she shared with Havel, as well as with Mary and Abe Isaak, an anarchist couple and their family. Goldman was arrested, along with Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.
Earlier, Czolgosz had tried but failed to become friends with Goldman and her companions. During a talk in Cleveland, Czolgosz had approached Goldman and asked her advice on which books he should read. In July 1901, he had appeared at the Isaak house, asking a series of unusual questions. They assumed he was an infiltrator, like a number of police agents sent to spy on radical groups. They had remained distant from him, and Abe Isaak sent a notice to associates warning of "another spy".
Although Czolgosz repeatedly denied Goldman's involvement, the police held her in close custody, subjecting her to what she called the "third degree". She explained her housemates' distrust of Czolgosz, and the police finally recognized that she had not had any significant contact with the attacker. No evidence was found linking Goldman to the attack, and she was released after two weeks of detention. Before McKinley died, Goldman offered to provide nursing care, referring to him as "merely a human being". Czolgosz, despite considerable evidence of mental illness, was convicted of murder and executed.
Throughout her detention and after her release, Goldman steadfastly refused to condemn Czolgosz's actions, standing virtually alone in doing so. Friends and supporters—including Berkman—urged her to quit his cause. But Goldman defended Czolgosz as a "supersensitive being" and chastised other anarchists for abandoning him. She was vilified in the press as the "high priestess of anarchy", while many newspapers declared the anarchist movement responsible for the murder. In the wake of these events, socialism gained support over anarchism among US radicals. McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, declared his intent to crack down "not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists".
### Mother Earth and Berkman's release
After Czolgosz was executed, Goldman withdrew from society and, from 1903 to 1913, lived at 208–210 East 13th Street, New York City. Scorned by her fellow anarchists, vilified by the press, and separated from her love, Berkman, she retreated into anonymity and nursing. "It was bitter and hard to face life anew," she wrote later.
Using the name E. G. Smith, she left public life and took on a series of private nursing jobs while suffering from severe depression. The US Congress' passage of the Anarchist Exclusion Act (1903) stirred a new wave of oppositional activism, pulling Goldman back into the movement. A coalition of people and organizations across the left end of the political spectrum opposed the law on grounds that it violated freedom of speech, and she had the nation's ear once again.
After an English anarchist named John Turner was arrested under the Anarchist Exclusion Act and threatened with deportation, Goldman joined forces with the Free Speech League to champion his cause. The league enlisted the aid of noted attorneys Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters, who took Turner's case to the US Supreme Court. Although Turner and the League lost, Goldman considered it a victory of propaganda. She had returned to anarchist activism, but it was taking its toll on her. "I never felt so weighed down," she wrote to Berkman. "I fear I am forever doomed to remain public property and to have my life worn out through the care for the lives of others."
In 1906, Goldman decided to start a publication, "a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters". Mother Earth was staffed by a cadre of radical activists, including Hippolyte Havel, Max Baginski, and Leonard Abbott. In addition to publishing original works by its editors and anarchists around the world, Mother Earth reprinted selections from a variety of writers. These included the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and British writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Goldman wrote frequently about anarchism, politics, labor issues, atheism, sexuality, and feminism, and was the first editor of the magazine.
On May 18 of the same year, Alexander Berkman was released from prison. Carrying a bouquet of roses, Goldman met him on the train platform and found herself "seized by terror and pity" as she beheld his gaunt, pale form. Neither was able to speak; they returned to her home in silence. For weeks, he struggled to readjust to life on the outside: An abortive speaking tour ended in failure, and in Cleveland he purchased a revolver with the intent of killing himself. Upon returning to New York, he learned that Goldman had been arrested with a group of activists meeting to reflect on Czolgosz. Invigorated anew by this violation of freedom of assembly, he declared, "My resurrection has come!" and set about securing their release.
Berkman took the helm of Mother Earth in 1907, while Goldman toured the country to raise funds to keep it operating. Editing the magazine was a revitalizing experience for Berkman. But his relationship with Goldman faltered, and he had an affair with a 15-year-old anarchist named Becky Edelsohn. Goldman was pained by his rejection of her but considered it a consequence of his prison experience. Later that year she served as a delegate from the US to the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam. Anarchists and syndicalists from around the world gathered to sort out the tension between the two ideologies, but no decisive agreement was reached. Goldman returned to the US and continued speaking to large audiences.
### Reitman, essays, and birth control
For the next ten years, Goldman traveled around the country nonstop, delivering lectures and agitating for anarchism. The coalitions formed in opposition to the Anarchist Exclusion Act had given her an appreciation for reaching out to those of other political positions. When the US Justice Department sent spies to observe, they reported the meetings as "packed". Writers, journalists, artists, judges, and workers from across the spectrum spoke of her "magnetic power", her "convincing presence", her "force, eloquence, and fire".
In the spring of 1908, Goldman met and fell in love with Ben Reitman, the so-called "Hobo doctor". Having grown up in Chicago's Tenderloin District, Reitman spent several years as a drifter before earning a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago. As a doctor, he treated people suffering from poverty and illness, particularly venereal diseases. He and Goldman began an affair. They shared a commitment to free love and Reitman took a variety of lovers, but Goldman did not. She tried to reconcile her feelings of jealousy with a belief in freedom of the heart but found it difficult.
Two years later, Goldman began feeling frustrated with lecture audiences. She yearned to "reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused". She collected a series of speeches and items she had written for Mother Earth and published a book titled Anarchism and Other Essays. Covering a wide variety of topics, Goldman tried to represent "the mental and soul struggles of twenty-one years".
When Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to contraception, coined the term "birth control" and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggressive support from Goldman. The latter had already been active in efforts to increase birth control access for several years. In 1916, Goldman was arrested for giving lessons in public on how to use contraceptives. Sanger, too, was arrested under the Comstock Law, which prohibited the dissemination of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles", which authorities defined as including information relating to birth control.
Although they later split from Sanger over charges of insufficient support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of Sanger's pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitman's). In 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour, in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation's attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested on February 11, 1916, as she was about to give another public lecture. Goldman was charged with violating the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a \$100 fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw as an "opportunity" to reconnect with those rejected by society.
### World War I
Although President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan "He kept us out of the war", at the start of his second term, he announced that Germany's continued deployment of unrestricted submarine warfare was sufficient cause for the US to enter the Great War. Shortly afterward, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required all males aged 21–30 to register for military conscription. Goldman saw the decision as an exercise in militarist aggression, driven by capitalism. She declared in Mother Earth her intent to resist conscription, and to oppose US involvement in the war.
To this end, she and Berkman organized the No Conscription League of New York, which proclaimed: "We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, antimilitarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments." The group became a vanguard for anti-draft activism, and chapters began to appear in other cities. When police began raiding the group's public events to find young men who had not registered for the draft, Goldman and others focused their efforts on distributing pamphlets and other writings. In the midst of the nation's patriotic fervor, many elements of the political left refused to support the League's efforts. The Women's Peace Party, for example, ceased its opposition to the war once the US entered it. The Socialist Party of America took an official stance against US involvement but supported Wilson in most of his activities.
On June 15, 1917, Goldman and Berkman were arrested during a raid of their offices, in which authorities seized "a wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda". The New York Times reported that Goldman asked to change into a more appropriate outfit, and emerged in a gown of "royal purple". The pair were charged with conspiracy to "induce persons not to register" under the newly enacted Espionage Act, and were held on US\$25,000 bail each. Defending herself and Berkman during their trial, Goldman invoked the First Amendment, asking how the government could claim to fight for democracy abroad while suppressing free speech at home:
> We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?
The jury found Goldman and Berkman guilty. Judge Julius Marshuetz Mayer imposed the maximum sentence: two years' imprisonment, a \$10,000 fine each, and the possibility of deportation after their release from prison. As she was transported to Missouri State Penitentiary, Goldman wrote to a friend: "Two years imprisonment for having made an uncompromising stand for one's ideal. Why that is a small price."
In prison, she was assigned to work as a seamstress, under the eye of a "miserable gutter-snipe of a 21-year-old boy paid to get results". She met the socialist Kate Richards O'Hare, who had also been imprisoned under the Espionage Act. Although they differed on political strategy—O'Hare believed in voting to achieve state power—the two women came together to agitate for better conditions among prisoners. Goldman also met and became friends with Gabriella Segata Antolini, an anarchist and follower of Luigi Galleani. Antolini had been arrested transporting a satchel filled with dynamite on a Chicago-bound train. She had refused to cooperate with authorities and was sent to prison for 14 months. Working together to make life better for the other inmates, the three women became known as "The Trinity". Goldman was released on September 27, 1919.
### Deportation
Goldman and Berkman were released from prison during the United States' Red Scare of 1919–20, when public anxiety about wartime pro-German activities had expanded into a pervasive fear of Bolshevism and the prospect of an imminent radical revolution. It was a time of social unrest due to union organizing strikes and actions by activist immigrants. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the US Department of Justice's General Intelligence Division (now the FBI), were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion Act and its 1918 expansion to deport any non-citizens they could identify as advocates of anarchy or revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman," Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and return to the community will result in undue harm."
At her deportation hearing on October 27, 1919, Goldman refused to answer questions about her beliefs, on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the US. She presented a written statement instead: "Today so-called aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be exiled." Louis Post at the Department of Labor, which had ultimate authority over deportation decisions, determined that the revocation of her husband Kershner's American citizenship in 1908 after his conviction had revoked hers as well. After initially promising a court fight, Goldman decided not to appeal his ruling.
The Labor Department included Goldman and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en masse, mostly people with only vague associations with radical groups, who had been swept up in government raids in November. Buford, a ship the press nicknamed the "Soviet Ark", sailed from the Army's New York Port of Embarkation on December 21. Some 58 enlisted men and four officers provided security on the journey, and pistols were distributed to the crew. Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake." The ship landed her charges in Hanko, Finland, on Saturday, January 17, 1920. Upon arrival in Finland, authorities there conducted the deportees to the Russian frontier under a flag of truce.
### Russia
Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light. She wrote in Mother Earth that despite its dependence on Communist government, it represented "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being". By the time she neared Europe, she expressed fears about what was to come. She was worried about the ongoing Russian Civil War and the possibility of being seized by anti-Bolshevik forces. The state, anti-capitalist though it was, also posed a threat. "I could never in my life work within the confines of the State," she wrote to her niece, "Bolshevist or otherwise."
She quickly discovered that her fears were justified. Days after returning to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), she was shocked to hear a party official refer to free speech as a "bourgeois superstition". As she and Berkman traveled around the country, they found repression, mismanagement, and corruption instead of the equality and worker empowerment they had dreamed of. Those who questioned the government were demonized as counter-revolutionaries, and workers labored under severe conditions. They met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them that government suppression of press liberties was justified. He told them: "There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period." Berkman was more willing to forgive the government's actions in the name of "historical necessity", but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing the Soviet state's authority.
In March 1921, strikes erupted in Petrograd when workers took to the streets demanding better food rations and more union autonomy. Goldman and Berkman felt a responsibility to support the strikers, stating: "To remain silent now is impossible, even criminal." The unrest spread to the port town of Kronstadt, where the government ordered a military response to suppress striking soldiers and sailors. In the Kronstadt rebellion, approximately 1,000 rebelling sailors and soldiers were killed and two thousand more were arrested; many were later executed. In the wake of these events, Goldman and Berkman decided there was no future in the country for them. "More and more", she wrote, "we have come to the conclusion that we can do nothing here. And as we can not keep up a life of inactivity much longer we have decided to leave."
In December 1921, they left the country and went to the Latvian capital city of Riga. The US commissioner in that city wired officials in Washington DC, who began requesting information from other governments about the couple's activities. After a short trip to Stockholm, they moved to Berlin for several years; during this time Goldman agreed to write a series of articles about her time in Russia for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. These were later collected and published in book form as My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). The publishers added these titles to attract attention; Goldman protested, albeit in vain.
### England, Canada, and France
Goldman found it difficult to acclimate to the German leftist community in Berlin. Communists despised her outspokenness about Soviet repression; liberals derided her radicalism. While Berkman remained in Berlin helping Russian exiles, Goldman moved to London in September 1924. Upon her arrival, the novelist Rebecca West arranged a reception dinner for her, attended by philosopher Bertrand Russell, novelist H. G. Wells, and more than 200 other guests. When she spoke of her dissatisfaction with the Soviet government, the audience was shocked. Some left the gathering; others berated her for prematurely criticizing the Communist experiment. Later, in a letter, Russell declined to support her efforts at systemic change in the Soviet Union and ridiculed her anarchist idealism.
In 1925, the spectre of deportation loomed again, but James Colton, a Scottish anarchist Goldman had first met in Glasgow whilst on a speaking tour in 1895, had offered to marry her and provide British citizenship. Although they were only distant acquaintances, she accepted and they were married on June 27, 1925, Goldman's 58th birthday. Her new status gave her peace of mind and allowed her to travel to France and Canada. The pair sporadically exchanged correspondence until Colton's death in 1936. Life in London was stressful for Goldman; she wrote to Berkman: "I am awfully tired and so lonely and heartsick. It is a dreadful feeling to come back here from lectures and find not a kindred soul, no one who cares whether one is dead or alive." She worked on analytical studies of drama, expanding on the work she had published in 1914. But the audiences were "awful," and she never finished her second book on the subject.
Goldman traveled to Canada in 1927, just in time to receive news of the impending executions of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston. Angered by the many irregularities of the case, she saw it as another travesty of justice in the US. She longed to join the mass demonstrations in Boston; memories of the Haymarket affair overwhelmed her, compounded by her isolation. "Then," she wrote, "I had my life before me to take up the cause for those killed. Now I have nothing."
In 1928, she began writing her autobiography, with the support of a group of American admirers, including journalist H. L. Mencken, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Theodore Dreiser and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who raised \$4,000 for her. She secured a cottage in the French coastal city of Saint-Tropez and spent two years recounting her life. Berkman offered sharply critical feedback, which she eventually incorporated at the price of a strain on their relationship. Goldman intended the book, Living My Life, as a single volume for a price the working class could afford (she urged no more than \$5.00); her publisher Alfred A. Knopf released it as two volumes sold together for \$7.50. Goldman was furious, but unable to force a change. Due in large part to the Great Depression, sales were sluggish despite keen interest from libraries around the US. Critical reviews were generally enthusiastic; The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Saturday Review of Literature all listed it as one of the year's top non-fiction books.
In 1933, Goldman received permission to lecture in the United States under the condition that she speak only about drama and her autobiography—but not current political events. She returned to New York on February 2, 1934, to generally positive press coverage—except from Communist publications. Soon she was surrounded by admirers and friends, besieged with invitations to talks and interviews. Her visa expired in May, and she went to Toronto in order to file another request to visit the US. This second attempt was denied. She stayed in Canada, writing articles for US publications.
In February and March 1936, Berkman underwent a pair of prostate gland operations. Recuperating in Nice and cared for by his companion, Emmy Eckstein, he missed Goldman's sixty-seventh birthday in Saint-Tropez in June. She wrote in sadness, but he never read the letter; she received a call in the middle of the night that Berkman was in great distress. She left for Nice immediately but when she arrived that morning, Goldman found that he had shot himself and was in a nearly comatose paralysis. He died later that evening.
### Spanish Civil War
In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started after an attempted coup d'état by parts of the Spanish Army against the government of the Second Spanish Republic. At the same time, the Spanish anarchists, fighting against the Nationalist forces, started an anarchist revolution. Goldman was invited to Barcelona and in an instant, as she wrote to her niece, "the crushing weight that was pressing down on my heart since Sasha's death left me as by magic". She was welcomed by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) organizations, and for the first time in her life lived in a community run by and for anarchists, according to true anarchist principles. "In all my life", she wrote later, "I have not met with such warm hospitality, comradeship and solidarity." After touring a series of collectives in the province of Huesca, she told a group of workers: "Your revolution will destroy forever [the notion] that anarchism stands for chaos." She began editing the weekly CNT-FAI Information Bulletin and responded to English-language mail.
Goldman began to worry about the future of Spain's anarchism when the CNT-FAI joined a coalition government in 1937—against the core anarchist principle of abstaining from state structures—and, more distressingly, made repeated concessions to Communist forces in the name of uniting against fascism. In November 1936, she wrote that cooperating with Communists in Spain was "a denial of our comrades in Stalin's concentration camps". The USSR, meanwhile, refused to send weapons to anarchist forces, and disinformation campaigns were being waged against the anarchists across Europe and the US. Her faith in the movement unshaken, Goldman returned to London as an official representative of the CNT-FAI.
Delivering lectures and giving interviews, Goldman enthusiastically supported the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. She wrote regularly for Spain and the World, a biweekly newspaper focusing on the civil war. In May 1937, Communist-led forces attacked anarchist strongholds and broke up agrarian collectives. Newspapers in England and elsewhere accepted the timeline of events offered by the Second Spanish Republic at face value. British journalist George Orwell, present for the crackdown, wrote: "[T]he accounts of the Barcelona riots in May ... beat everything I have ever seen for lying."
Goldman returned to Spain in September, but the CNT-FAI appeared to her like people "in a burning house". Worse, anarchists and other radicals around the world refused to support their cause. The Nationalist forces declared victory in Spain just before she returned to London. Frustrated by England's repressive atmosphere—which she called "more fascist than the fascists"—she returned to Canada in 1939. Her service to the anarchist cause in Spain was not forgotten. On her seventieth birthday, the former Secretary-General of the CNT-FAI, Mariano Vázquez, sent a message to her from Paris, praising her for her contributions and naming her as "our spiritual mother". She called it "the most beautiful tribute I have ever received".
### Final years
As the events preceding World War II began to unfold in Europe, Goldman reiterated her opposition to wars waged by governments. "[M]uch as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco", she wrote to a friend, "I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise." She felt that Britain and France had missed their opportunity to oppose fascism, and that the coming war would only result in "a new form of madness in the world".
### Death
On Saturday, February 17, 1940, Goldman suffered a debilitating stroke. She became paralyzed on her right side, and although her hearing was unaffected, she could not speak. As one friend described it: "Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word." For three months she improved slightly, receiving visitors and on one occasion gesturing to her address book to signal that a friend might find friendly contacts during a trip to Mexico. She suffered another stroke on May 8 and she died six days later in Toronto, aged 70.
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be brought back to the United States. She was buried in German Waldheim Cemetery (now named Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, near the graves of those executed after the Haymarket affair. The bas relief on her grave marker was created by sculptor Jo Davidson, and the stone includes the quote "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty".
## Philosophy
Goldman spoke and wrote extensively on a wide variety of issues. While she rejected orthodoxy and fundamentalist thinking, she was an important contributor to several fields of modern political philosophy.
She was influenced by many diverse thinkers and writers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Henry David Thoreau, Peter Kropotkin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Another philosopher who influenced Goldman was Friedrich Nietzsche. In her autobiography, she wrote: "Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats."
### Anarchism
Anarchism was central to Goldman's view of the world, and she is widely considered one of the most important figures in the history of anarchism. First drawn to it during the persecution of anarchists after the 1886 Haymarket affair, she wrote and spoke regularly on behalf of anarchism. In the title essay of her book Anarchism and Other Essays, she wrote:
> Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
Goldman's anarchism was intensely personal. She believed it was necessary for anarchist thinkers to live their beliefs, demonstrating their convictions with every action and word. "I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct," she once wrote. "I care if his spirit of today is correct." Anarchism and free association were to her logical responses to the confines of government control and capitalism. "It seems to me that these are the new forms of life," she wrote, "and that they will take the place of the old, not by preaching or voting, but by living them."
At the same time, she believed that the movement on behalf of human liberty must be staffed by liberated humans. While dancing among fellow anarchists one evening, she was chided by an associate for her carefree demeanor. In her autobiography, Goldman wrote:
> I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."
#### Tactical uses of violence
Goldman, in her political youth, held targeted violence to be a legitimate means of revolutionary struggle. Goldman at the time believed that the use of violence, while distasteful, could be justified in relation to the social benefits it might accrue. She advocated propaganda of the deed—attentat, or violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt. She supported her partner Alexander Berkman's attempt to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and even begged him to allow her to participate. She believed that Frick's actions during the Homestead strike were reprehensible and that his murder would produce a positive result for working people. "Yes," she wrote later in her autobiography, "the end in this case justified the means." While she never gave explicit approval of Leon Czolgosz's assassination of US President William McKinley, she defended his ideals and believed actions like his were a natural consequence of repressive institutions. As she wrote in "The Psychology of Political Violence": "the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in an act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning."
Her experiences in Russia led her to qualify her earlier belief that revolutionary ends might justify violent means. In the afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia, she wrote: "There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.... The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose...." In the same chapter, Goldman affirmed that "Revolution is indeed a violent process," and noted that violence was the "tragic inevitability of revolutionary upheavals..." Some misinterpreted her comments on the Bolshevik terror as a rejection of all militant force, but Goldman corrected this in the preface to the first US edition of My Disillusionment in Russia:
> The argument that destruction and terror are part of revolution I do not dispute. I know that in the past every great political and social change necessitated violence. [...] Black slavery might still be a legalized institution in the United States but for the militant spirit of the John Browns. I have never denied that violence is inevitable, nor do I gainsay it now. Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of defense. It is quite another thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle. Such terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn itself becomes counter-revolutionary.
Goldman saw the militarization of Soviet society not as a result of armed resistance per se, but of the statist vision of the Bolsheviks, writing that "an insignificant minority bent on creating an absolute State is necessarily driven to oppression and terrorism."
### Capitalism and labor
Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with human liberty. "The only demand that property recognizes," she wrote in Anarchism and Other Essays, "is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade." She also argued that capitalism dehumanized workers, "turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron."
Originally opposed to anything less than complete revolution, Goldman was challenged during one talk by an elderly worker in the front row. In her autobiography, she wrote:
> He said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week.... But what were men of his age to do? They were not likely to live to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system. Were they also to forgo the release of perhaps two hours a day from the hated work? That was all they could hope to see realized in their lifetime.
### State
Goldman viewed the state as essentially and inevitably a tool of control and domination. As a result of her anti-state views, Goldman believed that voting was useless at best and dangerous at worst. Voting, she wrote, provided an illusion of participation while masking the true structures of decision-making. Instead, Goldman advocated targeted resistance in the form of strikes, protests, and "direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code". She maintained an anti-voting position even when many anarcho-syndicalists in 1930s Spain voted for the formation of a liberal republic. Goldman wrote that any power anarchists wielded as a voting bloc should instead be used to strike across the country. She disagreed with the movement for women's suffrage, which demanded the right of women to vote. In her essay "Woman Suffrage", she ridicules the idea that women's involvement would infuse the democratic state with a more just orientation: "As if women have not sold their votes, as if women politicians cannot be bought!" She agreed with the suffragists' assertion that women are equal to men but disagreed that their participation alone would make the state more just. "To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers." Goldman was also critical of Zionism, which she saw as another failed experiment in state control.
Goldman was also a passionate critic of the prison system, critiquing both the treatment of prisoners and the social causes of crime. Goldman viewed crime as a natural outgrowth of an unjust economic system, and in her essay "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", she quoted liberally from the 19th-century authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde on prisons, and wrote:
> Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, shipwrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence.
Goldman was a committed war resister and was particularly opposed to the draft, viewing it as one of the worst of the state's forms of coercion, and was one of the founders of the No-Conscription League for which she was ultimately arrested and imprisoned in 1917 before being deported in 1919.
Goldman was routinely surveilled, arrested, and imprisoned for her speech and organizing activities in support of workers and various strikes, access to birth control, and in opposition to World War I. As a result, she became active in the early 20th century free speech movement, seeing freedom of expression as a fundamental necessity for achieving social change. Her outspoken championship of her ideals, in the face of persistent arrests, inspired Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. Goldman's and Reitman's experiences with vigilantism in the San Diego free speech fight in 1912 is an example of their persistence in the fight for free speech despite risking their safety.
### Feminism and sexuality
Although she was hostile to the suffragist goals of first-wave feminism, Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women, and is today heralded as a founder of anarcha-feminism, which challenges patriarchy as a hierarchy to be resisted alongside state power and class divisions. In 1897, she wrote: "I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood."
A nurse by training, Goldman was an early advocate for educating women concerning contraception. Like many feminists of her time, she saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions, and birth control as a positive alternative. Goldman was also an advocate of free love, and a strong critic of marriage. She saw early feminists as confined in their scope and bounded by social forces of Puritanism and capitalism. She wrote: "We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and habits. The movement for women's emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction."
Goldman was also an outspoken critic of prejudice against homosexual and genderqueer people. Her belief that social liberation should extend to gay men and lesbians was virtually unheard of at the time, even among anarchists. As German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, "she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public." In numerous speeches and letters, she defended the right of gay men and lesbians to love as they pleased and condemned the fear and stigma associated with homosexuality. As Goldman wrote in a letter to Hirschfeld, "It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life."
### Atheism
A committed atheist, Goldman viewed religion as another instrument of control and domination. Her essay "The Philosophy of Atheism" quoted Bakunin at length on the subject and added:
> Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it a philosophy, is static and fixed.
In essays like "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism" and a speech entitled "The Failure of Christianity", Goldman made more than a few enemies among religious communities by attacking their moralistic attitudes and efforts to control human behavior. She blamed Christianity for "the perpetuation of a slave society", arguing that it dictated individuals' actions on Earth and offered poor people a false promise of a plentiful future in heaven.
## Legacy
Goldman was well known during her life, described as—among other things—"the most dangerous woman in America". After her death and through the middle part of the 20th century, her fame faded. Scholars and historians of anarchism viewed her as a great speaker and activist but did not regard her as a philosophical or theoretical thinker on par with, for example, Kropotkin.
In 1970, Dover Press reissued Goldman's biography, Living My Life, and in 1972, feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman issued a collection of Goldman's writing and speeches, Red Emma Speaks. These works brought Goldman's life and writings to a larger audience, and she was in particular lionized by the women's movement of the late 20th century. In 1973, Shulman was asked by a printer friend for a quotation by Goldman for use on a T-shirt. She sent him the selection from Living My Life about "the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things", recounting that she had been admonished "that it did not behoove an agitator to dance". The printer created a statement based on these sentiments that has become one of the most famous quotations attributed to Goldman even though she probably never said or wrote it as such: "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution." Variations of this saying have appeared on thousands of T-shirts, buttons, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, hats, and other items.
The women's movement of the 1970s that "rediscovered" Goldman was accompanied by a resurgent anarchist movement, beginning in the late 1960s, which also reinvigorated scholarly attention to earlier anarchists. The growth of feminism also initiated some reevaluation of Goldman's philosophical work, with scholars pointing out the significance of Goldman's contributions to anarchist thought in her time. Goldman's belief in the value of aesthetics, for example, can be seen in the later influences of anarchism and the arts. Similarly, Goldman is now given credit for significantly influencing and broadening the scope of activism on issues of sexual liberty, reproductive rights, and freedom of expression.
Goldman has been depicted in numerous works of fiction over the years, including Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds, in which she was portrayed by Maureen Stapleton, who won an Academy Award for her performance. Goldman has also been a character in two Broadway musicals, Ragtime and Assassins. Plays depicting Goldman's life include Howard Zinn's play, Emma; Martin Duberman's Mother Earth; Jessica Litwak's Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy, and Other Affairs (about Goldman's relationship with Berkman and her arrest in connection with McKinley's assassination); Lynn Rogoff's Love Ben, Love Emma (about Goldman's relationship with Reitman); Carol Bolt's Red Emma; and Alexis Roblan's Red Emma and the Mad Monk. Ethel Mannin's 1941 novel Red Rose is also based on Goldman's Life.
Goldman has been honored by a number of organizations named in her memory. The Emma Goldman Clinic, a women's health center located in Iowa City, Iowa, selected Goldman as a namesake "in recognition of her challenging spirit." Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse, an infoshop in Baltimore, Maryland adopted her name out of their belief "in the ideas and ideals that she fought for her entire life: free speech, sexual and racial equality and independence, the right to organize in our jobs and in our own lives, ideas and ideals that we continue to fight for, even today".
## Works
Goldman was a prolific writer, penning countless pamphlets and articles on a diverse range of subjects. She authored six books, including an autobiography, Living My Life, and a biography of fellow anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre.
### Books
- Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.
- The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Boston: Gorham Press, 1914.
- My Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1923.
- My Further Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1924.
- Living My Life. New York: Knopf, 1931.
- Voltairine de Cleyre. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: Oriole Press, 1932.
### Edited collections
- Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches. New York: Random House, 1972. .
- Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 1 – Made for America, 1890–1901. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. .
- Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 2 – Making Speech Free, 1902–1909. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. .
- Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 3 – Light and Shadows, 1910–1916. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. .
## See also
- Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest
- Emma or Emma: A Play in Two Acts about Emma Goldman, American Anarchist, a play by Howard Zinn
- Birth control movement in the United States
- John R. Coryell
- List of peace activists
- List of women's rights activists
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Avery Brundage
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President of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972
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"American pentathletes",
"Athletes (track and field) at the 1912 Summer Olympics",
"Basketball players from Chicago",
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Avery Brundage (/ˈeɪvri ˈbrʌndɪdʒ/; September 28, 1887 – May 8, 1975) was an American sports administrator who served as the fifth president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. The only American and only non-European to attain that position, Brundage is remembered as a zealous advocate of amateurism and for his involvement with the 1936 and 1972 Summer Olympics, both held in Germany.
Brundage was born in Detroit in 1887 to a working-class family. When he was five years old, his father moved his family to Chicago and subsequently abandoned his wife and children. Raised mostly by relatives, Brundage attended the University of Illinois to study engineering and became a track star. He competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics, where he participated in the pentathlon and decathlon, but did not win any medals; both events were won by teammate Jim Thorpe. He won national championships in track three times between 1914 and 1918 and founded his own construction business. He earned his wealth from this company and from investments, and never accepted pay for his involvement in sports.
Following his retirement from athletics, Brundage became a sports administrator and rose rapidly through the ranks in United States sports groups. As leader of America's Olympic organizations, he fought zealously against a boycott of the 1936 Summer Olympics, which had been awarded to Germany before the rise of the Nazi regime and its escalating persecution of Jews. Brundage successfully prevented a US boycott of the Games, and he was elected to the IOC that year. He quickly became a major figure in the Olympic movement and was elected IOC president in 1952.
As President of the American Olympic Committee, Brundage fought strongly for amateurism and against the commercialization of the Olympic Games, even as these stands increasingly came to be seen as incongruous with the realities of modern sports. The advent of the state-sponsored athlete of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, West Germany, were his final Games as president of the IOC. The event was marred by tragedy and controversy when eleven Israeli team members were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. At the memorial service, Brundage decried the politicization of sports and refused to cancel the remainder of the Olympics, declaring "the Games must go on." Although those in attendance applauded Brundage's statement, his decision to continue the Games has since been harshly criticized, and his actions in 1936 and 1972 seen as evidence of antisemitism. In retirement, Brundage married his second wife, a German princess. He died in 1975 at age 87.
## Early life and athletic career
Avery Brundage was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 28, 1887, the son of Charles and Minnie (Lloyd) Brundage. Charles Brundage was a stonecutter. The Brundages moved to Chicago when Avery was five, and Charles soon thereafter abandoned his family. Avery and his younger brother, Chester, were raised mostly by aunts and uncles. At age 13 in 1901, Brundage finished first in an essay competition, winning a trip to President William McKinley's second inauguration. Avery attended Sherwood Public School and then R. T. Crane Manual Training School, both in Chicago. Crane Tech was a journey of 7 miles (11 km) by public transportation, which he undertook only after completing a newspaper delivery route. Even though the school had no athletic facilities, Brundage made his own equipment (including a shot and a hammer to throw) in the school's workshop and by his final year was written of in the newspapers as a schoolboy track star. According to sportswriter William Oscar Johnson in a 1980 article in Sports Illustrated, Brundage was "the kind of man whom Horatio Alger had canonized—the American urchin, tattered and deprived, who rose to thrive in the company of kings and millionaires".
After he graduated from Crane Tech in 1905, Brundage enrolled at the University of Illinois, where he undertook an arduous schedule of civil engineering courses. He received an honors degree in 1909. He wrote for various campus publications and continued his involvement in sports. Brundage played basketball and ran track for Illinois, and also participated in several intramural sports. In his senior year, he was a major contributor to Illinois' Western Conference championship track team, which defeated the University of Chicago (coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg).
After graduation, Brundage began work as a construction superintendent for the leading architectural firm of Holabird & Roche. In the three years he worked for the firm, he supervised the construction of \$7.5 million in buildings—3 percent of the total built in Chicago in that time frame. He disliked the corruption of the Chicago building trades. Brundage's biographer, Allen Guttmann, points out that the young engineer was in a position to benefit from influence if he had wanted to, as his uncle, Edward J. Brundage, was by then-Republican leader of Chicago's North Side and would become Attorney General of Illinois.
Brundage had been successful in several track and field events while at Illinois. In 1910, as a member of the Chicago Athletic Association (CAA), he finished third in the national all-around championships (an American predecessor of the decathlon), sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and continued training, aiming at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. At Stockholm, Brundage finished sixth in the pentathlon and 16th in the decathlon. Far behind on points, after eight events he dropped out of the decathlon, which he always regretted. He later moved up one spot in the standings in each event when his fellow American, Jim Thorpe, who had won both events, was disqualified after it was shown that he had played semi-professional baseball: this meant Thorpe was considered a professional athlete, not an amateur as was required for Olympic participation. Throughout his tenure as president, Brundage refused to ask the IOC to restore Thorpe's medals despite advocacy by Thorpe supporters. The committee eventually did so in 1982, after the deaths of both men. Brundage's refusal led to charges that he held a grudge for being beaten in Stockholm.
Upon his return to Chicago, Brundage accepted a position as construction superintendent for John Griffith and Sons Contractors. Among the structures he worked on for Griffith were the Cook County Hospital, the Morrison Hotel, the Monroe Building, and the National Biscuit Company warehouse. In 1915, he struck out on his own in construction, founding the Avery Brundage Company, of which his uncle Edward was a director. Brundage continued his athletic career as well. He was US all-around champion in 1914, 1916, and 1918. Once he had ceased to be a track star, he took up handball. As a young man, he was ranked in the top ten in the country and even in 1934, at the age of 46, he won one game out of two against Angelo Trulio, who had recently been the US national champion.
## Sports administrator
### Rise to leadership
As Brundage approached the end of his track career, he began to involve himself in sports administration, at first through the CAA, then through the Central Association of the Amateur Athletic Union (of which the CAA was a member) and then, beginning in 1919, in the AAU. That group was involved in an ongoing battle for dominance over US amateur sports with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Athletes were often used as pawns in the battle, with one organization threatening to suspend those who participated in events sponsored by the other. Another venue for conflict was in the United States' National Olympic Committee (NOC), which was then called the American Olympic Committee (AOC), and which was AAU-dominated. In 1920, there was public outcry when the AOC chartered a disused troopship to carry home America's representatives in the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp; much of the team instead booked passage by ocean liner. In response, the AAU founded an American Olympic Association as a separate group, although it was still initially dominated by AAU representatives—it then selected the AOC. In 1928, on the resignation of then-AOA president General Douglas MacArthur, Brundage was elected president of the AOA; he was also elected president of the AOC, a post he held for over 20 years.
In 1925 Brundage became vice-president of the AAU, and chairman of its Handball Committee. After a year as first vice-president, he became president in 1928 and kept the post (except for a one-year break in 1933) through 1935. In that capacity, he was able to secure peace between the NCAA and AAU, with the former gaining the right to certify college students as amateurs, and greater representation on the AOA's executive board.
Brundage quickly displayed what writer Roger Butterfield termed "a dictatorial temperament" in a 1948 article for Life magazine. In 1929, American track star Charlie Paddock stated that Brundage and other sports officials were making money for the AOC by using him as a gate attraction, while treating him badly; Brundage shot back accusing Paddock of "untruths" and "sensationalism of the rankest sort". The runner turned professional, escaping Brundage's jurisdiction. In 1932, soon after winning three medals at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, track star Mildred "Babe" Didrikson appeared in an automobile advertisement, and the Brundage-led AAU quickly suspended her amateur status. Didrikson objected that she had not been paid and that regardless, the rules for maintaining amateur status were overcomplex. In the first of several well-publicized run-ins he had with female athletes, Brundage replied that he had not had any problem with the rules when an Olympic athlete himself, and stated, "You know, the ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games. They wouldn't even let them on the sidelines. I'm not so sure but they were right." According to Butterfield, Brundage was suspicious of female athletes, suspecting that some were actually men in disguise.
### 1936 Olympics
#### Fighting a boycott
In 1931, the IOC awarded the 1936 Olympics to Germany, with the winter games in Bavaria and the summer games in the capital city, Berlin. After Germany was selected, several IOC members indicated that they were showing support for its democratic government, which was under attack from extremists in the hard economic times of the Great Depression. The Berlin Games were thrown in doubt, however, by the German July 1932 elections, in which the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, unexpectedly won the most seats in the Reichstag, the national legislature. The Nazis had expressed little interest in international sport, instead preferring the idea of "German games," in which German athletes would compete without what they deemed subhuman "Untermenschen" such as people of Jewish, Gypsy or African descent, thereby promoting their ideas of Aryan racial superiority and Germans as a "master race." When the Nazis attained power in January 1933, the Olympics were thought likely to be moved elsewhere.
Although the Nazis were suspicious of the chairman of the local Olympic organizing committee, Theodor Lewald, because he had a Jewish grandmother, they quickly saw the propaganda potential in hosting the Olympic Games. Lewald had intended to stage the Games on a shoestring budget; instead, the Reich threw its resources behind the effort. As the Nazi hatred of the Jews manifested itself in persecution, there were calls to move the Olympics from Germany, or alternatively, to boycott the Games. As head of the US Olympic movement, Brundage received many letters and telegrams urging action. American Olympic champion Lillian Copeland accused Brundage of "deliberately concealing the truth" about Hitler and Nazi Germany, was one of 24 former U.S. Olympic champions who petitioned the IOC in 1933 to move the Games from Germany, to no avail, and herself ultimately boycotted the Games.
IOC President Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour wrote to Brundage in 1933, "I am not personally fond of jews [sic] and of the jewish [sic] influence, but I will not have them molested in no way [sic] whatsoever." According to historical writer Christopher Hilton in his account of the 1936 Games, "Baillet-Latour, and the great and good around him, had no idea what was coming, and if the [IOC's] German delegates kept offering assurances, what else could they do but accept them?" Baillet-Latour opposed boycotting the Games, as did Brundage (who had learned in 1933 that he was being considered for IOC membership).
In her 1982 journal article on his role in the US participation in the 1936 Summer Games, Carolyn Marvin explained Brundage's political outlook:
> The foundation of Brundage's political world view was the proposition that communism was an evil before which all other evils were insignificant. A collection of lesser themes basked in the reflected glory of the major one. These included Brundage's admiration for Hitler's apparent restoration of prosperity and order to Germany, his conception that those who did not work for a living in the United States were an anarchic human tide, and a suspicious anti-Semitism which feared the dissolution of Anglo-Protestant culture in a sea of ethnic aspirations.
Nazi pledges of non-discrimination in sports proved inconsistent with their actions, such as the expulsion of Jews from sports clubs, and in September 1934, Brundage sailed for Germany to see for himself. He met with government officials and others, although he was not allowed to meet with Jewish sports leaders alone. When he returned, he reported, "I was given positive assurance in writing ... that there will be no discrimination against Jews. You can't ask more than that and I think the guarantee will be fulfilled." Brundage's trip only increased the controversy over the question of US participation, with New York Congressman Emanuel Celler stating that Brundage "had prejudged the situation before he sailed from America." The AOC heard a report from Brundage on conditions in Germany and announced its decision. On September 26, 1934, the Committee voted to send the United States team to Berlin.
Brundage took the position that as the Germans had reported non-discrimination to the IOC, and the IOC had accepted that report, US Olympic authorities were bound by that determination. Nevertheless, it became increasingly apparent that Nazi actions would prohibit any Jew from securing a place on the German team. On this issue, Brundage stated that only 12 Jews had ever represented Germany in the Olympics, and it would hardly be surprising if none did in 1936.
Those who had advocated a boycott were foiled by the AOC, and they turned to the Amateur Athletic Union, hoping that the organization, though also led by Brundage, would refuse to certify American athletes for the 1936 Olympics. Although no vote took place on a boycott at the AAU's December 1934 meeting, Brundage did not seek re-election, and delegates elected Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney as the new president, to take office in 1935. Although pro-boycott activities briefly fell into a lull, renewed Nazi brutality against the Jews in June 1935 sparked a resurgence, and converted Mahoney to the pro-boycott cause. In October, Baillet-Latour wrote to the three American IOC members—William May Garland, Charles Sherrill, and Ernest Lee Jahncke—asking them to do all they could to ensure a US team was sent to Germany. Garland and Sherrill agreed; Jahncke, however, refused, stating that he would be supporting the boycott. Brundage, at Baillet-Latour's request, took the lead in the anti-boycott campaign. Matters came to a head at the AAU convention in December 1935. Brundage's forces won the key votes, and the AAU approved sending a team to Berlin, specifying that this did not mean it supported the Nazis. Brundage was not magnanimous in victory, demanding the resignation of opponents. Although not all quit, Mahoney did.
Brundage believed that the boycott controversy could be used effectively for fundraising, writing, "the fact that the Jews are against us will arouse interest among thousands of people who have never subscribed before, if they are properly approached." In March 1936, he wrote to advertising mogul Albert Lasker, a Jew, complaining that "a large number of misguided Jews still persist in attempting to hamper the activities of the American Olympic Committee. The result, of course, is increased support from the one hundred and twenty million non-Jews in the United States, for this is a patriotic enterprise." In a letter which David Large, in his book on the 1936 Games, terms "heavy-handed," Brundage suggested that by helping to finance American participation in the Olympic Games, Jews could decrease anti-Semitism in the US. However, "Lasker, to his credit, refused to be blackmailed," writing to Brundage that "You gratuitously insult not only Jews but the millions of patriotic Christians in America, for whom you venture to speak without warrant, and whom you so tragically misrepresent in your letter."
#### Berlin
Brundage led the contingent of American athletes and officials who embarked for Hamburg on the S.S. Manhattan at New York Harbor on July 15, 1936. Immediately upon arrival in Germany, Brundage became headline news when he and the AOC dismissed American swimmer Eleanor Holm, who was a gold medalist in 1932 and expected to repeat, for allegedly getting drunk at late-night parties and missing her curfew. There were various rumors and accounts of the married swimmer's pursuits while on board the ship; the gossip included statements that she was at an "all-night party" with playwright Charles MacArthur, who was traveling without his wife, actress Helen Hayes. Brundage discussed the matter with fellow AOC members, then met with Holm. Although the AOC attempted to send her home, Holm pleaded in vain for reinstatement; "to the AOC's horror," she remained in Berlin as a journalist, watching from the stands as the gold medal went to Dutch swimmer Nida Senff. Decades later, Holm told Olympic sprinter Dave Sime that Brundage had held a grudge against her, having propositioned her, and she turned him down. According to Guttmann, "Brundage has appeared, ever since [1936], in the guise of a killjoy." Butterfield noted that through the efforts of sportswriters who supported Holm, "Brundage became celebrated as a tyrant, snob, hypocrite, dictator and stuffed shirt, as well as just about the meanest man in the whole world of sports."
On July 30, 1936, six days after the American arrival in Germany, the IOC met in Berlin and unanimously expelled Jahncke. Two places for the United States were vacant, as Sherrill had died in June, but the minutes specifically note that Brundage was elected to the IOC in Jahncke's place.
One of the sensations of the Games was black American track star Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals. According to some American press stories, Hitler left the stadium rather than shake hands with him. This was not the case; IOC president Baillet-Latour had told Hitler not to shake hands with the winners unless he was prepared to shake hands with all gold medalists, which he was not. This, however, was not publicized. According to Butterfield, in later years, retellings of what Brundage termed "a fairy tale" roused the American to "acute fury." Hitler was, however, asked by his youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, to meet Owens, and he refused, saying, "Do you really think that I'd allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?"
The question of the US 4 × 100 meters relay squad was another controversy that may have involved Brundage. The scheduled team included sprinters Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, who were both Jewish. After Owens won his third gold medal, both men were removed from the relay squad in favor of Owens and fellow black athlete Ralph Metcalfe. The US track coach, Lawson Robertson, told Stoller and Glickman that the Germans had upgraded their squad and it was important to have the fastest team possible. In the event, the US team turned in back-to-back world record times in the heats and final to take the gold medal; the Italians were a distant second, edging out the Germans for the silver medal. Stoller and Glickman, who were the only Jews on the US track team and the only American athletes who went to Berlin and did not compete, did not believe the stated reason for their replacement. Stoller recorded in his diary that he and Glickman had been left out of the relay because the two other participants, Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, had been coached by one of Robertson's assistants at the University of Southern California. Glickman conceded college favoritism as a possible reason, but thought anti-Semitism more likely, and his position—that he and Stoller had been replaced so as not to embarrass Hitler by having him see Jews, as well as blacks, win gold medals for the US track team—hardened in the following years. He believed Brundage was behind the replacement. Brundage denied any involvement in the decision, which remains controversial. Glickman went on to a lengthy career as a sports broadcaster, and was given the inaugural Douglas MacArthur Award (for lifetime achievement in the field of sports) in 1998, after Stoller's death, by the United States Olympic Committee (successor to the AOC). USOC chairman William Hybl stated that while he had seen no written proof that Brundage was responsible, "I was a prosecutor. I'm used to looking at evidence. The evidence was there"—though, as Large notes, "exactly what evidence, he didn't say." In the report that he submitted after the Games, Brundage called the controversy "absurd"; he noted that Glickman and Stoller had finished fifth and sixth at the Olympic trials at New York's Randall's Island Stadium and that the US victory had validated the decision.
### Road to the IOC presidency
Brundage's first IOC session as an incumbent member was at Warsaw in June 1937. The vice president of the IOC, Baron Godefroy de Blonay of Switzerland, had died, and Sweden's Sigfrid Edström was elected to replace him. Brundage was selected to fill Edström's place on the executive board. Edström had been a Brundage ally in the boycott fight, writing to the American that while he did not desire the persecution of the Jews, as an "intelligent and unscrupulous" people, "they had to be kept within certain limits". Brundage wrote to a German correspondent regretting that Leni Riefenstahl's film about the Berlin Olympics, Olympia, could not be commercially shown in the United States, as "unfortunately the theaters and moving picture companies are almost all owned by Jews".
The Berlin Games had increased Brundage's admiration for Germany, and he spoke out at a speech before the pro-Nazi German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden in October 1936, stating that "five years ago they [Germans] were discouraged and demoralized—today they are united—sixty million people believing in themselves and in their country ... We can learn much from Germany." In 1938, his construction company received the contract to build a new German embassy in Washington (this was not fulfilled as World War II intervened). Brundage joined the Keep America Out of War Committee and became a member of America First (he resigned from both the day after Pearl Harbor). Brundage was the subject of an FBI investigation in 1942, following allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies.
Although the 1940 Olympic Games were canceled due to World War II, Brundage sought to organize Western Hemisphere games that might be able to proceed despite the troubled international climate. Brundage was one of the leaders in the founding of the Pan-American Games, participating in the initial discussions in August 1940 in Buenos Aires. On his return, he arranged for the American Olympic Association to be renamed the United States of America Sports Federation (USASF), which would organize the United States Olympic Committee (as the AOC would now be called) and another committee to see to American participation in the Pan-American Games. Brundage became an early member of the international Pan-American Games Commission, although the inaugural event in Buenos Aires was postponed because of the war and was eventually held in 1951, with Brundage present. Despite his role in founding them, Brundage viewed the Pan-American Games as imitative, with no true link with antiquity.
War postponed any future Olympics, and fractured the IOC geographically and politically. With Baillet-Latour in German-occupied Belgium, Brundage and IOC vice president Edström did their best to keep channels of communication open between IOC members; according to Guttmann, "He and Edström perceived themselves as keepers of the sacred flame, guardians of an ideal in whose name they were ready once again to act as soon as the madness ended." Baillet-Latour died in 1942; Edström took on the duties of president, although he continued to style himself vice-president. Edström and Brundage did not await the end of war to rebuild the Olympic movement; Brundage even sent parcels to Europe in aid of IOC members and others in places where food was scarce. With Edström turning 74 in 1944, the Swede expressed concern as to who would lead the IOC if he should die, and suggested that Brundage become second vice-president, a newly created position. A mail ballot of IOC members who could be reached confirmed the choice the following year. When Edström was made president by the first postwar IOC session at Lausanne in September 1946, Brundage was elected first vice-president.
As vice president, Brundage served on a commission appointed at the IOC's London session in 1948 to recommend whether the 1906 Intercalated Games, held in Athens, should be considered a full Olympic Games. All three members of what came to be known as the Brundage Commission were from the Western Hemisphere and met in New Orleans in January 1949. The commission found that there was nothing to be gained by recognizing the 1906 games as Olympic, and it might set an embarrassing precedent. The full IOC endorsed the report when it met later that year in Rome.
Edström intended to retire following the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, when a successor would be elected. Brundage's rival for the presidency was Great Britain's Lord Burghley, an Olympic gold medalist in track in 1928 and president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF). The balloting took place at the IOC session in the Finnish capital before the Games. Although Brundage was the executive board's candidate, he was disliked by some IOC members; others felt that the president should be a European. Private notes kept during the balloting reveal it to have been very close, but on the 25th and final ballot, Brundage received 30 votes to 17 for Burghley and was elected.
## IOC president (1952–1972)
### Amateurism
Throughout his career as a sports official, according to Guttmann, Brundage "was unquestionably an idealist." He often concluded speeches by quoting from John Galsworthy:
> Sport, which still keeps the flag of idealism flying, is perhaps the most saving grace in the world at the moment, with its spirit for rules kept, and regard for the adversary, whether the fight is going for or against. When, if ever, the spirit of sport, which is the spirit of fair play, reigns over international affairs, the cat force, which rules there now, will slink away, and human life emerge for the first time from the jungle.
This ideal was best realized, Brundage believed, in amateur sports. The athlete, he stated, should compete "for the love of the game itself without thought of reward or payment of any kind," with professionals being part of the entertainment business. Amateurism, to Brundage, expressed the concept of the Renaissance man, with abilities in many fields, yet a specialist in none.
As the definition of "amateur" varied by sport, many of the battles Brundage engaged in concerned the question of what money or valuables an athlete could accept while retaining their amateur status, with some sports more liberal than others. In 1948, tennis allowed expense payments of up to \$600 per tournament, while boxing permitted valuable prizes as awards. Enforcement of these rules often fell to National Olympic Committees, and Brundage found them less than enthusiastic about rules which hampered their own athletes in the pursuit of medals.
Both before and after becoming IOC president, Brundage was involved in a number of controversies involving threats to, or sometimes actual disqualification of, athletes for breach of amateur rules. In 1932, he was part of a special committee of the IAAF which disqualified Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi from the Los Angeles Games for allegedly accepting monetary compensation. At the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, rival US ice hockey teams, sponsored by different accrediting organizations (one from the AAU and the other from AHAUS), came to the Games. The dispute proved difficult, and the IOC initially voted to cancel the tournament and eliminate ice hockey as an Olympic sport, but relented as organizers had sold thousands of tickets. A compromise was then reached: the AAU team, backed by Brundage and the AOC, would march in the opening ceremony, while the AHAUS team, not favored by Brundage but supported by the LIHG (the forerunner to today's IIHF), featuring former semi-professional players, were allowed to compete but could not earn an Olympic medal. However, since at the time the Olympic hockey tournament also doubled as that year's Ice Hockey World Championships, their results would be recorded for that competition, in which they finished fourth. In 1972, Brundage banned Austrian skier Karl Schranz from the Sapporo Winter Olympics for commercial activities, calling him "a walking billboard."
Eastern bloc countries were known for skirting the edge of the rules by having state-sponsored "full-time amateurs." Their Olympic athletes were given everything they needed to live and train, but were not technically paid to do it, and all the money came from the government. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full-time basis. This put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. Near the end of the 1960s, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) felt their amateur players could no longer be competitive against the Soviet team's full-time athletes and the other constantly improving European teams. They pushed for the ability to use professional players, but met opposition from the IIHF and IOC; Brundage was opposed to the idea of amateurs and professionals competing together. At the IIHF Congress in 1969, the organization decided to allow Canada to use nine non-NHL professional hockey players at the 1970 World Championships in Montreal and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The decision was reversed in January 1970 after Brundage said that ice hockey's status as an Olympic sport would be in jeopardy if the change was made. In response, Canada withdrew from international ice hockey competition and officials stated that they would not return until "open competition" was instituted. Günther Sabetzki became president of the IIHF in 1975, after Brundage had left the post of IOC president, and helped to resolve the dispute with the CAHA. In 1976, the IIHF agreed to allow "open competition" between all players in the World Championships. However, NHL players were still not allowed to play in the Olympics because of the IOC's amateur-only policy.
As IOC president, Brundage's views on amateurism came increasingly to be seen as outdated in the modern world, as the rules were tested by athletes who saw everyone making money but themselves. In 1962, against Brundage's opposition, the IOC amended the rules to allow sports federations to offer athletes "broken time" payments, compensating them for time missed from work, but only if they had dependents in need. In 1972, Brundage called for the elimination of the Winter Olympics after 1976, finding them hopelessly polluted by rampant commercialism, especially in alpine skiing. In his final speech to the IOC in Munich in 1972, Brundage maintained his position on amateurism: "There are only two kinds of competitors. Those free and independent individuals who are interested in sports for sport's sake, and those in sports for financial reasons. Olympic glory is for amateurs."
### National participation controversies
#### Germany
No German team was allowed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London or the Winter Games in St. Moritz. Brundage was anxious to reintegrate Germany into the Olympic movement once the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, through Brundage's lifetime) was formed in 1949. Soon after the state's formation, its National Olympic Committee approached the IOC, seeking recognition, but there was still much animus towards Germany. Just prior to the IOC session in Vienna in 1951 (Brundage was still vice president), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) also formed an NOC and requested recognition. This created controversy, as the Federal Republic and its NOC claimed to represent both West and East Germany, but did not control the latter. Despite lengthy discussions, no resolution was reached in 1951, and the matter was put over until February 1952, when a negotiating session was scheduled for Copenhagen. Although the East Germans came to Copenhagen, they refused to attend the session, which was eventually cancelled by Edström after the IOC officials and West Germans waited for hours in vain. The German team which competed in Helsinki that summer was entirely West German (with Saarland, then a French protectorate, competing as an independent Saar team).
In 1954, the East Germans resumed their attempts at recognition. The following year, after Brundage received assurances that the East German NOC was not government-run, the IOC voted to recognize it, but required that both East and West Germany (as well as the Saar) compete as part of a single German team in 1956. East Germany sent only 37 athletes to the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, and they lived and trained separately from their West German counterparts. For the Summer Olympics at Rome in 1960, under continuing IOC insistence that the two states send a single team, East Germany contributed 141 of the 321 athletes; competitors from both states lived in the same area of the Olympic Village. At the Opening Ceremony at Rome, Italian President Giovanni Gronchi marveled, much to Brundage's delight, that the IOC had obtained the German reunification which politicians had been unable to secure; Brundage responded, "But in sport, we do such things." Brundage saw the German participation as symbolic of the potential for the Olympic Games to overcome divisions to unite.
Despite the construction of the Berlin Wall beginning in 1961, which increased tensions between East and West, Brundage was successful in securing a joint German team for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Nevertheless, the East Germans, supported by IOC members from Warsaw Pact nations, aspired to have their own team. They made a major breakthrough when the IAAF (led by the Marquess of Exeter, the former Lord Burghley) recognized a separate East German team beginning with the 1966 European Athletics Championships. The East Germans did their best to get Brundage's support, and, at the IOC session at Mexico City in 1968, they were granted full membership, with their own team under their own flag, which they displayed on West German soil four years later at the Opening Ceremony at Munich. Brundage, while finally supporting full membership for East Germany, considered the matter a defeat for Olympic ideals.
#### Soviet Union
Although Tsarist Russia had sent athletes to the Olympic Games, after the Soviet Union was formed, it declined to participate, considering the Olympics bourgeois. As early as 1923, the IOC attempted to lure the Soviets back into the fold; Brundage visited the USSR in 1934. He was impressed by the progress which had been made there since a visit he had made in 1912 after competing in Stockholm. Despite his anti-communism, Brundage wanted the Soviets to join the Olympic movement. According to Guttmann, "When Brundage had to choose between his hostility to communism and his commitment to the ideal of Olympic universality, he chose the latter. He wanted the Russians [sic] in the Olympics, communists or not."
During World War II, Brundage wrote to other IOC members that he had no objection to Soviet involvement in international sports, with representation on the IOC, if the USSR joined the international sports federations (ISFs). The IOC required that an NOC be independent of the government of the territory which it represents; there were concerns a Soviet NOC would not be. This was a problem not unique to communist states; a number of Latin American countries were starting to bring the local NOCs into the political structure, with an official naming the NOC chair—who might even be the country's political leader. This mixture of sports and politics worried Brundage.
Beginning in 1946, the Soviets began to join international federations; in 1951 their NOC was recognized by the IOC, and they began Olympic competition the following year. As few Soviet sports officials were internationally known, the IOC had little alternative than to accept the nominees of the USSR's government if they wished to have Soviet IOC members. The Soviet members were believers in sport, and completely loyal to their nation and to communist ideals. They quickly became the leaders of the IOC members from behind the Iron Curtain, who voted in accord with the Soviet members. Brundage visited the USSR at Soviet invitation (though at his own expense) in 1954. He deemed the nation's physical education program as "creating the greatest army of athletes the world has ever seen," warning (as he would often through the 1950s) that Americans were by comparison soft and unfit. Brundage found his view, often expressed in the press, that physical education and competitive sports made for better citizens, especially in the event of war, more enthusiastically embraced in the Soviet Union than in the United States. According to David Maraniss in his account of the 1960 Rome Games, Brundage's admiration for the Soviet Union's sports programs "in some ways mirrored his response two decades earlier to his encounters with Nazi Germany".
On his return, he related in an article for The Saturday Evening Post that he had confronted Soviet officials with information from defectors stating that the USSR was running year-round training camps and giving athletes material inducements for success. He also repeated the Soviet response, which questioned the defectors' integrity: "These men are deserters, traitors. Would you attach any truth to their statements had they been Americans and had turned against your country?" Since Brundage did not comment on the response, there was a storm of controversy in the press, which accused Brundage of being a Soviet dupe.
Despite the evident conflicts between amateurism and the Soviet system in which athletes received salaries and property at state expense, allowing them to train full-time, Brundage took no action against the USSR or Warsaw Pact nations with similar systems; when challenged on this point, he argued that Western nations did similar things, citing athletic scholarships as an example. The Soviet system remained in place.
#### China and Taiwan
The Republic of China, which then governed the mainland, had joined the Olympic movement in 1924, when the China National Amateur Athletic Federation was recognized by the IOC as the nation's NOC. China participated in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, as well as in Berlin four years later and the first post-war Olympics at London in 1948. When the communists were successful in the Chinese Civil War and established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, most NOC members fled the mainland for the island of Taiwan. This left China with two rival NOCs, one on the mainland and one on Taiwan, each claiming to represent the whole of China.
Matters came to a head in 1952, when the mainland NOC (the All-China Athletic Federation), considering itself a continuation of the pre-1949 committee, wrote to the IOC stating that it desired to participate in the Helsinki Olympics to be held that year. As the Taiwanese also proposed to send a team, this conflicted with IOC rules stating that only one committee could represent a country, and both Chinese groups were unwilling to negotiate with the other, or to send a joint team. After considerable deliberation, the IOC decided that if either committee was recognized by the ISF for a sport, the committee could send athletes to participate in events in that discipline. In protest, Taiwan withdrew from the Games; the PRC sent a team to Helsinki, though it arrived ten days after the start of the Games. Brundage, president-elect when the decision was made to allow PRC athletes to compete, argued against the decision to allow mainland participation before its NOC was recognized, but he was overruled by his colleagues.
In 1954, the Brundage-headed IOC, in a narrow vote, recognized both committees, thus allowing both states to participate at Melbourne. Only the PRC's committee initially accepted, but when the Taiwanese NOC changed its mind and decided to send a team to the Games, the mainlanders withdrew in protest. Brundage took the position that despite similar concerns about state sponsorship as with the USSR, once the PRC's committee was recognized and reported to the IOC that all eligibility rules were observed, the international committee had to accept that unless it had evidence to the contrary. He was frustrated by the continuing controversy, considering the squabble a distraction from the goal of advancing the Olympic movement.
When continuing efforts to exclude the Taiwanese failed, in 1958 the mainlanders withdrew from the IOC. The following year, the IOC ruled the Taiwanese could not compete under the name Republic of China Olympic Committee, but would have to compete under some other name which did not imply they governed sports in China. Brundage and Exeter both advocated for the ruling, which they compared to having an Italian NOC represent only Sicily. The press interpreted the ruling to mean that Nationalist China had been expelled from the Olympic movement, and for the next year, the anti-communist Brundage found himself under attack in the press as a communist sympathizer. Although United States State Department officials attempted to persuade them to stand on principle, Taiwanese officials decided to participate in the Rome Games, hoping to secure China's first medal, and believing their NOC's continued presence helped keep mainland China out of the Games. Taiwanese athletes competed under the designation Formosa (an alternate name for Taiwan), and caused a sensation by briefly displaying a sign reading "Under Protest" at the Opening Ceremony; when Yang Chuan-Kwang took the silver medal in the decathlon, he was not allowed to display the Nationalist Chinese flag at the medals ceremony.
Brundage, through his tenure, slowly came around to the position advocated by Iron Curtain IOC members, that the important thing was to recognize the mainland, with Taiwan of less importance. Although the mainland Chinese were invited by the Munich Olympic organizers to send an observer delegation to Munich (they declined due to the Taiwanese presence), it was not until 1975, after Brundage's departure as president, that the PRC applied to rejoin the Olympic movement. The PRC again participated at the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid and then the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; the island NOC competed as the Republic of China in 1968 and 1972; when refused permission to compete under that name in 1976, after Brundage's death, it boycotted the 1976 and 1980 games, returning in 1984 as Chinese Taipei.
#### South Africa and Rhodesia
In the late 1950s, protest against South Africa's apartheid regime reached the stage of seeking to exclude the nation from international sport. In 1956, government rules requiring separate events for whites and non-whites in South Africa were issued; non-whites received poorer facilities. Brundage initially opposed taking any action. The run-up to the 1960 Rome Olympics had seen tumult in South Africa, including the Sharpeville massacre and a crackdown on the African National Congress. Activists attempted to persuade Brundage that South Africa should be excluded from the Games. Brundage initially took the word of South African sport leaders that all citizens were able to compete for a place on the Olympic team, and that non-white South Africans simply were not good enough.
The drive towards a boycott was fueled by the large number of African nations which became independent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To prevent the new nations from overwhelming the ISFs, Brundage proposed that the federations adopt weighted voting systems to allow earlier members to wield disproportionate influence, which some did. By 1962, with the suspension of South Africa from FIFA (the association football governing body), Brundage had come around to the position that South Africa's racist policies were inconsistent with the ideals of the Olympic movement. At the 1963 IOC session in Baden-Baden (moved there from Nairobi when Kenyan officials refused to issue visas to South African representatives), the IOC voted to suspend South Africa from the Olympics unless its NOC and government adopted non-discrimination policies regarding Olympic selection. This did not come to pass, and South Africa did not participate in 1964. In 1968, Brundage and the IOC invited a South African team (supposedly to be multiracial) to the Mexico City Games, but under a threatened boycott and with evidence of minimal South African compliance, withdrew it.
In 1971, the IOC, at its Amsterdam session, voted to strip the South African NOC of recognition. Although Brundage had hoped to keep South Africa within the Olympic movement, he believed that those who sought its expulsion had made the stronger case. South Africa did not return to the Olympics until the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, after the end of its apartheid government.
A parallel problem was that of Rhodesia, the British colony which had unilaterally declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. Rhodesia had a white minority government. In May 1968, the United Nations Security Council condemned its government and asked nations not to honor its passports, and the Mexican government, set to host the Olympics later that year, complied with the ban. The IOC initially believed that sports facilities in the breakaway colony were not segregated, despite its government's policies. The proposed 16-member Olympic team included two black athletes. Because of this, Brundage supported Rhodesian participation at Mexico City, but he was overruled by the IOC; according to the head of the Rhodesian Olympic Committee, Douglas Downing, "His voice cries in a wilderness of spite." For Munich in 1972, the IOC decided to allow the Rhodesians to compete as British subjects, which by international law they were. African nations again threatened to boycott if the Rhodesians were allowed to participate, and, at its Munich session in 1972 just before the Games, the IOC narrowly voted to exclude the Rhodesians. Brundage was livid at the decision, believing that the IOC had yielded to blackmail. In 1974, after Brundage left office, the IOC found evidence of segregated facilities in Rhodesia, and it subsequently withdrew recognition from its NOC. Rhodesia returned to the Olympics in 1980 as recognized independent Zimbabwe.
### Olympic administration; challenges to leadership
Unpaid as IOC president, even for his expenses, Brundage sometimes spent \$50,000 per year to finance his role. In 1960, the IOC had almost no funds. Brundage and the IOC had considered the potential of television revenue as early as the Melbourne Games of 1956, but had been slow to address the issue, with the result that television rights for the 1960 Games were in the hands of the Rome organizing committee; the IOC received only 5% of the \$60,000 rights fee. Accounts submitted by the Rome organizers showed they lost money on the Olympics; the IOC would have received a portion of the profits, and had no money to offer the sports federations who wanted a percentage of the proceeds. In future years, the sale of television rights became a major source of revenue for the IOC, rising to \$10 million by the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and \$1.2 billion, long after Brundage's death, at Athens in 2004. Brundage was concerned about the increasing revenue, warning IOC members in 1967, "The moment we handle money, even if we only distribute it, there will be trouble ..."
NOC representatives had met with Brundage and the IOC executive board from time to time, but many NOC representatives felt that Brundage was taking no action in response to concerns expressed by the NOC attendees. In the early 1960s, many NOCs, led by Italian IOC member Giulio Onesti, sought to bypass Brundage and the IOC by forming a Permanent General Assembly of National Olympic Committees (PGA-NOC), which Brundage strongly opposed and the IOC refused to recognize. The PGA-NOC from 1965 demanded a share of television revenue; it also desired that the ISFs, not the IOC, set policy on amateurism.
Brundage had been initially elected in 1952 for an eight-year term; he was re-elected unanimously in 1960 for an additional four years. Despite talk that he would be opposed by Exeter, Brundage's 1952 rival nominated him for the new term. Brundage was re-elected in 1964 by an announced unanimous vote, though Guttmann records that Brundage actually only narrowly turned back a challenge by Exeter. As Brundage's term as president neared its end in 1968, some IOC members, who saw him as hidebound, or just too old at 81 to effectively lead the organization, sought his ouster. Nevertheless, he was easily re-elected at the IOC session in Mexico City that year, though he pledged not to seek another four-year term, but to retire in 1972. Ireland's Lord Killanin was elected first vice-president. Killanin, seen (correctly) as Brundage's likely successor, was more sympathetic to the concerns of the NOCs, and attended PGA-NOC meetings. Brundage did not recognize the PGA-NOC, but did establish joint IOC-NOC committees to address NOC concerns. Although the PGA-NOC did not gain Olympic recognition, it remained a significant outside organization through Brundage's presidency, and according to Guttmann, "Brundage won a less than total victory and Onesti suffered a far from complete defeat. The I.O.C. had become far more attractive to the national Olympic committees and to their interests, and that is what Onesti called for in the first place."
With Brundage in Chicago or at his California home, day to day IOC operations were overseen at "Mon Repos", the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, by Otto Meyer, the IOC's chancellor. Brundage came to consider Meyer too impetuous, and dismissed him in 1964, abolishing the office. Eventually, Brundage promoted Monique Berlioux to be IOC director in the last years of his tenure, and apparently found her services satisfactory. Mon Repos, the former home of the founder of the Modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, proved too cramped for the IOC, which had to share space with de Coubertin's widow, who lived to be 101. In 1968, the IOC moved to new quarters at Lausanne's Château de Vidy.
### Political demonstration at Mexico City
The year 1968 had seen turmoil in the United States, including hundreds of riots, both before and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and continuing after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Prior to the Olympics in Mexico City in October 1968, some African Americans, led by activist Harry Edwards, had urged a boycott of the Games, but found little enthusiasm among athletes, reluctant to waste years of effort. The atmosphere was made more tense by unrest in Mexico City before the Games, which left dozens dead.
There were racial tensions between black US athletes and their white counterparts; in one incident, African Americans blocked whites from the track. One black runner, Tommie Smith, told writers on October 15, "I don't want Brundage presenting me any medals". The following day, Smith won the 200 meters, and fellow African-American John Carlos took the bronze medal. The two men, after receiving their medals from IAAF president Lord Exeter, and as "The Star-Spangled Banner" played, raised black-gloved fists, heads down, in salute of black power. Brundage deemed it to be a domestic political statement unfit for the apolitical, international forum the Olympic Games were intended to be. In response to their actions, he ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the US team and banned from the Olympic Village. When the US Olympic Committee refused, Brundage threatened to ban the entire US track team. This threat led to the expulsion of the two athletes from the Games. Other demonstrations by African-Americans also took place: the three African Americans who took the medals in the 400 meters race, led by gold medalist Lee Evans, wore black berets on the podium but took them off before the anthem while African-American boxer George Foreman, triumphant in the heavyweight division, waved a small American flag around the boxing ring and bowed to the crowd with fellow American boxers. Brundage's comment about the Smith-Carlos incident was "Warped mentalities and cracked personalities seem to be everywhere and impossible to eliminate." The USOC's official report omits the iconic photograph of Smith and Carlos with their fists raised; the local organizing committee's official film showed footage of the ceremony. Brundage, who termed the incident "the nasty demonstration against the American flag by negroes", objected in vain to its inclusion.
### Munich 1972
At the same IOC session in August 1972 in Munich at which the Rhodesians were excluded, the IOC elected Killanin as Brundage's successor, to take office after the Games. Brundage cast a blank ballot in the vote which selected the Irishman, considering him an intellectual lightweight without the force of character needed to hold the Olympic movement together.
Brundage hoped that the Munich Games would take the sting out of his defeat over the Rhodesian issue. Munich was one of his favorite cities (in 1975, the Brundageplatz there would be named after him), and the heitere Spiele ('cheerful Games') were designed to efface memories of 1936 and Berlin in the eyes of the world. They initially seemed to be doing so, as athletic feats, like those of gymnast Olga Korbut and swimmer Mark Spitz captivated viewers. In the early morning of September 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists from the organization Black September entered the Olympic Village and took 11 Israelis hostage, demanding freedom for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli custody. Brundage, once informed, rushed to the Olympic Village, where he conferred with German and Bavarian state officials through the day, playing what Guttmann describes as a modest role in the discussions. German officials moved the hostages and their captors to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where German police and troops tried a rescue late that evening. The attempt was bungled; the nine remaining hostages (two had been murdered earlier) and three of their captors were killed.
Even before the ill-fated rescue attempt, IOC officials began conferring. Killanin and other officials were in Kiel for the yacht racing; they hurried back to Munich. Just before 4 pm, Brundage called off the remainder of the day's events, and announced a memorial service honoring those who had already died for the following morning. Many Olympic leaders were critical of Brundage for his participation in the discussions with the government, feeling that this should have been left for the authorities and the local organizing committee, but all supported the memorial service, which was held the following day in the Olympic Stadium. There, before the audience in the stadium and the millions watching on television, Brundage offered what Guttmann called "the credo of his life":
> Every civilized person recoils in horror at the barbarous criminal intrusion of terrorists into the peaceful Olympic precincts. We mourn our Israeli friends, victims of this brutal assault. The Olympic flag and the flags of all the world fly at half mast. Sadly, in this imperfect world, the greater and more important the Olympic Games become, the more they are open to commercial, political and now criminal pressure. The Games of the 20th Olympiad have been subjected to two savage attacks. We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail. We have only the strength of a great ideal. I am sure the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill we have in the Olympic movement. The Games must go on and we must continue our efforts to keep them clear, pure and honest and try to extend sportsmanship of the athletic field to other areas. We declare today a day of mourning and will continue all the events one day later than scheduled.
The crowd in the stadium responded to Brundage's statement with loud applause; according to Stars & Stripes, "Brundage's statement that 'the games must go on' took much of the heavy gloom away which has permeated Munich since early Tuesday [September 5, the day of the attack]."
Killanin, after his own retirement as IOC president, stated that "I believe Brundage was right to continue and that his stubborn determination saved the Olympic Movement one more time" but that Brundage's mention of the Rhodesian question was, while not inappropriate, at least better left for another time. According to future IOC vice president Dick Pound, the insertion of the Rhodesian issue into the speech "was universally condemned, and Brundage left office under a cloud of criticism that effectively undermined a lifetime of well-intentioned work in the Olympic movement". Brundage said after the Games, "I was severely criticized for that ... but the fact is that I did it on purpose. I had to. There was a principle involved and altho [sic] it was a terrible thing that some lives were lost, principles are just as important as human lives." Brundage subsequently issued a statement that he did not mean to imply the decision to exclude the Rhodesians, which he stated was "purely a matter of sport", was comparable to the murder of the Israelis. According to Alfred Senn in his history of the Olympics, the decision to continue the games "sat poorly with many observers"; sportswriter Red Smith of The New York Times was among the critics:
> This time surely, some thought, they would cover the sandbox and put the blocks aside. But, no. "The Games must go on," said Avery Brundage, and 80,000 listeners burst into applause. The occasion was yesterday's memorial service for eleven members of Israel's Olympic delegation murdered by Palestinian terrorists. It was more like a pep rally.
## Retirement and death
Brundage retired as IOC president after the 1972 Summer Games. There were differing accounts of Brundage's state of mind during his retirement. IOC director Berlioux stated that Brundage would come to the Château de Vidy and take telephone calls or look at correspondence while he waited for Lord Killanin to turn to him for help. According to Berlioux, Brundage sometimes called her from Geneva and asked her to go there. The two would spend hours wandering the streets, saying little. Brundage's longtime factotum, Frederick Ruegsegger, described a different, tranquil, Brundage, whom he compared to an abdicated Japanese emperor.
His wife of nearly half a century, Elizabeth, to whom he had not been faithful, died in 1971. Brundage had once jested that his ambition was to wed a German princess. In June 1973, this came to pass when he married Princess Mariann Charlotte Katharina Stefanie von Reuss (1936–2003), daughter of Heinrich XXXVII, Prince of Reuss-Köstritz. Von Reuss had worked as an interpreter during the Munich Games; she stated that she had met Brundage in 1955, when she was 19. When Brundage was asked by reporters about the 48-year difference in their ages, Brundage responded that he was young for his age and she mature for hers, and instead of 85 years to 37, it should be thought of as more like 55 to 46. Ruegsegger refused to be best man and stated after Brundage's death that the couple had dissipated much of Brundage's fortune through free spending, though Guttmann notes that some of those purchases were of real estate, which could be deemed investments.
In January 1974, Brundage underwent surgery for cataracts and glaucoma. The necessary arrangements had initially been made by Brundage's protégé, Spanish IOC member Juan Antonio Samaranch, who would become IOC president in 1980. At the last moment, Brundage cancelled the plans, choosing to have the surgery in Munich, near the home he had purchased in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics. After a month and a half, Brundage was discharged from the hospital, though whether the surgery had improved his vision was disputed, with Mariann Brundage stating that it did and Ruegsegger stating the contrary. Now frail, at age 87 he went with his wife on a final tour of the Far East. Despite the efforts of Olympic officials on his behalf, he was not given an invitation to mainland China, source of much of the art he loved. In April 1975, Brundage entered the hospital at Garmisch-Partenkirchen with flu and a severe cough. He died there on May 8, 1975, of heart failure, and was buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.
In his will, Brundage provided for his wife and for Ruegsegger, as well as making several charitable bequests. He left his papers and memorabilia to the University of Illinois; he had already given it \$350,000 to fund scholarships for students interested in competing in sports who do not receive an athletic scholarship.
## Personal life and business career
### Relationships
In 1927, at the age of 40, Brundage married Elizabeth Dunlap, who was the daughter of a Chicago banker. She was a trained soprano, which was a talent that she exhibited to people who visited the Brundage home. She had a strong interest in classical music. This interest might not have been fully shared by her husband, who said that a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre "started at 7 o'clock, at 10:00 pm I looked at my watch and it registered exactly 8 o'clock". Elizabeth died at age 81 in 1971.
In 1973, Brundage married Princess Mariann Charlotte Katharina Stefanie von Reuss. He had no children with either of his two wives. However, during his first marriage Brundage fathered two sons out of wedlock with his Finnish mistress, Lilian Dresden. His affair with Dresden was one of many. The children were born in 1951 and 1952, at precisely the time that Brundage was being considered for the presidency of the IOC. Though he privately acknowledged paternity, Brundage took great pains to conceal the existence of these children; he was concerned that the truth about his extra-marital relationships might damage his chances of election. He requested that his name be kept off the birth certificates. Brundage visited his two sons periodically in the 1950s, visits that tailed off to telephone calls in the 1960s and nothing in his final years. He did establish a trust fund for the boys' education and start in life, but after his death, unnamed in his will, they sued and won a small settlement of \$62,500 each out of his \$19 million estate.
### Construction executive
After its founding in 1915, a large source of the Avery Brundage Company's business was wartime government contracts. Brundage, who applied for a commission in the Army Ordnance Corps but was rejected, in the postwar period became a member of the Construction Division Association, composed of men who had built facilities for the military, and later became its president from 1926 to 1928.
In the 1920s, Brundage and his company became very active in constructing high-rise apartment buildings in Chicago. He used rapid construction methods, allowing clients to begin realizing income from their investments quickly—the Sheridan-Brompton Apartments (1924) overlooking Lincoln Park, were built in five months, allowing the start of \$40,000 in monthly rental income, offsetting a monthly mortgage payment of \$15,000. Often, the Brundage Company was involved in the ownership of the apartments: 3800 Sheridan Road (1927), a 17-story building costing \$3,180,000, was owned by a company which had as its president and treasurer Chester Brundage, Avery's younger brother. It was constructed in eight months, through the Chicago winter, using an onsite concrete mixing plant. This temporary structure also provided office space for the construction. Another source of income for Brundage and his company was hotel construction, for which he was often paid in part with stock in the new facility. One president of an engineering firm specializing in large structures called Brundage's methods on the Shoreham Hotel "progressive, snappy, [and] up-to-date" and "straightforward and honest".
In 1923, Brundage constructed a massive assembly plant on Torrence Avenue on Chicago's South Side for the Ford Motor Company. At \$4 million in cost and bringing 16 acres (6.5 ha) under one roof, it was the largest industrial plant built by Brundage. Constructed in ten months, the new facility helped meet the national demand for Model T cars in the 1920s, and in 1950, produced 154,244 vehicles. A plant for Hubbard & Co. was erected in 125 days despite an unusually harsh Chicago winter. Despite later statements from Brundage that he avoided public works due to corruption, he built the 23rd Street viaduct as part of the South Shore Development project; Brundage's viaduct extended Chicago's shoreline into Lake Michigan at a cost of two million dollars. By 1925, the Avery Brundage Company was acclaimed for speed, innovation and quality, and had a payroll of \$50,000 a week.
Although the start of the Depression in 1929 was a major setback for Brundage, he rebuilt his wealth by investments in real estate, also accepting interests in buildings he had constructed in lieu of payments the owners were unable to make. He later stated that "you didn't have to be a wizard" in order to "buy stocks and bonds in depressed corporations for a few cents on the dollar—and then wait. I was just a little lucky." According to historian and archivist Maynard Brichford, Brundage "emerged from the difficult depression years with a substantial annual income, a good reputation, and excellent investments". His foresight resulted in a fortune which by 1960 was estimated at \$25,000,000.
A major Brundage investment was Chicago's La Salle Hotel, which had been built in 1908. Located in the heart of The Loop and the city's financial district, Brundage first leased it in 1940, later purchasing it. When the hotel was seriously damaged by fire in 1946, Brundage spent about \$2.5 million remodeling and modernizing it. As Brundage made a home there during his time as IOC president, the hotel became famous in international sports as his residence. He sold the hotel in 1970, but later reclaimed it when the purchaser failed to make required payments.
### Art collector and benefactor
Brundage's interest in Asian art stemmed from a visit he made to an exhibition of Chinese art at the Royal Academy in London in early 1936, after the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Brundage stated of the experience, "We [his first wife Elizabeth and himself] spent a week at the exhibition and I came away so enamored with Chinese art that I've been broke ever since." He did not begin active collecting until after the Brundages' two-week visit to Japan in April 1939, where they visited Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara and Nikko. They followed up Japan with visits to Shanghai and Hong Kong, but due to the war between Japan and China, were unable to explore further on Avery Brundage's only visit to mainland China—this disappointment bothered him his whole life.
On his return to the United States after the June 1939 IOC session in London, Brundage systematically set about becoming a major collector of Asian art. The unsettled conditions caused wealthy Chinese to sell family heirlooms, and prices were depressed, making it an opportune moment to collect. He bought many books on Asian art, stating in an interview that a "major library is an indispensable tool". After the US entered World War II, stock owned by Japanese dealers in the United States was impounded; Brundage was able to purchase the best items. Dealers found him willing to spend money, but knowledgeable and a hard bargainer. Brundage rarely was fooled by forgeries, and was undeterred by the few he did buy, noting that in Asian art, fake pieces were often a thousand years old. In his 1948 article on Brundage for Life, Butterfield noted that "his collection is regarded as one of the largest and most important in private hands in this country".
Brundage engaged the French scholar René-Yvon Lefebvre d'Argencé, then teaching at the University of California, as full-time curator of his collection and advisor on acquisitions. The two men made a deal—no piece would be purchased unless both men agreed. They built a collection of jade which ranged from the neolithic period to the modern era; and hundreds of Chinese, Japanese and Korean bronzes, mostly Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The painter whom Brundage admired the most was Huizong, 12th-century Chinese emperor of the Song dynasty; the collector never was able to obtain any of his work. Brundage several times bought pieces smuggled out of their lands of origin to restore them there. When Brundage sold a piece, it was most likely because he no longer favored it artistically, rather than to realize a profit. In 1954, a financial statement prepared for Brundage listed the value of his collection as more than \$1 million. In 1960, Robert Shaplen, in his article on Brundage for The New Yorker, noted that Brundage, during his travels as IOC president, always found time to visit art dealers, and stated that the collection was valued at \$15 million.
By the late 1950s, Brundage was increasingly concerned about what to do with his collection. His homes in Chicago and California were so overwhelmed with art that priceless artifacts were kept in shoeboxes under beds. In 1959, Brundage agreed to give part of his collection to the city of San Francisco. The following year city voters passed a bond issue of \$2,725,000 to house the donation. The result was the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, which opened in 1966 in Golden Gate Park, initially sharing space with the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum before moving to its own facility near the Civic Center in 2003. Brundage made another major donation in 1969 (despite a fire which destroyed many pieces at his California home, "La Piñeta" near Santa Barbara in 1964), and left the remainder of his collection to the museum in his will. Today, the museum has 7,700 pieces from Brundage among the 17,000-plus objects which make up its collection.
Brundage connected the world of art and that of amateur sports in his own mind. In a speech to the IOC session in Tokyo in 1958, he discussed netsuke, used at one time by Japanese men to anchor items, typically inro wallets, hung from kimono belts. Brundage owned several thousand netsuke, and held two in his hands as he spoke. He told the members that a netsuke was at one time carefully carved by the man who wore it, building "something of himself into the design", and although a class of professional netsuke makers arose later, whose work might have been more technically adept, it was "ordinarily cold, stiff, and without imagination. ... Missing was the element of the amateur carver, which causes these netsuke to be esteemed so much higher by the collector than the commercial product carved for money." Brundage later commented about his speech, "Here was the difference between amateurism and professionalism spelled out in a netsuke."
## Legacy
In May 2012, The Independent dubbed him "The ancient IOC emperor, anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser bent on insulating the Games from the meddlesome tentacles of the real world." The Orange County Register stated that Brundage's "racism and anti-Semitism are well documented", and the New York Daily News averred that Brundage "admired Hitler and infamously replaced two Jewish sprinters on the 4-by-100 relay team because it could have further embarrassed Hitler if they won". David Miller described him as "despotic" in The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC (2012).
In 2021, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum removed a bust of Brundage that had sat prominently in its foyer for five decades, which had been dedicated to him for his donating his sizable collection. Museum director Jay Xu wrote that Brundage “espoused racist and anti-Semitic views.”
Writing for The Nation, Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff criticized him for his controversial policies and statements, concluding, "Brundage’s 'contributions' to Olympic history need to be understood. But he has long forfeited a place of honor and respect".
Brundage, the only American and only non-European to serve as IOC president, left a mixed legacy. Guttmann notes that in the 1960s, Brundage may have been better-known as an art collector than for his sports activities, and "there are those who maintain that he will be remembered not for his career in sports but for his jades and bronzes." Andrew Leigh, a Member of the Australian House of Representatives, criticizes Brundage for expelling the two athletes in Mexico City, calling him "a man who'd had no difficulty with the Nazi salute being used in the 1936 Olympics". Dick Pound believes Brundage to have been one of the IOC's great presidents, along with de Coubertin and Samaranch, but concedes that by the end of his term, Brundage was out of touch with the world of sports. While Pound credits Brundage with holding the Olympic movement together in a period when it was beset by many challenges, he notes that this might not be fully appreciated by those who remember Brundage for the final years of his term, and for Munich.
Alfred Senn suggests that Brundage remained too long as IOC president:
> After Munich, Brundage departed the Games, which had grown beyond his comprehension and his capacity to adjust. The NOCs and the [ISFs] were revolting against his arbitrary administration; violence had invaded his holy mountain and was giving every indication of returning; despite all his efforts to reach out to the world through athletics, he stood accused of bigotry and both race and class prejudice, not to mention the denunciations proclaiming him politically naive ... Few mourned his departure from the Olympic scene, and the International Olympic Committee turned to his successor, who, its members hoped, would be better suited to handle the new items on its agenda.
|
5,452,357 |
Eduard Fraenkel
| 1,154,376,064 |
German classical scholar (1888–1970)
|
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"1970 suicides",
"Academic staff of the University of Freiburg",
"Academic staff of the University of Göttingen",
"Academic staff of the University of Kiel",
"British classical philologists",
"Corpus Christi Professors of Latin",
"Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford",
"German classical philologists",
"German emigrants to England",
"German male writers",
"Humboldt University of Berlin alumni",
"Jewish German writers",
"Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom",
"Suicides in Oxford",
"University of Göttingen alumni",
"Writers from Berlin"
] |
Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel FBA ((1888-03-17)17 March 1888 – (1970-02-05)5 February 1970) was a German classical scholar who served as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1953. Born to a family of assimilated Jews in the German Empire, he studied Classics at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen. In 1934, antisemitic legislation introduced by the Nazi Party forced him to seek refuge in the United Kingdom where he eventually settled at Corpus Christi College.
Fraenkel established his academic reputation with the publication of a monograph on the Roman comedian Plautus, Plautinisches im Plautus ('Plautine Elements in Plautus', 1922). The book was developed from his doctoral thesis and changed the study of Roman comedy by asserting that Plautus was a more innovative playwright than previously thought. In 1950, he published a three-volume commentary on the Agamemnon by the Greek playwright Aeschylus which has been described by the classicist H. J. Rose as "perhaps the most erudite that any Greek play has ever had". He wrote a monograph, entitled Horace (1957), on the Roman poet Horace after retiring from his teaching post.
Biographers place particular emphasis on the impact of Fraenkel's teaching at Oxford, where he led a weekly seminar on classical texts. A feature of European academic life that had been rare at the university, these classes influenced the intellectual development of many Oxford undergraduates. His seminars on the Agamemnon were the subject of a poem by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. In 2018, following a petition by the student body, Corpus Christi decided to re-name a room in the college that had been named after Fraenkel in reaction to allegations of sexual harassment against him. Summarising Fraenkel's contributions to the discipline, the Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones described him as "one of the most learned classical scholars of his time" due to his acquaintance with a diverse range of disciplines within the Classics.
## Early life and education
Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel was born on 17 March 1888 in Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His family were Jewish but had assimilated and prospered economically. His mother Edith was the sister of Hugo Heimann, a Social Democratic politician and publisher of law books who helped Fraenkel develop an interest in the history of law. His father, Julius Fraenkel, worked as a wine merchant. Through him, Fraenkel was related to two philologists: his cousin Ernst Fraenkel was a scholar of the Baltic languages, and his father's uncle Ludwig Traube was one of the founders of the discipline of palaeography. When he was around ten, Fraenkel contracted osteomyelitis. The life-threatening illness left his right arm deformed.
From 1897 to 1906 Fraenkel attended the Askanisches Gymnasium [de] in the borough of Berlin-Tempelhof, where his teachers included the mythographer Otto Gruppe, whom Fraenkel credited in his doctoral thesis with inspiring his interest in classical antiquity. In spite of these leanings, he enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law, as antisemitic hiring conventions would have made it difficult to obtain a teaching position at a German university. During his time as a student of law, Fraenkel began to be mentored by the Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose lectures he attended in his own time. After a visit to Rome in late 1907, Fraenkel formally changed his degree subject to classical philology. In 1909, he transferred to the University of Göttingen to continue his studies under the Latinist Friedrich Leo and the linguist Jacob Wackernagel. In 1912, he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Roman comedy entitled De media et nova comoedia quaestiones selectae ('Selected Studies on Middle and New Comedy').
## Career in Germany
Fraenkel's first academic appointment was in 1913 as an assistant at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, a lexicographical project based in Munich. After briefly working at a secondary school in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he began the process of habilitation in 1917 at the University of Berlin and began to teach there as an untenured lecturer, known in German as Privatdozent. In 1918, Fraenkel married Ruth von Velsen, a classical scholar who gave up her career to support him. They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom was the mathematician Edward Fraenkel. Having been promoted to an extraordinary professorship at Berlin in 1920, Fraenkel was appointed a full professor of Latin at the University of Kiel in 1923. His appointment followed the publication of a monograph on the Roman comedian Plautus which established his reputation in the discipline.
In 1928, Fraenkel accepted an offer to return to the University of Göttingen. His three-year stint there was a difficult period for him and his family; his son Albert died from an illness and Fraenkel was subject to antisemitism in the context of what the classicist Gordon Williams described as "personal quarrels" within the faculty. In 1931, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Freiburg, where he experienced a fulfilling personal life and hoped to settle permanently. However, his tenure at the university was interrupted in early 1933, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had come to power. In April of that year, a Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, prohibiting Jews from teaching at universities. Having lost his post, he remained in Germany for the remainder of the year and faced increasing discrimination.
## Exile in England
Fraenkel spent part of 1934 at Christ Church College of the University of Oxford, having been invited by the faculty of Classics and the classical scholar Gilbert Murray. In August, after the faculty at Oxford could not extend Fraenkel's stay, he was elected to a Bevan Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Helped by his friend—the Latinist Donald Robertson—Fraenkel and his family moved to Cambridge later that year.
When it proved difficult to sustain his family with his position at Trinity, Fraenkel began planning a lecture tour through the United States for late 1934, by which he hoped to find a permanent appointment. Before he could embark on the tour, the Corpus Christi Professorship of Latin at Oxford became vacant after the resignation of Albert Curtis Clark. Fraenkel applied for the chair with the support of many British classicists including the future Vice-Chancellor of the university Maurice Bowra, and A. E. Housman, the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. His candidacy was opposed by novelist and M.P. John Buchan who protested in The Sunday Times the "importation of foreigners" to British universities. Fraenkel was elected to the chair in 1935 and cancelled his commitments in the United States.
Upon his election, Fraenkel became a fellow of Corpus Christi College and moved into a house on Museum Road. In addition to lectures on Latin poetry, including on the works of Catullus, Horace, and Vergil, he also taught seminars on both Greek and Latin texts. Attended by students and academics, these seminars were a feature of European academic life that was rare at Oxford before Fraenkel's arrival. During term time, participants met once a week to conduct "a slow and detailed examination", reading and discussing the text at a pace of under 10 lines per hour. Individual students were asked to prepare on specific passages with Fraenkel commenting on their work and challenging them on points of interest including interpretation, textual criticism, and the history of classical scholarship. From autumn term 1936 to spring term 1942, the seminars covered the Agamemnon by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, on which Fraenkel published a three-volume commentary in 1950.
## Retirement and death
In 1953, Fraenkel retired from his academic appointment, but kept giving lectures and leading seminars. In around 1955, he met the Italian cleric Giuseppe De Luca [it], who directed a scholarly publishing house, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura [it]. Working with de Luca, he re-edited Leo's Kleine Schriften and two studies by the German philologist Wilhelm Schulze [de], Orthographica and Graeca Latina. In 1957, Fraenkel published a monograph on Horace. While Fraenkel remained active long into his retirement, Ruth's health began to deteriorate. She died on 5 February 1970; Fraenkel killed himself on the same day, four hours later.
## Contributions to classical scholarship
### Plautus
In the late 19th century, study of the comedies of Plautus was dominated by the idea that his plays were largely derived from examples of Greek middle comedy, most of which have been lost. Scholars treated Plautus's plays chiefly as a means of retrieving information about this lost Greek genre. Fraenkel's mentor, Friedrich Leo, took this line of argumentation in his 1885 study Plautinische Forschungen. In 1922, Fraenkel published a monograph entitled Plautinisches im Plautus ('Plautine Elements in Plautus'), founded upon his doctoral work conducted under Leo. The book was designed to analyse Plautus as an author in his own right and not as a source for middle comedy.
Fraenkel's approach to this problem was to isolate recurring details and forms of expression as a basis for the reconstruction of Plautus's original contribution to the genre of comedy. Using this method, he identified four elements which he deemed characteristic of Plautus: the opening formulae of direct speeches; his characters' habit to intimate their own transformation into someone else; his use of Greek mythology; and his treatment of inanimate objects as animate. Building on these observations, he went on to delineate the main areas of the genre where he considered Plautus to have innovated. These include the length of direct speech, the character of the "crafty slave", and his creative use of sung interventions (cantica). He concluded that, contrary to the predominant academic consensus, Plautus was an "innovative creator in his own right". In 1960, an Italian translation of Plautinisches im Plautus was published, which gave Fraenkel the opportunity to add a list of amendments to his original argument.
Writing for Classical Philology, the classicist Henry Prescott considered Fraenkel's book the most important contribution to the study of Roman comedy since Leo's Plautinische Forschungen. Although Prescott described its conclusions as an "important swing of the pendulum" towards recognising Plautus's originality, he regarded Fraenkel's identification of typical elements as the more successful part of the argument. In 2007, the Hellenist C. W. Marshall stated that the book was "insightful, thought-provoking and at times very frustrating", adding that Fraenkel's judgement of previous scholarship had "stood the test of time". The classicist Lisa Maurice wrote that, even though some of its arguments had been rejected, Plautinisches im Plautus was "the catalyst for modern Plautine scholarship".
### Aeschylus
Fraenkel had begun to show interest in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus as early as 1925 but focused on Latin literature in the years leading up to his application for the Corpus Professorship. He developed his thoughts on the play in his weekly seminars held from 1936 to 1942. From March 1942, a group of friends around the Latinist R. A. B. Mynors and the historian John Beazley began to support Fraenkel in the process of preparing his notes for publication. Parts of his work, including a translation of the Greek text, had to be translated from German into English. In 1943, Fraenkel submitted a manuscript for a commentary on the play to Oxford University Press. Although Kenneth Sisam, the responsible delegate of the press, took a favourable view of it, the publication process was held up due to concerns about the manuscript's exceptional length, leading Sisam to describe the commentary as "a Teutonic monster". The book was published in 1950 in three volumes.
In his commentary, Fraenkel followed the method of the variorum, whereby substantial space is given to the views of previous scholars beside those of the primary author. In a remarkable piece of detection, he showed that many of the most penetrating notes in the highly influential early edition of the text (1663) by Thomas Stanley owed much to the anonymous generosity of John Pearson. In Fraenkel's view, the presentation of existing approaches, though laborious, was necessary to separate the text from the scholarly views that had accrued over time. Contrary to common practice, his book did not deal with overarching themes in a separate introduction but covered them in the commentary whenever they appeared. His individual notes thus became sources of information on many areas of scholarship beyond the play itself. Fraenkel also showed an interest in commentary technique, coining new critical terms, such as guttatim for Aeschylus's use of cumulative apposition.
For the classicist H. J. Rose, Fraenkel's commentary was "perhaps the most erudite that any Greek play has ever had". Rose commended the book for espousing the practice of a thematic introduction and for its balance in presenting the Fraenkel's own views next to those of his predecessors. Rose concluded his review for The Journal of Hellenic Studies by saying "with confidence that the [commentary's] value is permanent". The reviewer C. Arthur Lynch called the edition a "source of joy and amazement", highlighting Fraenkel's willingness to admit irremediable difficulties in the text. The Hellenist J. C. Kamerbeek disapproved of the commentary's harsh criticism of other classicists but added that it was "a monument of 20th-century philology" ("un monument de la philologie du XXe siècle").
### Horace
Fraenkel began publishing articles on Horace in the early 1930s. His Horace (1957) advanced an overall interpretation of the poet's work based on the analysis of individual texts. The book's preliminary chapter reconstructed the poet's life using the testimony of the Roman biographer Suetonius. The remainder of the book contained complete interpretations of selected poems with an emphasis of Horace's earliest and latest works.
In Fraenkel's chapters on the Epodes and Satires, he argued that Horace had undergone a process of artistic maturation away from the imitation of his literary models (the Greek lyric poet Archilochus and the Roman satirist Gaius Lucilius) towards his own conception of the respective genres. A large central section dealt with the first three books of Odes. He showed how Horace developed the patterns of Greek lyric into an increasingly abstract form of literature. Concerning the poems addressing the emperor Augustus, Fraenkel argued that they did not contradict the political stances of Horace's youth, contradicting the views of the historian Ronald Syme. In The Roman Revolution, Syme depicted these poems as a form of propaganda for the Augustan regime.
The book took an innovative view on Horace's Epistles, a collection of letters in dactylic metre; although most previous scholars had regarded them as either faithful reproductions of real-world letters or entirely fictitious, Fraenkel argued that they were of a "double nature", combining real and unreal elements. He interpreted the Carmen Saeculare, a celebratory hymn commissioned for the Secular Games of 17 BC, as a poem independent from its festival context, which marked Horace's return to lyric poetry. Thus, this usually neglected text became an important component in Fraenkel's reading of Horace's work. The final chapter covered the fourth book of Odes, focusing again on the poet's advancement over his models.
Although Horace received largely positive reviews, Fraenkel was disappointed with the reactions from the scholarly community. Having described it as "highly original", Williams wrote that "[the book's] faults too are clear. Fraenkel was inclined to assume a simple relationship between the poet's poetry and his life". He added that Fraenkel's view of Augustus as a "benevolent and reluctant monarch" produced a flawed picture of the relationship of poetry and politics. Reviewing the work for The Classical Journal, the Latinist Janice Benario stated that the book "might be considered an encyclopedia of Horace, so vast is the material covered", deeming it "indispensable to the teacher of Horace at any level". The Latinist Carl Becker [de] viewed the book as "one of the great accomplishments of Latin philology" ("eine der großen Leistungen der lateinischen Philologie")", but highlighted Fraenkel's concept of poetic maturation in the Epodes and Satires as its weakest argument.
## Reception
Summarising Fraenkel's contributions to the discipline, the Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones described him as "one of the most learned classical scholars of his time" due to his acquaintance with a diverse range of disciplines within the Classics. According to Williams, Fraenkel's most influential writings were his monograph on Plautus and his many journal articles because they "express the true excitement of intellectual discovery". Williams also highlighted Fraenkel's ability to discern "unexpected connections between unconnected facts". The historian of classical scholarship Christopher Stray views Fraenkel as "one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century."
In 2007, the Hellenist Stephanie West published a book chapter exploring the impact of Fraenkel's arrival at Oxford. Drawing on her own recollection and that of other Oxford classicists, she described his seminars as his most important contribution to classical teaching as the meetings were attended mainly by undergraduates with whom Fraenkel shared his broad knowledge in several areas of the Classics. Acknowledging the influence of these seminars on the intellectual development of many Oxford undergraduates, the Hellenist Martin West wrote: "Here we saw German philology in action; we felt it reverberate through us as he patrolled the room behind our chairs [...] We knew, and could not doubt, that this was what Classical Scholarship was and that it was for us to learn to carry it on." The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who had been a student at Oxford, composed a poem entitled 'The Agamemnon Class, 1939' which juxtaposed Fraenkel's seminar with the outbreak of the Second World War.
In her 2000 book A Memoir: People and Places, the philosopher Mary Warnock wrote that in 1943 Fraenkel had touched her and another female student, Imogen Wrong, against their will during 'individual evening tutorials' in his office. According to Warnock, Fraenkel apologised for his actions after being confronted in a letter by Jocelyn Toynbee, then a Classics tutor at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1990, the Latinist Nicholas Horsfall stated that "[Fraenkel] did enjoy, warmly, but most decorously, female beauty". His statement was criticised by the ancient historian Mary Beard, who described it as a probable "defence mechanism" against further dissemination of knowledge of Fraenkel's behaviour.
After Fraenkel's death, Corpus Christi converted part of his office into a commemorative conference room entitled Fraenkel Room. On 26 November 2017, the college's undergraduate student body passed a resolution calling for the room to be renamed and for a portrait of Fraenkel to be removed in response to the allegations of sexual harassment made against him. Their effort was publicised by the student newspaper Cherwell, drawing attention from national publications including the Daily Mail and The Times. On 6 February 2018, a town hall meeting took place between students and the college's classical scholars; the meeting arrived at a proposal to rename the Fraenkel Room to Refugee Scholars Room honouring a number of academics who had taken refuge at Corpus Christi. On 7 March, the college's governing body accepted the proposal. The room was fitted with a commemorative plaque commemorating the historians Paul Vinogradoff and Michael Rostovtzeff, the classicist Rudolf Pfeiffer, and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin alongside Fraenkel.
## Honours
Fraenkel was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1941. He received the Kenyon Medal for classical studies in 1965 and held honorary doctorates from the Free University of Berlin and the universities of Urbino, St. Andrews, Florence, Fribourg, and Oxford.
## Publications
The following books were authored by Fraenkel:
|
14,958 |
Immune system
| 1,173,793,549 |
Biological system protecting an organism against disease
|
[
"Immune system"
] |
The immune system is a network of biological processes that protects an organism from diseases. It detects and responds to a wide variety of pathogens, from viruses to parasitic worms, as well as cancer cells and objects such as wood splinters, distinguishing them from the organism's own healthy tissue. Many species have two major subsystems of the immune system. The innate immune system provides a preconfigured response to broad groups of situations and stimuli. The adaptive immune system provides a tailored response to each stimulus by learning to recognize molecules it has previously encountered. Both use molecules and cells to perform their functions.
Nearly all organisms have some kind of immune system. Bacteria have a rudimentary immune system in the form of enzymes that protect against viral infections. Other basic immune mechanisms evolved in ancient plants and animals and remain in their modern descendants. These mechanisms include phagocytosis, antimicrobial peptides called defensins, and the complement system. Jawed vertebrates, including humans, have even more sophisticated defense mechanisms, including the ability to adapt to recognize pathogens more efficiently. Adaptive (or acquired) immunity creates an immunological memory leading to an enhanced response to subsequent encounters with that same pathogen. This process of acquired immunity is the basis of vaccination.
Dysfunction of the immune system can cause autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases and cancer. Immunodeficiency occurs when the immune system is less active than normal, resulting in recurring and life-threatening infections. In humans, immunodeficiency can be the result of a genetic disease such as severe combined immunodeficiency, acquired conditions such as HIV/AIDS, or the use of immunosuppressive medication. Autoimmunity results from a hyperactive immune system attacking normal tissues as if they were foreign organisms. Common autoimmune diseases include Hashimoto's thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes mellitus type 1, and systemic lupus erythematosus. Immunology covers the study of all aspects of the immune system.
## Layered defense
The immune system protects its host from infection with layered defenses of increasing specificity. Physical barriers prevent pathogens such as bacteria and viruses from entering the organism. If a pathogen breaches these barriers, the innate immune system provides an immediate, but non-specific response. Innate immune systems are found in all animals. If pathogens successfully evade the innate response, vertebrates possess a second layer of protection, the adaptive immune system, which is activated by the innate response. Here, the immune system adapts its response during an infection to improve its recognition of the pathogen. This improved response is then retained after the pathogen has been eliminated, in the form of an immunological memory, and allows the adaptive immune system to mount faster and stronger attacks each time this pathogen is encountered.
Both innate and adaptive immunity depend on the ability of the immune system to distinguish between self and non-self molecules. In immunology, self molecules are components of an organism's body that can be distinguished from foreign substances by the immune system. Conversely, non-self molecules are those recognized as foreign molecules. One class of non-self molecules are called antigens (originally named for being antibody generators) and are defined as substances that bind to specific immune receptors and elicit an immune response.
## Surface barriers
Several barriers protect organisms from infection, including mechanical, chemical, and biological barriers. The waxy cuticle of most leaves, the exoskeleton of insects, the shells and membranes of externally deposited eggs, and skin are examples of mechanical barriers that are the first line of defense against infection. Organisms cannot be completely sealed from their environments, so systems act to protect body openings such as the lungs, intestines, and the genitourinary tract. In the lungs, coughing and sneezing mechanically eject pathogens and other irritants from the respiratory tract. The flushing action of tears and urine also mechanically expels pathogens, while mucus secreted by the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract serves to trap and entangle microorganisms.
Chemical barriers also protect against infection. The skin and respiratory tract secrete antimicrobial peptides such as the β-defensins. Enzymes such as lysozyme and phospholipase A2 in saliva, tears, and breast milk are also antibacterials. Vaginal secretions serve as a chemical barrier following menarche, when they become slightly acidic, while semen contains defensins and zinc to kill pathogens. In the stomach, gastric acid serves as a chemical defense against ingested pathogens.
Within the genitourinary and gastrointestinal tracts, commensal flora serve as biological barriers by competing with pathogenic bacteria for food and space and, in some cases, changing the conditions in their environment, such as pH or available iron. As a result, the probability that pathogens will reach sufficient numbers to cause illness is reduced.
## Innate immune system
Microorganisms or toxins that successfully enter an organism encounter the cells and mechanisms of the innate immune system. The innate response is usually triggered when microbes are identified by pattern recognition receptors, which recognize components that are conserved among broad groups of microorganisms, or when damaged, injured or stressed cells send out alarm signals, many of which are recognized by the same receptors as those that recognize pathogens. Innate immune defenses are non-specific, meaning these systems respond to pathogens in a generic way. This system does not confer long-lasting immunity against a pathogen. The innate immune system is the dominant system of host defense in most organisms, and the only one in plants.
### Immune sensing
Cells in the innate immune system use pattern recognition receptors to recognize molecular structures that are produced by pathogens. They are proteins expressed, mainly, by cells of the innate immune system, such as dendritic cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils and epithelial cells to identify two classes of molecules: pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), which are associated with microbial pathogens, and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), which are associated with components of host's cells that are released during cell damage or cell death.
Recognition of extracellular or endosomal PAMPs is mediated by transmembrane proteins known as toll-like receptors (TLRs). TLRs share a typical structural motif, the leucine rich repeats (LRRs), which give them a curved shape. Toll-like receptors were first discovered in Drosophila and trigger the synthesis and secretion of cytokines and activation of other host defense programs that are necessary for both innate or adaptive immune responses. Ten toll-like receptors have been described in humans.
Cells in the innate immune system have pattern recognition receptors, which detect infection or cell damage, inside. Three major classes of these "cytosolic" receptors are NOD–like receptors, RIG (retinoic acid-inducible gene)-like receptors, and cytosolic DNA sensors.
### Innate immune cells
Some leukocytes (white blood cells) act like independent, single-celled organisms and are the second arm of the innate immune system. The innate leukocytes include the "professional" phagocytes (macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells). These cells identify and eliminate pathogens, either by attacking larger pathogens through contact or by engulfing and then killing microorganisms. The other cells involved in the innate response include innate lymphoid cells, mast cells, eosinophils, basophils, and natural killer cells.
Phagocytosis is an important feature of cellular innate immunity performed by cells called phagocytes that engulf pathogens or particles. Phagocytes generally patrol the body searching for pathogens, but can be called to specific locations by cytokines. Once a pathogen has been engulfed by a phagocyte, it becomes trapped in an intracellular vesicle called a phagosome, which subsequently fuses with another vesicle called a lysosome to form a phagolysosome. The pathogen is killed by the activity of digestive enzymes or following a respiratory burst that releases free radicals into the phagolysosome. Phagocytosis evolved as a means of acquiring nutrients, but this role was extended in phagocytes to include engulfment of pathogens as a defense mechanism. Phagocytosis probably represents the oldest form of host defense, as phagocytes have been identified in both vertebrate and invertebrate animals.
Neutrophils and macrophages are phagocytes that travel throughout the body in pursuit of invading pathogens. Neutrophils are normally found in the bloodstream and are the most abundant type of phagocyte, representing 50% to 60% of total circulating leukocytes. During the acute phase of inflammation, neutrophils migrate toward the site of inflammation in a process called chemotaxis, and are usually the first cells to arrive at the scene of infection. Macrophages are versatile cells that reside within tissues and produce an array of chemicals including enzymes, complement proteins, and cytokines, while they can also act as scavengers that rid the body of worn-out cells and other debris, and as antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that activate the adaptive immune system.
Dendritic cells are phagocytes in tissues that are in contact with the external environment; therefore, they are located mainly in the skin, nose, lungs, stomach, and intestines. They are named for their resemblance to neuronal dendrites, as both have many spine-like projections. Dendritic cells serve as a link between the bodily tissues and the innate and adaptive immune systems, as they present antigens to T cells, one of the key cell types of the adaptive immune system.
Granulocytes are leukocytes that have granules in their cytoplasm. In this category are neutrophils, mast cells, basophils, and eosinophils. Mast cells reside in connective tissues and mucous membranes, and regulate the inflammatory response. They are most often associated with allergy and anaphylaxis. Basophils and eosinophils are related to neutrophils. They secrete chemical mediators that are involved in defending against parasites and play a role in allergic reactions, such as asthma.
Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are a group of innate immune cells that are derived from common lymphoid progenitor and belong to the lymphoid lineage. These cells are defined by absence of antigen specific B or T cell receptor (TCR) because of the lack of recombination activating gene. ILCs do not express myeloid or dendritic cell markers.
Natural killer cells (NK cells) are lymphocytes and a component of the innate immune system which does not directly attack invading microbes. Rather, NK cells destroy compromised host cells, such as tumor cells or virus-infected cells, recognizing such cells by a condition known as "missing self." This term describes cells with low levels of a cell-surface marker called MHC I (major histocompatibility complex)—a situation that can arise in viral infections of host cells. Normal body cells are not recognized and attacked by NK cells because they express intact self MHC antigens. Those MHC antigens are recognized by killer cell immunoglobulin receptors which essentially put the brakes on NK cells.
### Inflammation
Inflammation is one of the first responses of the immune system to infection. The symptoms of inflammation are redness, swelling, heat, and pain, which are caused by increased blood flow into tissue. Inflammation is produced by eicosanoids and cytokines, which are released by injured or infected cells. Eicosanoids include prostaglandins that produce fever and the dilation of blood vessels associated with inflammation, and leukotrienes that attract certain white blood cells (leukocytes). Common cytokines include interleukins that are responsible for communication between white blood cells; chemokines that promote chemotaxis; and interferons that have anti-viral effects, such as shutting down protein synthesis in the host cell. Growth factors and cytotoxic factors may also be released. These cytokines and other chemicals recruit immune cells to the site of infection and promote healing of any damaged tissue following the removal of pathogens. The pattern-recognition receptors called inflammasomes are multiprotein complexes (consisting of an NLR, the adaptor protein ASC, and the effector molecule pro-caspase-1) that form in response to cytosolic PAMPs and DAMPs, whose function is to generate active forms of the inflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18.
### Humoral defenses
The complement system is a biochemical cascade that attacks the surfaces of foreign cells. It contains over 20 different proteins and is named for its ability to "complement" the killing of pathogens by antibodies. Complement is the major humoral component of the innate immune response. Many species have complement systems, including non-mammals like plants, fish, and some invertebrates. In humans, this response is activated by complement binding to antibodies that have attached to these microbes or the binding of complement proteins to carbohydrates on the surfaces of microbes. This recognition signal triggers a rapid killing response. The speed of the response is a result of signal amplification that occurs after sequential proteolytic activation of complement molecules, which are also proteases. After complement proteins initially bind to the microbe, they activate their protease activity, which in turn activates other complement proteases, and so on. This produces a catalytic cascade that amplifies the initial signal by controlled positive feedback. The cascade results in the production of peptides that attract immune cells, increase vascular permeability, and opsonize (coat) the surface of a pathogen, marking it for destruction. This deposition of complement can also kill cells directly by disrupting their plasma membrane.
## Adaptive immune system
The adaptive immune system evolved in early vertebrates and allows for a stronger immune response as well as immunological memory, where each pathogen is "remembered" by a signature antigen. The adaptive immune response is antigen-specific and requires the recognition of specific "non-self" antigens during a process called antigen presentation. Antigen specificity allows for the generation of responses that are tailored to specific pathogens or pathogen-infected cells. The ability to mount these tailored responses is maintained in the body by "memory cells". Should a pathogen infect the body more than once, these specific memory cells are used to quickly eliminate it.
### Recognition of antigen
The cells of the adaptive immune system are special types of leukocytes, called lymphocytes. B cells and T cells are the major types of lymphocytes and are derived from hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. B cells are involved in the humoral immune response, whereas T cells are involved in cell-mediated immune response. Killer T cells only recognize antigens coupled to Class I MHC molecules, while helper T cells and regulatory T cells only recognize antigens coupled to Class II MHC molecules. These two mechanisms of antigen presentation reflect the different roles of the two types of T cell. A third, minor subtype are the γδ T cells that recognize intact antigens that are not bound to MHC receptors. The double-positive T cells are exposed to a wide variety of self-antigens in the thymus, in which iodine is necessary for its thymus development and activity. In contrast, the B cell antigen-specific receptor is an antibody molecule on the B cell surface and recognizes native (unprocessed) antigen without any need for antigen processing. Such antigens may be large molecules found on the surfaces of pathogens, but can also be small haptens (such as penicillin) attached to carrier molecule. Each lineage of B cell expresses a different antibody, so the complete set of B cell antigen receptors represent all the antibodies that the body can manufacture. When B or T cells encounter their related antigens they multiply and many "clones" of the cells are produced that target the same antigen. This is called clonal selection.
### Antigen presentation to T lymphocytes
Both B cells and T cells carry receptor molecules that recognize specific targets. T cells recognize a "non-self" target, such as a pathogen, only after antigens (small fragments of the pathogen) have been processed and presented in combination with a "self" receptor called a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule.
### Cell mediated immunity
There are two major subtypes of T cells: the killer T cell and the helper T cell. In addition there are regulatory T cells which have a role in modulating immune response.
#### Killer T cells
Killer T cells are a sub-group of T cells that kill cells that are infected with viruses (and other pathogens), or are otherwise damaged or dysfunctional. As with B cells, each type of T cell recognizes a different antigen. Killer T cells are activated when their T-cell receptor binds to this specific antigen in a complex with the MHC Class I receptor of another cell. Recognition of this MHC:antigen complex is aided by a co-receptor on the T cell, called CD8. The T cell then travels throughout the body in search of cells where the MHC I receptors bear this antigen. When an activated T cell contacts such cells, it releases cytotoxins, such as perforin, which form pores in the target cell's plasma membrane, allowing ions, water and toxins to enter. The entry of another toxin called granulysin (a protease) induces the target cell to undergo apoptosis. T cell killing of host cells is particularly important in preventing the replication of viruses. T cell activation is tightly controlled and generally requires a very strong MHC/antigen activation signal, or additional activation signals provided by "helper" T cells (see below).
#### Helper T cells
Helper T cells regulate both the innate and adaptive immune responses and help determine which immune responses the body makes to a particular pathogen. These cells have no cytotoxic activity and do not kill infected cells or clear pathogens directly. They instead control the immune response by directing other cells to perform these tasks.
Helper T cells express T cell receptors that recognize antigen bound to Class II MHC molecules. The MHC:antigen complex is also recognized by the helper cell's CD4 co-receptor, which recruits molecules inside the T cell (such as Lck) that are responsible for the T cell's activation. Helper T cells have a weaker association with the MHC:antigen complex than observed for killer T cells, meaning many receptors (around 200–300) on the helper T cell must be bound by an MHC:antigen to activate the helper cell, while killer T cells can be activated by engagement of a single MHC:antigen molecule. Helper T cell activation also requires longer duration of engagement with an antigen-presenting cell. The activation of a resting helper T cell causes it to release cytokines that influence the activity of many cell types. Cytokine signals produced by helper T cells enhance the microbicidal function of macrophages and the activity of killer T cells. In addition, helper T cell activation causes an upregulation of molecules expressed on the T cell's surface, such as CD40 ligand (also called CD154), which provide extra stimulatory signals typically required to activate antibody-producing B cells.
#### Gamma delta T cells
Gamma delta T cells (γδ T cells) possess an alternative T-cell receptor (TCR) as opposed to CD4+ and CD8+ (αβ) T cells and share the characteristics of helper T cells, cytotoxic T cells and NK cells. The conditions that produce responses from γδ T cells are not fully understood. Like other 'unconventional' T cell subsets bearing invariant TCRs, such as CD1d-restricted natural killer T cells, γδ T cells straddle the border between innate and adaptive immunity. On one hand, γδ T cells are a component of adaptive immunity as they rearrange TCR genes to produce receptor diversity and can also develop a memory phenotype. On the other hand, the various subsets are also part of the innate immune system, as restricted TCR or NK receptors may be used as pattern recognition receptors. For example, large numbers of human Vγ9/Vδ2 T cells respond within hours to common molecules produced by microbes, and highly restricted Vδ1+ T cells in epithelia respond to stressed epithelial cells.
### Humoral immune response
A B cell identifies pathogens when antibodies on its surface bind to a specific foreign antigen. This antigen/antibody complex is taken up by the B cell and processed by proteolysis into peptides. The B cell then displays these antigenic peptides on its surface MHC class II molecules. This combination of MHC and antigen attracts a matching helper T cell, which releases lymphokines and activates the B cell. As the activated B cell then begins to divide, its offspring (plasma cells) secrete millions of copies of the antibody that recognizes this antigen. These antibodies circulate in blood plasma and lymph, bind to pathogens expressing the antigen and mark them for destruction by complement activation or for uptake and destruction by phagocytes. Antibodies can also neutralize challenges directly, by binding to bacterial toxins or by interfering with the receptors that viruses and bacteria use to infect cells.
Newborn infants have no prior exposure to microbes and are particularly vulnerable to infection. Several layers of passive protection are provided by the mother. During pregnancy, a particular type of antibody, called IgG, is transported from mother to baby directly through the placenta, so human babies have high levels of antibodies even at birth, with the same range of antigen specificities as their mother. Breast milk or colostrum also contains antibodies that are transferred to the gut of the infant and protect against bacterial infections until the newborn can synthesize its own antibodies. This is passive immunity because the fetus does not actually make any memory cells or antibodies—it only borrows them. This passive immunity is usually short-term, lasting from a few days up to several months. In medicine, protective passive immunity can also be transferred artificially from one individual to another.
### Immunological memory
When B cells and T cells are activated and begin to replicate, some of their offspring become long-lived memory cells. Throughout the lifetime of an animal, these memory cells remember each specific pathogen encountered and can mount a strong response if the pathogen is detected again. This is "adaptive" because it occurs during the lifetime of an individual as an adaptation to infection with that pathogen and prepares the immune system for future challenges. Immunological memory can be in the form of either passive short-term memory or active long-term memory.
## Physiological regulation
The immune system is involved in many aspects of physiological regulation in the body. The immune system interacts intimately with other systems, such as the endocrine and the nervous systems. The immune system also plays a crucial role in embryogenesis (development of the embryo), as well as in tissue repair and regeneration.
### Hormones
Hormones can act as immunomodulators, altering the sensitivity of the immune system. For example, female sex hormones are known immunostimulators of both adaptive and innate immune responses. Some autoimmune diseases such as lupus erythematosus strike women preferentially, and their onset often coincides with puberty. By contrast, male sex hormones such as testosterone seem to be immunosuppressive. Other hormones appear to regulate the immune system as well, most notably prolactin, growth hormone and vitamin D.
### Vitamin D
Although cellular studies indicate that vitamin D has receptors and probable functions in the immune system, there is no clinical evidence to prove that vitamin D deficiency increases the risk for immune diseases or vitamin D supplementation lowers immune disease risk. A 2011 United States Institute of Medicine report stated that "outcomes related to ... immune functioning and autoimmune disorders, and infections ... could not be linked reliably with calcium or vitamin D intake and were often conflicting."
### Sleep and rest
The immune system is affected by sleep and rest, and sleep deprivation is detrimental to immune function. Complex feedback loops involving cytokines, such as interleukin-1 and tumor necrosis factor-α produced in response to infection, appear to also play a role in the regulation of non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Thus the immune response to infection may result in changes to the sleep cycle, including an increase in slow-wave sleep relative to REM sleep.
In people with sleep deprivation, active immunizations may have a diminished effect and may result in lower antibody production, and a lower immune response, than would be noted in a well-rested individual. Additionally, proteins such as NFIL3, which have been shown to be closely intertwined with both T-cell differentiation and circadian rhythms, can be affected through the disturbance of natural light and dark cycles through instances of sleep deprivation. These disruptions can lead to an increase in chronic conditions such as heart disease, chronic pain, and asthma.
In addition to the negative consequences of sleep deprivation, sleep and the intertwined circadian system have been shown to have strong regulatory effects on immunological functions affecting both innate and adaptive immunity. First, during the early slow-wave-sleep stage, a sudden drop in blood levels of cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine causes increased blood levels of the hormones leptin, pituitary growth hormone, and prolactin. These signals induce a pro-inflammatory state through the production of the pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin-1, interleukin-12, TNF-alpha and IFN-gamma. These cytokines then stimulate immune functions such as immune cell activation, proliferation, and differentiation. During this time of a slowly evolving adaptive immune response, there is a peak in undifferentiated or less differentiated cells, like naïve and central memory T cells. In addition to these effects, the milieu of hormones produced at this time (leptin, pituitary growth hormone, and prolactin) supports the interactions between APCs and T-cells, a shift of the T<sub>h</sub>1/T<sub>h</sub>2 cytokine balance towards one that supports T<sub>h</sub>1, an increase in overall T<sub>h</sub> cell proliferation, and naïve T cell migration to lymph nodes. This is also thought to support the formation of long-lasting immune memory through the initiation of Th1 immune responses.
During wake periods, differentiated effector cells, such as cytotoxic natural killer cells and cytotoxic T lymphocytes, peak to elicit an effective response against any intruding pathogens. Anti-inflammatory molecules, such as cortisol and catecholamines, also peak during awake active times. Inflammation would cause serious cognitive and physical impairments if it were to occur during wake times, and inflammation may occur during sleep times due to the presence of melatonin. Inflammation causes a great deal of oxidative stress and the presence of melatonin during sleep times could actively counteract free radical production during this time.
### Physical exercise
Physical exercise has a positive effect on the immune system and depending on the frequency and intensity, the pathogenic effects of diseases caused by bacteria and viruses are moderated. Immediately after intense exercise there is a transient immunodepression, where the number of circulating lymphocytes decreases and antibody production declines. This may give rise to a window of opportunity for infection and reactivation of latent virus infections, but the evidence is inconclusive.
#### Changes at the cellular level
During exercise there is an increase in circulating white blood cells of all types. This is caused by the frictional force of blood flowing on the endothelial cell surface and catecholamines affecting β-adrenergic receptors (βARs). The number of neutrophils in the blood increases and remains raised for up to six hours and immature forms are present. Although the increase in neutrophils ("neutrophilia") is similar to that seen during bacterial infections, after exercise the cell population returns to normal by around 24 hours.
The number of circulating lymphocytes (mainly natural killer cells) decreases during intense exercise but returns to normal after 4 to 6 hours. Although up to 2% of the cells die most migrate from the blood to the tissues, mainly the intestines and lungs, where pathogens are most likely to be encountered.
Some monocytes leave the blood circulation and migrate to the muscles where they differentiate and become macrophages. These cells differentiate into two types: proliferative macrophages, which are responsible for increasing the number of stem cells and restorative macrophages, which are involved their maturing to muscle cells.
### Repair and regeneration
The immune system, particularly the innate component, plays a decisive role in tissue repair after an insult. Key actors include macrophages and neutrophils, but other cellular actors, including γδ T cells, innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), and regulatory T cells (Tregs), are also important. The plasticity of immune cells and the balance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory signals are crucial aspects of efficient tissue repair. Immune components and pathways are involved in regeneration as well, for example in amphibians such as in axolotl limb regeneration. According to one hypothesis, organisms that can regenerate (e.g., axolotls) could be less immunocompetent than organisms that cannot regenerate.
## Disorders of human immunity
Failures of host defense occur and fall into three broad categories: immunodeficiencies, autoimmunity, and hypersensitivities.
### Immunodeficiencies
Immunodeficiencies occur when one or more of the components of the immune system are inactive. The ability of the immune system to respond to pathogens is diminished in both the young and the elderly, with immune responses beginning to decline at around 50 years of age due to immunosenescence. In developed countries, obesity, alcoholism, and drug use are common causes of poor immune function, while malnutrition is the most common cause of immunodeficiency in developing countries. Diets lacking sufficient protein are associated with impaired cell-mediated immunity, complement activity, phagocyte function, IgA antibody concentrations, and cytokine production. Additionally, the loss of the thymus at an early age through genetic mutation or surgical removal results in severe immunodeficiency and a high susceptibility to infection. Immunodeficiencies can also be inherited or 'acquired'. Severe combined immunodeficiency is a rare genetic disorder characterized by the disturbed development of functional T cells and B cells caused by numerous genetic mutations. Chronic granulomatous disease, where phagocytes have a reduced ability to destroy pathogens, is an example of an inherited, or congenital, immunodeficiency. AIDS and some types of cancer cause acquired immunodeficiency.
### Autoimmunity
Overactive immune responses form the other end of immune dysfunction, particularly the autoimmune diseases. Here, the immune system fails to properly distinguish between self and non-self, and attacks part of the body. Under normal circumstances, many T cells and antibodies react with "self" peptides. One of the functions of specialized cells (located in the thymus and bone marrow) is to present young lymphocytes with self antigens produced throughout the body and to eliminate those cells that recognize self-antigens, preventing autoimmunity. Common autoimmune diseases include Hashimoto's thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes mellitus type 1, and systemic lupus erythematosus.
### Hypersensitivity
Hypersensitivity is an immune response that damages the body's own tissues. It is divided into four classes (Type I – IV) based on the mechanisms involved and the time course of the hypersensitive reaction. Type I hypersensitivity is an immediate or anaphylactic reaction, often associated with allergy. Symptoms can range from mild discomfort to death. Type I hypersensitivity is mediated by IgE, which triggers degranulation of mast cells and basophils when cross-linked by antigen. Type II hypersensitivity occurs when antibodies bind to antigens on the individual's own cells, marking them for destruction. This is also called antibody-dependent (or cytotoxic) hypersensitivity, and is mediated by IgG and IgM antibodies. Immune complexes (aggregations of antigens, complement proteins, and IgG and IgM antibodies) deposited in various tissues trigger Type III hypersensitivity reactions. Type IV hypersensitivity (also known as cell-mediated or delayed type hypersensitivity) usually takes between two and three days to develop. Type IV reactions are involved in many autoimmune and infectious diseases, but may also involve contact dermatitis. These reactions are mediated by T cells, monocytes, and macrophages.
### Idiopathic inflammation
Inflammation is one of the first responses of the immune system to infection, but it can appear without known cause.
Inflammation is produced by eicosanoids and cytokines, which are released by injured or infected cells. Eicosanoids include prostaglandins that produce fever and the dilation of blood vessels associated with inflammation, and leukotrienes that attract certain white blood cells (leukocytes). Common cytokines include interleukins that are responsible for communication between white blood cells; chemokines that promote chemotaxis; and interferons that have anti-viral effects, such as shutting down protein synthesis in the host cell. Growth factors and cytotoxic factors may also be released. These cytokines and other chemicals recruit immune cells to the site of infection and promote healing of any damaged tissue following the removal of pathogens.
## Manipulation in medicine
The immune response can be manipulated to suppress unwanted responses resulting from autoimmunity, allergy, and transplant rejection, and to stimulate protective responses against pathogens that largely elude the immune system (see immunization) or cancer.
### Immunosuppression
Immunosuppressive drugs are used to control autoimmune disorders or inflammation when excessive tissue damage occurs, and to prevent rejection after an organ transplant.
Anti-inflammatory drugs are often used to control the effects of inflammation. Glucocorticoids are the most powerful of these drugs and can have many undesirable side effects, such as central obesity, hyperglycemia, and osteoporosis. Their use is tightly controlled. Lower doses of anti-inflammatory drugs are often used in conjunction with cytotoxic or immunosuppressive drugs such as methotrexate or azathioprine.
Cytotoxic drugs inhibit the immune response by killing dividing cells such as activated T cells. This killing is indiscriminate and other constantly dividing cells and their organs are affected, which causes toxic side effects. Immunosuppressive drugs such as cyclosporin prevent T cells from responding to signals correctly by inhibiting signal transduction pathways.
### Immunostimulation
Claims made by marketers of various products and alternative health providers, such as chiropractors, homeopaths, and acupuncturists to be able to stimulate or "boost" the immune system generally lack meaningful explanation and evidence of effectiveness.
### Vaccination
Long-term active memory is acquired following infection by activation of B and T cells. Active immunity can also be generated artificially, through vaccination. The principle behind vaccination (also called immunization) is to introduce an antigen from a pathogen to stimulate the immune system and develop specific immunity against that particular pathogen without causing disease associated with that organism. This deliberate induction of an immune response is successful because it exploits the natural specificity of the immune system, as well as its inducibility. With infectious disease remaining one of the leading causes of death in the human population, vaccination represents the most effective manipulation of the immune system mankind has developed.
Many vaccines are based on acellular components of micro-organisms, including harmless toxin components. Since many antigens derived from acellular vaccines do not strongly induce the adaptive response, most bacterial vaccines are provided with additional adjuvants that activate the antigen-presenting cells of the innate immune system and maximize immunogenicity.
### Tumor immunology
Another important role of the immune system is to identify and eliminate tumors. This is called immune surveillance. The transformed cells of tumors express antigens that are not found on normal cells. To the immune system, these antigens appear foreign, and their presence causes immune cells to attack the transformed tumor cells. The antigens expressed by tumors have several sources; some are derived from oncogenic viruses like human papillomavirus, which causes cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, mouth, and throat, while others are the organism's own proteins that occur at low levels in normal cells but reach high levels in tumor cells. One example is an enzyme called tyrosinase that, when expressed at high levels, transforms certain skin cells (for example, melanocytes) into tumors called melanomas. A third possible source of tumor antigens are proteins normally important for regulating cell growth and survival, that commonly mutate into cancer inducing molecules called oncogenes.
The main response of the immune system to tumors is to destroy the abnormal cells using killer T cells, sometimes with the assistance of helper T cells. Tumor antigens are presented on MHC class I molecules in a similar way to viral antigens. This allows killer T cells to recognize the tumor cell as abnormal. NK cells also kill tumorous cells in a similar way, especially if the tumor cells have fewer MHC class I molecules on their surface than normal; this is a common phenomenon with tumors. Sometimes antibodies are generated against tumor cells allowing for their destruction by the complement system.
Some tumors evade the immune system and go on to become cancers. Tumor cells often have a reduced number of MHC class I molecules on their surface, thus avoiding detection by killer T cells. Some tumor cells also release products that inhibit the immune response; for example by secreting the cytokine TGF-β, which suppresses the activity of macrophages and lymphocytes. In addition, immunological tolerance may develop against tumor antigens, so the immune system no longer attacks the tumor cells.
Paradoxically, macrophages can promote tumor growth when tumor cells send out cytokines that attract macrophages, which then generate cytokines and growth factors such as tumor-necrosis factor alpha that nurture tumor development or promote stem-cell-like plasticity. In addition, a combination of hypoxia in the tumor and a cytokine produced by macrophages induces tumor cells to decrease production of a protein that blocks metastasis and thereby assists spread of cancer cells. Anti-tumor M1 macrophages are recruited in early phases to tumor development but are progressively differentiated to M2 with pro-tumor effect, an immunosuppressor switch. The hypoxia reduces the cytokine production for the anti-tumor response and progressively macrophages acquire pro-tumor M2 functions driven by the tumor microenvironment, including IL-4 and IL-10. Cancer immunotherapy covers the medical ways to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer tumors.
### Predicting immunogenicity
Some drugs can cause a neutralizing immune response, meaning that the immune system produces neutralizing antibodies that counteract the action of the drugs, particularly if the drugs are administered repeatedly, or in larger doses. This limits the effectiveness of drugs based on larger peptides and proteins (which are typically larger than 6000 Da). In some cases, the drug itself is not immunogenic, but may be co-administered with an immunogenic compound, as is sometimes the case for Taxol. Computational methods have been developed to predict the immunogenicity of peptides and proteins, which are particularly useful in designing therapeutic antibodies, assessing likely virulence of mutations in viral coat particles, and validation of proposed peptide-based drug treatments. Early techniques relied mainly on the observation that hydrophilic amino acids are overrepresented in epitope regions than hydrophobic amino acids; however, more recent developments rely on machine learning techniques using databases of existing known epitopes, usually on well-studied virus proteins, as a training set. A publicly accessible database has been established for the cataloguing of epitopes from pathogens known to be recognizable by B cells. The emerging field of bioinformatics-based studies of immunogenicity is referred to as immunoinformatics. Immunoproteomics is the study of large sets of proteins (proteomics) involved in the immune response.
## Evolution and other mechanisms
### Evolution of the immune system
It is likely that a multicomponent, adaptive immune system arose with the first vertebrates, as invertebrates do not generate lymphocytes or an antibody-based humoral response. Many species, however, use mechanisms that appear to be precursors of these aspects of vertebrate immunity. Immune systems appear even in the structurally simplest forms of life, with bacteria using a unique defense mechanism, called the restriction modification system to protect themselves from viral pathogens, called bacteriophages. Prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) also possess acquired immunity, through a system that uses CRISPR sequences to retain fragments of the genomes of phage that they have come into contact with in the past, which allows them to block virus replication through a form of RNA interference. Prokaryotes also possess other defense mechanisms. Offensive elements of the immune systems are also present in unicellular eukaryotes, but studies of their roles in defense are few.
Pattern recognition receptors are proteins used by nearly all organisms to identify molecules associated with pathogens. Antimicrobial peptides called defensins are an evolutionarily conserved component of the innate immune response found in all animals and plants, and represent the main form of invertebrate systemic immunity. The complement system and phagocytic cells are also used by most forms of invertebrate life. Ribonucleases and the RNA interference pathway are conserved across all eukaryotes, and are thought to play a role in the immune response to viruses.
Unlike animals, plants lack phagocytic cells, but many plant immune responses involve systemic chemical signals that are sent through a plant. Individual plant cells respond to molecules associated with pathogens known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns or PAMPs. When a part of a plant becomes infected, the plant produces a localized hypersensitive response, whereby cells at the site of infection undergo rapid apoptosis to prevent the spread of the disease to other parts of the plant. Systemic acquired resistance is a type of defensive response used by plants that renders the entire plant resistant to a particular infectious agent. RNA silencing mechanisms are particularly important in this systemic response as they can block virus replication.
### Alternative adaptive immune system
Evolution of the adaptive immune system occurred in an ancestor of the jawed vertebrates. Many of the classical molecules of the adaptive immune system (for example, immunoglobulins and T-cell receptors) exist only in jawed vertebrates. A distinct lymphocyte-derived molecule has been discovered in primitive jawless vertebrates, such as the lamprey and hagfish. These animals possess a large array of molecules called Variable lymphocyte receptors (VLRs) that, like the antigen receptors of jawed vertebrates, are produced from only a small number (one or two) of genes. These molecules are believed to bind pathogenic antigens in a similar way to antibodies, and with the same degree of specificity.
### Manipulation by pathogens
The success of any pathogen depends on its ability to elude host immune responses. Therefore, pathogens evolved several methods that allow them to successfully infect a host, while evading detection or destruction by the immune system. Bacteria often overcome physical barriers by secreting enzymes that digest the barrier, for example, by using a type II secretion system. Alternatively, using a type III secretion system, they may insert a hollow tube into the host cell, providing a direct route for proteins to move from the pathogen to the host. These proteins are often used to shut down host defenses.
An evasion strategy used by several pathogens to avoid the innate immune system is to hide within the cells of their host (also called intracellular pathogenesis). Here, a pathogen spends most of its life-cycle inside host cells, where it is shielded from direct contact with immune cells, antibodies and complement. Some examples of intracellular pathogens include viruses, the food poisoning bacterium Salmonella and the eukaryotic parasites that cause malaria (Plasmodium spp.) and leishmaniasis (Leishmania spp.). Other bacteria, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, live inside a protective capsule that prevents lysis by complement. Many pathogens secrete compounds that diminish or misdirect the host's immune response. Some bacteria form biofilms to protect themselves from the cells and proteins of the immune system. Such biofilms are present in many successful infections, such as the chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia cenocepacia infections characteristic of cystic fibrosis. Other bacteria generate surface proteins that bind to antibodies, rendering them ineffective; examples include Streptococcus (protein G), Staphylococcus aureus (protein A), and Peptostreptococcus magnus (protein L).
The mechanisms used to evade the adaptive immune system are more complicated. The simplest approach is to rapidly change non-essential epitopes (amino acids and/or sugars) on the surface of the pathogen, while keeping essential epitopes concealed. This is called antigenic variation. An example is HIV, which mutates rapidly, so the proteins on its viral envelope that are essential for entry into its host target cell are constantly changing. These frequent changes in antigens may explain the failures of vaccines directed at this virus. The parasite Trypanosoma brucei uses a similar strategy, constantly switching one type of surface protein for another, allowing it to stay one step ahead of the antibody response. Masking antigens with host molecules is another common strategy for avoiding detection by the immune system. In HIV, the envelope that covers the virion is formed from the outermost membrane of the host cell; such "self-cloaked" viruses make it difficult for the immune system to identify them as "non-self" structures.
## History of immunology
Immunology is a science that examines the structure and function of the immune system. It originates from medicine and early studies on the causes of immunity to disease. The earliest known reference to immunity was during the plague of Athens in 430 BC. Thucydides noted that people who had recovered from a previous bout of the disease could nurse the sick without contracting the illness a second time. In the 18th century, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis experimented with scorpion venom and observed that certain dogs and mice were immune to this venom. In the 10th century, Persian physician al-Razi (also known as Rhazes) wrote the first recorded theory of acquired immunity, noting that a smallpox bout protected its survivors from future infections. Although he explained the immunity in terms of "excess moisture" being expelled from the blood—therefore preventing a second occurrence of the disease—this theory explained many observations about smallpox known during this time.
These and other observations of acquired immunity were later exploited by Louis Pasteur in his development of vaccination and his proposed germ theory of disease. Pasteur's theory was in direct opposition to contemporary theories of disease, such as the miasma theory. It was not until Robert Koch's 1891 proofs, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905, that microorganisms were confirmed as the cause of infectious disease. Viruses were confirmed as human pathogens in 1901, with the discovery of the yellow fever virus by Walter Reed.
Immunology made a great advance towards the end of the 19th century, through rapid developments in the study of humoral immunity and cellular immunity. Particularly important was the work of Paul Ehrlich, who proposed the side-chain theory to explain the specificity of the antigen-antibody reaction; his contributions to the understanding of humoral immunity were recognized by the award of a joint Nobel Prize in 1908, along with the founder of cellular immunology, Elie Metchnikoff. In 1974, Niels Kaj Jerne developed the immune network theory; he shared a Nobel Prize in 1984 with Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein for theories related to the immune system.
## See also
- Fc receptor
- Immunostimulator
- List of distinct cell types in the adult human body
- Neuroimmune system
- Original antigenic sin – when the immune system uses immunological memory upon encountering a slightly different pathogen
- Plant disease resistance
- Polyclonal response
- Tumor antigens
|
11,193,273 |
SMS Brandenburg
| 1,156,652,774 |
Battleship of the German Imperial Navy
|
[
"1891 ships",
"Brandenburg-class battleships",
"Ships built in Stettin",
"World War I battleships of Germany"
] |
SMS Brandenburg was the lead ship of the Brandenburg-class pre-dreadnought battleships, which included Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, Weissenburg, and Wörth, built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the early 1890s. She was the first pre-dreadnought built for the German Navy; earlier, the navy had only built coastal defense ships and armored frigates. The ship was laid down at the AG Vulcan dockyard in 1890, launched on 21 September 1891, and commissioned into the German Navy on 19 November 1893. Brandenburg and her three sisters were unique for their time in that they carried six heavy guns instead of the four that were standard in other navies. She was named after the Province of Brandenburg.
Brandenburg served with I Division during the first decade of her service with the fleet. This period was generally limited to training exercises and goodwill visits to foreign ports. These training maneuvers were nevertheless very important to developing German naval tactical doctrine in the two decades before World War I, especially under the direction of Alfred von Tirpitz. The ship saw her first major deployment in 1900, when she and her three sister ships were deployed to China to suppress the Boxer Uprising. In the early 1900s, all four ships were heavily rebuilt. She was obsolete by the start of World War I and only served in a limited capacity, initially as a coastal defense ship. In December 1915, she was withdrawn from active service and converted into a barracks ship. Brandenburg was scrapped in Danzig, after the war, in 1920.
## Design
Brandenburg was the first pre-dreadnought battleship of the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy). Prior to the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the German throne in June 1888, the German fleet had been largely oriented toward defense of the German coastline and Leo von Caprivi, chief of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Naval Office), had ordered a number of coastal defense ships in the 1880s. In August 1888, the Kaiser, who had a strong interest in naval matters, replaced Caprivi with Vizeadmiral (VAdm—Vice Admiral) Alexander von Monts and instructed him to include four battleships in the 1889–1890 naval budget. Monts, who favored a fleet of battleships over the coastal defense strategy emphasized by his predecessor, cancelled the last four coastal defense ships authorized under Caprivi and instead ordered four 10,000-metric-ton (9,800-long-ton) battleships. Though they were the first modern battleships built in Germany, presaging the Tirpitz-era High Seas Fleet, the authorization for the ships came as part of a construction program that reflected the strategic and tactical confusion of the 1880s caused by the Jeune École (Young School).
Brandenburg and her sister ships—Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, Weissenburg, and Wörth—were 115.7 m (379 ft 7 in) long, with a beam of 19.5 m (64 ft) and a draft of 7.6 m (24 ft 11 in). She displaced 10,013 t (9,855 long tons) as designed and up to 10,670 t (10,500 long tons) at full combat load. She was equipped with two sets of 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion steam engines that each drove a screw propeller. Steam was provided by twelve transverse cylindrical Scotch marine boilers. The ship's propulsion system was rated at 10,000 metric horsepower (9,900 ihp) and a top speed of 16.5 knots (30.6 km/h; 19.0 mph). She had a maximum range of 4,300 nautical miles (8,000 km; 4,900 mi) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). Her crew numbered 38 officers and 530 enlisted men.
The ship was unusual for its time in that it possessed a broadside of six heavy guns in three twin gun turrets, rather than the four-gun main battery typical of contemporary battleships. The forward and after turrets carried 28 cm (11 in) K L/40 guns, while the amidships turret mounted a pair of 28 cm (11 in) guns with shorter L/35 barrels. Her secondary armament consisted of eight 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/35 quick-firing guns mounted in casemates and eight 8.8 cm (3.45 in) SK L/30 quick-firing guns, also casemate mounted. Brandenburg's armament system was rounded out with six 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes, all in above-water swivel mounts. Although the main battery was heavier than other capital ships of the period, the secondary armament was considered weak in comparison to other battleships.
The ship was protected with compound armor. Her main belt armor was 400 millimeters (15.7 in) thick in the central citadel that protected the ammunition magazines and machinery spaces. The deck was 60 mm (2.4 in) thick. The main battery barbettes were protected with 300 mm (11.8 in) thick armor.
## Service history
### Construction to 1896
Ordered as battleship A, Brandenburg was laid down at AG Vulcan in Stettin in May 1890. Her hull was completed by September 1891 and launched on 21 September, when she was christened by Wilhelm II. Fitting out work followed and was finished, with the exception of the installation of her guns, by the end of September 1893, when she was transferred to Kiel. There, her guns were mounted, and on 19 November Brandenburg was commissioned into the fleet. Sea trials began four days later; on the first day of trials, Wilhelm II and a delegation from the Brandenburg provincial government came aboard the ship to observe. On 27 December, the ship received a flag bearing the coat of arms of Brandenburg, which was flown on special occasions. At the end of the month, Brandenburg was formally assigned to II Division of the Maneuver Squadron.
Trials continued into 1894, and while conducting forced draft tests in Strander Bucht on 16 February, the ship suffered the worst machinery accident in the history of the Kaiserliche Marine. One of the main steam valves from the starboard boilers exploded, killing forty-four men in the boiler room and injuring another seven. The cause of the explosion was a defect in the construction of the valve. Prince Henry, aboard the nearby transport ship Pelikan, immediately ordered the ship to come to Brandenburg's aid, and took off the dead and wounded men. Brandenburg then put into Wiker Bucht, and was later towed to Kiel, where she entered the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) for repairs. The accident caused a minor political incident after the press criticized Wilhelm II for failing to send Prince Henry to the funerals for the sailors. Additionally, VAdm Friedrich von Hollmann, the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Naval Office) stated before the Reichstag (Imperial Diet) that "such accidents could occur again and again", which increased parliamentary resistance to further increases in naval budgets; this led to an initial rejection of funds for the first armored cruiser, Fürst Bismarck. Admirals Eduard von Knorr and Hans von Koester criticized the comment, forcing Hollmann to publicly apologize.
Repair work was completed by 16 April, allowing Brandenburg to return to trials which lasted until the middle of August, and included a cruise through the Kattegat. On 21 August, the ship joined II Division, though a reorganization of the fleet saw the ship transferred to I Division, along with her three sister ships. I Division was based in Wilhelmshaven in the North Sea. Brandenburg and the rest of the squadron attended ceremonies for the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal at Kiel on 3 December. The squadron thereafter began a winter training cruise in the Baltic Sea; this was the first such cruise by the German fleet. In previous years, the bulk of the fleet was deactivated for the winter months. During this voyage, I Division anchored in Stockholm from 7 to 11 December, during the 300th anniversary of the birth of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. King Oscar II held a reception for the visiting German delegation. Thereafter, further exercises were conducted in the Baltic before the ships had to put into their home ports for repairs.
The year 1895 began with what became the normal training cruises to Heligoland and then to Bremerhaven, with Wilhelm II onboard the flagship, Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm. This was followed by individual ship and divisional training, which was interrupted by a voyage to the northern North Sea, the first time that units of the main German fleet had left home waters. On this trip, Brandenburg joined Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm and the two battleships stopped in Lerwick in Shetland from 16 to 23 March. These exercises tested the ships in heavy weather; both vessels performed admirably. In May, more fleet maneuvers were carried out in the western Baltic, and they were concluded by a visit of the fleet to Kirkwall in Orkney. The squadron returned to Kiel in early June, where preparations were underway for the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. Tactical exercises were carried out in Kiel Bay in the presence of foreign delegations to the opening ceremony. Further training exercises lasted until 1 July, when I Division began a voyage into the Atlantic Ocean. This operation had political motives; Germany had only been able to send a small contingent of vessels—the protected cruiser Kaiserin Augusta, the coastal defense ship Hagen, and the sailing frigate Stosch—to an international naval demonstration off the Moroccan coast at the same time. The main fleet could therefore provide moral support to the demonstration by steaming to Spanish waters. Rough weather again allowed Brandenburg and her sister ships to demonstrate their excellent seakeeping. The fleet departed Vigo and stopped in Queenstown, Ireland. Wilhelm II, aboard his yacht Hohenzollern, attended the Cowes Regatta while the rest of the fleet stayed off the Isle of Wight.
On 10 August, the fleet returned to Wilhelmshaven and began preparations for the autumn maneuvers later that month. The first exercises began in the Heligoland Bight on 25 August. The fleet then steamed through the Skagerrak to the Baltic; heavy storms caused significant damage to many of the ships and the torpedo boat S41 capsized and sank in the storms—only three men were saved. The fleet stayed briefly in Kiel before resuming exercises, including live-fire exercises, in the Kattegat and the Great Belt. During this period, on 22 August, Brandenburg collided with the aviso Jagd, though only the latter was damaged in the accident. The main maneuvers began on 7 September with a mock attack from Kiel toward the eastern Baltic. The next day, while she was in Kiel, Czar Nicholas II of Russia inspected Brandenburg during a visit to Germany. Subsequent maneuvers took place off the coast of Pomerania and in Danzig Bay. A fleet review for Wilhelm II off Jershöft concluded the maneuvers on 14 September. The rest of the year was spent on individual ship training. The year 1896 followed much the same pattern as the previous year. Individual ship training was conducted through April, followed by squadron training in the North Sea in late April and early May, which included a visit to the Dutch ports of Vlissingen and Nieuwediep. Further maneuvers, which lasted from the end of May to the end of July, took the squadron further north in the North Sea, frequently into Norwegian waters where the ships visited Bergen from 11 to 18 May. During the maneuvers, Wilhelm II and the Chinese viceroy Li Hongzhang observed a fleet review off Kiel. On 9 August, the training fleet assembled in Wilhelmshaven for the annual autumn fleet training.
### 1897–1900
Brandenburg and the rest of the fleet operated under the normal routine of individual and unit training in the first half of 1897. Early in the year, the naval command considered deploying I Division to another naval demonstration off Morocco to protest the murder of two German nationals there, but a smaller squadron of sailing frigates was sent instead. The typical routine was interrupted in early August when Wilhelm II and Kaiserin (Empress) Augusta went to visit the Russian imperial court; both divisions of I Squadron were sent to Kronstadt to accompany the Kaiser, who proceeded to the capital at Saint Petersburg. They had returned to Neufahrwasser in Danzig on 15 August, where the rest of the fleet joined them for the annual autumn maneuvers. These exercises reflected the tactical thinking of the new State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt, Konteradmiral (KAdm—Rear Admiral) Alfred von Tirpitz, and the new commander of I Squadron, VAdm August von Thomsen. These new tactics stressed accurate gunnery, especially at longer ranges, though the necessities of the line-ahead formation led to a great deal of rigidity in the tactics. Thomsen's emphasis on shooting created the basis for the excellent German gunnery during World War I. The maneuvers were completed by 22 September in Wilhelmshaven.
In early December, I Division conducted maneuvers in the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, though they were cut short due to shortages in officers and men. Additionally, while steaming through the Great Belt, Brandenburg collided with the ironclad Württemberg, damaging both vessels and forcing them to put into Kiel for repairs. After temporary repairs to Brandenburg were completed, she moved to Wilhelmshaven, where a new ram bow had to be installed. The fleet followed the typical routine of individual and fleet training in 1898 without incident, though a voyage to the British Isles was also included and the fleet stopped in Queenstown, Greenock, and Kirkwall. The fleet assembled in Kiel on 14 August for the annual autumn exercises: the maneuvers included a mock blockade of the coast of Mecklenburg and a pitched battle with an "Eastern Fleet" in the Danzig Bay. While steaming back to Kiel, a severe storm hit the fleet, causing significant damage to many ships and sinking the torpedo boat S58. The fleet then transited the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and continued the maneuvers in the North Sea. Training finished on 17 September in Wilhelmshaven. In December, I Division conducted artillery and torpedo training in Eckernförde Bay, followed by divisional training in the Kattegat and Skagerrak. During these maneuvers, the division visited Kungsbacka, Sweden, from 9 to 13 December. After returning to Kiel, the ships of I Division went into dock for their winter repairs.
During a snowstorm on 22 March 1899, the anchor chain for the ironclad Oldenburg broke, allowing the ship to drift out and run aground in Strander Bucht. Brandenburg and the shipyard steamer Norder towed Oldenburg free and back to port. On 5 April, the ship participated in the celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Eckernförde during the First Schleswig War. In May, I and II Divisions, along with the Reserve Division from the Baltic, went on a major cruise into the Atlantic. On the voyage out, I Division stopped in Dover and II Division went into Falmouth to restock their coal supplies. I Division joined II Division at Falmouth on 8 May, and the two units then departed for the Bay of Biscay, arriving at Lisbon on 12 May. There, they met the British Channel Fleet of eight battleships and four armored cruisers. The German fleet departed for Germany, stopping again in Dover on 24 May. There, they participated in the naval review celebrating Queen Victoria's 80th birthday. The fleet returned to Kiel on 31 May.
In July, the fleet conducted squadron maneuvers in the North Sea, which included coast defense exercises with soldiers from the X Corps. On 16 August, the fleet assembled in Danzig once again for the annual autumn maneuvers. The exercises started in the Baltic and on 30 August the fleet passed through the Kattegat and Skagerrak and steamed into the North Sea for further maneuvers in the German Bight, which lasted until 7 September. After a third phase of the maneuvers in the Kattegat and the Great Belt from 8 to 26 September, the fleet went into port for annual maintenance. The year 1900 began with the usual routine of individual and divisional exercises. In the second half of March, the squadrons met in Kiel, followed by torpedo and gunnery practice in April and a voyage to the eastern Baltic. From 7 to 26 May, the fleet went on a major training cruise to the northern North Sea, which included stops in Shetland from 12 to 15 May and in Bergen from 18 to 22 May. On 8 July, the ships of I Division were reassigned to II Division.
### Boxer Uprising
During the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Chinese nationalists laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing and murdered Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the German plenipotentiary. The widespread violence against Westerners in China led to an alliance between Germany and seven other Great Powers: the United Kingdom, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the United States, France, and Japan. Those soldiers who were in China at the time were too few in number to defeat the Boxers; in Beijing there was a force of slightly more than 400 officers and infantry from the armies of the eight European powers. At the time, the primary German military force in China was the East Asia Squadron, which consisted of the protected cruisers Kaiserin Augusta, Hansa, and Hertha, the small cruisers Irene and Gefion, and the gunboats Jaguar and Iltis. There was also a German 500-man detachment in Taku; combined with the other nations' units the force numbered some 2,100 men. Led by the British Admiral Edward Seymour, these men attempted to reach Beijing but were forced to stop in Tianjin due to heavy resistance. As a result, the Kaiser determined an expeditionary force would be sent to China to reinforce the East Asia Squadron. The expedition included Brandenburg and her three sisters, six cruisers, ten freighters, three torpedo boats, and six regiments of marines, under the command of Generalfeldmarschall (General Field Marshal) Alfred von Waldersee.
On 7 July, KAdm Richard von Geißler, the expeditionary force commander, reported that his ships were ready for the operation, and they left two days later. The four battleships and the aviso Hela transited the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and stopped in Wilhelmshaven to rendezvous with the rest of the expeditionary force. On 11 July, the force steamed out of the Jade Bight, bound for China. They stopped to coal at Gibraltar on 17–18 July and passed through the Suez Canal on 26–27 July. More coal was taken on at Perim in the Red Sea, and on 2 August the fleet entered the Indian Ocean. On 10 August, the ships reached Colombo, Ceylon, and on 14 August they passed through the Strait of Malacca. They arrived in Singapore on 18 August and departed five days later, reaching Hong Kong on 28 August. Two days later, the expeditionary force stopped in the outer roadstead at Wusong, downriver from Shanghai.
By the time the German fleet had arrived, the siege of Beijing had already been lifted by forces from other members of the Eight-Nation Alliance that had formed to deal with the Boxers. Nevertheless, Brandenburg took up patrol duties in the area surrounding the mouth of the Yangtze River, and in October participated in the occupations of the coastal fortifications protecting the cities of Shanhaiguan and Qinhuangdao before returning to the Yangtze. Since the situation had calmed, the four battleships were sent to Hong Kong or Nagasaki, Japan, in late 1900 and early 1901 for overhauls; Brandenburg went to Hong Kong for her overhaul in January and February 1901. After the work was completed, she steamed to Qingdao in the German Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory, where she took part in training exercises with the rest of the expeditionary force.
On 26 May, the German high command recalled the expeditionary force to Germany. The fleet took on supplies in Shanghai and departed Chinese waters on 1 June. The ships stopped in Singapore from 10 to 15 June and took on coal before proceeding to Colombo, where they stayed from 22 to 26 June. Steaming against the monsoons forced the fleet to stop in Mahé, Seychelles, to take on more coal. The ships then stopped for a day each to take on coal in Aden and Port Said. On 1 August they reached Cadiz, and then met with I Division and steamed back to Germany together. They separated after reaching Helgoland, and on 11 August, after reaching the Jade roadstead, the ships of the expeditionary force were visited by Admiral Koester, who was now the Inspector General of the Navy. The following day the expeditionary fleet was dissolved. In the end, the operation cost the German government more than 100 million marks.
### 1901–1914
Upon their return, Brandenburg and her sisters were assigned to I Squadron. On 21 August, the annual fleet maneuvers began; these were interrupted on 11 September when Nicholas II visited the fleet while on another visit to Germany. The ships conducted a naval review for his visit in the Putziger Wiek. For the remainder of the maneuvers, the navy cooperated with the German Army in joint exercises in West Prussia that included the ships' Seebataillon (marines), and I Corps and XVII Corps. Later in the year, Brandenburg took part in a winter cruise, followed by a period in the shipyard in Wilhelmshaven for periodic maintenance. The year 1902 followed the routine pattern of individual, unit, and fleet training, along with a major cruise to Norway and Scotland, which concluded by passing through the English Channel. After completing the fleet maneuvers in August and September, Brandenburg was decommissioned on 23 October. The ship's crew were sent to man the newly commissioned battleship Zähringen, which took her place in I Squadron.
In the early 1900s, the four Brandenburgs were taken into the drydocks at the Kaiserliche Werft in Wilhelmshaven for major reconstruction. Brandenburg was modernized between 1903 and 1904. During the modernization, a second conning tower was added in the aft superstructure, along with a gangway. Brandenburg and the other ships had their boilers replaced with newer models, and also had the hamper amidships reduced. She was recommissioned on 4 April 1905 and was assigned to II Squadron of what was now renamed the Active Battlefleet, though she remained in service only briefly. She participated in the normal routine of training exercises through 1905, 1906, and 1907, before being decommissioned again on 30 September 1907. During this period, the only noteworthy incident involving Brandenburg was a minor grounding outside Stockholm that did not inflict any damage on the ship. Upon her second decommissioning, her crew was again sent to staff a new battleship, this time Hannover. Brandenburg was thereafter assigned to the Reserve Formation of the North Sea.
By 1910, the first dreadnought battleships began to enter service with the German fleet, rendering older vessels like Brandenburg obsolescent. That year, she temporarily returned to service with III Squadron to take part in the annual fleet maneuvers. After the exercises ended, she returned to what was now the Reserve Division of the North Sea, where she conducted further training. In mid-1911, she was transferred to the Training and Experimental Ships Unit, where she participated in training exercises in the Baltic. Brandenburg again temporarily returned to III Squadron for the fleet maneuvers in August and September, and on 16 October she was again decommissioned. In 1912, she was allocated to the Marinestation der Ostsee (Baltic Sea Naval Station), where she remained inactive for the following two years.
### World War I and subsequent activity
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Brandenburg was reactivated and assigned to V Squadron, which was initially tasked with coastal defense duties in the North Sea. In mid-September, V Squadron was transferred to the Baltic, under the command of Prince Henry. He initially planned to launch a major amphibious assault on Windau, but a shortage of transports forced a revision of the plan. Instead, V Squadron was to carry the landing force, but this too was cancelled after Heinrich received false reports of British warships having entered the Baltic on 25 September. Brandenburg and the rest of the squadron returned to Kiel the following day, disembarked the landing force, and then proceeded to the North Sea, where they resumed guard ship duties. Before the end of the year, V Squadron was once again transferred to the Baltic. Prince Henry next ordered a foray toward Gotland. On 26 December, the battleships rendezvoused with the Baltic cruiser division in the Bay of Pomerania and then departed on the sortie. Two days later, the fleet arrived off Gotland to show the German flag, and was back in Kiel by 30 December.
The squadron returned to the North Sea for guard duties, but was withdrawn from front-line service in February 1915. Shortages of trained crews in the High Seas Fleet, coupled with the risk of operating older ships in wartime, necessitated the deactivation of the V Squadron ships. Brandenburg had her crew reduced in Kiel, and she was briefly assigned to the reserve division in the Baltic. From July to December, she underwent shipyard maintenance, before being transferred to Libau. On 20 December, she was decommissioned there, for use as a water distillation and barracks ship. Her heavy guns were removed for use in the Ottoman Empire, but there is no record of them ever having been shipped to the Ottomans. Near the end of the war, Brandenburg was taken back to Danzig, where work began to convert her into a target ship, but the war ended before the reconstruction was completed. Brandenburg was struck from the naval register on 13 May 1919 and sold for scrapping. The ship was purchased by Norddeutsche Tiefbaugesellschaft, a shipbreaking firm headquartered in Berlin, and she was then broken up for scrap in Danzig.
|
31,709,160 |
William F. Raynolds
| 1,151,672,078 |
U.S. Army surveyor and topographer
|
[
"1820 births",
"1894 deaths",
"19th-century explorers",
"American engineers",
"American explorers",
"American military personnel of the Mexican–American War",
"American mountain climbers",
"Burials at West Lawn Cemetery",
"Explorers of Montana",
"Grand Teton National Park",
"People from Canton, Ohio",
"People of Ohio in the American Civil War",
"Union Army colonels",
"United States Army officers",
"United States Military Academy alumni",
"Yellowstone region"
] |
William Franklin Raynolds (March 17, 1820 – October 18, 1894) was an American explorer, engineer and U.S. army officer who served in the Mexican–American War and American Civil War. He is best known for leading the 1859–60 Raynolds Expedition while serving as a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers.
During the 1850s and again after his participation in the Civil War, Raynolds was the head engineer on numerous lighthouse construction projects. He oversaw riverway and harbor dredging projects intended to improve accessibility and navigation for shipping. As a cartographer, Raynolds surveyed and mapped the islands and shorelines on the Great Lakes and other regions. At least six lighthouses whose construction he oversaw are still standing. Some are still in use and of these, several are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1848, during the American occupation of Mexico after the Mexican–American War, Raynolds and other U.S. Army personnel were the first confirmed to have reached the summit of Pico de Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico, and inadvertently set what may have been a 50-year American alpine altitude record. In 1859, Raynolds was placed in charge of the first government-sponsored expedition to venture into the upper Yellowstone region that was later to become Yellowstone National Park. Heavy winter snowpack in the Absaroka Range of Wyoming prevented the expedition from reaching the Yellowstone Plateau, forcing them to divert to the south and cross Union Pass at the northern end of the Wind River Range. After negotiating the pass the expedition entered Jackson Hole and surveyed the Teton Range, now within Grand Teton National Park.
During the Civil War, Raynolds participated in the Battle of Cross Keys during the Valley Campaign of 1862 and a year later was in charge of fortifications in the defense of the military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. On March 13, 1865, Raynolds was brevetted brigadier general for meritorious service during the Civil War. After the war, Lt. Col Raynolds was assigned to a myriad of positions across the Nation to include establishing the St. Louis Engineer Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1870 to 1872. Raynolds retired from the army on March 17, 1884, with the permanent rank of colonel.
He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1867.
## Early life
William Franklin Raynolds was born on March 17, 1820, in Canton, Ohio, the fourth of six children to William Raynolds (November 2, 1789 – September 20, 1829) and Elizabeth Seabury (née Fisk; 1796 – April 13, 1853). William F. Raynolds's grandfather was also named William Raynolds (1764–1814) and had been a veteran of the War of 1812, serving as a company captain from April 12, 1812, until April 13, 1813. During the War of 1812, the grandfather Raynolds rose to the rank of major while serving under Lewis Cass.
William F. Raynolds entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, on July 1, 1839, after being appointed from Ohio. He graduated fifth out of 39 classmates in his class of 1843, which included William B. Franklin, Raynolds's friend Joseph J. Reynolds, and future president Ulysses S. Grant. Raynolds married at a young age; he and his wife had no children.
## Military career
Initially appointed a brevet second lieutenant in the 5th U.S. Infantry, within a few weeks Raynolds was transferred to the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. The Topographical Engineers performed surveys and developed maps for army use until their merger with the Corps of Engineers in 1863. Raynolds's first assignments from 1843 to 1844 were as an assistant topographical engineer involved in improving navigation on the Ohio River and surveying the northeastern boundary of the U.S. between 1844 and 1847.
### Mexican–American War
When war with Mexico seemed imminent, topographic engineers were sent to the border to assist with the army's preparations. Raynolds served in Winfield Scott's Mexican–American War campaign that marched overland to Mexico City from the Gulf of Mexico seaport at Veracruz. After the war, the American army occupied Mexico City and the surrounding region. During the occupation, Raynolds and others set out to map and explore nearby mountains. Raynolds's party is credited with being the first confirmed to climb to the summit of Pico de Orizaba (), which at 18,620 feet (5,680 m), is the tallest mountain in Mexico and third tallest in North America. Over a period of several months, Raynolds and other officers from both the army and navy mapped the best approach route to Pico de Orizaba. To assist them in their climb, the party planned on taking grapnels attached to long ropes and primitive crampons in the form of shoes with projecting points to help ensure they could safely climb up cliffs and across glaciers. Told by local villagers that any attempt to reach the summit would be fruitless because no one had ever done it before, the Americans became even more determined to show the Mexicans it could be climbed.
As the expedition left to ascend the mountain, a long pack train of nearly fifty officers, soldiers and native guides departed from the town of Orizaba in early May 1848. After several days of hiking through dense jungle, the expedition slowly gained altitude and established a base camp at 12,000 ft (3,700 m). Starting from base camp in the early morning of May 10 nearly two dozen climbers made the final push to the top of the mountain, but only Raynolds and a few others reached the summit. According to mountaineer and author Leigh N. Ortenburger, this feat may have inadvertently set the American mountaineering altitude record for the next fifty years. Raynolds estimated the summit of Pico de Orizaba to be 17,907 ft (5,458 m) above sea level, which was slightly greater than previous estimates but below the modern known altitude. As no higher peaks were known in North America at that time, Raynolds believed Pico de Orizaba was the tallest mountain on the continent. The summit crater was covered in snow but estimated to be between 400 and 650 yards (370 and 590 m) in diameter and 300 ft (91 m) deep. The American achievement was disputed by the Mexicans until an 1851 French expedition discovered an American flag on the summit with the year 1848 carved in the flagpole.
### Lighthouse engineer
After returning from Mexico, Raynolds resumed mapping the U.S.–Canada border which he had been surveying before the war, then embarked on a project to develop water resources for the nation's growing capital of Washington, D.C. Raynolds traveled the Great Lakes for several years surveying and mapping shorelines while identifying potential lighthouse locations. After promotion to first lieutenant and then captain, in 1857 he was assigned to design and supervise the construction of lighthouses along the Jersey Shore and the Delmarva Peninsula regions. in the late 1850s Raynolds supervised construction of the Fenwick Island Light in Delaware and the Cape May Light in New Jersey. In 1859, Raynolds was working on finishing the Jupiter Inlet Light in Jupiter, Florida, when he was reassigned to lead the first U.S. Government-sponsored expedition to explore the Yellowstone region.
### Raynolds Expedition
In early 1859, Raynolds was charged with leading an expedition into the Yellowstone region of Montana and Wyoming to determine, "as far as practicable, everything relating to ... the Indians of the country, its agricultural and mineralogical resources ... the navigability of its streams, its topographical features, and the facilities or obstacles which the latter present to the construction of rail or common roads ..." The expedition was carried out by a handful of technicians, including photographer and topographer James D. Hutton, artist and mapmaker Anton Schönborn, and geologist and naturalist Ferdinand V. Hayden, who led several later expeditions to the Yellowstone region. Raynolds's second-in-command was lieutenant Henry E. Maynadier. The expedition was supported by a small infantry detachment of 30 and was federally funded with \$60,000. Experienced mountain man Jim Bridger was hired to guide the expedition.
The expedition started in late May 1859 at St. Louis, Missouri, then was transported by two steamboats up the Missouri River to New Fort Pierre, South Dakota. In late June the expedition left New Fort Pierre and headed overland to Fort Sarpy where they encountered the Crow Indians. Raynolds said the Crow were a "small band compared to their neighbors, but are famous warriors, and, according to common report, seldom fail to hold their own with any of the tribes unless greatly outnumbered." Raynolds was impressed with Chief Red Bear and, after assuring him the expedition meant only to pass through their territory and not linger, traded with the Crow for seven horses.
Raynolds divided his expedition, sending a smaller detachment under Maynadier to explore the Tongue River, a major tributary of the Yellowstone River. Two of Maynadier's party, James D. Hutton and Zephyr Recontre, the expedition's Sioux interpreter, took a side trip to locate and investigate an isolated rock formation that had been seen from great distance by a previous expedition in 1857. Hutton was the first person of European descent to reach this rock formation in northeastern Wyoming, later known as Devils Tower; Raynolds never elaborated on this event, mentioning it only in passing. By September 2, 1859, Raynolds's detachment had followed the Yellowstone River to the confluence with the Bighorn River in south-central Montana. The two parties under Raynolds and Maynadier reunited on October 12, 1859, and wintered at Deer Creek Station, on the Platte River in central Wyoming.
The expedition recommenced its explorations in May 1860. Raynolds led a party north and west up the upstream portion of the Bighorn River, which is today called the Wind River, hoping to cross the mountains at Togwotee Pass in the Absaroka Range, a mountain pass known to expedition guide Jim Bridger. Meanwhile, Maynadier led his party back north to the Bighorn River to explore it and its associated tributary streams more thoroughly. The plan was for the two parties to reunite on June 30, 1860, at Three Forks, Montana, so they could make observations of a total solar eclipse forecast for July 18, 1860. Hampered by towering basaltic cliffs and deep snows, Raynolds attempted for over a week to reconnoiter to the top of Togwotee Pass, but was forced south due to the June 30 deadline for reaching Three Forks. Bridger then led the party south over another pass in the northern Wind River Range that Raynolds named Union Pass, to the west of which lay Jackson Hole and the Teton Range. From there the expedition went southwest, crossing the southern Teton Range at Teton Pass and entering Pierre's Hole in present-day Idaho. Though Raynolds and his party managed to get to Three Forks by the scheduled date, Maynadier's party was several days late, which prevented a detachment heading north to observe the solar eclipse. The reunited expedition then headed home, traveling from Fort Benton, Montana, to Fort Union near the Montana-North Dakota border via steamboat. It then journeyed overland to Omaha, Nebraska, where the expedition members were disbanded in October 1860.
Though the Raynolds Expedition was unsuccessful in exploring the region that later became Yellowstone National Park, it was the first federally funded party to enter Jackson Hole and observe the Teton Range. The expedition covered over 2,500 miles (4,000 km) and explored an area of nearly 250,000 square miles (650,000 km<sup>2</sup>). In a preliminary report sent east in 1859, Raynolds stated that the once-abundant bison were being killed for their hides at such an alarming rate they might soon become extinct. Raynolds's immediate participation in the Civil War, followed by a severe illness, delayed him from presenting his report on the expedition until 1868. Research data and botanical specimens, as well as fossils and geological items that had been collected during the expedition, were sent to the Smithsonian Institution but were not studied in detail until after the war. Much of the artwork created by Hutton and especially Schönborn was lost, though several of Schönborn's chromolithographs appeared in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1883 report that was submitted after later expeditions.
### American Civil War
Raynolds returned to Washington at the outbreak of the war, and was made chief topographic engineer of the Department of Virginia in July 1861. The army lacked adequate maps for military use, so Raynolds and his team of engineers began to survey and draw up maps of Virginia and the region of the western portion of that state that had remained loyal to the Union and would become the new state of West Virginia. In 1862, Raynolds was engaged with John C. Frémont's Mountain Department in chasing Stonewall Jackson up the Shenandoah Valley and participated in the Battle of Cross Keys.
Raynolds spent two months recovering from illness after the Valley Campaign, then was assigned as chief engineer of Middle Department and VIII Corps in January 1863. Promoted to major in the Corps of Engineers, he found himself in charge of the defenses of vital Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in March 1863 during Robert E. Lee's second Confederate invasion of the north during the Gettysburg Campaign. On March 31, 1863, the Corps of Topographical Engineers ceased to be an independent branch of the army and was merged into the Corps of Engineers and Raynolds served in that branch of the army for the rest of his career. Officers from the two corps maintained their ranks based on the time at which they received their promotion.
As the end of war approached and hostilities with the Sioux Indians loomed, Raynolds's knowledge of and experiences in the Great Lakes region became more important to the army than his command of the fortifications of Harpers Ferry. As a result, he returned to the Great Lakes as superintending engineer of surveys and lighthouses in April 1864, and saw no further combat for the rest of his career. Before the war was over, on March 13, 1865, Raynolds was brevetted to brigadier general for meritorious service.
### Postwar career
After the Civil War, the Corps of Engineers undertook a program of river and harbor improvements. Raynolds supervised the dredging and improvement of navigation on the Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. He also helped supervise several harbor dredging and construction projects, involving the harbor in Buffalo, New York, the Harbor of Refuge in New Buffalo, Michigan, Erie Harbor in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the river harbors of St. Louis, Missouri and Alton, Illinois. Raynolds sited and oversaw the installation of dozens of lighthouses in the Great Lakes area, where he served as the superintending engineer from 1864 to 1870. Raynolds was promoted to permanent rank of lieutenant colonel in the Corps of Engineers on March 7, 1867. He then supervised lighthouse construction along the Gulf Coast and in New Jersey where he managed the construction of the Hereford Inlet Lighthouse in 1874.
In 1870, work on the harbors received a boost when the Office of Western River Improvements relocated from Cincinnati, Ohio, to St. Louis with the reassignment of Lt. Col. Raynolds as officer in charge. Since the 1830s, the work of the Office of Western River Improvements had been divided between the Ohio River on one hand and Mississippi, Arkansas, Red, and Missouri rivers on the other. In practice, engineer officers in the Corps of Topographical Engineers maintained temporary offices near each project to oversee work, including one in St. Louis or Alton. After the Civil War and the reunification of the Topographical Engineers and Corps of Engineers, there were separate offices overseeing work on the Ohio River and Western Rivers, each reporting separately to the Chief of Engineers. Most of this work remained snag removal, for which the Corps had built numerous snag-removal vessels. It was only logical to relocate the office closer to the projects being managed by moving the Office of Ohio River Improvements to Cincinnati and Western River Improvements to St. Louis. This was, in essence, the first step taken from a project-based Corps office in St. Louis to what became a district office overseeing regional projects. By 1872, Raynolds was reporting from the Engineer Office in St. Louis with responsibility from the Illinois to the Ohio River rather than from the Office of Western River Improvements, which had ceased to exist.
From May 5 to October 7, 1877, Raynolds led a procession of American engineers to an engineering conference in Europe. Promoted to the permanent rank of colonel on January 2, 1881, Raynolds continued serving with the Corps of Engineers supporting a variety of harbor and river navigational improvements until his retirement in 1884, after a military career spanning forty years. As he approached retirement, Raynolds was elected a trustee of the Presbyterian Church. According to West Point classmate Joseph Reynolds, who saw him at the West Point graduates' reunion in 1893, Raynolds maintained a vigorous and healthy appearance long after his retirement, his brown hair, "then but slightly sprinkled with gray". Raynolds died on October 18, 1894, in Detroit, Michigan, leaving his widow a substantial estate for the time, estimated at between US\$50,000 (\$ today) and \$100,000 (\$ today). After providing for his widow, his will directed that after her death, the entire estate would be donated to the Presbyterian Church. Raynolds was interred in West Lawn Cemetery in Canton, Ohio.
## Legacy
Raynolds's 1848 expedition to the summit of Pico de Orizaba in Mexico predated what is known as the Golden age of alpinism (1854–65), when many major mountain peaks in the Alps were first climbed. The effort to summit the mountain was one of the earliest deliberate attempts to climb a major mountain peak, and involved logistics, planning and use of rudimentary climbing equipment, "making it one of the more serious mountaineering expeditions undertaken to that point in history". Though unable to penetrate into the heart of what later became Yellowstone National Park, the Raynolds Expedition produced maps that were used by subsequent explorers to the greater Yellowstone region. Raynolds also located suitable wagon routes in the Bighorn Basin and was able to help narrow down the most appropriate routes for a future transcontinental railroad. The Raynolds Expedition further determined that few if any rivers in the region would be suitable for steamboats due to numerous rapids and steep gradients. Several lighthouses whose construction was designed or supervised by Raynolds are still in use and several are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
At least two geographical locations are named for William Raynolds. The mountain gap where his expedition crossed the Continental Divide between southwest Montana and northeast Idaho is named Raynolds Pass () and Raynolds Peak () is an isolated peak in the Teton Range that was named after him in 1938. The fossil remains of the extinct gastropod Viviparus raynoldsanus was named by Ferdinand V. Hayden in honor of Raynolds after the specimen was collected in the Powder River Basin during the expedition.
Lt. Col. William F. Rayholds is credited with being the first Commander of the St. Louis Engineer Office (now District) with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) as it transferred from the Office of Western River Improvements out of Cincinnati.
|
45,230,571 |
1937 Fox vault fire
| 1,170,208,672 |
Fire at 20th Century-Fox film storage facility in New Jersey
|
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"1930s lost films",
"1937 disasters in the United States",
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"Cinema of New Jersey",
"Fires in New Jersey",
"July 1937 events",
"Little Ferry, New Jersey",
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A major fire broke out in a 20th Century-Fox film-storage facility in Little Ferry, New Jersey, United States, on July 9, 1937. Flammable nitrate film had previously contributed to several fires in film-industry laboratories, studios, and vaults, although the precise causes were often unknown. In Little Ferry, gases produced by decaying film, combined with high temperatures and inadequate ventilation, resulted in spontaneous combustion.
One death and two injuries resulted from the fire, which also destroyed all the archived film in the vaults, resulting in the loss of most of the silent films produced by the Fox Film Corporation before 1932. Also destroyed were negatives from Educational Pictures to Belarusfilm (with which Fox was then affiliated) and films of several other studios. The fire brought attention to the potential for decaying nitrate film to spontaneously ignite and changed the focus of film preservation efforts to include a greater focus on fire safety.
## Background
### Nitrate film
The early motion-picture industry primarily used film stock made of nitrocellulose, commonly called nitrate film. This film is flammable and produces its own oxygen supply as it burns. Nitrate fires burn rapidly and cannot be extinguished, as they are capable of burning even under water. Nitrocellulose is also subject to thermal decomposition and hydrolysis, breaking down over time in the presence of high temperatures and moisture. This decaying film stock releases nitrogen oxides that themselves contribute to the decay and make the damaged film burn more easily. Under the right conditions, nitrate film can spontaneously combust. In part because of substantial variability in the manufacturing of early film, considerable uncertainty exists about the circumstances necessary for self-ignition. Sustained temperatures of 100 °F (38 °C) or higher, large quantities of nitrate film, increased humidity, poor ventilation, and aged or decaying film have all been considered risk factors. Most such fires in film archives have taken place in heat waves during summers, in closed facilities with limited ventilation, compounding several of these variables. Especially in confined areas, such fires can result in explosions.
Large and dangerous fires sometimes resulted. On May 4, 1897, one of the first major fires involving nitrate film began when a Lumière projector caught fire at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris. The resulting blaze caused 126 deaths. In the United States, a series of fires occurred at industry facilities. The Lubin Manufacturing Company's vault in Philadelphia exploded on June 13, 1914, followed on December 9 by a fire that destroyed Thomas Edison's laboratory complex in West Orange, New Jersey. The New York studio of the Famous Players Film Company burned in September 1915; in July 1920, the shipping facility of its corporate successor, Famous Players–Lasky, was destroyed by a fire in Kansas City, Missouri, despite construction intended to minimize that risk. The United Film Ad Service vault, also in Kansas City, burned on August 4, 1928, and a fire was reported at Pathé Exchange nine days later. In October 1929, the Consolidated Film Industries facility was badly damaged by a nitrate fire. Spontaneous combustion was not proven to have occurred in any of these fires, and may not have been recognized as possible before a 1933 study determined that the temperatures necessary for nitrate film to self-ignite had been overestimated.
### Little Ferry
In the earlier 20th century, nearby Fort Lee on the Hudson Palisades was home to many film studios of America's first motion picture industry. When Little Ferry, New Jersey, contractor William Fehrs was hired to construct a film-storage facility in 1934, he designed the structure to be fireproof. The building had 12-inch (30 cm) brick outer walls and a reinforced concrete roof. Internally, it was divided into 48 individual vaults, each enclosed behind a steel door and separated by 8-inch (20 cm) brick interior walls. The local fire department confirmed Fehrs's fireproofing. However, it had neither a fire sprinkler system nor mechanical ventilation, and no security guard was employed to watch the facility. Despite the potential fire danger of stored film, the building was located in a residential neighborhood.
Film processing company DeLuxe Laboratories owned the building and rented it to 20th Century-Fox to store the silent films acquired from Fox Film Corporation after its merger with Twentieth Century Pictures.
## Fire
Northern New Jersey experienced a heat wave in July 1937, with daytime temperatures of 100 °F (38 °C) and warm nights. The sustained heat contributed to nitrate decomposition in the film vaults, and the building's ventilation was inadequate to prevent a dangerous buildup of gases. At some time shortly after 2:00 a.m. on July 9, spontaneous ignition occurred in the vault at the building's northwest corner. Local truck driver Robert Davison observed flames coming from one of the structure's window vents, and within five minutes, used a municipal fire alarm call box to report the fire.
Davison then attempted to awaken the residents of the surrounding houses, many of whom were already alerted to the situation by the noise and intense heat. As the contents of additional vaults ignited, bursts of flame shot out 100 feet (30 m) horizontally across the ground from the windows, and a similar distance into the air from the building's roof vents. When the fire spread to the vaults in the south and east of the building, they exploded, damaging the brickwork and blowing out window frames. Anna Greeves and her two sons, John and Charles, were caught in a "sheet of flame" while attempting to flee the area. All three were seriously burned; 13-year-old Charles eventually died from his injuries on July 19. Other families were able to escape unharmed, as the fire spread to five neighboring residences and destroyed two vehicles.
Little Ferry firefighters first arrived at 2:26 a.m., followed by companies from Hawthorne, Ridgefield Park, River Edge, and South Hackensack. It took 150 men employing 14 hose streams to put the fire out by 5:30 a.m. All the film in the facility was destroyed; more than 40,000 reels of negatives and prints burned to ashes inside their film cans. The building was also badly damaged. Exploding vaults had destroyed segments of both the exterior walls and interior partitions, and had deformed the structure's concrete roof. Total property damage was estimated at \$150,000–200,000. Fifty-seven truckloads of burned film were hauled from the site to have their silver content extracted. Each can contained about five cents' worth of silver; the salvaged metal returned \$2,000.
## Legacy
Although 20th Century-Fox officials at the time remarked that "only old films" were destroyed, the fire is now understood as a significant loss of American film heritage. Motion picture historian Anthony Slide called the destruction of the Fox vault "the most tragic" American nitrate fire. The highest-quality examples of every Fox film produced prior to 1932 were destroyed; all known copies of many movies had been stored in the facility. Films lost to the fire include pictures starring Theda Bara, Shirley Mason, William Farnum, and many others. Tom Mix made 85 pictures with Fox, most of which were archived exclusively at Little Ferry. The grandfather of director Blake Edwards, J. Gordon Edwards, had directed all the highest-grossing epics for Fox and all the masters for his films were lost (although a few survive as low-quality prints, which were housed elsewhere). For some actors, such as Valeska Suratt, none of their films survived; "there are entire careers that don't exist because of [the fire]," according to Museum of Modern Art film curator Dave Kehr. Because some copies were located elsewhere, some of Fox's silent films survive as lower-quality prints – or fragments – but more than 75% of Fox's feature films from before 1930 are completely lost.
The Little Ferry vaults also held works by other film studios that had contracted with Fox for distribution. Educational Pictures lost more than 2000 silent negatives and prints; the company's sound films survived. Also present was the original negative of D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (which Fox had purchased with the intent of remaking), the negative for the controversial Christie Productions sponsored film The Birth of a Baby and films produced by Sol Lesser under his imprints Atherton Productions, Peck's Bad Boy Corporation, and Principal Pictures. Archival material intended for the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library was lost, as well.
The destruction of the Little Ferry facility spurred an interest in fire safety as an aspect of film preservation. Unlike previous large nitrate-film fires, investigators determined that the spontaneous combustion of decomposing film stock was responsible. They suggested that the older nitrocellulose film in the archive was of lower quality than their current film, thus more unstable. The Society of Motion Picture Engineers' Committee on Preservation of Film, three months after the vault fire, cited "recent and rather extensive film fires" as evidence that existing preservation efforts had failed to adequately address the risk of fire. More heavily reinforced film vaults were suggested, to prevent fires in a single vault from destroying entire archival facilities. Film storage cabinets with ventilation and cooling systems were also proposed, as was further research into improving the quality of cellulose acetate film to encourage its use as a safer replacement for nitrate film. By the 1950s, the use of nitrate film in the United States had been essentially eliminated.
## See also
- America's first motion picture industry
- List of building or structure fires
- List of Fox Film films
- 1965 MGM vault fire, also destroyed many silent and early sound films
- 2008 Universal Studios fire, destroyed thousands of audio master tapes
- Cleveland Clinic fire of 1929, caused by the combustion of X-ray film
|
1,453,473 |
The Body (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
| 1,172,632,344 | null |
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"2001 American television episodes",
"American LGBT-related television episodes",
"Articles containing video clips",
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 5) episodes",
"Grief in fiction",
"Television episodes about death",
"Television episodes directed by Joss Whedon",
"Television episodes set in hospitals",
"Television episodes written by Joss Whedon"
] |
"The Body" is the sixteenth episode of the fifth season of the supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The episode was written and directed by series creator Joss Whedon and originally aired on The WB in the United States on February 27, 2001. In the series, Buffy Summers is a teenager chosen by mystical forces and endowed with superhuman powers to defeat vampires, demons, and other evils in the fictional town of Sunnydale. She is supported in her struggles by a close circle of friends and family, nicknamed the "Scooby Gang". In "The Body", Buffy is powerless as she comes upon her lifeless mother, who has died of a brain aneurysm.
Although Buffy and her friends deal with death every week, often in very gruesome and fantastic ways, in this episode they are bewildered by the natural death of Joyce Summers, the divorced mother of Buffy and her sister Dawn and occasionally a mother figure to their friends. They struggle to comprehend what the loss means to each of them and to the group. Buffy must begin to face her life and her duties as the Slayer without parental support and comfort. The episode was stripped of all music and disorienting effects were included to convey the sense of displacement and loss associated with the death of a close family member.
"The Body" aired to wide acclaim, and has since been ranked by several critics as one of the greatest television episodes ever broadcast.
## Background
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is assisted from season one by her close friends, who collectively refer to themselves as the Scooby Gang: Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), whose primary strength is his devotion to Buffy, and Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), who begins dabbling in witchcraft and grows progressively more powerful. They are mentored by Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy's "Watcher", and joined by Xander's girlfriend Anya Jenkins (Emma Caulfield), who was a vengeance demon until her powers were taken away. Anya is often at a loss to know how to communicate with humans, and her speech is frequently abrupt. In the fourth season, Willow became romantically involved with Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), also a witch.
Each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (often simplified as Buffy) presents an overall theme episodes tie into. Roz Kaveney identifies family and belonging as the overall theme of the fifth season. Buffy's mother Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) begins experiencing headaches at the beginning of the season, once collapsing and requiring hospitalization. She subsequently has a brain tumor removed. She has been recovering well. In the previous episode, "I Was Made to Love You", she receives flowers from a male suitor, which Buffy finds at the end of that episode. The fifth season also introduces Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), Buffy's 14-year-old sister. Each season has a primary antagonist called the Big Bad; in the fifth season this takes the form of a powerful goddess named Glory (Clare Kramer).
## Plot
Buffy arrives home and sees flowers sent by Joyce's suitor. She calls out to her mother, but hears no answer. Buffy sees Joyce lying lifeless on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.
There is a flashback to a Christmas dinner where Joyce and all the Scoobies are present, having a typical lighthearted conversation. The scene snaps back to a hysterical Buffy in the living room, shaking Joyce and screaming at her. She calls for an ambulance and attempts CPR, but to no avail. As the paramedics arrive, Buffy briefly fantasizes about Joyce reviving and recovering in the hospital; only to return to reality where the paramedics are unable to revive Joyce and pronounce her dead. Giles arrives and Buffy tells him not to move the body, shocking herself by using that word. At school, Buffy pulls Dawn out of class into the hall. Through the windows of the art room, the class watches Buffy tell her that Joyce has died. Dawn collapses, wailing.
In Willow's dormitory room, Tara tries to help Willow find a shirt to wear. Xander and Anya arrive. Willow panics, rejecting shirt after shirt, not knowing how to appear for Buffy and Dawn. Anya asks Xander what she is supposed to do; he cannot answer. Xander expresses his desire to find Glory and exact justice, then complains about Joyce's negligent doctors. Anya asks if they will see the body, then if the body will be cut open, and Willow responds angrily. Anya tearfully says she does not understand how to behave, or why Joyce cannot go back into her own body, unable to understand human death. The group then leaves to visit Buffy, Dawn and Giles at the hospital.
In the waiting room outside the morgue, the doctor tells Buffy that Joyce died of an aneurysm suddenly and painlessly. Dawn goes alone to see Joyce's body. While she is there, one of the bodies, now a vampire, gets up. After noticing Dawn has not come back, Buffy goes to look for her. As Buffy kills the vampire, the sheet falls from Joyce's face. Looking at her mother's body, Dawn asks where she went, as she reaches out to touch her cheek.
## Production and writing
From the start of writing the Buffy series, Joss Whedon asserted that it would never have a "very special episode" as in contemporary series Beverly Hills, 90210, The Wonder Years, or Party of Five, where the core cast of characters addresses a single issue (AIDS, drug abuse, or alcoholism, for example) and resolve all the problems at the end. Whedon was not interested in finding a life-affirming lesson for "The Body". Rather, he wanted to capture the isolation and boredom involved in the minutes and hours after finding a loved one has died, what he termed "the black ashes in your mouth numbness of death". He did not intend to resolve any religious or existential questions about the end of life, but wanted to examine the process in which a person becomes a mere body. Whedon's mother, a teacher, also died of a cerebral aneurysm, and he drew on his own experiences, and those of friends and other writers, in constructing the episode. He tried to achieve an "unlovely physicality" in "The Body" to portray the upsetting minutiae involved in attempting to comprehend what is incomprehensible.
Small details became significant: to protect her dignity, Buffy pulls the hem of Joyce's skirt down after it rode up when she attempted CPR; the camera focuses on a breeze through wind chimes while Buffy vomits; to emphasize Buffy's isolation, the scene has no exterior establishing shots of the house.
The opening sequence of "The Body" was also the closing scene of the previous episode, "I Was Made to Love You"; this is the only episode in the series that was first aired without a "Previously on Buffy" lead-in. The Christmas dinner scene was used both to contrast the stark reality of the rest of the episode, and to avoid having the credits appear over the beginning scenes where Buffy is trying to revive her mother.
The episode is presented in four acts, each beginning in total silence and with a close-up shot of Joyce's pale, staring face. Shooting the first act was difficult for Gellar (Buffy). Whedon shot the scene where she finds her mother as one long take, showing her move through the house and calling the paramedics, about seven times. The rest of the scenes in the act were shot in sequence. At the end, Giles arrives and also attempts to revive Joyce, but Buffy blurts, "We're not supposed to move the body!" Both Gellar and Trachtenberg (Dawn) were raised by single women, and Gellar later spoke about the experience of acting something that was very real and close to her, stating, "you try to separate it as best you can and at the same time it adds that extra layer". As soon as the scene was finished with Gellar "at a fever pitch", they restarted it where she comes in the door happily, which Whedon regretted for the emotional range Gellar was required to endure.
Kristine Sutherland (Joyce) was informed during the third season that her character would be killed off, which she accepted because she intended to spend time in Europe. She is absent from most of the fourth season because she was traveling. She reported that the atmosphere on the set of "The Body" was strange and tense because she had been a regular character through the series and she was suddenly playing a corpse. She found the part difficult to play, not only for the stillness, but getting into the make-up, and lying on the morgue table with other bodies.
The most difficult scene for Whedon to film was Willow panicking in her dormitory room. Her obsession about what to wear to visit Buffy was inspired by Whedon's own experiences when he was at a loss for what tie to wear for a friend's funeral. He praised Alyson Hannigan's acting, saying that she was able to be consistently emotional in every take and make him and the crew cry every time. Whedon acknowledged his difficulty speaking on the DVD commentary while watching Hannigan in the scene.
Whedon's rejection of the "very special episode" format impelled him to address the physicality of Willow and Tara's relationship within "The Body". Before this episode, they had held hands and danced on screen, but they had not kissed. A genre of television specials dealing with female homosexuality developed as the "lesbian kiss episode" in the 1990s, where a female character kissed another female but no relationship is further explored. Whedon set out to acknowledge Willow's and Tara's affection without making it the primary focus of the show. For attempting this, he received resistance from the airing network, the WB. Whedon informed them that the kiss between Willow and Tara was "not negotiable". According to Whedon, the conversation about the kiss was approached by the network executives, who were concerned with the number of gay relationships on the network. Whedon countered that the kiss was "true to character" and said he would quit the show if the network forbade it. It was the only time during the series he threatened to do so.
When Willow and Tara first met in the fourth season, the writers did not intend the relationship to be romantic but the actors had such chemistry that, two episodes later, Whedon and the writing team took Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson aside to inform them where it would go. For the rest of the season, the sexual relationship between Willow and Tara was represented metaphorically by witchcraft, and none of the WB executives realized it. In the end, Whedon praised the way the WB handled the display of affection in "The Body", saying "They raised an eyebrow, but they've been great. I give the WB props when it came to the [characters' first] kiss. What I want to show is real affection, and 'The Body' turned out to be the perfect place to put it in. To the network's credit, they not only aired it, but they did not advertise it. I thought that was pretty classy." Stephen Tropiano in Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV writes that this approach was "truly groundbreaking"; no long speech, no huge discovery: "Like Willow, we're made to feel as if her love for Tara is the most natural thing in the world". Tropiano calls it "A simple kiss. A quiet, simple moment. Two lovers kissing. Just like lovers do." Shortly before the end of the scene, while Xander is talking, Willow can be seen silently mouthing "I love you" to Tara.
Audiences reacted more emotionally than Whedon expected to Emma Caulfield's performance. Anya's blunt innocence was similar to a plot twist, as viewers did not expect the depth of sensitivity that she portrayed in her monologue, which Whedon considers "the heart of the experience" and critic Noel Murray reiterates as the "whole point of the episode in bolded, capital letters". Xander's punching the wall and hurting his hand served to give the four in this scene something to concentrate on, to redirect their helplessness, which was another facet of the physicality of dealing with the crisis. Whedon used another long tracking shot from Joyce's face in the morgue following the doctor down the hall to speak with Buffy and the Scoobies to cement the reality of their being so close in proximity, as opposed to cutting shots to give the possibility that it was part of another set located somewhere else. The vampire that attacks Dawn in the morgue was a touch many viewers took to be out of place for the episode. This scene contrasts the more fantasy-related deaths common in the series with Joyce's realistic death. Furthermore, similar to Xander's parking ticket and the sounds of life outside Buffy's house, in Sunnydale vampires are a normal experience, and it was intended to show that life for Buffy continues.
## Themes
### Grief
In Nikki Stafford's analysis, the reactions of Buffy, Dawn, Xander, Willow, Anya, and Tara represent stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief in different parts. Joss Whedon stated on the DVD commentary how surprised he was at the response from viewers who wrote to say that the episode allowed them to accept the death of a close family member, even if they had not acknowledged it for months or years. Joyce's death was the first by natural causes in the series.
In The Psychology of Joss Whedon, two academic psychologists identify the source of Buffy's strength as her mother, paired with Giles' mentorship. Joyce did not know all along that Buffy was a Slayer and had difficulty accepting what her daughter was called to do. She was nonetheless always attentive and available when Buffy's confidence was shaken, and both Joyce's and Giles' devotion to her "gave her the self-assurance to wield her power to its full potential". Joyce served as a parent figure to all of Buffy's friends, whose home lives were often unstable or unloving, thus making her death more poignant to all of them. Willow mentions her parents several times throughout the series, but her father is never seen. Her mother is portrayed only once in "Gingerbread", at first as an academic so preoccupied with her career that she is unable to communicate with Willow, and then—with Joyce—under the spell of a demon and in the throes of moral panic, attempting to burn her own daughter at the stake for being involved in witchcraft. Xander's parents are described by him and those who have been to his house as alcoholic and verbally abusive. Even Anya, severely wanting in social graces, has lost someone she admires and trusts. Giles also grieves for the loss of a friend and—in one episode when the adults fall under a spell making them retreat into an adolescent state—a lover. Lorna Jowett in Sex and the Slayer writes that Joyce represents stability and normality. For the Scoobies, her death destroys the illusion that normal life is trouble-free; it is just as challenging as encountering supernatural forces.
Finding her mother's body, Buffy at first denies what she sees, to the point of imagining alternate realities. Whedon stated that these mini dream sequences were like documentaries; people who find their loved ones dead are desperate to imagine a different, better outcome, and they create fantasies that cause much more pain when they are forced to return to the harshness of reality. Later in the hospital, Buffy imagines what she might have been able to do to save Joyce, although the doctor tells her there was nothing to be done. Willow and Xander express anger and helplessness. Anya, new to mortality and human connections, is childlike in her innocence and questions. Xander's anger and Anya's confusion allow them to be mothered somewhat by Willow, who needs to take care of someone. Dawn is deeply in denial, unable to understand that the woman she thought she had known all her life was gone. Tara, who has gone through the ordeal before, represents the acceptance phase, soothing and helping the others to work through what they are experiencing. Buffy toward the end also begins to see acceptance when she tells Dawn that the body in the morgue is not their mother; Joyce is gone.
The episode also emphasizes another theme of the season: Buffy's response to forces that she cannot fight. Throughout the season she encounters the much more powerful goddess Glory, but Joyce's death leaves her feeling the most helpless. In Joyce's death there is no evil force to combat; she simply dies, and Buffy, with all her power, is ill-equipped to grasp the enormity of her situation. In her shock, Buffy retreats to a childlike state of confusion, calling to her mother when she does not answer: "Mom? ... Mom? ... Mommy?" Emma Caulfield was also given the direction for her voice to rise to a childlike pitch at the end of her speech to give the same effect. According to Buffy scholar Rhonda Wilcox, the themes of maturation and facing adult responsibilities begin with the departure of Buffy's boyfriend Riley Finn six episodes before, and crystallize in the preceding episode in which Buffy realizes she does not need a boyfriend to be fulfilled. At the end of that episode she is confronted with Joyce's death, which is fully explored in "The Body". Facing responsibilities became the major theme of the sixth season. One critic writes, "Drastic as it was, killing off Joyce was the logical way to bring Buffy and Dawn closer together, sever Buffy's last ties to girlhood and emphasize Buffy's inability to accept the limits of her power, a recurring theme this season."
### Reality
Whedon uses several disorienting effects to heighten the reality of the situations in the episode to the point that they seem surreal. The long opening shot of Buffy coming home and finding Joyce was filmed with one hand-held camera in constant movement as she walks through the house to the phone and back to her mother again. The buttons on Buffy's phone are abnormally large, an effect that Whedon added because he experienced it when his mother died. Buffy is so bewildered by the paramedic telling her that Joyce is dead that she can only focus on his mouth in an attempt to understand what he is saying. The camera uses her perspective and only the bottom part of the paramedic's face is in view. Instead of a normal "over-the-shoulder" view, Buffy is shot at the same height as the paramedic's shoulder, barely squeezed into the frame as if to portray her, according to Whedon, as trapped by reality. Kristine Sutherland stated that the script was "amazing", specifically at capturing the detachment: "It's not something you can process. I mean mortality is just not part of your vocabulary when you're that age."
In the hospital, as Buffy listens to the doctor confirm how Joyce died, the doctor says something, but the words "I have to lie to you to make you feel better" are spoken discordantly, as though, according to cinema scholar Katy Stevens, Buffy "constructs what she believes to be an unmentionable truth—her culpability in her mother's death". In the same scene, Dawn is shot with a hand-held camera that drifts, giving her a slightly unreal moment as she struggles to believe, unlike what Buffy already knows, that her mother's body is down the hall on a steel table. The scene with Buffy and Tara sitting in the waiting room was noted by Rhonda Wilcox for its reality in showing Gellar as ragged and distinctly unglamorous, particularly because she had been presented in a specific way to attract male viewers and was a spokeswoman for Maybelline while Buffy aired. Buffy sits with circles under her eyes, unflattering hair, and slumped posture next to Tara, who had been criticized for being too heavy, despite her body type being more typical of women her age.
Foremost of the disorienting effects, to critics and scholars, is Whedon's use of sound and silence. While Buffy performs CPR, she cracks one of Joyce's ribs with a startling snap. After Buffy vomits on the floor, she stands in the back doorway listening to life carrying on: children playing, someone practicing a trumpet, and birds singing. Long pauses between dialogue create gaps that turn awkward as the characters try to think of what to say, made especially notable in a series famous for its rapid banter. The transition between the Christmas dinner scene and the living room scene is abrupt, and the sound of Buffy and Joyce shouting because they dropped a pie on the floor carries over into the silence of Joyce's lifeless face and Buffy standing alone in the living room. This effect is also used when shifting between Buffy's alternate version of her mother being "good as new" in the hospital and the paramedics trying to revive her. In the car on the way to Willow's dormitory, Anya is shot by a camera mounted on the front bumper, separated from the audience by the windshield. Xander, driving, faces the other way; neither of them speak and only the sound of the car can be heard. Joyce Millman at Salon.com writes of the sound issues, "The effect was almost Bergmanesque in its starkness. The spooky stillness and the long, spacey pauses in conversation as characters struggled to articulate their feelings exaggerated the sense of time elongating and standing still."
Katy Stevens notes that the dialogue in "The Body" was recorded with microphones very close to the actors, making variations in their voices—cracks, rises, and whispers—more prominent to the audience, to close the distance between the actors and the viewer. Conversely, the scene in which Dawn is told of Joyce's death was shot through a large classroom window, muffling Dawn's emotional reaction, to isolate Buffy and Dawn from the class and the audience. Several moments of silence follow this scene. Whedon shot the conversation up close several times, filming over-the-shoulder and reaction shots, but eventually went with a more distanced point of view. Michelle Trachtenberg later said of this effect, "obviously you know in the end result there was no sound and I thought that was actually one of the most brilliant ideas [he's] ever had because it allows everyone to sort of attach their own emotional plug into whatever might have happened in your life. I think it allowed the audience to really connect with Dawn for the first time."
Presenting the episode without any non-diegetic music was Whedon's way of denying the audience any comfort, forcing them to discern their own meanings from the characters' actions and words. As two musicologists write about this absence, "Without music's acoustic balm, all our empathetic attention is on the characters and their state of bewilderment ... Music would provide a conceptualization and a catharsis ... but a catharsis at this point would in some measure trivialize the loss." Television critic Gareth McLean writes that this decision is "a move that makes it more courageous than, for instance, ER. There were no soaring strings or plaintive piano to trigger an emotional response. Instead the soundtrack took in the ambient noises of wind chimes, doors squeaking, footsteps on carpets. Conversations were stilted and awkward, but the spaces in between always mattered."
## Reception
Critics praised the episode, and have continued to count it as one of the finest episodes of television ever broadcast. David Bianculli in the New York Daily News commends the acting abilities of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Michelle Trachtenberg, Alyson Hannigan, and Amber Benson. "The Body", according to Bianculli is "Emmy-worthy ... It also will haunt you—but not in the normal way associated with this still-evolving, still-achieving series." Television critic Alesia Redding and editor Joe Vince of the South Bend Tribune write, "I was riveted by this show ... This isn't just one of the best Buffy episodes of all time. It's one of the best episodes of TV of all time." Redding adds, "If you watch this incredible episode and don't recognize it as great TV, you're hopeless ... A 'fantasy' show delivers the most stark and realistic take on death I've ever seen, deftly depicting how a loved one who dies suddenly becomes 'the body'."
Gareth McLean in The Guardian rejects the notion that Buffy is similar to other "schmaltzy American teen show(s)" like Dawson's Creek: "This episode was a brave, honest and wrenching portrayal of death and loss. The way this was handled by Joss Whedon ... was ingenious. Time slowed down and the feeling of numbness was palpable as Buffy and her gang tried to come to terms with Joyce's death." McLean especially appreciated the small details of Buffy protecting Joyce's dignity and the confusion shown by the characters. He concludes, "Joyce may be dead but long live Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Joe Gross in the Austin American-Statesman calls the episode "devastatingly calm" and states that "the entire cast and crew should have received some sort of Emmy for 'The Body'".
At Salon.com, Joyce Millman writes, "there hasn't been a finer hour of drama on TV this year than ... 'The Body' ... You have to hand it to the writers; Joyce's demise came as a complete surprise. In that instant, Buffy's childhood officially ends. Even if Buffy gets stiffed in every other Emmy category this year, 'The Body' should convince the nominating committee that Gellar is for real ... I can't remember the last time I saw a more wrenching portrayal of the shock of loss." Andrew Gilstrap at PopMatters declares it "possibly the finest hour of television I've seen, bar none ... It is an incredibly moving episode, one that finally admits that you don't walk away from death unscathed. It also shows that, for all the group's slaying experience, they really weren't prepared for death when it stole a loved one." Gilstrap went on to say the series did not again address death and grief of this magnitude until, in another shocking turn of events, Tara dies of a stray gunshot in the sixth season. Jerry McCormick in The San Diego Union-Tribune agrees, rating Joyce's death as having the same emotional impact as Tara's in "Seeing Red", both of which he listed as the saddest in the series.
Kira Schlechter in The Patriot-News declares "The Body" "one of the finest episodes of any series ever", stating that the silence and novel cinematography are "remarkable and the writing is brilliant". Buffy and Dawn's conversation at her school, Schlechter says, is "positively wrenching". When the series ended in 2003, Amy Antangelo in the Boston Herald and Siona LaFrance of the New Orleans Times-Picayune both rated the best Buffy episodes giving "The Body" equal billing at the top with "Hush" and "Once More, with Feeling", LaFrance designating the episode an "instant classic". Jonathan Last in The Weekly Standard lists "The Body" eighth out of the ten best Buffy episodes, writing that it is "the series' most difficult episode because it's real—and not real in the way ER or The Practice or Law & Order, all hyper-versions of reality, are real. At some point, most of us will experience a day like Buffy has in 'The Body' and we sense that the writers have gotten nearly every detail of that day—right down to the absence of a musical score—right." In the A.V. Club, Noel Murray also finds small details compelling, such as the camera's focus on the paper towel Buffy uses to cover the vomit on the carpet. He does, however, write that some of the shots "come off a little gimmicky, but the ones that work are so effective that it seems petty to complain that Whedon overdoes it at times. (Besides, different moments are likely to move different people.)"
In addition to praising Gellar's acting, Buffy scholar Ian Shuttleworth comments on the cast and the nuanced numbness and confusion of the characters, paired with the moments of silence in the episode: "It is simply one of the finest pieces of television drama, and the single finest depiction of bereavement in any medium, that I have ever seen." Nikki Stafford, author of Bite Me! The Unofficial Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calls "The Body" "an absolute masterpiece", explaining that it is "hands down the single most terrifying, heart-breaking, painful, and amazing hour of television I have ever seen". She praises the entire cast equally, but highlights Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, and Emma Caulfield. Stafford also praised Kristine Sutherland—as did Whedon—for having to lie motionless with her eyes open for hours upon hours over eight days of filming.
In 2015, Gavin Hetherington of SpoilerTV looked back at the episode fourteen years later. Upon reviewing the episode, he called it "one of the best hours of television" he had ever seen and went on to say "I don't think any other supernatural show has ever had a more beautiful episode than The Body".
When the episode was originally broadcast in the United States on the WB network on February 27, 2001, it received a Nielsen rating of 3.5 and a share of 5, and was watched by 6 million viewers. The episode placed fifth in its timeslot, and 82nd among broadcast television for the week of February 26 – March 4, 2001. It was the most watched program on the WB that night, and the second most watched program that week, trailing 7th Heaven. This was a slight increase from a 3.4 rating and 87th position achieved by the previous episode. The episode was released on DVD on October 28, 2002 in Region 2, and December 9, 2003 in Region 1. Although the episode received positive reviews, it was not nominated for any Emmy awards. Rhonda Wilcox attributes this to the Emmys being a "bastion of conservative popular taste", automatically rejecting television shows in the fantasy/science fiction genres. The script was nominated for a Nebula Award, given for excellence in science fiction/fantasy writing.
|
18,808,717 |
1999 Football League Second Division play-off final
| 1,170,272,192 | null |
[
"1998–99 Football League Second Division",
"1999 Football League play-offs",
"1999 sports events in London",
"Association football penalty shoot-outs",
"EFL League One play-off finals",
"Football League Second Division play-off finals",
"Gillingham F.C. matches",
"Manchester City F.C. matches",
"May 1999 sports events in the United Kingdom"
] |
The 1999 Football League Second Division play-off Final was an association football match which was played on 30 May 1999 at Wembley Stadium, London, between Manchester City and Gillingham. The match was to determine the third and final team to gain promotion from the Football League Second Division, the third tier of English football, to the First Division. The top two teams of the 1998–99 Football League Second Division season gained automatic promotion to the First Division, while the clubs placed from third to sixth in the table took part in play-offs. Manchester City ended the season in third position while Gillingham were fourth. The winners of these semi-finals competed for the final place in the First Division for the 1999–2000 season. In the semi-finals, Gillingham defeated Preston North End and Manchester City beat Wigan Athletic.
It was Gillingham's first match at Wembley Stadium, although Manchester City had played there on eleven previous occasions. The final drew a crowd of just under 77,000, the largest crowd to ever witness a Gillingham match, and was refereed by Mark Halsey. The match was scoreless until the 81st minute, when Carl Asaba gave Gillingham the lead. Robert Taylor added a second goal five minutes later. Kevin Horlock scored for City in the 90th minute to halve the deficit and, in the fifth minute of injury time, Paul Dickov scored an equaliser to make the score 2–2 and send the game into extra time. With no further goals being scored, the match was decided by a penalty shoot-out, which City won 3–1 to gain promotion.
Manchester City's next season saw them secure automatic promotion to the FA Premier League after ending their campaign as runners-up. Gillingham finished their following season in third place in the Second Division and qualified for the play-offs again, where they secured promotion to the First Division with a 3–2 victory against Wigan Athletic in the final.
## Route to the final
The teams finishing in the top two positions in the Second Division, the third tier of the English football league system, in the 1998–99 Football League season gained automatic promotion to the First Division. The teams finishing between third and sixth inclusive competed in the play-offs for the third and final promotion place. Manchester City finished the regular season in third place, two points ahead of fourth-placed Gillingham. Both therefore missed out on the two automatic places for promotion to the First Division and instead took part in the play-offs, along with Preston North End and Wigan Athletic, to determine the third promoted team. Manchester City finished five points behind Walsall (who were promoted in second place) and nineteen behind league winners Fulham.
Gillingham's opponents for their play-off semi-final were Preston North End, with the first match of the two-legged tie taking place at Deepdale in Preston on 16 May 1999. After a goalless first half, David Eyres put Preston ahead in the 54th minute. Robert Taylor equalised with 11 minutes to go and the match ended 1–1. The second leg was held three days later at Priestfield Stadium in Gillingham. Within two minutes of the start of the match, Gillingham took the lead through Andy Hessenthaler: Barry Ashby passed to Carl Asaba who guided the ball to Hessenthaler to score. Gillingham dominated the remainder of the half and, despite pressure from Preston after the interval, they held onto their lead; Vince Bartram, the Gillingham goalkeeper, dived full-length across his goal to keep out a strike from Jon Macken. The match ended 1–0 and Gillingham progressed to the final with a 2–1 aggregate victory.
Manchester City faced Wigan Athletic in their semi-final and the first leg was played at Springfield Park in Wigan on 15 May 1999. Within 20 seconds, the home side had taken the lead: a misunderstanding between Manchester City goalkeeper Nicky Weaver and his team-mate Gerard Wiekens allowed Stuart Barlow to score from 15 yards (14 m). Paul Dickov equalised with 13 minutes of the match remaining and the game ended 1–1. The second leg took place four days later at Maine Road in Manchester. City dominated the early stages and took the lead in the 27th minute through Shaun Goater, who put the ball past Roy Carroll in the Wigan goal with his chest from a Michael Brown cross. With four minutes remaining, a shot by Wigan's Graeme Jones struck the crossbar. The match ended 1–0 and Manchester City progressed to the final 2–1 on aggregate.
## Match
### Background
The match was Gillingham's first appearance at Wembley Stadium, the country's national stadium and the venue reserved for major tournament finals since 1923. Manchester City, by comparison, had played there on eleven previous occasions in FA Cup and League Cup finals. Gillingham were aiming to reach the second tier of English football for the first time in their history, whereas their opponents had spent more than 100 seasons in the top two tiers and had played in the top-level FA Premier League as recently as the 1995–96 season. At the end of the 1997–98 season, City had been relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time.
This season saw the first competitive matches between the sides: the first game, at Maine Road in November 1998, ended in a goalless draw while the return match played at Priestfield the following April ended in a 2–0 victory for Manchester City. Asaba was the season's top scorer for Gillingham with 22 goals (20 in the league and 2 in the Football League Trophy) followed by Taylor, who scored 19 goals in the regular season (16 in the league and 3 in the Football League Trophy). Manchester City's Goater was leading scorer for his side, with 20 goals (17 in the league, 1 in the FA Cup and 2 in the League Cup) followed by Dickov on 13 (10 in the league, 1 in the FA Cup and 2 in the League Cup) and Kevin Horlock with 10 (all in the league).
Gillingham manager Tony Pulis picked the same eleven players in his starting line-up as in the second leg of the semi-final. His opposite number, Joe Royle, made one change, selecting Andy Morrison in place of Tony Vaughan, who was instead named as one of the substitutes. The referee for the match was Mark Halsey, from Welwyn Garden City. The play-off final drew an attendance of 76,935, the largest crowd ever to watch a Gillingham match. It was a new record attendance for the third-tier play-off final and a larger attendance than that for the First Division play-off final the following day. Liam and Noel Gallagher of the rock band Oasis were among the Manchester City fans in attendance.
### Summary
The match kicked off at around 3.00 p.m. on 30 May 1999. In the first minute, Dickov's overhead kick struck Ashby's hand in the Gillingham penalty area but referee Halsey did not award a penalty kick. Goater then saw his shot hit the Gillingham goalpost. Gillingham's first goal-scoring chance came from Mick Galloway, who had a shot from close range saved by a diving Weaver. After 26 minutes, City's Terry Cooke crossed the ball into the penalty area, where Horlock headed it towards goal, but it was saved by Gillingham's Bartram. Both teams had further goal-scoring opportunities in the second half. For Gillingham, Nicky Southall crossed the ball to Mark Saunders, but his shot went wide of the goal, and Asaba was tackled by City's Ian Bishop when in a potential scoring position. After 70 minutes, Weaver saved a strongly-hit shot from Gillingham's Paul Smith, and five minutes later Cooke was again involved for City, as he set up Goater, whose shot went past Bartram but hit the goalpost. The BBC characterised much of the match as "ordinary" and suggested that both teams were somewhat overawed by the high-profile setting.
The match remained scoreless until the 81st minute, when Asaba gave Gillingham the lead. He played a one-two with Smith before shooting past Weaver from around 15 yards (14 m). Taylor added a second goal five minutes later: he found Asaba with a header and received a backheeled return pass before scoring with a shot. With only a minute of normal time left, and two goals behind in the game, many City fans considered that the game had been lost and began to make their way to the exits. However, after Darren Carr had tackled Goater to deny him a goal-scoring opportunity, Horlock scored from the rebound for City to halve the deficit in the 90th minute. In the fifth minute of injury time, Wiekens punted the ball forward, Horlock and Goater helped it on to Dickov who scored an equalising goal. The regulation 90 minutes ended moments later, and with the scores level the game went into extra time. Dickov saw his header gathered by Bartram and although Hodge's cross was blocked by Jeff Whitley's hand, no penalty was awarded. With no goals being scored in the additional 30 minutes, the match and promotion to the First Division would be decided by a penalty shoot-out.
Horlock scored the opening penalty for Manchester City before Weaver saved Smith's spot kick. Dickov missed his penalty after it struck both posts, but Adrian Pennock then missed for Gillingham. Cooke made it 2–0 to City before John Hodge scored for Gillingham. Richard Edghill scored for City to make the score 3–1, meaning that City would win if Guy Butters failed to score with Gillingham's fourth penalty. Weaver saved the defender's kick to give Manchester City victory and secure promotion to the First Division.
### Details
## Post-match
Gillingham manager Pulis was bemused by the amount of time added on by referee Halsey, stating that he "could not believe" the decision to add an additional five minutes. One month after the 1999 final, Pulis was dismissed from his job at Gillingham, amid accusations of gross misconduct on his part, a decision which led to a lengthy and acrimonious court case between Pulis and club owner Paul Scally. Scally was charged with misconduct by the Football Association (the FA), the governing body of the sport in England, after it emerged that he had placed a series of bets on the play-off final in contravention of the rules governing individuals gambling on matches in which they had a vested interest. He appeared at an FA tribunal the following year and was fined £10,000.
Manchester City's next season saw them secure automatic promotion to the FA Premier League after ending their campaign as runners-up. Gillingham, under new manager Peter Taylor, returned to the play-offs in their following season, finishing in third place in the Second Division. They secured promotion to the First Division with a 3–2 victory against Wigan Athletic in the final.
Looking back on the match in 2011, Pulis stated that "[Gillingham] didn't deserve to lose that game ... But it made me a much stronger person. You take things out of defeat as well as victory". Manchester City's 1999 captain, Morrison, contended in 2018 that the club was at risk of going out of business within a year, if not for their match-winning promotion out of the Second Division. Twenty years after the match, Dickov recalled scoring the equalising goal past his friend and the best man at his wedding, Gillingham goalkeeper Bartram: "There is nothing better than getting one over your mate or reminding him of it a few years later". As a result of the subsequent success of the club, the Manchester Evening News described the match as "legendary in City's history" and Dickov's celebration of his goal as "iconic". In 2017, the English Football League (formerly The Football League) described the 1999 final as a "play-off classic". Manchester City fans and other commentators regard the game as a crucial first step in the club's revival from the third tier of English football to yearly contenders for the Premier League championship.
|
52,478,971 |
Yugoslav gunboat Beli Orao
| 1,135,235,040 |
Yugoslav Royal Navy's royal yacht
|
[
"1939 ships",
"Gunboats",
"Naval ships of Yugoslavia captured by Italy during World War II",
"Royal and presidential yachts",
"Ships built by Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico",
"Ships built in Trieste",
"Ships of the Royal Yugoslav Navy",
"World War II auxiliary ships",
"World War II escort ships"
] |
Beli Orao (Serbo-Croatian for 'White Eagle') was a royal yacht built in 1938–39 for the Yugoslav Royal Navy, which intended her to serve as a patrol boat, escort, or guard ship in wartime. Upon completion, she was pressed into service as the admiralty yacht – used by senior admirals for transport and to review fleet exercises. She was captured in April 1941 by the Italians during the World War II Axis invasion of Yugoslavia. The Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) replaced her guns and used her as a gunboat for harbour protection and coastal escort duties, briefly as Alba then Zagabria. She was then used to train anti-submarine warfare specialists from the naval base at La Spezia.
After the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943, Zagabria escaped capture by the Germans and was returned to the Yugoslav Royal Navy-in-exile in December that year. Refitted, and under her original name of Beli Orao, she became a tender for a flotilla of motor gunboats that had been loaned to the Yugoslav Royal Navy-in-exile by the British Royal Navy. In this role she operated out of the British Crown Colony of Malta, and in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the western coast of Italy, and later in the Adriatic Sea off the Yugoslav coast. After the war she remained in Yugoslav hands under the names Biokovo then Jadranka, serving as a naval yacht and as a presidential yacht for the President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito, and also as a dispatch boat. In 1978, she was still in service as a yacht, but was scrapped soon after.
## Background, description and construction
Beli Orao was ordered from Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico (CRDA) at Trieste, Italy, in 1938, originally designed as a guard ship for the Yugoslav Financial Guard. During her construction, the plans were varied several times by the Yugoslav government, so that she was completed as a royal yacht for use by the regent Prince Paul during peacetime. In wartime, she was to be used as a patrol boat, escort, or guard ship. The final design gave her the appearance of a motor yacht or fast passenger ship.
Sources vary on Beli Orao's length overall; both 60.45 metres (198 ft 4 in) and 65 metres (213 ft 3 in) are given. She had a length between perpendiculars of 60.08 m (197 ft 1 in), a beam of 7.95 m (26 ft 1 in) or 8.08 m (26 ft 6 in), and a draught of 2.8 m (9 ft 2 in) or 2.84 m (9 ft 4 in). She had a standard displacement of 567 tonnes (558 long tons), and displaced around 660 t (650 long tons) at full load. She was powered by two CRDA-Sulzer diesel engines driving two propellers. Sources vary on the power of her engines. Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1922–1946 states that they generated 1,900 brake horsepower (1,400 kW), but the naval historian Zvonimir Freivogel gives a higher output of 2,200 bhp (1,600 kW). The engines were designed to drive her at a cruising speed of 17 knots (31 km/h; 20 mph) and a top speed of 18.5 kn (34.3 km/h; 21.3 mph). The size of her crew is unknown. For wartime service she was to be armed with two 40-millimetre (1.6 in) anti-aircraft guns, and two 15 mm (0.59 in) or 7.9 mm (0.31 in) machine guns. Beli Orao, named after the double-headed white eagle on the Yugoslav coat of arms, was laid down on 23 December 1938, launched on 3 June 1939, and completed on 29 October of that year, after World War II had broken out.
## Service history
When Beli Orao was completed, Yugoslavia had not yet been drawn into the war, but she was immediately pressed into service to replace the admiralty yacht Vila, which was used by senior admirals for transport and to review fleet exercises. This changed with the April 1941 German-led Axis invasion of the country. At the time of the invasion, Beli Orao was located at the main navy fleet base at the Bay of Kotor. When the fleet flagship, the obsolete light cruiser Dalmacija, was tasked to participate in an attack against the Italian enclave of Zara, the fleet staff transferred to Beli Orao. After the Italians captured Kotor, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, Rear Admiral Emil Domainko, who was aboard Beli Orao anchored off Krtole within the bay, was summoned to meet with an Italian general whose troops were occupying Kotor. Beli Orao then hosted the negotiations between the fleet staff and the Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) regarding the surrender of the fleet. Domainko was allowed to sail in Beli Orao to Herceg Novi at the mouth of the bay, but returned to Kotor to surrender the ship.
She was put into service with the Regia Marina as a gunboat, initially as Alba (Dawn), although her name was soon changed to Zagabria (the Italian name for Zagreb), probably to compensate for the fact that the Yugoslav destroyer Zagreb had been scuttled by two of her officers instead of being surrendered. Zagabria's two 40 mm guns were replaced with two Oerlikon 20 mm (0.79 in) L/70 guns. At the time, she was one of the largest gunboats operated by the Italians. Like other Italian gunboats, she was employed only on harbour protection and coastal escort duties.
Zagabria was then attached to the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) school at La Spezia on the Ligurian Sea, where she was equipped with hydrophones for detecting submarines. Until the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943, she was used to train ASW specialists for service on corvettes, destroyers and torpedo boats. At the time of the armistice, Zagabria escaped from impending German capture by sailing to Augusta, Sicily. On 19 September, she departed for Valletta in the British Crown Colony of Malta with the Gabbiano-class corvettes Folaga and Gru, but had to turn back to deliver the Italian admiral Prince Aimone, Duke of Aosta, to Taranto in southern Italy, as the terms of the armistice did not allow him to leave the country. On 7 December of that year, Zagabria was returned by the Italians to the Yugoslav Royal Navy-in-exile, and resumed the name Beli Orao. Soon after her return she was visited at Malta by Peter II, the King of Yugoslavia, who was living in exile in the UK with his government.
After refitting in Taranto, Beli Orao was used as a tender for a flotilla of motor gunboats (MGBs) that had been loaned to the Yugoslav Royal Navy-in-exile by the British Royal Navy. In 1944 and 1945, she was stationed at Malta where the British Royal Navy purged the remaining "royalists" from the flotilla, replacing those personnel with politically reliable crew loyal to the Yugoslav Communist Party-led Yugoslav Partisans. The flotilla was then based at Livorno on the western coast of Italy, while it operated in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The flotilla conducted operations in the Adriatic late in the war, under Commander Konstantin Jeremić, based at Ancona on the eastern coast of Italy from 1 April 1945. In mid-April, four MGBs from the flotilla supported the capture of the island of Rab by Partisan troops, but distrust remained between the homegrown Partisan Navy and the remnants of the Yugoslav Royal Navy-in-exile, and even the British apparently limited the information they would share with the flotilla. Beli Orao continued in service until the end of the war. In the post-war communist era, Yugoslav historians criticised or ignored the operations of the flotilla, and little historical research has been conducted on the subject.
After the war she was renamed Biokovo, and in 1949 she was renamed Jadranka, serving as an armed yacht in the Yugoslav Navy and also as a presidential yacht for the President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. In 1969 she was serving as a dispatch boat, and was deleted from the naval register in 1976 or 1977, after which a new Jadranka was built as a presidential yacht. In 1978, the original Jadranka was still in service as a yacht, but was scrapped soon after. Her ship's bell, wheel and the Yugoslav coat of arms she carried during her service are preserved at the Croatian Maritime Museum in Split.
|
206,947 |
H II region
| 1,170,118,346 |
Large, low-density interstellar cloud of partially ionized gas
|
[
"H II regions",
"Nebulae"
] |
An H II region or HII region is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. It is typically in a molecular cloud of partially ionized gas in which star formation has recently taken place, with a size ranging from one to hundreds of light years, and density from a few to about a million particles per cubic centimetre. The Orion Nebula, now known to be an H II region, was observed in 1610 by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc by telescope, the first such object discovered.
The regions may be of any shape because the distribution of the stars and gas inside them is irregular. The short-lived blue stars created in these regions emit copious amounts of ultraviolet light that ionize the surrounding gas. H II regions—sometimes several hundred light-years across—are often associated with giant molecular clouds. They often appear clumpy and filamentary, sometimes showing intricate shapes such as the Horsehead Nebula. H II regions may give birth to thousands of stars over a period of several million years. In the end, supernova explosions and strong stellar winds from the most massive stars in the resulting star cluster disperse the gases of the H II region, leaving a cluster of stars which have formed.
H II regions can be observed at considerable distances in the universe, and the study of extragalactic H II regions is important in determining the distances and chemical composition of galaxies. Spiral and irregular galaxies contain many H II regions, while elliptical galaxies are almost devoid of them. In spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way, H II regions are concentrated in the spiral arms, while in irregular galaxies they are distributed chaotically. Some galaxies contain huge H II regions, which may contain tens of thousands of stars. Examples include the 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud and NGC 604 in the Triangulum Galaxy.
## Terminology
The term H II is pronounced "H two" by astronomers. "H" is the chemical symbol for hydrogen, and "II" is the Roman numeral for 2. It is customary in astronomy to use the Roman numeral I for neutral atoms, II for singly-ionised—H II is H<sup>+</sup> in other sciences—III for doubly-ionised, e.g. O III is O<sup>2+</sup>, etc. H II, or H<sup>+</sup>, consists of free protons. An H I region consists of neutral atomic hydrogen, and a molecular cloud of molecular hydrogen, H<sub>2</sub>. In spoken discussion with non-astronomers there is sometimes confusion between the identical spoken forms of "H II" and "H<sub>2</sub>".
## Observations
A few of the brightest H II regions are visible to the naked eye. However, none seem to have been noticed before the advent of the telescope in the early 17th century. Even Galileo did not notice the Orion Nebula when he first observed the star cluster within it (previously cataloged as a single star, θ Orionis, by Johann Bayer). The French observer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc is credited with the discovery of the Orion Nebula in 1610. Since that early observation large numbers of H II regions have been discovered in the Milky Way and other galaxies.
William Herschel observed the Orion Nebula in 1774, and described it later as "an unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns". In early days astronomers distinguished between "diffuse nebulae" (now known to be H II regions), which retained their fuzzy appearance under magnification through a large telescope, and nebulae that could be resolved into stars, now known to be galaxies external to our own.
Confirmation of Herschel's hypothesis of star formation had to wait another hundred years, when William Huggins together with his wife Mary Huggins turned his spectroscope on various nebulae. Some, such as the Andromeda Nebula, had spectra quite similar to those of stars, but turned out to be galaxies consisting of hundreds of millions of individual stars. Others looked very different. Rather than a strong continuum with absorption lines superimposed, the Orion Nebula and other similar objects showed only a small number of emission lines. In planetary nebulae, the brightest of these spectral lines was at a wavelength of 500.7 nanometres, which did not correspond with a line of any known chemical element. At first it was hypothesized that the line might be due to an unknown element, which was named nebulium—a similar idea had led to the discovery of helium through analysis of the Sun's spectrum in 1868. However, while helium was isolated on earth soon after its discovery in the spectrum of the sun, nebulium was not. In the early 20th century, Henry Norris Russell proposed that rather than being a new element, the line at 500.7 nm was due to a familiar element in unfamiliar conditions.
Interstellar matter, considered dense in an astronomical context, is at high vacuum by laboratory standards. Physicists showed in the 1920s that in gas at extremely low density, electrons can populate excited metastable energy levels in atoms and ions, which at higher densities are rapidly de-excited by collisions. Electron transitions from these levels in doubly ionized oxygen give rise to the 500.7 nm line. These spectral lines, which can only be seen in very low density gases, are called forbidden lines. Spectroscopic observations thus showed that planetary nebulae consisted largely of extremely rarefied ionised oxygen gas (OIII).
During the 20th century, observations showed that H II regions often contained hot, bright stars. These stars are many times more massive than the Sun, and are the shortest-lived stars, with total lifetimes of only a few million years (compared to stars like the Sun, which live for several billion years). Therefore, it was surmised that H II regions must be regions in which new stars were forming. Over a period of several million years, a cluster of stars will form in an H II region, before radiation pressure from the hot young stars causes the nebula to disperse.
## Origin and lifetime
The precursor to an H II region is a giant molecular cloud (GMC). A GMC is a cold (10–20 K) and dense cloud consisting mostly of molecular hydrogen. GMCs can exist in a stable state for long periods of time, but shock waves due to supernovae, collisions between clouds, and magnetic interactions can trigger it is collapse. When this happens, via a process of collapse and fragmentation of the cloud, stars are born (see stellar evolution for a lengthier description).
As stars are born within a GMC, the most massive will reach temperatures hot enough to ionise the surrounding gas. Soon after the formation of an ionising radiation field, energetic photons create an ionisation front, which sweeps through the surrounding gas at supersonic speeds. At greater and greater distances from the ionising star, the ionisation front slows, while the pressure of the newly ionised gas causes the ionised volume to expand. Eventually, the ionisation front slows to subsonic speeds, and is overtaken by the shock front caused by the expansion of the material ejected from the nebula. The H II region has been born.
The lifetime of an H II region is of the order of a few million years. Radiation pressure from the hot young stars will eventually drive most of the gas away. In fact, the whole process tends to be very inefficient, with less than 10 percent of the gas in the H II region forming into stars before the rest is blown off. Contributing to the loss of gas are the supernova explosions of the most massive stars, which will occur after only 1–2 million years.
## Destruction of stellar nurseries
Stars form in clumps of cool molecular gas that hide the nascent stars. It is only when the radiation pressure from a star drives away its 'cocoon' that it becomes visible. The hot, blue stars that are powerful enough to ionize significant amounts of hydrogen and form H II regions will do this quickly, and light up the region in which they just formed. The dense regions which contain younger or less massive still-forming stars and which have not yet blown away the material from which they are forming are often seen in silhouette against the rest of the ionised nebula. Bart Bok and E. F. Reilly searched astronomical photographs in the 1940s for "relatively small dark nebulae", following suggestions that stars might be formed from condensations in the interstellar medium; they found several such "approximately circular or oval dark objects of small size", which they referred to as "globules", since referred to as Bok globules. Bok proposed at the December 1946 Harvard Observatory Centennial Symposia that these globules were likely sites of star formation. It was confirmed in 1990 that they were indeed stellar birthplaces. The hot young stars dissipate these globules, as the radiation from the stars powering the H II region drives the material away. In this sense, the stars which generate H II regions act to destroy stellar nurseries. In doing so, however, one last burst of star formation may be triggered, as radiation pressure and mechanical pressure from supernova may act to squeeze globules, thereby enhancing the density within them.
The young stars in H II regions show evidence for containing planetary systems. The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed hundreds of protoplanetary disks (proplyds) in the Orion Nebula. At least half the young stars in the Orion Nebula appear to be surrounded by disks of gas and dust, thought to contain many times as much matter as would be needed to create a planetary system like the Solar System.
## Characteristics
### Physical properties
H II regions vary greatly in their physical properties. They range in size from so-called ultra-compact (UCHII) regions perhaps only a light-year or less across, to giant H II regions several hundred light-years across. Their size is also known as the Stromgren radius and essentially depends on the intensity of the source of ionising photons and the density of the region. Their densities range from over a million particles per cm<sup>3</sup> in the ultra-compact H II regions to only a few particles per cm<sup>3</sup> in the largest and most extended regions. This implies total masses between perhaps 100 and 10<sup>5</sup> solar masses.
There are also "ultra-dense H II" regions (UDHII).
Depending on the size of an H II region there may be several thousand stars within it. This makes H II regions more complicated than planetary nebulae, which have only one central ionising source. Typically H II regions reach temperatures of 10,000 K. They are mostly ionised gases with weak magnetic fields with strengths of several nanoteslas. Nevertheless, H II regions are almost always associated with a cold molecular gas, which originated from the same parent GMC. Magnetic fields are produced by these weak moving electric charges in the ionised gas, suggesting that H II regions might contain electric fields.
A number of H II regions also show signs of being permeated by a plasma with temperatures exceeding 10,000,000 K, sufficiently hot to emit X-rays. X-ray observatories such as Einstein and Chandra have noted diffuse X-ray emissions in a number of star-forming regions, notably the Orion Nebula, Messier 17, and the Carina Nebula. The hot gas is likely supplied by the strong stellar winds from O-type stars, which may be heated by supersonic shock waves in the winds, through collisions between winds from different stars, or through colliding winds channeled by magnetic fields. This plasma will rapidly expand to fill available cavities in the molecular clouds due to the high speed of sound in the gas at this temperature. It will also leak out through holes in the periphery of the H II region, which appears to be happening in Messier 17.
Chemically, H II regions consist of about 90% hydrogen. The strongest hydrogen emission line, the H-alpha line at 656.3 nm, gives H II regions their characteristic red colour. (This emission line comes from excited un-ionized hydrogen.) H-beta is also emitted, but at approximately 1/3 of the intensity of H-alpha. Most of the rest of an H II region consists of helium, with trace amounts of heavier elements. Across the galaxy, it is found that the amount of heavy elements in H II regions decreases with increasing distance from the galactic centre. This is because over the lifetime of the galaxy, star formation rates have been greater in the denser central regions, resulting in greater enrichment of those regions of the interstellar medium with the products of nucleosynthesis.
### Numbers and distribution
H II regions are found only in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and irregular galaxies. They are not seen in elliptical galaxies. In irregular galaxies, they may be dispersed throughout the galaxy, but in spirals they are most abundant within the spiral arms. A large spiral galaxy may contain thousands of H II regions.
The reason H II regions rarely appear in elliptical galaxies is that ellipticals are believed to form through galaxy mergers. In galaxy clusters, such mergers are frequent. When galaxies collide, individual stars almost never collide, but the GMCs and H II regions in the colliding galaxies are severely agitated. Under these conditions, enormous bursts of star formation are triggered, so rapid that most of the gas is converted into stars rather than the normal rate of 10% or less.
Galaxies undergoing such rapid star formation are known as starburst galaxies. The post-merger elliptical galaxy has a very low gas content, and so H II regions can no longer form. Twenty-first century observations have shown that a very small number of H II regions exist outside galaxies altogether. These intergalactic H II regions may be the remnants of tidal disruptions of small galaxies, and in some cases may represent a new generation of stars in a galaxy's most recently accreted gas.
### Morphology
H II regions come in an enormous variety of sizes. They are usually clumpy and inhomogeneous on all scales from the smallest to largest. Each star within an H II region ionises a roughly spherical region—known as a Strömgren sphere—of the surrounding gas, but the combination of ionisation spheres of multiple stars within a H II region and the expansion of the heated nebula into surrounding gases creates sharp density gradients that result in complex shapes. Supernova explosions may also sculpt H II regions. In some cases, the formation of a large star cluster within an H II region results in the region being hollowed out from within. This is the case for NGC 604, a giant H II region in the Triangulum Galaxy. For a H II region which cannot be resolved, some information on the spatial structure (the electron density as a function of the distance from the center, and an estimate of the clumpiness) can be inferred by performing an inverse Laplace transform on the frequency spectrum.
## Notable regions
Notable Galactic H II regions include the Orion Nebula, the Eta Carinae Nebula, and the Berkeley 59 / Cepheus OB4 Complex. The Orion Nebula, about 500 pc (1,500 light-years) from Earth, is part of OMC-1, a giant molecular cloud that, if visible, would be seen to fill most of the constellation of Orion. The Horsehead Nebula and Barnard's Loop are two other illuminated parts of this cloud of gas. The Orion Nebula is actually a thin layer of ionised gas on the outer border of the OMC-1 cloud. The stars in the Trapezium cluster, and especially θ<sup>1</sup> Orionis, are responsible for this ionisation.
The Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way at about 50 kpc (160 thousand light years), contains a giant H II region called the Tarantula Nebula. Measuring at about 200 pc (650 light years) across, this nebula is the most massive and the second-largest H II region in the Local Group. It is much bigger than the Orion Nebula, and is forming thousands of stars, some with masses of over 100 times that of the sun—OB and Wolf-Rayet stars. If the Tarantula Nebula were as close to Earth as the Orion Nebula, it would shine about as brightly as the full moon in the night sky. The supernova SN 1987A occurred in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula.
Another giant H II region—NGC 604 is located in M33 spiral galaxy, which is at 817 kpc (2.66 million light years). Measuring at approximately 240 × 250 pc (800 × 830 light years) across, NGC 604 is the second-most-massive H II region in the Local Group after the Tarantula Nebula, although it is slightly larger in size than the latter. It contains around 200 hot OB and Wolf-Rayet stars, which heat the gas inside it to millions of degrees, producing bright X-ray emissions. The total mass of the hot gas in NGC 604 is about 6,000 Solar masses.
## Current issues
As with planetary nebulae, estimates of the abundance of elements in H II regions are subject to some uncertainty. There are two different ways of determining the abundance of metals (metals in this case are elements other than hydrogen and helium) in nebulae, which rely on different types of spectral lines, and large discrepancies are sometimes seen between the results derived from the two methods. Some astronomers put this down to the presence of small temperature fluctuations within H II regions; others claim that the discrepancies are too large to be explained by temperature effects, and hypothesise the existence of cold knots containing very little hydrogen to explain the observations.
The full details of massive star formation within H II regions are not yet well known. Two major problems hamper research in this area. First, the distance from Earth to large H II regions is considerable, with the nearest H II (California Nebula) region at 300 pc (1,000 light-years); other H II regions are several times that distance from Earth. Secondly, the formation of these stars is deeply obscured by dust, and visible light observations are impossible. Radio and infrared light can penetrate the dust, but the youngest stars may not emit much light at these wavelengths.
## See also
- Emission nebula
- Reflection nebula
- Astronomical object
- H I region
- Planetary nebula
- Protoplanetary nebula
- Astronomical spectroscopy
- Interstellar medium
|
28,100,063 |
Speak Now
| 1,173,899,161 |
2010 album by Taylor Swift
|
[
"2010 albums",
"Albums produced by Nathan Chapman (record producer)",
"Albums produced by Taylor Swift",
"Big Machine Records albums",
"Canadian Country Music Association Top Selling Album albums",
"Concept albums",
"Country pop albums",
"Pop rock albums by American artists",
"Taylor Swift albums"
] |
Speak Now is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 25, 2010, through Big Machine Records. Swift wrote the album entirely herself within two years while touring to promote her second studio album, Fearless (2008).
Inspired by Swift's transition from adolescence into adulthood, Speak Now is a loose concept album consisting of confessional songs mostly about love and heartbreak that explore past relationships and depart from the youthful optimism on her past albums. Some tracks were inspired by her rising stardom and public experience, and they have lyrics about confrontation against her critics and adversaries. Produced by Swift and Nathan Chapman, the album combines country pop, pop rock, and power pop. Its songs incorporate prominent rock stylings, and their melodies are characterized by acoustic instruments intertwined with chiming electric guitars, dramatic strings, and drums.
After the album's release, Swift embarked on the Speak Now World Tour from February 2011 to March 2012. The album was supported by six singles, including the US Billboard Hot 100 top-ten singles "Mine" and "Back to December", and the US Hot Country Songs number ones "Sparks Fly" and "Ours". Speak Now peaked atop charts and received multi-platinum certifications in Australia (double platinum), Canada (triple platinum), and New Zealand (triple platinum). In the US, it sold one million copies within its first release week, spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, and was certified six-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Music critics generally praised Speak Now for what they deemed radio-friendly tunes and an emotional engagement to Swift's audience. Some critics found the album to showcase Swift's grown-up perspective, but others took issue with the tracks about vengeance as shallow. At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012, Speak Now was nominated for Best Country Album, and its third single "Mean" won Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. The album appeared in 2010s decade-end lists by Billboard and Spin, and on Rolling Stone's "50 Best Female Albums of All Time" in 2012. After a dispute regarding the ownership of Swift's back catalog, she re-recorded Speak Now and released it as Speak Now (Taylor's Version) on July 7, 2023.
## Background
American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released her second studio album Fearless through Nashville-based Big Machine Records in November 2008. The album spent 11 weeks at number one on the US Billboard 200, the longest chart run for a female country music artist. It was the best-selling album of 2009 in the US and then-20-year-old Swift the youngest artist to have an annual best-seller since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking album sales in 1991. Two of the album's singles, "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", performed well on both country and pop radio and brought Swift to mainstream prominence. "Love Story" was the first country song to reach number one on the Mainstream Top 40 chart and "You Belong with Me" was the first country song to top the all-genre Radio Songs chart. At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards in February 2010, Fearless won Album of the Year and Best Country Album, and its single "White Horse" won Best Female Country Vocal Performance and Best Country Song.
The success of Fearless made Swift one of country music's biggest stars to crossover into the mainstream market. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where Swift won Best Female Video for "You Belong with Me", rapper Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech; the incident received widespread media coverage and became known as "Kanyegate". At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, Swift sang "You Belong with Me" and "Rhiannon" with Stevie Nicks; some critics commented Swift performed with weak vocals. MTV News commented the MTV Awards incident transformed Swift into a "bona-fide mainstream celebrity", and The New York Times said it was refreshing to see a talented singer-songwriter like Swift "make the occasional flub". Swift began writing for her third studio album immediately after she released Fearless and continued during her Fearless Tour in 2009 and 2010.
## Writing and lyrics
Because of her extensive touring schedule, Swift wrote her third album alone: "I'd get my best ideas at 3:00 a.m. in Arkansas, and I didn't have a co-writer around so I would just finish it. That would happen again in New York and then again in Boston and that would happen again in Nashville." Inspired by her growth into adulthood, she conceived Speak Now as a loose concept album about the things she wanted to tell certain people she had met but never had a chance to. As with her songwriting on previous albums, Swift strove to convey emotional honesty with details as specifically as possible, believing it is important for a songwriter to do so. She described her songs as "diary entries" about her emotions that helped her navigate adulthood. Swift chose not to follow the trend of making increasingly sexualized music by artists of her age and believed such a path would be incongruent with her artistic vision.
Departing from Fearless's theme of fairy tales and starry-eyed romance, Speak Now explores introspection and backward-looking reflections on relationships. By avoiding sexual references in its songs, the album kept Swift's "good-girl" image intact. Some tracks were inspired by Swift's public experience, including past relationships with high-profile celebrities, which received media attention during the album's promotional rollout. The confessional lyrics of Speak Now are more direct and confrontational than those on Swift's past albums. On "Back to December", she asks an ex-lover to forgive her wrongdoings. Swift wrote the title track after hearing a friend's ex-boyfriend was marrying another woman; in the lyrics, the protagonist crashes the ex-boyfriend's wedding and tries to halt it. "Dear John" narrates a devastating relationship of a 19-year-old female narrator who accuses a much-older man of manipulating her with "dark, twisted games". Swift's encounter with an ex-lover at an awards show, where they ignored each other despite Swift feeling a need to speak to him inspired "The Story of Us". On "Better than Revenge", Swift affirms vengeance against a romantic rival who is known for "the things she does on the mattress".
Romantic optimism is another major theme of the album. The opening track "Mine" is about Swift's hope of attaining happiness despite her tendency to "run from love" to avoid heartbreak. It was the first song she included on the track list because it represents her then-new perspective of romance. Swift had written "Sparks Fly"—a song about dangerous hints of love at first sight—before she released her 2006 self-titled debut album. She re-recorded the song for Speak Now after she received fan request to release it at the 2010 CMA Music Festival. "Enchanted" describes the aftermath of an encounter with a special person without knowing whether the infatuation would be reciprocated. "Haunted" is about romantic obsession and "Last Kiss" explores the lingering feelings after a breakup. On "Long Live", Swift expresses gratitude to her fans and bandmates. The lyrics of "Enchanted" and "Long Live" incorporate high-school-prom and fairy-tale imagery that recalls the youthful optimism of Fearless.
Besides love and romance, Swift wrote about self-perception. "Never Grow Up" is a contemplation of her childhood, adulthood, and future. The self-aware "Mean", in which Swift sings about facing a man who had tried to take her down, was inspired by her detractors. Because of her confessional songwriting, the media became invested in Swift's personal life and believed each song is about a real person: an ex-lover, a friend, or an enemy. Although Swift was interested to hear the response from the people to whom she dedicated the songs, she did not publicly name them and believed they would realize this themselves. She did reveal that Kanye West, who interrupted Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, was the subject of "Innocent". In the track, Swift sings about forgiving a man who wronged her; according to Esquire, the track can be interpreted as "a simple lament of a lost love, or a former friend being forgiven".
Swift wrote as many as 25 songs and by early 2010, she had begun to select songs for the album. To ensure the album would be coherent, she played the songs to her family, friends, and producer Nathan Chapman, who had produced for Swift since the recording of her self-titled debut album in 2006. Swift chose Enchanted as a working title but Big Machine Records executive Scott Borchetta recommended Swift choose a different title, deeming Enchanted unfit for the album's mature perspective. She settled on the title Speak Now because she thought it best captures the album's essence: "I think it's such a metaphor, that moment where it's almost too late, and you've got to either say what it is you are feeling or deal with the consequences forever ... And this album seemed like the opportunity for me to speak now or forever hold my peace." Swift finalized the track list by June 2010.
## Composition
### Production
Swift recorded much of Speak Now with Chapman at his Pain in the Art Studio in Nashville. Although Fearless's commercial success allowed Swift to engage a larger group of producers, she worked solely with Chapman because she believed they had a productive relationship. The recording process started with a demo; Swift recorded vocals and played guitar, and Chapman sang background vocals and played other instruments. After arranging the demos, Swift and Chapman approached engineers and other musicians to tweak some elements, including overdubs and programmed drums. The first track Chapman produced with Swift on Speak Now is "Mine", which they recorded within five hours.
Because of his artistic autonomy, Chapman said he was responsible for "60 percent of the music on the album, including 90 percent of the guitars". Much of his production for Speak Now is identical to that for Fearless; he programmed the drums with Toontrack's software Superior Drummer, played drums on the Roland Fantom G6 keyboard, added electric guitars to the arrangements, recorded Swift's vocals with an Avantone CV12 microphone and his background vocals with a Shure SM57, produced the bass with an Avalon VT737 preamplifier, and used Endless Audio's CLASP System to synchronize his editing on Pro Tools and Logic. Because of Swift's country-music vision, Chapman asked other musicians, mostly in Nashville, to replace his programmed drums with live drumming and add acoustic instruments such as fiddle. For instance, Chapman asked Steve Marcantonio to cut down programmed drums on "Mine" at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. For some tracks, including "Back to December", Swift and her team went to Capitol Studios in Los Angeles to record string orchestration.
After recording finished, Justin Niebank mixed the album on Pro Tools at Blackbird Studios; he had mixed some tracks on Fearless. Within three weeks, Niebank finished mixing 17 tracks including 14 on the standard edition and three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition. Because Swift wanted Speak Now to be a direct communication with her audience, Niebank infused monoaural reverberation inspired by 1950s and 1960s music in the mix to evoke a "vintage" and "retro" vibe that, according to Niebank, brought a sense of authenticity. Music engineer Hank Williams mastered the recordings. Because much of Speak Now was recorded and mixed in Nashville, Niebank believed the album stood out among popular records that were manipulated with contemporaneous technologies Auto-Tune and Melodyne. Although Chapman was responsible for much of the production, he said Swift's co-production credit is "not a vanity credit. We were really a team, very collaborative."
### Music
Speak Now follows the country pop production of Fearless and incorporates prominent elements of mainstream pop music, more so than Fearless. Critics debated the album's genre. Paste described the album as a blend of country and radio-friendly pop tunes with climatic build-ups and catchy hooks. Entertainment Weekly classified the album as pop and commented the only country elements are its "smattering of banjo pluck and dainty twang". According to BBC Music, Speak Now veers towards pop rock. Ann Powers, in a review for the Los Angeles Times, found the album borderline alternative rock and bubblegum pop with its songs experimenting with styles from "lush strings of Céline-style kitsch-pop to Americana banjo to countrypolitan electric guitar". Now described Speak Now as "slickly produced power pop".
Critics noted the banjo-led bluegrass track "Mean" as the album's pure country song. Much of the album consists of uptempo country pop melodies, exemplified by the opening track "Mine". Many tracks explore rock stylings that draw from rock music of the late 1970s through the 1980s, and their melodies incorporate chiming guitars, loud drums, and powerful choruses. "Sparks Fly" has an arena rock production with guitars and subtle fiddles. The title track is an acoustic guitar-driven country pop song with a 1950s rock chorus. "The Story of Us" and "Better than Revenge" are electric-guitar-driven pop punk songs; the former contains influences of dance-pop and new wave. The arena-rock and goth-rock-inspired "Haunted" incorporates a dramatic recurring string section. The closing track "Long Live" is a heartland rock song featuring girl-group harmonies and chiming rock guitars.
The remaining tracks of Speak Now are ballads. "Back to December" is a gentle, orchestral, string-laden ballad. Speak Now's longest track, "Dear John" at six minutes and 43 seconds, is a slow-burning, bluesy, country-pop song with electric guitar licks. The guitar ballad "Never Grow Up" incorporates an understated production that accompanies its wistful lyrics. On "Enchanted", the acoustic guitar crescendos after each refrain and leads up to a harmony-layered coda at the end. The tracks "Innocent" and "Last Kiss" incorporate sparse instruments; the latter is a slow-tempo waltz with breathy vocals. "If This Was a Movie", a bonus song on the deluxe edition and the only song not written solely by Swift, is a fast-paced ballad with a recurring guitar riff and simple harmonies.
## Release and promotion
Swift announced Speak Now on July 20, 2010, in a live stream on Ustream. Big Machine Records released the lead single "Mine" to US country radio and digital download sites on August 4, 2010. The single peaked at number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 and was certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It reached number six in Japan, number seven in Canada, and number nine in Australia. On August 18, Swift released the album's cover art, which depicts Swift with curly hair and red lipstick twirling in a deep-purple gown. On September 15, she announced a Target-exclusive deluxe edition whose cover art is identical to that of the standard edition but the gown is red instead of purple. Starting from October 4, 2010, Big Machine released one Speak Now track each week on the iTunes Store as part of a three-week countdown campaign; the title track was released on October 5, followed by "Back to December" on October 12 and "Mean" on October 19. On October 22, Xfinity premiered a preview of "The Story of Us".
Big Machine released the standard and deluxe editions of Speak Now on October 25, 2010. The Target-exclusive CD+DVD edition contains 14 songs of the standard; the bonus tracks "Ours", "If This Was a Movie", and "Superman"; acoustic versions of "Back to December" and "Haunted"; a "pop mix" of "Mine"; a 30-minute behind-the-scenes video for "Mine"; and the music video for "Mine". The deluxe edition was released to other retailers on January 17, 2012. To bolster sales of the album, Swift had partnerships with Starbucks, Sony Electronics, Walmart, and Jakks Pacific. In October 2011, Swift partnered with Elizabeth Arden, Inc. to release her fragrance brand "Wonderstruck", whose name references the lyrics of "Enchanted".
To further promote Speak Now, Swift appeared on magazine covers and conducted press interviews. She performed "Innocent" at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Her other performances at awards shows include the Country Music Association Awards and the American Music Awards in 2010; the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Country Music Association Awards in 2011. She also performed at Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame. In Europe, Swift performed on BBC Radio 2 and X Factor Italy, and she had interviews with BBC Radio 1 in the UK and NRJ in France. She embarked on a promotional tour in Japan, where she appeared on variety show SMAPxSMAP and music program Music Station. Her round of American television shows included Today, Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Live with Regis and Kelly, and Dancing with the Stars. She also gave private concerts to contest winners and played a semi-private concert for JetBlue at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
After "Mine", Swift released five more singles from Speak Now. "Back to December" and "Mean", which were earlier available for digital download, were released to US country radio on November 15, 2010, and March 13, 2011, respectively. The two singles peaked at numbers seven and ten, respectively, in Canada, and "Back to December" reached number six on the US Billboard Hot 100. "The Story of Us" was released to US pop radio on April 19, 2011. "Sparks Fly" and "Ours" were released to US country radio on July 18 and December 5, 2011, respectively. Prior to its single release, "Ours", together with the other deluxe edition tracks, was released for digital download via the iTunes Store on November 8, 2011. "Sparks Fly" and "Ours" reached the top 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and peaked atop the US Hot Country Songs chart. The RIAA certified all six of the album's singles at least platinum; "Back to December" and "Mean" sold over two million copies each, and they were respectively certified double-platinum and triple-platinum.
On November 23, 2010, Swift announced the Speak Now World Tour, which started in Singapore on February 9, 2011. The tour visited Asia and Europe before the North American leg started in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 27, 2011. Within two days of announcement, the tour sold 625,000 tickets. By April 2011, Swift had added another 16 shows to the North American leg. After the final US concert in New York City on November 22, 2011, the Speak Now World Tour had covered 80 sold-out North American shows. On August 10, 2011, Swift released a music video for "Sparks Fly" that includes footage from the tour. She released the album Speak Now World Tour – Live on November 21, 2011. In December 2011, Swift announced an extension of the tour to Australia and New Zealand starting in March 2012. Concluding on March 18, 2012, the Speak Now World Tour had covered 110 shows, visited 18 countries, and grossed \$123.7 million.
## Commercial performance
Before Speak Now's release, Big Machine shipped two million copies of the album to stores in the US. In the week ending November 13, 2010, the album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, with first-week sales of 1,047,000 copies. It marked the highest single-week tally for a female country artist and became the first album since Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III (2008) to sell over one million copies in its first week of release. Media publications including Billboard, MTV, and The New York Times noted Speak Now's first-week sales figures in the context of declining record sales brought about by the emergence of music download platforms. According to The New York Times, although the music industry in 2010 saw album sales "[plunging] by more than 50 percent in the last decade", the album's strong sales proved Swift "has transcended the limitations of genre and become a pop megastar". The Guinness World Records in 2010 recognized Speak Now as the fastest-selling album in the US by a female country artist.
In Speak Now's first charting week, 11 of the standard edition's 14 tracks charted on the Billboard Hot 100, making Swift the first female artist to have 11 songs on the Hot 100 at the same time. After the digital release of the deluxe edition tracks in November 2011, "If This Was a Movie" charted at number 10 on the Hot 100, making Swift the first artist to have eight songs debut in the top 10. With this achievement, Speak Now had three songs peaking in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100—"Mine", "Back to December", and "If This Was a Movie". The album spent six non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200. Speak Now was the third-best-selling album of 2010 in the US with sales of 2,960,000 copies. By October 2022, it had sold 4,800,000 copies in the US. The RIAA certified the album six-times platinum, which denotes six million album-equivalent units based on sales, song downloads, and streaming.
Speak Now was a chart success in the wider English-speaking world: it peaked atop the albums charts of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and peaked at number six in Ireland and the UK. The album was certified double-platinum in Australia and triple-platinum in Canada and New Zealand. In certain European markets, it charted at number four in Norway, number six in Japan, number eight in Mexico, and number ten in Spain. After Swift embarked on the Eras Tour (2023–2024), Speak Now resurged in popularity in the UK: it re-entered the top 40 (at number 23) of the UK Albums Chart for the week ending May 18, 2023, which was its first top-40 appearance since November 2010.
## Critical reception
Speak Now received generally positive reviews from contemporaneous critics. Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, gave the album an average score of 77 that was based on 20 reviews. AnyDecentMusic? compiled 10 reviews and gave it an average score of 6.9 out of 10.
Most critics approved of Swift's grown-up perspective on love and relationships. Reviews published in AllMusic, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and Rolling Stone complimented the songs for portraying emotions with engaging narratives and vivid details. In AllMusic's review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote; "[Swift] writes from the perspective of the moment yet has the skill of a songwriter beyond her years". American Songwriter approved of Swift's self-penned material and artistic control. In his consumer guide, Robert Christgau commented although the album is "overlong and overworked", the songs "evince an effort that bears a remarkable resemblance to care—that is, to caring in the best, broadest, and most emotional sense".
The album's dramatic themes of heartbreak and vengeance received mixed reviews. Spin and Now said although it includes some memorable tracks, Speak Now is blemished by celebrity, rage, and grievances. Slant Magazine lauded Swift's melodic songwriting for offering radio-friendly pop hooks but criticized the lyrics of "Dear John", "Mean", "Innocent", and "Better than Revenge" as shallow and shortsighted. According to Steven Hyden from The A.V. Club, those tracks are Speak Now's strength; "Swift's niftiest trick is being at her most likeable when she's indulging in such overt nastiness". Entertainment Weekly agreed, deeming those tracks inevitable for Swift's artistic evolution. The Village Voice said Swift's songwriting is "not confessional, but dramatic" and found it more nuanced and mature compared to that of Fearless.
Other reviews focused on Speak Now's production. Reviews published in Paste and Slant Magazine call it a catchy album with radio-friendly pop tunes; Paste was impressed by the crossover appeal but deemed the overall production dull. The Village Voice took issue with Swift's weak and strained vocals. BBC Music found the album's track list too long but called it overall a "sparky and affecting record". Now approved of Swift's experimentation with styles other than country but considered it "too safe" and said the album is tarnished by "slickly produced power pop and a sugary sameness [that is] indiscernible from any number of today's radio-oriented artists". Ann Powers appreciated Speak Now's soft, introspective tracks for personalizing pop music. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times lauded the experimentation with genres such as blues and pop punk, and he called Speak Now a bold step for Swift.
## Accolades
Speak Now was ranked 13th on Rolling Stone's list of the best albums of 2010. The New York Times' Jon Caramanica ranked the album number two (behind Rick Ross's Teflon Don) in his 2010 year-end list. The album appeared on lists of the best country albums of 2010; PopMatters ranked it fifth and The Boot ranked it second. In 2012, Speak Now appeared at number 45 on Rolling Stone's list of the "50 Best Female Albums of All Time"; the magazine commented: "She might get played on the country station, but she's one of the few genuine rock stars we've got these days, with a flawless ear for what makes a song click." In 2019, Billboard listed Speak Now in 51st place on its list of the best albums of the 2010s and second on its list of best country albums of the same decade. The album also ranked 37th on Spin's 2010s decade-end list and 71st on that of Cleveland.com; and Taste of Country named it the fourth-best country album of the 2010s.
Speak Now received industry awards and nominations. In the US, it was nominated for Album of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards, the American Country Awards, and in 2011 the Country Music Association Awards. At the 2011 Billboard Music Awards, Speak Now was nominated for Top Billboard 200 Album and won Top Country Album. It won Favorite Album (Country) at the 2011 American Music Awards and Top Selling Album of 2011 by the Canadian Country Music Association; and was nominated for International Album of the Year at the 2011 Juno Awards and for International Album of the Year at the 2012 Canadian Independent Music Awards. At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012, Speak Now was nominated for Best Country Album, and its single "Mean" won Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song.
## Impact
In a 2019 Rolling Stone cover story, Swift said she wrote the album by herself as a reaction to her critics' doubts about her songwriting ability. For some critics and academics, the self-written Speak Now is an album that solidified Swift's songwriting and artistry with its nuanced observations and confessional songs about young adulthood and confrontation against her critics. Many considered it a strong groundwork to Swift's consistently-evolved songcraft on subsequent albums. For communications professor Myles McNutt, the album established Swift's credentials to claim authorship to her music and career, contrary to other artists being commodified by their labels. Its commercial success contributed to her fame as a pop star transcending her self-identity as a country-music artist. Pitchfork's Sam Sodomsky, reviewing the album in 2019, contended that her country-music identity served as an indicator of her autobiographical songwriting rather than musical style.
Some commentators reflected on Speak Now in the context of Swift's celebrity: they viewed the songs inspired by Swift's public experience—including high-profile, short-lived romantic relationships and the 2009 MTV Awards incident—as a precedent to her confessional narratives of subsequent albums, which received extensive media attention. According to gender studies professor Adriane Brown, the songs about idealized romance and her innocent, "good-girl" image made her stand out in a contemporary pool of sexualized female pop artists. Brown commented that Swift's unwillingness to openly discuss sex and tendency to criticize females who "whore themselves out", as in the lyrics of "Better than Revenge", were problematic. In Vulture, Maura Johnston remarked that although the songs about Swift's public experience were missteps, they hinted at her 2017 album Reputation, which explores Swift's public image and confrontation against her critics.
### 2023 re-recording
In November 2020, after a dispute over the ownership of the masters to her back catalog, Swift began re-recording her first six studio albums. The first of these was Fearless (Taylor's Version), released on April 9, 2021, followed by Red (Taylor's Version) on November 12. On May 5, 2023, at the first Eras Tour show in Nashville, Swift announced Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and its release date on July 7. The re-recorded album consists of all fourteen songs from the standard edition, the deluxe tracks "Ours" and "Superman", and six previously unreleased "From the Vault" songs. Two of them feature American rock acts Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams respectively; both were cited by Swift as influences while writing Speak Now. After Speak Now (Taylor's Version) was released, the original album reached new peaks in Switzerland (number one), Austria (number one), Germany (number two), and it was certified gold in the latter two countries.
## Track listing
Notes
- The international Apple Music edition features the original version of "Mine", noted as the "US version", as track 15.
- International standard editions feature different versions of "Mine" (noted as the "Pop mix" on digital releases), "Back to December" and "The Story of Us" in place of their original versions in the tracklist.
- The international deluxe editions include the original versions of "Mine", "Back to December" and "The Story of Us" as bonus tracks, each noted as "US version".
- CD releases of the album in Japan included the original versions of "Back to December" and "The Story of Us", each noted as "US version", as tracks 15 and 16 on the standard and deluxe editions with the deluxe bonus tracks on the second disc being numbered 17–22 with the original version of "Mine", also noted as the "US Version", as the final track.
## Personnel
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.
Musicians
- Taylor Swift – vocals, acoustic guitar, handclapping, vocal harmony, banjo
- Nathan Chapman – banjo, bass guitar, Fender Rhodes, electric twelve-string guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, handclapping, mandolin, organ, piano, synthesizer, vocal harmony
- Tom Bukovac – electric guitar
- Nick Buda – drums
- Chris Carmichael – strings
- Smith Curry – lap steel guitar
- Eric Darken – percussion
- Caitlin Evanson – vocal harmony
- Shannon Forrest – drums
- John Gardner – drums
- Rob Hajacos – fiddle
- Amos Heller – bass guitar
- Liz Huett – vocal harmony
- Tim Lauer – Hammond B3, piano
- Tim Marks – bass guitar
- Mike Meadows – electric guitar, handclapping
- Grant Mickelson – electric guitar
- Michael Rhodes – bass guitar
- Paul Sidoti – electric guitar
- Tommy Sims – bass guitar
- Bryan Sutton – acoustic guitar, twelve-string guitar, ukulele
- Al Wilson – handclapping, percussion
Production
- Taylor Swift – background vocals direction, liner notes, songwriter, producer
- Nathan Chapman – engineer, producer, programming
- Chuck Ainlay – engineer
- Joseph Anthony Baker – photography
- Steve Blackmon – assistant
- Drew Bollman – assistant, assistant engineer, engineer
- Tristan Brock-Jones – assistant engineer
- David Bryant – assistant engineer
- Paul Buckmaster – conductor, orchestral arrangements
- Jason Campbell – production coordination
- Chad Carlson – engineer
- Chris Carmichael – composer, string arrangements
- Joseph Cassell – stylist
- Steve Churchyard – engineer
- Mark Crew – mixing engineer
- Dean Gillard – production, mixing, additional instrumentation
- Jed Hackett – engineer
- Jeremy Hunter – engineer
- Aubrey Hyde – wardrobe
- Suzie Katayama – orchestra contractor
- Steve Marcantonio – engineer
- Seth Morton – assistant engineer
- Emily Mueller – production assistant
- Jemma Muradian – hair stylist
- John Netti – assistant engineer
- Bethany Newman – design, illustrations
- Josh Newman – design, illustrations
- Justin Niebank – engineer, mixing
- Mark Petaccia – assistant engineer
- Joel Quillen – engineer
- Matt Rausch – assistant
- Lowell Reynolds – engineer
- Mike Rooney – assistant engineer
- Austin Swift – photography
- Todd Tidwell – assistant engineer, engineer
- Lorrie Turk – make-up
- Matt Ward – production, mixing, additional instrumentation
- Hank Williams – mastering
- Brian David Willis – engineer
- Nathan Yarborough – assistant mixing engineer
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### Decade-end charts
### All-time charts
## Certifications and sales
## See also
- List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2010
- List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2011
- List of Top Country Albums number ones of 2010
- List of Top Country Albums number ones of 2011
- List of number-one albums of 2010 (Canada)
- List of number-one albums from the 2010s (New Zealand)
- List of number-one albums of 2010 (Australia)
|
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Tender Mercies
| 1,154,231,190 |
1983 film by Bruce Beresford
|
[
"1980s American films",
"1980s English-language films",
"1983 drama films",
"1983 films",
"American drama films",
"Country music films",
"EMI Films films",
"English-language drama films",
"Films about Christianity",
"Films about alcoholism",
"Films directed by Bruce Beresford",
"Films featuring a Best Actor Academy Award-winning performance",
"Films featuring a Best Drama Actor Golden Globe winning performance",
"Films set in Texas",
"Films shot in Texas",
"Films whose writer won the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award",
"Films with screenplays by Horton Foote",
"Universal Pictures films"
] |
Tender Mercies is a 1983 American drama film directed by Bruce Beresford. The screenplay by Horton Foote focuses on Mac Sledge, a recovering alcoholic country music singer who seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young widow and her son in rural Texas. Robert Duvall plays the role of Mac; the supporting cast includes Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin and Allan Hubbard.
Financed by EMI Films, Tender Mercies was shot largely in Waxahachie, Texas. The script was rejected by several American directors before the Australian Beresford accepted it. Duvall, who sang his own songs in the film, drove more than 600 miles (1,000 km) throughout the state, tape recording local accents and playing in country music bands to prepare for the role. He and Beresford repeatedly clashed during production, at one point prompting the director to walk off the set and reportedly consider quitting the film.
The film encompasses several themes, including the importance of love and family, the possibility of spiritual resurrection amid death and the concept of redemption through Mac Sledge's conversion to Christianity. Following poor test screening results, distributor Universal Pictures made little effort to publicise Tender Mercies, which Duvall attributed to the studio's lack of understanding of country music.
The film was released on March 4, 1983, in a limited number of theatres. Although unsuccessful at the box office, it was critically acclaimed and earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Tender Mercies won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for Foote and Duvall won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
## Plot
Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), a washed-up, alcoholic country singer, awakens at a run-down Texas roadside motel and gas station after a night of heavy drinking. He meets the owner, a young widow named Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), and offers to perform maintenance work at the motel in exchange for a room. Rosa, whose husband was killed in the Vietnam War, is raising her young son, Sonny (Allan Hubbard), on her own. She agrees to let Mac stay on condition that he does not drink while working. The two begin to develop feelings for each other, mostly during quiet evenings sitting alone and sharing parts of their life stories.
Mac resolves to give up alcohol and start his life anew. After enough days of keeping his word and doing his work, he is comfortable enough in his new life that he and Rosa Lee wed. They start attending a Baptist church on a regular basis. One day, a newspaper reporter visits the motel and asks Mac whether he has stopped recording music and if he has deliberately chosen to lead an anonymous life. When Mac refuses to answer, the reporter explains he is writing a story about him and has interviewed his ex-wife, Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), a country music star who is performing nearby.
After the story is published, the neighbourhood learns of Mac's past, and members of a local country–western band visit him to show their respect. Although he greets them politely, Mac remains reluctant to open up about his past. Later, he secretly attends Dixie's concert. She passionately sings several songs that Mac wrote years earlier, and he leaves in the middle of the performance. Backstage, he talks to Dixie's manager, his old friend, Harry (Wilford Brimley). Mac gives him a copy of a new song he has written and asks him to show it to Dixie. Mac tries to talk to her but she becomes angry on seeing him and warns him to stay away from their 18-year-old daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin).
On his return home, Mac assures Rosa Lee he no longer has any feelings for Dixie, whom he describes as "poison" to him. Later, Harry visits Mac to tell him, seemingly at Dixie's urging, that the country music business has changed and his new song is no good. Hurt and angry, Mac drives away and nearly crashes the truck. He buys a bottle of whiskey but, returning home to a worried Rosa Lee and Sonny, he tells them he poured it out. He says he tried to leave Rosa Lee, but found he could not. Some time later, Mac and Sonny are baptised together in Rosa Lee's church.
Eventually, Sue Anne visits Mac—their first encounter since she was a baby. Mac asks whether she got any of his letters, and she says her mother kept them from her. She also reports that Dixie tried to keep her from visiting Mac, and that, despite her mother's objections, she is eloping with her boyfriend. Mac admits that he used to hit Dixie and that she divorced him after he tried to kill her in a drunken rage. Sue Anne asks whether Mac remembers a song about a dove he sang to her when she was a baby. He claims he does not, but after she leaves, he sings to himself the hymn "On the Wings of a Dove," which refers to a dove from the Lord saving Noah, and to the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove at Jesus' baptism.
Boys at school bully Sonny about his dead father, and he and Mac grow closer. The members of the local country band ask Mac permission to perform one of his songs, and he agrees. Mac begins performing with them and they make plans to record together. His newfound happiness is interrupted when Sue Anne dies in a car accident. Mac attends his daughter's funeral at Dixie's lavish home in Nashville and comforts her when she breaks down. He also complains to Rosa Lee that, during their marriage, Dixie kept saying she would give up her career but never did.
Back home, Mac keeps quiet about his emotional pain, although he wonders aloud to Rosa Lee why his once sorry existence has been given meaning and, on the other hand, his daughter has died. Throughout his mourning, Mac continues his new life with Rosa Lee and Sonny. In the final scene, Sonny finds a football that Mac has left as a gift for him. Mac is watching the motel from a field across the road, singing "On the Wings of a Dove" to himself. Sonny thanks him for the football and the two play catch together in the field as Rosa Lee watches them from inside the motel through a window.
## Cast
- Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge
- Tess Harper as Rosa Lee
- Betty Buckley as Dixie
- Wilford Brimley as Harry
- Ellen Barkin as Sue Anne
- Allan Hubbard as Sonny
- Lenny Von Dohlen as Robert
- Paul Gleason as Reporter
- Michael Crabtree as Lewis Menefee
- Norman Bennett as Reverend Hotchkiss
## Production
### Writing
Playwright Horton Foote reportedly considered giving up on film writing, due to what he regarded as a poor adaptation of his 1952 play The Chase into a 1966 film of the same name. Following what Foote saw as a far more successful adaptation of his 1968 play Tomorrow in 1972, his interest in filmmaking was rekindled, with the condition that he maintain some degree of control over the final product. Foote said of this stage in his career, "I learned that film really should be like theatre in the sense that, in theatre, the writer is, of course, very dominant ... If we don't like something, we can speak our minds. ... It is always a collaborative effort. ... But in Hollywood it wasn't so. A writer there has in his contract that you are a writer for hire, which means that you write a script, then it belongs to them." This renewed interest in cinema prompted Foote to write Tender Mercies, his first work written specifically for the screen. In the view of biographer George Terry Barr, the script reflected "Foote's determination to battle a Hollywood system that generally refuses to make such personal films."
The story was inspired partially by Foote's nephew, who struggled to succeed in the country music business. Foote was initially interested in writing a film based on his nephew's efforts to organise a band, which he saw as paralleling his own youthful attempts to find work as an actor. During his research, however, he met an experienced musician who had offered to help his nephew's band, and Foote found himself growing more interested in a story about him, rather than the band itself. Foote said, "This older man had been through it all. As I thought about a storyline, I got very interested in that type of character." The moment in the film where a woman asks, "Were you really Mac Sledge?" and he responds, "Yes ma'am, I guess I was," was based on an exchange that Foote overheard between a washed-up star and a fan. Foote said the entire film pivots on that statement, which he believed spoke volumes about Mac's personality and former status.
Foote based Sledge's victory over alcoholism on his observations of theatre people struggling with the problem. He sought to avoid a melodramatic slant in telling that aspect of the story. Foote described his protagonist as "a very hurt, damaged man ... silence was his weapon". He chose the title Tender Mercies, from the Book of Psalms, for its relation to the Rosa Lee character, who he said seeks only "certain moments of gentleness or respite, [not] grandness or largeness". Foote sought to portray each character as realistic and flawed, but not unsympathetic. Although the script conveyed a strong spiritual message with religious undertones, Foote felt it was important to balance those religious elements with a focus on the practical challenges of everyday life.
Film historian Gary Edgerton said the Tender Mercies script "catapulted Horton Foote into the most active professional period in his life." Film director and producer Alan J. Pakula credited the script with helping define the American independent film movement of the late 1980s by initiating a trend of personal filmmaking that often looks beyond Hollywood conventions.
### Development
Duvall, who had appeared in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), which Foote adapted from the Harper Lee novel, was involved in Tender Mercies as an actor and co-producer from its earliest stages. He said the script appealed to him because of the basic values it underlined and because the themes were universal even though the story was local. Duvall felt it portrayed people from the central region of the United States without parodying them, as he said many Hollywood films tend to do. Duvall's early involvement led to rumors that he had requested Foote write the script for him, something that both men denied.
Foote took the script to Philip and Mary Ann Hobel, a married couple who ran Antron Media Production and had produced more than 200 documentaries between them. Foote felt their background in documentaries would lend Tender Mercies the authenticity he and Duvall were seeking. The Hobels agreed to produce it after reading and liking the script; it would become their feature film debut as producers. The Hobels approached EMI Films, a British film and television production company, which agreed to provide financing for Tender Mercies as long as Duvall remained involved, and under the condition the Hobels find a good director. The script was rejected by many American directors, creating concerns for Foote and the producers that the film would never be made. Foote later said, "This film was turned down by every American director on the face of the globe." The Hobels eventually mailed the script to Australian director Bruce Beresford because they were impressed by his 1980 film Breaker Morant. Philip Hobel said, "What we saw in Breaker Morant is what we like as filmmakers ourselves — an attention to the environment, a straightforward presentation; it's almost a documentary approach."
Beresford was attracted to the idea of making a Hollywood film with a big budget and powerful distribution. Following his success with Breaker Morant, Beresford received about 150 Hollywood scripts as potential projects; although he went weeks before reading many of them, Beresford read Tender Mercies right away. It immediately appealed to him, in part because it dealt with aspects of American rural life he had seldom encountered in film scripts. Several of those involved with Tender Mercies had reservations about an Australian directing a film about a country music star. Beresford also found the decision strange, but kept his thoughts to himself because of his desire to direct the film. He contacted EMI Films and asked for one month to visit Texas and familiarize himself with the state before committing to direct, to which the company agreed. Beresford said of the trip, "I want to come over and see if this is all true, because if it's not really a true picture of what it's all like, it wouldn't be right to make it." During his visit to Texas, he saw parallels between the state and his homeland: the terrain reminded him of the Australian bush country, and the Texans he met in the isolated areas reminded him of residents of the Outback. He met Foote and discussed the script with him. The screenwriter, who gave Beresford tours of small Texas towns, felt the director's Australian background made him sensitive to the story's rural characters and would help him achieve the sought-for authenticity. Beresford agreed to direct and was hired after receiving final approval from Duvall (the actor had a clause in his contract allowing him such approval, the first time he had this power on a film).
The film was given a budget of \$4.5 million (\$ in dollars), modest by Hollywood standards at the time. Philip Hobel said it took about a year to secure the financing from EMI Films, whose major 1981 release, Honky Tonk Freeway, had done poor box office. For the primary location, Rosa Lee's home and motel/gas station business, Beresford imposed one requirement: that no other buildings or large manmade structures be visible from it. The filmmakers eventually decided on a property that had been sitting abandoned by a Waxahachie highway. Mary Ann Hobel said the owner, when approached about its availability, immediately handed over the keys: "We said, 'Don't you want a contract, something in writing?' And he said, 'We don't do things that way here.'"
Beresford, known for carefully planning every shot in his films, drew his own storyboards as well as detailed drawings of how he envisioned the sets. Jeannine Oppewall was hired as art director. Beresford praised her as "absolutely brilliant", especially for her attention to very small details, "going from the curtains to the color of the quilts on the floors." It was Oppewall who named the motel Mariposa, Spanish for "butterfly", which symbolizes the spiritual resurrection Mac Sledge would experience there. Beresford chose Australian Russell Boyd as cinematographer and Irishman William Anderson, who had worked on all of the director's previous features, as editor. He selected Elizabeth McBride as costume designer. It was her first time in the position on a feature film, and she went on to build a reputation for costuming Texan and other Southern characters.
### Casting
Duvall had always wanted to play a country singer, and Foote was rumored to have written the role of Mac Sledge specifically for him. Foote denied the claim, claiming he found it too constraining to write roles for specific actors, although he did hope Duvall would be cast in the part. Tender Mercies became a very important personal project for Duvall, who contributed a significant number of ideas for his character. In preparing for the role, he spent weeks roaming around Texas, speaking to strangers to find the right accent and mannerisms. He also joined a small country band and continued singing with them every free weekend while the film was being shot. In total, Duvall drove about 680 miles (1,094 km) to research the part, often asking people to speak into his tape recorder so he could practice their inflections and other vocal habits. Upon finding one man with the exact accent he wanted, Duvall had him recite the entire script into the recorder.
Tess Harper was performing on stage in Texas when she attended a casting call for a minor role in the film. Beresford was so impressed with her that he cast her in the lead. He later said that the actresses he had seen before her demonstrated a sophistication and worldliness inappropriate for the part, while she brought a kind of rural quality without coming across as simple or foolish. Beresford said of Harper, "She walked into the room and even before she spoke, I thought, 'That's the girl to play the lead.'" Harper said she knew she won the role when Beresford appeared on her doorstep with a bottle of champagne in each hand. Tender Mercies was Harper's feature film debut, and she was so excited about the role she bit her script to make sure it was real. When filming ended, Duvall gave her a blue cowgirl shirt as a gift with a card that read, "You really were Rosa Lee".
Beresford visited several schools and auditioned many children for the role of Sonny before he came across Allan Hubbard in Paris, Texas. Beresford said Hubbard, like Harper, was chosen based on a simple, rural quality he possessed. The boy was able to relate easily to the character because, like Sonny, his father died at an early age; later, some media reports falsely claimed that his father was killed during the Vietnam War, just as Sonny's was in the film's backstory. None of the filmmakers knew Hubbard's father had died until after filming began. Duvall developed a strong, trusting relationship with Hubbard, which Foote felt improved the duo's on-screen chemistry. Hubbard would often play guitar with Duvall during breaks from filming.
Betty Buckley attended a casting session in New York City and was chosen largely based on the quality of her singing voice; Beresford said that few of the actresses who auditioned for the role were able to sing. Buckley was originally from Fort Worth, Texas, near the Grapevine Opry; when her concert scenes were filmed there, her whole family participated as extras. Duvall said he thought Buckley perfectly conveyed the underlying frustration of a country singer and "brought a real zing to [the] part." The actual location of the bar scenes was in Seven Points, Texas, in a club called the Cedar Creek Opry House. Seven Points is just east of Ellis County, across the Trinity River in western Henderson County, Texas. The Opry House as it was known then, was a two-story building that used to be a skating rink in its earlier life. The old rink was upstairs and became the dance floor of the Opry House, where the concert and bar scenes were filmed. One scene of the movie shows the front of the building with its name visible.
Ellen Barkin was cast after impressing Beresford during a New York audition. At the time, she had appeared only in television movies; Diner, her feature film debut, was not yet in theaters. When filming on Diner wrapped, Barkin joked to her agent about future roles, "No more troubled teenagers, unless the movie is with Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall or Robert Redford." Duvall said of Barkin, "She brings a real credibility for that part, plus she was young and attractive and had a certain sense of edge, a danger for her that was good for that part." Some media outlets reported that Duvall and Barkin were involved romantically for a brief time during filming.
Wilford Brimley was cast at the urging of his good friend Duvall, who was not getting along well with Beresford and wanted "somebody down here that's on my side, somebody that I can relate to". Beresford felt Brimley was too old for the part, but eventually agreed to the casting.
### Filming
Most of Tender Mercies was filmed in Waxahachie and Palmer, two towns in Ellis County in north central Texas. Beresford largely avoided the Victorian architecture and other picturesque elements of Waxahachie and instead focused on relatively barren locations more characteristic of West Texas. The town portrayed in the film is never identified by name. Foote said when he wrote the script he did not have the same isolated and lonely vision for the setting Beresford did, but he felt the atmosphere the director captured served the story well.
Principal photography took place between November 2 and December 23, 1981. The plants used in the gardening scenes were brought inside at night to keep them from freezing. Due to the tight schedule, the cast and crew worked seven days a week with very long hours each day. Although the Australian filmmakers and the crew, who were mostly from Dallas, got along very well both on and off the set, Beresford and Duvall were at odds during the production. Beresford, in his usual approach, meticulously planned each scene, and Duvall, who preferred a free-form give-and-take on set, felt restricted by the director's methods. Although Duvall regularly acknowledged his talent as a director, he said of Beresford, "He has this dictatorial way of doing things with me that just doesn't cut it. Man, I have to have my freedom." Although he had no problem with Duvall's acting methodology, the actor's temperament infuriated Beresford. While filming one scene with Harper and Barkin, he became so frustrated during a phone conversation with Duvall that he said, "Well if you want to direct the film, go right ahead," and walked off the set. Beresford flew to New York and reportedly was ready to quit, until Duvall flew out to speak with him. After further arguments, the two made amends and returned to work on the film.
Beresford also clashed on set with Brimley. On the very first day of filming, he asked the actor to "pick up the pace", prompting Brimley to reply, "Hey, I didn't know anybody dropped it." On another occasion, when Beresford tried to advise Brimley on how Harry would behave, Duvall recalled Brimley responding, "Now look, let me tell you something, I'm Harry. Harry's not over there, Harry's not over here. Until you fire me or get another actor, I'm Harry, and whatever I do is fine 'cause I'm Harry." Duvall said he believed the on-set wrangling resulted in a combination of the director's and actors' visions and ultimately improved the picture. Likewise, Beresford said he did not feel the fights negatively affected the film because he and Duvall never disagreed on the interpretation of the Mac Sledge character.
Harper described the extent to which Duvall inhabited his character: "Someone once said to me, 'Well, how's Robert Duvall?' and I said, 'I don't know Robert Duvall. I know Mac Sledge very well.'" Beresford, too, said the transformation was so believable that he could feel his skin crawling up the back of his neck the first day of filming. Duvall made an effort to help Harper, who was making her film debut. While preparing to shoot a scene in which Mac and Rosa Lee fight, he yelled at a make-up artist in front of Harper to make her angry and fuel her performance; he apologized to the make-up artist after the scene was shot.
Cinematographer Russell Boyd largely used available light to give the movie a natural feel, which Beresford said was crucial to its sense of authenticity. Harper said Boyd was so quiet during filming that he mostly used just three words: "'Yeah', 'right' and 'sure'". Beresford, Foote and Duvall considered the climactic scene to be the one in which Mac, tending the family garden, discusses with Rosa Lee his pain over his daughter's death. Beresford and Boyd filmed the scene in a long take and long shot so it could flow uninterrupted, with the lonely Texas landscape captured in the background. When studio executives received the footage, they contacted Beresford and requested close-up shots be intercut, but he insisted on keeping the long take intact. Duvall said he felt the scene underscored Mac's stoicism in the face of tragedy and loss.
### Music
Tender Mercies includes no original film score, and the musical soundtrack is limited to the performances of country songs and the domestic guitar playing that occur as part of the story. A score was composed for the movie, but Beresford had it removed because he felt it was "too sweet" and sounded phony in the context of the film, although he acknowledged it as "very skillful". Duvall sang his own songs, a right he insisted be part of his contract. He commented, "What's the point if you're not going to do your own [singing]? They're just going to dub somebody else? I mean, there's no point to that." The film's financial backers were initially concerned about whether he could sing well enough for the role. Those concerns were allayed after Duvall produced a tape of himself singing a cappella "On the Wings of a Dove", a Bob Ferguson country song featured in the film. Duvall collaborated with Beresford in deciding on the unusual staging of the emotional scene in which Mac sings it after reflecting on the reunion with his daughter. The song is performed with Mac looking out a window with his back to the camera, his face unseen. Horton Foote thought the choice made the scene more moving and called it "an extraordinary moment" in the film. Duvall wrote two of Mac's other songs, "Fool's Waltz" and "I've Decided to Leave Here Forever". Several leading country singers, including Willie Nelson, George Jones and Merle Haggard, were believed to have inspired Mac and Duvall's portrayal of him, but Duvall insisted the character was not based on anyone in particular. Another country star, Waylon Jennings, complimented his performance, saying he had "done the impossible."
Betty Buckley also sang her own songs, one of which, "Over You", written by Austin Roberts and Bobby Hart, was nominated for an Academy Award. Although Buckley performed it in the film, country singer Lane Brody was chosen to record it for radio release, and Mac Davis later sang it at the 1984 Academy Awards ceremony. Other songs in the film include "It Hurts to Face Reality" by Lefty Frizzell, "If You'll Hold the Ladder (I'll Climb to the Top)" by Buzz Rabin and Sara Busby, "The Best Bedroom in Town" and "Champagne Ladies & Barroom Babies" by Charlie Craig, "I'm Drinkin' Canada Dry" by Johnny Cymbal and Austin Roberts, and "You Are What Love Means To Me" by Craig Bickhardt.
## Themes and interpretations
### Love and family
Mac Sledge finds redemption largely through his relationship and eventual marriage with Rosa Lee. This is in keeping with the motif of fidelity common in the works of Foote, inspired, said the writer, by his marriage to Lillian Vallish Foote. He told The New York Times that she "kept me goin'. She never lost faith, and that's a rare thing. I don't know now how we got through it, but we got through it." The lyrics of "If You'll Hold the Ladder", which Mac performs with his new country band in the second half of the film, suggest what love has done for him. He sings of someone holding the ladder for him as he climbs to the top; this is symbolic of Rosa's love and guidance, which has allowed Sledge to improve himself and build a new life. The desultory romances that defined his past are represented by the more promiscuous lyrics of Dixie Scott's songs, such as those of "The Best Bedroom in Town": "The best part of all / the room at the end of the hall / That's where you and me make everything alright ... We celebrate the happiness we've found / Every night in the best bedroom in town". His storming out of her concert symbolizes his rejection of that earlier life. In contrast, Rosa Lee sings the humble church hymn, "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me". In a related way, the film emphasizes the importance of the woman's role in domestic life - although Mac takes on the role of patriarch in his new family setting, it is only through the support and care of Rosa Lee that he is able to settle into this role. Sociologist Norman K. Denzin points out that Tender Mercies embodies many of the ideas of recovery from addiction that are part of the twelve-step program used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Both the film and the support group's program advocate the idea of hitting rock-bottom, making a decision to stop drinking, dealing with the past and adopting a spiritual way of life.
Tender Mercies also emphasizes the father–child theme common in the works of Foote, a theme that operates on both transcendent and temporal levels. Mac is reunited not only with his spiritual father through his conversion to Christianity, but also with his biological daughter, Sue Anne, when she pays him a surprise visit. Scholar Rebecca Luttrell Briley suggests that although Mac begins to plant new roots with Rosa Lee and Sonny in earlier scenes, they are not enough to fully satisfy his desire for redemption, as he is nearly driven to leave the family and return to his alcoholic ways. According to Briley, Sue Anne's visit prompts Mac to realize that reconciliation with her and a reformation of their father–daughter relationship is the ingredient that had been lacking in his quest for redemption. This is further demonstrated by Mac's singing "On the Wings of a Dove" to himself after their meeting; the lyrics describe God the Father and God the Holy Spirit's involvement in the baptism of God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. This connects Sledge's spiritual reconciliation with the divine, to the earthly reconciliation with his own child. However, the death of Sue Anne also demonstrates that, according to Briley, "all relationships cannot be mended, some by choice and some by chance, and the poignancy of missed opportunities between fathers and their children on this earth is underlined in this scene."
The relationship between Mac and Sonny, whose name derives from "son", is central to the film's exploration of the father–child theme. Sonny tries to conjure an image of his biological father, whom he never had the chance to know, through old photographs, his mother's memories and visits to his father's grave. Sonny finds a father figure in Mac. When another young boy asks Sonny if he likes Mac more than his real father, Sonny says that he does, because he never knew the other man; Briley says that this "emphasizes the distinction between companionship and blood relationship Foote has pointed out before." The final scene, in which Mac and Sonny play catch with a football Mac bought him as a gift, symbolizes the fact that, although Mac has lost the chance to reconcile with his daughter, he now has a second chance at establishing a father–child relationship with Sonny. The father–child theme also plays out through Mac's relationship with the young band members, who say that he has been an inspiration to them, playing a paternal role in their lives before they even met him. Sledge eventually teams up with the musicians, offering them fatherly counsel in a much more direct way.
### Religion
Mac's redemption and self-improvement run parallel with his conversion to Christianity. Briley argues that "the emphasis on the Christian family is stronger in this script than in any other Foote piece to this point." At the urging of Rosa Lee, Mac begins to attend church regularly and is eventually baptized for the first time, along with Sonny. During a church scene, he also sings the hymn "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me", which serves as a symbol for his new direction in life. After they are baptized, Sonny asks Mac whether he feels any different, to which Mac responds, "Not yet." According to scholars, this response indicates Mac's belief that his reunion with God will lead to meaningful changes in his life. It is after this moment, Briley points out, that Mac is able to forge other relationships, such as those with his young bandmates, and "develop his own potential for success as a man." Briley also proposes that Mac's response — "Yes, ma'am, I guess I was" — to a fan who asks if he was really Mac Sledge suggests that he has washed away his old self through baptism.
During one scene, Rosa Lee tells Mac, "I say my prayers for you and when I thank the Lord for his tender mercies, you're at the head of the list." Scholar Robert Jewett compares this line to the first verse of Romans 12, in which Paul the Apostle appeals to Christians to live out their lives in service to others "through the mercies of God". Many of the elements of Mac's redemption, conversion to Christianity and budding relationship with Rosa Lee occur off-camera, including their wedding. Jewett writes, "This is perfectly congruent with the theme of faith in the hidden mercies of God, the secret plot of the life of faith in Romans. ... It is a matter of faith, elusive and intangible." Jewett compares Mac's story to that of Abraham, because "just like Sledge's story, [it] centers on the provision of a future through the tender mercies of God". As told in Romans 4, Abraham and his wife Sarah are too old to produce a son, but Abraham develops the faith that God will provide them an heir, which is exactly what occurs, though — as Paul describes — Abraham did nothing practical to guarantee or deserve such a miracle. Jewett describes Mac as similarly undeserving of redemption, based on his selfish and abusive past, typified by his condition in his first encounter with Rosa Lee: in a drunken stupor following a motel room fight. She takes him in and eventually falls in love with him, despite his having done nothing to deserve her care or his redemption: "It is an undeserved grace, a gift of providence from a simple woman who continues to pray for him and to be grateful for him."
However, in the face of the loss of his daughter, Mac learns, in Briley's words, that "his life as a Christian is no more sheltered from this world's tragedies than it was before." Before finding redemption, Sledge questions why God has allowed his life to take the path it has and, in particular, why his daughter was killed instead of him. Commentators have described this as a prime example of theodicy, the question of why evil exists that is commonly faced by Christians. Scholar Richard Leonard writes, "For all believers, the meaning of suffering is the universal question. ... No answer is completely satisfying, least of all the idea that God sends bad events to teach us something." Following the death of his daughter, Mac moves forward with uncertainty as the film ends. Jewett writes of this conclusion, "The message of this film is that we have no final assurances, any more than Abraham did. But we can respond in faith to the tender mercies we have received."
### Death and resurrection
Mac experiences his spiritual resurrection even as he wrestles with death, in both the past — Sonny's father in the Vietnam War — and present — his own daughter in a car accident. The latter threatens to derail Mac's new life, captured in the moment when he learns of it and turns off the radio that is playing his new song. Leonard writes of this resurrection, "Depression hangs like a pall over Tender Mercies, [but] what makes this film inspiring is that it is also about the joy of being found. ... Mac finds the way, the truth, and the life he wants." In a climactic scene, Mac tells Rosa Lee that he was once nearly killed in a car crash himself, which forces him to address the question of why he was allowed to live while others have died. Jewett writes of this scene, "Mac Sledge can't trust happiness because it remains inexplicable. But he does trust the tender mercies that mysteriously led him from death to life."
Mac is portrayed as near death at the beginning of the film, having woken up in a drunken stupor in a boundless, empty flatland with nothing in his possession, a shot that scholar Roy M. Anker said "pointedly reflects the condition of his own soul". The dialogue in other scenes suggests the threat of mortality, including a moment when Mac has trouble singing due to his bad voice and says, "Don't feel sorry for me, Rosa Lee, I'm not dead yet." In several lasting shots, the vast sky dwarfs Mac, Rosa Lee and Sonny, starkly symbolizing their isolation, as well as the fragility of human existence. The fact that Mac sustains his newfound life with Rosa Lee and Sonny after his daughter's death, rather than reverting to his old pattern of alcoholism and abuse, is consistent with a recurring theme in Foote's works of characters overcoming tragedy and finding in it an opportunity for growth and maturation.
## Release
### Distribution
Philip and Mary Ann Hobel spent a long time seeking a distributor for Tender Mercies without any success. Duvall, who began to doubt the film would be widely released, was unable to help the Hobels because he was busy trying to find a distributor for Angelo My Love, a film he had written, directed and produced. Eventually, Universal Pictures agreed to distribute Tender Mercies. Test screenings for the film were held, which Beresford described as the most unusual he had ever experienced. The director said that the preview audiences appeared to be very engaged with the picture, to the point the theaters were so silent, "if you flicked a piece of paper on the floor, you could hear it fall." However, the post-screening feedback was, in Beresford's words, "absolutely disastrous." As a result, Universal executives lost faith in the film and made little effort to promote it. Foote said of the studio, "I don't know that they disliked the film, I just think they thought it was inconsequential and of no consequence at all. I guess they thought it would just get lost in the shuffle." Others in the film industry were equally dismissive; one Paramount Pictures representative described the picture as "like watching paint dry".
### Festivals and theatrical run
Tender Mercies was released on March 4, 1983, in only three theaters: one in New York City, one in Los Angeles, and one in Chicago. New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed that it was released during "the time of year when distributors usually get rid of all of those movies they don't think are worth releasing in the prime moviegoing times of Christmas and the midsummer months". The simultaneous release of Angelo My Love led to some more publicity for Duvall himself, but was of no help to Tender Mercies. Duvall also believed that Universal's lack of familiarity and comfort with southern culture and the country music genre further reduced their faith in the film. When country star Willie Nelson offered to help publicize it, a studio executive told Duvall she did not understand how the singer could contribute to the promotion, which Duvall said was indicative of the studio's failure to understand both the film and the country music genre.
Tender Mercies was shown in competition at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, where it was described as a relatively optimistic alternative to darker, more violent entries like One Deadly Summer, Moon in the Gutter and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It was also shown at the 1983 International Film Festival of India in New Delhi. A jury headed by director Lindsay Anderson determined that none of the films in contention, including Tender Mercies, were good enough to win the Golden Peacock, the festival's top prize. Film critic Jugu Abraham said the jury's standards were higher than those of the Academy Awards, and that Tender Mercies' lack of success at the festival was a "clear example of what is good cinema for some, not being so good for others".
### Home media
Following its brief theatrical run, Universal Studios quickly sold the film's rights to cable companies, allowing Tender Mercies to be shown on television. When the film unexpectedly received five Academy Award nominations nearly a year after its original release, the studio attempted to redistribute the film to theaters; however, the cable companies began televising the film about a week before the Oscar ceremony, which essentially halted any attempts at a theatrical re-release. When the film first played on HBO in March 1984, it surpassed the three major networks in ratings for homes with cable televisions. Tender Mercies was released on VHS some time later, and was first released on DVD on June 22, 1999.
## Reception
### Box office
Tender Mercies was not considered a box office success. In its first three days, March 4–6, the film grossed \$46,977 from exclusive engagements at the Tower East Theater in New York (\$21,183), the Fine Arts Theater in Los Angeles (\$18,254) and the Carnegie Theater in Chicago (\$7,540). Tender Mercies eventually played at a total of 37 theaters and grossed \$8,443,124.
### Critical response
Tender Mercies received mostly positive reviews. Richard Corliss of Time declared it the "best American movie of the new year". Carol Olten of The San Diego Union-Tribune declared Tender Mercies the best movie of 1983, and "the most poignant, but forthright, film of the year, with a brilliant performance by Robert Duvall". Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "This is a small, lovely and somewhat overloaded film about small-town life, loneliness, country music, marriage, divorce and parental love, and it deals with all of these things in equal measure. Still, the absence of a single, sharply dramatic story line is a relatively small price to pay for the plainness and clarity with which these other issues are defined." She also praised Beresford's direction, which she said lent the movie a light touch. The Times' Canby wrote, "In all respects Tender Mercies is so good that it has the effect of rediscovering a kind of film fiction that has been debased over the decades by hack moviemakers, working according to accepted formulas, frequently to the applause of the critics as well as the public." Leonard Maltin gave it three out of four stars, applauding Duvall in particular and describing it as a "winning but extremely low-key film", though he characterized Foote's screenplay as "not so much a story as a series of vignettes". David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor praised the film for its values, for underscoring the good in people and for avoiding flashiness and quick cuts in favor of a subtle and deliberately paced story, while maintaining a PG rating and omitting sex, drugs and violence. He also felt, however, that it tended toward melodrama on a few occasions and that the soundtrack had "a bit of syrupy music ... especially at the end".
Some reviews were less favorable. David Ansen of Newsweek said, "While one respects the filmmaker's small-is-beautiful philosophy, this story may indeed be too small for its britches. ... Beresford's nice little movie seems so afraid to make a false move that it runs the danger of not moving at all." Linda Beath of The Globe and Mail said Duvall's performance was "fabulous," but that the film was "very slight" compared to Beresford's Australian pictures. Gary Arnold of The Washington Post panned the film, criticizing its mood and tempo and describing Buckley as its only true asset: "Tender Mercies fails because of an apparent dimness of perception that frequently overcomes dramatists: they don't always know when they've got ahold of the wrong end of the story they want to tell."
Many critics specifically praised Duvall's performance. Sterritt called it "one of the most finely wrought achievements to reach the screen in recent memory." In Corliss's description, "Duvall's aging face, a road map of dead ends and dry gulches, can accommodate rage or innocence or any ironic shade in between. As Mac he avoids both melodrama and condescension, finding climaxes in each small step toward rehabilitation, each new responsibility shouldered." Ansen said, "Robert Duvall does another of his extraordinary disappearing acts. He vanishes totally inside the character of Mac Sledge." Maslin said he "so thoroughly transformed into Mac that he even walks with a Texan's rolling gait"; she also complimented the performances of the supporting cast. According to a review in People, "Duvall gives it everything he has, which is saying a great deal. His beery singing voice is a revelation, and his unfussy, brightly burnished acting is the kind for which awards were invented." The review also described Betty Buckley as "bitchy and brilliant". Duvall was praised as well for pulling off his first true romantic role; the actor said of the response, "This is the only film where I've heard people say I'm sexy. It's real romantic. Rural romantic. I love that part almost more than anything."
Reflecting on the film a decade after it came out, critic Danny Peary said he found Duvall's restrained portrayal "extremely irritating" and criticized the entire cast, save for Buckley, for their "subdued, emotions-in-check, phony 'honest' performances. You just wish the whole lot of them would start tickling each other." In his book Alternate Oscars, listing his personal opinions of who should have won the Academy Awards each year, Peary excluded Tender Mercies from all the categories, and chose Michael Caine as deserving of the Best Actor honor for Educating Rita. In June 2009, critic Roger Ebert included Tender Mercies in The Great Movies, his series of reviews celebrating what he considers the most important films of all time. He praised what he called one of Duvall's most understated performances, as well as Foote's minimalist storytelling and the restraint and patience of Beresford's direction. Ebert said of Foote's screenplay, "The down-to-earth quality of his characters drew attention away from his minimalist storytelling; all the frills were stripped away. ... Rarely does a movie elaborate less and explain more than Tender Mercies."
### Accolades
The 56th Academy Award nominations were announced about ten months after Tender Mercies was released. Little had been done to promote its candidacy: only four Oscar campaign advertisements were purchased; all of them appeared in the trade journal Variety, and Duvall had declined to campaign for himself or the film. Beresford and studio executives were surprised when the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Harper was believed by some to be a strong contender for either Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, but ultimately she was nominated in neither category.
Duvall was the only American actor nominated for the Best Actor Oscar; his competition were Britons Michael Caine (who had co-starred with Duvall in the 1976 The Eagle Has Landed), Tom Conti, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. During an interview before the Oscar ceremony, Duvall offended some Britons by complaining about "the Limey syndrome," claiming "the attitude with a lot of people in Hollywood is that what they do in England is somehow better than what we do here." Duvall, who was presented with the Oscar by country music star, Dolly Parton, said of winning the award, "It was a nice feeling, knowing I was the home-crowd favorite." In a New York Times profile of Duvall that appeared six years after Tender Mercies' release, Nan C. Robertson wrote that, despite four previous Academy Award nominations, "it was not until he won as Best Actor in 1983 ... that moviegoers woke up in droves to this great natural resource. The reason was that they rarely recognized Mr. Duvall from one part to another, so effortlessly did he vanish into each celluloid persona." Foote, who was so certain he would not win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird he had not attended the 1963 ceremony, made sure he was present to collect his award for Best Original Screenplay. The critical success of the film allowed Foote to exercise considerable control over his future film projects, including final veto power over major decisions; when such power was denied, Foote would simply refuse to do the film.
|
27,029,082 |
Brian Eaton
| 1,151,639,085 |
Royal Australian Air Force senior commander
|
[
"1916 births",
"1992 deaths",
"Australian Commanders of the Order of the British Empire",
"Australian Companions of the Distinguished Service Order",
"Australian Companions of the Order of the Bath",
"Australian aviators",
"Foreign recipients of the Silver Star",
"Military personnel from Melbourne",
"Military personnel from Tasmania",
"People educated at Carey Baptist Grammar School",
"People from Canterbury, Victoria",
"People from Launceston, Tasmania",
"Recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United Kingdom)",
"Royal Australian Air Force air marshals",
"Royal Australian Air Force personnel of World War II",
"Shot-down aviators"
] |
Air Vice-Marshal Brian Alexander Eaton, CB CBE DSO & Bar DFC (15 December 1916 – 17 October 1992) was a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Born in Tasmania and raised in Victoria, he joined the RAAF in 1936 and was promoted to flight lieutenant on the outbreak of World War II. He held training positions before being posted to No. 3 Squadron at the beginning of 1943, flying P-40 Kittyhawk fighter-bombers in North Africa. Despite being shot down three times within ten days soon after arriving, Eaton quickly rose to become the unit's commanding officer, and by year's end had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. His leadership earned him the Distinguished Service Order and Bar in 1944–45, and command of No. 239 Wing RAF in Italy, with the temporary rank of group captain. He was also awarded the US Silver Star in 1946 in recognition of his war service.
In the decade following World War II, Eaton led No. 81 Wing in Japan, and No. 78 Wing in Malta. He commanded RAAF Base Williamtown from 1957 to 1959, after which he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. As Director-General of Operational Requirements in 1965, Eaton argued for increased RAAF co-operation with the Australian Army in light of growing involvement in the Vietnam War. He was promoted to air vice-marshal the next year, and became Deputy Chief of the Air Staff. Posted to Singapore as Air Officer Commanding (AOC) No. 224 Group RAF in 1967, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath for his work as chief of staff at Headquarters RAF Far East Air Force in 1969. He then served as Air Member for Personnel, before being selected as AOC Operational Command in 1973. Eaton retired from the RAAF in December that year, and became an executive for Rolls-Royce in Canberra. He died in 1992 at the age of 75.
## Early career
Brian Eaton was born in Launceston, Tasmania, on 15 December 1916, to Sydney and Hilda Eaton. The family later moved to Canterbury, Victoria, and Brian was educated at Carey Baptist Grammar School. His early ambition to be a doctor was curtailed when his father died and he had to leave school early. He enlisted as an air cadet in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) on 20 January 1936, undergoing flying training at RAAF Station Point Cook. Eaton was commissioned as a pilot officer upon graduation from flying school in January 1937, and posted to No. 1 Squadron. Within six months he was promoted to flying officer and joined No. 21 Squadron at RAAF Station Laverton. In 1938, he became an instructor at Point Cook's No. 1 Flying Training School, where he also took part in the RAAF's early long navigation exercises. He was promoted to flight lieutenant on 1 September 1939.
## World War II
### Early war service
In April 1940, Eaton was assigned to the newly re-formed Central Flying School at Camden, New South Wales, as an instructor. Promoted to temporary squadron leader in September 1940, he was transferred to the Directorate of Training in June 1941. He became a fighter controller at No. 5 Fighter Sector Headquarters, Darwin, Northern Territory, in March 1942. In October that year, he departed Australia for North Africa via India and the United Kingdom, fearful that the fighting would be over before he arrived. He posted in to No. 1 Middle East Training School in January 1943 before taking up duties with No. 3 Squadron RAAF, which was then engaged in the Battle of Tunisia.
Eaton's combat career began inauspiciously, when he was shot down three times in the space of ten days. On the first occasion, his P-40 Kittyhawk was hit by 20 mm cannon shells from an enemy fighter that he never saw. He later recalled, "I was too busy getting the kite down to be frightened. But my God was I surprised." Eaton brought his crippled aircraft in for a forced landing at El Hamma—in the midst of a tank battle between German and New Zealand forces. After the fighting had died down he made his way over to the New Zealanders, who gave him a lift back to his air base. The second time he was shot down, his plane was struck by 88 mm anti-aircraft fire, necessitating another crash landing, this time behind enemy lines. Sympathetic Arab tribesmen smuggled him past the Germans and back to his airfield. Two days later, his P-40 was hit by fire from an Messerschmitt Bf 109 that dived at him from out of the sun. He was able to glide back to base, 80 miles (130 km) away, but on arriving found that it was under attack by German bombers. He decided he had no other option than to land the damaged plane among the exploding bombs, and managed to do so without mishap. His series of narrow escapes engendered a spirit of fatalism, and a habit of keeping his emotions severely in check while on duty: "I just couldn't see myself living when so many were dying. It was something which, at the time, didn't bear much dwelling on."
### Squadron and wing command
Despite his early setbacks in combat, Eaton soon rose to command No. 3 Squadron, taking over from Squadron Leader Bobby Gibbes on 21 April 1943. He led the unit as it relocated to Malta the following month, in preparation for the Allied invasion of Sicily. Illness forced him to hand over command in June–July, but he returned to take charge of the squadron in August as it continued to fly escort and interdiction missions in Sicily with other units of No. 239 Wing RAF. His brother Roger, a flight sergeant serving with the RAF, was killed in a Wellington bomber raid during the campaign. On 3 September, No. 3 Squadron took part in the opening day of the Allied invasion of Italy, supporting the British XIII Corps as it moved inland after landing at Calabria. Enemy air resistance remained light and worthwhile ground targets few as the campaign progressed but, on 24 October, Eaton led an attack against German shipping off the Yugoslav coast that left a merchant ship and two barges on fire. He repeated the exercise on 7 November, when the squadron scored hits on vessels in two separate raids in the harbour at Split. On 19 November, when the rest of No. 239 Wing was unable to complete any missions due to adverse weather, Eaton found a hole in the clouds and led eight Kittyhawks in a successful attack on Opi in central Italy. He was promoted to temporary wing commander on 1 December. On 14 December, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for pressing home a night attack on Axis armour at Termoli. The citation was promulgated in the London Gazette:
> One evening in October, 1943, this officer led his squadron in an attack on a strong enemy force, equipped with tanks, which were attacking our troops near Termoli. In spite of intense antiaircraft fire, Squadron Leader Eaton led his formation in at a low level and pressed home an attack which completely disrupted the enemy's forces. In this spirited action, Squadron Leader Eaton displayed inspiring leadership, great courage and tenacity.
On 16 February 1944, the day after the contentious destruction of Monte Cassino, Eaton took No. 3 Squadron through a break in the bad weather to attack the ruined monastery, the only one of No. 239 Wing's units to successfully bomb its target that day. He handed over command of No. 3 Squadron later that month, and was transferred to No. 1 Mobile Operations Room Unit as forward air controller for the final assault on Monte Cassino. The run of luck that Eaton experienced in his first weeks of air combat in Tunisia continued on the ground in Italy. He survived three months of constant artillery fire, including an occasion when a shell exploded directly above his observation post, striking down a British officer standing next to him. He also came under machine-gun fire when he took a wrong turn one day and drove into the German lines, but again escaped unhurt. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order on 7 April, in recognition of his leadership of No. 3 Squadron in North Africa, Malta, Sicily and Italy.
Raised to acting group captain, Eaton was given command of No. 239 Wing on 3 August 1944, taking responsibility for No. 3 Squadron and No. 450 Squadron RAAF, No. 112 Squadron and No. 260 Squadron RAF, No. 5 Squadron of the South African Air Force, and No. 250 Squadron of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force. Credited with leading "many outstanding raids", he was known to his staff as "The Boss", and often flew twice a day with a different squadron on each mission; when his superiors found out how many sorties he was personally undertaking and ordered him to cut back, he simply ceased recording his flying hours. The wing's two RAF squadrons had already re-equipped with P-51 Mustangs when Eaton took over; No. 5 converted in September and No. 3 in November. As well as supporting the Eighth Army in Italy, the Mustang units carried out missions in Yugoslavia in concert with the Balkan Air Force, prior to Axis forces surrendering on 2 May.
Eaton was unofficially credited with shooting down as many as seven enemy aircraft during the Mediterranean campaigns, but was never listed among Australian flying aces. Many of the missions that he undertook with No. 3 Squadron and in command of No. 239 Wing were ground attack or anti-shipping sorties, rather than air-to-air combat. He was also known as a leader who, when opportunities did arise to engage other aircraft, would attempt to manoeuvre his rookie pilots into position to make a "kill", rather than take the shot himself. On 12 June, he was awarded a Bar to his Distinguished Service Order for "Outstanding skill and leadership against heavy odds". His war service also earned him the US Silver Star, permission to wear it being gazetted on 14 June 1946.
## Post-war career
### Rise to senior command
Eaton was posted to Britain following the end of World War II, and attended RAF Staff College the next year. In September 1947, he was appointed Officer Commanding No. 81 (Fighter) Wing in Japan, as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF). The Australian contingent initially comprised three combat units, Nos. 76, 77 and 82 Squadrons, as well as No. 381 (Base) Squadron, No. 481 (Maintenance) Squadron, No. 111 Mobile Fighter Control Unit, and No. 5 Airfield Construction Squadron. By mid-1949, it had been reduced to No. 77 Squadron alone, and Headquarters BCOF had been disbanded; Eaton served as "RAAF Component" commander for the remainder of his tenure in Japan. As well as surveillance patrols, training and inter-service exercises, the Australian airmen took part in ceremonial flypasts. On one such occasion, over Tokyo, Eaton led his formation of thirty Mustangs into cloud with a faulty artificial horizon in his plane, with the result that he and his comrades, who were following his lead, became badly disorientated and were fortunate to avoid collision; RAAF historian Alan Stephens considered this a not-atypical example of the casual attitude to flying safety exhibited at the time by the veteran pilots of World War II.
Returning to Australia in November 1949, Eaton became Deputy Director of Training at the Department of Air, Canberra, where he remained until 1951. Later that year, he was appointed Officer Commanding No. 78 (Fighter) Wing at RAAF Base Williamtown, New South Wales. He had reverted to a substantive rank of wing commander since leaving Japan, as the RAAF shrank dramatically with demobilisation and many senior officers lost the temporary or acting ranks they had gained in wartime. On 15 September, he landed a Vampire jet fighter at Point Cook with one flat tyre and one wheel retracted, after its undercarriage had become jammed. The plane skidded off the runway but Eaton was able to walk away, reportedly remarking "Well, I didn't wreck it". He married Josephine Rumbles at Toorak Presbyterian Church in Melbourne on 10 May 1952; the couple later had a son and two daughters. Following Britain's request to the Australian government for a Commonwealth garrison in the Mediterranean, in July 1952 Eaton led No. 78 Wing on deployment to RAF Hal Far near Valletta, Malta, where its combat squadrons, Nos. 75 and 76, were equipped with leased Vampire FB9s. As the overseas posting was for a minimum of two years, his new bride and the families of other staff were permitted to make the journey as well. The Australian airmen participated in many NATO exercises while stationed at Malta, and one year took first and second place in the Middle Eastern Gunnery Contest for the "Imshi" Mason Cup. Promoted to the substantive rank of group captain on 1 January 1953, Eaton was granted command of RAF Ta'Kali when the wing transferred there from Hal Far in June.
Completing his tour with No. 78 Wing in mid-1954, Eaton joined Air Vice-Marshal Alister Murdoch on an international mission to examine potential new fighter, bomber, transport and training aircraft for the RAAF. The team's report advocated the F-104 Starfighter as a replacement for the CAC Sabre, as well as nuclear-capable British V-bomber strike aircraft to augment Australia's Canberra bombers, and C-130 Hercules transports to replace the C-47 Dakota. The proposals for V-bombers and the F-104 were not taken up, but the Australian Government acquired the C-130 in 1958. Described as second only to the General Dynamics F-111C as the "most significant" purchase by the RAAF, the Hercules gave the Air Force its first strategic airlift capability, which in years to come would provide a "lifeline" to Australian forces deployed to Malaya, Vietnam, and other parts of the South-West Pacific. The mission also recommended the locally built Vampire T35 as a jet trainer for No. 1 Applied Flying Training School; sixty-nine were later delivered by the de Havilland factory in Bankstown, New South Wales. Eaton served as RAAF Director of Operations during 1955–56, and as Officer Commanding RAAF Base Williamtown and commandant of the co-located School of Land/Air Warfare from March 1957 until February 1959. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1959 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Following his tour at Williamtown, Eaton spent two years as Director of Joint Services Plans before attending the Imperial Defence College, London in 1961. Raised to air commodore, he was appointed Director-General Operational Requirements in 1962. Concurrently he became an honorary aide-de-Camp to Queen Elizabeth II, in which capacity he served until 1965. As the Army reorganised to deal with Australia's increasing commitments to the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, it sought to procure a dozen twin-engined aircraft of a size hitherto operated only by the RAAF, and also proposed a joint review of close air support. RAAF senior command chose to deal with the Army's proposals by ignoring them. As Director-General of Operational Requirements, Eaton argued that if the RAAF did not more fully satisfy the ground support requirements of the Army, then the Army itself would seek to take control of this sphere of operations, undermining the RAAF's position as the main provider of Australia's air power. Pointing out to the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Murdoch, that it was "clearly the Army's intention to have complete command and control" of air-to-ground assets, he warned of a parallel situation in America, where the US Army was looking to take over all battlefield air support in response to the USAF failing to keep up to date in the provision of basic attack aircraft. The RAAF's refusal to adequately deal with its ground support responsibilities led to long-running inter-service enmity, and contributed to the Australian government's decision twenty years later to transfer control of battlefield helicopters to the Army. At this time, Eaton also led the acquisition team that selected the Macchi MB-326 as the RAAF's new jet trainer, as it met all requirements, could be licence-built in Australia, and was relatively inexpensive. The first of ninety-seven was delivered by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in 1967.
### Senior command and retirement
Promoted to air vice-marshal, Eaton became Deputy Chief of the Air Staff in 1966. In December that year, with Australian Caribou transports and Iroquois helicopters already serving in Vietnam, Eaton advocated building up the RAAF's "sharp end" there, increasing air support for ground troops. He preferred deploying Sabre or Mirage fighters rather than the mooted Canberra bombers, which he saw as more suitable for a strategic role. Above all, he accepted the "domino theory" and believed that if Australia did not aid South Vietnam, "we'd lose the lot". In the event, Canberras were despatched rather than fighters. In 1967, Eaton became the last AOC of No. 224 Group RAF under the British Far East Air Force (FEAF) in Singapore, as permanent squadrons were dropped from its strength. This reorganisation led to him taking over as chief of staff at Headquarters FEAF the following year. In this capacity, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in the 1969 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Returning to Australia, Eaton became Air Member for Personnel (AMP) in October 1969. As AMP, he sat on the Air Board, the RAAF's controlling body, consisting of its most senior officers and chaired by the Chief of the Air Staff. In January 1973, he was appointed AOC Operational Command (now Air Command). He served in this position until retirement, his tenure witnessing the introduction of the F-111C swing-wing bomber to service in Australia, when the first machines touched down at RAAF Base Amberley, Queensland, in July. Leaving the military on 15 December 1973, Eaton became Regional Executive for Rolls-Royce Australia in Canberra. He remained with the company for the next decade, continuing to live in Canberra until his death on 17 October 1992, at the age of 75. In 1996, his widow Josephine donated funding for the Air Vice-Marshal B.A. Eaton 'Airman of the Year' Award to the RAAF, to annually recognise "significant contribution to both the Service and the community" by airmen and airwoman ranked corporal or below.
|
1,671,153 |
These Are the Voyages...
| 1,172,117,876 | null |
[
"2005 American television episodes",
"American television series finales",
"Holography in television",
"Star Trek: Enterprise (season 4) episodes",
"Star Trek: The Next Generation",
"Television episodes written by Brannon Braga",
"Television episodes written by Rick Berman"
] |
"These Are the Voyages..." is the series finale of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: Enterprise. The 22nd episode of the fourth season and the 98th of the series overall, it first aired on the UPN network in the United States on May 13, 2005. It is a frame story where the 22nd-century events of Star Trek: Enterprise are recounted in a 24th-century holodeck re-creation that is folded into the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Pegasus", which aired eleven years earlier. It features guest stars Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Jeffrey Combs, as well as a voice cameo from Brent Spiner. Series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, who co-wrote the episode, conceived "These Are the Voyages..." as a valentine to Star Trek fans.
Set in the 22nd century, the series follows the adventures of the first Starfleet starship Enterprise, registration NX-01. In this episode, the story moves to the year 2370, when Commander William Riker grapples with making a difficult admission to his commanding officer about a cover-up. Riker, after consulting Counselor Deanna Troi, turns to the simulated events of the year 2161 for guidance, when the crew of Enterprise travels home to Earth for both decommissioning and the formation of the United Federation of Planets.
Reaction to "These Are the Voyages..." was negative. Critics and cast alike believed the Next Generation frame robbed the characters and their fans of closure, and that the death of Commander Trip Tucker felt forced and unnecessary. The final episode attracted 3.8 million viewers, the highest number since the previous season. After a strong premiere, Enterprise had grappled with declining ratings throughout its run. By the fourth season, fewer than three million viewers tuned in each week despite what some fans and critics considered an increase in episode quality. After selling the syndication rights, UPN and Paramount announced in February 2005 that the fourth season would be the show's last. With no new Star Trek episodes in the fall of 2005, the 2005–2006 season was the first year without a first-run Star Trek in 18 years since 1987.
## Plot
In 2370, Commander William Riker, aboard Enterprise-D, is troubled by the events depicted in the Next Generation episode "The Pegasus", and seeks guidance. At Lieutenant Commander Deanna Troi's suggestion, Riker sets a holo-program to the date 2161, some six years after the events of "Terra Prime", to a time when the original Enterprise (NX-01) is due to be decommissioned after ten years of active service. The starship and its crew are also returning to Earth for the signing of the Federation Charter, and Captain Jonathan Archer frets over the speech he will give to the assembled delegates.
En route, Riker and Troi observe as Enterprise is contacted by Shran, a former Andorian Imperial Guard officer whom Archer believed to be dead. Shran is married to Jhamel ("The Aenar"), and their young daughter has been kidnapped. He asks for Archer's help in rescuing her from Rigel X. Archer decides to assist, despite Commander T'Pol's warning that they may be late returning for the ceremony. Riker joins the Enterprise crew as it assaults Shran's enemies and brings his daughter safely back. Troi also advises that Riker assume the role of ship's chef, hoping to earn the confidence of the simulated crew. As he prepares food with the crew, he learns more about their memories and impressions of Trip Tucker.
He also watches as the kidnappers board Enterprise, and how, in order to save Archer's life, Commander Tucker overloads two conduits and dies after being mortally wounded. Riker notices that Archer is troubled that he must write a speech about how worthwhile their explorations have been despite his friend's death, but T'Pol assures him Tucker would have considered it worthwhile. On Earth, Troi watches as Archer enters a crowded grand hall to give his speech and Riker joins her, now sure of what course he should take. The final shot of the episode is a montage of the ships named Enterprise: (NCC-1701-D, NCC-1701, and NX-01) as Captains Jean-Luc Picard, James T. Kirk, and Archer recite the "Where no man has gone before" prologue.
## Background
"Broken Bow", Enterprise's 2001 premiere episode, attracted 12.5 million viewers in its first broadcast, but ratings quickly dropped to a low of 5.9 million viewers. Enterprise was threatened with cancellation by the third season. The show survived by slashing its budget amid broadcaster UPN's schedule revamp. The show was moved to Fridays in 2004, while the rest of UPN's programming became more female-friendly, in part due to the success of America's Next Top Model. The third season introduced a season-long story arc, to some of the best reviews of the entire series. In the fourth season, Manny Coto became executive producer after writing and co-producing the show since 2003. While Coto's episodes were hailed by critics and fans as equaling the quality of previous Star Trek television series, the average viewership dropped to 2.9 million, with a series-low showing of 2.5 million in January 2005. According to Nielsen Media Research, Enterprise's final episode attracted 3.8 million viewers, an increase of 69% over the previous season's finale.
On February 3, 2005, UPN and Paramount announced that the fourth season of the show would be its last. The network waited until the series had been sold to syndication before making the announcement. The cancellation marked the first time new Star Trek episodes would not appear on television in 18 years, since Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. The fourth season continued production so Paramount could sell an attractive 98 episodes to syndicates.
Actress Jolene Blalock (T'Pol) criticized the early stories as boring and lacking intriguing content. She felt early Enterprise scripts ignored basic tenets of Star Trek chronology, and offered "revealing costumes instead of character development". UPN executives said the male-oriented episodes of Enterprise did not mesh with the viewership of its other top shows, such as Top Model and Veronica Mars. Brannon Braga suggested the reason for cancellation was viewer fatigue, noting that "after 18 years and 624 hours of Star Trek, the audience began to have a little bit of overkill." Fans criticized Berman and Braga for ignoring Star Trek canon and refusing to fix their shows. Michael Hinman, news coordinator for SyFy Portal, said that in addition to the oversaturation of Star Trek, there "also is an oversaturation of Braga and Berman. [...] They couldn't sit back and say, 'You know, we just can't keep this fresh.' No, it was more about their stupid egos, and their nonsensical 'Even if it's broke, don't fix it' attitude." Berman noted that The Next Generation faced little competition from other science fiction shows, while Enterprise had to contend with a plethora of shows. For example, Friday viewing figures were higher for Battlestar Galactica.
## Production
"These Are the Voyages..." was written by Braga and Berman, the pair's only script of the fourth season. Enterprise writer Mike Sussman told TrekNation in May 2005 that Braga had considered the idea of an episode crossover featuring characters from other Star Trek series prior to the finale. Sussman's original idea for the episode was to have The Doctor of Star Trek: Voyager treating an ill patient who may or may not have been Archer trapped in the future. Due to the subject matter, Sussman said his version would not have been suitable for the final episode. In interviews, Berman said the episode had always been intended as the season finale regardless of cancellation, and gave conflicting answers as to whether Trip would still have been killed if the show had continued.
Allan Kroeker directed the episode, his third series finale following Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "What You Leave Behind" and Star Trek: Voyager's "Endgame". "These Are the Voyages..." featured guest appearances by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis as their Next Generation characters William Riker and Deanna Troi. Brent Spiner, another Next Generation veteran who had guest-starred earlier in the fourth season of Enterprise, had an off-screen speaking role as the android Data. Jeffrey Combs appeared as the Andorian Shran, whom Coto had wanted to be a permanent addition to the cast in the event of another season. The episode uses a framing story, so that it actually takes place in 2370 in the Star Trek universe aboard a holodeck on the Enterprise-D, specifically during the events of the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Pegasus".
Filming of the final episode began on Friday, February 25, after the first half of the day was spent completing "Terra Prime". Principal photography took eight days, one day longer than usual. The snowy, complex set of Rigel X, first seen in the pilot episode, was used, as was the rarely seen Enterprise galley. Enterprise-D locations such as hallways and the observation lounge were re-created. Frakes and Sirtis arrived just as a "Save Enterprise" rally was being held outside the lot. Similar to "What You Leave Behind", many of the production staff cameoed for a large crowd scene at the end of the episode, as Archer prepares to give his speech. Fifteen "VIPs", including writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, André Bormanis, and Manny Coto joined two dozen extras in forming part of the audience. The rest of the digital set was filled by a computer-generated crowd. After their parts were finished, the final dismissal of each cast member was met with applause. Jolene Blalock and Scott Bakula were the last actors to be released, and Bakula gave a speech thanking the production crew for making the cast feel welcome. Filming ended on Tuesday, March 8, and the sets were struck. Frakes and Sirtis returned on March 9 to complete green-screen shots to be used when their characters entered or exited the holodeck. Berman would not elaborate on the episode's content before it aired, saying, "It's going to have some surprising twists and turns. It's somewhat of a valentine."
A series-ending wrap party was held for the cast and crew at the Roosevelt Hotel in April. Cast members spoke about their feelings about the end of the series. John Billingsley said the show "was a great ride, and it changed my life. It's something that will last forever for me." He was happy to say goodbye to the two-hour makeup sessions to create his character, Phlox. Many of the cast were taking a break and going on vacation before seeking new acting work. Among the notable guests were Star Trek: Nemesis screenwriter John Logan, who was not affiliated with Enterprise; and Peter Weller, who appeared as a villain in "Terra Prime".
## Reception
"These Are the Voyages..." was negatively received by both critics and the show's cast, with it often being compared to being an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
### Cast and crew commentary
Before the episode aired, Blalock called the episode "appalling." She followed up her remarks by saying she was upset over the finale being a The Next Generation episode rather than an end for Enterprise.
Connor Trinneer, who played Commander Trip Tucker, felt the finale should have had a memorable farewell that he described as a "M\*A\*S\*H moment", but the producers did not want such an element. Trinneer liked the finale and was satisfied by it as an actor, his character had plenty to do and he enjoyed working with Frakes. Anthony Montgomery (who played Ensign Travis Mayweather) was displeased with the finale and said: "I feel there could have been a more effective way to wrap things up for our show as well as the franchise as a whole. It just seemed to take a little bit away from what the Enterprise cast and crew worked so diligently to achieve over the past four years." While Frakes enjoyed working with Sirtis again, he said "the reality is it was a bit of a stretch to have us shut down [the Enterprise cast's] show," and that in hindsight it was a disservice to them. The early criticism forced the show's producers to hold a conference and address the issue. Braga admitted there was cast unrest, but defended the episode as a way to close not just Enterprise but Star Trek as a whole.
Berman said: "I've read a lot of the criticisms and I understand how some people feel, but [Braga] and I spent a lot of time coming up with the idea and a somewhat, I would say, unique ending to a series, especially when you're ending it prematurely. [...] You never like to disappoint people, but I think it's nonsense to say that it was more a Next Generation episode than an Enterprise episode. The only elements of [The Next Generation] that were present were there as a sounding board to allow us to look at a mission that took place six years after "Terra Prime"." Braga later admitted that killing Tucker "wasn't a great idea", and called making the finale TNG-centric his biggest regret of the series. Coto said he liked the episode and found the script to be very moving. He said he considered the two-part story "Demons" and "Terra Prime" the quasi-finale of the season and called These Are the Voyages... "a kind of post-season episode" and actual farewell to Star Trek.
### Critical response
Reviewers were also critical of the Next Generation tie-in. Sci Fi Weekly's Patrick Lee said the framing story "reduces [the Enterprise cast] to the status of lab rats." Lee further noted that even without the guest appearances, the episode did not live up to the best offerings of the season, including "In a Mirror, Darkly". National Post's Alex Strachan called the Next Generation cameos reminders of better Star Trek, compared to the "bad make-up effects, bad acting, bad music" of the latest show. Rob Salem of the Toronto Star said the cameos served no narrative purpose, and that the episode "robs [the] characters (and their fans) of any significant long-term development or satisfying sense of closure." Reviewers also criticized the episode's ending, where viewers never got to see Archer's rousing speech. IGN said the episode was "Berman and Braga's parting shot, making sure that everyone knew who was in charge," and that the sharp contrast between "These Are the Voyages..." and "Terra Prime" brought into relief the reason neither should be allowed to produce Star Trek ever again.
The death of Tucker was another point of controversy. Salem described the development as "a major character is pointlessly killed off in service of a pointless plot device," a complaint echoed by IGN. Actor Connor Trinneer, who played Trip, said during a convention appearance that the character had "gotten out of much worse scrapes than that," and the death seemed forced. The writers, Trinneer contended, wanted to kill off a character to "get the fans talking," and so Trip was killed off simply to manipulate viewers. Several critics ended their reviews by saying that whether fans would be disappointed or pleased by the episode, the majority of casual viewers would not care one way or another. WhatCulture ranked this episode the 19th worst episode of Star Trek, while ScreenRant called it the worst episode of the entire franchise up to 2017. In 2009, Den of Geek, while acknowledging critiques of the finale, said "These Are the Voyages...'" was the tenth best episode of the series, praising the inclusion of Riker and Troi and remarking the "undeniable joy in seeing the familiar and beloved characters back on screen."
Newspapers covering Enterprise's cancellation and its final episode often said the failure of Enterprise was evidence that the franchise had moved too far from its roots and grown too dark. Andy Dehnart of MSNBC said that "while the writers and production designers deserve credit for offering worlds that were perhaps slightly more believable, they lost the fantastic, wondrous approach to space travel that The Next Generation borrowed from the original Star Trek and then perfected." USA Today's Michael Peck said that without the "dreams" of earlier series, "Star Trek becomes just another television drama." Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, meanwhile, said the show "never found the sense of uniqueness within the Trek universe that every version that came before it possessed."
## Home media release
The episode was released on DVD home media as part of the season four box set on November 1, 2005 in the United States. The episode was released in HD with surround sound on the Blu-ray release of the final season of Enterprise, which was made available on April 29, 2014. It was also one of three Enterprise episodes included in the DVD box set Star Trek Fan Collective - Captain's Log.
|
543,691 |
Battle of Tassafaronga
| 1,173,149,481 |
1942 naval battle in the Pacific theater of World War II
|
[
"1942 in Japan",
"1942 in the Solomon Islands",
"Battles and operations of World War II involving the Solomon Islands",
"Conflicts in 1942",
"Military history of Japan during World War II",
"Naval battles of World War II involving Japan",
"Naval battles of World War II involving the United States",
"November 1942 events",
"Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II",
"World War II naval operations and battles of the Pacific theatre"
] |
The Battle of Tassafaronga, sometimes referred to as the Fourth Battle of Savo Island or in Japanese sources as the Battle of Lunga Point (ルンガ沖夜戦, "Night Battle off Lunga"), was a nighttime naval battle that took place on 30 November 1942 between United States Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy warships during the Guadalcanal campaign. The battle took place in Ironbottom Sound near Tassafaronga Point on Guadalcanal.
In the battle, a US force of five cruisers and four destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright intercepted eight Japanese destroyers attempting to deliver food to their forces on Guadalcanal. The US destroyers waited four minutes after radar contact for permission to launch torpedoes and missed the optimal firing position; the torpedoes all missed, and the destroyers retired. The US cruisers opened fire and sank one destroyer. The muzzle flash exposed the US cruisers' positions. Under the command of Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka, Japanese destroyers quickly launched Type 93 "Long Lance" torpedoes, sinking one US cruiser and heavily damaging three others. The rest of Tanaka's force escaped undamaged but failed to complete the intended supply mission.
Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, considers this battle and the Battle of Savo Island to be two of the worst defeats in US naval history, behind only Pearl Harbor.
## Background
### Guadalcanal campaign
On 7 August 1942 Allied forces landed on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Florida Islands in the Solomon Islands. The landings were meant to deny the Japanese access to bases that they could use to threaten supply routes between the US and Australia, and to secure the islands as starting points for a campaign with the eventual goal of neutralizing the major Japanese base at Rabaul while also supporting the Allied New Guinea campaign. The landings began the six-month Guadalcanal campaign.
The 2,000 to 3,000 Japanese personnel on the islands were taken by complete surprise, and by nightfall on 8 August, the 11,000 Allied troops, under the command of Lieutenant General Alexander Vandegrift, secured Tulagi and nearby small islands as well as the Japanese airfield under construction at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal, named "Henderson Field" by the Allies. Allied aircraft operating from Henderson were called the "Cactus Air Force" (CAF) after the Allied code name for Guadalcanal. To protect the airfield, the US Marines established a perimeter defense around Lunga Point. Reinforcements over the next two months increased the number of US troops at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal to more than 20,000.
In response to the Allied landings on Guadalcanal, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters assigned the Imperial Japanese Army's 17th Army, a corps-sized command based at Rabaul and under the command of Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, the task of retaking the island. The first units of the 17th Army began to arrive there on August 19.
Because of the threat by CAF aircraft based at Henderson Field, the Japanese were rarely able to use large, slow transport ships or barges to deliver troops and supplies to the island; instead, they used warships based at Rabaul and the Shortland Islands to carry their forces to Guadalcanal. The Japanese warships, mainly light cruisers and destroyers from the Eighth Fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, were usually able to make the round trip down "The Slot" to Guadalcanal and back in a single night, thereby minimizing their exposure to CAF air attack. Delivering the troops in this manner, however, prevented most of the soldiers' heavy equipment and supplies, such as heavy artillery, vehicles, and much food and ammunition, from being carried to Guadalcanal with them. These high-speed warship runs to Guadalcanal occurred throughout the campaign and were later called the "Tokyo Express" by Allied forces and "Rat Transportation" by the Japanese.
The Japanese attempted several times between August and November 1942 to recapture Henderson Field and drive Allied forces from Guadalcanal, to no avail. The last attempt by the Japanese to deliver significant additional forces to the island failed during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal of 12–15 November.
On 26 November Japanese Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura took command of the new Eighth Area Army at Rabaul. The command encompassed both Hyakutake's 17th Army in the Solomons and the 18th Army in New Guinea. One of Imamura's first priorities upon assuming command was the continuation of the attempts to retake Henderson Field and Guadalcanal. However, the Allied attempt to take Buna in New Guinea changed Imamura's priorities; it was considered a more severe threat to Rabaul, and Imamura postponed further major reinforcement efforts to Guadalcanal to concentrate on the situation in New Guinea.
### Supply crisis
The combination of threats from CAF aircraft, US Navy PT boats stationed at Tulagi, and a cycle of bright moonlight caused the Japanese rely on submarines to deliver provisions to their forces on Guadalcanal. Beginning on 16 November and continuing for the next three weeks, 16 submarines made nocturnal deliveries of foodstuffs to the island, with one submarine making the trip each night. Each submarine could deliver 20 to 30 tons of supplies, about one day's worth of food for the 17th Army, but the difficult task of transporting the supplies by hand through the jungle to the frontline units limited their value to sustain the Japanese troops on Guadalcanal. At the same time, the Japanese tried to establish a chain of three bases in the central Solomons to allow small boats to use them as staging sites for making supply deliveries to Guadalcanal, but damaging Allied airstrikes on the bases forced the abandonment of this plan.
On 26 November the 17th Army notified Imamura that it faced a critical food crisis. Some front-line units had not been resupplied for six days, and even the rear-area troops were on one-third rations. The situation forced the Japanese to return to using destroyers to deliver the necessary supplies.
Eighth Fleet personnel devised a plan to help reduce the exposure of destroyers delivering supplies to Guadalcanal. Large oil or gas drums were cleaned and filled with medical supplies and food, with enough air space to provide buoyancy, and strung together with rope. When the destroyers arrived at Guadalcanal they would make a sharp turn, the drums would be cut loose, and a swimmer or boat from the shore could pick up the buoyed end of the rope and return it to the beach, where the soldiers could haul in the supplies.
The Eighth Fleet's Guadalcanal Reinforcement Unit, based in the Shortland Islands and under the command of Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka, was tasked by Mikawa with making the first of five scheduled runs using the drum method on the night of 30 November. Tanaka's unit was centered on the eight ships of Destroyer Squadron (Desron) 2, with six destroyers assigned to carry from 200 to 240 drums of supplies apiece, to Tassafaronga Point. Tanaka's flagship Naganami along with Takanami acted as escorts. The six drum-carrying destroyers were Kuroshio, Oyashio, Kagerō, Suzukaze, Kawakaze, and Makinami. To save weight, the drum-carrying destroyers left their reloads of Type 93 torpedoes (Long Lances) at the Shortlands, leaving each ship with eight torpedoes, one for each tube.
After the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, US Vice Admiral William Halsey, commander of Allied forces, South Pacific Area, had reorganized US naval forces under his command, including, on 24 November, the formation of Task Force 67 (TF67) at Espiritu Santo, comprising the heavy cruisers USS Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Northampton, the light cruiser Honolulu, and four destroyers (Fletcher, Drayton, Maury, and Perkins). US Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright replaced Thomas Kinkaid as commander of TF67 on 28 November.
Upon taking command, Wright briefed his ship commanders on his plan for engaging the Japanese in future; he expected night battles around Guadalcanal. The plan, which he had drafted with Kinkaid, stated that radar-equipped destroyers were to scout in front of the cruisers and deliver a surprise torpedo attack upon sighting Japanese warships, then vacate the area to give the cruisers a clear field of fire. The cruisers were then to engage with gunfire at a range of 10,000 to 12,000 yards (9,100 to 11,000 m). The cruisers' floatplanes would scout and drop flares during the battle.
On 29 November Allied intelligence personnel intercepted and decoded a Japanese message transmitted to the 17th Army on Guadalcanal alerting them to Tanaka's supply run. Informed of the message, Halsey ordered Wright to take TF67 to intercept Tanaka off Guadalcanal. TF67, with Wright flying his flag on Minneapolis, departed Espiritu Santo at 27 knots (31 mph; 50 km/h) just before midnight on 29 November for the 580 miles (930 km) run to Guadalcanal. En route, destroyers Lamson and Lardner, returning from a convoy escort assignment to Guadalcanal, were ordered to join up with TF67. Lacking the time to brief the commanding officers of the joining destroyers of his battle plan, Wright assigned them a position behind the cruisers. At 17:00 on 30 November, Wright's cruisers launched one floatplane each for Tulagi to drop flares during the expected battle that night. At 20:00, Wright sent his crews to battle stations.
Tanaka's force departed the Shortlands in the early morning of 30 November for the run to Guadalcanal. Tanaka attempted to evade Allied aerial reconnaissance aircraft by first heading northeast through Bougainville Strait before turning southeast and then south to pass through Indispensable Strait. Paul Mason, an Australian coastwatcher stationed in southern Bougainville, reported by radio the departure of Tanaka's ships from Shortland, and this message was passed to Wright. At the same time, a Japanese search aircraft spotted an Allied convoy near Guadalcanal and communicated the sighting to Tanaka who told his destroyer commanders to expect action that night and that, "In such an event, utmost efforts will be made to destroy the enemy without regard for the unloading of supplies."
## Battle
### Order of battle
### Prelude
At 21:40 on 30 November, Tanaka's ships sighted Savo Island from Indispensable Strait. The Japanese ships were in line ahead formation, interval 600 metres (660 yd), in the order of Takanami, Oyashio, Kuroshio, Kagerō, Makinami, Naganami, Kawakaze, and Suzukaze. At this same time, TF67 entered Lengo Channel en route to Ironbottom Sound. Wright's ships were in column in the order Fletcher, Perkins, Maury, Drayton, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pensacola, Honolulu, Northampton, Lamson, and Lardner. The four van destroyers led the cruisers by 4,000 yards (3,700 m) and the cruisers steamed 1,000 yards (910 m) apart.
At 22:40 Tanaka's ships passed south of Savo about 3 miles (5 km) offshore from Guadalcanal and slowed to 12 knots (14 mph; 22 km/h) as they approached the unloading area. Takanami took station about 1 mile (2 km) seaward to screen the column. At the same time, TF67 exited Lengo Channel into the sound and headed at 20 knots (23 mph; 37 km/h) towards Savo Island. Wright's van destroyers moved to a position slightly inshore of the cruisers. The night sky was moonless (the third-quarter moon would rise after midnight, after the fight was over) with between 2 miles (3 km) and 7 miles (11 km) of visibility. Because of extremely calm seas, which created a suction effect on their pontoons, Wright's cruiser floatplanes were delayed in lifting off from Tulagi harbor and were not be a factor in the battle.
At 23:06, Wright's force began to detect Tanaka's ships on radar near Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal about 23,000 yards (21,000 m) away. Wright's destroyers rejoined the column as it continued to head towards Savo. At the same time, Tanaka's ships, which were not equipped with radar, split into two groups and prepared to shove the drums overboard. Naganami, Kawakaze, and Suzukaze headed for their drop-off point near Doma Reef while Makinami, Kagerō, Oyashio, and Kuroshio aimed for nearby Tassafaronga. At 23:12, Takanami's crew visually sighted Wright's column, quickly confirmed by lookouts on Tanaka's other ships. At 23:16, Tanaka ordered unloading preparations halted and "All ships attack."
### Action
At 23:14, operators on Fletcher established firm radar contact with Takanami and the lead group of four drum-carrying destroyers. At 23:15, with the range 7,000 yards (6,400 m), Commander William M. Cole, commander of Wright's destroyer group and captain of Fletcher, radioed Wright for permission to fire torpedoes. Wright waited two minutes and then responded with, "Range on bogies [Tanaka's ships on radar] excessive at present." Cole responded that the range was fine. Another two minutes passed before Wright responded with permission to fire. In the meantime, the US destroyers' targets escaped from an optimum firing setup ahead to a marginal position passing abeam, giving the American torpedoes a long overtaking run near the limit of their range. At 23:20, Fletcher, Perkins, and Drayton fired 20 Mark 15 torpedoes towards Tanaka's ships. Maury, lacking SG radar and thus having no contacts, withheld fire.
At the same time, Wright ordered his force to open fire. At 23:21, Minneapolis complied with her first salvo, quickly followed by the other American cruisers. Cole's four destroyers fired star shells to illuminate the targets as previously directed then increased speed to clear the area for the cruisers to operate.
Because of her closer proximity to Wright's column, Takanami was the target of most of the Americans' initial gunfire. Takanami returned fire and launched her full load of eight torpedoes but was quickly hit by American gunfire and, within four minutes, was set afire and incapacitated. As Takanami was destroyed, the rest of Tanaka's ships, almost unnoticed by the Americans, were increasing speed, maneuvering, and preparing to respond to the American attack. All of the American torpedoes missed. Historian Russell S. Crenshaw Jr. postulates that had the 24 Mark 15 torpedoes fired by US Navy destroyers during the battle not been fatally flawed, the outcome of the battle might have been different.
Tanaka's flagship Naganami reversed course to starboard, opened fire and began laying a smoke screen. The next two ships astern, Kawakaze and Suzukaze, reversed course to port. At 23:23, Suzukaze fired eight torpedoes in the direction of the gunflashes from Wright's cruisers, followed by Naganami and Kawakaze which fired their full loads of eight torpedoes at 23:32 and 23:33 respectively.
Meanwhile, the four destroyers at the head of the Japanese column maintained their heading down the Guadalcanal coast, allowing Wright's cruisers to pass on the opposite course. Once clear of Takanami at 23:28, Kuroshio fired four and Oyashio fired eight torpedoes in the direction of Wright's column and then reversed course and increased speed. Wright's cruisers maintained the same course and speed as the 44 Japanese torpedoes headed in their direction.
At 23:27, as Minneapolis fired her ninth salvo and Wright prepared to order a course change for his column, two torpedoes, from either Suzukaze or Takanami, struck her forward half. One warhead exploded the aviation fuel storage tanks forward of turret one and the other knocked out three of the ship's four firerooms. The bow forward of turret one folded down at a 70-degree angle, and the ship lost power and steering control. Thirty-seven men were killed.
Less than a minute later a torpedo hit New Orleans abreast of turret one and exploded the ship's forward ammunition magazines and aviation gasoline storage. The blast severed the ship's entire bow forward of turret two. The bow twisted to port, damaging the ship's hull as it was wrenched free by the ship's momentum, and sank immediately off the aft port quarter. Everyone in turrets one and two perished. New Orleans was forced into a reverse course to starboard and lost steering and communications. A total of 183 men were killed. Herbert Brown, a seaman in the ship's plotting room, described the scene after the torpedo hit:
> I had to see. I walked alongside the silent turret two and was stopped by a lifeline stretched from the outboard port lifeline to the side of the turret. Thank God it was there, for one more step and I would have pitched head first into the dark water thirty feet below. The bow was gone. One hundred and twenty five feet of ship and number one main battery turret with three 8 inch guns were gone. Eighteen hundred tons of ship were gone. Oh my God, all those guys I went through boot camp with – all gone.
Pensacola followed next astern in the cruiser column. Observing Minneapolis and New Orleans taking hits and slowing, Pensacola steered to pass them on the port side and then, once past, returned to the same base course. At 23:39, Pensacola took a torpedo abreast the mainmast. The explosion spread flaming oil throughout the interior and across the main deck of the ship, killing 125 of the ship's crew. The hit ripped away the port outer driveshaft, and the ship took a 13-degree list and lost power, communications, and steering.
Astern of Pensacola, Honolulu's captain chose to pass Minneapolis and New Orleans on the starboard side. At the same time, the ship increased speed to 30 knots (35 mph; 56 km/h), maneuvered radically, and successfully transited the battle area without taking any damage while maintaining main battery fire at the rapidly disappearing Japanese destroyers.
The last cruiser in the American column, Northampton, followed Honolulu to pass the damaged cruisers ahead to starboard. Unlike Honolulu, Northampton did not increase speed or attempt any radical maneuvers. At 23:48, after returning to the base course, Northampton was hit by two of Kawakaze's torpedoes. One hit 10 feet (3 m) below the waterline abreast the after engine room, and the second hit 40 feet (12 m) further aft. The after engine room flooded, three of four shafts ceased turning, and the ship listed 10 degrees to port and caught fire. Fifty men were killed.
The last ships in Wright's column, Lamson and Lardner, failed to locate any targets and exited the battle area to the east after being mistakenly fired on by machine guns from New Orleans. Cole's four destroyers circled completely around Savo Island at maximum speed and reentered the battle area, but the engagement had already ended.
Meanwhile, at 23:44 Tanaka ordered his ships to break contact and retire from the battle area. As they proceeded up Guadalcanal's coast, Kuroshio and Kagerō fired eight more torpedoes towards the American ships, which all missed. When Takanami failed to respond to radio calls, Tanaka directed Oyashio and Kuroshio to go to her assistance. The two destroyers located the burning ship at 01:00 on 1 December but abandoned rescue efforts after detecting American warships in the area. Oyashio and Kuroshio quickly departed the sound to rejoin the rest of Tanaka's ships for the return journey to the Shortlands, which they reached 10 hours later. Takanami was the only Japanese warship hit by American gunfire and seriously damaged during the battle.
## Aftermath
Takanami'''s surviving crew abandoned ship at 01:30, but a large explosion killed many more of them in the water, including the destroyer division commander, Toshio Shimizu, and the ship's captain, Masami Ogura. Of her crew of 244, 48 survived to reach shore on Guadalcanal, and 19 of them were captured by the Americans.
Northampton's crew was unable to contain the ship's fires and list and began to abandon ship at 01:30. The ship sank at 03:04 about 4 nautical miles (7 km; 5 mi) from Doma Cove on Guadalcanal (). Fletcher and Drayton rescued the ship's 773 survivors.
Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Pensacola were able to sail the 19 nautical miles (35 km; 22 mi) to Tulagi by the morning of 1 December, where they were berthed for emergency repairs. The fires on Pensacola burned for 12 hours before being extinguished. Pensacola departed Tulagi for rear area ports and further repair on 6 December. After construction of temporary bows from coconut logs, Minneapolis and New Orleans departed Tulagi for Espiritu Santo or Sydney, Australia on 12 December. All three cruisers required lengthy and extensive repairs. New Orleans returned to action in August, Minneapolis in September, and Pensacola in October 1943.
The battle was one of the worst defeats suffered by the US Navy in World War II, third only to the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Savo Island. In spite of his defeat in the battle, Wright was awarded the Navy Cross, one of the highest American military decorations for bravery, for his actions during the engagement. Mitigating to some degree the destruction of his task force, Wright, in his after-action report, claimed that his force sank four Japanese destroyers and damaged two others. Halsey, in his comments on Wright's report, placed much of the blame for the defeat on Cole, saying that the destroyer squadron commander fired his torpedoes from too great a distance to be effective and should have "helped" the cruisers instead of circling around Savo Island. Tanaka claimed to have sunk a battleship and two cruisers in the battle. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison assessed the outcome by saying: "It is a painful truth that the Battle of Tassafaronga was a sharp defeat inflicted on an alert and superior cruiser force by a partially surprised and inferior destroyer force."
After the war, Tanaka said of his victory at Tassafaronga, "I have heard that US naval experts praised my command in that action. I am not deserving of such honors. It was the superb proficiency and devotion of the men who served me that produced the tactical victory for us." As for the US Navy, he said: "The enemy had discovered our plans and movements, had put planes in the air beforehand for purposes of illumination, had got into formation for an artillery engagement, and cleverly gained the advantage of prior neutralization fire. But his fire was inaccurate, shells improperly set for deflection were especially numerous, and it is conjectured that either his marksmanship is not remarkable or else the illumination from his star shells was not sufficiently effective.”
Cole's experience at Tassafaronga led to Arleigh Burke's standing orders to his own ships that "destroyers are to attack the enemy on first contact without awaiting orders from task force commander," which were instrumental in his success in the battles of Empress Augusta Bay and Cape St. George. Cole also influenced Commander Frederick Moosbrugger's tactics at the Battle of Vella Gulf, in which Moosbrugger withheld gunfire until his own torpedoes were observed hitting enemy ships, surprising the Japanese.
The results of the battle led to further discussion in the US Pacific Fleet about changes in tactical doctrine and the need for technical improvements, such as flashless powder. It was not until eight months later that the naval high command recognized there were serious problems with the functioning of the torpedoes. The Americans were still unaware of the range and power of Japanese torpedoes and the effectiveness of Japanese night battle tactics. In fact, Wright claimed that his ships must have been fired on by submarines since the observed position of Tanaka's ships "make it improbable that torpedoes with speed–distance characteristics similar to our own" could have caused such damage. The Americans would not recognize the true capabilities of their Pacific adversary's torpedoes and night tactics until well into 1943.
In spite of their defeat in the battle, the Americans had prevented Tanaka from landing the desperately needed food supplies on Guadalcanal, albeit at high cost. A second Japanese supply delivery attempt by ten destroyers led by Tanaka on 3 December successfully dumped 1,500 drums of provisions off Tassafaronga Point, but strafing American aircraft sank all but 310 of them the next day before they could be pulled ashore. On 7 December, a third attempt by 12 destroyers was turned back by US PT boats off Cape Esperance. The next night, two US PT boats torpedoed and sank the Japanese submarine as it attempted to deliver supplies to Guadalcanal. Based on the difficulties experienced trying to deliver food to the island, the Japanese Navy informed Imamura on 8 December that they intended to stop all destroyer transportation runs to Guadalcanal immediately. After Imamura protested, the navy agreed to one more run to the island.
The last attempt to deliver food to Guadalcanal by destroyers in 1942 was led by Tanaka on the night of 11 December and consisted of 11 destroyers. Five US PT boats met Tanaka off Guadalcanal and torpedoed his flagship Teruzuki, severely damaging the destroyer and injuring Tanaka. After Tanaka transferred to Naganami, Teruzuki was scuttled. Only 220 of the 1,200 drums released that night were recovered by Japanese army personnel on shore. Tanaka was subsequently relieved of command and transferred to Japan on 29 December.
On 12 December the Japanese Navy proposed that Guadalcanal be abandoned. Despite opposition from Japanese Army leaders, who still hoped that Guadalcanal could eventually be retaken from the Allies, on 31 December Japan's Imperial General Headquarters, with approval from Emperor Hirohito, agreed to the evacuation of all Japanese forces from the island and the establishment of a new line of defense for the Solomon Islands on New Georgia. The Japanese evacuated their remaining forces from Guadalcanal over three nights 2–7 February 1943, conceding the hard-fought campaign to the Allies. Building on their success at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, the Allies continued their campaign against Japan, ultimately culminating in Japan's defeat and the end of World War II.
The three Rogers brothers, who all served on New Orleans'', died during the Battle of Tassafaronga. Their deaths were similar to the loss of the five Sullivan brothers on Juneau only two weeks earlier. These groups of siblings' deaths led to the Sole Survivor Policy and the military policy that bans family members from serving together in combat areas.
|
51,375,461 |
Maryland Tercentenary half dollar
| 1,139,250,326 |
US commemorative fifty-cent piece (1934)
|
[
"1934 establishments in the United States",
"Currencies introduced in 1934",
"Early United States commemorative coins",
"Economy of Maryland",
"Fifty-cent coins",
"Tricentennial anniversaries"
] |
The Maryland Tercentenary half dollar was a commemorative fifty-cent piece issued by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1934. It depicts Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore on the obverse and the Coat of Arms of Maryland on the reverse.
The Maryland Tercentenary Commission sought a coin in honor of the 300th anniversary of the arrival of English settlers in Maryland. The state's two senators introduced legislation for such a piece, and it passed both houses of Congress with no opposition. A design had already been prepared by Professor Hans Schuler; it passed review by the Commission of Fine Arts, though there was controversy then and since over whether Lord Baltimore, a Cavalier and Catholic, would have worn a collar typical of Puritans.
The Commission sold about 15,000 of the full issue of 25,000 for \$1 each (), and thereafter discounted the price for large sales to dealers and speculators, getting as little as sixty-five cents per coin. They increased in value over time, and are now valued in the low hundreds of dollars.
## Background
The Maryland Tercentenary Commission, responsible for organizing observances of the 300th anniversary of the 1634 arrival of English settlers in what is now the state of Maryland, desired a commemorative half dollar to mark the occasion. Maryland's early settlers had founded St. Mary's City on land granted by King Charles I to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. The Tercentenary Commission wanted to use profits from the coin to defray the expenses of the anniversary celebrations. As well as seeking the coin, the commission requested that a commemorative postage stamp be issued.
In 1934, commemorative coins were not sold by the government—Congress, in authorizing legislation, usually designated an organization which had the exclusive right to purchase them at face value and vend them to the public at a premium. In the case of the Maryland half dollar, the responsible group was the Tercentenary Commission, acting through its president or secretary.
## Legislation
On March 6, 1934, Maryland's two senators, Millard E. Tydings and Phillips Lee Goldsborough, introduced a bill for a half dollar in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of Maryland; it was referred to the Committee on Banking and Currency. That committee issued a report on March 13, through Senator Goldsborough, recommending the bill pass without amendment. The bill was brought to the Senate floor on March 20, and passed without any recorded discussion.
The bill was transmitted to the House of Representatives and referred to the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures. That committee issued a report on April 25, 1934, through New York Representative Andrew Somers, recommending the bill pass, but with several amendments, including increasing the authorized mintage from 10,000 to 25,000 and requiring that the federal government would not pay for the coinage dies and other preparations for the coinage. Somers brought the bill to the House floor on May 2, and when he asked the House to consider it, Sam Rayburn of Texas stated that if there was to be debate, he would object. Somers stated that to his knowledge, there would be no debate. Thomas L. Blanton, also of Texas, proposed an amendment to increase the mintage further to 100,000, but this was merely pro forma, to be able to ask Somers questions. Somers stated that the figure of 25,000 had been arrived at in consultation with the Treasury Department. Blanton felt there was a need for more silver coins in circulation, but he and Somers agreed that commemorative coins, which rarely entered circulation and were generally picked out quickly, were not the answer. He withdrew his amendment, and the bill passed without further discussion.
As the two houses of Congress had passed versions of the bill that were not identical, it returned to the Senate. On May 3, Goldsborough moved that the Senate accept the House's amendments, and the bill passed without debate. The bill, authorizing 25,000 half dollars, passed into law on May 9, 1934 with the signature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
## Preparation
Designs for the coin had been prepared while the bill was pending, and on May 9, the date of passage, the secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, Hans Caemmerer, sent a telegram to its sculptor-member, Lee Lawrie, stating that the Treasury Department needed an immediate answer as to whether the designs were suitable. Lawrie journeyed by train to Philadelphia to visit the Mint there and confer with the Chief Engraver, John R. Sinnock. Lawrie made several suggestions, including deleting a dot between the words HALF and DOLLAR and respacing the letters in those words. The coin's designer, Hans Schuler of the Maryland Institute College of Art, made changes and brought the coin's plaster models back to the mint on the 14th; Sinnock generally approved of the changes but Lawrie had further suggestions, including moving the words IN GOD WE TRUST from the reverse to the obverse, adjacent to Lord Baltimore, who had decreed religious freedom in Maryland. He also felt that Lord Baltimore's garments were not accurate, since he was portrayed with a broad collar Lawrie deemed more typical of Puritans rather than Cavaliers such as Baltimore, a Catholic.
Schuler made the lettering changes, but would not accept the criticism of the collar, stating that he had based his depiction on a well-known painting of Baltimore by Gerard Soest. Lawrie did not argue further, and with the Tercentenary Commission anxious to have the coins struck as quickly as possible, the Commission of Fine Arts gave its approval. To save time, coinage dies for the issue were prepared by the Medallic Art Company of New York.
## Design
The obverse shows The 2nd Baron Baltimore. Since the time of issue, some numismatic writers have criticized the manner in which he is depicted, especially his collar. Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their joint work on commemorative coins, state that Schuler's reliance on the Soest painting "does not excuse the Puritan collar worn by Lord Baltimore, the Cavalier of Cavaliers. Schuler would have done better to go to Lord Baltimore's own coins, which show a very different portrait." Don Taxay noted, "since Calvert's own coinage depicts him in a loosely draped garment, the [Fine Art] Commission's objection to the puritan collar was probably well founded."
The reverse side features the Coat of Arms of Maryland; the arms of Lord Baltimore quartered with those of his wife. The Maryland piece and the York County, Maine Tercentenary half dollar (1936) are the only U.S. coins to have a cross as part of the design. The state motto appears on the ribbon beneath the arms, FATTI MASCHII PAROLE FEMINE, sometimes translated from Italian as "deeds are manly, words womanly". Swiatek and Breen noted in 1981 that the state "has not shown any disposition to repudiate this sexist rubbish". The Maryland General Assembly in 2017 passed an act disavowing that translation, saying it meant "strong deeds, gentle words". The sculptor's initials, HS, are found next to the M in MARYLAND, on the reverse.
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on U.S. commemorative coins and medals, complained that the Maryland piece "looks more like an advertising medal than a commemorative half-dollar". He deemed the obverse conventional "save for the facing bust, which has been so often taken for good design by mediocre medalists". The reverse, which Vermeule called "standard fare" on numismatic items, "could almost be a policeman's badge".
## Production and distribution
In July 1934, the Philadelphia Mint struck 25,000 Maryland half dollars, plus 15 extra that would be held for inspection and testing at the 1935 meeting of the annual Assay Commission. They were delivered to the Tercentenary Commission on July 10, and were put on sale at \$1 each. This made the Maryland coin the first authorized under the Roosevelt administration to be issued; the Texas Centennial half dollar had been authorized by Congress in 1933, but would not be struck until October 1934. By the end of 1934, about 15,000 Maryland half dollars had been sold. By this time, the tercentenary celebrations had ended, and the commission lowered the price to \$.75. The price was lowered even more, to \$.65, and the commission exhausted its stock. When Texas coin dealer Lyman W. Hoffecker enquired in May 1935, the commission advised him it was sold out, and that about 8,000 had been sold in bulk to dealers. Hoffecker testified before Congress in March 1936 about commemorative coin abuses, and stated that he had learned that about 1,000 had gone to a dealer in the Southwest, and when he visited the Tercentenary Commission's offices, the elevator operator told him he had bought 500 to lay aside for the future.
The Maryland Tercentenary half dollar sold at retail for about \$1.50 in 1935, but had fallen back to about \$1.25 in uncirculated condition in 1940. It thereafter increased in value, selling for about \$10 by 1955, and \$300 by 1985. The deluxe edition of R. S. Yeoman's A Guide Book of United States Coins, published in 2018, lists the coin for between \$130 and \$325, depending on condition. Between two and four pieces are known in proof condition, including two that had belonged to Chief Engraver Sinnock. One such specimen sold at auction for \$109,250 in 2012.
|
4,932,695 |
1984 World Snooker Championship
| 1,163,239,221 |
Professional snooker tournament, held April 1984
|
[
"1984 in English sport",
"1984 in snooker",
"April 1984 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"May 1984 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Sports competitions in Sheffield",
"World Snooker Championships"
] |
The 1984 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 1984 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purpose of sponsorship) was a ranking professional snooker tournament that took place between 21 April and 7 May 1984 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The event was organised by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, and was the eighth consecutive World Snooker Championship to be held at the Crucible since the 1977 event. The event featured 94 participants, of which 78 players competed in a qualifying event held at the Redwood Lodge in Bristol from 1 to 13 April. Of these, 16 players qualified for the main stage in Sheffield, where they met 16 invited seeds. The total prize fund for the event was £200,000, the highest total pool for any snooker tournament at that time; the winner received £44,000.
The defending champion was English player Steve Davis, who had won the title twice previously. He met fellow-countryman Jimmy White in the final, which was played as a best-of-35- match. Davis took a significant lead of 12–4 after the first two sessions; although White battled back into the match, Davis eventually won 18–16, becoming the first player to retain the title at the Crucible. Rex Williams secured the championship's highest , scoring a 138 in the 12th frame of his first-round loss to White. Eight were made during the competition, the fewest since the 1978 event. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy, and broadcast by BBC.
## Tournament format
The 1984 World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 21 April and 7 May 1984 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The event was the 1984 edition of the World Snooker Championship, which was first held in 1927. It was the last ranking event of the 1984–85 snooker season on the World Snooker Tour. The event was organised by World Snooker and the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA). There were a total of 94 entrants from the tour, with one player withdrawing, and the competition's main draw had 32 participants. A three-round knockout qualifying competition with 78 players was held from 1 to 13 April, producing the 16 qualifying players who progressed into the main draw to play the top 16 seeds.
The top 16 players in the latest world rankings automatically qualified for the main draw as seeded players. As defending champion, Steve Davis was seeded first for the event; the remaining 15 were allocated based on world rankings for the previous season. Matches in the first round of the main draw were played as best-of-19-frames. The number of frames needed to win a match increased to 13 in the second round and quarter-finals, and 16 in the semi-finals; the final match was played as best-of-35-frames.
The tournament was televised on BBC in the United Kingdom. During the last session of the final, the number of viewers varied from 6.3 million (when popular soap opera Coronation Street aired on ITV) to a peak of 13.1 million in the last 15 minutes of the match. The world number five Alex Higgins provided commentary on selected matches.
### Prize fund
The prize fund for the event was the largest for any snooker tournament to that date, at £200,000 with the winner receiving £44,000. The breakdown of prize money for the event is shown below:
- Winner: £44,000
- Runner-up: £22,000
- Semi-finals: £12,700
- Quarter-finals: £6,600
- Last 16: £4,350
- Last 32: £2,200
- Final qualifying round losers: £450
- Highest break (in the main competition): £4,000
- Highest break (in qualifying): £1,000
- Maximum break: £15,000
- Total: £200,000
## Summary
### Qualifying
A 78-competitor qualifying tournament for the event was held at Redwood Lodge in Bristol, from 1 April to 14 April 1984. The players were divided into 16 groups, with matches played on a knockout basis to produce 16 qualifiers. All qualifying matches were the best-of-19-. Tommy Murphy made two breaks of 108 in his first round defeat of Jack Fitzmaurice, two weeks after his win over Fitzmaurice in the World Professional Billiards Championship. John Parrott progressed after winning three rounds, beating Dennis Hughes 10–3, Clive Everton 10–2 and the 1978 World Snooker Championship runner-up Perrie Mans 10–0. Neal Foulds, aged 20, the British junior snooker champion, also won three matches to make his Crucible debut, defeating Doug French 10–5, Les Dodd 10–4 and Jim Meadowcroft 10–2.
Eight-time former world champion Fred Davis won his match against Jim Donnelly 10–5. Canadian John Bear, was scheduled to play but did not, and Roy Andrewartha received a walkover for the match. Mike Watterson, who as promoter of the world championship from 1977 to 1983 had first selected the Crucible as the tournament venue, defeated Bernard Bennett 10–5 in the first round before losing 8–10 to Warren King. Losers in the qualifying rounds received £450. Andrewartha, Foulds, Parrott, King, Marcel Gauvreau, Joe Johnson, Paul Mifsud, Mario Morra, and Eddie Sinclair made their World Championship debuts in qualifying.
### First round
The first round took place from 21 to 26 April. The matches were contested between the seeded players and qualifiers with each played over two sessions as best-of-19 frames. David Taylor, who was trailing 3–5 to Marcel Gauvreau after their first session, won seven frames in a row to win 10–5 and gain his first ranking points of the season. Roy Andrewartha, a time and motion analyst who played professional snooker part-time, lost 4–10 to Eddie Charlton. Neal Foulds took the last three frames of their first session to lead former world champion Alex Higgins 5–3, and having the more consistent long potting in the match, won 10–9 after the scores had been level at 7–7.
Silvino Francisco defeated Tony Meo, who to that point had been the fourth-highest earner on the snooker circuit that season, 10–5. Willie Thorne defeated John Virgo for the second consecutive world championship. Virgo's defeat came at the end of a season in which he failed to win any ranking points, and he dropped out of the top 16, to 18th. Eight-time champion Fred Davis made his last appearance at the World Championships, losing 4–10 to Bill Werbeniuk in the first round. Davis had first played in the World Championship in 1937. Aged 70 years and 253 days, he became the tournament's oldest-ever player.
Many of the matches had one-sided scorelines. Dennis Taylor and Kirk Stevens both won 10–1; Terry Griffiths won 10–2; Steve Davis, John Spencer and Cliff Thorburn won 10–3; and Bill Werbeniuk, Doug Mountjoy and Eddie Charlton won 10–4. Four of the top 16 seeded players lost in the first round: Tony Knowles (fourth seed), Alex Higgins (fifth), John Virgo (fourteenth) and Tony Meo (fifteenth).
Knowles, who had been the only player to beat Steve Davis in the World Championship in the previous three years, lost 7–10 to John Parrott. Knowles had recently featured in a three-part series in the tabloid newspaper The Sun, where he boasted of his sexual adventures and was dismissive of most other competitors in the tournament. The articles led to Knowles being fined £5,000, imposed by the WPBSA for bringing the sport into disrepute.
In the other matches, second seed Ray Reardon beat Jim Wych 10–7, and Jimmy White beat Rex Williams 10–6. Williams made the first break of the tournament in the 12th frame, a total clearance of 138, the highest break of the tournament. In the first round, 233 frames were played out of a possible 304, with an average frame time of 22.5 minutes. The longest frame, between Cliff Thorburn and Mario Morra, took 51 minutes, whilst the shortest was 9 minutes, in the Jimmy White and Rex Williams match.
### Second round
Matches in the second round were best-of-25 frames, and scheduled to each be played over three sessions taking place between 26 and 30 April. Davis took seven from eight frames and compiled breaks of 100, 95, and 92 against Spencer to win 13–5 after leading 6–4. White trailed 3–5 against Charlton at the end of the first session. White made breaks of 80, 79, 44, 61, 34, and 82 to lead 10–6 and went on to win 13–7. Griffiths beat Werbeniuk 13–5.
Dennis Taylor led Parrott 11–7, before Parrott won four frames in a row to level at 11–11. Taylor, who was the more consistent potter during the match, took the next two to win 13–11. Thorburn and Thorne contested a tight match that Thorburn won 13–11. From 9–9 against David Taylor, Stevens scored three breaks of over 50 to win the match 13–10. Neal Foulds led Doug Mountjoy 3–1 but ended up losing 6–13.
Reardon, having his least successful season in 17 years as a snooker professional, made a 109 break in the eighth frame to lead 5–3 at the end of the first session against Francisco. The score was tied at 8–8 after the second session. In the last session, Francisco was ahead, but under-hit when trying to pot the . This left Reardon needing one rather than three; Francisco , giving Reardon the additional points required. Reardon went on to win the frame on a after Francisco failed the pot and left the black ball over the of a . From 9–8, Reardon won four frames in a row to win the match 13–8.
### Quarter-finals
The quarter-finals were scheduled to each be played over three sessions, on 1 and 2 May, as best-of-25-frames matches. Steve Davis won the first three frames of his match against Terry Griffiths, but Griffiths won the next five frames to lead 5–3. Griffiths then won the first frame of the second session to lead 6–3. Davis, however, pulled back to level the match at 6–6, and the second session ended tied at 8–8. Davis won five of the seven frames in the third session to win 13–10 in a highly technical and safety-oriented match.
Stevens and Reardon's first session finished a frame early, with Reardon commenting that he "was glad it was over" having only won a single frame. Reardon won just the first and ninth frames as Stevens defeated him convincingly, 13–2, with a . Stevens set up a semi-final with Jimmy White, who had defeated Cliff Thorburn 13–8. White led 10-6 after the second session, before moving to 12-7 ahead. White went 63 points ahead in frame 20, but Thorburn made a clearance of 64 to win the frame, before White won the match in frame 21. Dennis Taylor defeated Doug Mountjoy, also 13–8, to move into the other semi-final, against Davis.
### Semi-finals
The semi-finals were scheduled to each be played over four sessions, on 3, 4 and 5 May, as best-of-31-frames matches. Steve Davis led Dennis Taylor 4–3 at the end of their first session, with Taylor winning two of his three frames on the final . Davis won the next three frames to lead 7–3 before Taylor won frames 11 and 12. On a break of 64, Taylor missed a red ball, allowing Davis to make a break of 65 to win the next frame and then make a break of 76 lead 9–5 lead at the end of their second session. Taylor won just one of the first five frames in the third session; Davis lead 13–6, but Taylor won the next two frames to avoid losing with a session to spare. Leading 14–8, Davis won three frames to Taylor's one in their last session to win 16–9.
In the other match, Stevens won the opening frame despite needing snookers, but White won the next three to lead 3–1 before the mid-session interval. At this time, White was "violently sick", having celebrated his 22nd birthday the night before. White took a 5–3 lead after the first session, also leaving to be sick after making a break of 85 in frame five. White attributed his illness to some sandwiches he had eaten and some cough syrup he had used to recover from a throat infection. The first seven frames of the second session was played in just 90 minutes as Stevens tied the match at 6–6, and then led 8–7 after their second session. Stevens won the next three frames to lead by four with White faltering. White, however, won the next three before Stevens won the final frame of the third session to lead 12–10. White won five frames in a row after Stevens missed a frame ball red in frame 23 to lead 15–12. Just one frame from defeat, Stevens won the next two frames, but White won frame 30 with a break of 44. The match finished 16–14, with White becoming the youngest player to reach a professional snooker World Championship final.
### Final
The final was played over four sessions, on 6 and 7 May, as a best-of-35-frames match between Steve Davis and Jimmy White. English referee Jim Thorpe presided over the match, taking charge of his third Triple Crown final, after two prior UK Championship finals in 1980 and 1984.
Davis dominated the first session to lead 6–1. He then extended the lead by winning the first two frames of the second session with breaks of 41, 37 and 44. White won the next frame with two breaks over 50, but was 10–2 behind at the mid-session interval. White won the next two frames, but went in frame 15, which he lost. Davis won the next frame to extend his lead to 12–4 at the end of the second session. On the second day, White fought back to 11–13 by winning seven of the eight frames in the third session. In 2020, Davis commented that he had gone "into [his] shell" after leading by so much overnight. The first frame he made a break of 119 which was the second-highest of the tournament. Davis started the final session by winning three of the first four frames to lead 16–12. White then won the next three to put himself just one behind at 15–16. Davis won a close frame by clearing the colours to lead 17–15, then White took the next with a break of 65 to reduce his deficit to 16–17. Davis took the last frame 77–40 to win 18–16 and become the first player to retain the championship at the Crucible.
The victory was Davis' third world championship, having previously won in 1981 and 1983. White's loss was the first of six world championship final defeats. He was the youngest player to compete in a world championship final; however, by losing the match he missed his chance to supersede Alex Higgins as the youngest-ever winner. Davis received £44,000 for winning the tournament, taking his prize money for the 1993–84 season to £159,511, more than double that of the second-highest earner, White, who made £78,725. When the world rankings were updated following the tournament, Davis was in first place; White was seventh, earning eight of his seventeen ranking points from being the championship runner-up.
Davis received boos and jeers from the crowd after defeating the popular White. Davis commented that White had outplayed him on the final day of the final and had "played his brains out". Davis would reach the final again for the following two years, and win a further three championships throughout the 1980s. White, however, stated that he played poorly on the first day of the final because of the lengthy semi-final win over Stevens. This was the first of, as of 2020, six world championship finals that White would lose. Despite this, White was confident that he would win the championship in the following years. White later recounted that he had used crack cocaine to cope with the loss, claiming to have spent £32,000 on the drug over a three-month period.
## Qualifying
A three-round knockout qualifying competition was held from 1 to 13 April at the Redwood Lodge in Bristol, producing the 16 qualifying players who progressed into the main draw to play the top 16 seeds. Winners' names are shown in bold.
## Main draw
Shown below are the results for each round of the main competition. Numbering in brackets shows player's seed, whilst those in bold denote match winners.
## Century breaks
There were eight century breaks in the championship, the fewest since the 1978 event. The highest break of the televised stages was 138 made by Rex Williams. The highest break in qualifying was a 112 made by Jim Donnelly.
- 138 – Rex Williams
- 119, 100 – Jimmy White
- 115, 101 – Kirk Stevens
- 109 – Ray Reardon
- 102 – Dennis Taylor
- 100 – Steve Davis
Qualifying
- 112 – Jim Donnelly
- 108, 108 – Tommy Murphy
- 106 Gino Rigitano
- 104 – Mario Morra
- 102, 100 – Neal Foulds
- 101 – John Parrott
- 100 – Ian Williamson
|
2,639,573 |
Sega Genesis
| 1,171,985,145 |
Home video game console
|
[
"Backward-compatible video game consoles",
"Fourth-generation video game consoles",
"Home video game consoles",
"Products and services discontinued in 1997",
"Products and services discontinued in 1999",
"Products introduced in 1988",
"Products introduced in 1989",
"Products introduced in 1990",
"Sega Genesis"
] |
The Sega Genesis, known as the outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega. It was Sega's third console and the successor to the Master System. Sega released it in 1988 in Japan as the Mega Drive, and in 1989 in North America as the Genesis. In 1990, it was distributed as the Mega Drive by Virgin Mastertronic in Europe, Ozisoft in Australasia, and Tectoy in Brazil. In South Korea, it was distributed by Samsung Electronics as the Super Gam\*Boy and later the Super Aladdin Boy.
Designed by an R&D team supervised by Hideki Sato and Masami Ishikawa, the Genesis was adapted from Sega's System 16 arcade board, centered on a Motorola 68000 processor as the CPU, a Zilog Z80 as a sound controller, and a video system supporting hardware sprites, tiles, and scrolling. It plays a library of more than 900 games on ROM-based cartridges. Several add-ons were released, including a Power Base Converter to play Master System games. It was released in several different versions, some created by third parties. Sega created two network services to support the Genesis: Sega Meganet and Sega Channel.
In Japan, the Mega Drive fared poorly against its two main competitors, Nintendo's Super Famicom and NEC's PC Engine, but it achieved considerable success in North America, Brazil, and Europe. Contributing to its success was its library of arcade game ports, the popularity of Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog series, several popular sports franchises, and aggressive youth marketing that positioned it as the cool console for adolescents. The 1991 North American release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System triggered a fierce battle for market share in the United States and Europe known as the "console war". This drew attention to the video game industry, and the Genesis and several of its games attracted legal scrutiny on matters involving reverse engineering and video game violence. Controversy surrounding violent games such as Night Trap and Mortal Kombat led Sega to create the Videogame Rating Council, a predecessor to the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
30.75 million first-party Genesis units were sold worldwide. In addition, Tectoy sold an estimated three million licensed variants in Brazil, Majesco projected it would sell 1.5 million licensed variants of the system in the United States and smaller numbers were sold by Samsung in South Korea. By the mid-2010s, licensed third-party Genesis rereleases were still being sold by AtGames in North America and Europe. Many games have been re-released in compilations or on online services such as the Nintendo Virtual Console, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Steam. The Genesis was succeeded in 1994 by the Sega Saturn.
## History
### Development
In the early 1980s, Sega Enterprises, Inc. – then a subsidiary of Gulf+Western – was one of the top five arcade game manufacturers active in the United States, as company revenues surpassed \$200 million between July 1981 and June 1982. A downturn in the arcade business starting in 1982 seriously hurt the company, leading Gulf+Western to sell its North American arcade manufacturing organization and the licensing rights for its arcade games to Bally Manufacturing. The company retained Sega's North American R&D operation, as well as its Japanese subsidiary, Sega Enterprises, Ltd. With its arcade business in decline, Sega Enterprises, Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama advocated that the company leverage its hardware expertise to move into the home console market in Japan, which was in its infancy at the time.
Nakayama received permission to proceed with this project, leading to the release of Sega's first home video game system, the SG-1000, in July 1983. While it had sold 160,000 units in Japan, far exceeding Sega's expectations, sales at stores were dominated by Nintendo's Famicom which had been released the same day. Sega estimated that the Famicom outsold the SG-1000 by a 10-to-1 margin. The SG-1000 was replaced by the Sega Mark III within two years. In the meantime, Gulf+Western began to divest itself of its non-core businesses after the death of company founder Charles Bluhdorn, so Nakayama and former Sega CEO David Rosen arranged a management buyout of the Japanese subsidiary in 1984 with financial backing from CSK Corporation, a prominent Japanese software company. Nakayama was then installed as CEO of Sega Enterprises, Ltd.
In 1986, Sega redesigned the Mark III for release in North America as the Master System. This was followed by a European release the next year. Although the Master System was a success in Europe, and later in Brazil, it failed to ignite significant interest in the Japanese or North American markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo. With Sega continuing to have difficulty penetrating the home market, Sega's console R&D team, led by Masami Ishikawa and supervised by Hideki Sato, began work on a successor to the Master System almost immediately after that console launched.
In 1987, Sega faced another threat to its console business when Japanese computer giant NEC released the PC Engine amid great publicity. To remain competitive against the two more established consumer electronics companies, Ishikawa and his team decided they needed to incorporate a 16-bit microprocessor into their new system to make an impact in the marketplace and once again turned to Sega's strengths in the arcade industry to adapt the successful Sega System 16 arcade board into architecture for a home console. The decision to use a Motorola 68000 as the system's main CPU was made late in development, while a Zilog Z80 was used as a secondary CPU to handle the sound due to fears that the load to the main CPU would be too great if it handled both the visuals and the audio. The 68000 chip was expensive and would have driven the retail price of the console up greatly, but Sega was able to negotiate with a distributor for a tenth of its price on an up-front volume order with the promise of more orders pending the console's future success.
The appearance of the Mega Drive was designed by a team led by Mitsushige Shiraiwa that drew inspiration from audiophile equipment and automobiles. Shiraiwa said this more mature look helped to target the Mega Drive to all ages, unlike the Famicom, which was aimed primarily at children. According to Sato, the Japanese design for the Mega Drive was based on the appearance of an audio player, with "16-bit" embossed in a golden metallic veneer to create an impression of power.
The console was announced in the June 1988 issue of the Japanese gaming magazine Beep! as the Mark V, but Sega management wanted a stronger name. After reviewing more than 300 proposals, the company settled on "Mega Drive". In North America, the name was changed to "Genesis". Rosen said he insisted on the name as he disliked "Mega Drive" and wanted to represent "a new beginning" for Sega. Sato said some design elements changed, such as the gold-colored "16-bit" wording, because it was believed that the color would be mistaken for yellow. He believes that the changes in design are representative of the differences in values between Japanese and American culture.
### Launch
Sega released the Mega Drive in Japan on October 29, 1988, though the launch was overshadowed by Nintendo's release of Super Mario Bros. 3 a week earlier. Positive coverage from magazines Famitsu and Beep! helped to establish a following. Within two days of release, the console's initial production run sold out. However, Sega only managed to ship 400,000 units in the first year. In order to increase sales, Sega released various peripherals and games, including an online banking system and answering machine called the Sega Mega Anser. Nevertheless, the Mega Drive was unable to overtake the venerable Famicom and remained a distant third in Japan behind Nintendo's Super Famicom and NEC's PC Engine throughout the 16-bit era.
Sega announced a North American release date for the system on January 9, 1989. At the time, Sega did not possess a North American sales and marketing organization and was distributing its Master System through Tonka. Dissatisfied with Tonka's performance, Sega looked for a new partner to market the Genesis in North America and offered the rights to Atari Corporation, which did not yet have a 16-bit system. David Rosen made the proposal to Atari CEO Jack Tramiel and the president of Atari's Entertainment Electronics Division, Michael Katz. Tramiel declined to acquire the new console, deeming it too expensive, and instead opted to focus on the Atari ST. Sega decided to launch the console through its own Sega of America subsidiary, which executed a limited launch on August 14, 1989, in New York City and Los Angeles. The Genesis was released in the rest of North America later that year.
The European version of the Mega Drive was released in September 1990, at a price of , i.e. \$ (equivalent to \$Error when using {{Inflation}}: `|value=` (parameter 2) must be specified. in 2022). The release was handled by Virgin Mastertronic, which was later purchased by Sega in 1991 and became Sega of Europe. Games like Space Harrier II, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Golden Axe, Super Thunder Blade, and The Revenge of Shinobi were available in stores at launch. The console was also bundled with Altered Beast. The Mega Drive and its first batch of games were shown at the 1990 European Computer Entertainment Show (ECES) in Earl's Court. Between July and August 1990, Virgin initially placed their order for 20,000 Mega Drive units. However, the company increased the order by 10,000 units when advanced orders had exceeded expectations, and another 10,000 units was later added following the console's success at the ECES event. The projected number of units to be sold between September and December 1990 had eventually increased to 40,000 units in the United Kingdom alone.
Other companies assisted in distributing the console to various countries worldwide. Ozisoft handled the Mega Drive's launch and marketing in Australia, as it had done before with the Master System. In Brazil, the Mega Drive was released by Tectoy in 1990, only a year after the Brazilian release of the Master System. Tectoy produced games exclusively for the Brazilian market and brought the Sega Meganet online service there in 1995. Samsung handled sales and distribution in Korea, where it was named Super Gam\*Boy and retained the Mega Drive logo alongside the Samsung name. It was later renamed Super Aladdin Boy. In India, Sega entered a distribution deal with Shaw Wallace in April 1994 in order to circumvent an 80% import tariff, with each unit selling for INR₹18,000.
In Russia, Sega officially licensed the console to local distributor Forrus in 1994, replaced in 1996 by Bitman. That year, the video game console market generated between \$200,000,000 (equivalent to \$384,000,000 in 2022) and \$250,000,000 (equivalent to \$480,000,000 in 2022) in Russia, with Sega accounting for half of all console sales in the country. However, only about 15% of the sales were official Sega units distributed by Bitman, while the rest were unofficial counterfeit clones.
### North American sales and marketing
For the North American market, former Atari Corporation Entertainment Electronics Division president and new Sega of America CEO Michael Katz instituted a two-part approach to build sales. The first part involved a marketing campaign to challenge Nintendo head-on and emphasize the more arcade-like experience available on the Genesis, with slogans including "Genesis does what Nintendon't". Since Nintendo owned the console rights to most arcade games of the time, the second part involved creating a library of recognizable games which used the names and likenesses of celebrities and athletes, such as Pat Riley Basketball, Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf, James 'Buster' Douglas Knockout Boxing, Joe Montana Football, Tommy Lasorda Baseball, Mario Lemieux Hockey, and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Nonetheless, Sega struggled to overcome Nintendo's presence in consumers' homes. Tasked by Nakayama to sell one million units within the first year, Katz and Sega of America sold only 500,000. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (Winter CES) in January 1990, the Sega Genesis demonstrated a strong line-up of games which received a positive reception for approaching arcade-quality graphics and gameplay as well as for providing non-arcade experiences such as Phantasy Star II.
In mid-1990, Nakayama hired Tom Kalinske to replace Katz as CEO of Sega of America. Although Kalinske knew little about the video game market, he surrounded himself with industry-savvy advisors. A believer in the razor and blades model, he developed a four-point plan: cut the price of the console, create an American team to develop games targeted at the American market, expand the aggressive advertising campaigns, and replace the bundled game Altered Beast with a new game, Sonic the Hedgehog. The Japanese board of directors initially disapproved of the plan, but all four points were approved by Nakayama, who told Kalinske, "I hired you to make the decisions for Europe and the Americas, so go ahead and do it." Critics praised Sonic as one of the greatest games yet made, and Genesis sales increased as customers who had been waiting for the release of the international version of Nintendo's Super Famicom, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), decided to purchase a Genesis instead. The SNES debuted against an established competitor, while NEC's TurboGrafx-16 failed to gain traction, and NEC soon pulled out of the market. In large part due to the popularity of Sonic the Hedgehog, the Genesis outsold the SNES in the United States nearly two to one during the 1991 holiday season. Sega controlled 65% of the 16-bit console market in January 1992, the first time Nintendo had not been the console leader since 1985.
The Genesis outsold the SNES for four consecutive Christmas seasons due to its two-year lead, lower price point, and larger game library compared to the SNES at its release. Sega had ten games for every game on SNES, and while the SNES had an exclusive version of Final Fight, one of Sega's internal development teams created Streets of Rage, which had bigger levels, tougher enemies, and a well-regarded soundtrack. ASCII Entertainment reported in early 1993 that Genesis had 250 games versus 75 for the SNES, but limited shelf space meant that stores typically offered 100 Genesis and 50 SNES games. The NES was still the leader, with 300 games and 100 on shelves.
Sega's advertising positioned the Genesis as the cooler console, and coined the term blast processing, an obscure and unused graphics programming method, to suggest that its processing capabilities were far greater than those of the SNES. A Sony focus group found that teenage boys would not admit to owning an SNES rather than a Genesis. With the Genesis often outselling the SNES at a ratio of 2:1, Nintendo and Sega focused heavily on impression management of the market, even going to the point of deception; Nintendo claimed it had sold more consoles in 1991 than it actually had, and forecasted it would sell 6 million consoles by the end of 1992, while its actual U.S. install base at the end of 1992 was only just more than 4 million units. Due to these tactics, it was difficult to ascertain a clear leader in market share for several years at a time, with Nintendo's dollar share of the U.S. 16-bit market dipping down from 60% at the end of 1992 to 37% at the end of 1993, Sega claiming 55% of all 16-bit hardware sales during 1994, and Donkey Kong Country helping the SNES to outsell the Genesis from 1995 through 1997. According to a 2004 study of NPD sales data, the Genesis maintained its lead over the Super NES in the American 16-bit console market. However, according to a 2014 Wedbush Securities report based on revised NPD sales data, the SNES outsold the Sega Genesis in the U.S. market by 1.5 million units.
### Electronic Arts
To compete with Nintendo, Sega was more open to new types of games, but still tightly controlled the approval process for third-party games and charged high prices for cartridge manufacturing. The American publisher Electronic Arts (EA) sought a better deal, but met resistance from Sega. They decided to reverse-engineer the Genesis, using a clean-room method similar to the method Phoenix Technologies had used to reverse-engineer the IBM Personal Computer BIOS around 1984.
The process began in 1989, led by Steve Hayes and Jim Nitchals. They created a controlled room in EA headquarters nicknamed "Chernobyl", to which only one person was allowed access, Mike Schwartz. Schwartz reviewed Sega's copyrighted development manuals and tools, studied the Genesis hardware and games, and wrote original documentation that summarized his findings. The process took him about a month. His work was reviewed by EA's lawyers before being disseminated to Hayes and Nitchals to verify its originality, and subsequently to the rest of the developers to let them build games. After a few months, EA began developing for the Genesis in earnest. The EA founder, Trip Hawkins, confronted Nakayama the day before the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), informing him that EA had the ability to run its own licensing program if Sega refused to meet its demands. Sega relented, and the next day EA's upcoming Genesis games were showcased at CES.
EA signed what Hawkins described as "a very unusual and much more enlightened license agreement" with Sega in June 1990: "Among other things, we had the right to make as many titles as we wanted. We could approve our own titles ... the royalty rates were a lot more reasonable. We also had more direct control over manufacturing." After the deal was in place, EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon learned that "we hadn't figured out all the workarounds" and "Sega still had the ability to lock us out ... It just would have been a public relations fiasco." EA released its first Genesis games, Populous and Budokan: The Martial Spirit, within the month. The first Genesis version of EA's John Madden Football arrived before the end of 1990, and became what Gordon called a "killer app". Taking advantage of the licensing agreement, Gordon and EA's vice president of marketing services, Nancy Fong, created a visual identifier for EA's Genesis cartridges: a yellow tab molded into the casing.
### Sonic the Hedgehog
Sega held a company-wide contest to create a mascot character to compete with Nintendo's Mario series. The winning submission was a blue hedgehog with red shoes, Sonic, created by Naoto Ohshima, spawning one of the best-selling video game franchises in history. The gameplay of Sonic the Hedgehog originated with a tech demo created by Yuji Naka, who had developed a prototype platform game that involved a fast-moving character rolling in a ball through a long winding tube. This concept was developed with Ohshima's character design and levels conceived by designer Hirokazu Yasuhara.
Although Katz and Sega of America's marketing experts disliked Sonic, certain that it would not catch on with American children, Kalinske's strategy to place Sonic the Hedgehog as the pack-in game paid off. Sonic the Hedgehog greatly increased the popularity of the Genesis in North America, and the bundle is credited with helping Sega gain 65% of the market share against Nintendo. Similarly, in Europe, Sega captured a 65% share of the European console market, where the Mega Drive maintained its lead over the SNES through 1994. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 set records for the fastest-selling game, selling 3.2 million copies worldwide within two weeks, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles selling a combined 4 million copies worldwide.
### Trademark Security System and Sega v. Accolade
After the release of the Genesis in 1989, video game publisher Accolade began exploring options to release some of their PC games on the console. At the time, Sega had a licensing deal in place for third-party developers that increased the costs to the developer. According to Accolade co-founder Alan Miller, "One pays them between \$10 and \$15 per cartridge on top of the real hardware manufacturing costs, so it about doubles the cost of goods to the independent publisher." To get around licensing, Accolade chose to seek an alternative way to bring their games to the Genesis. It did so by purchasing one in order to decompile the executable code of three Genesis games. Such information was used to program their new Genesis cartridges in a way that would allow them to disable the security lockouts on the Genesis that prevented unlicensed games from being played. This strategy was used successfully to bring Ishido: The Way of Stones to the Genesis in 1990. To do so, Accolade had copied Sega's copyrighted game code multiple times in order to reverse engineer the software of Sega's licensed Genesis games.
As a result of piracy in some countries and unlicensed development issues, Sega incorporated a technical protection mechanism into a new edition of the Genesis released in 1990, referred to as the Genesis III. This new variation of the Genesis included a code known as the Trademark Security System (TMSS), which, when a game cartridge was inserted, would check for the presence of the string "SEGA" at a particular point in the memory contained in the cartridge. If the string was present, the console would run the game, and would briefly display the message: "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises, Ltd." This system had a twofold effect: it added extra protection against unlicensed developers and software piracy and forced the Sega trademark to display when the game was powered up, making a lawsuit for trademark infringement possible if unlicensed software were to be developed. Accolade learned of this development at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1991, where Sega showed the new Genesis III and demonstrated it screening and rejecting an Ishido game cartridge. With more games planned for the following year, Accolade successfully identified the TMSS file. It later added this file to the games HardBall!, Star Control, Mike Ditka Power Football, and Turrican.
In response to the creation of these unlicensed games, Sega filed suit against Accolade in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on charges of trademark infringement, unfair competition, and copyright infringement. In response, Accolade filed a counterclaim for falsifying the source of its games by displaying the Sega trademark when the game was powered up. Although the district court initially ruled for Sega and issued an injunction preventing Accolade from continuing to reverse engineer the Genesis, Accolade appealed the verdict to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
As a result of the appeal, the Ninth Circuit overturned the district court's verdict and ruled that Accolade's decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair use. The court's written opinion followed on October 20, 1992, and noted that the use of the software was non-exploitative, although commercial. Further, the court found that the trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run on the system, had been inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and was the fault of Sega for having caused false labeling. Ultimately, Sega and Accolade settled the case on April 30, 1993. As a part of this settlement, Accolade became an official licensee of Sega, and later developed and released Barkley Shut Up and Jam! while under license. The terms of the licensing, including whether or not any special arrangements or discounts were made to Accolade, were not released to the public. The financial terms of the settlement were also not disclosed, although both companies agreed to pay their own legal costs.
### Congressional hearings on video game violence
In 1993, the American media began to focus on the mature content of certain video games. Games such as Night Trap for the Sega CD, an add-on, received unprecedented scrutiny. Issues about Night Trap were brought up in the United Kingdom, with former Sega of Europe development director Mike Brogan noting that "Night Trap got Sega an awful lot of publicity ... it was also cited in UK Parliament for being classified as '15' due to its use of real actors." This came at a time when Sega was capitalizing on its image as an edgy company with attitude, and this only reinforced that image. By far the year's most controversial game was Midway's Mortal Kombat, ported to the Genesis and SNES by Acclaim Entertainment. In response to public outcry over the game's graphic violence, Nintendo decided to replace the blood in the game with "sweat" and the arcade's gruesome "fatalities" with less violent finishing moves. Sega took a different approach, instituting America's first video game ratings system, the Videogame Rating Council (VRC), for all its current systems. Ratings ranged from the family-friendly GA rating to the more mature rating of MA-13, and the adults-only rating of MA-17. With the rating system in place, Sega released its version of Mortal Kombat, appearing to have removed all the blood and sweat effects and toning down the finishing moves even more than in the SNES version. However, all the arcade's blood and uncensored finishing moves could be enabled by entering a "Blood Code". This technicality allowed Sega to release the game with a relatively low MA-13 rating. Meanwhile, the tamer SNES version shipped without a rating.
The Genesis version of Mortal Kombat was well-received by gaming press, as well as fans, outselling the SNES version three- or four-to-one, while Nintendo was criticized for censoring the SNES version. Executive vice president of Nintendo of America Howard Lincoln was quick to point out at the hearings that Night Trap had no such rating, saying to Senator Joe Lieberman:
> Furthermore, I can't let you sit here and buy this nonsense that this Sega Night Trap game was somehow only meant for adults. The fact of the matter is this is a copy of the packaging. There was no rating on this game at all when the game was introduced. Small children bought this at Toys "R" Us, and he knows that as well as I do. When they started getting heat about this game, then they adopted the rating system and put ratings on it.
In response, Sega of America vice president Bill White showed a videotape of violent video games on the SNES and stressed the importance of rating video games. At the end of the hearing, Lieberman called for another hearing in February 1994 to check on progress toward a rating system for video game violence.
As a result of the congressional hearings, Night Trap started to generate more sales and released ports to the PC, Sega 32X, and 3DO. According to Digital Pictures founder Tom Zito, "You know, I sold 50,000 units of Night Trap a week after those hearings." Although experiencing increased sales, Sega decided to recall Night Trap and re-release it with revisions in 1994 due to the congressional hearings. After the close of these hearings, video game manufacturers came together to establish the rating system that Lieberman had called for. Initially, Sega proposed the universal adoption of its system, but after objections by Nintendo and others, Sega took a role in forming a new one. This became the Entertainment Software Rating Board, an independent organization that received praise from Lieberman. With this new rating system in place for the 1994 holiday season, Nintendo decided its censorship policies were no longer needed, and the SNES port of Mortal Kombat II was released uncensored.
### 32-bit era and beyond
Sega released two add-ons to increase the Genesis capabilities: a CD peripheral, the Sega CD (Mega-CD outside North America and Brazil), and a 32-bit peripheral, the Sega 32X. Worldwide, Sega sold 2.24 million Sega CD units and 800,000 32X units.
Following the launch of the next-generation 32-bit Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, sales of 16-bit hardware and software continued to account for 64% of the video game market in 1995. Sega underestimated the continued popularity of the Genesis and did not have the inventory to meet demand. Sega captured 43% of the dollar share of the U.S. video game market and claimed to have sold more than two million Genesis units in 1995, while Genesis software such as Vectorman remained successful, but Kalinske estimated that "we could have sold another 300,000 Genesis systems in the November/December timeframe". Nakayama's decision to focus on the Saturn, based on the systems' relative performance in Japan, has been cited as the major contributing factor in this miscalculation. By contrast, Nintendo concentrated on the 16-bit home console market, as well as its successful handheld, the Game Boy, and took in 42% of the video game market dollar share without launching a 32-bit console. Following tensions with Sega Enterprises, Ltd. over its focus on the Saturn, Kalinske, who oversaw the rise of the Genesis in 1991, lost interest in the business and resigned in mid-1996.
Sega sold 30.75 million Genesis units worldwide. Of these, 3.58 million were sold in Japan, and sales in Europe and the U.S. are roughly estimated at 8 million and 18–18.5 million as of June 1997 (at which time Sega was no longer manufacturing the system) respectively. In 1998, Sega licensed the Genesis to Majesco Entertainment to rerelease it in North America. Majesco began reselling millions of unsold cartridges at a budget price, together with 150,000 units of the second model of the Genesis. It released the Genesis 3, projecting to sell 1.5 million units of the console by the end of 1998. Tectoy continued to sell variants of the original hardware (including emulated variants) until June 2023, as the company no longer has any references to the console on its website, and has sold an estimated 3 million units in Brazil as of 2012.
## Technical specifications
The main microprocessor is a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.6 MHz. An 8-bit Zilog Z80 processor controls the sound hardware and provides backward compatibility with the Master System. The Genesis has 64 KB of RAM, 64 KB of video RAM and 8 KB of audio RAM. It can display up to 61 colors at once from a palette of 512. The games are in ROM cartridge format and inserted in the top.
The Genesis produces sound using a Texas Instruments SN76489 programmable sound generator, integrated with the Video Display Processor (VDP), and a Yamaha YM2612 FM synthesizer chip. The Z80 processor is primarily used to control both sound chips to produce stereo music and sound effects. Most revisions of the original Genesis contain a discrete YM2612 and a separate YM7101 VDP; in a later revision, the chips were integrated into a single custom ASIC (FC1004).
The back of the Model 1 console provides an RF output port (designed for use with antenna and cable systems) and a specialized 8-pin DIN port, which both provide video and audio output. Both outputs produce monophonic sound; a headphone jack on the front of the console produces stereo sound. On the Model 2, the DIN port, RF output port, and headphone jack are replaced by a 9-pin mini-DIN port on the back for composite video, RGB and stereo sound, and the standard RF switch. Earlier Model 1 consoles have a 9-pin extension port. An edge connector on the bottom right of the console can be connected to a peripheral.
### Peripherals
The standard controller features a rounded shape, a directional pad, three main buttons, and a START button. In 1993, Sega released a slightly smaller pad with three additional face buttons, similar to the design of buttons on some popular arcade fighting games such as Street Fighter II. Sega also released a wireless revision of the six-button controller, the Remote Arcade Pad.
The system is backward compatible with the Master System. The first peripheral released, the Power Base Converter (Master System Converter in Europe), allows Master System games to be played. It's designed for the Model 1. It will work with the Model 2, but the shell does block the power and AC ports, so the converter will either to have its shell modified or a pass thru adaptor needs to be used. The converter does not work with the Model 3 or the Nomad. A second model, the Master System Converter 2, was released only in Europe for use with the Mega Drive II. It will work with NTSC Model 1 and 2 consoles, though not the Model 3 and Nomad.
Other peripherals were released to add functionality. The Menacer is a wireless, infrared light gun peripheral used with compatible games. Other third parties created light gun peripherals for the Genesis, such as the American Laser Games Pistol and the Konami Justifier. Released for art creation software, the Sega Mega Mouse features three buttons and is only compatible with a few games, such as Eye of the Beholder. A foam-covered bat called the BatterUP and the TeeVGolf golf club were released for both the Genesis and SNES.
In November 1993, Sega released the Sega Activator, an octagonal device that lies flat on the floor and was designed to translate the player's physical movements into game inputs; it was first shown at the January 1993 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where it was demonstrated with Streets of Rage 2. Several high-profile games, including Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition, were adapted to support the peripheral. The device was a commercial failure, due mainly to its inaccuracy and its high price point. IGN editor Craig Harris ranked the Sega Activator the third worst video game controller ever made.
Both EA and Sega released multitaps to allow more than the standard two players to play at once. Initially, EA's version, the 4 Way Play, and Sega's adapter, the Team Player, only supported each publisher's games. In response to complaints about this, Sega publicly stated, "We have been working hard to resolve this problem since we learned of it", and that a new Team Player which would work with all multitap games for the console would be released shortly. Later games were created to work on both the 4 Way Play and Team Player. Codemasters also developed the J-Cart system, providing two extra ports on the cartridge itself, although the technology came late in the console's life and is only featured on a few games. Sega planned to release a steering wheel peripheral in 1994, and the Genesis version of Virtua Racing was advertised as being "steering wheel compatible", but the peripheral was cancelled.
### Network services
In its first foray into online gaming, Sega created Sega Meganet, which debuted in Japan on November 3, 1990. Operating through a cartridge and a peripheral called the "Mega Modem", this allowed Mega Drive players to play a total of seventeen games online. A North American version, dubbed "Tele-Genesis", was announced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (Winter CES) in January 1990 but never released, though a version was operated in Brazil starting in 1995. Another phone-based system, the Mega Anser, turned the Japanese Mega Drive into an online banking terminal.
In 1994, Sega started the Sega Channel, a game distribution system using cable television services Time Warner Cable and TCI. Using a special peripheral, Genesis players could download a game from a library of fifty each month and demos for upcoming releases. Games were downloaded to internal memory and deleted when the console was powered off. The Sega Channel reached 250,000 subscribers at its peak and ran until July 31, 1998, well past the release of the Sega Saturn.
In an effort to compete with Sega, third-party developer Catapult Entertainment created the XBAND, a peripheral which allowed Genesis players to engage in online competitive gaming. Using telephone services to share data, XBAND was initially offered in five U.S. cities in November 1994. The following year, the service was extended to the SNES, and Catapult teamed up with Blockbuster Video to market the service, but as interest in the service waned, it was discontinued in April 1997.
## Library
The Genesis library was initially modest, but eventually grew to contain games to appeal to all types of players. The initial pack-in game was Altered Beast, which was later replaced with Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991. Top sellers included Sonic the Hedgehog, its sequel Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Disney's Aladdin. During development for the console, Sega Enterprises focused on developing action games, while Sega of America was tasked with developing sports games. A large part of the appeal of the Genesis library during the console's lifetime was the arcade-based experience of its games, as well as more difficult entries such as Ecco the Dolphin, and sports games such as Joe Montana Football. Compared to its competition, Sega advertised to an older audience by hosting more mature games, including the uncensored version of Mortal Kombat.
Notably, the arcade hit Street Fighter II by Capcom initially skipped the Genesis, instead only being released on the SNES. However, as the Genesis continued to grow in popularity, Capcom eventually ported a version of Street Fighter II to the system known as Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, that would go on to sell over a million copies. One of the biggest third-party companies to support the Genesis early on was Electronic Arts. Trip Hawkins, founder and then president of EA, believed the faster drawing speed of the Genesis made it more suitable for sport games than the SNES, and credits EA's success on the Genesis for helping catapult the EA Sports brand. Another third-party blockbuster for the system was the port of the original Mortal Kombat. Although the arcade game was released on the SNES and Genesis simultaneously, the two ports were not identical. The SNES version looked closer to the arcade game, but the Genesis version allowed players to bypass censorship, helping make it more popular. In 1997, Sega of America claimed the Genesis had a software attach rate of 16 games sold per console, double that of the SNES.
### Sega Virtua Processor
The Super NES can have enhancement chips inside each cartridge to produce more advanced graphics; for example, the launch game Pilotwings (1990) contains a digital signal processor. Later, the Super FX chip was designed to offload complex rendering tasks from the main CPU. It was first used in Star Fox (1993) for real-time 3D polygons, and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995) demonstrates rotation, scaling, and stretching of individual sprites and manipulates large areas of the screen.
Sega had produced such effects on its arcade platforms, and adapted some to the home console by developing the Sega Virtua Processor (SVP). Based on a digital signal processor core by Samsung Electronics, this chip enables the Genesis to render polygons in real time and provides an "Axis Transformation" unit that handles scaling and rotation. Virtua Racing (1994) is the only game released with this chip and the only Genesis cartridge with any enhancement chip, running at a significantly higher and more stable frame rate than filled polygon games on the SNES. The chip drastically increased the cost of the cartridge, and at , Virtua Racing is the most expensive Genesis cartridge ever produced. Two other games, Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA, were planned for the SVP chip, but were instead moved into the Saturn's launch line-up. Sega planned to sell the SVP chip as a separate upgrade module for the Genesis, but it was canceled, in order to focus its efforts on more powerful 32X add-on.
## Add-ons
In addition to accessories such as the Power Base Converter, the Genesis supports two add-ons that each support their own game libraries. The first is the Sega CD (known as the Mega-CD in all regions except for North America), a compact disc-based peripheral that can play its library of games in CD-ROM format. The second is the Sega 32X, a 32-bit peripheral which uses ROM cartridges and serves as a pass-through for Genesis games. Sega produced a custom power strip to fit the peripherals' large AC adapters. Both add-ons were officially discontinued in 1996.
### Sega CD
By 1991, compact discs had gained in popularity as a data storage device for music and software. PCs and video game companies had started to make use of this technology. NEC had been the first to include CD technology in a game console with the release of the TurboGrafx-CD add-on, and Nintendo was making plans to develop its own CD peripheral as well. Seeing the opportunity to gain an advantage over its rivals, Sega partnered with JVC to develop a CD-ROM add-on for the Genesis. Sega launched the Mega-CD in Japan on December 1, 1991, initially retailing at JP¥49,800. The CD add-on was launched in North America on October 15, 1992, as the Sega CD, with a retail price of US\$299; it was released in Europe as the Mega-CD in 1993. In addition to greatly expanding the potential size of its games, this add-on unit upgraded the graphics and sound capabilities by adding a second, more powerful processor, more system memory, and hardware-based scaling and rotation similar to that found in Sega's arcade games. It provided battery-backed storage RAM to allow games to save high scores, configuration data, and game progress.
Shortly after its launch in North America, Sega began shipping the Sega CD with the pack-in game Sewer Shark, a full motion video (FMV) game developed by Digital Pictures, a company that became an important partner for Sega. Touting the benefits of the CD's comparatively vast storage space, Sega and its third-party developers produced a number of games for the add-on that include digital video in their gameplay or as bonus content, as well as re-releasing several cartridge-based games with high-fidelity audio tracks. In 1993, Sega released the Sega CD 2, a smaller and lighter version of the add-on designed for the Genesis II, at a reduced price compared to the original. A limited number of games were later developed that use both the Sega CD and the Sega 32X add-ons.
The Mega-CD sold only 100,000 units during its first year in Japan, falling well below expectations. Although many consumers blamed its high launch price, it also suffered from a tiny software library; only two games were available at launch. This was due in part to the long delay before Sega made its software development kit available to third-party developers. Sales were higher in North America and Europe, although the novelty of FMV and CD-enhanced games quickly wore off, as many later games were met with lukewarm or negative reviews. In 1995, Sega announced a shift in focus to its new console, the Saturn, and discontinued advertising for Genesis hardware. The Sega CD sold 2.24 million units worldwide.
### Sega 32X
With the release of the Saturn scheduled for 1995, Sega began developing a stopgap to bridge the gap between the Genesis and Saturn and serve as a less expensive entry into the 32-bit era. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1994, Sega of America research and development head Joe Miller took a phone call from Nakayama, in which Nakayama stressed the importance of a quick response to the Atari Jaguar. One idea came from a concept from Sega Enterprises, "Project Jupiter," a new standalone console. Project Jupiter was initially planned as a new version of the Genesis, with an upgraded color palette and a lower cost than the Saturn, and limited 3D capabilities thanks to integration of ideas from the development of the Sega Virtua Processor chip. Miller suggested an alternative strategy, citing concerns with releasing a new console with no previous design specifications within six to nine months. At the suggestion from Miller and his team, Sega designed the 32X as a peripheral for the existing Genesis, expanding its power with two 32-bit SuperH-2 processors. The SH-2 had been developed in 1993 as a joint venture between Sega and Japanese electronics company Hitachi. At the end of the Consumer Electronics show, with the basic design of the 32X in place, Sega Enterprises invited Sega of America to assist in development of the new add-on.
Although the new unit was a stronger console than originally proposed, it was not compatible with Saturn games. Before the 32X could be launched, the release date of the Saturn was announced for November 1994 in Japan, coinciding with the 32X's target launch date in North America. Sega of America now was faced with trying to market the 32X with the Saturn's Japan release occurring simultaneously. Their answer was to call the 32X a "transitional device" between the Genesis and the Saturn. This was justified by Sega's statement that both platforms would run at the same time and that the 32X would be aimed at players who could not afford the more expensive Saturn.
The 32X was released in November 1994, in time for the holiday season. Demand among retailers was high, and Sega could not keep up orders for the system. More than 1,000,000 orders had been placed for 32X units, but Sega had only managed to ship 600,000 units by January 1995. Launching at about the same price as a Genesis console, the price of the 32X was less than half of what the Saturn's price would be at launch. Though positioning the console as an inexpensive entry into 32-bit gaming, Sega had a difficult time convincing third-party developers to create games for the new system. After an early run on the peripheral, news soon spread to the public of the upcoming release of the Sega Saturn, which would not support the 32X's games. The Saturn was released on May 11, 1995, four months earlier than its originally intended release date of September 2, 1995. The Saturn, in turn, caused developers to further shy away from the console and created doubt about the library for the 32X, even with Sega's assurances that there would be a large number of games developed for the system. In early 1996, Sega conceded that it had promised too much out of the 32X and decided to stop producing the system in order to focus on the Saturn. Prices for the 32X dropped to \$99 and cleared out of stores at \$19.95.
## Variations
More than a dozen licensed variations of the Genesis/Mega Drive have been released. In addition to models made by Sega, alternate models were made by other companies, such as Majesco Entertainment, AtGames, JVC, Pioneer Corporation, Amstrad, and Aiwa. A number of bootleg clones were created during its lifespan.
### First-party models
In 1993, Sega introduced a smaller, lighter version of the console, known as the Mega Drive II in Japan, Europe, and Australia and sold as Genesis (without the Sega prefix) in North America. This version omits the headphone jack, replaces the A/V-Out connector with a smaller version that supports stereo sound, and provides a simpler, less expensive mainboard that requires less power.
Sega released a combined, semi-portable Genesis/Sega CD unit, the Genesis CDX (marketed as the Multi-Mega in Europe). This unit retailed at US\$399.95; this was roughly US\$100 more than the individual Genesis and Sega CD units put together, as the Sega CD had been reduced to US\$229 half a year before. The CDX was bundled with Sonic CD, Sega Classics Arcade Collection, and the Sega CD version of Ecco the Dolphin. The CDX features a small LCD screen that, when the unit is used to play audio CDs, displays the current track being played. With this feature and the system's lightweight build (weighing two pounds), Sega marketed it in part as a portable CD player.
Late in the 16-bit era, Sega released a handheld version of the Genesis, the Genesis Nomad. Its design was based on the Mega Jet, a Mega Drive portable unit featured on airplane flights in Japan. As the only successor to the Game Gear, the Nomad operates on 6 AA batteries, displaying its graphics on a 3.25-inch (8.25-mm) LCD screen. The Nomad supports the entire Genesis library (save for one game that requires the use of the reset button, which the Nomad lacks), but cannot be used with the Sega 32X, the Sega CD, or the Power Base Converter.
Exclusive to the Japanese market was the TeraDrive, a Mega Drive combined with an IBM PC compatible computer. Sega also produced three arcade system boards based on the Mega Drive: the System C-2, the MegaTech, and the MegaPlay, which support approximately 80 games combined.
### Third-party models
Working with Sega Enterprises, JVC released the Wondermega on April 1, 1992, in Japan. The system was later redesigned by JVC and released as the X'Eye in North America in September 1994. Designed by JVC to be a Genesis and Sega CD combination with high quality audio, the Wondermega's high price (\$500 at launch) kept it out of the hands of average consumers. The same was true of the Pioneer LaserActive, which requires an add-on known as the Mega-LD pack, developed by Sega, in order to play Genesis and Sega CD games. Although the LaserActive was lined up to compete with the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, the combined price of the system and the Mega-LD pack made it a prohibitively expensive option for Sega players. Aiwa released the CSD-GM1, a combination Genesis/Sega CD unit built into a boombox. Several companies added the Mega Drive to personal computers, mimicking the design of Sega's TeraDrive; these include the MSX models AX-330 and AX-990, distributed in Kuwait and Yemen, and the Amstrad Mega PC, distributed in Europe and Australia.
After the Genesis was discontinued, Majesco Entertainment released the Genesis 3 as a budget version in 1998. This version is even smaller in comparison to earlier models, but it can only play standard cartridges as it omitted support for the Sega CD and the 32X. A similar thing happened in Portugal, where Ecofilmes, Sega's distributor in the country, obtained a license to sell the Mega Game II. This version was more akin to the second first-party model, being noteworthy the inclusion of six-button controllers and a switch to alternate between different game regions, enabling this version to play all games without the need for any device or modification to bypass region locking.
### Re-releases and emulation
A number of Genesis and Mega Drive emulators have been produced, including GenEM, KGen, Genecyst, VGen, Gens, and Kega Fusion. The GameTap subscription gaming service included a Genesis emulator and had several dozen licensed Genesis games in its catalog. The Console Classix subscription gaming service includes an emulator and has several hundred Genesis games in its catalog.
Compilations of Genesis games have been released for other consoles. These include Sonic Mega Collection and Sonic Gems Collection for PS2, Xbox, and GameCube; Sega Genesis Collection for PS2 and PSP; and Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (known as the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection in PAL territories) for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
During his keynote speech at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced that Sega would make a number of Genesis/Mega Drive games available to download on the Wii's Virtual Console. There are select Genesis games available on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2, as well as games available via the PlayStation Network and Steam.
Companies such as Radica Games have also released various compilations of Genesis and Mega Drive games in "plug-and-play" packages resembling the system's controller.
### Later releases
On May 22, 2006, North American company Super Fighter Team released Beggar Prince, a game translated from a 1996 Chinese original. It was released worldwide and was the first commercial Genesis game release in North America since 1998. Super Fighter Team would later go on to release two more games for the system, Legend of Wukong and Star Odyssey. In December 2010, WaterMelon, an American company, released Pier Solar and the Great Architects, the first commercial role-playing video game specifically developed for the console since 1996, and was the biggest 16-bit game ever produced for the console at the time at 64 Mb (roughly 8 Megabytes). Pier Solar is the only cartridge-based game which can optionally use the Sega CD to play an enhanced soundtrack and sound effects disc. In 2013, independent programmer Future Driver, inspired by the Disney film Wreck-It Ralph, developed Fix-It Felix Jr. for the Genesis. In 2017, American company Mega Cat Games released Coffee Crisis, a Beat 'em up, for the Sega Genesis.
On December 5, 2007, Tectoy released a portable version of the Genesis/Mega Drive with twenty built-in games. Another version called "Mega Drive Guitar Idol" comes with two six-button joypads and a guitar controller with five fret buttons. The Guitar Idol game contains a mix of Brazilian and international songs. The console has 87 built-in games, including some from Electronic Arts based on the mobile phone versions. In 2016, Tectoy announced that they had developed a new Genesis console that not only looks almost identical to the original model of the Genesis, but also has a traditional cartridge slot and SD card reader, which was released in June 2017.
In 2009, Chinese company AtGames produced a Genesis/Mega Drive-compatible console, the Firecore. It features a top-loading cartridge slot and includes two controllers similar to the six-button controller for the original Genesis. The console has 15 games built-in and is region-free, allowing cartridge games to run regardless of their region. AtGames also produced a handheld version of the console preloaded with 20 games. Both machines have been released in Europe by distributing company Blaze Europe.
In 2018, Sega announced a dedicated console, the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini. The console includes 40 games, including Gunstar Heroes and Castlevania: Bloodlines, with different games for different regions and a save-anywhere function. Streets of Rage composer Yuzo Koshiro provided the menu music. The console was released worldwide on September 19, 2019.
Crowdfunded Sega Genesis games have been released in recent years, with Tanglewood, a puzzle platformer being released on August 14, 2018, and Xeno Crisis released on October 28, 2019. Both games were created by indie-game developers using actual Sega development hardware to ensure compatibility with the Genesis. On December 16, 2020, Paprium, WaterMelon's follow up game to Pier Solar, was released after nearly a decade in development.
## Reception
Reviewing the Genesis in 1995, Game Players noted that its rivalry with the Super NES was skewed by genre, with the Genesis having superior sports games and the Super NES superior RPGs. Commenting that the Genesis hardware was aging and the new software drying up, they recommended consumers buy a next-generation system or a Genesis Nomad instead, but also advised those who already owned a Genesis to not sell it. In a 1997 year-end review, a team of five Electronic Gaming Monthly editors gave the Genesis scores of 4.5, 5.0, 4.0, 4.5, and 7.5 - for all five editors, the lowest score they gave to any of the five consoles reviewed in the issue. While their chief criticisms were the lack of upcoming game releases and dated hardware, they also concurred that the Genesis was clearly inferior to the Super NES in terms of graphics capabilities, sound chip, and games library. John Ricciardi, in particular, considered the Genesis overrated, saying he had consistently found more enjoyment in both the Super NES and TurboGrafx-16, while Dan Hsu and Crispin Boyer recommended it based on its selection of classic titles and the high value-for-money of the six pack-in games Sega was offering at the time.
## Legacy
The Genesis has often ranked among the best video game consoles. In 2009, IGN named it the fifth best video game console, citing its edge in sports games and better home version of Mortal Kombat, and lauding "what some consider to be the greatest controller ever created: the six button". In 2007, GameTrailers named the Genesis as the sixth best console of all time in their list of top ten consoles that "left their mark on the history of gaming", noting its great games and solid controller, and writing of the "glory days" of Sonic the Hedgehog. In January 2008, technology columnist Don Reisinger proclaimed that the Genesis "created the industry's best console war to date", citing Sonic the Hedgehog, superior sports games, and backward compatibility with the Sega Master System. In 2008, GamingExcellence ranked it sixth of the 10 best consoles, declaring, "one can truly see the Genesis for the gaming milestone it was." At the same time, GameDaily rated it ninth of ten for its memorable games.
In 2014, USgamer's Jeremy Parish wrote, "If the Atari generation introduced video games as a short-lived '70s fad ... and the NES generation established it into an enduring obsession for the young, Sega's Genesis began pushing the medium toward something resembling its contemporary form", expounding that the system served as "the key incubator for modern sports franchises", made "consoles truly international" by providing Western third-parties previously put at a disadvantage by Nintendo's restrictive licensing policies with a more profitable alternative, created "an online subscription service" that foreshadowed "PlayStation Plus more than 15 years early" with the Sega Channel, and "played a key role in ensuring the vitality and future of the games industry by breaking Nintendo's near-monopolistic hold on the U.S. and awakening the U.K. to the merits of television gaming".
For his part, Kalinske highlighted Sega's role in developing games for an older demographic and pioneering "the concept of the 'street date'" with the simultaneous North American and European release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. John Sczepaniak of Retro Gamer noted, "It was a system where the allure was born not only of the hardware and games, but the magazines, playground arguments, climate, and politics of the time." Sega of America's marketing campaign for the Genesis was widely emulated, influencing marketing in the subsequent generation of consoles.
## See also
- List of best-selling Sega Genesis games
- Neo Geo
- Philips CD-i
|
13,893,266 |
Royal Blue (train)
| 1,167,428,046 |
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's flagship passenger train
|
[
"Named passenger trains of the United States",
"North American streamliner trains",
"Passenger trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad",
"Railway services discontinued in 1958",
"Railway services introduced in 1890",
"Transportation in Baltimore",
"Transportation in Jersey City, New Jersey"
] |
The Royal Blue was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O)'s flagship passenger train between New York City and Washington, D.C., in the United States, beginning in 1890. The Baltimore-based B&O also used the name between 1890 and 1917 for its improved passenger service between New York and Washington, collectively dubbed the Royal Blue Line. Using variants such as the Royal Limited and Royal Special for individual Royal Blue trains, the B&O operated the service in partnership with the Reading Railroad and the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Principal intermediate cities served were Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. Later, as Europe reeled from the carnage of World War I and connotations of European royalty fell into disfavor, the B&O discreetly omitted the sobriquet Royal Blue Line from its New York passenger service and the Royal Blue disappeared from B&O timetables. Beginning in 1917, former Royal Blue Line trains were renamed: the Royal Limited (inaugurated on May 15, 1898), for example, became the National Limited, continuing west from Washington to St. Louis via Cincinnati. During the Depression, the B&O hearkened back to the halcyon pre-World War I era when it launched a re-christened Royal Blue train between New York and Washington in 1935. The B&O finally discontinued all passenger service north of Baltimore on April 26, 1958, including the Royal Blue.
Railroad historian Herbert Harwood said, in his seminal history of the service, "First conceived in late Victorian times to promote a new railroad line ... it was indeed one of the most memorable images in the transportation business, an inspired blend of majesty and mystique ... Royal Blue Line ... Royal Blue Trains ... the Royal Blue all meant different things at different times. But essentially they all symbolized one thing: the B&O's regal route." Between the 1890s and World War I, the B&O's six daily Royal Blue trains providing service between New York and Washington were noted for their luxury, elegant appearance, and speed. The car interiors were paneled in mahogany, had fully enclosed vestibules (instead of open platforms, still widely in use at the time on U.S. railroads), then-modern heating and lighting, and leaded glass windows. The car exteriors were painted a deep "Royal Saxony blue" color with gold leaf trim, a color personally chosen by the B&O's tenth president, Charles F. Mayer.
The B&O's use of electrification instead of steam power in a Baltimore tunnel on the Royal Blue Line, beginning in 1895, marked the first use of electric locomotives by an American railroad and presaged the dawn of practical alternatives to steam power in the 20th century. Spurred by intense competition from the formidable Pennsylvania Railroad, the dominant railroad in the lucrative New York–Washington market since the 1880s, the Royal Blue in its mid-1930s reincarnation was noted for a number of technological innovations, including streamlining and the first non-articulated diesel locomotive on a passenger train in the U.S., a harbinger of the steam locomotive's eventual demise.
## History
### 1880s–1918
Prior to 1884, the B&O and the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Railroad both used the independent Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B) between Baltimore, Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for their New York–Washington freight and passenger trains. In 1881, the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased a controlling interest in the PW&B, and in 1884 it denied the B&O further use of the PW&B to reach Philadelphia.
The B&O then built a new line from Baltimore to connect to the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in Philadelphia, completed in 1886. The B&O's passenger trains then used the Reading's New York Branch northward from Philadelphia to Bound Brook, New Jersey, where the Jersey Central's rails were used to reach the Communipaw Terminal in Jersey City. From Communipaw passengers connected to ferries for a twelve-minute crossing of the Hudson River to either Liberty Street Ferry Terminal or Whitehall Terminal on New York's Manhattan Island.
The new route presented problems in Baltimore, because a ferry boat was necessary to cross the harbor between Locust Point and Canton to connect with the B&O's Washington Branch. The solution was the Baltimore Belt Line, which included a 1.4-mile (2.3 km) long tunnel under Howard Street in downtown Baltimore. Work began on the tunnel in 1891 and was completed on May 1, 1895, when the first train traversed the tunnel. To avoid smoke problems from steam engines working upgrade in the long tunnel under the middle of Baltimore, the B&O pioneered the first mainline electrification of a U.S. railroad, installing an overhead third rail system in the tunnel and its approaches. An electric locomotive first pulled a Royal Blue train through the Howard Street tunnel on June 27, 1895.
The project also included the construction of B&O's second passenger terminal in Baltimore, Mount Royal Station, at the north end of the Howard Street tunnel in the fashionable Bolton Hill neighborhood. Designed by Baltimore architect E. Francis Baldwin in a blend of modified Romanesque and Renaissance styling, the station was built of Maryland granite trimmed with Indiana limestone, with a red tile roof and landmark 150-foot (46 m) clocktower. The station's interior featured marble mosaic flooring, a fireplace, and rocking chairs. It opened the following year on September 1, 1896. "It was considered," said the Baltimore Sun, "the most splendid station in the country built and used by only one railroad." That evaluation was shared by railroad historian Lucius Beebe, who proclaimed Mount Royal "one of the celebrated railroad stations of the world, ranking in renown with Euston Station, London, scene of so many of Sherlock Holmes' departures, the Gare du Nord in Paris, and the feudal fortress of the Pennsylvania [Railroad] at Broad Street, Philadelphia".
Even before the Baltimore Belt Line project was finished, the B&O launched its Royal Blue service on July 31, 1890. Powered by 4-6-0 steam locomotives having exceptionally large 78-inch (198 cm) diameter driving wheels for speed, the Royal Blue trains occasionally reached 90 mph (145 km/h). After the Baltimore Belt Line project was completed, travel time between New York and Washington was reduced to five hours, compared to nine hours in the late 1860s.
The trains were noted for their elegance and luxury. The parlor cars' ceilings and upholstery were covered in royal blue, and the dining cars Queen and Waldorf, panelled in mahogany, featured elaborate cuisine such as terrapin and canvasback prepared by French-trained chefs. A Railway Age magazine article of the time reporting on the Royal Blue called it "the climax in railway car building".
### 1918–1920s
As a result of the U.S. entry into World War I and resulting congestion on the nation's railroads, the wartime United States Railroad Administration (USRA) ordered the Pennsylvania Railroad to permit B&O passenger trains to use its Hudson River tunnels and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, beginning April 28, 1918, eliminating the B&O's need for the ferry connection from Jersey City. Following the end of World War I, the Pennsylvania Railroad continued to allow B&O passenger trains to use Pennsylvania Station for another eight years. On September 1, 1926, the Pennsylvania Railroad terminated its contract with the B&O, and the latter's trains reverted to the use of the Jersey Central's Jersey City terminal. Passengers were then transferred to buses that met the train right on the platform. These buses were ferried across the Hudson River into Manhattan and Brooklyn, where they proceeded to various "stations" around the city on four different routes, including the Vanderbilt Hotel, Wanamaker's, Columbus Circle, and Rockefeller Center. B&O's busiest Royal Blue bus terminal, located in the Chanin Building at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, opened on December 17, 1928. Connected to Grand Central Terminal by an underground concourse, it was trimmed in marble and furnished with Art Deco lighting fixtures and leather sofas. This arrangement would continue until the eventual demise of the Royal Blue in 1958.
Recalling the past glamor of the 1890s Royal Blue Line, the B&O introduced its Colonial-series dining cars such as the Martha Washington, which were particularly noted for their fresh Chesapeake Bay cuisine, served on Dresden china in ornate cars with glass chandeliers and colonial-style furnishings. The B&O's manager of dining car services said his department's objective was "...to be hospitable to our patrons in all respects – to make them feel the comfort, convenience and homelike atmosphere of our accommodations as soon as they step on our trains." Dining car specialties included oysters and Chesapeake Bay fish served with cornmeal muffins. B&O president Daniel Willard personally sampled his dining cars' cuisine while traveling about the line, and recognized particularly pleasing meals with letters of appreciation and autographed pictures given to the dining car chefs.
### 1930s–1940s
As the 1930s dawned, the B&O's New York passenger service faced two significant competitive disadvantages, compared to the Pennsylvania Railroad. First, the B&O lacked direct access to Manhattan Island, resulting in slower overall travel time. Second, the Pennsylvania's move in the early 1930s to replace steam power with modern, smokeless electric service along its entire New York–Washington mainline was met with enthusiastic public approval. The B&O responded by introducing Diesel locomotives, air conditioning, and streamlining on its New York trains. On June 24, 1935, the B&O inaugurated the first lightweight, streamlined train in the eastern U.S., when it began operating a re-christened Royal Blue train between Washington and New York. When the specially modified 4-4-4-type steam locomotive prepared for the run proved less than satisfactory in terms of stability at speed, it was replaced by a new EMC 1800 hp B-B diesel-electric "box-cab" locomotive with a carbody by General Electric and mechanicals by Electro-Motive Corporation. Designated \# 50 by the B&O, this marked the first single-unit, passenger road diesel locomotive use in the U.S. Previously, early experiments with internal combustion engines to replace steam in railroad applications included short, articulated trainsets (such as Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr and Union Pacific's M-10000), double-head sets of box-cab locomotives (developed by EMC) used to power the 1936 version of the AT&SF (Santa Fe) Super Chief (similar to number 50), and the cab/booster unit combinations developed with Union Pacific's M-10002 and M-10003 – M-10006 trainsets.
The B&O was not entirely satisfied with the ride quality of the lightweight Royal Blue train, however, and replaced it on April 25, 1937, with streamlined, refurbished heavyweight equipment, painted light gray and royal blue with gold striping, designed by Otto Kuhler. The B&O conveyed the displaced trainset to the Alton Railroad, where it ran as the Abraham Lincoln for decades. Ungainly box-cab locomotive #50 was replaced with the demurely streamlined locomotive \# 51 and booster \# 51x, the 3,600 h.p. EMC EA/EB model built by General Motors' Electro Motive Company. Praised for its beauty and handsome profile, this was the first streamlined single-unit diesel locomotive to enter service in the U.S. It "dazzled the press and public", said one magazine writer of the groundbreaking locomotive's introduction. The E units took the most advanced developments of diesel locomotive technology and made them available to all operators using the consists of their choice. The earliest adopters of the new E units demonstrated the improved flexibility, efficiency and reduced maintenance costs of diesel power in daily service compared to steam and gave impetus to the dieselization of the railroad industry.
Kuhler also streamlined one of B&O's 4-6-2 "Pacific" steam locomotives for use on the Royal Blue. Its bullet-shaped shroud became an iconic image for the Royal Blue and was modeled for years by American Flyer. Time magazine, in reporting on the precarious financial condition of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and other Depression-ravaged rail lines in 1937, referred to the B&O's "swashbuckling" Royal Blue streamliner launched that year as having "symbolize[d] the new era in railroading ..."
In 1930, the B&O introduced air conditioning, the first U.S. railroad to do so for regularly assigned equipment, when it installed air conditioning on the Martha Washington dining car. The following year, the B&O's Columbian on the Royal Blue Line became the first fully air-conditioned train on any railroad, giving the B&O a temporary advantage over arch-rival Pennsylvania Railroad, which did not equip its New York–Washington trains with air conditioning until 1933.
President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt was a frequent passenger on the B&O's Royal Blue Line during his time in office (1933–1945), when he traveled between Washington and his family home in Hyde Park, New York. A special presidential train from Washington used the regular B&O–Reading–Jersey Central route to Jersey City, continuing on the New York Central Railroad's West Shore Line along the Hudson River to Highland, New York (opposite Poughkeepsie), where the President was met by automobile.
Along with most other rail passenger services in the U.S. during World War II, the Royal Blue enjoyed a surge in passenger traffic between 1942 and 1945 as volume doubled to 1.2 million passengers annually on B&O's eight daily New York–Washington trains. Following the end of the war, however, passenger volumes soon dropped below prewar levels and the B&O discontinued one of its daily New York–Washington trains. In addition to its flagship Royal Blue, six other B&O passenger trains continued to serve New York until April 1958: the Metropolitan Special, Capitol Limited, National Limited, Diplomat, Marylander, and Shenandoah.
### 1950s and the end
Although all of B&O's Washington–Jersey City passenger trains had been fully dieselized by September 28, 1947, no new passenger cars were built for the Royal Blue in the postwar period. The refurbished 8-car 1937 Royal Blue trainset continued in operation to the end. The overwhelming market dominance of the Pennsylvania Railroad was evident when it introduced the 18-car stainless steel Morning Congressional and Afternoon Congressional streamliners in 1952. By the late 1950s, most U.S. passenger trains suffered a steep decline in patronage as the traveling public abandoned trains in favor of airplanes and automobiles, utilizing improved Interstate Highways. The Royal Blue was no exception, as operating deficits approached \$5 million annually and passenger volume declined by almost half between 1946 and 1957. Amidst the downward trend, the Royal Blue Line briefly recaptured the regal splendor of its early years on October 21, 1957, when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip travelled on the B&O from Washington to New York.
As financial losses mounted, the B&O finally ceded the New York–Washington market to the Pennsylvania Railroad altogether, discontinuing all passenger service north of Baltimore on Saturday, April 26, 1958, and bringing the venerable Royal Blue to an end. As the engineer was about to ease the locomotive's throttle open for the Royal Blue's final departure from Washington Union Station at 3:45 p.m., the event was covered in a trainside remote broadcast by Edward R. Murrow on a CBS network See It Now television special. The train's 7:49 p.m. arrival at Jersey City Terminal was met by news reporters from The New York Times, the New York Post, Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, on hand to cover the legendary Royal Blue's demise. In an editorial the next day, the Baltimore Sun lamented the end of the Royal Blue, saying it "may have been one of the most famous named trains in history". The New York Times, in a front page article accompanied by a photograph of train engineer Michael Goodnight bidding farewell to a 7-year old passenger, said "It was a sad and simple story yesterday as the nation's oldest railroad discontinued its crack Royal Blue and its five other passenger trains ... end[ing] sixty-eight years of continuous through service, operated in a gentlemanly fashion ... a kind of ante-bellum, gracious way of life ... and the reputation for very special service."
Mount Royal Station continued as the eastern terminus of B&O's passenger service until June 30, 1961, when it closed permanently as a rail passenger facility. It was one of thirteen Baltimore buildings selected in 1959 for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The building and trainshed were subsequently acquired by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1964 and are preserved as examples of late 19th century industrial architecture.
## Schedule and equipment
In the 1890s–1910s period, the Royal Limited operated in both directions simultaneously, with 3 p.m. departures in New York and Washington, arriving at its destination five hours later, at 8 p.m. During the steam era, track pans at various locations on the Royal Blue Line were used to replenish locomotive water without stopping, the only place on the B&O system where this was done. In 1935, travel time between Jersey City and Washington was reduced to four hours, with the Royal Blue attaining speeds of up to 96 miles per hour (154 km/h) on sections of the Reading's fast track in New Jersey. From 1935 to the end of service in 1958, the Royal Blue made a daily round trip, departing New York in the morning and returning from Washington in the evening. According to the Official Guide of February 1956, the Royal Blue operated on the following schedule as train \#27 (unconditional stops highlighted in blue, bus connections in yellow).
Eastbound, the train departed Washington at 3:45 p.m. as train \# 28, arriving at Jersey City 7:40 p.m.
Between 1937 and 1958, the Royal Blue was equipped with air-conditioned coaches, parlor cars with private drawing rooms, a lounge car for coach passengers, a full dining car serving complete meals, and a flat-end observation car with a "cafe-lounge" bringing up the rear of the train. Beginning in mid-August 1947, onboard telephone service was provided, making the B&O (along with the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad) one of the first three railroads in the U.S. to offer telephone service on its trains, using a forerunner of cell phone technology.
## See also
- B&O Railroad Museum (Baltimore), where selected equipment, diner china and silverware, and other artifacts from various Royal Blue trains are exhibited.
|
48,487,311 |
Archie vs. Predator
| 1,169,773,283 |
2015 American comic book
|
[
"Archie Comics titles",
"Dark Horse Comics titles",
"Intercompany crossovers",
"Predator (franchise) comics"
] |
Archie vs. Predator is a comic book and intercompany crossover, written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Fernando Ruiz. It was originally published as a four-issue limited series in the United States by Dark Horse Comics and Archie Comics in 2015. The single issues were released between April and July, a hardcover collection went on sale in November 2015, and a paperback collection became available in August 2019.
Following in a long tradition of 'all-American' teenager Archie Andrews meeting unusual celebrities and pop culture icons, this comic book shows him meeting 'the galaxy's deadliest hunter', the Predator. The idea was first suggested in the Archie office and then proposed to Dark Horse, which holds the license to comics featuring the Predator character owned by 20th Century Fox. The companies paired de Campi, a horror writer at Dark Horse, with Ruiz, a regular Archie artist. When the comic book was announced, many media outlets noted in their headlines that the new title was not a joke.
In Archie vs. Predator, a trophy-hunting alien arrives on Earth and begins stalking high school student Archie Andrews and his classmates. After a number of teenagers have been murdered, the survivors realize they are being hunted and decide to fight back.
The book received positive reviews from critics, who enjoyed the strange crossover matchup and dark humor. The miniseries was the bestselling book for both publishers during its release and won a Ghastly Award for Best Limited Series. A sequel, Archie vs. Predator II, began in July 2019 written by de Campi and illustrated by Robert Hack.
## Publication history
### Development
Since Archie Comics partnered with Marvel Comics for the 1994 one-shot comic Archie Meets the Punisher, the Archie characters have had a tradition of team-ups with characters from other fictional universes. Following the success of Archie meets KISS in 2012 and Archie meets Glee in 2013, the Archie Creative Summit held in March 2014 included a brainstorming session for new crossovers. Godzilla and Friday the 13th were considered, but the Predator received the most support. Artist Fernando Ruiz was at the summit and liked the premise, but did not believe it would actually be made, or that he would be involved if it was.
Archie Comics proposed the crossover to 20th Century Fox, who owns the Predator character, and Dark Horse Comics, who had licensed the character for comic books. Both quickly agreed. Dark Horse approached Alex de Campi to write based on her work on the horror comic book Grindhouse and the humorous comic book My Little Pony: Friends Forever. Dark Horse editor Brendan Wright, who was already editing the regular Predator comic book and had previously coordinated with Archie Comics on Dark Horse's Archie Archives reprints, was chosen as editor. Ruiz was the first and only artist considered to pencil the series, and inker Rich Koslowski was selected based on his work with Ruiz on a Thor parody in Archie \#648. The project was originally titled Archie meets Predator, but it was changed to vs. because the people involved in production kept calling it that unintentionally, and to parody the Alien vs. Predator franchise.
To prepare for the project, de Campi read over 4000 pages of Archie comic books. She drew inspiration for the story from the 1940s era of the series, when she says Archie Andrews' girlfriends Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge had "more edge". Her scripts were subject to notes and tweaks from Archie Comics and Fox, but de Campi described both licensors as "extremely mellow, pleasant and easy to work with". Fox's primary concern was why the Predator, who is known for choosing challenging prey, would be interested in teenagers, but a suitable explanation was included in the story. She expected some of the notes, such as being told she "can't make jokes about child predation in an Archie book". Other times, she was surprised when she did not receive notes, such as her use of emojis for the Predator's speech. She was pleased when she got to add depth to Dilton Doiley, a character she feels is often overlooked in regular Archie comics. The choice of whether Archie Andrews would survive the series or not was changed several times during scripting, and a final decision was not made until the last draft of the script.
Ruiz experimented with drawing the whole series in a more realistic manner, but from the beginning, the plan was to use the traditional Archie design style for the book, which Archie veteran Dan DeCarlo popularized in the classic comics since the 1960s. The editorial team felt this would make the story feel more "bizarre and unsettling". Although most modern comic art is created using digital tools and scans to accelerate the creation process, the art team for Archie vs. Predator chose to use traditional methods and used FedEx to get the physical copy of each page to the person who would complete the next step in the process.
Archie Comics and Dark Horse Comics jointly announced Archie vs. Predator and its creative team at the 2014 New York Comic Con. Soon after, many media outlets carrying the news used a headline indicating the bizarre announcement was not a joke. Wright described it as his "most nutso project" and was continually surprised by the scale of positive reaction to it.
### Publication
A promotional ashcan comic was released a couple of months before the first issue. It featured eight pages from the first issue and some of Ruiz's character designs, including some of his initial, more lifelike Predator sketches. The four issues were published monthly beginning April 15, 2015, and ending July 22, 2015. Each issue had two variant covers, and the first issue had some additional store-exclusive and convention-exclusive covers. All of the issues also included a one-page, humorous bonus strip written by de Campi featuring crossovers of other Archie and Dark Horse characters: Sabrina Meets Hellboy (art by Robert Hack), Little Mask and his Pals (art by Art Baltazar), Jughead Meets MIND MGMT: "S" is for Sleeper (art by Matt Kindt), and Josie and the Pussycats Meet Finder (art by Carla Speed McNeil). A 128-page hardcover collecting the series and bonus content was released November 4, 2015, followed by a 104-page softcover edition on August 21, 2019.
## Synopsis
When Archie and his friends take a spring break trip to Los Perdidos Resort, an alien, trophy-hunting Predator touches down in the nearby jungle. Betty and Veronica get into a fight during a contest and attract the attention of the Predator, who follows them home to Riverdale. While targeting Veronica, the Predator also kills several armed people. The creature's picture is taken by Betty. Kevin Keller's father, a US Military General, identifies it as a teenager from a race of nearly unstoppable alien hunters. The Kellers organize Archie's friends, and Jughead Jones is used as bait to lure the Predator, but the trap fails and the Predator kills most of the ambush party.
Some members of the group decide to split up in hopes the Predator will continue to pursue Veronica, allowing them to escape, while Archie, Betty, Jughead, and Dilton stay with Veronica. When the Predator attacks again, it kills Dilton and Jughead and critically wounds Archie. Betty and Veronica take refuge at Lodge Manor, where they hook Archie to an experimental healing machine. When the Predator attacks, Archie is killed and Veronica and Betty are critically wounded, which causes the Predator to show regret since it was motivated by a crush on Betty. Veronica recovers to find that Betty has used the healing machine to restore them both to full health and is now using it to transform the Predator into an Archie look-alike.
## Reception
The first issue was the best-selling issue for both publishers in April 2015, and the 74th best selling comic book among other releases that month. Sales numbers fell just under 30% through the fourth issue, which was the 102nd best selling issue in July. When the hardcover was released in November, it was the 36th best-selling comics collection of the month according to Diamond Comic Distributors.
The first issue garnered an average review rating of 7.9 out of 10 according to the review aggregator Comic Book Roundup. Writing for The Guardian, Graeme Virtue said the "appealingly strange" series fit with Archie Comics' reputation for pushing comics forward and praised it for remaining true to both the Archie and Predator properties. The book's "deeply funny dark humor" was a selling point for Robin Parrish at Tech Times, and IGN reviewer Jeff Lake described the first issue as "pretty darn great". The use of the traditional cartoon art style to depict gruesome scenes was described as "a visual loss of innocence" by Paste magazine. Comic Bastards' Dustin Cabeal called the miniseries "a hoot". The series won the 2015 Ghastly Award for Best Limited Series.
|
287,938 |
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
| 1,148,716,613 |
American journalist (1890–1998)
|
[
"1890 births",
"1998 deaths",
"20th-century American journalists",
"20th-century American women writers",
"American agnostics",
"American centenarians",
"American environmentalists",
"American nature writers",
"American non-fiction environmental writers",
"American women environmentalists",
"American women non-fiction writers",
"Everglades National Park",
"Journalists from Florida",
"Journalists from Massachusetts",
"Journalists from Minnesota",
"Miami Herald people",
"People from Taunton, Massachusetts",
"Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients",
"Wellesley College alumni",
"Women centenarians",
"Women science writers",
"Writers from Miami",
"Writers from Minneapolis",
"Yeoman (F) personnel"
] |
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring (1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, enabling her to advance her causes.
As a young woman, Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of the women's suffrage and civil rights movements. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of South Florida. Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades" as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived to 108, working until nearly the end of her life for Everglades restoration. Upon her death, an obituary in The Independent in London stated, "In the history of the American environmental movement, there have been few more remarkable figures than Marjory Stoneman Douglas."
## Early life
Marjory Stoneman was born on April 7, 1890, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen (1859-1912) and Frank Bryant Stoneman (1857–1941). One of her earliest memories was her father reading to her The Song of Hiawatha, at which she burst into sobs upon hearing that the tree had to give its life in order to provide Hiawatha the wood for a canoe. She was an early and voracious reader. Her first book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which she kept well into adulthood until "some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back". She visited Florida when she was four, and her most vivid memory of the trip was picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel. From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from Tampa to Havana.
Marjory's parents separated when she was six. Her father endured a series of failed entrepreneurial ventures and the instability caused her mother to move them abruptly to the Trefethen family house in Taunton, Massachusetts. She lived there with her mother, aunt, and grandparents, who did not get along well and consistently spoke ill of her father, to her dismay. Her mother, whom Marjory characterized as "high-strung", was committed to a mental sanitarium in Providence several times. Her parents' separation and the contentiousness of her mother's family caused her to suffer from night terrors. She credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.
As a youth, Marjory found solace in reading, and eventually, she began to write. At sixteen she contributed to the most popular children's publication of the day, St. Nicholas Magazine—also the first publisher of 20th-century writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rachel Carson, and William Faulkner—with a puzzle titled "Double Beheadings and Double Curtailings". In 1907, she was awarded a prize by the Boston Herald for "An Early Morning Paddle", a story about a boy who watches a sunrise from a canoe. As her mother's mental health deteriorated, Marjory took on more responsibilities, eventually managing some of the family finances and gaining a maturity imposed upon her by circumstance.
### Education and marriage
Marjory left for college in 1908, despite grave misgivings about her mother's mental state. Her aunt and grandmother shared her concerns, but recognized that she needed to leave in order to begin her own life. She was a straight-A student at Wellesley College, graduating with a BA in English in 1912. She found particular success in a class on elocution, and joined the first suffrage club with six of her classmates. She was elected Class Orator but was unable to fulfill the office since she was already involved in other activities. During her senior year while visiting home, her mother showed her a lump on her breast. Marjory arranged the surgery to have it removed. After the graduation ceremony, her aunt informed her it had metastasized, and within months her mother was dead. The family left the funeral arrangements up to Marjory.
After drifting with college friends through a few jobs to which she did not feel well-suited, Marjory Stoneman met Kenneth Douglas in 1914. She was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months. He portrayed himself as a newspaper editor, and was 30 years her senior, but the marriage quickly failed when it became apparent he was a con artist. The true extent of his duplicity Marjory did not entirely reveal, despite her honesty in all other matters. Douglas was married to Marjory while already married to another woman. While he spent six months in jail for passing a bad check, she remained faithful to him. His scheme to scam her absent father out of money worked in Marjory's favor when it attracted Frank Stoneman's attention. Marjory's uncle persuaded her to move to Miami and end the marriage. In the fall of 1915, Marjory Stoneman Douglas left New England to be reunited with her father, whom she had not seen since her parents' separation. Shortly before that, her father had married Lillius ("Lilla") Eleanor Shine, a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson (her grandfather was Francis W. Eppes). Marjory later wrote that Shine "remained my first and best friend all my life in Florida." After moving to Florida in 1915, Marjory rarely returned to Massachusetts, but she retained affection for it; her 1987 memoir Voice of the River, is dedicated "To Massachusetts, with love."
## Writing career
### The Miami Herald
Douglas arrived in South Florida when fewer than 5,000 people lived in Miami and it was "no more than a glorified railroad terminal". Her father, Frank Stoneman, was the first publisher of the paper that later became The Miami Herald. Stoneman passionately opposed the governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and his attempts to drain the Everglades. He infuriated Broward so much that when Stoneman won an election for circuit judge, Broward refused to validate the election, so Stoneman was referred to as "Judge" for the rest of his life without performing the duties of one.
Douglas joined the newspaper's staff in 1915. She began as a society columnist writing about tea parties and society events, but news was so slow she later admitted to making up some of her stories: "Somebody would say, 'Who's that Mrs. T.Y. Washrag you've got in your column?' And I would say, 'Oh, you know, I don't think she's been here very long'". When her father went on vacation less than a year after her arrival in Miami, he left her the responsibility of the editorial page. She developed a rivalry with an editor at The Miami Metropolis whose greater familiarity with Miami history gave her cause to make fun of Douglas in writing. Her father scolded her to check her facts better.
Douglas was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman from Miami to join the US Naval Reserve. When the woman did not show up for the interview, Douglas herself joined the Navy as a Yeoman (F) first class. It did not suit her; she disliked rising early and her superiors did not appreciate her correcting their grammar, so she requested a discharge and joined the American Red Cross, which stationed her in Paris. She witnessed the tumultuous celebrations on the Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed and cared for war refugees; seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
After the war, Douglas served as assistant editor at The Miami Herald. She gained some renown for her daily column, "The Galley", becoming something of a local celebrity. She amassed a devoted readership and attempted to begin each column with a poem. "The Galley" was topical and went in any direction Douglas chose. She promoted responsible urban planning when Miami saw a population boom of 100,000 people in a decade. She wrote supporting women's suffrage, civil rights, and better sanitation while opposing Prohibition and foreign trade tariffs.
Some of the stories she wrote spoke of the region's wealth as being in its "inevitable development", and she supplemented her income with \$100 a week from writing copy advertisements that praised the development of South Florida, something she would reconsider later in her life. In the early 1920s she wrote "Martin Tabert of North Dakota is Walking Florida Now", a ballad lamenting the death of a 22-year-old vagrant who was beaten to death in a labor camp. It was printed in The Miami Herald, and read aloud during a session of the Florida Legislature, which passed a law banning convict leasing in large part due to her writing. "I think that's the single most important thing I was ever able to accomplish as a result of something I've written", she wrote in her autobiography.
### Freelance writer
After quitting the newspaper in 1923, Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920 to 1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories. One of her first stories was sold to the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask for \$600 (equivalent to \$ in 2022). Forty of her stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post; one, "Story of a Homely Woman", was reprinted in 1937 in the Post's best short stories compilation. Recurring settings in her fiction were South Florida, the Caribbean, and Europe during World War I. Her protagonists were often independent, quirky women or youthful underdogs who encountered social or natural injustices. The people and animals of the Everglades served as subjects for some of her earliest writings. "Plumes", originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1930, was based on the murder of Guy Bradley, an Audubon Society game warden, by poachers. "Wings" was a nonfiction story, also first appearing in the Post in 1931, that addressed the slaughter of Everglades wading birds for their feathers. Her story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the O. Henry Award competition in 1928.
During the 1930s, she was commissioned to write a pamphlet supporting a botanical garden called "An argument for the establishment of a tropical botanical garden in South Florida." Its success caused her to be in demand at garden clubs where she delivered speeches throughout the area, then to serve on the board to support the Fairchild Garden. She called the garden "one of the greatest achievements for the entire area".
Douglas became involved with the Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s. One, "The Gallows Gate", was about an argument between a mother and father regarding the character of their son who is sentenced to hang. She got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body. The play won a state competition, and eventually \$500 in a national competition after it was written into three acts. With William W. Muir, husband of reporter Helen Muir, she authored "Storm Warnings", a play loosely based on the life of mobster Al Capone. Some of Capone's henchmen showed up at the theater, "add[ing] an extra tingle for the audience that night", though no actual problems arose. Douglas wrote the foreword to the Work Projects Administration's guide to Miami and environs, published in 1941 as part of the Federal Writers' Project's American Guide Series.
Douglas served as the book review editor of The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami Press from 1960 to 1963. She released her first novel, Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several nonfiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching and David Fairchild, a biologist who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her autobiography, Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River, was written with John Rothchild in 1987. She had been working on a book about W. H. Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times. It was incomplete when she died in 1998.
### The Everglades: River of Grass
Early in the 1940s, Douglas was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America Series by writing about the Miami River. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long”, but in researching it she became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher to allow her to write about the Everglades instead. She spent five years researching what little was known about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida. Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker, who discovered that South Florida's sole freshwater source was the Biscayne Aquifer, and it was filled by the Everglades. Parker confirmed the name of the book that has since become the nickname for the Everglades when Douglas, trying to capture the Everglades' essence, asked if she could safely call the fresh water flowing from Lake Okeechobee a river of grass.
The Everglades: River of Grass was published in 1947 and sold out of its first printing in a month. The book's first line, "There are no other Everglades in the world", has been called the "most famous passage ever written about the Everglades", and the line once welcomed visitors to the Everglades National Park website. Douglas characterized the Everglades as an ecosystem surrounding a river worthy of protection, inescapably connected to South Florida's people and cultures. She outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter, "The Eleventh Hour":
> Cattlemen's grass fires roared uncontrolled. Cane-field fires spread crackling and hissing in the saw grass in vast waves and pillars and billowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored, purple-shadowed smoke. Training planes flying over the Glades dropped bombs or cigarette butts, and the fires exploded in the hearts of the drying hammocks and raced on before every wind leaving only blackness ... There was no water in the canals with which to fight [the fires] ... The sweet water the rock had held was gone or had shrunk far down into its strange holes and cleavages.
The Everglades: River of Grass galvanized people to protect the Everglades and has been compared to Rachel Carson's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of DDT, Silent Spring; both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still felt as it is claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. The Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book is not only a classic of environmental literature, it also reads like a blueprint for what conservationists are hailing as the most extensive environmental restoration project ever undertaken anywhere in the world". The downside of the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her metaphor of a River of Grass is so predominant that the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades is oversimplified. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas's "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.
## Activism
Women's suffrage was an early interest of Douglas, and although she tended to shy away from polemics in her early work at The Miami Herald, on her third day as a society columnist, she chose suffrage and began to focus on writing about women in leadership positions. In 1917, she traveled with Mary Baird Bryan, William Jennings Bryan's wife, and two other women to Tallahassee to speak in support of women's right to vote. Douglas was not impressed with the reception the group got from the Florida Legislature. She wrote about her experience later: "All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats. Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all." Douglas was able to vote for the first time after she returned from Europe in 1920.
Using her influence at The Miami Herald, Douglas wrote columns about poverty:
> You can have the most beautiful city in the world as appearance goes, the streets may be clean and shining, the avenues broad and tree lined, the public buildings dignified, adequate and well kept ... but if you have a weak or inadequate health department, or a public opinion lax on the subject, all the splendors of your city will have not value.
In 1948 Douglas served on the Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee, with a friend of hers named Elizabeth Virrick, who was horrified to learn that no running water or sewers were connected to the racially segregated part of Coconut Grove. They helped pass a law requiring all homes in Miami to have toilets and bathtubs. In the two years it took them to get the referendum passed, they worked to set up a loan operation for the black residents of Coconut Grove, who borrowed the money interest-free to pay for the plumbing work. Douglas noted that all of the money loaned was repaid.
### Everglades work
Stoneman Douglas became involved in the Everglades in the 1920s, when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, a group led by Ernest F. Coe and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in imminent danger of disappearing forever because of gross mismanagement in the name of progress and real estate and agricultural development. Encouraged to get involved by the leaders of environmental groups, in 1969—at the age of 79—Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades to protest the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress portion of the Everglades. She justified her involvement saying, "It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping."
She toured the state giving "hundreds of ringing denunciations" of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full-time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser". President Richard Nixon, however, scrapped funding for the project due to the efforts of many Everglades watchdog groups.
Douglas continued her activism and focused her efforts on restoring the Everglades after declaring that "Conservation is now a dead word ... You can't conserve what you haven't got." Her criticism was directed at two entities she considered were doing the most damage to the Everglades. A coalition of sugarcane growers, named Big Sugar, she accused of polluting Lake Okeechobee by pumping water tainted with chemicals, human waste, and garbage back into the lake, which served as the fresh water source for the Miami metropolitan area. She compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the West Indies, which, she claimed, was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content.[^1]
Besides Big Sugar, Douglas spoke about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water. The Corps was responsible for constructing more than 1,400 miles (2,300 km) of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947. When the Central & South Florida Project (C&SF), run by former members of the Corps of Engineers, was proposed to assist the Everglades, Douglas initially gave it her approval, as it promised to deliver much-needed water to the shrinking Everglades. However, in application, the project instead diverted more water away from the Everglades, changed water schedules to meet sugarcane farmers' irrigation needs, and flat-out refused to release water to Everglades National Park, until much of the land was unrecognizable. "What a liar I turned out to be!" remarked Douglas, then suggested the motivation behind all the digging and diversion in saying, "Their mommies obviously never let them play with mud pies, so now they take it out on us by playing with cement".
Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the colonel in attendance dropped his pen on the floor. As he was stooping to pick it up, Douglas stopped her speech and said to him, "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"
In 1973, Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in Everglades City, and was observed by John Rothchild:
> Mrs. Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Stravinsky. When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less came to order. She reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don't remember what else. Her voice had the sobering effect of a one-room schoolmarm's. The tone itself seemed to tame the rowdiest of the local stone crabbers, plus the developers, and the lawyers on both sides. I wonder if it didn't also intimidate the mosquitoes ... The request for a Corps of Engineers permit was eventually turned down. This was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak.
Douglas was not well received by some audiences. She opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County named East Everglades. After the county approved building permits in the Everglades, the land flooded as it had for centuries. When homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, she was the only opposing voice. At the hearing in 1983, she was booed, jeered, and shouted at by the audience of residents. "Can't you boo any louder than that?" she chided, eventually making them laugh. "Look. I'm an old lady. I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat," she told them. Later, she wrote, "They're all good souls—they just shouldn't be out there." Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain.
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles explained her impact, saying, "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren."
### Other causes
Douglas also served as a charter member of the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter organized in the South in the 1950s. She lent her support to the Equal Rights Amendment, speaking to the legislature in Tallahassee urging them to ratify it. In the 1980s Douglas lent her support to the Florida Rural Legal Services, a group that worked to protect migrant farm workers who were centered on Belle Glade, and who were primarily employed by the sugarcane industry. She wrote to Governor Bob Graham in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured. The same year, Douglas approached the Dade County School Board and insisted that the Biscayne Nature Center, which had been housed in hot dog stands, needed a building of its own. The center received a portable building until 1991 when the Florida Department of Education endowed \$1.8 million for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Crandon Park. Douglas co-founded the Friends of the Miami-Dade Public Libraries with her longtime friend Helen Muir, and served as its first president.
## Personal life
### Religious views
Although Douglas grew up in an Episcopal household, she described herself as agnostic throughout her life, and forbade any religious ceremony at her memorial. Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying. However, she credited the motivation for her support of women's suffrage to her Quaker paternal grandparents whose dedication to the abolition of slavery she admired, and proudly claimed Levi Coffin, an organizer of the Underground Railroad, was her great-great-uncle. She wrote that his wife was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and had provided Stowe with the story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin fleeing slavery because Douglas's great-great-aunt took care of Eliza and her infant after their escape. Frank Stoneman grew up in a Quaker colony, and Douglas maintained he kept touches of his upbringing throughout his life, even after converting to Episcopalianism. Writer Jack Davis and neighbor Helen Muir suggest this Quaker influence was behind Douglas's use of "Friends" in naming the organizations Friends of the Everglades and Friends of the Miami-Dade Public Libraries.
### Mental health
As a child, Douglas was very close with her mother after her parents' separation. She witnessed her mother's emotional unraveling that caused her to be institutionalized, and even long after her mother returned to live with her, she exhibited bizarre, childlike behaviors. Following her mother's death, her relocation to Miami, and her displeasure in working as the assistant editor at The Miami Herald, in the 1920s, she suffered the first of three nervous breakdowns.
Douglas suggested she had what she referred to as "blank periods" before and during her marriage, but they were brief. She connected these lapses to her mother's insanity. She eventually quit the newspaper, but after her father's death in 1941 she suffered a third and final breakdown, when her neighbors found her roaming the neighborhood one night screaming. She realized she had a "father complex", explaining it by saying, "Having been brought up without him all those years, and then coming back and finding him so sympathetic had a powerful effect".
### Personal habits
Regardless of her dedication to the preservation of the Everglades, Douglas admitted the time she spent actually there was sporadic, driving there for occasional picnics. "To be a friend of the Everglades is not necessarily to spend time wandering around out there ... It's too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable", she wrote. Instead, she understood that the health of the environment indicated the general well-being of humanity.
Despite Douglas's demure appearance—she stood at 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m) and weighed 100 pounds (45 kg), and was always immaculately dressed in pearls, a floppy straw hat and gloves—she had an uncanny ability to get her point across. She was known for speaking in perfect, precise paragraphs, and was respected for her dedication and knowledge of her subjects; even her critics admitted her authority on the Everglades. Jeff Klinkenberg, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times who interviewed and wrote several stories about Douglas, wrote of her, "She had a tongue like a switchblade and the moral authority to embarrass bureaucrats and politicians and make things happen." Douglas was known for haughtily dismissing reporters who had not read her books and asked uninformed questions.
She enjoyed drinking Scotch and sherry; as friend and neighbor Helen Muir remembered her, "She would come up and have a sherry, and then I would walk her home, and then she'd walk me back, and we would have another sherry. What fun she was." Novelist Hervey Allen called Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Muir "the Stewart Avenue Gang". The two were fond of having sherry together and gossiping, but those moments were followed by serious talk of the future of libraries, and the role of women in South Florida. They were confidants, and often shared their work with one another. Douglas never learned to drive and never owned a car. Her house also had no air conditioning, electric stove, or dishwasher.
She was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he had already gone to France as a soldier. However, she said she did not believe in extramarital sex and would not have dishonored her father by being promiscuous. She told Klinkenberg in 1992, frankly, that she had not had sex since her divorce, saying "I wasn't a wild woman". However, she was fond of saying she used the emotion and energy instead on her work. "People don't seem to realize that the energy that goes into sex, all the emotion that surrounds it, can be well employed in other ways", she wrote in her autobiography.
## Awards, death, and legacy
### Honors
Douglas began accruing honors in her early days writing for The Miami Herald. In the 1980s, the awards became more prestigious, and her reactions to them mixed. The Florida Department of Natural Resources (now the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) named its headquarters in Tallahassee after her in 1980, which she considered a dubious honor. She told a friend she would have rather seen the Everglades restored than her name on a building. During her polite acceptance speech, she railed against Ronald Reagan and the then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt for their lackluster approach to environmental conservation. In 1986 the National Parks Conservation Association established the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award, which "honor(s) individuals who often must go to great lengths to advocate and fight for the protection of the National Park System". Despite blindness and diminished hearing, Douglas continued to be active into her second century, and was honored with a visit from Queen Elizabeth II, to whom Douglas gave a signed copy of The Everglades: River of Grass in 1991. Instead of gifts and celebrations, Douglas asked that trees be planted on her birthday, resulting in over 100,000 planted trees across the state and a bald cypress on the lawn of the governor's mansion. The South Florida Water Management District began removing exotic plants that had taken hold in the Everglades when Douglas turned 102.
In 1993, when she was 103, President Bill Clinton awarded Douglas the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor granted by the United States of America. The citation for the medal read,
> Marjory Stoneman Douglas personifies passionate commitment. Her crusade to preserve and restore the Everglades has enhanced our Nation's respect for our precious environment, reminding all of us of nature's delicate balance. Grateful Americans honor the 'Grandmother of the Glades' by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come.
Douglas donated her medal to Wellesley College. Most of the others she received she stored at her home.
Douglas was posthumously inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Hall of Fame in 1999, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2000. Upon hearing that she was to be inducted, she questioned, "Why should they have a Women's Hall of Fame, as I heard they wanted to put me in the other day? Why not a Citizens' Hall of Fame?"
Douglas was included in a tribute to pioneering women when television character Lisa Simpson made a papier-mâché bust of her with Georgia O'Keeffe and Susan B. Anthony in an early episode of The Simpsons. She appears as a major supporting character in the 2014 point-and-click adventure A Golden Wake.
Some of Douglas's stories were collected by University of Florida professor Kevin McCarthy in two edited collections: Nine Florida Stories in 1990 and A River In Flood in 1998. McCarthy wrote that he collected Douglas's short stories because most people in the 1990s were well aware of her as an environmentalist but did not know about her career as a freelance writer. "Probably no other person has been as important to the environmental well-being of Florida than this little lady from Coconut Grove", McCarthy wrote in the introduction to A River in Flood.
### Remembrances
Marjory Stoneman Douglas died at the age of 108 on May 14, 1998. John Rothchild, who helped write her autobiography, said that her death was the only thing that could "shut her up" and added, "The silence is terrible." Carl Hiaasen eulogized her in The Miami Herald, writing that The Everglades: River of Grass was "monumental", and praised her passion and her resolve; even when politicians finally found value in the Everglades and visited her for a photo opportunity, she still provoked them to do more and do it faster.
The National Wildlife Federation described her as "a passionate, articulate, and tireless voice for the environment". Chairman of the Florida Audubon Society Ed Davison remembered her, saying, "She kept a clear vision of the way things ought to be, and she didn't give a lot of credibility to excuses about why they're not like that. She would give these wonderful, curmudgeonly speeches to which there was no response. You can't holler back to grandmotherly scolding. All you can do is shuffle your feet and say, 'Yes, Ma'am.'" She was aware of it, once saying, "People can't be rude to me, this poor little old woman. But I can be rude to them, poor darlings, and nobody can stop me." Her ashes were scattered in the 1,300,000-acre (5,300 km<sup>2</sup>) Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area in Everglades National Park, which was named for her in 1997.
In 2000, the Naples, Florida-based composer Steve Heitzeg wrote a 15-minute orchestra piece entitled Voice of the Everglades (Epitaph for Marjory Stoneman Douglas) for the Naples Philharmonic. Heitzeg said, "She was outspoken, she was direct, she had the energy and belief to make the world a better place."
Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (opened in 1990, the year of her 100th birthday) and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.
### Douglas home
Douglas's cottage in Coconut Grove at 3744–3754 Stewart Avenue, was built in 1924. She wrote all of her major books and stories there, and the City of Miami designated it an historic site in 1995, not only for its famous owner but also for its unique Masonry Vernacular architecture. After Douglas's death, Friends of the Everglades proposed making the house part of an education center about Douglas and her life, but neighbors protested, citing issues with parking, traffic, and an influx of visitors to the quiet neighborhood. The house, which had an exterior floodwater line from the 1926 Miami Hurricane and some damage from an infestation of bees, had fallen further into disrepair. For a while, the idea of moving the house to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, which Douglas helped to develop and where there is a life-size bronze statue to commemorate her efforts, was considered. The State of Florida owns Douglas's house and in April 2007 placed it in the care of the Florida Park Service, a division of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Restoration of the floors and counters took place in the following months. Water service was reconnected to the house and the electrical system was updated for safety purposes. All work was approved by the Department of Historic Resources. A park ranger was placed as a resident in the Douglas house to help maintain the structure and property.
On April 22, 2015, while giving an Earth Day speech in the Everglades, President Barack Obama announced that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell had designated the house a National Historic Landmark.
## Notable works
### Books
- The Everglades: River of Grass. Rinehart, 1947.
- Road to the Sun. Rinehart, 1952.
- Freedom River Florida 1845. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
- Hurricane. Rinehart, 1958 (revised, 1976). ,
- Alligator crossing. John Day, 1959.
- The Key to Paris. Keys to the Cities Series. Lippincott, 1961.
- Florida the Long Frontier. Harper & Row, 1967.
- The Joys of Bird Watching in Florida. Hurricane House, 1969.
- Adventures in a Green World – The Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop. Field Research Projects. 1973.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River. with John Rothchild. Pineapple Press, Inc. 1987. ,
### Short story collections
- Nine Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University of North Florida, 1990. ,
- "Pineland"
- "A Bird Dog in the Hand"
- "He Man"
- "Twenty Minutes Late for Dinner"
- "Plumes"
- "By Violence"
- "Bees in the Mango Bloom"
- "September-Remember"
- "The Road to the Horizon"
- A River in Flood and Other Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas.'' Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University Press of Florida, 1998. ,
- "At Home on the Marcel Waves"
- "Solid Mahogany"
- "Goodness Gracious, Agnes"
- "A River in Flood"
- "The Mayor of Flamingo"
- "Stepmother"
- "You Got to Go, But You Don't Have to Come Back"
- "High-Goal Man"
- "Wind Before Morning"
[^1]: "Damages caused by the Army Corps of Engineers and Big Sugar." Lecture by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Fort Lauderdale", Florida International University. May 6, 1983. Retrieved on January 26, 2008.
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Black Prince's chevauchée of 1356
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English raid of the Hundred Years' War
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[
"Battles involving England",
"Battles of the Hundred Years' War",
"Conflicts in 1356",
"Edward the Black Prince",
"Hundred Years' War, 1337–1360"
] |
The Black Prince's chevauchée of 1356 was a large-scale mounted raid by an Anglo-Gascon force under the command of Edward, the Black Prince, between 4 August and 2 October 1356 as a part of the Hundred Years' War. The war had broken out in 1337, but a truce and the ravages of the Black Death had restricted the extent of the fighting since 1347. In 1355 the French king, John II, determined to resume full-scale war. That autumn, while Edward III of England threatened northern France, his son, Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince, carried out a devastating mounted raid, or chevauchée: an Anglo-Gascon army marched from the English possession of Gascony 675 miles (1,086 km) to Narbonne and back. The French refused battle, despite suffering enormous economic damage.
In 1356 the Black Prince intended to carry out a similar chevauchée, this time as part of a larger strategic operation intended to strike the French from several directions simultaneously. On 4 August 6,000 Anglo-Gascon soldiers headed north from Bergerac towards Bourges, devastating a wide swathe of French territory and sacking many French towns on the way. It was hoped to join up with two English forces in the vicinity of the River Loire, but by early September the Anglo-Gascons were facing the much larger French royal army on their own. The Black Prince withdrew towards Gascony; he was prepared to give battle, but only if he could fight on the tactical defensive on ground of his own choosing. John was determined to fight, preferably by cutting the Anglo-Gascons off from supply and forcing them to attack him in his prepared position. In the event the French succeeded in cutting off the Prince's army, but then decided to attack it in its prepared defensive position anyway, partly from fear it might slip away, but mostly as a question of honour. This was the Battle of Poitiers.
Between 14,000 and 16,000 French troops, including at least 10,000 men-at-arms, attacked on the morning of 19 September in four separate waves. The Anglo-Gascons defeated each in turn during a long-drawn-out battle. They partially surrounded the final French attack and captured the French King and one of his sons. In total 5,800 Frenchmen were killed and 2,000 to 3,000 men-at-arms captured. The surviving French dispersed while the Anglo-Gascons continued their withdrawal to Gascony. The following spring a two-year truce was agreed and the Black Prince escorted John to London. Negotiations to end the war and ransom John dragged out and Edward launched a further campaign in 1359. During this both sides compromised and the Treaty of Brétigny was agreed by which vast areas of France were ceded to England, to be personally ruled by the Black Prince, and John was ransomed for three million gold écu. At the time this seemed to end the war, but the French initiated a resumption of hostilities in 1369 and recaptured most of the territory lost. The war did not end until 1453, with a French victory.
## Background
Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, English monarchs had held titles and lands within France, the possession of which made them vassals of the kings of France. Following a series of disagreements between Philip VI of France (r. 1328–1350) and Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377), on 24 May 1337 Philip's Great Council in Paris agreed that the lands held by Edward III in France should be taken back into Philip's hands on the grounds that Edward III was in breach of his obligations as a vassal. This marked the start of the Hundred Years' War, which was to last 116 years.
The only important French possession still held by the English in France was Gascony in the south west. But Gascony was disproportionately important: duty levied by the English Crown on wine from Gascony was more than all other English customs duties combined and by far the largest source of state income. Bordeaux, the capital of Gascony, had a population of more than 50,000, greater than London's, and Bordeaux was possibly richer. Although Gascony was the cause of the war, Edward III was able to spare few resources for its defence. In most campaigning seasons the Gascons had to rely on their own resources and were hard-pressed by the French. Typically the Gascons could field 3,000–6,000 men, the large majority infantry, although up to two-thirds of them would be tied down in garrisoning their fortifications. In 1345 and 1346 Henry, Earl of Lancaster, led a series of successful campaigns in Aquitaine and the combined English and Gascon forces, or Anglo-Gascons, were able to push the focus of the fighting away from the heart of Gascony.
The French port of Calais fell to the English in August 1347 after the Crécy campaign and shortly afterward the Truce of Calais was signed. This was partially the result of both countries being financially exhausted. The same year the Black Death reached northern France and southern England killing a high proportion of the population of Western Europe, and with an even higher death rate in England. This catastrophe, which lasted until 1350, temporarily halted the fighting. The treaty was extended repeatedly over the years; this did not stop ongoing naval clashes, nor small-scale fighting – which was especially fierce in south-west France – nor occasional fighting on a larger scale.
A treaty ending the war was negotiated at Guînes and signed on 6 April 1354. However, the French king, now John II (r. 1350–1364), decided not to ratify it and it did not take effect. It was clear that from the summer of 1355 both sides would be committed to full-scale war. In April 1355 Edward and his council, with the treasury in an unusually favourable financial position, decided to launch offensives that year in both northern France and Gascony. John attempted to strongly garrison his northern towns and fortifications against the expected descent by Edward III, at the same time as assembling a field army; he was unable to, largely because of lack of money.
### Black Prince arrives
Edward's eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later commonly known as the Black Prince, was given the Gascon command and began assembling men, shipping and supplies. He arrived in Bordeaux on 20 September 1355 accompanied by 2,200 English soldiers. The next day he was formally acknowledged as the king's lieutenant in Gascony, with plenipotentiary powers. Gascon nobles reinforced him to a strength of somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 and provided a bridging train and a substantial supply train.
Edward set out on 5 October on a chevauchée, which was a large-scale mounted raid. The Anglo-Gascon force marched from Bordeaux in English-held Gascony 300 miles (500 km) to Narbonne and back to Gascony, devastating a wide swathe of French territory and sacking many French towns on the way. John, Count of Armagnac, who commanded the local French forces, avoided battle, and there was little fighting. While no territory was captured, enormous economic damage was done to France; the modern historian Clifford Rogers concluded "the importance of the economic attrition of the chevauchée can hardly be exaggerated." The expedition returned to Gascony on 2 December having marched 675 miles (1,100 km).
The English component resumed the offensive after Christmas to great effect, and more than 50 French-held towns or fortifications were captured during the following four months, including strategically important towns close to the borders of Gascony, and others more than 80 miles (130 km) away. Local French commanders attempted no countermeasures. Several members of the local French nobility went over to the English; the Black Prince received homage from them on 24 April 1356.
Money and enthusiasm for the war were running out in France. The modern historian Jonathan Sumption describes the French national administration as "fall[ing] apart in jealous acrimony and recrimination". A contemporary chronicler recorded "the King of France was severely hated in his own realm". Arras rebelled and killed loyalists. The major nobles of Normandy refused to pay taxes. On 5 April 1356 John arrested the notoriously treacherous Charles II, king of Navarre, one of the largest landholders in France and another nine of his more outspoken critics; four were summarily executed. Several Norman nobles turned to Edward for assistance.
Seeing an opportunity, Edward diverted an expedition planned for Brittany under Lancaster to Normandy in late June. Lancaster set off with 2,300 men and pillaged and burnt his way eastward across Normandy from the Cotentin. King John moved to Rouen with a much stronger force, hoping to intercept Lancaster. After relieving and re-victualling two besieged fortifications the English stormed and sacked the important town of Verneuil. John pursued, but bungled several opportunities to bring the English to battle and they escaped. In three weeks the expedition had seized a large amount of loot, including many horses, damage had been done to the French economy and prestige, new alliances had been cemented, there had been few casualties and the French King had been distracted from the English preparations for a greater chevauchée from south-west France.
## Prelude
The French announced an arrière-ban, a formal call to arms for all able-bodied males, on 14 May. The response was unenthusiastic and the call was repeated in late May and again in early June. The French were so short of cash they were unable to pay wages to those men who did muster. The French army had inherent weaknesses: it consisted of thousands of very small contingents; unaccustomed to cooperating with each other; unknown to their commanders; and of variable health, training and equipment. John's fifteen-year-old son John, Count of Poitiers, was given command of an army in Languedoc, to guard against the Black Prince repeating the previous year's exploits.
The Black Prince received reinforcements of men, Edward is known to have ordered 600 additional longbowmen be raised in England specifically for Gascony. Horses, food and materiel also arrived during the spring. Ralph, Earl of Stafford, arrived in mid-June 1356 with further reinforcements and supplies, and bearing orders from Edward. The Black Prince called a grand assembly of the Gascon nobility and representatives of the towns, made a show of seeking their advice and when it appeared there was a consensus for war asked for funds with which to prosecute it. In the glow of his recent successes he was granted a tax of one-fifteenth of all of Gascony's movable goods. He thanked the assembly and made a stirring speech encouraging a large turnout for the forthcoming campaign.
The gathering point for the Anglo-Gascon army was Bergerac; the town had good river supply links to Bordeaux and from there the Prince could strike in several directions. The hope was that this would cause the French to divide their forces in an attempt to cover all avenues of attack. In fact there was already a broad plan: three English armies would rendezvous somewhere on the Loire. Edward would march south west from Calais, Lancaster would strike south from Brittany and the Black Prince would move north from Bergerac.
In Normandy John committed his army to re-establishing the siege of Breteuil on 12 July; Breteuil was the last fortification holding out against him in eastern Normandy. The royal army attracted great contemporary praise for its splendour and the high status of many of its participants. However, it made little progress, as Breteuil was well garrisoned and had been resupplied by Lancaster with food for a year. John attempted to mine under the walls, to no avail.
## Chevauchée
### Heading north
So many Gascons arrived at Bergerac that there was concern the province would not be adequately defended if the French were to counter-attack. So 2,000–3,000 men were detached to remain, under the Seneschal of Gascony, John de Cheverston. The force which set out contained some 6,000 fighting men: 3,000 English and Gascon men-at-arms; 2,000 archers, almost entirely English and Welsh longbowmen; and 1,000 other infantry, predominately Gascons. They were accompanied by approximately 4,000 non-combatants. All the fighting men were mounted, including those who would fight on foot, such as the archers. On 4 August 1356 they headed north. On the 6th they reached Périgueux, which they looted. On 14 August the Anglo-Gascon army crossed the River Vienne, halting on the 15th at Lesterps to rest and repair equipment, having marched 113 miles (182 km) from Bergerac.
The Anglo-Gascon army then separated into three divisions, known as battles, which moved north abreast of each other and began to systematically devastate the countryside. There would be approximately 40 miles (64 km) between the flanking units, enabling them to devastate a band of French territory more than 50 miles (80 km) wide yet be able to unite to face an enemy at approximately a day's notice. They advanced slowly, to facilitate their tasks of looting and destruction. The modern historian David Green has described the progress of the Black Prince's army as "deliberately destructive, extremely brutal ... methodical and sophisticated." Several strong castles were assaulted and captured. The populaces of most towns fled, or surrendered at the first sight of Anglo-Gascon troops. Overall, there was little French resistance, and no field army to prevent the Prince's forces from dispersing widely to maximise their destructive effect on the French countryside.
The main French army remained in Normandy. Despite it being clear Breteuil could be neither stormed nor starved, John felt unable to abandon its siege as this would undermine his prestige as a warrior-king. He declined to march against the Black Prince, declaring the garrison of Breteuil posed a more serious threat. At some point in August an unusually large belfry, or mobile siege tower, was pushed up to the walls of Breteuil and a large assault launched. The defenders set fire to the belfry and repulsed the attack. Sumption describes the French losses in this attack as "terrible" and the entire second siege as "a pointless endeavour". The historian Kenneth Fowler describes the siege as "magnificent but archaic". Eventually John had to give way to the pressure to do something to prevent the destruction being wrought in south-west France. Some time around 20 August he offered the garrison of Breteuil free passage to the Cotentin, a huge bribe, and permission to take their valuables and goods, which persuaded them to vacate the town. The French army promptly marched south, as all available forces were concentrated against the Black Prince.
The Anglo-Gascons had been advancing in the general direction of Bourges, a large and well-fortified town where the Count of Poitiers had moved his army from Languedoc and was rallying regional French forces. Poitiers retreated as the Anglo-Gascons advanced on Bourges, and a division of the Black Prince's army tried and failed to take the town, then burnt the suburbs and continued north. This division reached Aubigny, 30 miles (48 km) to the north, by 28 August, which was looted and razed. Anglo-Gascon forces continued north, searching for a place where their army could cross the Loire. But it had been a wet summer, the river was flowing too fast and deep to be forded and the French had destroyed all bridges which they were not certain they could defend. Still on the 28th a large French scouting party was driven off near Aubigny with losses. From prisoners taken during this encounter the Black Prince learnt that the main French army was on the move and approaching Orléans and that John hoped to bring the Prince to battle near Tours.
### Clashes along the Loire
Hearing that John was marching on Tours and was prepared to give battle, the Black Prince moved his three divisions closer together and ordered them to move towards Tours. He was willing to fight an open battle, if he could do so under the right circumstances. He still hoped to cross the Loire, both to be able to come to grips with the French army and to link up with either Edward's or Lancaster's armies, if they were in the area. On 29 August another party of French men-at-arms, led by Boucicaut, the newly appointed marshal of France, ambushed a small English force before being driven off by fresh English troops and pursued to the castle of Romorantin. The entire Anglo-Gascon army gathered here and assaulted the castle on the 30th. The outer walls were captured, but the French held out in the keep. A council of war decided to besiege it, both hoping to capture Boucicaut and anticipating a battle if John attempted to relieve the siege. But John was still gathering his forces at Orléans and Chartres and so the Anglo-Gascons were able to concentrate on attacking Romorantin, where the French surrendered on 3 September.
The French royal army from Breteuil had moved to Chartres, where it received reinforcements, particularly of men-at-arms. John sent home nearly all of the infantry contingents, leaving an entirely mounted force which had the mobility and speed to match that of the Black Prince's all-mounted army. Disbanding the large number of infantry units also reduced the French wage bill, and John was convinced the utility of many of the poorly trained and equipped militia was low. Nevertheless, he was criticised both at the time and later for the decision. Two hundred Scottish picked men-at-arms under William, Earl of Douglas, who was then Lord of Douglas and not yet an earl, joined John at Chartres. Once John felt he had an overwhelmingly strong force it set off south towards the Loire, and then south west along its north bank.
The Anglo-Gascons marched west from Romorantin along the valley of the Cher towards Tours. Scouts were sent north to search for passages of the Loire, but as before were unable to find passable fords or intact bridges not strongly fortified and garrisoned. The camp-fires of the French army were visible to the north. Early on 8 September the Black Prince's army reached Tours, where he received news that Lancaster was not far to the east, on the other side of the Loire, and hoped to join him soon. The Anglo-Gascons prepared for battle and expected the imminent arrival of the French. But John had crossed the Loire at Blois, to the east of Tours, on 10 September where he was joined by the army of the Count of Poitiers.
### Other English offensives
Meanwhile, the anticipated support from England failed to materialise. In early August an Aragonese galley fleet, which had sailed from Barcelona in April, arrived in the English Channel. Galleys were ships commonly used in the Mediterranean, which the French adopted for use in northern waters during summer months. Being shallow-draught vessels propelled by banks of oars the galleys could penetrate shallow harbours and were highly manoeuvrable, making them effective for raiding and ship-to-ship combat in meeting engagements. The fleet hired by the French only contained nine galleys, but it caused panic among the English. Edward's attempts to raise an army to send to France were still under way and shipping was being assembled. The troops gathered were split up to guard the coast and the ships sailing to Southampton to transport the army were ordered to remain in port until the galleys had left.
At some point in August Lancaster marched south from eastern Brittany with an army of unknown size. He had brought with him from Normandy 2,500 men. He also had under his command more than 2,000 men garrisoning the English-held fortifications of Brittany. The extent to which he added the men from these garrisons to the troops he brought with him before marching to support the Black Prince is not known. As for the Black Prince, the unusual height of the river and the French control of the bridges, meant Lancaster was unable to cross and effect a junction. In early September he abandoned the attempt to force a crossing at Les Ponts-de-Cé and returned to Brittany. En route he captured and garrisoned many French strongpoints. Once back in Brittany he laid siege to its capital, Rennes.
### Strategy
The Anglo-Gascon army was treading a balance. While there were no large French forces facing them they spread out to loot and despoil the land. Their primary objective was to use the threat of devastation to force, or perhaps persuade, the French army to attack them. The Anglo-Gascons were confident that fighting defensively on ground of their choosing they could defeat a numerically superior French force. In the event of the French being too numerous they were equally confident that they could avoid battle by manoeuvring. The French, aware of this approach, usually attempted to isolate English forces against a river or the sea, where the threat of starvation would force them to take the tactical offensive and attack the French in a prepared position. Once he crossed the Loire, John repeatedly attempted to interpose his army between the Anglo-Gascons and Gascony, so they would be forced to try and fight their way out. Meanwhile the Black Prince did not wish to rapidly retreat to the safety of Gascony, but to manoeuvre in the vicinity of the French army so as to persuade it to attack on unfavourable terms, without himself becoming cut off. He was aware John had been eager to fight Lancaster's force in Normandy in June and anticipated this enthusiasm for battle would continue.
### Retreating south
Once he had crossed the Loire on 10 September and been reinforced John moved to cut off the Anglo-Gascon line of retreat. Hearing of this, and losing hope that Lancaster would be able to join him, the Black Prince moved his army some 8 miles (13 km) south to Montbazon where he took up a fresh defensive position on 12 September. The same day John's son and heir Charles, the Dauphin, entered Tours, having travelled from Normandy with 1,000 men-at-arms, and Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, Cardinal of Périgord arrived at the Black Prince's camp to attempt to negotiate a two-day truce on behalf of Pope Innocent VI. According to differing sources this was to be followed by peace negotiations or an arranged battle. Happy to do battle, but concerned that a two-day delay would leave his army with its back to the Loire in an area with few supplies, the Black Prince dismissed Talleyrand and marching hard crossed the River Creuse at La Haye on the 13th, 25 miles (40 km) to the south. John, aware he outnumbered the Anglo-Gascons, was eager to wipe them out in battle and so similarly ignored Talleyrand. The French army continued to march south parallel to the English, rather than moving directly towards them, with the aim of cutting their lines of retreat and supply. On the 14th the English marched 15 miles (24 km) south west to Châtellerault on the Vienne.
At Châtellerault the Black Prince felt there were no geographical barriers against which the French could pin his army and that he was occupying an advantageous defensive position. He arrived there on 14 September, the day Talleyrand had proposed for the two armies to engage in battle, and waited for the French to come to him. Two days later his scouts reported that John had bypassed his position and was about to cross the Vienne at Chauvigny. At this point the French had lost track of the Anglo-Gascon army and were unaware of its position, but were about to serendipitously position themselves 20 miles (32 km) south of the Anglo-Gascons and directly in their path back to friendly territory. The Black Prince saw an opportunity to attack the French while they were on the march, or possibly even while crossing the Vienne, and so set off at first light on the 17th to intercept them, leaving his baggage train behind to follow on as best it could.
When the Anglo-Gascon vanguard reached Chauvigny most of the French army had already crossed and marched on towards Poitiers. A force of 700 men-at-arms of the French rearguard was intercepted near Savigny-Lévescault. Contemporary accounts note they were not wearing helmets, suggesting they were completely unarmoured and not expecting battle. They were rapidly routed with 240 killed or captured, including 3 counts taken prisoner. Many Anglo-Gascons pursued the remaining, fleeing, French, although the Black Prince held back most of his army, not wishing to scatter it in the close vicinity of the enemy, and camped at Savigny-Lévescault. In response, John drew up his army outside Poitiers in battle order.
### Battle of Poitiers
On 18 September the Anglo-Gascons marched towards Poitiers arrayed for battle, hoping the French would launch an impromptu assault. Instead Talleyrand rode up to negotiate. The Black Prince was initially disinclined to delay any battle. He was persuaded to discuss terms after Talleyrand pointed out that the two armies were now so close that if the French declined to attack, the Anglo-Gascons would find it almost impossible to withdraw. If they attempted to the French would attack, aiming to defeat them in detail, and if they stood their positions they would run out of supplies before the French. Unknown to Talleyrand the Anglo-Gascons were already unable to find sufficient water for their horses.
After lengthy negotiations the Black Prince agreed extensive concessions in exchange for free passage to Gascony. However, they were dependent on the agreement being ratified by his father, Edward III. Unknown to the French, Edward had given his son written permission to, in such circumstances, "help himself by making a truce or armistice, or in any other way that seems best to him." This has caused modern historians to doubt the Prince's sincerity. The French discussed these proposals at length, with John in favour, but several senior advisers felt it would be humiliating to, as they saw it, have at their mercy the Anglo-Gascon army which had devastated so much of France and to tamely allow it to escape. John was persuaded and Talleyrand informed the Black Prince that he could expect a battle. Attempts to agree a site for the battle failed, as the French wished the Anglo-Gascons to move out of their strong defensive position and the English wished to remain there. Early on 19 September Talleyrand again attempted to arrange a truce, but as his army's supplies were already running out the Black Prince rejected this.
The English army was arrayed in its three divisions, in line abreast, and a small reserve. The French army, of 14,000 to 16,000 men: 10,000–12,000 were men-at-arms, 2,000 were crossbowmen and 2,000 infantrymen who were not classed as men-at-arms. They were divided into four battles or divisions, of which the rearmost was held in reserve under the King. John ordered the raising of the French sacred standard, the oriflamme, indicating no prisoners were to be taken, on pain of death. One contemporary chronicler stated that John made a solitary exception, for the Black Prince. Initially neither side was prepared to advance across the broken ground between the armies, so the Black Prince, urgently needing to provoke a battle, manoeuvred his 6,000-strong army across the front of the French and persuaded them they could catch the Anglo-Gascons at a disadvantage.
Most of the French had dismounted and sent their horses to the rear, but some of French vanguard who were mounted attacked, believing the movement signalled an Anglo-Gascon retreat. They were driven back, but were followed by the French vanguard, on foot. After a prolonged fight this was thrown back by the English. The second French division, consisting of 4,000 men-at-arms under Charles, the Dauphin, then attacked, all on foot. They were also repulsed by the now-confident Anglo-Gascons, but with even more difficulty than the vanguard. As the Dauphin's division recoiled there was confusion in the French ranks: about half the men of their third division, under Philip, the Duke of Orléans, left the field, taking with them many of the survivors of the first two attacks and all four of John's sons. Those Frenchmen remaining gathered around the King and launched a third attack against the by now exhausted Anglo-Gascons, again all as infantry.
Concerned his army would break and flee, the Black Prince ordered an advance. This bolstered Anglo-Gascon morale and shook the French. Some Anglo-Gascon men-at-arms mounted and charged the French on horseback. Battle was again joined, with the French slowly getting the better of it. Then a small force of 160 men, who had been sent earlier to threaten the French rear area, appeared behind the main French force. Believing themselves surrounded, some Frenchmen fled, which panicked others, and soon the entire French force collapsed. John was captured; as was the oriflamme; one of John's sons, Philip; and according to different sources 2,000 to 3,000 men-at-arms. Approximately 2,500 French men-at-arms were killed, as were approximately 3,300 common soldiers. Modern sources estimate Anglo-Gascon fatalities at about 40 men-at-arms and an uncertain but much larger number of bowmen and other infantry.
### Post-battle
The French were concerned the victorious Anglo-Gascons would attempt to storm Poitiers or other towns, or continue their devastation. The Black Prince was more concerned with getting his army with its prisoners and loot safely back to Gascony. He was aware many Frenchmen had survived the battle, but unaware of their state of cohesion or morale. The Anglo-Gascons moved 3 miles (4.8 km) south on 20 September and tended the wounded, buried the dead, paroled some of their prisoners, and reorganised their formations. On 21 September the Anglo-Gascons continued their interrupted march south, travelling slowly, overladen as they were with loot, booty and prisoners. On 2 October they entered Libourne and rested while a triumphal entrance was arranged at Bordeaux. Two weeks later the Black Prince escorted John into Bordeaux amid ecstatic scenes.
## Aftermath
The Black Prince's chevauchée was described by Rogers as "the most important campaign of the Hundred Years' War". In its aftermath English and Gascon forces raided widely across France, against little or no opposition. With no effective central authority France dissolved into near anarchy. In March 1357 a truce was agreed for two years. In April the Black Prince sailed for England, accompanied by his prisoner, John, and landed at Plymouth on 5 May. By May 1358 protracted negotiations between John and Edward led to the First Treaty of London, which would have ended the war with a large transfer of French territory to England and the payment of a huge ransom for John's freedom. The transfer of territory was much as that agreed in the earlier and abortive Treaty of Guînes. The French government was unenthusiastic and anyway was unable to raise the first instalment of John's ransom, causing the treaty to lapse. A peasant revolt known as the jacquerie broke out in northern France during the summer of 1358 and was bloodily put down during June. At length John and Edward agreed the Second Treaty of London, which was similar to the first except that even larger swathes of French territory would be transferred to the English. In May 1359 this was similarly rejected by the Dauphin and the Estates General.
In October 1359 Edward led another campaign in northern France. It was unopposed by French forces, but was unable to take any strongly fortified places. Instead the English army spread out and for six months devastated much of the region. Both countries were finding it almost impossible to finance continued hostilities, but neither were inclined to change their attitude to the proposed peace terms. On 13 April 1360, near Chartres, a sharp fall in temperature and a heavy hail storm killed many English baggage horses and some soldiers. Taking this as a sign from God, Edward reopened negotiations, directly with the Dauphin. By 8 May the Treaty of Brétigny had been agreed, which largely replicated the First Treaty of London. By the Treaty of Brétigny vast areas of France were ceded to England, to be personally ruled by the Black Prince, and John was ransomed for three million gold écu. Rogers states "Edward gained territories comprising a full third of France, to be held in full sovereignty, along with a huge ransom for the captive King John – his original war aims and much more." At the time it seemed this was the end of the war, but large-scale fighting broke out again in 1369 and recaptured most of the territory lost. The Hundred Years' War did not end until 1453.
## Notes, citations and sources
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180,869 |
Paulinus of York
| 1,173,821,903 |
7th-century missionary, Bishop of York, and saint
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Paulinus (died 10 October 644) was a Roman missionary and the first Bishop of York. A member of the Gregorian mission sent in 601 by Pope Gregory I to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism, Paulinus arrived in England by 604 with the second missionary group. Little is known of Paulinus's activities in the following two decades.
After some years spent in Kent, perhaps in 625, Paulinus was consecrated a bishop. He accompanied Æthelburg of Kent, sister of King Eadbald of Kent, on her journey to Northumbria to marry King Edwin of Northumbria, and eventually succeeded in converting Edwin to Christianity. Paulinus also converted many of Edwin's subjects and built some churches. One of the women Paulinus baptised was a future saint, Hilda of Whitby.
Following Edwin's death in 633, Paulinus and Æthelburg fled Northumbria, leaving behind a member of Paulinus's clergy, James the Deacon. Paulinus returned to Kent, where he became Bishop of Rochester. He received a pallium from the pope, symbolizing his appointment as Archbishop of York, but too late to be effective. After his death in 644, Paulinus was canonized as a saint and is now venerated in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican Churches.
## Early life
Paulinus was a monk from Rome sent to the Kingdom of Kent by Pope Gregory I in 601, along with Mellitus and others, as part of the second group of missionaries sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. He was probably an Italian by birth. The second group of missionaries arrived in Kent by 604, but little is known of Paulinus's further activities until he went to Northumbria.
Paulinus remained in Kent until 625, when he was consecrated as bishop by Justus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on 21 July. He then accompanied Æthelburg, the sister of King Eadbald of Kent, to Northumbria where she was to marry King Edwin of Northumbria. A condition of the marriage was that Edwin had promised that he would allow Æthelburg to remain a Christian and worship as she chose. Bede, writing in the early 8th century, reports that Paulinus wished to convert the Northumbrians, as well as provide religious services to the new queen.
There is some difficulty with Bede's chronology on the date of Æthelburh's marriage, as surviving papal letters to Edwin urging him to convert imply that Eadbald only recently had become a Christian, which conflicts with Bede's chronology. The historian D. P. Kirby argues that Paulinus and Æthelburh must therefore have gone to Northumbria earlier than 624, and that Paulinus went north, not as a bishop, but as a priest, returning later to be consecrated. The historian Henry Mayr-Harting agrees with Kirby's reasoning. Another historian, Peter Hunter Blair, argues that Æthelburh and Edwin were married before 625, but that she did not go to Northumbria until 625. If Kirby's arguments are accepted, then the date of Paulinus's consecration needs to be changed by a year, to 21 July 626.
Bede describes Paulinus as "a man tall of stature, a little stooping, with black hair and a thin face, a hooked and thin nose, his aspect both venerable and awe-inspiring".
## Bishop of York
Bede relates that Paulinus told Edwin that the birth of his and Æthelburg's daughter at Easter 626 was because of Paulinus's prayers. The birth coincided with a foiled assassination attempt on the king by a group of West Saxons from Wessex. Edwin promised to convert to Christianity and allow his new daughter Eanflæd to be baptised if he won a victory over Wessex. He did not fulfill his promise immediately after his subsequent military success against the West Saxons however, only converting after Paulinus had revealed the details of a dream the king had before he took the throne, during his exile at the court of King Rædwald of East Anglia. In this dream, according to Bede, a stranger told Edwin that power would be his in the future when someone laid a hand on his head. As Paulinus was revealing the dream to Edwin, he laid his hand on the king's head, which was the proof Edwin needed. A late seventh-century hagiography of Pope Gregory I claims that Paulinus was the stranger in the vision; if true, it might suggest that Paulinus spent some time at Rædwald's court, although Bede does not mention any such visit.
It is unlikely that it was supernatural affairs and Paulinus's persuasion alone that caused Edwin to convert. The Northumbrian nobles seem to have been willing and the king also received letters from Pope Boniface V urging his conversion. Eventually convinced, Edwin and many of his followers were baptised at York in 627. One story relates that during a stay with Edwin and Æthelburg at their palace in Yeavering, Paulinus spent 36 days baptising new converts. Paulinus also was an active missionary in Lindsey, and his missionary activities help show the limits of Edwin's royal authority.
Pope Gregory's plan had been that York would be England's second metropolitan see, so Paulinus established his church there. Although built of stone, no trace of it has been found. Paulinus also built a number of churches on royal estates. His church in Lincoln has been identified with the earliest building phase of the church of St Paul in the Bail.
Among those baptised by Paulinus were Hilda, later the founding abbess of Whitby Abbey, and Hilda's successor, Eanflæd, Edwin's daughter. As the only Roman bishop in England, Paulinus also consecrated another Gregorian missionary, Honorius, as Archbishop of Canterbury after Justus' death, some time between 628 and 631.
## Bishop of Rochester
Edwin was defeated by an alliance of Gwynedd Welsh and Mercian Angles, being killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, on a date traditionally given as 12 October 633. One problem with the dating of the battle is that Pope Honorius I wrote in June 634 to Paulinus and Archbishop Honorius saying that he was sending a pallium, the symbol of an archbishop's authority, to each of them. The pope's letter shows no hint that news of Edwin's death had reached Rome, almost nine months after the supposed date of the battle. The historian D. P. Kirby argues that this lack of awareness makes it more likely that the battle occurred in 634.
Edwin's defeat and death caused his kingdom to fragment into at least two parts. It also led to a sharp decline in Christianity in Northumbria when Edwin's immediate successors reverted to paganism. Widowed queen Æthelburg fled to her brother Eadbald's Kent kingdom. Paulinus went with her, along with Edwin and Æthelburg's son, daughter, and grandson. The two boys went to the continent for safety, to the court of King Dagobert I. Æthelburg, Eanflæd, and Paulinus remained in Kent, where Paulinus was offered the see, or bishopric, of Rochester, which he held until his death. Because the pallium did not reach Paulinus until after he had left York, it was of no use to him. Paulinus's deputy, James the Deacon, remained in the north and struggled to rebuild the Roman mission.
## Death and veneration
Paulinus died on 10 October 644 at Rochester, where he was buried in the sacristy of the church. His successor at Rochester was Ithamar, the first Englishman consecrated to a Gregorian missionary see. After Paulinus's death, Paulinus was revered as a saint, with a feast day on 10 October. When a new church was constructed at Rochester in the 1080s his relics, or remains, were translated (ritually moved) to a new shrine. There also were shrines to Paulinus at Canterbury, and at least five churches were dedicated to him. Although Rochester held some of Paulinus's relics, the promotion of his cult there appears to have occurred after the Norman Conquest. He is considered a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Paulinus's missionary efforts are difficult to evaluate. Bede implies that the mission in Northumbria was successful, but there is little supporting evidence, and it is more likely that Paulinus's missionary efforts there were relatively ineffectual. Although Osric, one of Edwin's successors, was converted to Christianity by Paulinus, he returned to paganism after Edwin's death. Hilda, however, remained a Christian, and eventually went on to become abbess of the influential Whitby Abbey. Northumbria's conversion to Christianity was mainly achieved by Irish missionaries brought into the region by Edwin's eventual successor, Oswald.
## See also
- List of members of the Gregorian mission
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40,225 |
George IV
| 1,173,664,811 |
King of the United Kingdom and Hanover from 1820 to 1830
|
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George IV (George Augustus Frederick; 12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until his death in 1830. At the time of his accession to the throne, he was acting as prince regent for his father, George III, having done so since 5 February 1811 during his father's final mental illness.
George IV was the eldest child of King George III and Queen Charlotte. He led an extravagant lifestyle that contributed to the fashions of the Regency era. He was a patron of new forms of leisure, style and taste. He commissioned John Nash to build the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and remodel Buckingham Palace, and commissioned Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild Windsor Castle. George's charm and culture earned him the title "the first gentleman of England", but his dissolute way of life and poor relationships with his parents and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, earned him the contempt of the people and dimmed the prestige of the monarchy. He excluded Caroline from his coronation and asked the government to introduce the unpopular Pains and Penalties Bill in an unsuccessful attempt to divorce her.
George's rule was tarnished by scandal and financial extravagance. His ministers found his behaviour selfish, unreliable and irresponsible and he was strongly influenced by favourites. During most of George's regency and reign, Lord Liverpool controlled the government as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Liverpool's government presided over Britain's ultimate victory over Napoleon and negotiated a peace settlement with the French. After Liverpool's retirement, George IV was forced to accept Catholic emancipation despite opposing it. His only legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, predeceased him in 1817, as did his childless younger brother Prince Frederick in 1827, so he was succeeded by another younger brother, William IV.
## Early life
George was born at St James's Palace, London, on 12 August 1762, the first child of King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. As the eldest son of a British sovereign, he automatically became Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay at birth; he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester a few days later. On 18 September of the same year, he was baptised by Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury. His godparents were his maternal uncle Adolphus Frederick IV, Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (for whom the Lord Chamberlain, William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, stood proxy); his paternal grand-uncle Prince William, Duke of Cumberland; and his grandmother Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. George was a talented student, and quickly learned to speak French, German and Italian, in addition to his native English.
At the age of 18, Prince George was given a separate establishment, and in dramatic contrast to his prosaic, scandal-free father, threw himself with zest into a life of dissipation and wild extravagance involving heavy drinking and numerous mistresses and escapades. He was a witty conversationalist, drunk or sober, and showed good, but grossly expensive, taste in decorating his palace. George turned 21 in 1783, and obtained a grant of £60,000 (equivalent to £ today) from Parliament and an annual income of £50,000 (equivalent to £ today) from his father. It was far too little for his wants – his stables alone cost £31,000 a year. He then established his residence in Carlton House, where he lived a profligate life. Animosity developed between the prince and his father, who desired more frugal behaviour on the part of the heir apparent. The King, a political conservative, was also alienated by the prince's adherence to Charles James Fox and other radically inclined politicians.
Soon after he reached the age of 21, the prince became infatuated with Maria Fitzherbert. She was a commoner (though granddaughter of a baronet), six years his elder, twice widowed, and a Roman Catholic. Nevertheless, the prince was determined to marry her. This was in spite of the Act of Settlement 1701, which barred the spouse of a Catholic from succeeding to the throne, and the Royal Marriages Act 1772, which prohibited his marriage without the King's consent.
Nevertheless, the couple went through a marriage ceremony on 15 December 1785 at her house in Park Street, Mayfair. Legally the union was void, as the King's consent was not granted (and never even requested). However, Fitzherbert believed that she was the prince's canonical and true wife, holding the law of the Church to be superior to the law of the State. For political reasons, the union remained secret and Fitzherbert promised not to reveal it.
Prince George was plunged into debt by his exorbitant lifestyle. His father refused to assist him, forcing him to quit Carlton House and live at Fitzherbert's residence. In 1787, the prince's political allies proposed to relieve his debts with a parliamentary grant. George's relationship with Fitzherbert was suspected, and revelation of the illegal marriage would have scandalised the nation and doomed any parliamentary proposal to aid him. Acting on Prince George's authority, the Whig leader Charles James Fox declared that the story was a calumny. Fitzherbert was not pleased with the public denial of the marriage in such vehement terms and contemplated severing her ties to George. He appeased her by asking another Whig, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to restate Fox's forceful declaration in more careful words. Parliament, meanwhile, granted the prince £161,000 (equivalent to £ today) to pay his debts and £60,000 (equivalent to £ today) for improvements to Carlton House.
## Regency crisis of 1788
In the summer of 1788, the King's mental health deteriorated, possibly as the result of the hereditary disease porphyria. He was nonetheless able to discharge some of his duties and to declare Parliament prorogued from 25 September to 20 November. During the prorogation he became deranged, posing a threat to his own life, and when Parliament reconvened in November, the King could not deliver the customary speech from the throne during the State Opening of Parliament. Parliament found itself in an untenable position: according to long-established law it could not proceed to any business until the delivery of the King's Speech at a State Opening.
Although arguably barred from doing so, Parliament began debating a regency. In the House of Commons, Charles James Fox declared his opinion that Prince George was automatically entitled to exercise sovereignty during the King's incapacity. A contrasting opinion was held by the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who argued that, in the absence of a statute to the contrary, the right to choose a regent belonged to Parliament alone. He even stated that, without parliamentary authority "the Prince of Wales had no more right ... to assume the government, than any other individual subject of the country." Though disagreeing on the principle underlying a regency, Pitt agreed with Fox that the Prince of Wales would be the most convenient choice for a regent.
The Prince of Wales—though offended by Pitt's boldness—did not lend his full support to Fox's approach. Prince George's brother Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, declared that George would not attempt to exercise any power without previously obtaining the consent of Parliament. Following the passage of preliminary resolutions Pitt outlined a formal plan for the regency, suggesting that Prince George's powers be greatly limited. Among other things, George would not be able either to sell the King's property or to grant a peerage to anyone other than a child of the King. Prince George denounced Pitt's scheme, declaring it a "project for producing weakness, disorder, and insecurity in every branch of the administration of affairs." In the interests of the nation, both factions agreed to compromise.
A significant technical impediment to any Regency Bill involved the lack of a speech from the throne, which was necessary before Parliament could proceed to any debates or votes. The speech was normally delivered by the King, but could also be delivered by royal representatives known as Lords Commissioners. However, no document could empower the Lords Commissioners to act unless the Great Seal of the Realm was affixed to it. The seal could not be legally affixed without the prior authorisation of the sovereign. Pitt and his fellow ministers ignored the last requirement and instructed the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal without the King's consent, as the act of affixing the Great Seal in itself gave legal force to the bill. This legal fiction was denounced by Edmund Burke as "forgery, fraud", a "glaring falsehood", and as a "palpable absurdity". Prince Frederick described the plan as "unconstitutional and illegal." Nevertheless, others in Parliament felt that such a scheme was necessary to preserve an effective government. Consequently, on 3 February 1789, more than two months after it had convened, Parliament was formally opened by an "illegal" group of Lords Commissioners. The Regency Bill was introduced, but before it could be passed the King recovered. The King declared retroactively that the instrument authorising the Lords Commissioners to act was valid.
## Marriage and mistresses
Prince George's debts continued to climb, and his father refused to aid him unless he married his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick. In 1795, the prince acquiesced, and they were married on 8 April 1795 at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. The marriage, however, was disastrous; each party was unsuited to the other. The two were formally separated after the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte, in 1796, and remained separated thereafter. George remained attached to Maria Fitzherbert for the rest of his life, despite several periods of estrangement.
George's mistresses included Mary Robinson, an actress whom he paid to leave the stage; Grace Elliott, the divorced wife of a physician; and Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey, who dominated his life for some years. In later life, his mistresses were the Marchioness of Hertford and the Marchioness Conyngham.
George was rumoured to have fathered several illegitimate children. James Ord (born 1786)—who moved to the United States and became a Jesuit priest—was reportedly his son by Fitzherbert. Late in life, George told a friend that he had a son who was a naval officer in the West Indies, whose identity has been tentatively established as Captain Henry A. F. Hervey (1786–1824), reportedly George's child by the songwriter Lady Anne Lindsay (later Barnard), a daughter of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres. Other reported children include Major George Seymour Crole, the son of theatre manager's daughter Eliza Crole; William Hampshire, the son of publican's daughter Sarah Brown; and Charles "Beau" Candy, the son of a Frenchwoman with that surname. Anthony Camp, Director of Research at the Society of Genealogists, has dismissed the claims that George IV was the father of Ord, Hervey, Hampshire and Candy as fictitious.
The problem of George's debts, which amounted to the extraordinary sum of £630,000 in 1795 (equivalent to £ today), was solved (at least temporarily) by Parliament. Being unwilling to make an outright grant to relieve these debts, it provided him an additional sum of £65,000 (equivalent to £ today) per annum. In 1803, a further £60,000 (equivalent to £ today) was added, and George's debts as at 1795 were finally cleared in 1806, although the debts he had incurred since 1795 remained.
In 1804, a dispute arose over the custody of Princess Charlotte, which led to her being placed in the care of the King. It also led to a Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into Princess Caroline's conduct after her husband accused her of having an illegitimate son. The investigation cleared Caroline of the charge but still revealed her behaviour to have been extraordinarily indiscreet.
## Regency
In late 1810, the King's mental health once again broke down, following the death of his youngest daughter, Princess Amelia. Parliament agreed to follow the precedent of 1788; without the King's consent, the Lord Chancellor affixed the Great Seal of the Realm to letters patent naming Lords Commissioners. The letters patent lacked the Royal Sign Manual, but were sealed by request of resolutions passed by both Houses of Parliament. The Lords Commissioners appointed by the letters patent, in the name of the King, then signified the granting of Royal Assent to a bill that became the Regency Act 1811. Parliament restricted some of the powers of the Prince Regent (as the Prince of Wales became known). The constraints expired one year after the passage of the Act. The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on 5 February 1811.
The Regent let his ministers take full charge of government affairs, playing a far smaller role than his father. The principle that the prime minister was the person supported by a majority in the House of Commons, whether the King personally favoured him or not, became established. His governments, with little help from the Regent, presided over British policy. One of the most important political conflicts facing the country concerned Catholic emancipation, the movement to relieve Roman Catholics of various political disabilities. The Tories, led by Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, were opposed to Catholic emancipation, while the Whigs supported it. At the beginning of the Regency, Prince George was expected to support the Whig leader, Lord Grenville. He did not, however, immediately put Grenville and the Whigs into office. Influenced by his mother, he claimed that a sudden dismissal of the Tory government would exact too great a toll on the health of the King (a steadfast supporter of the Tories), thereby eliminating any chance of a recovery.
In 1812, when it appeared highly unlikely that the King would recover, the Prince of Wales again failed to appoint a new Whig administration. Instead, he asked the Whigs to join the existing ministry under Perceval. The Whigs, however, refused to co-operate because of disagreements over Catholic emancipation. Grudgingly, Prince George allowed Perceval to continue as Prime Minister.
On 11 May 1812, Perceval was assassinated by John Bellingham. The Prince Regent was prepared to reappoint all the members of the Perceval ministry under a new leader. The House of Commons formally declared its desire for a "strong and efficient administration", so George then offered leadership of the government to Lord Wellesley and afterwards to Lord Moira. He doomed the attempts of both to failure, however, by forcing each to construct an all-party ministry at a time when neither party wished to share power with the other. Possibly using the failure of the two peers as a pretext, George immediately reappointed the Perceval administration, with Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister.
The Tories, unlike Whigs such as Lord Grey, sought to continue the vigorous prosecution of the war in Continental Europe against the powerful and aggressive emperor of the French, Napoleon I. An anti-French alliance, which included Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain and several smaller countries, defeated Napoleon in 1814. In the subsequent Congress of Vienna, it was decided that the Electorate of Hanover, a state that had shared a monarch with Britain since 1714, would be raised to the Kingdom of Hanover. Napoleon returned from exile in 1815, but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, brother of Lord Wellesley.
During this period George took an active interest in matters of style and taste, and his associates such as the dandy Beau Brummell and the architect John Nash created the Regency style. In London Nash designed the Regency terraces of Regent's Park and Regent Street. George took up the new idea of the seaside spa and had the Brighton Pavilion developed as a fantastical seaside palace, adapted by Nash in the "Indian Gothic" style inspired loosely by the Taj Mahal, with extravagant "Indian" and "Chinese" interiors.
## Reign
When George III died in 1820, the Prince Regent, then aged 57, ascended the throne as George IV, with no real change in his powers. By the time of his accession, he was obese and possibly addicted to laudanum.
George IV's relationship with his wife Caroline had deteriorated by the time of his accession. They had lived separately since 1796, and both were having affairs. In 1814, Caroline left the United Kingdom for continental Europe, but she chose to return for her husband's coronation and to publicly assert her rights as queen consort. However, he refused to recognise Caroline as queen, and commanded British ambassadors to ensure that monarchs in foreign courts did the same. By royal command, Caroline's name was omitted from the Book of Common Prayer, the liturgy of the Church of England.
The King sought a divorce, but his advisors suggested that any divorce proceedings might involve the publication of details relating to George's own adulterous relationships. Therefore, he requested and ensured the introduction of the Pains and Penalties Bill, under which Parliament could have imposed legal penalties without a trial in a court of law. The bill would have annulled the marriage and stripped Caroline of the title of Queen. The bill proved extremely unpopular with the public, and was withdrawn from Parliament. George decided, nonetheless, to exclude his wife from his coronation at Westminster Abbey, on 19 July 1821. Caroline fell ill that day and died on 7 August; during her final illness she often stated that she thought she had been poisoned.
George's coronation was a magnificent and expensive affair, costing about £243,000 (approximately £ in 2023; for comparison, his father's coronation had only cost about £10,000). Despite the enormous cost, it was a popular event. In 1821, George became the first monarch to pay a state visit to Ireland since Richard II of England. The following year he visited Edinburgh for "one and twenty daft days". His visit to Scotland, organised by Sir Walter Scott, was the first by a reigning monarch since the mid-17th century.
George spent most of his later reign in seclusion at Windsor Castle, but he continued to intervene in politics. At first it was believed that he would support Catholic emancipation, as he had proposed a Catholic Emancipation Bill for Ireland in 1797, but his anti-Catholic views became clear in 1813 when he privately canvassed against the ultimately defeated Catholic Relief Bill of 1813. By 1824 he was denouncing Catholic emancipation in public. Having taken the coronation oath on his accession, George now argued that he had sworn to uphold the Protestant faith, and could not support any pro-Catholic measures. The influence of the Crown was so great, and the will of the Tories under Prime Minister Liverpool so strong, that Catholic emancipation seemed hopeless. In 1827, however, Liverpool retired, to be replaced by the pro-emancipation Tory George Canning. When Canning entered office, the King, hitherto content with privately instructing his ministers on the Catholic Question, thought it fit to make a public declaration to the effect that his sentiments on the question were those of his revered father, George III.
Canning's views on the Catholic Question were not well received by the most conservative Tories, including the Duke of Wellington. As a result, the ministry was forced to include Whigs. Canning died later in that year, leaving Lord Goderich to lead the tenuous Tory–Whig coalition. Goderich left office in 1828, to be succeeded by Wellington, who had by that time accepted that the denial of some measure of relief to Roman Catholics was politically untenable. George was never as friendly with Wellington as he had been with Canning and chose to annoy the Duke by pretending to have fought at Waterloo disguised as a German general. With great difficulty Wellington obtained the King's consent to the introduction of a Catholic Relief Bill on 29 January 1829. Under pressure from his fanatically anti-Catholic brother Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the King withdrew his approval and in protest the Cabinet resigned en masse on 4 March. The next day the King, now under intense political pressure, reluctantly agreed to the Bill and the ministry remained in power. Royal Assent was finally granted to the Catholic Relief Act on 13 April.
## Declining health and death
George's heavy drinking and indulgent lifestyle had taken their toll on his health by the late 1820s. While still Prince of Wales, he had become obese through his huge banquets and copious consumption of alcohol, making him the target of ridicule on the rare occasions that he appeared in public; by 1797, his weight had reached 17 stone 7 pounds (111 kg; 245 lb). By 1824, his corset was made for a waist of 50 inches (130 cm). He had gout, arteriosclerosis, peripheral edema ("dropsy"), and possibly porphyria. In his last years, he spent whole days in bed and had acute and serious spasms of breathlessness.
George's last years were marked by increasing physical and mental decay and withdrawal from public affairs. Privately, a senior aide to the King confided to his diary: "A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist ... There have been good and wise kings but not many of them ... and this I believe to be one of the worst." By December 1828, like his father, George was almost completely blind from cataracts, and had such severe gout in his right hand and arm that he could no longer sign documents. In mid-1829, David Wilkie reported the King "was wasting away frightfully day after day", and had become so obese that he looked "like a great sausage stuffed into the covering". George took laudanum to counteract severe bladder pains, which left him in a drugged and mentally impaired state for days on end. He underwent surgery to remove a cataract in September 1829, by which time he was regularly taking over 100 drops of laudanum before state occasions.
By the spring of 1830, George's imminent end was apparent. Now largely confined to his bedchambers, having completely lost sight in one eye and describing himself "as blind as a beetle", he was forced to approve legislation with a stamp of his signature in the presence of witnesses. His weight was recorded to be 20 stone (130 kg; 280 lb). Attacks of breathlessness due to dropsy forced him to sleep upright in a chair, and doctors frequently tapped his abdomen in order to drain excess fluid. Despite his obvious decline, George was admired for clinging doggedly to life. His will to live and still-prodigious appetite astonished observers; in April 1830, the Duke of Wellington wrote that the King had consumed for breakfast "a Pidgeon and Beef Steak Pye ... Three parts of a bottle of Mozelle, a Glass of Dry Champagne, two Glasses of Port [and] a Glass of Brandy", followed by a large dose of laudanum. Writing to Maria Fitzherbert in June, the King's doctor, Sir Henry Halford, noted "His Majesty's constitution is a gigantic one, and his elasticity under the most severe pressure exceeds what I have ever witnessed in thirty-eight years' experience." Though George had been under Halford's care since the time of the Regency, the doctor's social ambitions and perceived lack of competence were strongly criticised, with The Lancet labelling Halford's bulletins on the King's health as "utterly and entirely destitute of information", subsequently characterising Halford's treatment of George, which involved administering both opium and laudanum as sedatives, as appearing to lack sense or direction.
George dictated his will in May and became very devout in his final months, confessing to an archdeacon that he repented of his dissolute life, but hoped mercy would be shown to him as he had always tried to do the best for his subjects. By June, he was unable to lie down, and received the Sacrament on 14 June in the presence of Lady Conyngham, Halford, and a clergyman. While Halford only informed the Cabinet on 24 June that "the King's cough continues with considerable expectoration", he privately told his wife that "things are coming to a conclusion ... I shall be released about Monday."
At about three in the morning of 26 June 1830 at Windsor Castle, George awoke and passed a bowel movement – "a large evacuation mix'd with blood". He then sent for Halford, allegedly calling to his servants "Sir Henry! Sir Henry! Fetch him; this is death!" Accounts of George's final moments and last words vary. According to Halford, following his arrival and that of Sir William Knighton, the King's "lips grew livid, and he dropped his head on the page's shoulder ... I was up the stairs in five minutes, and he died but eight minutes afterwards." Other accounts state the King placed his hands on his stomach and said "Surely, this must be death", or that he called out "Good God, what is this?", clasped his page's hand, and said "my boy, this is death". George died at 3:15 a.m. An autopsy conducted by his physicians revealed George had died from upper gastrointestinal bleeding resulting from the rupture of a blood vessel in his stomach. A large tumour "the size of an orange" was found attached to his bladder; his heart was enlarged, had heavily calcified valves and was surrounded by a large fat deposit. The King was buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 15 July.
## Legacy
George's only legitimate child, Charlotte, had died from post-partum complications in 1817, after delivering a stillborn son. George III's second son, Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, had died childless in 1827, so the throne passed to the third son of George III, William, Duke of Clarence, who reigned as William IV.
George was described as the "First Gentleman of England" on account of his style and manners. He was bright, clever, and knowledgeable, but his laziness and gluttony led him to squander much of his talent. The Times wrote that he would always prefer "a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon".
The Regency period saw a shift in fashion that was largely determined by George. After political opponents put a tax on wig powder, he abandoned wearing a powdered wig in favour of natural hair. He wore darker colours than had been previously fashionable as they helped to disguise his size, favoured pantaloons and trousers over knee breeches because they were looser, and popularised a high collar with neck cloth because it hid his double chin. His visit to Scotland in 1822 led to the revival, if not the creation, of Scottish tartan dress as it is known today.
During the political crisis caused by Catholic emancipation, the Duke of Wellington said that George was "the worst man he ever fell in with his whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality". However, his eulogy delivered in the House of Lords called George "the most accomplished man of his age" and praised his knowledge and talent. Wellington's true feelings were probably somewhere between these two extremes; as he said later, George was "a magnificent patron of the arts ... the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy, and good feeling—in short a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good—that I ever saw in any character in my life."
Upon George's death, The Times captured elite opinion succinctly: "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? ... If he ever had a friend – a devoted friend in any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her never reached us".
There are many statues of George IV, a large number of which were erected during his reign. In the United Kingdom, they include a bronze statue of him on horseback by Sir Francis Chantrey in Trafalgar Square.
In Edinburgh, "George IV Bridge" is a main street linking the Old Town High Street to the north over the ravine of the Cowgate, designed by the architect Thomas Hamilton in 1829 and completed in 1835. King's Cross, now a major transport hub sitting on the border of Camden and Islington in north London, takes its name from a short-lived monument erected to George IV in the early 1830s. A square and a neighbouring park in St Luke's, Islington, are also named after George IV.
## Titles, styles, honours, and arms
### Titles and styles
At birth, George was entitled to the dignities Prince of Great Britain and Ireland, Electoral Prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg and Duke of Rothesay. Under the Act of Parliament that instituted the regency, the prince's formal title as regent was "Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
### Honours
#### National honours
- 26 December 1765: Royal Knight of the Garter
- 21 November 1783: Privy Counsellor
- 26 January 1789: Fellow of the Royal Society
- 2 May 1810: Doctor of Civil Law, University of Oxford
- 28 April 1818: Founder of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George
- Kingdom of Hanover: 28 April 1815: Founder of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order
#### Foreign honours
- Russian Empire:
- 25 November 1813: Knight of St. Andrew
- 20 April 1814: Knight of St. Alexander Nevsky
- Kingdom of Prussia: 11 April 1814: Knight of the Black Eagle
- Kingdom of France: 20 April 1814: Knight of the Holy Spirit
- Spain: 5 July 1814: Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III
- Kingdom of Portugal: 7 April 1815: Grand Cross of the Sash of the Three Orders
- Austrian Empire:
- 8 June 1815: Knight of the Golden Fleece
- 1819: Grand Cross of St. Stephen
- Denmark: 4 July 1815: Knight of the Elephant
- Two Sicilies:
- 1816: Knight of St. Januarius
- 1816: Grand Cross of St. Ferdinand and Merit
- Netherlands: 27 November 1818: Grand Cross of the Military William Order
- Kingdom of Bavaria: 1826: Knight of St. Hubert
#### Military appointments
- 1782: Colonel, British Army
- 1796–1820: Colonel of the 10th Light Dragoons
### Arms
George's coat of arms as the Prince of Wales was the royal arms (with an inescutcheon of Gules plain in the Hanoverian quarter), differenced by a label of three points Argent. The arms included the royal crest and supporters but with the single arched coronet of his rank, all charged on the shoulder with a similar label. His arms followed the change in the royal arms in 1801, when the Hanoverian quarter became an inescutcheon and the French quarter was dropped altogether. The 1816 alteration did not affect him as it only applied to the arms of the King.
As king, George's arms were those of his two kingdoms, the United Kingdom and Hanover, superimposed: Quarterly, I and IV Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England); II Or a lion rampant within a double tressure flory-counter-flory Gules (for Scotland); III Azure a harp Or stringed Argent (for Ireland); overall an escutcheon tierced in pall reversed (for Hanover), I Gules two lions passant guardant Or (for Brunswick), II Or a semy of hearts Gules a lion rampant Azure (for Lüneburg), III Gules a horse courant Argent (for Westphalia), overall an inescutcheon Gules charged with the crown of Charlemagne Or, the whole escutcheon surmounted by a crown.
## Ancestry
|
7,712,905 |
Pilot (House)
| 1,168,069,593 | null |
[
"2004 American television episodes",
"American television series premieres",
"House (season 1) episodes"
] |
"Pilot", also known as "Everybody Lies," is the first episode of the medical drama House. The episode premiered on the Fox network on November 16, 2004. It introduces the character of Dr. Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie)—a maverick antisocial doctor—and his team of diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. The episode features House's attempts to diagnose a kindergarten teacher after she collapses in class.
House was created by David Shore, who got the idea for the misanthropic title character from a doctor's visit. Initially, producer Bryan Singer wanted an American to play House, but British actor Hugh Laurie's audition convinced him that a foreign actor could play the role. Shore wrote House as a character with parallels to Sherlock Holmes—both are drug users, blunt, and close to being friendless. The show's producers wanted House handicapped in some way and gave the character a damaged leg arising from an improper diagnosis.
The episode received generally positive reviews; the character of House was widely noted as a unique aspect of the episode and series, though some reviewers believed that such a cruel character would not be tolerated in real life. Other complaints with the episode included stereotyped supporting characters and an implausible premise. The initial broadcast of "Pilot" was watched by approximately seven million viewers, making it the 62nd-most-watched show of the week.
## Plot
Shortly after the start of class, kindergarten teacher Rebecca Adler becomes dysphasic and experiences seizures. Dr. James Wilson attempts to convince Gregory House to treat Adler, but House initially dismisses him, believing that the case would be boring. Hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy approaches House in the elevator and attempts to persuade him to fulfill his duties at the hospital's walk-in clinic. House refuses, claiming that Cuddy cannot fire him due to tenure, and hurriedly leaves. When House's team attempts to perform an MRI on Adler, they discover that House's authorization for diagnostics has been revoked; Cuddy restores his authorization in exchange for his working at the clinic.
Adler's throat closes up during the MRI due to an allergic reaction to gadolinium, prompting two members of House's team, Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), to perform a tracheotomy. In the hospital's clinic, House's first patient is a man who is orange because of an over-consumption of carrots and vitamins (niacin). House also treats a ten-year-old boy whose mother allows him to use his asthmatic inhaler only intermittently instead of daily as prescribed. House criticizes the mother for making such a drastic medical decision without first learning more about asthma. During his monologue, House stumbles on an idea and leaves quickly to treat Adler; he diagnoses her with cerebral vasculitis, despite having no proof. House treats Adler with steroids, which improves her condition greatly for a time, until she starts seizing and has heart failure.
On House's insistence, neurologist Dr. Eric Foreman and Cameron break into Adler's house to find anything that might account for Adler's symptoms. They find an opened package of ham in Adler's kitchen and House concludes that she is suffering from neurocysticercosis from eating undercooked pork at some point in her past. Adler refuses to accept more random treatments unless there is conclusive evidence that the diagnosis is correct. House is ready to dismiss the case when Chase provides an idea for noninvasive evidence of Adler's tapeworm infection; by taking an X-ray of her thigh, House proves that Adler is infested with other tapeworms and her condition is treatable. After seeing the evidence, Adler agrees to take medication to kill the tapeworms.
## Production
In 2003, executive producers Katie Jacobs and Paul Attanasio approached David Shore about developing a series with them. Attanasio, inspired by the "Diagnosis" column in The New York Times Magazine, suggested a medical-themed procedural. Shore was initially not eager about the medical focus, but found the networks they pitched to were interested in the concept. The trio pitched House to the Fox Broadcasting Company as a medical detective show—a hospital whodunit where the doctors would be the sleuths looking for the source of symptoms. The ideas behind House's character were added after Fox bought the show. Shore was inspired by a vivid memory of a doctor's visit: he once had to wait two weeks to get a doctor's appointment for a sore hip, by which point his pain had disappeared. Nevertheless, he went to the appointment, and Shore recalled thinking they were "incredibly polite" even as he wasted their time; he liked the idea of a doctor who would have been blunt with their patient. Shore said that the writings of Berton Roueché, a The New Yorker staff writer who chronicled intriguing medical cases, inspired the plots for "Pilot" and other early episodes.
As Shore developed an outline for the show, he was afraid it was developing into a more character-focused series, rather than a procedural. Attanasio suggested not showing the network an outline, and instead giving them a full pilot script. The pilot took Shore five months to write, and the completed script was delivered in early 2004. Shore recalled there were relatively few changes to what he wrote; one significant change was moving the setting from Boston to Princeton. Director Bryan Singer suggested the change because he had grown up in Princeton and liked the smaller, more academic-focused setting that was more unique on television.
A key element of the show's premise was the handicapped main character. The initial idea was for House to use a wheelchair, but Fox turned down this interpretation (for which the crew was later grateful). The wheelchair idea turned into a scar on House's face, which later turned into a bad leg necessitating use of a cane. Shore drew on the character of the detective Sherlock Holmes for House, as he was always a fan of the character and found the character's traits of indifference to his clients unique. The parallels to Holmes informed the House-Wilson dynamic.
After Fox green-lit the pilot, the production began casting. House's casting directors had previously worked on Jacobs and Attanasio's series Century City. While ideally the production would have cast their lead and then built the cast around them, the competitive rush of pilot season meant that roles were filled whenever they could. Wilson was the first role cast, followed by Cuddy and Cameron. Laurie was not cast as House until two weeks before photography for the pilot commenced. Laurie had put together an audition tape in a dingy hotel bathroom in Namibia while shooting Flight of the Phoenix, using an umbrella for a cane. The roles of Chase and Foreman were cast soon after.
The episode was shot in Vancouver, Canada; later episodes would be shot on soundstages in California. The show was not called House until days into filming. The music was composed by Christopher Hoag in his only work for the series; subsequent episodes would be scored by Jon Ehrlich and Jason Derlatka.
## Analysis
"Pilot" establishes much of the formula the series would heavily rely on for the structure of most of its episodes; this predictable structure would be considered part of the show's appeal. The episode opens with a "teaser" that shows the individual's medical mystery that House and his team will diagnose; the middle showcases House's unorthodox methods, including breaking into a patient's home to identify a possible cause for the illness; possible diagnoses are discussed using metaphors for the benefit of the viewer; and the "eureka" moments where a sudden insight reveals the true diagnosis. The recurring theme that "everyone lies" is repeatedly underlined throughout the episode, beginning with the patient's lies to their coworker in the teaser. In "Pilot", the notoriously patient-averse House pays Adler a bedside visit, revealing personal history to convince her to fight for her life; House occasionally makes similar patient visits in later episodes. It also sketches out the main aspects of the cast and their relationships, particularly House's focus on unique or uncommon medical diagnoses, his dry personality, and his relationships with Wilson, Cuddy, and the team. In comparison with later episodes, "Pilot" has a greater focus on the patient, and some character elements are adjusted as the series continues; House is much more casually-dressed, and the diagnostic team are less at a remove from their boss. Another staple of the earlier episodes is the clinic visits House reluctantly takes in "Pilot", which break up the tension of the main case and intersperse comedic beats.
## Reception
House's premiere episode was generally well received, with the show being considered a bright spot in Fox's otherwise reality television-heavy broadcast schedule. New York called the series "medical TV at its most satisfying and basic," and stated that the cast consisted of "[professional] actors playing doctors who come to care about their patients," while other reviews appreciated that the episode did not sugarcoat the flaws of the characters or the medical industry. TV Guide's Matt Roush stated House was a better alternative to common television medical dramas. Critics at The A.V. Club were concerned the formula established in the pilot might turn repetitive, but felt the dialogue and irreverence prevented boredom.
Critics generally reacted positively to the character of House; Tom Shales of The Washington Post called him "the most electrifying character to hit television in years." The Seattle Times's Kay McFadden and USA Today's Robert Bianco wrote that Laurie's portrayal turned an otherwise unlikeable character into a compelling one to watch, and The Los Angeles Times's Paul Brownfield felt the character alone elevated the show from formulaic procedural. In comparison, Sherwin Nuland of Slate felt that the meanness of House would be unrealistic in a real hospital setting, and Halo Boedeker felt that the role "smothered" Laurie's charm.
Reviews often highlighted the show's heavy use of medical imagery as too gory or a turnoff for some viewers. In contrast, Shales wrote that the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation-influenced effects were well done and reminded viewers of the complexity of the human body. Other reviews highlighted the perceived stereotypes of young, attractive doctors, and a lack of characterization for the supporting characters in the early episodes.
The episode's format was compared to NBC's Medical Investigation, which premiered the same season and featured a gruff diagnostician and harmful tapeworms. USA Today favorably considered House more character-driven than Investigation's plot-heavy procedural format, and the San Francisco Chronicle felt that House was the better show due to the title character. Variety's Brian Lowry, meanwhile, stated that the two shows were too similar and House was mismatched among Fox's other programs.
The premiere attracted approximately seven million viewers in the United States, making it the 62nd-most-watched show for the week of November 15–21, 2004. The United Kingdom terrestrial premiere was broadcast on June 9, 2005, by Five and garnered a ten percent share (1.8 million viewers). Christopher Hoag, who composed the music for "Pilot" and the first season of House, was nominated in the 2005 Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Music Composition for the episode. Shore received a Humanitas Prize nomination for writing the episode, but lost out to John Wells, who wrote the episode of The West Wing entitled "NSF Thurmont". Fox marketing Vice President Chris Carlisle promoted the show by distributing nearly two million free DVDs of the program through Entertainment Weekly and People.
|
13,255 |
Hydrogen
| 1,170,606,249 | null |
[
"Airship technology",
"Chemical elements",
"Diatomic nonmetals",
"E-number additives",
"Gaseous signaling molecules",
"Hydrogen",
"Nuclear fusion fuels",
"Reactive nonmetals",
"Reducing agents",
"Refrigerants"
] |
Hydrogen is the chemical element with the symbol H and atomic number 1. Hydrogen is the lightest element. At standard conditions hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules having the formula H<sub>2</sub>. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and highly combustible. Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, constituting roughly 75% of all normal matter. Stars such as the Sun are mainly composed of hydrogen in the plasma state. Most of the hydrogen on Earth exists in molecular forms such as water and organic compounds. For the most common isotope of hydrogen (symbol <sup>1</sup>H) each atom has one proton, one electron, and no neutrons.
In the early universe, the formation of protons, the nuclei of hydrogen, occurred during the first second after the Big Bang. The emergence of neutral hydrogen atoms throughout the universe occurred about 370,000 years later during the recombination epoch, when the plasma had cooled enough for electrons to remain bound to protons.
Hydrogen is nonmetallic (except when it becomes metallic at extremely high pressures) and readily forms a single covalent bond with most nonmetallic elements, forming compounds such as water and nearly all organic compounds. Hydrogen plays a particularly important role in acid–base reactions because these reactions usually involve the exchange of protons between soluble molecules. In ionic compounds, hydrogen can take the form of a negative charge (i.e., anion) where it is known as a hydride, or as a positively charged (i.e., cation) species denoted by the symbol H<sup>+</sup>. The H<sup>+</sup> cation is simply a proton (symbol p) but its behavior in aqueous solutions and in ionic compounds involves screening of its electric charge by nearby polar molecules or anions. Because hydrogen is the only neutral atom for which the Schrödinger equation can be solved analytically, the study of its energetics and chemical bonding has played a key role in the development of quantum mechanics.
Hydrogen gas was first artificially produced in the early 16th century by the reaction of acids on metals. In 1766–1781, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize that hydrogen gas was a discrete substance and that it produces water when burned, the property for which it was later named: in Greek, hydrogen means "water-former".
Industrial production is mainly from steam reforming of natural gas, oil reforming, or coal gasification. A small percentage is also produced using more energy-intensive methods such as the electrolysis of water. Most hydrogen is used near the site of its production, the two largest uses being fossil fuel processing (e.g., hydrocracking) and ammonia production. It can be burned to produce heat or combined with oxygen in fuel cells to generate electricity directly, with water being the only emissions at the point of usage. Hydrogen atoms may embrittle metals.
## Properties
### Combustion
Hydrogen gas (dihydrogen or molecular hydrogen) is highly flammable:
2 H<sub>2</sub>(g) + O<sub>2</sub>(g) → 2 H<sub>2</sub>O(l) (572 kJ/2 mol = 286 kJ/mol = 141.865 MJ/kg)
The enthalpy of combustion is −286 kJ/mol.
Hydrogen gas forms explosive mixtures with air in concentrations from 4–74% and with chlorine at 5–95%. The explosive reactions may be triggered by spark, heat, or sunlight. The hydrogen autoignition temperature, the temperature of spontaneous ignition in air, is 500 °C (932 °F).
#### Flame
Pure hydrogen-oxygen flames emit ultraviolet light and with high oxygen mix are nearly invisible to the naked eye, as illustrated by the faint plume of the Space Shuttle Main Engine, compared to the highly visible plume of a Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster, which uses an ammonium perchlorate composite. The detection of a burning hydrogen leak may require a flame detector; such leaks can be very dangerous. Hydrogen flames in other conditions are blue, resembling blue natural gas flames. The destruction of the Hindenburg airship was a notorious example of hydrogen combustion and the cause is still debated. The visible flames in the photographs were the result of carbon compounds in the airship skin burning.
#### Reactants
H<sub>2</sub> is unreactive compared to diatomic elements such as halogens or oxygen. The thermodynamic basis of this low reactivity is the very strong H–H bond, with a bond dissociation energy of 435.7 kJ/mol. The kinetic basis of the low reactivity is the nonpolar nature of H<sub>2</sub> and its weak polarizability. It spontaneously reacts with chlorine and fluorine to form hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, respectively. The reactivity of H<sub>2</sub> is strongly affected by the presence of metal catalysts. Thus, while mixtures of H<sub>2</sub> with O<sub>2</sub> or air combust readily when heated to at least 500 °C by a spark or flame, they do not react at room temperature in the absence of a catalyst.
### Electron energy levels
The ground state energy level of the electron in a hydrogen atom is −13.6 eV, which is equivalent to an ultraviolet photon of roughly 91 nm wavelength.
The energy levels of hydrogen can be calculated fairly accurately using the Bohr model of the atom, which conceptualizes the electron as "orbiting" the proton in analogy to the Earth's orbit of the Sun. However, the atomic electron and proton are held together by electromagnetic force, while planets and celestial objects are held by gravity. Because of the discretization of angular momentum postulated in early quantum mechanics by Bohr, the electron in the Bohr model can only occupy certain allowed distances from the proton, and therefore only certain allowed energies.
A more accurate description of the hydrogen atom comes from a purely quantum mechanical treatment that uses the Schrödinger equation, Dirac equation or Feynman path integral formulation to calculate the probability density of the electron around the proton. The most complicated treatments allow for the small effects of special relativity and vacuum polarization. In the quantum mechanical treatment, the electron in a ground state hydrogen atom has no angular momentum at all—illustrating how the "planetary orbit" differs from electron motion.
### Spin isomers
Molecular H<sub>2</sub> exists as two spin isomers, i.e. compounds that differ only in the spin states of their nuclei. In the orthohydrogen form, the spins of the two nuclei are parallel, forming a spin triplet state having a total molecular spin $S = 1$; in the parahydrogen form the spins are antiparallel and form a spin singlet state having spin $S = 0$. The equilibrium ratio of ortho- to para-hydrogen depends on temperature. At room temperature or warmer, equilibrium hydrogen gas contains about 25% of the para form and 75% of the ortho form. The ortho form is an excited state, having higher energy than the para form by 1.455 kJ/mol, and it converts to the para form over the course of several minutes when cooled to low temperature. The thermal properties of the forms differ because they differ in their allowed rotational quantum states, resulting in different thermal properties such as the heat capacity.
The ortho-to-para ratio in H<sub>2</sub> is an important consideration in the liquefaction and storage of liquid hydrogen: the conversion from ortho to para is exothermic and produces enough heat to evaporate most of the liquid if not converted first to parahydrogen during the cooling process. Catalysts for the ortho-para interconversion, such as ferric oxide and activated carbon compounds, are used during hydrogen cooling to avoid this loss of liquid.
### Phases
- Gaseous hydrogen
- Liquid hydrogen
- Slush hydrogen
- Solid hydrogen
- Metallic hydrogen
- Plasma hydrogen
### Compounds
#### Covalent and organic compounds
While H<sub>2</sub> is not very reactive under standard conditions, it does form compounds with most elements. Hydrogen can form compounds with elements that are more electronegative, such as halogens (F, Cl, Br, I), or oxygen; in these compounds hydrogen takes on a partial positive charge. When bonded to a more electronegative element, particularly fluorine, oxygen, or nitrogen, hydrogen can participate in a form of medium-strength noncovalent bonding with another electronegative element with a lone pair, a phenomenon called hydrogen bonding that is critical to the stability of many biological molecules. Hydrogen also forms compounds with less electronegative elements, such as metals and metalloids, where it takes on a partial negative charge. These compounds are often known as hydrides.
Hydrogen forms a vast array of compounds with carbon called the hydrocarbons, and an even vaster array with heteroatoms that, because of their general association with living things, are called organic compounds. The study of their properties is known as organic chemistry and their study in the context of living organisms is known as biochemistry. By some definitions, "organic" compounds are only required to contain carbon. However, most of them also contain hydrogen, and because it is the carbon-hydrogen bond that gives this class of compounds most of its particular chemical characteristics, carbon-hydrogen bonds are required in some definitions of the word "organic" in chemistry. Millions of hydrocarbons are known, and they are usually formed by complicated pathways that seldom involve elemental hydrogen.
Hydrogen is highly soluble in many rare earth and transition metals and is soluble in both nanocrystalline and amorphous metals. Hydrogen solubility in metals is influenced by local distortions or impurities in the crystal lattice. These properties may be useful when hydrogen is purified by passage through hot palladium disks, but the gas's high solubility is a metallurgical problem, contributing to the embrittlement of many metals, complicating the design of pipelines and storage tanks.
#### Hydrides
Compounds of hydrogen are often called hydrides, a term that is used fairly loosely. The term "hydride" suggests that the H atom has acquired a negative or anionic character, denoted H<sup>−</sup>, and is used when hydrogen forms a compound with a more electropositive element. The existence of the hydride anion, suggested by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1916 for group 1 and 2 salt-like hydrides, was demonstrated by Moers in 1920 by the electrolysis of molten lithium hydride (LiH), producing a stoichiometric quantity of hydrogen at the anode. For hydrides other than group 1 and 2 metals, the term is quite misleading, considering the low electronegativity of hydrogen. An exception in group 2 hydrides is BeH<sub>2</sub>, which is polymeric. In lithium aluminium hydride, the [AlH<sub>4</sub>]<sup>−</sup> anion carries hydridic centers firmly attached to the Al(III).
Although hydrides can be formed with almost all main-group elements, the number and combination of possible compounds varies widely; for example, more than 100 binary borane hydrides are known, but only one binary aluminium hydride. Binary indium hydride has not yet been identified, although larger complexes exist.
In inorganic chemistry, hydrides can also serve as bridging ligands that link two metal centers in a coordination complex. This function is particularly common in group 13 elements, especially in boranes (boron hydrides) and aluminium complexes, as well as in clustered carboranes.
#### Protons and acids
Oxidation of hydrogen removes its electron and gives H<sup>+</sup>, which contains no electrons and a nucleus which is usually composed of one proton. That is why H<sup>+</sup> is often called a proton. This species is central to discussion of acids. Under the Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory, acids are proton donors, while bases are proton acceptors.
A bare proton, H<sup>+</sup>, cannot exist in solution or in ionic crystals because of its unstoppable attraction to other atoms or molecules with electrons. Except at the high temperatures associated with plasmas, such protons cannot be removed from the electron clouds of atoms and molecules, and will remain attached to them. However, the term 'proton' is sometimes used loosely and metaphorically to refer to positively charged or cationic hydrogen attached to other species in this fashion, and as such is denoted "H<sup>+</sup>" without any implication that any single protons exist freely as a species.
To avoid the implication of the naked "solvated proton" in solution, acidic aqueous solutions are sometimes considered to contain a less unlikely fictitious species, termed the "hydronium ion" ([H<sub>3</sub>O]<sup>+</sup>). However, even in this case, such solvated hydrogen cations are more realistically conceived as being organized into clusters that form species closer to [H<sub>9</sub>O<sub>4</sub>]<sup>+</sup>. Other oxonium ions are found when water is in acidic solution with other solvents.
Although exotic on Earth, one of the most common ions in the universe is the H+3 ion, known as protonated molecular hydrogen or the trihydrogen cation.
### Isotopes
Hydrogen has three naturally occurring isotopes, denoted <sup>1</sup>
H, <sup>2</sup>
H and <sup>3</sup>
H. Other, highly unstable nuclei (<sup>4</sup>
H to <sup>7</sup>
H) have been synthesized in the laboratory but not observed in nature.
- <sup>1</sup>
H is the most common hydrogen isotope, with an abundance of more than 99.98%. Because the nucleus of this isotope consists of only a single proton, it is given the descriptive but rarely used formal name protium. It is unique among all stable isotopes in having no neutrons; see diproton for a discussion of why others do not exist.
- <sup>2</sup>
H, the other stable hydrogen isotope, is known as deuterium and contains one proton and one neutron in the nucleus. All deuterium in the universe is thought to have been produced at the time of the Big Bang, and has endured since that time. Deuterium is not radioactive, and does not represent a significant toxicity hazard. Water enriched in molecules that include deuterium instead of normal hydrogen is called heavy water. Deuterium and its compounds are used as a non-radioactive label in chemical experiments and in solvents for <sup>1</sup>
H-NMR spectroscopy. Heavy water is used as a neutron moderator and coolant for nuclear reactors. Deuterium is also a potential fuel for commercial nuclear fusion.
- <sup>3</sup>
H is known as tritium and contains one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus. It is radioactive, decaying into helium-3 through beta decay with a half-life of 12.32 years. It is so radioactive that it can be used in luminous paint, making it useful in such things as watches. The glass prevents the small amount of radiation from getting out. Small amounts of tritium are produced naturally by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric gases; tritium has also been released during nuclear weapons tests. It is used in nuclear fusion reactions, as a tracer in isotope geochemistry, and in specialized self-powered lighting devices. Tritium has also been used in chemical and biological labeling experiments as a radiolabel.
Unique among the elements, distinct names are assigned to its isotopes in common use today. During the early study of radioactivity, various heavy radioactive isotopes were given their own names, but such names are no longer used, except for deuterium and tritium. The symbols D and T (instead of <sup>2</sup>
H and <sup>3</sup>
H) are sometimes used for deuterium and tritium, but the symbol P is already in use for phosphorus and thus is not available for protium. In its nomenclatural guidelines, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) allows any of D, T, <sup>2</sup>
H, and <sup>3</sup>
H to be used, although <sup>2</sup>
H and <sup>3</sup>
H are preferred.
The exotic atom muonium (symbol Mu), composed of an antimuon and an electron, can also be considered a light radioisotope of hydrogen. Because muons decay with lifetime 2.2 μs, muonium is too unstable to exhibit observable chemistry. Nevertheless, muonium compounds are important test cases for quantum simulation, due to the mass difference between the antimuon and the proton, and IUPAC nomenclature incorporates such hypothetical compounds as muonium chloride (MuCl) and sodium muonide (NaMu), analogous to hydrogen chloride and sodium hydride respectively.
### Thermal and physical properties
Table of thermal and physical properties of hydrogen (H<sub>2</sub>) at atmospheric pressure:
## History
### Discovery and use
In 1671, Robert Boyle discovered and described the reaction between iron filings and dilute acids, which results in the production of hydrogen gas.
> Having provided a saline spirit [hydrochloric acid], which by an uncommon way of preparation was made exceeding sharp and piercing, we put into a vial, capable of containing three or four ounces of water, a convenient quantity of filings of steel, which were not such as are commonly sold in shops to Chymists and Apothecaries, (those being usually not free enough from rust) but such as I had a while before caus'd to be purposely fil'd off from a piece of good steel. This metalline powder being moistn'd in the viol with a little of the menstruum, was afterwards drench'd with more; whereupon the mixture grew very hot, and belch'd up copious and stinking fumes; which whether they consisted altogether of the volatile sulfur of the Mars [iron?], or of metalline steams participating of a sulfureous nature, and join'd with the saline exhalations of the menstruum, is not necessary to be here discuss'd. But whencesoever this stinking smoak proceeded, so inflammable it was, that upon the approach of a lighted candle to it, it would readily enough take fire, and burn with a blewish and somewhat greenish flame at the mouth of the viol for a good while together; and that, though with little light, yet with more strength than one would easily suspect.
The word "sulfureous" may be somewhat confusing, especially since Boyle did a similar experiment with iron and sulfuric acid. However, in all likelihood, "sulfureous" should here be understood to mean combustible.
In 1766, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize hydrogen gas as a discrete substance, by naming the gas from a metal-acid reaction "inflammable air". He speculated that "inflammable air" was in fact identical to the hypothetical substance called "phlogiston" and further finding in 1781 that the gas produces water when burned. He is usually given credit for the discovery of hydrogen as an element. In 1783, Antoine Lavoisier gave the element the name hydrogen (from the Greek ὑδρο- hydro meaning "water" and -γενής genes meaning "former") when he and Laplace reproduced Cavendish's finding that water is produced when hydrogen is burned.
Lavoisier produced hydrogen for his experiments on mass conservation by reacting a flux of steam with metallic iron through an incandescent iron tube heated in a fire. Anaerobic oxidation of iron by the protons of water at high temperature can be schematically represented by the set of following reactions:
1\) Fe + H<sub>2</sub>O → FeO + H<sub>2</sub>
2\) Fe + 3 H<sub>2</sub>O → Fe<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> + 3 H<sub>2</sub>
3\) Fe + 4 H<sub>2</sub>O → Fe<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> + 4 H<sub>2</sub>
Many metals such as zirconium undergo a similar reaction with water leading to the production of hydrogen.
Hydrogen was liquefied for the first time by James Dewar in 1898 by using regenerative cooling and his invention, the vacuum flask. He produced solid hydrogen the next year. Deuterium was discovered in December 1931 by Harold Urey, and tritium was prepared in 1934 by Ernest Rutherford, Mark Oliphant, and Paul Harteck. Heavy water, which consists of deuterium in the place of regular hydrogen, was discovered by Urey's group in 1932. François Isaac de Rivaz built the first de Rivaz engine, an internal combustion engine powered by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in 1806. Edward Daniel Clarke invented the hydrogen gas blowpipe in 1819. The Döbereiner's lamp and limelight were invented in 1823.
The first hydrogen-filled balloon was invented by Jacques Charles in 1783. Hydrogen provided the lift for the first reliable form of air-travel following the 1852 invention of the first hydrogen-lifted airship by Henri Giffard. German count Ferdinand von Zeppelin promoted the idea of rigid airships lifted by hydrogen that later were called Zeppelins; the first of which had its maiden flight in 1900. Regularly scheduled flights started in 1910 and by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, they had carried 35,000 passengers without a serious incident. Hydrogen-lifted airships were used as observation platforms and bombers during the war.
The first non-stop transatlantic crossing was made by the British airship R34 in 1919. Regular passenger service resumed in the 1920s and the discovery of helium reserves in the United States promised increased safety, but the U.S. government refused to sell the gas for this purpose. Therefore, H<sub>2</sub> was used in the Hindenburg airship, which was destroyed in a midair fire over New Jersey on 6 May 1937. The incident was broadcast live on radio and filmed. Ignition of leaking hydrogen is widely assumed to be the cause, but later investigations pointed to the ignition of the aluminized fabric coating by static electricity. But the damage to hydrogen's reputation as a lifting gas was already done and commercial hydrogen airship travel ceased. Hydrogen is still used, in preference to non-flammable but more expensive helium, as a lifting gas for weather balloons.
In the same year, the first hydrogen-cooled turbogenerator went into service with gaseous hydrogen as a coolant in the rotor and the stator in 1937 at Dayton, Ohio, by the Dayton Power & Light Co.; because of the thermal conductivity and very low viscosity of hydrogen gas, thus lower drag than air, this is the most common type in its field today for large generators (typically 60 MW and bigger; smaller generators are usually air-cooled).
The nickel hydrogen battery was used for the first time in 1977 aboard the U.S. Navy's Navigation technology satellite-2 (NTS-2). For example, the ISS, Mars Odyssey and the Mars Global Surveyor are equipped with nickel-hydrogen batteries. In the dark part of its orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope is also powered by nickel-hydrogen batteries, which were finally replaced in May 2009, more than 19 years after launch and 13 years beyond their design life.
### Role in quantum theory
Because of its simple atomic structure, consisting only of a proton and an electron, the hydrogen atom, together with the spectrum of light produced from it or absorbed by it, has been central to the development of the theory of atomic structure. Furthermore, study of the corresponding simplicity of the hydrogen molecule and the corresponding cation H+2 brought understanding of the nature of the chemical bond, which followed shortly after the quantum mechanical treatment of the hydrogen atom had been developed in the mid-1920s.
One of the first quantum effects to be explicitly noticed (but not understood at the time) was a Maxwell observation involving hydrogen, half a century before full quantum mechanical theory arrived. Maxwell observed that the specific heat capacity of H<sub>2</sub> unaccountably departs from that of a diatomic gas below room temperature and begins to increasingly resemble that of a monatomic gas at cryogenic temperatures. According to quantum theory, this behavior arises from the spacing of the (quantized) rotational energy levels, which are particularly wide-spaced in H<sub>2</sub> because of its low mass. These widely spaced levels inhibit equal partition of heat energy into rotational motion in hydrogen at low temperatures. Diatomic gases composed of heavier atoms do not have such widely spaced levels and do not exhibit the same effect.
Antihydrogen () is the antimatter counterpart to hydrogen. It consists of an antiproton with a positron. Antihydrogen is the only type of antimatter atom to have been produced as of 2015.
## Cosmic prevalence and distribution
Hydrogen, as atomic H, is the most abundant chemical element in the universe, making up 75 percent of normal matter by mass and more than 90 percent by number of atoms. (Most of the mass of the universe, however, is not in the form of chemical-element type matter, but rather is postulated to occur as yet-undetected forms of mass such as dark matter and dark energy.) This element is found in great abundance in stars and gas giant planets. Molecular clouds of H<sub>2</sub> are associated with star formation. Hydrogen plays a vital role in powering stars through the proton-proton reaction in case of stars with very low to approximately 1 mass of the Sun and the CNO cycle of nuclear fusion in case of stars more massive than the Sun.
### States
Throughout the universe, hydrogen is mostly found in the atomic and plasma states, with properties quite distinct from those of molecular hydrogen. As a plasma, hydrogen's electron and proton are not bound together, resulting in very high electrical conductivity and high emissivity (producing the light from the Sun and other stars). The charged particles are highly influenced by magnetic and electric fields. For example, in the solar wind they interact with the Earth's magnetosphere giving rise to Birkeland currents and the aurora.
Hydrogen is found in the neutral atomic state in the interstellar medium because the atoms seldom collide and combine. They are the source of the 21-cm hydrogen line at 1420 MHz that is detected in order to probe primordial hydrogen. The large amount of neutral hydrogen found in the damped Lyman-alpha systems is thought to dominate the cosmological baryonic density of the universe up to a redshift of z = 4.
Under ordinary conditions on Earth, elemental hydrogen exists as the diatomic gas, H<sub>2</sub>. Hydrogen gas is very rare in the Earth's atmosphere (around 0.53 ppm on a molar basis) because of its light weight, which enables it to escape from the atmosphere more rapidly than heavier gases. However, hydrogen is the third most abundant element on the Earth's surface, mostly in the form of chemical compounds such as hydrocarbons and water.
A molecular form called protonated molecular hydrogen (H+3) is found in the interstellar medium, where it is generated by ionization of molecular hydrogen from cosmic rays. This ion has also been observed in the upper atmosphere of the planet Jupiter. The ion is relatively stable in the environment of outer space due to the low temperature and density. H+3 is one of the most abundant ions in the universe, and it plays a notable role in the chemistry of the interstellar medium. Neutral triatomic hydrogen H<sub>3</sub> can exist only in an excited form and is unstable. By contrast, the positive hydrogen molecular ion (H+2) is a rare molecule in the universe.
## Production
H<sub>2</sub> is produced in chemistry and biology laboratories, often as a by-product of other reactions; in industry for the hydrogenation of unsaturated substrates; and in nature as a means of expelling reducing equivalents in biochemical reactions.
### Commercial methods
Hydrogen is often produced by reacting water with methane and carbon monoxide, which causes the removal of hydrogen from hydrocarbons at very high temperatures, with 48% of hydrogen production coming from steam reforming. The water vapor is then reacted with the carbon monoxide produced by steam reforming to oxidize it to carbon dioxide and turn the water into hydrogen. Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas with release of atmospheric greenhouse gas or with capture using CCS and climate change mitigation. Steam reforming is also known as the Bosch process and is widely used for the industrial preparation of hydrogen.
At high temperatures (1000–1400 K, 700–1100 °C or 1300–2000 °F), steam (water vapor) reacts with methane to yield carbon monoxide and H<sub>2</sub>.
CH<sub>4</sub> + H<sub>2</sub>O → CO + 3 H<sub>2</sub>
This reaction is favored at low pressures but is nonetheless conducted at high pressures (2.0 MPa, 20 atm or 600 inHg). This is because high-pressure H<sub>2</sub> is the most marketable product, and pressure swing adsorption (PSA) purification systems work better at higher pressures. The product mixture is known as "synthesis gas" because it is often used directly for the production of methanol and related compounds. Hydrocarbons other than methane can be used to produce synthesis gas with varying product ratios. One of the many complications to this highly optimized technology is the formation of coke or carbon:
CH<sub>4</sub> → C + 2 H<sub>2</sub>
Consequently, steam reforming typically employs an excess of H<sub>2</sub>O. Additional hydrogen can be recovered from the steam by use of carbon monoxide through the water gas shift reaction, especially with an iron oxide catalyst. This reaction is also a common industrial source of carbon dioxide:
CO + H<sub>2</sub>O → CO<sub>2</sub> + H<sub>2</sub>
Other important methods for CO and H<sub>2</sub> production include partial oxidation of hydrocarbons:
2 CH<sub>4</sub> + O<sub>2</sub> → 2 CO + 4 H<sub>2</sub>
and the coal reaction, which can serve as a prelude to the shift reaction above:
C + H<sub>2</sub>O → CO + H<sub>2</sub>
Hydrogen is sometimes produced and consumed in the same industrial process, without being separated. In the Haber process for the production of ammonia, hydrogen is generated from natural gas. Electrolysis of brine to yield chlorine also produces hydrogen as a co-product.
Olefin production units may produce substantial quantities of byproduct hydrogen particularly from cracking light feedstocks like ethane or propane.
### Water electrolysis
The electrolysis of water is a simple method of producing hydrogen. A current is run through the water, and gaseous oxygen forms at the anode while gaseous hydrogen forms at the cathode. Typically the cathode is made from platinum or another inert metal when producing hydrogen for storage. If, however, the gas is to be burnt on site, oxygen is desirable to assist the combustion, and so both electrodes would be made from inert metals. (Iron, for instance, would oxidize, and thus decrease the amount of oxygen given off.) The theoretical maximum efficiency (electricity used vs. energetic value of hydrogen produced) is in the range 88–94%.
2 H<sub>2</sub>O(l) → 2 H<sub>2</sub>(g) + O<sub>2</sub>(g)
### Methane pyrolysis
Hydrogen production using natural gas methane pyrolysis is a process with a lower carbon footprint than commercial hydrogen production processes. Developing a commercial methane pyrolysis process could expedite the expanded use of hydrogen in industrial and transportation applications. Methane pyrolysis is accomplished by passing methane through a molten metal catalyst containing dissolved nickel. Methane is converted to hydrogen gas and solid carbon.
CH<sub>4</sub>(g) → C(s) + 2 H<sub>2</sub>(g) (ΔH° = 74 kJ/mol)
The carbon may be sold as a manufacturing feedstock or fuel, or landfilled.
Further research continues in several laboratories, including at Karlsruhe Liquid-metal Laboratory and at University of California – Santa Barbara. BASF built a methane pyrolysis pilot plant.
### Metal-acid
Many metals react with water to produce H<sub>2</sub>, but the rate of hydrogen evolution depends on the metal, the pH, and the presence of alloying agents. Most commonly, hydrogen evolution is induced by acids. The alkali and alkaline earth metals, aluminium, zinc, manganese, and iron react readily with aqueous acids. This reaction is the basis of the Kipp's apparatus, which once was used as a laboratory gas source:
Zn + 2 H<sup>+</sup> → Zn<sup>2+</sup> + H<sub>2</sub>
In the absence of acid, the evolution of H<sub>2</sub> is slower. Because iron is widely used structural material, its anaerobic corrosion is of technological significance:
Fe + 2 H<sub>2</sub>O → Fe(OH)<sub>2</sub> + H<sub>2</sub>
Many metals, such as aluminium, are slow to react with water because they form passivated coatings of oxides. An alloy of aluminium and gallium, however, does react with water. At high pH, aluminium can produce H<sub>2</sub>:
2 Al + 6 H<sub>2</sub>O + 2 OH<sup>−</sup> → 2 [Al(OH)<sub>4</sub>]<sup>−</sup> + 3 H<sub>2</sub>
Some metal-containing compounds react with acids to evolve H<sub>2</sub>. Under anaerobic conditions, ferrous hydroxide (Fe(OH)
<sub>2</sub>) can be oxidized by the protons of water to form magnetite and H<sub>2</sub>. This process is described by the Schikorr reaction:
3 Fe(OH)<sub>2</sub> → Fe<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> + 2 H<sub>2</sub>O + H<sub>2</sub>
This process occurs during the anaerobic corrosion of iron and steel in oxygen-free groundwater and in reducing soils below the water table.
### Thermochemical
More than 200 thermochemical cycles can be used for water splitting. Many of these cycles such as the iron oxide cycle, cerium(IV) oxide–cerium(III) oxide cycle, zinc zinc-oxide cycle, sulfur-iodine cycle, copper-chlorine cycle and hybrid sulfur cycle have been evaluated for their commercial potential to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water and heat without using electricity. A number of laboratories (including in France, Germany, Greece, Japan, and the United States) are developing thermochemical methods to produce hydrogen from solar energy and water.
## Applications
### Petrochemical industry
Large quantities of H<sub>2</sub> are used in the "upgrading" of fossil fuels. Key consumers of H<sub>2</sub> include hydrodealkylation, hydrodesulfurization, and hydrocracking. Many of these reactions can be classified as hydrogenolysis, i.e., the cleavage of bonds to carbon. Illustrative is the separation of sulfur from liquid fossil fuels:
R<sub>2</sub>S + 2 H<sub>2</sub> → H<sub>2</sub>S + 2 RH
### Hydrogenation
Hydrogenation, the addition of H<sub>2</sub> to various substrates is conducted on a large scale. The hydrogenation of N<sub>2</sub> to produce ammonia by the Haber–Bosch process consumes a few percent of the energy budget in the entire industry. The resulting ammonia is used to supply the majority of the protein consumed by humans. Hydrogenation is used to convert unsaturated fats and oils to saturated fats and oils. The major application is the production of margarine. Methanol is produced by hydrogenation of carbon dioxide. It is similarly the source of hydrogen in the manufacture of hydrochloric acid. H<sub>2</sub> is also used as a reducing agent for the conversion of some ores to the metals.
### Coolant
Hydrogen is commonly used in power stations as a coolant in generators due to a number of favorable properties that are a direct result of its light diatomic molecules. These include low density, low viscosity, and the highest specific heat and thermal conductivity of all gases.
### Energy carrier
Elemental hydrogen has been widely discussed in the context of energy, as a possible future carrier of energy on an economy-wide scale. Hydrogen is a ''carrier'' of energy rather than an energy resource, because there is no naturally occurring source of hydrogen in useful quantities.
Hydrogen can be burned to produce heat or combined with oxygen in fuel cells to generate electricity directly, with water being the only emissions at the point of usage. The overall lifecycle emissions of hydrogen depend on how it is produced. Nearly all of the world's current supply of hydrogen is created from fossil fuels. The main method is steam methane reforming, in which hydrogen is produced from a chemical reaction between steam and methane, the main component of natural gas. Producing one tonne of hydrogen through this process emits 6.6–9.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide. While carbon capture and storage can remove a large fraction of these emissions, the overall carbon footprint of hydrogen from natural gas is difficult to assess as of 2021, in part because of emissions created in the production of the natural gas itself.
Electricity can be used to split water molecules, producing sustainable hydrogen provided the electricity was generated sustainably. However, this electrolysis process is currently more expensive than creating hydrogen from methane and the efficiency of energy conversion is inherently low. Hydrogen can be produced when there is a surplus of variable renewable electricity, then stored and used to generate heat or to re-generate electricity. Hydrogen created through electrolysis using renewable energy is commonly referred to as "green hydrogen." It can be further transformed into synthetic fuels such as ammonia and methanol.
Innovation in hydrogen electrolysers could make large-scale production of hydrogen from electricity more cost-competitive. There is potential for hydrogen to play a significant role in decarbonising energy systems because in certain sectors, replacing fossil fuels with direct use of electricity would be very difficult. Hydrogen fuel can produce the intense heat required for industrial production of steel, cement, glass, and chemicals. For steelmaking, hydrogen can function as a clean energy carrier and simultaneously as a low-carbon catalyst replacing coal-derived coke. Hydrogen used in transportation would burn relatively cleanly, with some NO<sub>x</sub> emissions, but without carbon emissions. Disadvantages of hydrogen as an energy carrier include high costs of storage and distribution due to hydrogen's explosivity, its large volume compared to other fuels, and its tendency to make pipes brittle. The infrastructure costs associated with full conversion to a hydrogen economy would be substantial.
### Semiconductor industry
Hydrogen is employed to saturate broken ("dangling") bonds of amorphous silicon and amorphous carbon that helps stabilizing material properties. It is also a potential electron donor in various oxide materials, including ZnO, SnO<sub>2</sub>, CdO, MgO, ZrO<sub>2</sub>, HfO<sub>2</sub>, La<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, Y<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, TiO<sub>2</sub>, SrTiO<sub>3</sub>, LaAlO<sub>3</sub>, SiO<sub>2</sub>, Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, ZrSiO<sub>4</sub>, HfSiO<sub>4</sub>, and SrZrO<sub>3</sub>.
### Aerospace
Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen together serve as cryogenic fuel in liquid-propellant rockets, as in the Space Shuttle main engines.
### Niche and evolving uses
- Shielding gas: Hydrogen is used as a shielding gas in welding methods such as atomic hydrogen welding.
- Cryogenic research: Liquid H<sub>2</sub> is used in cryogenic research, including superconductivity studies.
- Buoyant lifting: Because H<sub>2</sub> is lighter than air, having only 7% of the density of air, it was once widely used as a lifting gas in balloons and airships.
- Leak detection: Pure or mixed with nitrogen (sometimes called forming gas), hydrogen is a tracer gas for detection of minute leaks. Applications can be found in the automotive, chemical, power generation, aerospace, and telecommunications industries. Hydrogen is an authorized food additive (E 949) that allows food package leak testing, as well as having anti-oxidizing properties.
- Neutron moderation: Deuterium (hydrogen-2) is used in nuclear fission applications as a moderator to slow neutrons.
- Nuclear fusion fuel: Deuterium is used in nuclear fusion reactions.
- Isotopic labeling: Deuterium compounds have applications in chemistry and biology in studies of isotope effects on reaction rates.
- Rocket propellant: NASA has investigated the use of rocket propellant made from atomic hydrogen, boron or carbon that is frozen into solid molecular hydrogen particles that are suspended in liquid helium. Upon warming, the mixture vaporizes to allow the atomic species to recombine, heating the mixture to high temperature.
- Tritium uses: Tritium (hydrogen-3), produced in nuclear reactors, is used in the production of hydrogen bombs, as an isotopic label in the biosciences, and as a source of beta radiation in radioluminescent paint for instrument dials and emergency signage.
## Biological reactions
H<sub>2</sub> is a product of some types of anaerobic metabolism and is produced by several microorganisms, usually via reactions catalyzed by iron- or nickel-containing enzymes called hydrogenases. These enzymes catalyze the reversible redox reaction between H<sub>2</sub> and its component two protons and two electrons. Creation of hydrogen gas occurs in the transfer of reducing equivalents, produced during pyruvate fermentation, to water. The natural cycle of hydrogen production and consumption by organisms is called the hydrogen cycle. Bacteria such as Mycobacterium smegmatis can utilize the small amount of hydrogen in the atmosphere as a source of energy when other sources are lacking, using a hydrogenase with small channels that exclude oxygen and so permits the reaction to occur even though the hydrogen concentration is very low and the oxygen concentration is as in normal air.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the human body in terms of numbers of atoms of the element but the third most abundant element by mass. H<sub>2</sub> occurs in the breath of humans due to the metabolic activity of hydrogenase-containing microorganisms in the large intestine and is a natural component of flatus. The concentration in the breath of fasting people at rest is typically less than 5 parts per million (ppm) but can be 50 ppm when people with intestinal disorders consume molecules they cannot absorb during diagnostic hydrogen breath tests.
Water splitting, in which water is decomposed into its component protons, electrons, and oxygen, occurs in the light reactions in all photosynthetic organisms. Some such organisms, including the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and cyanobacteria, have evolved a second step in the dark reactions in which protons and electrons are reduced to form H<sub>2</sub> gas by specialized hydrogenases in the chloroplast. Efforts have been undertaken to genetically modify cyanobacterial hydrogenases to efficiently synthesize H<sub>2</sub> gas even in the presence of oxygen. Efforts have also been undertaken with genetically modified alga in a bioreactor.
## Safety and precautions
Hydrogen poses a number of hazards to human safety, from potential detonations and fires when mixed with air to being an asphyxiant in its pure, oxygen-free form. In addition, liquid hydrogen is a cryogen and presents dangers (such as frostbite) associated with very cold liquids. Hydrogen dissolves in many metals and in addition to leaking out, may have adverse effects on them, such as hydrogen embrittlement, leading to cracks and explosions. Hydrogen gas leaking into external air may spontaneously ignite. Moreover, hydrogen fire, while being extremely hot, is almost invisible, and thus can lead to accidental burns.
Even interpreting the hydrogen data (including safety data) is confounded by a number of phenomena. Many physical and chemical properties of hydrogen depend on the parahydrogen/orthohydrogen ratio (it often takes days or weeks at a given temperature to reach the equilibrium ratio, for which the data is usually given). Hydrogen detonation parameters, such as critical detonation pressure and temperature, strongly depend on the container geometry.
## See also
- (for hydrogen)
|
5,541,749 |
Banksia attenuata
| 1,167,817,429 |
Species of plant in the family Proteaceae found across much of the southwest of Western Australia
|
[
"Australian Aboriginal bushcraft",
"Banksia taxa by scientific name",
"Bushfood",
"Endemic flora of Southwest Australia",
"Eudicots of Western Australia",
"Plants described in 1810",
"Taxa named by Robert Brown (botanist, born 1773)"
] |
Banksia attenuata, commonly known as the candlestick banksia, slender banksia, or biara to the Noongar people, is a species of plant in the family Proteaceae. Commonly a tree, it reaches 10 m (33 ft) high, but it is often a shrub in drier areas 0.4 to 2 m (1.3 to 6.6 ft) high. It has long, narrow, serrated leaves and bright yellow inflorescences, or flower spikes, held above the foliage, which appear in spring and summer. The flower spikes age to grey and swell with the development of the woody follicles. The candlestick banksia is found across much of the southwest of Western Australia, from north of Kalbarri National Park down to Cape Leeuwin and across to Fitzgerald River National Park.
English botanist John Lindley had named material collected by Australian botanist James Drummond Banksia cylindrostachya in 1840, but this proved to be the same as the species named Banksia attenuata by Scottish botanist Robert Brown 30 years earlier in 1810, and thus Brown's name took precedence. Within the genus Banksia, the close relationships and exact position of B. attenuata is unclear.
The candlestick banksia is pollinated by and provides food for a wide array of animals in summer months. Several species of honeyeater visit the flower spikes, as does the honey possum, which has an important role as a pollinator. It regenerates from bushfire by regrowing from its woody base, known as a lignotuber, or from epicormic buds within its trunk. It can have a lifespan of 300 years. It has been widely used as a street tree and for amenities planting in urban Western Australia, though its large size generally precludes use in small gardens. A dwarf form is commercially available in nurseries.
## Description
Banksia attenuata is generally encountered as a tree up to 10 m (30 ft) tall. In the north of its range as the climate becomes warmer and drier, it is often a stunted multistemmed shrub 0.4 to 2 m (1.3 to 6.6 ft) tall. Both forms occur in the vicinity of Hill River but there is otherwise a marked demarcation.
In the Wheatbelt and east of the Stirling Range, it is a stunted tree. Tree forms have a solid trunk, generally wavy or bent, with 1–2 cm (0.39–0.79 in) thick crumbly orange-grey bark which is a red-brown underneath. It regenerates from fire via lignotuber or epicormic buds from its fire-tolerant trunk. It has long narrow shiny green linear leaves 4 to 27 cm (1.6 to 10.6 in) long and 0.5 to 1.6 cm (0.20 to 0.63 in) wide. The leaf margins have v- or u-shaped serrations along their length. The new growth is a pale grey-green and occurs mainly in the late spring and summer, often after flowering. The brilliant yellow inflorescences (flower spikes) occur from spring into summer and are up 5 cm (2.0 in) wide and up to 25–30 cm (9.8–11.8 in) tall. They are made up of many small individual flowers; a study at Mount Adams 330 km (210 mi) north of Perth revealed a count of 1933 (± a standard error of 88) flowers per inflorescence, and another in the Fitzgerald River National Park yielded a count of 1720 (± 76) flowers. Anthesis proceeds up the flower spike over about 10 to 20 days and is asynchronous. That is, a plant produces flower spikes over a several-week period and will thus have spikes at different stages of development over the flowering season.
Often bright green in bud stage, they are terminal, occurring at the ends of one- to three-year-old branches, and displayed prominently above the foliage. The smell of the open flowers has been likened to a peppery Shiraz wine. Over time, the spikes fade to brown and then grey, and the individual flowers shrivel and lie against the spikes. This coincides with the development of dark furry oval follicles, which measure 2–3.5 cm (0.79–1.38 in) long, 1–1.5 cm (0.39–0.59 in) high, and 1.4–2 cm (0.55–0.79 in) wide. However, only a very small percentage (0.1%) of flowers develop into follicles; the field study at Mount Adams yielded a count of 3.6 ± 1.2 per cone. The follicles develop and mature over seven to eight months, from February to December, while seed development occurs over four months from September to December.
## Taxonomy
Banksia attenuata was first collected by Robert Brown from King George Sound in December 1801 and published by him in 1810. The specific epithet is the Latin adjective attenuatus "narrowed", and refers to the leaves narrowing towards the base. The species has had a fairly uneventful taxonomic history. It has only two synonyms, and no subspecies or varieties have been published; Australian botanist Alex George reviewed the variation in form in the species and felt that the tree and shrub forms differed only in size and hence were not distinct enough to represent separate taxa. In 1840, John Lindley published a putative new species, Banksia cylindrostachya, in his A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony; this has now been shown to be a taxonomic synonym of B. attenuata. In 1891, Otto Kuntze rejected the generic name Banksia L.f., on the grounds that the name Banksia had previously been published in 1776 as Banksia J.R.Forst & G.Forst, referring to the genus now known as Pimelea. Kuntze proposed Sirmuellera as an alternative, referring to this species as Sirmuellera attenuata. This application of the principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries, and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved and Sirmuellera rejected in 1940. Common names include slender banksia, candle banksia, and candlestick banksia. Piara (alternately spelled biara) is an aboriginal name from the Melville region of Perth.
The relationships of Banksia attenuata within the genus are unclear. When Carl Meissner published his infrageneric arrangement of Banksia in 1856, he placed B. attenuata in section Eubanksia because its inflorescence is a spike rather than a domed head, and in series Salicinae, a large series that is now considered quite heterogeneous. This series was discarded in the 1870 arrangement of George Bentham; instead, B. attenuata was placed in section Cyrtostylis, a group of species that did not fit easily into one of the other sections.
In 1981, George published a revised arrangement that placed B. attenuata in the subgenus Banksia because of its flower spike, section Banksia because its styles are straight rather than hooked, and the series Cyrtostylis, a large and rather heterogenous series of twelve species. He conceded its large emarginate cotyledons (having a notch in their apex) were quite different from other members, and that it had similarities in flower architecture to another anomalous member B. elegans. He felt B. attenuata to have affinities to B. lindleyana and B. media.
George's arrangement remained current until 1996, when Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published an arrangement informed by a cladistic analysis of morphological characteristics. They calculated B. attenuata to lie at the base of a large B. attenuata – B.ashbyi clade, but conceded further work was needed before its relationships could be determined, and left it as incertae sedis (i.e. Its exact placement is unclear.). Questioning the emphasis on cladistics in Thiele and Ladiges' arrangement, George published a slightly modified version of his 1981 arrangement in his 1999 treatment of Banksia for the Flora of Australia series of monographs. To date, this remains the most recent comprehensive arrangement. The placement of B. attenuata in George's 1999 arrangement may be summarised as follows:
Banksia
: B. subg. Banksia
: : B. sect. Banksia
: : : B. ser. Cyrtostylis
: : : : B. media
: : : : B. praemorsa
: : : : B. epica
: : : : B. pilostylis
: : : : B. attenuata
: : : : B. ashbyi
: : : : B. benthamiana
: : : : B. audax
: : : : B. lullfitzii
: : : : B. elderiana
: : : : B. laevigata
: : : : : B. laevigata subsp. laevigata
: : : : : B. laevigata subsp. fuscolutea
: : : : B. elegans
: : : : B. lindleyana
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 attenuata resolves as a basal member of and next closest relative, or 'sister', to a clade containing B. elegans and, within that, a monophyletic B. subg. Isostylis. An Eocene fossil cone named Banksia archaeocarpa, around 50 million years old, resembles that of B. attenuata.
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. attenuata is placed in B. subg. Banksia.
## Distribution and habitat
The most widely distributed of all western banksias, Banksia attenuata occurs across a broad swathe of southwest of Western Australia, from Kalbarri National Park and the Murchison River (with an outlying population in Zuytdorp National Park) southwards right to the southwestern corner of the state at Augusta and Cape Leeuwin, and then eastwards across the south to the western edge of Fitzgerald River National Park. Along the eastern border northwards it is found at Lake Grace, Lake Magenta north of Jerramungup, and the Wongan Hills. It is restricted to various sandy soils, including white, yellow, or brown sands, and sand over either laterite or limestone. It forms an important component of open Eucalyptus woodland as a dominant or understory tree or tall shrub. To the north, it is a shrubby component of shrubland. It does not grow on heavy (clay-based) soils, and is hence only found in sandy pockets. Within open woodland, it is found alongside B. menziesii, B. ilicifolia, B. prionotes, Allocasuarina fraseriana, Eucalyptus marginata, or E. gomphocephala. The annual rainfall within its distribution varies from 300 to 900 mm (12 to 35 in).
## Ecology
Like many plants in southwest Western Australia, B. attenuata is adapted to an environment in which bushfire events are relatively frequent. Most Banksia species can be placed in one of two broad groups according to their response to fire: reseeders are killed by fire, but fire also triggers the release of their canopy seed bank, thus promoting recruitment of the next generation; resprouters survive fire, resprouting from a lignotuber or, more rarely, epicormic buds protected by thick bark. Bearing epicormic buds and a lignotuber, B. attenuata is one of the latter group, with follicles that may open spontaneously or by fire.
It is moderately serotinous, storing only one-tenth the number of seeds in its seed bank as the reseeding B. hookeriana with which it coexists on sand dunes in scrub at Eneabba north of Perth. Even then, many of its follicles do not release seed after a fire, but instead after successive autumn rains. An experiment simulating wet weather following a fire saw a series of Banksia attenuata cones with follicles subjected to twice-weekly immersions in water after being heated in a ring Bunsen flame to around 500–600 °C (932–1,112 °F) for two minutes. Cones that had been exposed to water for more weeks had more seed released from follicles over time; around 40% released at three weeks, increasing steadily to almost 90% at ten weeks, compared with a series of controls (which were kept dry) of which fewer than 10% of seed released. Thus, the seed remains in the follicles until successive rains result in seed dispersal in the wetter winter (instead of dryer summer), increasing the chance of survival. After the follicle is split, the seed and separator are exposed to the elements. The wings of the woody separator are hygroscopic, move together when wet, and spread and curl apart when dry. The seed is gradually drawn out by the movement with each wetting.
Once released, seed germinates at temperatures between 15 and 20 °C (59 and 68 °F) to optimise timing with autumn and winter rains and hence maximise chance of survival. Still, many seedlings die off in the hot and dry summer months. Seedling survival for the species is lower than for banksias which regenerate by seeding over time. Despite this, the longevity of mature plants allows for maintenance of population until favourable years enable better survival of young plants. As they mature, plants are less likely to perish and are estimated to live for 300 years or more. Analyzing the seed bank and longitudinal results over fifteen years on the Eneabba sandplain showed that B. attenuata would become more abundant over time with fire intervals averaging between 6 and 20 years, peaking with intervals around 10 to 12 years, compared with longer intervals for the reseeders B. hookeriana and B. prionotes. Placed against its rivals, B. attenuata would be dominant between 8 and 10 or 11 years, but at longer intervals is outcompeted by B. hookeriana. Variability in the timing between fires allows all three species to coexist. Exaggerated good and bad weather conditions favours B. attenuata over the reseeding species, which suffer more.
Despite having relatively heavy seed, seed from Banksia attenuata has a high rate of long-distance dispersal. A genetic study of populations in Eneabba showed that over 5% of plants had originated up to 2.6 km (1.6 mi) away (similar rates to Banksia hookeriana, the seed of which only weighs half as much). The mechanism for this is unclear, although Byron Lamont has proposed the Carnaby's black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus latirostris) as a vector; the species seeks out Banksia attenuata cones after bushfire, possibly because the large seeds and greater chance of grubs in the cone make them more nutritious. Flowering has been recorded one to two years after a bushfire.
Flower spikes in late bud are used in the cut flower industry, primarily in Western Australia.
Aboriginal people, particularly the Nyoongar and Yamatji, placed the flower spike in a paperbark-lined hole filled with water to make a sweet drink. Both this species and B. aemula have been credited with the inspiration behind May Gibbs' Big Bad Banksia Men; this species was familiar to Gibbs in her childhood and likely gave her the initial inspiration, although the depictions resemble the latter species. Artist Marianne North produced a highly regarded painting of B. attenuata during her stay in Australia in 1880–1881.
|
2,316,836 |
New Zealand nationality law
| 1,172,776,682 |
History and regulations of New Zealand citizenship
|
[
"Foreign relations of New Zealand",
"Immigration to New Zealand",
"New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Nations",
"New Zealand nationality law"
] |
New Zealand nationality law details the conditions by which a person is a national of New Zealand. The primary law governing these requirements is the Citizenship Act 1977, which came into force on 1 January 1978. Regulations apply to the entire Realm of New Zealand, which includes the country of New Zealand itself, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, and the Ross Dependency.
All persons born within the Realm before 2006 were automatically citizens at birth regardless of the nationalities of their parents. Individuals born in the Realm from that year on receive New Zealand citizenship at birth if at least one of their parents is a New Zealand citizen or otherwise entitled to live in New Zealand indefinitely (meaning New Zealand and Australian permanent residents, as well as Australian citizens). Foreign nationals may be granted citizenship if they are permanent residents and live in any part of the Realm.
New Zealand was previously a colony of the British Empire and local residents were British subjects. Over time, the colony was granted more autonomy and gradually became independent from the United Kingdom. Although New Zealand citizens are no longer British, they continue to hold favoured status when residing in the UK; as Commonwealth citizens, New Zealanders are eligible to vote in UK elections and serve in public office there.
## Terminology
Although citizenship and nationality have distinct legal meanings, New Zealand nationals have been referred to as citizens in domestic nationality legislation since 1948. Nationality refers to a person's legal belonging to a country and is the common term used in international treaties when referring to members of a state, while citizenship usually refers to the set of rights and duties a person has in that nation. This distinction is generally clearly defined in non-English speaking countries but not in the Anglosphere. In the New Zealand context, there is little distinction between the two terms and they are used interchangeably.
## History
### Colonial-era policy
New Zealand became a part of the British Empire in 1840 after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Accordingly, British nationality law applied to the colony. All New Zealanders were British subjects, including the indigenous Māori, who were extended all rights as British subjects under the terms of the treaty.
Any person born in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else within Crown dominions was a natural-born British subject. Foreign nationals who were not British subjects had limited property rights and could not own land. French and German immigrants successfully lobbied the government for the ability to naturalise in 1844. Individuals intending to become British subjects needed to request for their names to be included in annual naturalisation ordinances or Acts passed by the governor or General Assembly that regularly granted foreigners subject status.
British nationality law during this time was uncodified and did not have a standard set of regulations, relying instead on past precedent and common law. Until the mid-19th century, it was unclear whether rules for naturalisation in the United Kingdom were applicable elsewhere in the Empire. Each colony had wide discretion in developing their own procedures and requirements for naturalisation up to that point. In 1847, the Imperial Parliament formalised a clear distinction between subjects who naturalised in the UK and those who did so in other territories. Individuals who naturalised in the UK were deemed to have received the status by imperial naturalisation, which was valid throughout the Empire. Those naturalising in colonies were said to have gone through local naturalisation and were given subject status valid only within the relevant territory; a subject who locally naturalised in New Zealand was a British subject there, but not in England or New South Wales. When travelling outside of the Empire, British subjects who were locally naturalised in a colony were still entitled to imperial protection.
Naturalisation continued to be processed through annual personalised legislation until 1866, when the process was streamlined. Individuals living in or intending to reside in New Zealand who met a good character requirement and were able to pay a £1 fee could apply for naturalisation with the Colonial Secretary's Office. There was no minimum residence requirement and applicants simply needed approval from the governor. British subjects who had already been naturalised in the United Kingdom or other parts of the Empire (except for its colonies in Asia) could apply to be naturalised again in New Zealand without swearing an oath of allegiance if they had previously taken one; they already would have owed allegiance to the Sovereign. Foreign women who married British subjects were considered to have automatically naturalised under the new regulations. New Zealand was the first self-governing nation to grant the right to vote to women; British subject women participated in their first elections in 1893.
#### Māori conflicts and integration
Rising tensions over land sale disputes and settler incursions into Māori land led to a series of armed conflicts and mass land confiscations in the 1860s, as well as legislative efforts to assimilate the Māori into colonial legal systems. Ambiguous wording in the Treaty of Waitangi raised uncertainty as to whether they were actually granted subjecthood or merely the rights of that status; the Native Rights Act 1865 was enacted to affirm their British subject status and clarify the colonial judiciary's legal authority over them. Franchise qualification was dependent on an individual owning land, but Māori land was customarily held in communal title rather than by freehold title under a single person's ownership. Māori electorates in the General Assembly were created in 1867 as a temporary measure while Māori land was gradually converted into titles recognisable in colonial law, and this special representation was later made permanent in 1876. Male subjects of partial Māori descent were assigned to an electorate based on their ancestry; those who were more than half-Māori were assigned to the Māori electoral roll, and those who had more non-Māori lineage were assigned to the general roll. Men who were exactly half-Māori could vote in either or both electorates.
#### Discriminatory policies against Chinese migrants
Chinese immigration to New Zealand began in the 1860s during the West Coast Gold Rush. Growing hostility and anti-Chinese sentiment along with the rise of colonial nationalism led to a concerted movement within the legislature to restrict Chinese immigration. At least 20 bills written to curb Chinese migration were introduced in the House of Representatives from 1879 to 1920. The first of these to pass was the Chinese Immigrants Act 1881, which limited the number of Chinese migrants who could land in New Zealand to one per ten tons of cargo and imposed a £10 head tax on every Chinese person who entered the colony. These restrictions were tightened to one migrant per 100 tons in 1888, then to one per 200 tons in 1896. China, Hong Kong, Mauritius, and the islands of modern Indonesia were declared to be "infected places" under the Public Health Act 1876; ships originating from or stopping in one of these territories, or those that allowed any person or cargo coming from or passing through those areas were subject to strict quarantine on their arrival in New Zealand. The head tax was increased to £100 in 1896, and would not be abolished until 1944. Chinese residents were completely prohibited from naturalising as British subjects from 1908 to 1952.
#### Territorial acquisitions
The Cook Islands, Tokelau, and Niue respectively became British protectorates in 1888, 1889, and 1901. Island residents became British subjects at the time when Britain acquired these territories. Britain then ceded administrative control over the Cook Islands and Niue to New Zealand in 1901, and for Tokelau in 1925. The transfers of the islands did not alter the national status of these islanders, and they continued to be British subjects under New Zealand administration.
Western Samoa was a German territory from 1900 until the First World War. After the war, it became a League of Nations mandate under New Zealand control. Following the recommendation of the Permanent Mandates Commission, Western Samoans did not automatically become British subjects when New Zealand assumed mandatory authority in 1920 but were treated as British protected persons instead. Although Parliament amended nationality law in 1923 and 1928 to allow facilitated naturalisation to Western Samoans wanting to become British subjects, virtually none had taken this option. Only 50 Samoans naturalised between 1928 and 1948, while 82 individuals of European descent had completed the process in the territory during the same timeframe. All other Samoans who chose not to naturalise had an unclear status that was unresolved until after Western Samoan independence.
### Imperial common code
The Imperial Parliament brought regulations for British subject status into codified statute law for the first time with passage of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. British subject status was standardised as a common nationality across the Empire. Dominions that adopted this Act as part of local legislation were authorised to grant subject status to aliens by imperial naturalisation. New Zealand adopted most of this law (Parts I and III) in 1923, except for its provisions on imperial naturalisation (Part II), which it later enacted in 1928.
The 1914 regulations codified the doctrine of coverture into imperial nationality law, where a woman's consent to marry a foreigner was also assumed to be intent to denaturalise; British women who married foreign men automatically lost their British nationality. There were two exceptions to this: a wife married to a husband who lost his British subject status was able to retain British nationality by declaration, and a British-born widow or divorcée who had lost her British nationality through marriage could reacquire that status without meeting residence requirements after the dissolution or termination of her marriage.
A woman who married a foreigner could regain her British nationality if her husband naturalised as a British subject; she would then be automatically granted her husband's new nationality. New Zealand women who married Chinese men were severely affected by the coverture regulations, due to the naturalisation prohibition on all Chinese during this period. Any woman in such a marriage would have had no path to British nationality until her husband's death or divorce.
By the end of the First World War, the Dominions had exercised increasing levels of autonomy in managing their own affairs and each by then had developed a distinct national identity. Britain formally recognised this at the 1926 Imperial Conference, jointly issuing the Balfour Declaration with all the Dominion heads of government, which stated that the United Kingdom and Dominions were autonomous and equal to each other within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Full legislative independence was granted to the Dominions with passage of the Statute of Westminster 1931.
Women's rights groups throughout the Empire pressured the imperial government during this time to amend nationality regulations that tied a married woman's status to that of her husband. Because the British government could no longer enforce legislative supremacy over the Dominions after 1931 and wanted to maintain a strong constitutional link to them through the common nationality code, it was unwilling to make major changes without unanimous agreement among the Dominions on this issue, which it did not have. Imperial legal uniformity was nevertheless eroded during the 1930s; New Zealand and Australia amended their laws in 1935 and 1936 to allow women denaturalised by marriage to retain their rights as British subjects, and Ireland changed its regulations in 1935 to cause no change to a woman's nationality after her marriage.
### Changing relationship with Britain
Diverging developments in Dominion nationality laws, as well as growing assertions of local national identity separate from that of Britain and the Empire, culminated with the creation of Canadian citizenship in 1946, unilaterally breaking the system of a common imperial nationality. Combined with the approaching independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, comprehensive nationality law reform was necessary at this point to address ideas that were incompatible with the previous system. The Dominion governments agreed on the principle of equal standing for women in a reformed nationality system at the 1946 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference and New Zealand amended its law to grant equal nationality rights in that same year.
New Zealand enacted the British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act 1948 to create its own citizenship, which came into force at the same time as the British Nationality Act 1948 throughout the Empire. All British subjects who were born, naturalised, or resident for at least 12 months in New Zealand automatically acquired New Zealand citizenship on 1 January 1949. British subjects born to a father who himself was born or naturalised in New Zealand and British subject women who were married to someone qualifying as a New Zealand citizen also automatically acquired citizenship on that date. Cook Islanders, Niueans, Tokelauans, and British subjects born in Western Samoa became New Zealand citizens automatically as well.
The 1948 Act redefined the term British subject as any citizen of New Zealand or another Commonwealth country. Commonwealth citizen is defined in this Act to have the same meaning. British subject/Commonwealth citizen status co-existed with the citizenships of each Commonwealth country. Irish citizens were treated as if they were British subjects, despite Ireland's exit from the Commonwealth in 1949. All Commonwealth and Irish citizens were eligible to become New Zealand citizens by registration, rather than naturalisation, after residing in New Zealand for at least three years. Commonwealth and Irish women who were married to New Zealand citizens were eligible to acquire citizenship by registration with no further requirements. Foreign wives and minor children of male New Zealand citizens were allowed to register as citizens at the discretion of the Minister of Internal Affairs. All other foreign nationals could acquire citizenship by naturalisation after at least five years of residence.
All British subjects under the reformed system initially held an automatic right to settle in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Non-white immigration into the UK was systemically discouraged, but strong economic conditions in Britain following the Second World War attracted an unprecedented wave of colonial migration. In response, the British Parliament imposed immigration controls on any subjects originating from outside the UK and Ireland with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Ireland had continued to allow all British subjects free movement despite independence in 1922 as part of the Common Travel Area arrangement, but moved to mirror Britain's restriction in 1962 by limiting this ability only to people born on the islands of Great Britain or Ireland. Britain somewhat relaxed these measures in 1971 for patrials, subjects whose parents or grandparents were born in the United Kingdom, which gave effective preferential treatment to white Commonwealth citizens.
As a sign of New Zealand's changing relationship with Britain, New Zealand passports were no longer labelled with the phrase "British passport" beginning in 1964 and stopped listing national status as "British subject and New Zealand citizen" in 1974. Voting rights were extended to all individuals permanently resident in the country for at least one year in 1975. Prior to that year, British subject status was required to participate in elections. Political candidates of partial Māori or non-Māori backgrounds were permitted to stand for election in Māori electorates beginning in 1967 and all Māori voters, irrespective of the degree of their ancestry, could participate in either Māori or general electorates from 1975.
### Transition to national citizenship
By the 1970s and 1980s, most colonies of the British Empire had become independent and remaining ties to the United Kingdom had been significantly weakened. New Zealand made further reforms to its nationality law in 1977 that abolished the preferences that were afforded to citizens from other Commonwealth countries and allowed citizenship to be transferrable by descent to children through mothers as well as fathers. Foreign nationals becoming New Zealand citizens are no longer naturalised, but receive "citizenship by grant". Commonwealth and Irish citizens remain technically defined in New Zealand law as non-foreign, but there are no benefits provided to either group. The UK itself updated its nationality law to reflect the more modest boundaries of its remaining territory and possessions with the British Nationality Act 1981, which redefined British subject to no longer also mean Commonwealth citizen. New Zealand citizens continue to be Commonwealth citizens and are still eligible to vote and stand for public office in the UK.
Applicants who successfully apply for citizenship are required to take an oath or affirmation of citizenship pledging their loyalty to the New Zealand monarch, who is the same person as the British sovereign. Although there have been formal reviews of the oath and attempts to change it to mention allegiance to the country or people of New Zealand instead of (or in addition to) the monarch, the oath remains unchanged. Following a general trend in other common law jurisdictions, New Zealand ended unrestricted birthright citizenship in 2005. Children born in New Zealand beginning in 2006 are only granted citizenship by birth if at least one parent is a citizen or otherwise have permission to remain in New Zealand indefinitely.
#### Nationality arrangements for former territories
##### Samoa
Western Samoa became independent in 1962. Legislation in the 1920s had allowed Samoans to become British subjects if they chose to but left the status of those who had not completed the formal naturalisation process unclear. Subsequent New Zealand legislation after Samoan independence caused a significant number of Samoans already living in New Zealand to become illegal immigrants. In 1982, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled that all Western Samoans born between 1928 and 1948 were British subjects and automatically became New Zealand citizens in 1949. This decision would have granted New Zealand citizenship for an estimated 100,000 Samoans, out of a total population of 160,000 at the time.
Faced with the prospect of a potential brain drain if large numbers of its people exercised their newfound dual citizenship rights, Western Samoa signed the Protocol to the Treaty of Friendship with New Zealand on 21 August 1982. This treaty, and the subsequent Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982, effectively nullified the Privy Council ruling. This Act affirmed citizenship for Samoans who were already present in New Zealand before 15 September 1982, but required that those who enter the country after that date must first become permanent residents before acquiring citizenship.
In early August 2023, Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono introduced a member's bill called the "Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill." This proposed bill seeks to restore the right to New Zealand citizenship for people from Western Samoa who were born in the period between 1924 and 1949.
##### Cook Islands and Niue
The Cook Islands became a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand in 1965, and Niue gained independence under largely the same terms in 1974. New Zealand retained responsibility for defence and foreign affairs for the two nations and residents of both states remain New Zealand citizens.
## Acquisition and loss of citizenship
### Entitlement by birth, descent, or adoption
Nationality regulations apply to the entire Realm of New Zealand, which includes New Zealand itself, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, and the Ross Dependency. New Zealand airspace, its internal and territorial waters, and New Zealand-registered ships and aircraft are treated as part of the Realm for nationality purposes.
All persons born within the Realm before 2006 automatically received citizenship at birth regardless of the nationalities of their parents. Individuals born in the Realm from that year on receive New Zealand citizenship at birth if at least one parent is a New Zealand citizen or otherwise entitled to be in New Zealand indefinitely. Children born overseas are New Zealand citizens by descent if either parent is a citizen otherwise than by descent. Adopted children are treated as if they were naturally born to the adopting parents at the time of adoption.
### Voluntary acquisition
Foreigners over the age of 16 may become New Zealand citizens by grant after residing in the Realm for more than five years while possessing indefinite permission to remain. This usually means holding New Zealand permanent residency, but Australian citizens and permanent residents also have an indefinite permission to remain. Permanent residents of the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau meet this requirement as well. Applicants must demonstrate proficiency in the English language and be physically present in the country for at least 1,350 days during that five-year period and at least 240 days in each of those five years. Under exceptional circumstances, the physical presence requirement may be reduced to 450 days in a 20-month period. Candidates who are overseas on Crown service or accompanying New Zealand citizen spouses overseas on Crown service are treated as if they are present in New Zealand during that period of service. Successful applicants aged 14 and older are required to take an oath or affirmation of citizenship in which they pledge loyalty to the New Zealand monarch; these are usually administered by local councils at citizenship ceremonies that take place three to five months after approval.
There is no effective differentiation or hierarchy between the different types of citizenship that can be obtained in New Zealand. The only major disadvantage applies to citizens by descent, who cannot pass citizenship to their children born abroad. These individuals may apply to become citizens by grant after fulfilling the five-year residence and physical presence requirement. Otherwise, they may apply for their children born overseas to receive citizenship by grant, at the discretion of the Minister of Internal Affairs. An average of 28,000 people per year were granted citizenship through the 2010s. As of the 2018 census, about 1.27 million New Zealand citizens usually resident in the country were born overseas.
Samoan citizens who enter New Zealand after 14 September 1982 and have indefinite permission to remain in the country are entitled to become New Zealand citizens by grant without a minimum residence requirement. Samoans who were already living in New Zealand on that date automatically became New Zealand citizens by grant. Children born in Samoa to Tokelauan mothers seeking medical attention there are treated as if they are born in Tokelau and are New Zealand citizens at birth.
### Relinquishment and deprivation
New Zealand citizenship can be relinquished by making a declaration of renunciation, provided that the declarant already possesses another nationality. Renunciation may be denied if the applicant currently lives in New Zealand or the country is at war with another country. Citizenship may be involuntarily deprived from individuals who fraudulently acquired it, or from those who possess another nationality and willfully acted against the national interest.
## See also
- Visa policy of New Zealand
- Visa requirements for New Zealand citizens
|
59,784,811 |
Inter-Allied Women's Conference
| 1,167,795,773 |
1919 conference convened to introduce women's issues to the peace process at the end of World War I
|
[
"1919 conferences",
"1919 in Paris",
"Allies of World War I",
"Opposition to World War I",
"Women in Paris",
"Women's conferences",
"Women's suffrage"
] |
The Inter-Allied Women's Conference (also known as the Suffragist Conference of the Allied Countries and the United States) opened in Paris on 10 February 1919. It was convened parallel to the Paris Peace Conference to introduce women's issues to the peace process after the First World War. Leaders in the international women's suffrage movement had been denied the opportunity to participate in the official proceedings several times before being allowed to make a presentation before the Commission on International Labour Legislation. On 10 April, women were finally allowed to present a resolution to the League of Nations Commission. It covered the trafficking and sale of women and children, their political and suffrage status, and the transformation of education to include the human rights of all persons in each nation.
Though the women involved failed to achieve many of their aims, their efforts marked the first time that women were allowed to participate formally in an international treaty negotiation. They were successful in gaining the right for women to serve in the League of Nations in all capacities, whether as staff or delegates; and in gaining adoption of their provisions for humane labour conditions and the prevention of trafficking. The fact that the women were allowed to participate in the formal peace conference validated women's ability to take part in international policy-making and globalised the discussion of human rights.
## Background
The consequences of the First World War were profound: four empires fell; numerous countries were created or regained independence; and significant changes were made to the political, cultural, economic, and social climate of the world. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the initial forum for establishing the terms of peace; it was by design a global conference with representation from 33 nations, concerned with a broad mandate extending to the establishment of a new international community based on moral and legal principles. As such, it called on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to assist in its work. It was the focus of NGO and lobby groups eager to advance their agendas by vigorous advocacy.
Initially, the Peace Conference organisers had planned to draw up the treaties based on the plenary sessions. The need for restoring stability, secrecy, and speedy progress, however, prevented the public sessions from doing so. Instead, the meetings of the Supreme Council, headed by the Prime Minister and foreign minister of each of the Principal Powers—United Kingdom (UK), France, Italy, Japan, and the US—served as the negotiation sessions for delegates in attendance. Fifty-two separate commissions, and numerous committees, made up of diplomats, policy experts, and other specialists, framed the articles of the various treaties and presented them as recommendations to the Supreme Council. Among the varied commissions were the Commission on Labour Questions, and the League of Nations Commission, which would eventually agree to meet with the women's delegates.
As world leaders gathered for negotiations to draft peace terms after the armistices, Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger—vice-president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and president of the auxiliary organisation, the French Union for Women's Suffrage—wrote a letter dated 18 January 1919 to the US President, Woodrow Wilson, urging him to allow women to participate in the discussions that would inform the treaty negotiations and policy making. Concerned with war crimes committed against women and the lack of any formal outlet for women's political agency, French suffragists wrote to Wilson again on 25 January. They stressed that because some women had fought alongside men, and many women had provided support for men in the war, women's issues should be addressed at the conference. Though Wilson acknowledged their participation and sacrifices, he refused to grant women an official role in the peace process, arguing that their concerns were outside the scope of discussions and that conference delegates were not in a position to tell governments how to manage their internal affairs.
A delegation of 80 French women led by Valentine Thomson, editor of La Vie Feminine and daughter of former cabinet minister Gaston Thomson, met with President Wilson on 1 February at Villa Murat to press for their inclusion in the deliberations of the peace conference. His response was similar to his previous stance that employment issues might be discussed, but women's civil and political rights were domestic issues. During the Labour and Socialist International Conference held in Berne, Switzerland, between 3 and 8 February, women participants from the International Women's Committee of Permanent Peace had held a special meeting organised by Rosika Schwimmer, the Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland and founder of the Hungarian Feminist Association. The delegates at the Berne conference resolved that they would support a democratically formed League of Nations and women's participation in the Paris Peace Conference.
In response, women from the French Union for Women's Suffrage and the National Council of French Women, acting under the leadership of de Witt-Schlumberger, invited international colleagues to meet in Paris in a parallel conference scheduled to open on 10 February. They sent invitations to organisations involved in the suffrage movement in all Allied nations, asking for delegates to participate in a women's conference to present their views and concerns to the delegates of the "official" conference. In parallel, the French feminists worked to persuade the male delegates to support the women's involvement, as they were convinced that international co-operation and co-ordination were required to solve domestic socio-economic problems. The women who responded to the call to participate as delegates or to bring information about conditions in their countries included representatives from France, Italy, the UK, and the US, as well as Armenia, Belgium, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, and South Africa.
## Actions
### February
The Paris Peace Conference negotiations took place from January to May 1919, while the women's conference convened from mid-February to mid-April. On 10 February, when the women's conference opened, Thomson and Louise Compain, a writer and member of the French Union for Women's Suffrage, began serving as editors and translators to the women's conference secretary, Suzanne Grinberg, a lawyer, vice-president of the Association du Jeune Barreau in Paris, and secretary of the central committee of the French Union for Women's Suffrage. Constance Drexel, a German-American newspaper reporter, wrote daily dispatches for the Chicago Tribune Foreign News Service and collaborated with the women delegates throughout the conference.
On 11 February, a delegation led by chair Millicent Fawcett, a leader in the British suffrage movement and president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, called on Wilson. The delegation included Zabel Yesayan of Armenia, who brought a report about women in Armenia and Macedonia being captured during the war and detained in harems; Margherita Ancona, president of the National Pro Suffrage Federation for Italy; and Nina Boyle (Union of South Africa), a member of the Women's Freedom League and a journalist. Belgian delegates included Jane Brigode, president of the Belgian Federation for Suffrage and Marie Parent, president of the Belgian National Council of Women and League for Rights of Women. Also present were British delegates Ray Strachey, a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and Rosamond Smith. The French women who participated in the delegation were de Witt-Schlumberger; Cécile Brunschvicg, a founder of the French Union for Women's Suffrage and its first general secretary; and Marguerite Pichon-Landry, chair of the legislation section of the National Council of French Women. The delegates from the US were Katharine Bement Davis, head of the US government's Women's Department of Social Hygiene; Florence Jaffray Harriman, chair of the Women's Committee of the Democratic Party; and Juliet Barrett Rublee, a member of the National Birth Control League and the Cornish [New Hampshire] Equal Suffrage League. The delegation asked if a Women's Commission could be included in the conference to address the concerns of women and children. At the meeting Wilson suggested, instead, that the male diplomats from the peace conference form a Women's Commission to which the Inter-Allied Women's Conference could serve as advisers.
The following day, an almost identical delegation to that which had met with Wilson, met with French President Raymond Poincaré and his wife, Henriette, at the Élysée Palace. It included de Witt-Schlumberger, Ruth Atkinson, president of the Nelson, New Zealand branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and delegates from Belgium, France, Italy, the UK, and possibly Australia. Also present were three women from the US: Harriman, Rublee, and Harriet Taylor, head of the YMCA in France. On 13 February, Wilson took the request to the Council of Ten—Arthur Balfour (UK), Georges Clemenceau (France), Robert Lansing (US), Baron Nobuaki Makino (Japan), Viscount Alfred Milner (UK), Vittorio Orlando (Italy), Stephen Pichon (France), Sidney Sonnino (Italy), and Wilson—along with the Maharaja of Bikaner Ganga Singh (India) and other dignitaries. Once again the women's proposal was dismissed, with Prime Minister Clemenceau recommending that they be referred to work with the Commission on Labour.
Their dismissal did not stop the women from attempting to gain support from the peace conference delegates. They met with Jules Cambon, Paul Hymans and Poincaré, all of whom agreed that the women's input on such issues as deportations from Armenia, Belgium, Greece, France, Poland, and Serbia and the sale of women in Greece and the Ottoman Empire were pertinent issues on which a women's commission might gather data. At the end of February, some of the women who had come from Britain returned home and were replaced in early March by Margery Corbett Ashby, a member of the executive board of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and Margery Fry, a penal reformer, who at one time was president of the Birmingham branch of the National Union of Women Workers and a member of the Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage. Also by the end of February, Graziella Sonnino Carpi of the National Women's Union (Unione femminile nazionale [it]) of Milan and Eva Mitzhouma of Poland had joined the women's conference.
### March
The women's conference delegates met with peace conference delegates from 16 countries, hoping to generate support at least for allowing women to sit on committees likely to deal with issues concerning women and children. A second delegation of women, led by de Witt-Schlumberger, met with the Council of Ten, without Wilson present, on 11 March. The Peace Conference delegates who were present agreed to allow the women an audience with the Commission on International Labour Legislation and the League of Nations Commission. While an audience was far less than the women wanted, allowing them formal participation in an international treaty negotiation was unprecedented.
On 18 March, suffragists testified before the Labour Commission, giving an overview of women's working conditions. In addition to Ashby (UK), several of the delegates were from France. These included Brunschvicg; Eugénie Beeckmans, a seamstress and member of the French Confederation of Christian Workers (Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens); Georgette Bouillot, a representative of the workers of the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail); Jeanne Bouvier, co-founder of the French Office for Work at Home, (Office français du travail à domicile) and trade unionist; Gabrielle Duchêne, co-founder of the Office français du travail à domicile, pacifist, and member of the National Council of French Women; and Maria Vérone, a lawyer, journalist, and general secretary of the French League for Women's Rights (Ligue française pour le droit des femmes). Delegates from other countries included Harriman (US); Marie d'Amalio-Tivoli, wife of Peace Conference delegate Mariano D'Amelio [it] and Louise van den Plas (Belgium), founder of Christian Feminism of Belgium (Féminisme chrétien de Belgique).
The resolutions the women's conference delegates presented to the chair of the Labour Commission, Samuel Gompers, covered a variety of issues including the health hazards of working conditions. There were recommendations on limiting hours worked per day and per week, on establishing a fair minimum wage based upon a cost of living analysis, and on equal pay for equal work; as well as on regulations for child labour, maternity pay, and technical trade education. They also asked for each nation to establish a formal body of women members to analyse and advise on legislative policy liable to impact women. Two trade unionists from the US, Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman, arrived in Paris too late to participate in the presentation to the Labour Commission. Instead, they met with Wilson, to urge that women be allowed to participate in global governance structures. Though he made promises to include women, they were to be unfulfilled. By the end of March, the women had persuaded the delegates to introduce a measure specifying that women could serve in any office of the League of Nations. The resolution was presented by Lord Robert Cecil and received unanimous approval on 28 March from the League of Nations Commission.
### April
Lady Aberdeen, president of the International Council of Women arrived at the conference after the delegates had met with the Labour Commission to assist with preparations for the presentation to the League of Nations Commission. She called together a group of women to prepare a resolution to be read to the delegates. The documents they prepared focused on three key areas: civil status, political status, and human rights. Arguing that the civil status of women and children was inadequately addressed in international law, the women's conference delegates expressed concern over civil codes which allowed child marriages; condoned prostituting, trafficking, and the sale of women and children; and treated women as the chattels of their husbands and fathers. They called for international law to provide protections in these areas, and proposed an institution be established to protect public health and advise the public on hygiene and disease. The resolution pointed out that while women suffered in time of war, they also undertook jobs which soldiers, who were away fighting, could not do and supported efforts to secure the safety and welfare of their countries. They asked for suffrage to be granted to women, enabling them to participate in the process of governance. The women's final point was that provisions should be made to ensure that internationally, basic education provided training on civilisation and the obligations of citizenship, with a focus on respecting the humanity, cultures, and human rights of all citizens of each nation.
Seventeen of the delegates from the Inter-Allied Women's Conference participated on 10 April in a presentation to the League of Nations Commission. Among them were Lady Aberdeen, de Witt-Schlumberger, Ashby, Brunschvicg, Fry, Grinberg, Rublee, d'Amalio-Tivoli, and Vérone. Other French women in the delegation included Gabrielle Alphen-Salvador of the French Union for Women's Suffrage, who was on the International Women's Council's steering committee; Nicole Girard-Mangin, a military physician and campaigner for the French Union for Women's Suffrage; Marie-Louise Puech, a secretary of the French Union for Women's Suffrage; Avril de Sainte-Croix, a journalist and secretary of the National Council of French Women; and Julie Siegfried, president of the National Council of French Women. The rest of the delegation included Elisa Brătianu, wife of the Prime Minister of Romania Ion I. C. Brătianu; Fannie Fern Andrews, a Canadian-American teacher, pacifist, and member of the Woman's Peace Party, who founded the American School Peace League; and Alice Schiavoni, a member of the National Council of Italian Women (Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane). The delegates insisted women should be given equal access to all offices, committees, and bodies of the League, and that governments which failed to grant equality to women should be barred from membership. They argued that if people were allowed to have self-determination, women should have equal opportunity and the legal right to make their own life choices. The demands for suffrage and recognition of the civil, political, and human rights of women were unsuccessful. However, Article 7 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was incorporated into the Versailles Treaty, admitted women to all organisational positions of the League.
## Aftermath
The delegates of the official peace conference refused to see women's citizenship and political agency as an international concern or one of human rights. Instead, especially in regard to married women, the delegates maintained that each nation should have the ability to determine its own citizenship requirements. The Inter-Allied Women's Conference suggestions on education, labour, and nationality were deemed "far too radical" for implementation and most of them were dismissed without much consideration. The Covenant of the League of Nations did contain provisions "that the member states should promote humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children, as well as prevent traffic in women and children".
Many feminists who had initially supported the creation of the League of Nations were disillusioned by the final terms of the Treaty of Versailles. At the Zürich Peace Conference, hosted by the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace from 17 to 19 May 1919, the delegates vilified the Treaty for both its punitive measures and its lack of provisions to condemn violence. They also expressed disdain for the exclusion of women from civil and political participation. Representatives of the Women for Permanent Peace (renamed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at the Zürich conference) incorporated many of the ideals of the Inter-Allied Women's Conference in the "Woman's Charter", which they eventually adopted. The International Labour Organisation, when it was founded as an agency of the League of Nations, adopted the women's idea of equal pay for equal work in its constitutional preamble. Its governing documents also specified a woman delegate should be appointed to attend the International Labour Conference, whenever issues concerning women were to be discussed.
Women labour leaders, also dissatisfied with the outcome of the negotiations, were intent on participating in the November International Labour Conference scheduled to convene in Washington, D.C. Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the Women's Trade Union League, was convinced that women would again be barred from official proceedings. To prevent such an outcome, she spearheaded the International Congress of Working Women, which convened on 29 October to prepare an agenda of significant points. During the ten days of the conference, the women adopted into their resolution many of the labour standards and workers' rights guarantees that the women's conference delegates had proposed. The subsequent attendance and authoritative speeches made by many of the delegates from the Congress of Working Women at the International Labour Conference resulted in the passage of international labour standards for maternity leave, on working hours, and for child labour (though these were below those proposed by the women concerned).
## Legacy
During the Second World War, French feminist archives, along with others from Belgium, Liechtenstein, and the Netherlands, including the International Archives for the Women's Movement, were looted by the Nazis. As the Soviet forces advanced on the territories held by Nazi Germany, they confiscated the records and took them to Moscow where they were housed in the KGB's secret Osobyi Archive [de] (Russian: Особый архив). The documents were discovered in the early 1990s; glasnost and perestroika policy reforms eventually led to their repatriation to their respective countries of origin. The French archival records were delivered in two convoys in February and November 2000 and catalogued by the Archives Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was determined by the heirs of the feminists, whose works had been stolen, that a public archive would be beneficial and the Association des archives féministes (Feminist Archives Association) was founded to create the Archives du Féminisme at the University of Angers. After two years of sorting and cataloguing the materials, the archive opened, allowing scholars to begin accessing and assessing the documents.
Because the initial meetings of women with the Peace Conference delegates and the Council of Ten were not part of the official records of the conference, and the French archives had been effectively lost, scholarship on the Inter-Allied Women's Conference did not emerge until the 21st century. These new studies into the Conference have shown that women were active participants in the peace process and desired to assume public roles in shaping the international policies at the end of the First World War. The historian Glenda Sluga, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, states that the participants saw "female self-determination as the corollary of the democratisation of nations". In 2019, the 133rd American Historical Association meeting featured presentations by the historians Mona L. Siegel of California State University and Dorothy Sue Cobble of Rutgers University reassessing the import of the Inter-Allied Women's Conference to the peace process in 1919. Siegel concluded that though the women's conference delegates did not achieve many of their aims, they legitimised women's participation in international policy making and globalised the discussion of human rights, successes which have continued to the present day.
## Conference participants
|
25,147,300 |
Noronha skink
| 1,145,125,667 |
Species of skink
|
[
"Endemic fauna of Brazil",
"Fernando de Noronha",
"Reptiles described in 1945",
"Reptiles of Brazil",
"Taxa named by Karl Patterson Schmidt",
"Trachylepis"
] |
The Noronha skink (Trachylepis atlantica) is a species of skink from the island of Fernando de Noronha off northeastern Brazil. It is covered with dark and light spots on the upperparts and is usually about 7 to 10 cm (3 to 4 in) in length. The tail is long and muscular, but breaks off easily. Very common throughout Fernando de Noronha, it is an opportunistic feeder, eating both insects and plant material, including nectar from the Erythrina velutina tree, as well as other material ranging from cookie crumbs to eggs of its own species. Introduced predators such as feral cats prey on it and several parasitic worms infect it.
Perhaps seen by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503, it was first formally described in 1839. Its subsequent taxonomic history has been complex, riddled with confusion with Trachylepis maculata and other species, homonyms, and other problems. The species is classified in the otherwise mostly African genus Trachylepis and is thought to have reached its island from Africa by rafting. The enigmatic Trachylepis tschudii, supposedly from Peru, may well be the same species.
## Discovery and taxonomy
In an early account of what may be Fernando de Noronha, purportedly based on a voyage by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503, the island was said to be inhabited by "lizards with two tails", which is thought be a reference to the Noronha skink. The tail is long and fragile, and it breaks easily, like that of many skinks and other lizards, following which it may regenerate. However, when it does not completely break off, a new tail may nevertheless grow out of the broken part, so that the tail appears forked.
### 19th century
The species was first formally described by John Edward Gray in 1839, based on two specimens collected by HMS Chanticleer before 1838. He introduced the names Tiliqua punctata, for the Noronha skink, and Tiliqua maculata, for a species from Guyana, among many others. Six years later, he transferred both to the genus Euprepis. In 1887, George Boulenger placed both in the genus Mabuya (misspelled "Mabuia") and considered them identical, using the name "Mabuia punctata" for the species, which was said to occur both on Fernando de Noronha and in Guyana. He also included Mabouya punctatissima O'Shaughnessy, 1874, purportedly from South Africa, as a synonym. In 1874, A.W.E. O'Shaughnessy described the new species Mabouya punctatissima on the basis of a specimen, purchased from a Mr. Parzudaki, which had been labeled as coming from the Cape of Good Hope, a location O'Shaughnessy considered "very doubtful". G.A. Boulenger, in 1887 synonymized it under Mabuia punctata (the Noronha skink) without comment, a position followed by H. Travassos with some doubt. The latter wrote that the description of punctatissima suggested to him that punctatissima and the Noronha skink are morphologically different, but that Boulenger's examination of the type and the uncertainty of the type locality inclined him to favor the synonymy. In 2002, P. Mausfeld and D. Vrcibradic re-examined the holotype, which is the only known specimen. It is similar to T. atlantica, but larger, and lacks well-developed keels on its dorsal scales. Therefore, they suggested that it was not the same as T. atlantica and that its original locality may have been correct. Although it may represent a valid species of southern African Trachylepis, the name Trachylepis punctatissima is preoccupied by Euprepes punctatissimus A. Smith, 1849, also currently placed in Trachylepis.
### 20th century
In 1900, L.G. Andersson claimed that Gray's name punctata was preoccupied by Lacerta punctata Linnaeus, 1758, which he identified as Mabuya homalocephala. He therefore replaced the name punctata with its junior synonym maculata, using the name Mabuya maculata for the skink of Fernando de Noronha. Linnaeus's Lacerta punctata in fact refers to the Asian species Lygosoma punctatum, not to Mabuya homalocephala, but Gray's name punctata remains invalid regardless. In 1931, C.E. and M.D. Burt resurrected the name Mabuya punctata (now spelled correctly) for the Noronha skink, noting that it was "apparently a very distinct species", but did not mention maculata, and in 1935, E.R. Dunn disputed Boulenger's conclusion as to the synonymy of punctata and maculata and, in apparent ignorance of Andersson's work, restored the name Mabuya punctata for the Noronha skink. He wrote that the Noronha skink was very distinct from other American Mabuya and more similar in some respects to African species.
Karl Patterson Schmidt, in 1945, agreed with Dunn's conclusion that maculata and punctata of Gray were not the same, but he noted Andersson's point that punctata was preoccupied and therefore introduced the new name Mabuya atlantica to replace punctata. The next year, H. Travassos, disagreeing with Dunn and unaware of Andersson's and Schmidt's contributions, considered both of Gray's names to be synonymous and restored the name Mabuya punctata for the Noronha skink. He also considered Mabouya punctatissima and Trachylepis (Xystrolepis) punctata Tschudi, 1845, described from Peru, as synonyms of this species. In 1948, he acknowledged the preoccupation of punctata noted by Andersson and accordingly retired Mabuya punctata in favor of Mabuya maculata, as Andersson had done. The name Mabuya maculata remained in general usage for the Noronha skink in subsequent decades, though some have used Mabuya punctata, "not ... aware of the last nomenclatural changes."
### 21st century
In 2002, P. Mausfeld and D. Vrcibradic published a note on the nomenclature of the Noronha skink informed by a re-examination of Gray's original type specimens; despite extensive attempts to correctly name the species, they were apparently the first to do so since Boulenger in 1887. Based on differences in the number of scales, subdigital lamellae (lamellae on the lower sides of the digits), and keels (longitudinal ridges) on the dorsal scales (located on the upperparts), as well as the separation of the parietal scales (on the head behind the eyes) in maculata, they concluded that the two were not, after all, identical, and that Schmidt's name Mabuya atlantica should therefore be used. Mausfeld and Vrcibradic considered Mabouya punctatissima to represent a different species on the basis of morphological differences, but were unable to resolve the status of Trachylepis (Xystrolepis) punctata.
In the same year, Mausfeld and others conducted a molecular phylogenetic study on the Noronha skink, using the mitochondrial 12S and 16S rRNA genes, and showed that the species is more closely related to African than to South American Mabuya species, as previously suggested on the basis of morphological similarities. They split the old genus Mabuya into four genera for geographically discrete clades, including Euprepis for the African–Noronha clade, thus renaming the Noronha species to Euprepis atlanticus. In 2003, A.M. Bauer found that the name Euprepis had been incorrectly applied to this clade and that Trachylepis was correct instead, so that the Noronha skink is currently referred to as Trachylepis atlantica. Additional molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2003 and 2006 confirmed the relationship between the Noronha skink and African Trachylepis.
In 2009, Miralles and others reviewed the taxon maculata and concluded that the animal now known as Trachylepis maculata also belongs in the African clade, but they were unable to determine whether or not it is indigenous to Guyana. They also reviewed Trachylepis (Xystrolepis) punctata and replaced it with Trachylepis tschudii because the older name was preoccupied by Linnaeus's and Gray's punctata. Although they were unable to resolve the identity of T. tschudii, which is still known from a single specimen, they believed that it is most likely the same species as the Noronha skink; it may be either a representative of an undiscovered Amazonian population of the latter or simply a mislabeled animal from Fernando de Noronha.
## Description
The Noronha skink is covered with light and dark spots above, but there is substantial variation in the precise colors. There are no longitudinal stripes. The scales on the underparts are yellowish or grayish. The eyelids are white to yellow. It has a small head with small nostrils, which are placed far to the front at the sides of the head. The mouth contains small and conical teeth and a thin but well-developed tongue. The eyes are small and placed laterally and contain dark, rounded irises. There are three to five well-developed auricular lobules (small projections) in front of the ears; these lobules are absent in true Mabuya. The hindlimbs are longer and stronger than the forelimbs, which are small. The tail is longer than the body and is muscular but very brittle. It is nearly cylindrical in form and tapers towards the end.
In reptiles, features of the scales are important in distinguishing among species and groups of species. In the Noronha skink, the supranasal scales (located above the nose) are in contact, as are the prefrontal scales (behind the nose) in most individuals. The two frontoparietal scales (above and slightly behind the eyes) are not fused. Unlike in T. maculata, the parietal scales (behind the frontoparietals) are in contact with each other. There are four supraocular scales (above the eyes) in almost all specimens and five supraciliary scales (immediately above the eyes, below the supraoculars). The dorsal scales (on the upperparts) have three keels, two fewer than in T. maculata. There are 34 to 40 (mode 38) midbody scales (counted around the body midway between the fore- and hindlimbs), 58 to 69 (mode 63–64) dorsal, and 66 to 78 (mode 70) ventral scales (on the underparts). Mabuya species and T. maculata generally have fewer midbody scales (up to 34). There are 21 to 29 subdigital lamellae under the fourth toe, more than in T. maculata, which has 18. The Noronha skink has 26 presacral vertebrae (located before the sacrum), similar to most Trachylepis, but unlike American Mabuya, which have at least 28.
Although there is substantial variation in measurements within the species, no discrete groups can be detected and it is not possible to separate the sexes unambiguously using measurements alone. Among 15 male and 21 female T. atlantica collected in 2006, snout to vent length was 80.6 to 103.1 mm (3.17 to 4.06 in), averaging 95.3 mm (3.75 in), in males and 65.3 to 88.1 mm (2.57 to 3.47 in), averaging 78.3 mm (3.08 in), in females and body mass was 10.2 to 26.0 g (0.36 to 0.92 oz), averaging 19.0 g (0.67 oz), in males and 6.0 to 15.0 g (0.21 to 0.53 oz), averaging 10.0 g (0.35 oz), in females. Males are significantly larger than females. In 100 specimens collected in 1876, head length was 12.0 to 18.9 mm (0.47 to 0.74 in), averaging 14.8 mm (0.58 in); head width was 7 to 14.4 mm (0.28 to 0.57 in), averaging 9 mm (0.35 in), and tail length was 93 to 170 mm (3.7 to 6.7 in), averaging 117 mm.
## Ecology and behavior
The Noronha skink is very abundant throughout Fernando de Noronha, even occurring commonly in houses, and also occurs on the smaller islands that surround the main island of the archipelago. Its abundance may be a result of the absence of ecologically similar competitors. Apart from T. atlantica, the reptile fauna of Fernando de Noronha consists of the indigenous amphisbaenian Amphisbaena ridleyi and two introduced lizards, the gecko Hemidactylus mabouia and the tegu Tupinambis merianae.
The species is found in several microhabitats, but most often on rocks. Although predominantly ground-dwelling, it is a good climber. Nothing is known about its reproduction except that skinks studied in late October and early November, during the dry season, showed little evidence of reproductive activity. The Noronha skink is oviparous (egg-laying), like many Trachylepis, but unlike Mabuya, which are all viviparous (giving live birth).
Trachylepis atlantica is active during the day. Its body temperature averages 32 °C (90 °F), a few degrees higher than the environment temperature. During the day, body temperature peaks at up to 38 °C (100 °F) around midday and is lower earlier and later. In the early morning, the lizard may bask in the sun. During foraging, it spends about 28.4% of its time moving on average, a relatively high value for Trachylepis.
A geologist who visited the island in 1876 noted that the skink is curious and bold:
> While seated upon the bare rocks I have often observed these little animals watching me, apparently with as much curiosity as I watched them, turning their heads from side to side as if in an effort to be wise. If I kept quiet for a few minutes they would creep up to me and finally upon me; if I moved, they ran down the faces of the rocks, and turning, stuck their heads above the edges to watch me.
### Diet
The Noronha skink is an opportunistic omnivore and "thrives on anything edible". Analysis of stomach contents indicates that it mainly eats plant material, at least during the dry period, but it also feeds on insects, including larvae, termites (Isoptera), ants (Formicidae), and beetles (Coleoptera). Its prey is mostly mobile, rather than sedentary, which is consistent with the relatively high proportion of time it spends moving. Related skink species eat mostly insects, but island populations may often be more herbivorous. Animal prey averages 6.9 mm<sup>3</sup> in volume, less than in most other Trachylepis.
When the mulungu tree Erythrina velutina blooms during the dry season, Noronha skinks climb up to 12 m (39 ft) to reach the inflorescences of the tree and to eat the nectar by inserting their heads into the flowers. They probably use the nectar both for its sugar and water content. In this way, the skinks aid in pollinating the tree, as they acquire pollen on their scales and leave pollen on stigmas when visiting a flower. Pollination is rare behavior among lizards, but occurs most frequently in island species. Humans have introduced additional food sources to the island, including Acacia seeds, feces of the rock cavy (Kerodon rupestris), carrion flies, juvenile Hemidactylus mabouya, and even cookie crumbs given by tourists. The availability of these additional food sources may increase the abundance of the skink. In 1887, H. N. Ridley observed Noronha skinks eating banana skins and yolk from doves' eggs. Several cases of cannibalism have been reported, involving skinks eating eggs, juveniles, and the tail of an adult.
### Relationships with other species
The Noronha skink probably lacked predators before Fernando de Noronha was discovered by humans, but several species that arrived since do prey on it, most commonly the cat (Felis catus) and cattle egret (Bubulcus ibis). These may negatively affect skink abundance at some localities on the island. The Argentine black and white tegu lizard, Tupinambis merianae, and three introduced rodents, the house mouse (Mus musculus), brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) and black rat (Rattus rattus), have also been observed to eat Noronha skinks, but the rodents, particularly the house mouse, may have been scavenging on already dead skinks.
According to a 2006 study, the Noronha skink is infected by several parasitic worms, most frequently by the nematode Spinicauda spinicauda. Another nematode, Moaciria alvarengai, is much rarer. Other rare parasites include two trematodes—Mesocoelium monas and an undetermined species of Platynossomum—and an undetermined species of Oochoristica, a cestode. S. spinicauda is usually only found in teiid lizards; it may have entered the archipelago when Tupinambis merianae, a teiid, was introduced to the island in 1960. Among nematodes, previous studies in 1956 and 1957 had only reported M. alvarengai and Thelandros alvarengai from the skink; the presence of S. spinicauda could explain the rarity of M. alvarengai and absence of T. alvarengai in Noronha skinks observed in 2006.
## Origin
Phylogenetic analyses using a variety of mitochondrial and nuclear genes places the Noronha skink among the tropical African species of Trachylepis, a position also supported by morphological similarities. It may have arrived on its island on rafting vegetation from southwestern Africa via the Benguela Current and the South Equatorial Current, which passes Fernando de Noronha. This possibility was first suggested by Alfred Russel Wallace before 1888. Mausfeld and coworkers calculated that the journey from Africa to Fernando de Noronha would take 139 days. Because this period seemed too long for the skink to survive, they proposed that the Noronha skink instead arrived via Ascension Island, where a skink may have persisted into historical times.
The South American and Caribbean Mabuya skinks form a clade that appears to be derived from a separate colonization from Africa. Both transatlantic colonization events are believed to have occurred within the last 9 million years.
## Conservation status
The reptile is thought to be stable in terms of population trends and not under any threat of extinction. However, the climate is rapidly changing, so this could change at any point in time. Although environmental changes do not affect the species in particular, the density of the species is at risk of decreasing should the environment change drastically as well as if tourism trends or more invasive animals are introduced. Additionally, the urbanization of surrounding areas to the lizards habitat could be detrimental, therefore International Union for Conservation of Nature evaluated it as least concern.
|
62,799,266 |
The Minute Man
| 1,157,716,382 |
1874 sculpture by Daniel Chester French
|
[
"1874 sculptures",
"American Revolutionary War monuments and memorials",
"Bronze sculptures in Massachusetts",
"Farming in art",
"Granite sculptures in Massachusetts",
"Minute Man National Historical Park",
"Monuments and memorials in Massachusetts",
"Outdoor sculptures in Massachusetts",
"Sculptures by Daniel Chester French",
"Sculptures of men in Massachusetts",
"Statues in Massachusetts"
] |
The Minute Man is an 1874 sculpture by Daniel Chester French in Minute Man National Historical Park, Concord, Massachusetts. It was created between 1871 and 1874 after extensive research, and was originally intended to be made of stone. The medium was switched to bronze and it was cast from ten Civil War-era cannons appropriated by Congress.
The statue depicts a minuteman stepping away from his plow to join the patriot forces at the Battle of Concord, at the start of the American Revolutionary War. The young man has an overcoat thrown over his plow, and has a musket in his hand. Nineteenth-century art historians noticed that the pose resembles the pose of the Apollo Belvedere. Until the late twentieth century, it was assumed that the pose was transposed from the earlier statue. Based on Daniel Chester French's journals, modern art historians have shown that the Apollo Belvedere was only one of several statues that were used in the research for The Minute Man.
The statue was unveiled in 1875 for the centennial of the Battle of Concord. It received critical acclaim and continues to be praised by commentators. The statue has been a suffragette symbol and a symbol of the United States National Guard and its components, the Army National Guard, and the Air National Guard, and depicted on coins such as the 1925 Lexington–Concord Sesquicentennial half dollar and the 2000 Massachusetts state quarter.
## Background
Minutemen or Minute Companies were a part of the militia of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The name minutemen comes from the idea that they would be ready to fight with a minute's notice. The force was created in response to the Massachusetts militia's failure to respond to the Powder Alarm in September 1774. Unlike the general militia, which was made up of all able-bodied white men between 16 and 60, the two companies of minutemen were made up of young volunteers who were paid one shilling, eight pence for their time drilling three times a week. The other difference between the general militia and minutemen was how officers were appointed. In the general militia, officers were appointed by the governor as a political favor; officers of minutemen were elected by their peers. By February 1775, Concord, Massachusetts had 104 minutemen in two companies.
### Battles of Lexington and Concord
In 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress designated Concord as the stockpile for patriot cannons, gunpowder, and ammunition. In response to the growing stockpile of arms, British Army General Thomas Gage sent spies to Concord to survey the preparations. Based on the reports from spies and instructions from Secretary of State for America William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, Gage ordered a preemptive strike on Concord. At daybreak on April 19, 1775, six companies of grenadiers and light infantry under the command of major John Pitcairn met a group of 70 militiamen under the command of John Parker on the Lexington Common. The militiamen were alerted to the British advance by Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott who traveled from Boston. It is unknown who fired the first shot of the Battle of Lexington, but after less than 30 minutes of fighting, eight militiamen were killed and nine were wounded. After dispersing the patriots, Pitcairn moved his troops on to Concord.
Based on alerts from Prescott and reports from Lexington 150 minutemen from Concord and Lincoln mustered on the Concord Common under the command of James Barrett. After meeting the advancing British troops, the minutemen retreated to higher ground without firing a shot. Since the British troops had control of the town, they proceeded to search for and destroy the stockpiled supplies. The cannon, musket balls, and flour were all rendered unusable, but the gunpowder was removed before it could be seized. While the British were searching the town, the minutemen moved to the Old North Bridge and were reinforced by militiamen from other towns. At the bridge, 400 minutemen and militiamen repelled the British advance and forced them to retreat. Many of the minutemen who participated in the Battle of Concord went home after the British retreated from the bridge. However, minutemen from other towns skirmished with the British troops during their march back to Boston.
### 1836 Battle monument
In 1825, the Bunker Hill Monument Association donated \$500 () to Concord to build a monument to the Battle of Concord. The original plan was to place the monument "near the town pump" in Concord. Due to disagreements within the town, nothing was done with the money until Ezra Ripley donated land for the monument near the Old North Bridge in 1835. After the donation, the town had Solomon Willard design a simple 25-foot-tall (7.6-meter) granite obelisk to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Concord. The "Concord Hymn" was written by transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson for the dedication of the monument in 1836. At the ceremony, it was sung to the tune of "Old Hundred".
To the dislike of Emerson, the obelisk stands on the bank of the river where the British stood during battle. The Minute Man was created for the centennial celebration of the battle in 1875. Unlike the earlier monument, it was to be placed on the bank where the Massachusetts militia stood.
## Creation and unveiling
The monument committee for The Minute Man—which consisted of George M. Brooks, John B. More, John S. Keyes, and Emerson—only considered Daniel Chester French because he was from Concord and his father, Henry F. French, was a prominent local lawyer and former judge. The statue was French's first full-size work; previously French had produced a bust of his father and one additional statue. In 1871, a year before he was formally commissioned, the committee chairman asked French to start working on the statue. Throughout the year, French sketched possible poses for the statue. That summer, he created a small clay "related figure" that was rejected by the committee. It is unknown what that statue looked like and it was not saved.
French researched The Minute Man by studying powder horns and buttons from the era. According to Harold Holzer, because French was a handsome man, "there would be a line of young women outside his studio ready to show him their alleged Colonial artifacts" to help him with his research. After a months-long search, a plow from the correct era was located to model for the statue. In 1873, his second clay model of the statue was accepted by the statue committee. The same year, the medium of the statue was changed from stone to bronze. The miniature version of the statue won a local art competition in September 1873, but the pose of the figure was deemed "awkwardly stiff" by critics. The pose of The Minute Man was made more natural in the enlargement process by working with models. By September 1874, the statue was completed and a plaster version of the clay statue was sent to Ames Manufacturing Works in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Because the town did not have the money to cast the statue in bronze, through a bill introduced by Ebenezer R. Hoar, the United States Congress appropriated ten Civil War-era cannons to the project. The statue was cast with the metal from guns.
The statue was unveiled on April 19, 1875, during the centennial celebration of the Battle of Concord, in a ceremony attended by President Ulysses S. Grant and Ralph Waldo Emerson. French, however, left for Italy to further study sculpture in 1874 and was not in attendance. Holzer suggests that French avoided the celebration "in case the statue was panned" by contemporary critics. French's fears were unfounded and the statue was positively received by art critics and the public.
### The Concord Minute Man of 1775
French was commissioned by the town of Concord in 1889 to rework The Minute Man for the Yorktown-class gunboat USS Concord. The new statue, paid for by Congress, was titled The Concord Minute Man of 1775. The reworked statue cleaned up some imperfections in the face of the original statue and incorporated elements of Beaux-Arts. French made the movement of the new statue more fluid and natural. It was completed in 1890 and installed on the gunboat in 1891. A copy of the statue was also carried by the Omaha-class cruiser USS Concord in the 1940s.
## Composition
### Statue
The statue is 7 feet (2.1 meters) tall and depicts a minuteman at the Battle of Concord. It is, perhaps, a portrait of Isaac Davis, an officer who died in the battle. The farmer-turned-soldier is shown trading his plow for a musket and stepping away from his private life toward the impending battle. The sleeves of his coat and shirt are rolled up; the minuteman's overcoat is draped over the plow. A powder horn, mistakenly, sits on the man's back instead of on his hip where it can be used. His face is alert while his eyes are transfixed on the battle into which he is ready to march. On his head sits a wide-brimmed hat that has been pinned on the right side.
The pose of the soldier has been compared to the pose of the Apollo Belvedere. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century art critics, such as Lorado Taft and H. C. Howard, have suggested that the pose was directly copied from the Roman sculpture. Howard in particular trivializes the sculpture as "little more than an Americanized rendition of the Apollo Belvedere". Modern scholarship, working with French's journals, disagrees that the pose is a copy while acknowledging that French used a variety of plaster casts of classical sculptures, including the Apollo Belvedere, as inspiration when creating The Minute Man.
### Pedestal
The Minute Man was intended to be placed on a local boulder by the town of Concord. At the insistence of French and his father, the town allowed for the design of a stone pedestal. Several architects submitted designs to the town, including French's brother, but the competition was won by James Elliot Cabot. The resulting design is a simple granite pedestal that is 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) wide with inscriptions in two sides. On the front, it is inscribed with the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn". The date of the battle and the year of the centennial are on the rear. Cabot's design is nearly identical to French's final pedestal design. Throughout the creation of The Minute Man, French sketched and built a variety of potential pedestals.
Beneath the pedestal is a copper time capsule from 1875 that contains items from past celebrations of the battle, maps, and photographs of both the sculpture and sculptor. In 1975, a second time capsule was placed beneath the pedestal that included Girl Scouts USA pins, the United States Bicentennial's flag, and a cassette tape.
## Reception
The Minute Man is highly regarded by art historians and critics. Rudyard Kipling came "very near to choking" when he saw the statue and battlefield during his 1892 tour of the United States. Anna Seaton-Schmidt referred to it as "the most inspiring of our soldier monuments" in her 1922 biography of French in The American Magazine of Art. The Boston National Historic Sites Commission claimed the statue "perfectly personifies the American Patriot" in their 1959 interim report. Michael Richman, the 1971–1972 Samuel H. Kress Fellow, calls it a "masterwork in nineteenth-century American sculpture". Chris Bergeron from The MetroWest Daily News describes The Minute Man as "naturalistic detail imbued with an idealistic effect". Harold Holzer describes the statue as representative of French's style of "naturalism, a great feeling of humanity, and connection to the subject".
Louisa May Alcott, writing for Woman's Journal, commented on the lack of place for women in its unveiling ceremony. Alcott and other suffragettes appropriated the statue as a symbol of their struggle for voting rights, and the suffragettes made pilgrimages to the statue in the 1880s.
### Government usage
The Minute Man was widely used by the US government to evoke the idea of the citizen-soldier, commemorate the Battle of Concord, and serve as a symbol for Massachusetts. The statue appears on the seal of the United States National Guard and its components, the Army National Guard, and the Air National Guard. In 1925, the United States Post Office Department released a five-cent stamp depicting the statue and verses from "Concord Hymn". The United States Treasury has used the statue on both war bonds and savings bonds. Workplaces and schools with a 90% war bond participation rate were authorized to fly a flag featuring The Minute Man during World War II. The statue has been depicted on United States coins twice. It appears on the obverse of the 1925 Lexington–Concord Sesquicentennial half dollar, and on the reverse of the 2000 Massachusetts state quarter along with an outline of the state.
## See also
- Public sculptures by Daniel Chester French
|
292,186 |
Bernard Quatermass
| 1,145,624,152 |
Fictional scientist
|
[
"Fictional British people",
"Fictional aerospace engineers",
"Quatermass",
"Science fiction characters",
"Television characters introduced in 1953"
] |
Professor Bernard Quatermass is a fictional scientist, originally created by the writer Nigel Kneale for BBC Television. An intelligent and highly moral British scientist, Quatermass is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading the British Experimental Rocket Group. He continually finds himself confronting sinister alien forces that threaten to destroy humanity.
The role of Quatermass was featured in three influential BBC science fiction serials of the 1950s, and again in a final serial for Thames Television in 1979. A remake of the first serial appeared on BBC Four in 2005. The character also appeared in films, on the radio and in print over a fifty-year period. Kneale picked the character's unusual surname from a London telephone directory, while the first name was in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell.
The character of Quatermass has been described by BBC News Online as Britain's first television hero, and by The Independent newspaper as "a brilliantly conceived and finely crafted creation ... [He] remained a modern 'Mr Standfast', the one fixed point in an increasingly dreadful and ever-shifting universe". In 2005, an article in The Daily Telegraph suggested that the character shares other elements from other British characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Ellen MacArthur.
## Character
Little is revealed of Quatermass's early life during the course of the films and television series in which he appears. In The Quatermass Experiment, he at one point despairs that he should have stuck to his original career as a surveyor.
In Nigel Kneale's 1996 radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs, it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and that his wife died young. The unmade prequel serial Quatermass in the Third Reich, an idea conceived by Kneale in the late 1990s, would have shown Quatermass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme, before helping a young Jewish refugee to escape from the country. According to The Quatermass Memoirs, during World War II Quatermass conducted top secret work for the British war effort, which he subsequently refused ever to discuss.
By 1953 (in The Quatermass Experiment), Quatermass is the head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, which has a programme to launch a manned rocket into space from a base in Tarooma, Australia. Although Quatermass succeeds in launching a three-man crew, the rocket vastly overshoots its projected orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London. Only one of the crew, Victor Carroon, remains; it transpires that he has been taken over by an alien presence, eventually forcing Quatermass to destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him in a climax set in Westminster Abbey.
Despite this trauma, Quatermass continues with his space programme, now called the British Rocket Group, and by Quatermass II (1955) is actively planning the establishment of Moon bases. In this serial, his daughter, Paula Quatermass, works as an assistant at the Rocket Group, but there is no sign of a wife or other children. In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, tying in with The Quatermass Memoirs later assertion of his wife's early death.
At the beginning of the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), Quatermass's funding is being cut and the Rocket Group is being handed over to military control, much to his disgust. Command is to be handed over to Colonel Breen, and Quatermass senses that he is being forced out: however, after the events of the serial, Breen is dead, Quatermass has helped to save the world and London is recovering from chaos.
It is not clear what happens to the Rocket Group immediately after this: the next time Quatermass is seen on screen (Quatermass, also released internationally as The Quatermass Conclusion and Quatermass IV, 1979) he has long been retired, living in retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has recently become the guardian of his teenaged granddaughter Hettie after her parents were killed in a road accident in Germany. After Hettie runs away from home, he travels to London in search of her and finds a dystopian world there. Quatermass and the scientist Joe Kapp establish that an alien probe is causing the collapse of society by feeding on the world's youth, and Quatermass forms a plan to drive the intruder away by the detonation of a nuclear bomb. He presses the button to detonate it himself, with Hettie's help, and they are killed in the blast as the planet is saved.
## Appearances
## History
Nigel Kneale conceived the character of Quatermass in 1953, when he was assigned in his capacity as a BBC television staff drama writer to create a new six-part serial to run on Saturday nights in July and August. Kneale initially named his leading character Professor Charlton, but during the writing process decided he wanted something more striking and memorable.
A native of the Isle of Man, Kneale was inspired by the fact that surnames beginning with "Qu" were common on the island. The eventual name was picked from a London telephone directory; there was a family by that name who traded as fruiterers in the city's East End. The surname has its origins as a measurement of land assigned in the division of England by the Normans following their conquest of the country under William the Conqueror in 1066. The Professor's first name, Bernard, was in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell, founder of the Jodrell Bank observatory.
### On television (1950s)
The director assigned to the serial, which was eventually named The Quatermass Experiment, was Rudolph Cartier. A few months beforehand he had directed a play entitled It Is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer for the BBC, and he offered the role of Quatermass to one of the stars of that play, André Morell. Morell considered the offer but declined the part, which Cartier then offered to Reginald Tate, another actor who had appeared in the play, who accepted.
The serial was a success, with the British Film Institute later describing it as "one of the most influential series of the 1950s". The following year the BBC's Controller of Programmes, Cecil McGivern—who had initially feared that viewers would not accept such an unusual name for the leading character—noted in reference to the impending launch of the rival ITV network that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while [The Quatermass Experiment] lasted. We are going to need many more 'Quatermass Experiment' programmes".
A sequel, Quatermass II, was accordingly commissioned in 1955, but Reginald Tate died of a heart attack only a month before production was due to begin. With very little time to find a replacement, John Robinson was picked as the only suitable actor available. Robinson was uncomfortable about taking over from Tate and with some of the technical dialogue he was required to deliver, and his performance has been criticised as "robotic", although others such as Andrew Pixley in Time Screen Magazine have praised Robinson for doing compelling work after the initial episode of the serial.
By the summer of 1957, Kneale was working on the scripts for a third and final BBC serial. Titled Quatermass and the Pit and again produced and directed by Cartier, this was eventually broadcast in December 1958 and January 1959. John Robinson was no longer available to play Quatermass, so the role was offered instead to Alec Clunes. Clunes turned down the part, and it was offered once more to André Morell, who this time accepted. Morell has been praised by several reviewers as having given the definitive portrayal of Quatermass. The serial itself has been praised by the BBC's own website as "simply the first finest thing the BBC ever made. It justifies licence fees to this day". Despite this success, Kneale was unsure about whether the character would ever return, later telling an interviewer: "I didn't want to go on repeating because Professor Quatermass had already saved the world from ultimate destruction three times, and that seemed to me to be quite enough".
Of the TV serials, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit have been preserved in full. Only the first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment now exist.
### In films
At roughly the same time as Quatermass II was being transmitted by the BBC, Hammer Film Productions released its film adaptation of the first serial in British cinemas. Directed by Val Guest, it was retitled The Quatermass Xperiment to capitalise on the British "X" classification and starred American actor Brian Donlevy as part of a deal to help the film find US distribution. Kneale, who had little involvement with the film, was unimpressed with this casting: "I may have picked Quatermass's surname out of a phone book, but his first name was carefully chosen: Bernard, after Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank. Pioneer, ultimate questing man. Donlevy played him as a mechanic, a creature with a completely closed mind". Val Guest has praised Donlevy's performance, saying that "he gave it absolute reality".
Despite Kneale's reservations about the casting, The Quatermass Xperiment was the highest-grossing film Hammer had made up to that point in its history, and has since been described by one academic as "the key British science fiction film of the 1950s". Hammer was keen to make an immediate follow-up, and wanted to use Quatermass in its 1956 film X the Unknown, but Kneale refused Hammer the rights, and the company created its own substitute character, Doctor Adam Royston. Hammer did release an adaptation of Quatermass II in 1957, called Quatermass 2 and this time with Kneale's involvement in the script. To the writer's displeasure, Donlevy returned as Quatermass.
Hammer also purchased the film rights to Quatermass and the Pit (released in the US as Five Million Years to Earth), as it had done with the previous two TV serials, although it did not release its version until 1967. This time the film was directed by Roy Ward Baker and starred Scottish actor Andrew Keir, after Morell had been offered and declined the chance to play the part again. Keir's performance was well-received, particularly in contrast to Donlevy's portrayal. The Guardian newspaper wrote in 1997 that: "Keir also made many films ... most gratifyingly, perhaps, the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967), when he finally replaced the absurdly miscast Brian Donlevy".
Soon after the release of the Quatermass and the Pit film, Kneale was approached by Hammer about writing a fourth Quatermass story directly for them, but the idea came to nothing.
Possible remakes of one or more of the Hammer film adaptations were also mooted at various points during the 1990s, with Dan O'Bannon scripting a potential new version of The Quatermass Experiment in 1993, but again nothing was eventually filmed. In February 2012 Simon Oakes, president of the revived Hammer Films, announced a new Quatermass film, but nothing came of the project after his announcement.
### On television (1970s onwards)
By the early 1970s Kneale was once again regularly writing for the BBC, which announced plans to produce a fourth Quatermass serial in 1972. This ultimately was not made by the BBC, but Kneale's scripts were produced in 1979 as a four-part serial for Thames Television, titled Quatermass. This time John Mills played Quatermass in an expensive and high-profile production, which was screened on the ITV network. The production company Euston Films also released a 100-minute film version titled The Quatermass Conclusion or Quatermass IV, for distribution abroad. There was, however, little interest among film distributors, and it received only a limited theatrical release.
Kneale was not keen to return to the character following this, telling one interviewer: "I blew him up ... and I don't feel inclined to invent a 'Son of Quatermass' either". However, in the late 1990s he conceived an idea for a prequel serial, entitled Quatermass in the Third Reich, set in Germany in the 1930s. The idea was submitted to the BBC, which turned it down.
In 2005, the digital television channel BBC Four produced a new version of The Quatermass Experiment, transmitted live as the original had been. Jason Flemyng starred as Quatermass. The Times's television reviewer, Sarah Vine, commented of this production: "Jason Flemyng as Quatermass made a surprisingly good fist of things ... the live performance lent the drama an edge that might have been lost in re-takes".
## In other media
In addition to the character's various television and film appearances, Quatermass was also seen in a variety of other media between the 1950s and the 1990s. In 1955 Kneale was invited by the publishers of the Daily Express to write a new prose Quatermass story for serialisation in their newspaper; as he was unable to think of a new storyline, they suggested he simply adapt Quatermass II, which he agreed to do. The serialisation ran in the Daily Express from 5 to 20 December 1955, although Kneale was forced to draw it to a rapid conclusion when the paper lost interest in the project and instructed him to complete the story as soon as possible.
A script book for The Quatermass Experiment, including some photographs from the production, was released by Penguin Books in 1959. This was followed by similar releases of Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, both published in 1960. All three of these releases were reprinted by Arrow Books in 1979 with new introductions by Kneale, to tie-in with the television transmission of the fourth and final serial.
Arrow Books also released a novelisation of the 1979 Quatermass serial, written by Kneale. This was written during production, and contained many additional scenes and extra background detail not included in the original scripts. Kneale offered many of these new scenes to the producers of the television version, but by this stage it was too late for them to be incorporated.
In 1995, BBC Radio producer Paul Quinn approached Kneale with the idea of making a new radio series about Quatermass, and the resulting project was produced and aired as the five-part serial The Quatermass Memoirs on BBC Radio 3 in the spring of 1996. The serial had three strands: a monologue from Kneale recounting the historical environment in which he created and wrote the original 1950s serials; archive material from the original productions and contemporary news broadcasts; and a dramatised strand set shortly before the 1979 serial, with Quatermass being visited in retreat in Scotland by a reporter eager to write his life story. Of the actors who had previously played Quatermass, only Keir and Mills were still alive; Keir took the role, his final professional performance before his death the following year. The Quatermass Memoirs was repeated several times on digital radio station BBC7 from 2003, and the serial was released on CD in 2006.
A live theatrical production of Quatermass and the Pit was staged, with the permission of Kneale, outdoors in a quarry at the village of Cropwell Bishop in Nottinghamshire in August 1997. The adaptation was written by Peter Thornhill and mounted by Creation Productions, with David Longford starring as Quatermass.
All the various film and surviving television productions featuring Quatermass have been released on DVD.
## Themes
Nigel Kneale explained in a 1990s interview the background that had led him to formulate Quatermass and the other characters of the original serial in 1953: "I wanted to write some strong characters, but I didn't want them to be like those horrible people in those awful American science fiction films, chewing gum and stating the obvious. Not that I wanted to do something terribly 'British', but I didn't like all the flag-waving you got in those films. I tried to get real human interest in the stories, and some good humour".
Writing in 2005, the television history lecturer Dr Catherine Johnson felt that in the original three 1950s serials, Quatermass as a character represented the championing of science and rationality over the supernatural and the fantastic: "As a leading scientific innovator, Quatermass is invested with scientific and moral authority. Over the three serials, this authority is tested and undermined ... Despite this, the narrative structure of all three serials works to reinforce the authority invested in Quatermass and in science. Although scientific enterprise is responsible for disastrous consequences in the first two Quatermass serials, it is only through science that the alien invasions are overcome ... He is invested with the narrative authority to understand and explain the fantastic events depicted".
The writer and critic Kim Newman went further, explaining in a 2003 television documentary on Nigel Kneale's career that he believed Quatermass to be not only a representation of science but of humanity itself. Referring to the conclusion of The Quatermass Experiment, he commented: "It almost boils down to an editorial speech by Quatermass representing humanity, or the humane aspects of humanity. He talks to the monster, and so the monster is defeated by an intellectual argument or an emotional appeal". Like Kneale, he contrasted this to American science-fiction productions, where the alien adversary would be defeated by "it being blown up or electrocuted, or having the entire firepower of the army turned against it". Hammer had altered their film version of the story so that the creature is in fact killed by being electrocuted.
In contrast to Newman's idea of Quatermass as the embodiment of humanity, writer and lecturer Peter Hutchings in his essay "We are the Martians" sees Quatermass as an isolated character: "In the 1950s Quatermass stories, Quatermass himself is someone who, while working to protect the nation, remains a curiously isolated figure, bereft of anything resembling a meaningful relationship. In the 1979 Quatermass, he has acquired a granddaughter; possibly connected with this is the fact that here he seems a much weaker figure who can only defeat the aliens through the sacrifice of the lives of both himself and his granddaughter". Hutchings also compared this to American productions of the era: "The standard, if not clichéd, figures of the clean-cut square-jawed hero and his girl, which are present in some form or other in most US sf films of this period ... are absent".
## Outside references
### Doctor Who
The BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who has often been heavily influenced by the various Quatermass serials, and despite Kneale's dislike of it ("It sounded a terrible idea and I still think it was", he commented in 1986) and his refusal to write for it, unofficial references to Quatermass have appeared in the programme and its spin-offs.
Serials directly influenced include The Web of Fear, The Invasion, Spearhead from Space, The Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Daemons, The Seeds of Doom and Image of the Fendahl, as well as the 2007 "The Lazarus Experiment", which echoes the first serial's climax in Westminster Abbey, with the use of Southwark Cathedral. Former Doctor Who script editor and producer Derrick Sherwin admitted on a DVD documentary that the idea of setting more serials on contemporary Earth in the early 1970s was to recall a Quatermass feel. Neil Cross, the writer of the 2013 Doctor Who episode "Hide", has stated in interviews that when he was working on his initial ideas for the episode, he took inspiration from the Quatermass serials, and even intended for the character of Bernard Quatermass to appear in the story. However, it was not possible to gain copyright clearance to use the character.
In episode three of the 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, which is set in 1963, military scientific advisor Alison Williams remarks to her colleague Dr Rachel Jensen, "I wish Bernard was here". Rachel replies, "British Rocket Group's got its own problems". The 2005 Doctor Who episode "The Christmas Invasion" also featured a British Rocket Group, although the organisation was identifiable only by a logo not clearly seen on screen and never referred to in dialogue. It was, however, heavily referenced in a tie-in website for the episode created by the bbc.co.uk Doctor Who webteam. In 2009 television episode "Planet of the Dead", "Bernard" is used as the name for a unit of measurement, and it is explained that this is in reference to Quatermass—whether as a fictional or a real person is not stated.
The 1994 Doctor Who novel Nightshade is about an actor who starred in a thinly disguised version of Quatermass, discovering that the events of the serials are becoming reality. The fictional Professor Nightshade was also mentioned in subsequent novels. Author Mark Gatiss described the Nightshade serial in his notes accompanying the e-book release as "a TV series that isn't quite Quatermass and isn't quite Doctor Who", adding "I was utterly obsessed by Quatermass at that time".
The 1997 Doctor Who novel The Dying Days, set in its year of release, features in one chapter an elderly character introduced halfway through a sentence as "-ermass", and subsequently referred to as "Professor" and "Bernard" during his brief appearance. Author Lance Parkin confirmed in his notes accompanying the later e-book release that this was a deliberate cameo from Quatermass, specifically the John Mills version from the final serial. In the 2008 Doctor Who novel Beautiful Chaos, the Doctor briefly mentions being invited to the Royal Planetary Society by "Bernard and Paula".
### Parodies and homages
The 1956 British science fiction horror film, X the Unknown, made by Hammer Film Productions, was originally intended to be sequel to The Quatermass Xperiment, but when Kneale refused permission for Quatermass to be used in the film, the character was changed to Atomic Energy scientist, Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger).
In February 1959 the BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show broadcast a parody of Quatermass and the Pit, entitled "The Scarlet Capsule". Harry Secombe played his regular character in The Goon Show, Neddie Seagoon, in turn playing "Professor Ned Cratermess, OBE". This was followed later in the same year by a spoof on another BBC radio comedy show, That Man Chester, which launched a regular strand entitled "The Quite-a-Mess Three Saga", with Deryck Guyler as "Professor Quite-a-Mess". However, the "Quite-a-Mess" name and references were dropped after only three of the episodes under pressure from Kneale, who felt a 13-week spoof would be to the detriment of the original character.
In the early 1970s, a British progressive rock group named both themselves and their first album "Quatermass".
A television spoof appeared in a 1986 episode of the BBC sketch show The Two Ronnies, which featured a sketch entitled "It Came From Outer Hendon", written by David Renwick. This spoof starred Ronnie Corbett as "Professor Martin Cratermouse".
Quatermass also appears in a short segment of the 2007 graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, in which he takes his niece and nephew to visit an interplanetary zoo. Here he is identified as Uncle Bernard.
Andrew Marshall and Rob Grant, produced directed and wrote the Radio 4 Series "The Quanderhorn Xperimentations". They also created a novel of the same name released by Gollancz Publishers.
Woody Allen's spoof of the science fiction genre exemplified by the Quatermass works, The Kugelmass Episode, features as protagonist a "Professor Kugelmass".
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Shepseskaf
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Last Egyptian pharaoh of the 4th dynasty
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[
"26th-century BC Pharaohs",
"26th-century BC deaths",
"3rd-millennium BC births",
"Pharaohs",
"Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt"
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Shepseskaf (meaning "His Ka is noble") was a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, the sixth and probably last ruler of the fourth dynasty during the Old Kingdom period. He reigned most probably for four but possibly up to seven years in the late 26th to mid-25th century BC.
Shepseskaf's relation to his predecessor Menkaure is not entirely certain; he might have been his son or possibly his brother. The identity of his mother is highly uncertain as she could have been one of Menkaure's consorts or queen Khentkaus I or Neferhetepes. Similarly, Shepseskaf's relation to his probable successor on the throne, Userkaf, is not known although in the absence of clear indication of strife at the transition between the fourth and fifth dynasties, Userkaf could well have been his son or his brother. If Shepseskaf was succeeded directly by Userkaf rather than by Thampthis as claimed by some historical sources, then his death marks the end of the fourth dynasty. The transition to the fifth dynasty seems not to have been a sharp rupture but rather a continuous process of evolution in the king's power and role within the Egyptian state. Around this time, some of the highest positions of power such as that of vizier which had hitherto been the prerogative of the royal family were opened to nobles of non-royal extraction.
The only activities firmly datable to Shepseskaf's short reign are the completion of the hitherto unfinished mortuary complex of the Pyramid of Menkaure using mudbricks and the construction of his own tomb at South Saqqara, now known as the Mastabat al-Fir'aun. Shepseskaf's decisions to abandon the Giza necropolis and to build a mastaba, that is a flat-roofed rectangular structure, rather than a pyramid for himself are significant and continue to be debated. Some Egyptologists see these decisions as symptoms of a power-struggle between the king and the priesthood of Ra, while others believe purely practical considerations, possibly including a declining economy, are at fault. Alternatively, it may be that Shepseskaf intended his tomb to be a pyramid, but after his death it was completed as a mastaba. Possibly because of this, and the small dimensions of his tomb compared to those of his forebears and his short reign, Shepseskaf was the object of a relatively minor state-sponsored funerary cult that disappeared in the second half of the fifth dynasty. This cult was revived in the later Middle Kingdom period as a privately run lucrative cult aimed at guaranteeing a royal intercessor for the offerings made to their dead by members of the lower strata of society.
## Family
### Parents
The relationship between Shepseskaf and his predecessor Menkaure is not entirely certain. The dominant view in modern Egyptology was first expounded by George Andrew Reisner who proposed that Shepseskaf was Menkaure's son. Reisner based his hypothesis on a decree showing that Shepseskaf completed Menkaure's mortuary temple. This hypothesis is shared by many Egyptologists including Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton, Rainer Stadelmann and Peter Clayton. Peter Jánosi nonetheless remarks that the decree does not constitute irrefutable proof of filiation since it does not describe the relationship between these two kings explicitly. In particular, the completion of the tomb of a deceased pharaoh by his successor does not necessarily depend on a direct father/son relation between the two. A possible alternative proposed by Miroslav Verner is that Menkaure and Shepseskaf could have been brothers, and the latter's consequently advanced age when ascending to the throne could explain his short reign. In contrast with these hypotheses, Egyptologists Ludwig Borchardt and William C. Hayes posited that Shepseskaf could have been of non-royal extraction and took the throne only thanks to his marriage to queen Khentkaus I.
The identity of Shepseskaf's mother is even more uncertain than that of his father. If the latter was Menkaure, then Shepseskaf's mother could have been one of Menkaure's royal wives Khamerernebty II, Rekhetre or a secondary wife. Alternatively Miroslav Bárta believes that Khentkaus I may have been Shepseskaf's mother and also the mother of his successor Userkaf. Indeed, a close relationship between Shepseskaf and Khentkaus I has been inferred by Egyptologist Selim Hassan based on the "immense conformity" of their tombs, an opinion that is widely shared, yet what this relationship was remains unclear. Khentkaus I may instead have been the wife or the daughter of Shepseskaf. One more possibility was put forth by Arielle Kozloff, who proposed instead that it was Neferhetepes, a daughter of Djedefre, who was Shepseskaf's mother. For Egyptologist Vivienne Gae Callender there is no evidence in support of this hypothesis.
### Queens and children
Inscriptions in queen Bunefer's Giza tomb demonstrate that she is related to Shepseskaf: she notably bore the title of "Great of praise, priestess of King Shepseskaf, the king's wife, the great ornament, the great favourite". Lana Troy, an Egyptologist, deduces from this title that while she married a pharaoh, she served as a priestess in the funerary cult for her father and therefore must have been Shepseskaf's daughter and the consort of another unspecified king. Indeed, all priestesses serving in a king's funerary cult were princesses, daughters or granddaughters of that king. If this hypothesis is true, it makes Bunefer the only queen known from Ancient Egypt to have served in a mortuary cult. Exceptional circumstances could explain this observation, for example if there was no other suitable female descendant to officiate in Shepseskaf's cult after his death. Bunefer's mother could have been Khentkaus I whose tomb is located near Bunefer's so that Khentkaus I might have been a consort of Shepseskaf. Bunefer's royal husband may have been pharaoh Thamphthis, whose existence is uncertain however as he is not attested archaeologically (see below for a discussion).
Hassan, who excavated Bunefer's tomb, rejects the opinion that Bunefer was Shepseskaf's daughter. He notes that most of Bunefer's titles are wifely ones and stresses "the fact that the name of Shepseskaf appears in her tomb is in favour of the assumption that he was her husband". In any case Bunefer had at least one son, whose name is lost, and whose father was not a king according to this son's titles. He was possibly an issue from a second, non-royal, marriage of Bunefer.
Princess Khamaat married to the high priest of Ptah, Ptahshepses, and is known by her titles to have been the daughter of a king. She was long thought to be a daughter of Shepseskaf following a hypothesis by 19th-century Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé. A consensus was reached on this issue, but in 2002 Egyptologist Peter F. Dorman published inscriptions from Ptahshepses's tomb showing that she was Userkaf's daughter instead.
Finally, Mark Lehner proposes that Shepseskaf fathered pharaoh Userkaf with queen Khentkaus I, an idea shared by Kozloff but rejected by Bárta who thinks they were brothers. Alternatively, Khentkaus I has been conjectured to be Shepseskaf's daughter.
## Reign
Shepseskaf's reign is difficult to date precisely in absolute terms. An absolute chronology referring to dates in the modern Western calendar is estimated by Egyptologists working backwards by adding reign lengths – themselves uncertain and inferred from historical sources and archaeological evidence – and, in a few cases, using ancient astronomical observations and radiocarbon dates. These methodologies do not agree perfectly and some uncertainty remains. As a result, Shepseskaf's rule is dated to some time around the late 26th to mid-25th century BC.
### Relative chronology
The relative chronological position of Shepseskaf within the fourth dynasty is not entirely certain. The near contemporary fifth dynasty royal annals now known as the Palermo stone indicates unambiguously that he succeeded Menkaure on the throne and was crowned on the 11th day of the fourth month. The identity of his successor is less certain. Archaeological evidence seems to indicate that Shepseskaf was succeeded directly by Userkaf. In particular, no intervening king is mentioned on the tombs of officials who served at the time. For example, an inscription in the tomb of the palace courtier Netjerpunesut gives the following sequence of kings he served under: Djedefre → Khafre → Menkaure → Shepseskaf → Userkaf → Sahure → Neferirkare. Similarly, in his Giza tomb prince Sekhemkare reports about his career under the kings Khafre, Menkaura, Shepseskaf, Userkaf and Sahure, while the high priest Ptahshepses describes being born under Menkaure, growing up under Shepseskaf and starting his career under Userkaf. Furthermore, Egyptologist Patrick O'Mara underlines that "no names of estates of the period [which are] compounded with royal names make mention of any other kings than these, nor do the names of [...] royal grandchildren, who often bore the name of a royal ancestor as a component of their own [name]." This reconstruction of late fourth to early fifth dynasty is also in agreement with that given on the Abydos king list written during the reigns of Seti I (c. 1292–1279 BC), where Shepseskaf's cartouche is on the 25th entry between those of Menkaure and Userkaf.
Three historical sources go directly or indirectly against this order of succession. The source in direct contradiction is the Aegyptiaca (Αἰγυπτιακά), a history of Egypt written in the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II (283–246 BC) by Manetho. No copies of the Aegyptiaca have survived and it is now known only through later writings by Sextus Julius Africanus and Eusebius. According to the Byzantine scholar George Syncellus, Africanus wrote that the Aegyptiaca mentioned the succession "Bicheris → Sebercherês → Thamphthis" at the end of the fourth dynasty while "Usercherês" is given as the fifth dynasty's first king. Sebercherês (in Greek, Σεβερχέρης) and Usercherês are believed to be the Hellenised forms for Shepeseskaf and Userkaf, respectively, while the identities of Bicheris and Thampthis are unknown. They could refer to shadowy figures, perhaps the fourth dynasty prince Baka in the case of Bicheris and Thampthis could originate from the Egyptian name Djedefptah, or they could both be fictitious rulers. That a king might have reigned between Shepseskaf and Userkaf is also indirectly supported by the Turin canon, a king list written during the 19th dynasty in the early Ramesside era (1292–1189 BC). The canon, written on papyrus is damaged at several spots and thus many royal names are either fragmentary or completely lost in lacunae today. In column III, line 15 King Shepseskaf is listed, line 16 is wholly in a lacuna while the end of Userkaf's name is legible on line 17. The missing line 16 must have originally held the royal name of Shepseskaf's unknown successor. The Saqqara Tablet, written under Ramses II (), also seems to have mentioned an unknown successor for Shepseskaf as it originally listed nine cartouches corresponding to fourth dynasty kings, when only six are otherwise known from archaeological evidence (Sneferu, Khufu, Djedefre, Khafra, Menkaure and Shepseskaf). The five cartouches between those of Khafre and Userkaf are now illegible.
For Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick, the uncertainty regarding Shepseskaf's successor and the presence of further shadowy rulers in historical sources during the late fourth dynasty point to some family instability at the time.
### Duration
The duration of Shepseskaf's rule is uncertain but it is generally taken to have lasted probably four but perhaps up to seven years. Explicit archaeological evidence on this matter is reduced to six documents. Four of these are inscriptions dated to the year of his accession to the throne, three found in tombs of the Giza necropolis and one from the Palermo stone. The last two contemporary inscriptions mention his second regnal year, one of which is found on the decree of Shepseskaf concerning Menkaure's pyramid town.
Two historical sources report the duration of Shepseskaf's reign. The Turin canon credits him with a reign of four years, while Manetho's Aegyptiaca gives him seven years on the throne. Although this figure is compatible with the Palermo stone which may have had up to seven compartments relating Shepseskaf's reign according to Georges Daressy, this is considered an overestimate according to modern consensus. Verner points notably to the unfinished state of his mastaba to conclude Shepseskaf's rule did not exceed the four years attributed to him by the Turin canon. A reappraisal of the Palermo stone by Jürgen von Beckerath limits the space available on it for Shepseskaf's rule to five or six compartments, corresponding to that many years. Manetho's count may be explained by a conflation of the four full years attributed to Shepseskaf by the Turin king list plus two full years and a significant monthly fraction credited to his anonymous successor on that list. This successor could correspond to Manetho's Thampthis, to whom Manetho gives nine years of reign, although as observed by Verner archaeological evidence for this ruler is nil.
### Activities
Very few activities of Shepseskaf are known. The Palermo stone reports that in the year of his accession to the throne he participated in the "going around the Two Lands" and a "festival of the diadem" during which two images of the god Wepwawet were fashioned and the gods who unite the two lands are said to have followed the king. These events occurred at or close to the coronation of the king. The site of Shepseskaf's tomb, said to be a pyramid, was chosen that same year. On that occasion, an enclosure of Lebanese wood may have been set up to surround the perimeter of the part of the Saqqara necropolis where the tomb was to be constructed. Finally Shepseskaf probably decreed a daily offering of 20 measures of something (what was offered is lost in a lacuna of the stone) to the senuti shrine.
It was during his second year of rule that Shepseskaf recorded the earliest surviving decree from the Old Kingdom period. Inscribed on a limestone slab uncovered in Menkaure's mortuary temple, the decree concerns the completion of this temple, records offerings to be made there and protects the estate and staff of the pyramid of Menkaure by exempting them from taxation:
> Horus Shepsesket, the year after the first occasion of the count of cattle and herds [...] which was done in the presence of the King himself. The King of Upper and Lower Egypt Shepseskaf. For the king of Upper and Lower Egypt [Menkaure] he set up a monument, a pekher offering [...] in the pyramid of Menkaure [...] With regard to the pekher offering brought for the king of Upper and Lower Egypt [Menkaure] [...] priestly duty [is done] with respect to it for ever. [...] [it should never be taken away by someone] in the course of his duty for ever [...] the pyramid of Menkaure [...]. My majesty does not permit [...] servants [...] priests [...]
Excavations of Menkaure's mortuary temple confirm that it was probably left unfinished at this pharaoh's death. Originally planned to be made of granite, then altered to be completed of white Turah limestone, all stone construction ceased and the temple was hastily finished in crude bricks during Shepseskaf's rule. This material allows for rapid construction. Shepseskaf's works concerned the causeway and entrance corridors of the temple, its great open court, storerooms and inner temple as well as the exterior walls. All brick constructions were covered in yellow mud then plastered white and left plain, except for the walls of the great open court which were made into a system of niches. The completed doorways were fitted with wooden doors and the temple floors were of beaten mud on packed limestone chips, while the great court received a stone flooring.
Further activities are reported in Herodotus' account of the late fourth dynasty. According to Herodotus, Menkaure was succeeded by a king, whom he calls Asukhis, who built an outer court of Hephaestus's (Ptah's) temple, decreed a new law on borrowing to remedy the lack of money in circulation during his reign and built a brick pyramid.
`Herodotus's account cannot easily be reconciled with the historical reality and seems to stem from confusion between fourth and 24th dynasty rulers, garbled references to legends regarding a second dynasty king as lawgiver and 12th dynasty brick pyramids of Dahshur, such as that of Amenemhat III. As Diodorus Siculus makes similar mistakes in reporting the history of the fourth dynasty – notably, both he and Herodotus incorrectly believed the fourth dynasty came after the 20th – it is possible that it was their sources in Egypt which were at fault.`
### Court life
Some of the officials who served under Shepseskaf are known from the funerary inscriptions they made on their tombs and which mention the king. These are mostly found in Giza and Saqqara. The fact that many of these inscriptions only mention Shepseskaf without further details hints at the short duration of his reign. The court officials who mentioned Shepseskaf include Babaef II, vizier under Shepseskaf and possibly his cousin; Sekhemkare, a son of Khafre, priest of the royal funerary cults; Nisutpunetjer, who was a priest of the royal funerary cults; Ptahshepses I who was educated among the royal children in Shepseskaf's palace and harem, later promoted to the office of priest of Ptah by Userkaf and son-in-law of this pharaoh; and Kaunisut, a palace official, priest and director of hairdressers.
### End of dynasty
The division of ancient Egyptian kings into dynasties is an invention of Manetho's Aegyptiaca, intended to adhere more closely to the expectations of Manetho's patrons, the Greek rulers of Ptolemaic Egypt. The historical reality of these dynasties is difficult to appraise and they might not correspond to the modern conception for that term: for example Djoser, the first king of the third dynasty, was the son of Khasekhemwy, final king of the Second dynasty. Stadelmann and Bárta remark that Shepseskaf (which means "His Ka is noble") and Userkaf have much in common, for example their throne names both follow the same pattern qualifying the Ka of Ra as "noble" for the former and "strong" for the later and they probably belonged to the same family with Userkaf being either Shepseskaf's son or his brother. In addition, the biographies of officials serving at the time show no break in their careers at the juncture of the fourth and fifth dynasties and no traces of religious, political or economic upheavals at the time.
Some distinction between the fourth and fifth dynasties may nonetheless have been recognised by the ancient Egyptians, as recorded by a tradition much older than Manetho's and found in the tale of the Westcar Papyrus. In this story, King Khufu is foretold the demise of his line and the rise of a new dynasty through the accession of three sons of Ra to the throne of Egypt.
In modern Egyptology no sharp division is understood to have taken place between the fourth and fifth dynasties. Yet some transition between them is perceived through the evolution of the Egyptian state at the time, from one where all power and positions of prestige were taken by the royal family, to one where the state-administration was opened to people of non-royal descent. It is in the interval from Menkaure to Userkaf that the royal family began to step back from the highest offices, in particular that of the vizier. Shepseskaf, Userkaf and their fifth dynasty successors responded to these changes by designing new means of asserting their supremacy and religious influence, through the cult of Ra, the creation of novel offices of state and changes in the king's role. Ra's primacy over the rest of the Egyptian pantheon and the increased royal devotion given to him made Ra a sort of state-god, a novelty in comparison with the earlier fourth dynasty, when more emphasis was put on royal burials.
## Burial
Shepseskaf's tomb is a great mastaba at South Saqqara. Called Qbḥ-Špss-k3.f ("Qebeh Shepseskaf") by the ancient Egyptians, this name is variously translated as "Shepseskaf is pure", "Shepseskaf is purified", "Coolness of King Shepseskaf" and "The cool place of Shepseskaf". Nowadays it is known as Mastabat al-Fir'aun, meaning "bench of the pharaoh" in Egyptian Arabic. This mastaba was first recognised as such by Richard Lepsius who listed it as structure XLIII in his pioneering list of pyramids. First excavated in 1858 by Auguste Mariette, it was not before the years 1924–1925 that the mastaba was thoroughly explored by Gustave Jéquier.
### Location
Shepseskaf's decision to be buried in South Saqqara represents a departure from the Giza necropolis used by his predecessors. The reason for this choice is debated. Verner remarks that this choice had political symbolism as it allowed Shepseskaf a greater proximity to the dynasty founder Sneferu's red and bent pyramids in Dahshur, possibly emphasising his belonging to the dynastic line. For Bárta, Shepseskaf simply decided to come back to the traditional burial grounds of Saqqara and Abusir, a choice that therefore does not need to be seen as a sign of religious conflicts within the royal family, as had been proposed by Hassan.
However, the main reason might have been economic or practical rather than political or religious. There was simply not enough space left in Giza for another large pyramid complex, and the proximity of limestone quarries to South Saqqara could have played a role. Egyptologist Adolf Erman instead conjectures that the choice of location for a pharaoh's tomb was mostly dictated by the vicinity of his palace which could change owing to economic, political and military interests. This remains unverified as no palace of an Old Kingdom king has been located so far, and it may be instead that it was the centre of the administration and royal house which followed the funerary complex rather than the other way around.
### Decision to build a mastaba
As Shepseskaf chose to have a mastaba built for himself he broke with the fourth dynasty tradition of constructing pyramids. Several theories have been put forth to explain this choice. First, Verner hypothesises that Shepseskaf may have designed a mastaba as a temporary measure because he was faced with the arduous task of completing Menkaure's pyramid complex at Giza while simultaneously having to start his own tomb. In this theory, Shepseskaf may have intended to turn the mastaba into a pyramid at a later stage. In support of this theory is the observation that the architecture and layout of the subterranean structures of the mastaba exactly follow the standard plan for royal pyramids. Shepseskaf might have been forced to take this decision if Egypt experienced economic difficulties at the time as Verner posits, or perhaps Menkaure's failure to complete his mortuary temple could have made Shepseskaf more cautious about his own tomb.
At the opposite, Egyptologist Stephen Quirke believes that Shepseskaf's tomb amounts to the first step of a planned step pyramid that was unfinished owing to its owner's early death, only to be completed by his successor or his queen in the shape of a mastaba. This theory finds some support in the Palermo stone which indicates that the emplacement and name of Shepseskaf's tomb were chosen during his first year on the throne. In this text the name of the tomb is written with the determinative of a pyramid rather than that of a mastaba, but in the tomb of Nikauhor, who worked as overseer of Shepseskaf's tomb, it appears with the determinative of a mastaba.
Alternatively, Hassan has put forward the idea that Shepseskaf may have deliberately chosen to build a mastaba owing to religio-political reasons, as the pyramid shape is closely associated with the solar cult. In doing so he would have tried to undermine the growing influence of the priesthood of Ra. This hypothesis could also explain the absence of a direct theophoric reference to Ra in his name as well as in that of his probable immediate successor Userkaf. Hassan, who believes Khentkaus I was Shepseskaf's consort, further conjectures that Khentkaus was forced to marry Userkaf, the high priest of Ra, after Shepseskaf's death. This marriage would have sealed the unrivalled ascendancy of the solar cult throughout the fifth dynasty. Egyptologist Jaromir Málek concurs in part with this hypothesis, seeing Shepseskaf's decision as the symptom of a possible religious crisis. The archaeologist Joyce Tyldesley notes that if Shepseskaf really did intend his tomb to be a mastaba and regardless of his motivations, this indicates that while a pyramid may be desirable, it was not an absolute necessity for a pharaoh to reach the afterlife.
In a fourth opinion, Bárta, who stresses that the reasons for Shepseskaf's choice largely elude us, nonetheless proposes that the king may have lacked full legitimacy after ascending the throne from his position of high official through marriage. In this hypothesis Shepseskaf would be a son of Khentkaus I. While in all probability related to the fourth dynasty royal family, he may not have had the legitimacy that prince Khuenre, the firstborn son of Menkaure and queen Khamerernebty II, had enjoyed prior to his death. Possibly faced with opponents and a state-administration increasingly from outside of the royal family, he could have chosen to build a non-typical tomb fitting his peculiar status.
### Architecture
The mastaba, oriented on a north–south axis, is rectangular in shape with a base of 99.6 m × 74.4 m (327 ft × 244 ft) and a height of 18 m (59 ft). The outer slope of its wall is 65° or 70° and it may have risen in two steps. The tomb dimensions are deemed very small and modest by Verner as compared with the great pyramids of Shepseskaf's fourth dynasty predecessors. Indeed, the total volume of the mastaba masonry represents no more than a third that of Menkaure's pyramid. For Verner and Egyptologist Abeer El-Shahawy, this could be explained by the decline in the economic prosperity of Egypt at the time as well as a decline in the king's power. At the opposite, for Stadelmann one should not conclude that political instability or economic difficulties prevented Menkaure, Shepseskaf and their successors from emulating the great pyramids of their forebears. Instead he proposes that the main impetus behind Menkaure's smaller pyramid and for Shepseskaf's decision to have a mastaba made for himself is a cultic change, where the pyramid is replaced as the centre of appearance and importance by the mortuary temple as the centre of the funerary ritual. In spite of its reduced size, Shepseskaf's tomb and funerary complex were probably unfinished at the death of the king, something which is taken to confirm a short reign. Excavations have shown that parts of the associated mortuary temple as well as the entirety of the causeway leading to it from the Nile valley have been "hastily" completed in mudbrick, probably by one of his successors.
The narrow ends of the mastaba were deliberately raised unlike the traditional fashion, making the tomb look like a great sarcophagus or the hieroglyphic determinative for a shrine. The mastaba was originally clad with white Turah limestone except for its lower course, which was clad in red granite. The entrance to the substructures is on the mastaba's northern face, from where a nearly 20.95 m (68.7 ft) long rock-cut passageway descends at 23°30' to an antechamber, the access to which was to be protected by three portcullises. To the southeast of the antechamber is a room with six niches, possibly storerooms, while west of the antechamber lies the burial chamber. Measuring 7.79 m × 3.85 m (25.6 ft × 12.6 ft) it is lined with granite and has a 4.9 m (16 ft) high arched ceiling sculpted into a false vault. Remnants of a decorated dark basalt sarcophagus were uncovered there although the burial chamber was never finished and in all probability never used.
The mastaba was surrounded by a double enclosure wall of mudbricks. On the eastern face of the tomb was a mortuary temple with an offering hall, false door and five storerooms, the layout of which later served as template for Neferirkare Kakai's temple. No niches meant to house statues of the king were found, although fragments of a statue of Shepseskaf in the style of those of Khafre and Menkaure were uncovered in the temple. To the east lay a small inner court and a larger outer one. Remnants of a causeway have been found; it is supposed to have led to a valley temple which has yet to be located.
## Legacy
### Old Kingdom
Like other pharaohs of the fourth and fifth dynasties, Shepseskaf was the object of an official funerary cult after his death. This cult seems to have been relatively minor when compared to those given to his predecessors. Only three priests serving in this cult are known, including Shepseskaf's probable daughter queen Bunefer. This contrasts with the at least 73 and 21 priests known to have served in the cults of Khufu and Menkaure, respectively. Furthermore, no evidence for Shepseskaf's cult has been found beyond the mid fifth dynasty, while the cults of some of his close successors lasted beyond the end of the Old Kingdom. Provisions for these official mortuary cults were produced in agricultural estates set up during the ruler's reign. Possibly owing to the short duration of his reign only two such estates are known for Shepseskaf compared with at least sixty for Khufu.
In parallel to the official cult, it seems that Shepseskaf's name and memory were especially well regarded at least as late as the second half of the fifth dynasty as attested by at least seven high officials bearing the name Shepseskafankh, meaning "May Shepseskaf live" or "Shepseskaf lives", up until the reign of Nyuserre Ini. This includes a royal physician, a royal estate steward, a courtier, a priest, and a judicial official.
### Middle Kingdom
While no trace of state-sponsored cult of Shepseskaf have been uncovered from the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate periods, Jéquier discovered a Middle Kingdom stele during his excavations of Shepseskaf's mortuary temple. At that time, the vicinity of the mastaba had become a necropolis housing tombs from the lower strata of society. The stele uncovered by Jéquier probably originated from a nearby tomb and had been reused at a later time as paving for the temple floor. The stele indicates that some sort of popular cult had been revived by the 12th dynasty on the premises of the temple. Dedicated by a butcher named Ptahhotep, the stele depicts Ptahhotep and his family seemingly officiating a fully functioning cult, with its priests, scribes and servants. Contrary to the Old Kingdom state-sponsored cult honouring Shepseskaf, the main object of this cult was not Shepseskaf himself but the dead of the surrounding necropolis for whom people were making offerings, offerings which only the gods could give the dead after accepting them thanks to Shepseskaf's intercession. For Jéquier, this cult had been turned into a lucrative activity by Ptahhotep's family.
### New Kingdom
Along with other royal monuments at Saqqara and Abusir which had fallen into ruin, Shepseskaf's mastaba was the object of restoration works under the impulse of prince Khaemwaset, a son of Ramses II. This was possibly to appropriate stones for his father's construction projects while ensuring a minimal restoration for cultic purposes.
|
18,704,324 |
Manganese, Minnesota
| 1,147,563,361 | null |
[
"1912 establishments in Minnesota",
"1960 disestablishments in Minnesota",
"Brainerd, Minnesota micropolitan area",
"Former municipalities in Minnesota",
"Former populated places in Crow Wing County, Minnesota",
"Former populated places in Minnesota",
"Geography of Crow Wing County, Minnesota",
"Ghost towns in Minnesota",
"Mining communities in Minnesota",
"Populated places established in 1912"
] |
Manganese is a ghost town and former mining community in the U.S. state of Minnesota that was inhabited between 1912 and 1960. It was built in Crow Wing County on the Cuyuna Iron Range in sections 23 and 28 of Wolford Township, about 2 miles (3 km) north of Trommald, Minnesota. After its formal dissolution, Manganese was absorbed by Wolford Township; the former town site is located between Coles Lake and Flynn Lake. First appearing in the U.S. Census of 1920 with an already dwindling population of 183, the village was abandoned by 1960.
Manganese was one of the last of the Cuyuna Range communities to be established, and was named after the mineral located in abundance near the town. Manganese was an incorporated community, built on land above the Trommald Formation, the main ore-producing unit of the North Range district of the Cuyuna Iron Range, unique due to the amount of manganese in part of the iron formation and ore. The Trommald Formation and adjacent Emily District are the largest resource of manganese in the United States. The community was composed of many immigrants who had fled the natural disasters and social and political upheavals in Europe during the decades before World War I.
Manganese was laid out with three north–south and five east–west streets. Concrete sidewalks and curbing lined the clay streets, which were never paved. At its peak around 1919, Manganese had two hotels, a bank, two grocery stores, a barbershop, a show hall, and a two-room school, and housed a population of nearly 600. After World War I, the population of Manganese went into steady decline as mining operations shut down; along with the quagmire of the clay streets due to spring rains, this led to the community's eventual abandonment and formal dissolution in 1961. The privately owned land started to be resettled in 2017, as the old wooded lots were cleared and redeveloped as primitive campsites.
## History
The area around Manganese, and modern-day Crow Wing County, was inhabited in the mid-to-late 1600s by three distinct populations of Native Americans vying for control of the lands that would become the Cuyuna Range. The Arapaho living along the western border of the Great Lakes were quickly displaced by the Dakota and Ojibwe nations; frequent conflicts between the Dakota and Ojibwe eventually resulted in undisputed control of the region by the Ojibwe. In 1855, a treaty between the Ojibwe and the U.S. government was signed by chief Hole in the Day in what was then Minnesota Territory. This treaty secured Ojibwe hunting and fishing rights while ceding land which would become the Cuyuna Range to European-Americans looking to build new settlements in the region. The Minnesota Territorial Legislature enacted the creation of Crow Wing County on May 23, 1857. Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state on May 11, 1858, and Deerwood (originally named Withington), was the first Cuyuna Range community, settled in 1871.
The discovery of the Cuyuna Iron Range was an accident, made by the chance observation of a compass needle irregularity in 1895 while surveyor and mining engineer Cuyler Adams was exploring the area with his St. Bernard, named "Una". Adams surmised that a large, underground body of iron ore might be responsible for the discrepancy. Eight years after meticulously mapping these compass deflections, Adams performed test drilling in May 1903 which resulted in the discovery of manganiferous ore near Deerwood. Thirteen years after ore discovery by the Merritt Brothers in 1890 trigged an iron rush to the Mesabi Range, another iron rush began in Minnesota, and new mining communities began to develop along the width and breadth of the "Cuyuna" Iron Range, named by combining the first syllable of Adams' given name and the name of his dog.
### Establishment and community
Manganese was platted in sections 23 and 28 of Wolford Township by the Duluth Land and Timber Company on February 5, 1911, established on March 13, 1912, and incorporated on November 10, 1913, with 960 acres (390 ha) inside the corporate limits. As a result of the rapid mining development, all of the lots were sold within seven weeks of platting for \$100 to \$350 each. Manganese was named for the mineral located in abundance nearby. The mines surrounding the community included the Algoma mine, owned by the Onaham Iron Company and founded in 1911; the Gloria and Merrit No. 2 mines, both owned by the Hanna Mining Company and founded in 1916; the Milford Mine, owned by the Cuyuna-Minneapolis Iron Company and founded in 1917, and the Preston mine, owned by Coates and Tweed and founded in 1918. The sixth of the Cuyuna Range communities to be established (after Deerwood, Cuyuna, Crosby, Ironton, and Riverton), the new town was touted as the "Hibbing of the Cuyuna Range". Hibbing, founded in 1893 and by 1915 the largest mining community on the Mesabi Range with a population of 20,000, was at one time called the "Iron Ore Capital of the World."
An official U.S. Post Office opened in 1912 and remained in operation through 1924. In 1914, the town site had a crew of men and teams building streets with concrete sidewalks and curbing (although the clay roads were never paved). The Fitger Brewing Company also built a \$10,000, two-story hotel in 1914, complete with a bar and restaurant. By 1919, Manganese had two hotels, a bank, two grocery stores, two butcher shops, a lumber yard, a bakery, a livery stable, a barbershop, a pool room, a show hall, a dog pound, and a two-room school, and housed a population of nearly 600. That same year, the village issued a bond for a \$30,000 waterworks project, and the Pastoret Company of Duluth built a 100-foot (30 m) water tower with a 30,000-US-gallon (110,000 L) capacity. Manganese and other Cuyuna Range communities benefited greatly from an unusual situation created by an ad valorem property tax on unmined natural ore, resulting in huge amounts of unforeseen revenue, great expenditures of which were made on public works and improvements.
After the discovery of ore near Deerwood, Adams approached James J. Hill, then president of the Northern Pacific Railway, asking for a discounted rate to haul Cuyuna Range ore to Duluth (the rate from the Mesabi Range, which had richer ore, was one dollar per ton). Hill refused, so Adams went to Thomas Shaughnessy, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway and a competitor of Hill, who readily agreed to build 100 miles (160 km) of railroad with the guarantee to haul ten million tons of ore at sixty-five cents per ton. At the time, the Canadian Pacific controlled the Soo Line Railroad, having secured the railroad's funded debt, and the Soo Line came to furnish rail transportation to Manganese and the surrounding mines. In 1914, the Soo Line Railroad constructed a branch line to Manganese, and began excavation for a 24-by-60-foot (7 m × 18 m) passenger and freight depot with a 300-foot-long (91 m) platform. This branch line was essentially a spur track uncontrolled by train orders: only one train at a time was permitted on the track, with all of the traffic controlled by the Soo Line dispatcher at Iron Hub. Passenger connections with the other Cuyuna Iron Range towns were available three times daily through the operation of buses owned by the Cuyuna Range Transportation Company. It was speculated that Henry Ford once visited Manganese when he was exploring the acquisition of the Algoma mine on behalf of the Ford Motor Company. Ford was never observed, but his private rail car, the Fair Lane, with the familiar Ford oval and the gilded words "Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Michigan", was seen parked on the siding at Manganese.
The community was composed of many immigrants, including Finns, Croatians, Austrians, Swedes, Irish, Australians, English, Norwegians, Slovenians, and Serbs. Children attended school in Manganese through the eighth grade, attending high school in nearby Crosby, Minnesota. Known then as Independent School District No. 86, the school had indoor plumbing and later its own well, constructed by the Works Progress Administration. Over time, the village of Manganese had three wells, all of which collapsed at some point due to the heavy clay soils.
During late World War I, all of the mines surrounding the community were running at full capacity, furnishing about 90% of the manganese used during the war. By 1920, the combined payrolls of these mines totaled \$160,000 (approximately \$9.6 million in adjusted 2020 production worker compensation). Seven citizens from Manganese served in the military during World War I, including Harry Hosford, who later survived the Milford mine disaster.
### Decline
After the World War I armistice was signed, the demand for manganiferous ore decreased, and Manganese experienced a sharp drop in population from its peak of nearly 600 in 1919 to 183 in 1920. Many of the remaining residents worked in the Milford mine, which flooded on February 5, 1924, a result of blasting in a drift that extended beneath Foley (now Milford) Lake. Forty-one miners were killed in what was Minnesota's worst mining disaster; only seven, including Hosford, made it to safety. Many Manganese residents were superstitious and convinced that both the town of Manganese, and the Milford mine, were cursed.
With the advent of the Great Depression, mining operations ceased. The Soo Line tore up the track to Manganese in 1930. The last shipment of ore from the Gloria mine occurred in 1931; the Milford mine closed in 1932, although the Merritt mine continued to produce ore intermittently until 1943, and stockpile shipments from the Algoma mine continued through 1980. Very few photos of Manganese are known to exist. Never a wealthy community, residents had no money for cameras, a luxury item during the Depression.
In 1938, a Wesleyan Methodist Church and Sunday school was founded. Up to four Sunday school classes were offered depending on the ages of the children, and guest pastors would come to conduct services when occasional revival meetings were held. The congregation came from Trommald, Mission, Wolford, and Perry Lake, in addition to Manganese. The church was sold and torn down after World War II when the congregation was no longer able have a pastor appointed. As mining operations began to shut down, little employment was left in the community, and residents gradually started moving their homes out of town, relocating to other communities in the region to find new jobs.
### Abandonment and later use
Most of the remaining residents moved out around 1955. Structures that were not moved out of the community were torn down. After all of the residents left, the clay roads continued to be maintained, and the street lights remained on until the early 1970s. In 1959, the village of Ironton, one of the creditors for the village of Manganese, petitioned Crow Wing County for the community's dissolution. Einer R. Anderson, then Crow Wing County Auditor, was appointed as its receiver, and creditors of the village of Manganese were given six months to file a claim. Notices sent via registered mail to the last known village officers were refused and returned. Bids were accepted for the sale of the Manganese water tower and the frame building that had housed the village hall, with the condition that all debris be disposed of at the expense of the buyer. The steel water tower, with an estimated weight of 100 short tons (91,000 kg) of scrap metal, was valued at \$1,200; however, the sale and salvage of the water tower yielded net proceeds of only \$200. Ironically, the surviving Cuyuna Iron Range municipally-owned elevated metal water tanks (in the towns of Crosby, Cuyuna, Deerwood, Ironton, and Trommald) were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The final hearing regarding the dissolution of Manganese was held on July 17, 1961. Manganese was formally dissolved and absorbed by Wolford Township.
After the town was abandoned, only remnants of sidewalks, rubble, building foundations, old tires, plastic, pieces of clothing, beer cans, and other abandoned items remained. Willow, aspen, and other trees covered what was once a land occupied by numerous buildings; roots, shrubs, and grass began to heave and crack the concrete sidewalks and overtake the remaining grid pattern of roads, and the entire town site was consumed by the steady growth of natural vegetation. Most of the remaining structures succumbed to the elements. Old building foundations and basements, covered with graffiti, were engulfed by the brush. In 2003, the majority of the land which comprised the former town site was purchased, and a gate was posted along with a "no trespassing" sign at the southeast entrance to the former town. In 2006, the privately owned land was sold again; limited resettlement began in 2017. Called Manganese Base Camp, the old wooded lots, about 0.3 acres (0.12 ha) each, were being cleared and redeveloped as primitive campsites, without electricity, running water, or waste disposal services. Since then, Base Camp has hosted an annual Manganese Days Festival. The event is open to the public as a way to honor the former village, learn of its history, and explore the old town.
## Geography
Manganese lay at an elevation of 1,250 feet (380 m) in Crow Wing County, Minnesota, about 15 miles (24 km) northeast of Brainerd and 91 miles (146 km) west-southwest of Duluth. The nearest cities to Manganese were Trommald, approximately 2 miles (3 km) to the south-southwest, and Wolford, approximately 2 miles (3 km) to the northeast. Manganese was located to the west of Crow Wing County Road 30, about 5 miles (8 km) north of Minnesota State Highway 210 and 3 miles (5 km) west of Minnesota State Highway 6.
Manganese was laid out with three primary north–south streets: First Street East, Main Street, and First Street West. Second Avenue North, First Avenue North, Manganese Avenue, First Avenue South (now Old Manganese Road), and Second Avenue South traversed Manganese from east to west. The Soo Line right of way bisected the community on the east side of Manganese from the northeast to the southwest. First Avenue North extended about 1.9 miles (3.1 km) to the Milford mine.
### Geology
Manganese lay atop the iron-rich Trommald Formation, the main ore-producing unit of the North Range district of the Cuyuna Iron Range.
The Trommald Formation and adjacent Emily District are the largest resource of manganese in the United States. The largest high-grade deposit of manganiferous ore is located about 14 miles (23 km) north of Manganese on a 5-acre (2.0 ha) site at the edge of Emily. Valuable in steel and aluminum production, manganese is also used to make batteries. There is a local push to "scram" the stockpiles of ore found in the old waste rock of the Cuyuna Iron Range. This mining process is significantly less invasive than traditional blasting and crushing, producing iron ore and iron ore concentrates from previously developed waste rock stockpiles, tailings basins, open pit, or underground mines on land not previously affected by mining. However, the processing of some stockpiles would disrupt the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trails, which opened in June 2011, and have been economically beneficial to the region after the last manganiferous ore was shipped from the Cuyuna Range in 1984, resurrecting many Cuyuna Range communities that had been on the brink of economic collapse. This potential for ore processing has created debate as to whether mining and mountain biking can coexist. The use of former underground Cuyuna Range mines as a means of compressed-air energy storage has also been investigated by researchers at the University of Minnesota.
### Climate
Manganese was in the Laurentian Mixed Forest Province in the Brainerd Lakes Area of north central Minnesota. The Köppen climate classification is Dfb. Precipitation ranges from about 21 inches (53 cm) annually along the western border of the forest to about 32 inches (81 cm) at its eastern edge. Average annual temperatures are about 34 °F (1 °C) along the northern part of the forest, rising to 40 °F (4 °C) at its southern extreme.
July is the warmest month, when the average high temperature is 80 °F (27 °C) and the average low is 56 °F (13 °C). January is the coldest, with an average high temperature of 20 °F (−7 °C) and average low of 0 °F (−18 °C). The spring rains wreaked havoc on Manganese's clay streets, which was cited as one of the reasons for its abandonment.
## See also
- Iron Range
- List of ghost towns in the United States
|
1,965,396 |
Fossa (animal)
| 1,170,996,581 |
Cat-like, carnivorous mammal endemic to Madagascar
|
[
"Apex predators",
"Carnivorans of Africa",
"EDGE species",
"Endemic fauna of Madagascar",
"Euplerids",
"Mammals described in 1833",
"Mammals of Madagascar",
"Vulnerable animals",
"Vulnerable biota of Africa"
] |
The fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox; /ˈfɒsə/ or /ˈfuːsə/; ) is a slender, long-tailed, cat-like mammal that is endemic to Madagascar. It is a member of the carnivoran family Eupleridae.
The fossa is the largest mammalian carnivore on Madagascar and has been compared to a small cougar, as it has convergently evolved many cat-like features. Adults have a head-body length of 70–80 cm (28–31 in) and weigh between 5.5 and 8.6 kg (12 and 19 lb), with the males larger than the females. It has semi-retractable claws (meaning it can extend but not retract its claws fully) and flexible ankles that allow it to climb up and down trees head-first, and also support jumping from tree to tree. A larger relative of the species, Cryptoprocta spelea, probably became extinct before 1400.
The species is widespread, although population densities are usually low. It is found solely in forested habitat, and actively hunts both by day and night. Over 50% of its diet consists of lemurs, the endemic primates found on the island; tenrecs, rodents, lizards, birds, and other animals are also documented as prey. Mating usually occurs in trees on horizontal limbs and can last for several hours. Litters range from one to six pups, which are born altricial (blind and toothless). Infants wean after 4.5 months and are independent after a year. Sexual maturity occurs around three to four years of age, and life expectancy in captivity is 20 years. The fossa is listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List. It is generally feared by the Malagasy people and is often protected by their fady taboo. The greatest threat to the fossa is habitat destruction.
Its taxonomic classification has been controversial because its physical traits resemble those of cats, yet other traits suggest a close relationship with viverrids. Its classification, along with that of the other Malagasy carnivores, influenced hypotheses about how many times mammalian carnivores have colonized Madagascar. With genetic studies demonstrating that the fossa and all other Malagasy carnivores are most closely related to each other forming a clade, recognized as the family Eupleridae, carnivorans are now thought to have colonized the island once, around 18–20 million years ago.
## Etymology
The generic name Cryptoprocta refers to how the animal's anus is hidden by its anal pouch, from the Ancient Greek words crypto- "hidden", and procta "anus". The species name ferox is the Latin adjective "fierce" or "wild". Its common name comes from the word fosa in Malagasy, an Austronesian language, and some authors have adopted the Malagasy spelling in English. The word is similar to posa (meaning "cat") in the Iban language (another Austronesian language) from Borneo, and both terms may derive from trade languages from the 1600s. However, an alternative etymology suggests a link to another word that comes from Malay: pusa refers to the Malayan weasel (Mustela nudipes). The Malay word pusa could have become posa for cats in Borneo, while in Madagascar the word could have become fosa to refer to the fossa.
## Taxonomy
The fossa was formally described by Edward Turner Bennett on the basis of a specimen from Madagascar sent by Charles Telfair in 1833. The common name is the same as the generic name of the Malagasy civet (Fossa fossana), but they are different species. Because of shared physical traits with viverrids, mongooses, and Felidae, its classification has been controversial. Bennett originally placed the fossa as a type of civet in the family Viverridae, a classification that long remained popular among taxonomists. Its compact braincase, large eye sockets, retractable claws, and specialized carnivorous dentition have also led some taxonomists to associate it with the felids. In 1939, William King Gregory and Milo Hellman placed the fossa in its own subfamily within Felidae, the Cryptoproctinae. George Gaylord Simpson placed it back in Viverridae in 1945, still within its own subfamily, yet conceded it had many cat-like characteristics.
In 1993, Géraldine Veron and François Catzeflis published a DNA hybridization study suggesting that the fossa was more closely related to mongooses (family Herpestidae) than to cats or civets. However, in 1995, Veron's morphological study once again grouped it with Felidae. In 2003, molecular phylogenetic studies using nuclear and mitochondrial genes by Anne Yoder and colleagues showed that all native Malagasy carnivorans share a common ancestry that excludes other carnivores (meaning they form a clade, making them monophyletic) and are most closely related to Asian and African Herpestidae. To reflect these relationships, all Malagasy carnivorans are now placed in a single family, Eupleridae. Within Eupleridae, the fossa is placed in the subfamily Euplerinae along with the falanouc (Eupleres goudoti) and Malagasy civet, but its exact relationships are poorly resolved.
An extinct relative of the fossa was described in 1902 from subfossil remains and recognized as a separate species, Cryptoprocta spelea, in 1935. This species was larger than the living fossa (with a body mass estimate roughly twice as great), but otherwise similar. Across Madagascar, people distinguish two kinds of fossa—a large fosa mainty ("black fossa") and the smaller fosa mena ("reddish fossa")—and a white form has been reported in the southwest. It is unclear whether this is purely folklore or individual variation—related to sex, age or instances of melanism and leucism—or whether there is indeed more than one species of living fossa.
## Description
The fossa appears as a diminutive form of a large felid, such as a cougar, but with a slender body and muscular limbs, and a tail nearly as long as the rest of the body. It has a mongoose-like head, relatively longer than that of a cat, although with a muzzle that is broad and short, and with large but rounded ears. It has medium brown eyes set relatively wide apart with pupils that contract to slits. Like many carnivorans that hunt at night, its eyes reflect light; the reflected light is orange in hue. Its head-body length is 70–80 cm (28–31 in) and its tail is 65–70 cm (26–28 in) long. There is some sexual dimorphism, with adult males (weighing 6.2–8.6 kg or 14–19 lb) being larger than females (5.5–6.8 kg or 12–15 lb). Smaller individuals are typically found north and east on Madagascar, larger ones to the south and west. Unusually large individuals weighing up to 20 kg (44 lb) have been reported, but there is some doubt as to the reliability of the measurements. The fossa can smell, hear, and see well. It is a robust animal and illnesses are rare in captive fossas.
Both males and females have short, straight fur that is relatively dense and without spots or patterns. Both sexes are generally a reddish-brown dorsally and colored a dirty cream ventrally. When in rut, they may have an orange coloration to their abdomen from a reddish substance secreted by a chest gland, but this has not been consistently observed by all researchers. The tail tends to be lighter in coloration than the sides. Juveniles are either gray or nearly white.
Several of the animal's physical features are adaptions to climbing through trees. It uses its tail to assist balance and has semi-retractable claws that it uses to climb trees in its search for prey. It has semiplantigrade feet, switching between a plantigrade-like gait (when arboreal) and a digitigrade-like one (when terrestrial). The soles of its paws are nearly bare and covered with strong pads. The fossa has very flexible ankles that allow it to readily grasp tree trunks so as to climb up or down trees head first or to leap to another tree. Captive juveniles have been known to swing upside down by their hindfeet from knotted ropes.
The fossa has several scent glands, although the glands are less developed in females. Like herpestids it has a perianal skin gland inside an anal sac which surrounds the anus like a pocket. The pocket opens to the exterior with a horizontal slit below the tail. Other glands are located near the penis or vagina, with the penile glands emitting a strong odor. Like the herpestids, it has no prescrotal glands.
### External genitalia
One of the more peculiar physical features of this species is its external genitalia. The fossa is unique within its family for the shape of its genitalia, which share traits with those of cats and hyenas. The male fossa has an unusually long penis and baculum (penis bone), reaching to between his forelegs when erect, with an average thickness of 20 mm (0.79 in). The glans extends about halfway down the shaft and is spiny except at the tip. In comparison, the glans of felids is short and spiny, while that of viverrids is smooth and long. The female fossa exhibits transient masculinization, starting at about 1–2 years of age, developing an enlarged, spiny clitoris that resembles a male's penis. The enlarged clitoris is supported by an os clitoridis, which decreases in size as the animal grows. The females do not have a pseudo-scrotum, but they do secrete an orange substance that colors their underparts, much like the secretions of males. Hormone levels (testosterone, androstenedione, dihydrotestosterone) do not seem to play a part in this transient masculinization, as those levels are the same in masculinized juveniles and non-masculinized adults. It is speculated that the transient masculinization either reduces sexual harassment of juvenile females by adult males, or reduces aggression from territorial females. While females of other mammal species (such as the spotted hyena) have a pseudo-penis, no other is known to diminish in size as the animal grows.
### Comparison with related carnivorans
Overall, the fossa has features in common with three different carnivoran families, leading researchers to place it and other members of Eupleridae alternatively in Herpestidae, Viverridae, and Felidae. Felid features are primarily those associated with eating and digestion, including tooth shape and facial portions of the skull, the tongue, and the digestive tract, typical of its exclusively carnivorous diet. The remainder of the skull most closely resembles skulls of genus Viverra, while the general body structure is most similar to that of various members of Herpestidae. The permanent dentition is (three incisors, one canine, three or four premolars, and one molar on each side of both the upper and lower jaws), with the deciduous formula being similar but lacking the fourth premolar and the molar. The fossa has a large, prominent rhinarium similar to that of viverrids, but has comparatively larger, round ears, almost as large as those of a similarly sized felid. Its facial vibrissae (whiskers) are long, with the longest being longer than its head. Like some mongoose genera, particularly Galidia (which is now in the fossa's own family, Eupleridae) and Herpestes (of Herpestidae), it has carpal vibrissae as well. Its claws are retractile, but unlike those of Felidae species, they are not hidden in skin sheaths. It has three pairs of nipples (one inguinal, one ventral, and one pectoral).
## Habitat and distribution
The fossa has the most widespread geographical range of the Malagasy carnivores, and is generally found in low numbers throughout the island in remaining tracts of forest, preferring pristine undisturbed forest habitat. It is also encountered in some degraded forests, but in lower numbers. Although the fossa is found in all known forest habitats throughout Madagascar, including the western dry deciduous forests, the eastern rainforests, and the southern spiny forests, it is seen more frequently in humid than in dry forests. This may be because the reduced canopy in dry forests provides less shade, and also because the fossa seems to travel more easily in humid forests. It is absent from areas with the heaviest habitat disturbance and, like most of Madagascar's fauna, from the central high plateau of the country.
The fossa has been found across several different elevational gradients in undisturbed portions of protected areas throughout Madagascar. In the Réserve Naturelle Intégrale d'Andringitra, evidence of the fossa has been reported at four different sites ranging from 810 to 1,625 m (2,657 to 5,331 ft). Its highest known occurrence was reported at 2,000 m (6,600 ft); its presence high on the Andringitra Massif was subsequently confirmed in 1996. Similarly, evidence has been reported of the fossa at the elevational extremes of 440 m (1,440 ft) and 1,875 m (6,152 ft) in the Andohahela National Park. The presence of the fossa at these locations indicates its ability to adapt to various elevations, consistent with its reported distribution in all Madagascar forest types.
## Behavior
The fossa is active during both the day and the night and is considered cathemeral; activity peaks may occur early in the morning, late in the afternoon, and late in the night. The animal generally does not reuse sleeping sites, but females with young do return to the same den. The home ranges of male fossas in Kirindy Forest are up to 26 km<sup>2</sup> (10 sq mi) large, compared to 13 km<sup>2</sup> (5.0 sq mi) for females. These ranges overlap—by about 30 percent according to data from the eastern forests—but females usually have separated ranges. Home ranges grow during the dry season, perhaps because less food and water is available. In general, radio-collared fossas travel between 2 and 5 kilometres (1.2 and 3.1 mi) per day, although in one reported case a fossa was observed moving a straight-line distance of 7 km (4.3 mi) in 16 hours. The animal's population density appears to be low: in Kirindy Forest, where it is thought to be common, its density has been estimated at one animal per 4 km<sup>2</sup> (1.5 sq mi) in 1998. Another study in the same forest between 1994 and 1996 using the mark and recapture method indicated a population density of one animal per 3.8 km<sup>2</sup> (1.5 sq mi) and one adult per 5.6 km<sup>2</sup> (2.2 sq mi).
Except for mothers with young and occasional observations of pairs of males, animals are usually found alone, so that the species is considered solitary. A 2009 publication, however, reported a detailed observation of cooperative hunting, wherein three male fossas hunted a 3 kg (6.6 lb) sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) for 45 minutes, and subsequently shared the prey. This behavior may be a vestige of cooperative hunting that would have been required to take down larger recently extinct lemurs.
Fossas communicate using sounds, scents, and visual signals. Vocalizations include purring, a threatening call, and a call of fear, consisting of "repeated loud, coarse inhalations and gasps of breath". A long, high yelp may function to attract other fossas. Females mew during mating and males produce a sigh when they have found a female. Throughout the year, animals produce long-lasting scent marks on rocks, trees, and the ground using glands in the anal region and on the chest. They also communicate using face and body expression, but the significance of these signals is uncertain. The animal is aggressive only during mating, and males in particular fight boldly. After a short fight, the loser flees and is followed by the winner for a short distance. In captivity, fossas are usually not aggressive and sometimes even allow themselves to be stroked by a zookeeper, but adult males in particular may try to bite.
### Diet
The fossa is a carnivore that hunts small to medium-sized animals. One of eight carnivorous species endemic to Madagascar, the fossa is the island's largest surviving endemic terrestrial mammal and the only predator capable of preying upon adults of all extant lemur species, the largest of which can weigh as much as 90 percent of the weight of the average fossa. Although it is the predominant predator of lemurs, reports of its dietary habits demonstrate a wide variety of prey selectivity and specialization depending on habitat and season; diet does not vary by sex. While the fossa is thought to be a lemur specialist in Ranomafana National Park, its diet is more variable in other rain forest habitats.
The diet of the fossa in the wild has been studied by analyzing their distinctive scats, which resemble gray cylinders with twisted ends and measure 10–14 cm (3.9–5.5 in) long by 1.5–2.5 cm (0.6–1.0 in) thick. Scat collected and analyzed from both Andohahela and Andringitra contained lemur matter and rodents. Eastern populations in Andringitra incorporate the widest recorded variety of prey, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. Vertebrates consumed ranged from reptiles to a wide variety of birds, including both understory and ground birds, and mammals, including insectivores, rodents, and lemurs. Invertebrates eaten by the fossa in the high mountain zone of Andringitra include insects and crabs. One study found that vertebrates comprised 94% of the diet of fossas, with lemurs comprising over 50%, followed by tenrecs (9%), lizards (9%), and birds (2%). Seeds, which comprised 5% of the diet, may have been in the stomachs of the lemurs eaten, or may have been consumed with fruit taken for water, as seeds were more common in the stomach in the dry season. The average prey size varies geographically; it is only 40 grams (1.4 oz) in the high mountains of Andringitra, in contrast to 480 grams (17 oz) in humid forests and over 1,000 grams (35 oz) in dry deciduous forests. In a study of fossa diet in the dry deciduous forest of western Madagascar, more than 90% of prey items were vertebrates, and more than 50% were lemurs. The primary diet consisted of approximately six lemur species and two or three spiny tenrec species, along with snakes and small mammals. Generally, the fossa preys upon larger lemurs and rodents in preference to smaller ones.
Prey is obtained by hunting either on the ground or in the trees. During the non-breeding season the fossa hunts individually, but during the breeding season hunting parties may be seen, and these may be pairs or later on mothers and young. One member of the group scales a tree and chases the lemurs from tree to tree, forcing them down to the ground where the other is easily able to capture them. The fossa is known to eviscerate its larger lemur prey, a trait that, along with its distinct scat, helps identify its kills. Long-term observations of the fossa's predation patterns on rainforest sifakas suggest that the fossa hunts in a subsection of their range until prey density is decreased, then moves on. The fossa has been reported to prey on domestic animals, such as goats and small calves, and especially chickens. Food taken in captivity includes amphibians, birds, insects, reptiles, and small- to medium-sized mammals.
This wide variety of prey items taken in various rainforest habitats is similar to the varied dietary composition noted occurring in the dry forests of western Madagascar, as well. As the largest endemic predator on Madagascar, this dietary flexibility combined with a flexible activity pattern has allowed it to exploit a wide variety of niches available throughout the island, making it a potential keystone species for the Madagascar ecosystems.
### Breeding
Fossas have a polyandrous mating system. Most of the details of reproduction in wild populations are from the western dry deciduous forests; determining whether certain of these details are applicable to eastern populations will require further field research. Mating typically occurs during September and October, although there are reports of its occurring as late as December, and can be highly conspicuous. In captivity in the Northern Hemisphere, fossas instead mate in the northern spring, from March to July. Intromission usually occurs in trees on horizontal limbs about 20 m (66 ft) off the ground. Frequently the same tree is used year after year, with remarkable precision as to the date the season commences. Trees are often near a water source, and have limbs strong enough and wide enough to support the mating pair, about 20 cm (7.9 in) wide. Some mating has been reported on the ground as well.
As many as eight males will be at a mating site, staying in close vicinity to the receptive female. The female seems to choose the male she mates with, and the males compete for the attention of the female with a significant amount of vocalization and antagonistic interactions. The female may choose to mate with several of the males, and her choice of mate does not seem to have any correlation to the physical appearance of the males. To stimulate the male to mount her, she gives a series of mewling vocalizations. The male mounts from behind, resting his body on her slightly off-center, a position requiring delicate balance; if the female were to stand, the male would have significant difficulty continuing. He places his paws on her shoulders or grasps her around the waist and often licks her neck. Mating may last for nearly three hours. This unusually lengthy mating is due to the physical nature of the male's erect penis, which has backwards-pointing spines along most of its length. Fossa mating includes a copulatory tie, which may be enforced by the male's spiny penis. The tie is difficult to break if the mating session is interrupted. Copulation with a single male may be repeated several times, with a total mating time of up to fourteen hours, while the male may remain with the female for up to an hour after the mating. A single female may occupy the tree for up to a week, mating with multiple males over that time. Also, other females may take her place, mating with some of the same males as well as others. This mating strategy, whereby the females monopolize a site and maximize the available number of mates, seems to be unique among carnivores. Recent research suggests that this system helps the fossa overcome factors which would normally impede mate-finding, such as low population density and lack of den use.
The birthing of the litter of one to six (typically two to four) takes place in a concealed location, such as an underground den, a termite mound, a rock crevice, or in the hollow of a large tree (particularly those of the genus Commiphora). Contrary to older research, litters are of mixed sexes. Young are born in December or January, making the gestation period 90 days, with the late mating reports indicating a gestational period of about six to seven weeks. The newborns are blind and toothless and weigh no more than 100 g (3.5 oz). The fur is thin and has been described as gray-brown or nearly white. After about two weeks the cubs' eyes open, they become more active, and their fur darkens to a pearl gray. The cubs do not take solid food until three months old, and do not leave the den until they are 4.5 months old; they are weaned shortly after that. After the first year, the juveniles are independent of their mother. Permanent teeth appear at 18 to 20 months. Physical maturity is reached by about two years of age, but sexual maturity is not attained for another year or two, and the young may stay with their mother until they are fully mature. Lifespan in captivity is up to or past 20 years of age, possibly due to the slow juvenile development.
## Human interactions
The fossa has been assessed as "Vulnerable" by the IUCN Red List since 2008, as its population size has probably declined by at least 30 percent between 1987 and 2008; previous assessments have included "Endangered" (2000) and "Insufficiently Known" (1988, 1990, 1994). The species is dependent on forest and thus threatened by the widespread destruction of Madagascar's native forest but is also able to persist in disturbed areas. A suite of microsatellite markers (short segments of DNA that have a repeated sequence) have been developed to help aid in studies of genetic health and population dynamics of both captive and wild fossas. Several pathogens have been isolated from the fossa, some of which, such as anthrax and canine distemper, are thought to have been transmitted by feral dogs or cats. Toxoplasma gondii was reported in a captive fossa in 2013.
Although the species is widely distributed, it is locally rare in all regions, making fossas particularly vulnerable to extinction. The effects of habitat fragmentation increase the risk. For its size, the fossa has a lower than predicted population density, which is further threatened by Madagascar's rapidly disappearing forests and dwindling populations of lemurs, which make up a high proportion of its diet. The loss of the fossa, either locally or completely, could significantly impact ecosystem dynamics, possibly leading to over-grazing by some of its prey species. The total population of the fossa living within protected areas is estimated at less than 2,500 adults, but this may be an overestimate. Only two protected areas are thought to contain 500 or more adult fossas: Masoala National Park and Midongy-Sud National Park, although these are also thought to be overestimated. Too little population information has been collected for a formal population viability analysis, but estimates suggest that none of the protected areas support a viable population. If this is correct, the extinction of the fossa may take as much as 100 years to occur as the species gradually declines. In order for the species to survive, it is estimated that at least 555 km<sup>2</sup> (214 sq mi) is needed to maintain smaller, short-term viable populations, and at least 2,000 km<sup>2</sup> (770 sq mi) for populations of 500 adults.
Taboo, known in Madagascar as fady, offers protection for the fossa and other carnivores. In the Marolambo District (part of the Atsinanana region in Toamasina Province), the fossa has traditionally been hated and feared as a dangerous animal. It has been described as "greedy and aggressive", known for taking fowl and piglets, and believed to "take little children who walk alone into the forest". Some do not eat it for fear that it will transfer its undesirable qualities to anyone who consumes it. However, the animal is also taken for bushmeat; a study published in 2009 reported that 57 percent of villages (8 of 14 sampled) in the Makira forest consume fossa meat. The animals were typically hunted using slingshots, with dogs, or most commonly, by placing snare traps on animal paths. Near Ranomafana National Park, the fossa, along with several of its smaller cousins and the introduced small Indian civet (Viverricula indica), are known to "scavenge on the bodies of ancestors", which are buried in shallow graves in the forest. For this reason, eating these animals is strictly prohibited by fady. However, if they wander into villages in search of domestic fowl, they may be killed or trapped. Small carnivore traps have been observed near chicken runs in the village of Vohiparara.
Fossas are occasionally held in captivity in zoos. They first bred in captivity in 1974 in the zoo of Montpellier, France. The next year, at a time when there were only eight fossas in the world's zoos, the Duisburg Zoo in Germany acquired one; this zoo later started a successful breeding program, and most zoo fossas now descend from the Duisburg population. Research on the Duisburg fossas has provided much data about their biology.
The fossa was depicted as an antagonist in the 2005 DreamWorks animated film Madagascar, being referred to as the "foosa", and accurately shown as the lemurs' most feared predator.
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53,948 |
Hippocampus
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Vertebrate brain region involved in memory consolidation
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"Hippocampus (brain)",
"Limbic system"
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The hippocampus (: hippocampi; via Latin from Greek ἱππόκαμπος, 'seahorse') is a major component of the brain of humans and other vertebrates. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. The hippocampus is located in the allocortex, with neural projections into the neocortex in humans, as well as primates. The hippocampus, as the medial pallium, is a structure found in all vertebrates. In humans, it contains two main interlocking parts: the hippocampus proper (also called Ammon's horn), and the dentate gyrus.
In Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia), the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; short-term memory loss and disorientation are included among the early symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation (hypoxia), encephalitis, or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. People with extensive, bilateral hippocampal damage may experience anterograde amnesia: the inability to form and retain new memories.
Since different neuronal cell types are neatly organized into layers in the hippocampus, it has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. The form of neural plasticity known as long-term potentiation (LTP) was initially discovered to occur in the hippocampus and has often been studied in this structure. LTP is widely believed to be one of the main neural mechanisms by which memories are stored in the brain.
In rodents as model organisms, the hippocampus has been studied extensively as part of a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Many neurons in the rat and mouse hippocampus respond as place cells: that is, they fire bursts of action potentials when the animal passes through a specific part of its environment. Hippocampal place cells interact extensively with head direction cells, whose activity acts as an inertial compass, and conjecturally with grid cells in the neighboring entorhinal cortex.
## Name
The earliest description of the ridge running along the floor of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle comes from the Venetian anatomist Julius Caesar Aranzi (1587), who likened it first to a silkworm and then to a seahorse (Latin hippocampus, from Greek ἱππόκαμπος, from ἵππος, 'horse' + κάμπος, 'sea monster'). The German anatomist Duvernoy (1729), the first to illustrate the structure, also wavered between "seahorse" and "silkworm". "Ram's horn" was proposed by the Danish anatomist Jacob Winsløw in 1732; and a decade later his fellow Parisian, the surgeon de Garengeot, used cornu Ammonis – horn of Amun, the ancient Egyptian god who was often represented as having a ram's head.
Another reference appeared with the term pes hippocampi, which may date back to Diemerbroeck in 1672, introducing a comparison with the shape of the folded back forelimbs and webbed feet of the mythological hippocampus, a sea monster with a horse's forequarters and a fish's tail. The hippocampus was then described as pes hippocampi major, with an adjacent bulge in the occipital horn, described as the pes hippocampi minor and later renamed as the calcar avis. The renaming of the hippocampus as hippocampus major, and the calcar avis as hippocampus minor, has been attributed to Félix Vicq-d'Azyr systematizing nomenclature of parts of the brain in 1786. Mayer mistakenly used the term hippopotamus in 1779, and was followed by some other authors until Karl Friedrich Burdach resolved this error in 1829. In 1861 the hippocampus minor became the center of a dispute over human evolution between Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen, satirized as the Great Hippocampus Question. The term hippocampus minor fell from use in anatomy textbooks and was officially removed in the Nomina Anatomica of 1895. Today, the structure is just called the hippocampus, with the term cornu Ammonis (that is, 'Ammon's horn') surviving in the names of the hippocampal subfields CA1-CA4.
## Relation to limbic system
The term limbic system was introduced in 1952 by Paul MacLean to describe the set of structures that line the deep edge of the cortex (Latin limbus meaning border): These include the hippocampus, cingulate cortex, olfactory cortex, and amygdala. Paul MacLean later suggested that the limbic structures comprise the neural basis of emotion. The hippocampus is anatomically connected to parts of the brain that are involved with emotional behavior – the septum, the hypothalamic mammillary body, and the anterior nuclear complex in the thalamus, and is generally accepted to be part of the limbic system.
## Anatomy
The hippocampus can be seen as a ridge of gray matter tissue, elevating from the floor of each lateral ventricle in the region of the inferior or temporal horn. This ridge can also be seen as an inward fold of the archicortex into the medial temporal lobe. The hippocampus can only be seen in dissections as it is concealed by the parahippocampal gyrus. The cortex thins from six layers to the three or four layers that make up the hippocampus.
The term hippocampal formation is used to refer to the hippocampus proper and its related parts. However, there is no consensus as to what parts are included. Sometimes the hippocampus is said to include the dentate gyrus and the subiculum. Some references include the dentate gyrus and the subiculum in the hippocampal formation, and others also include the presubiculum, parasubiculum, and entorhinal cortex. The neural layout and pathways within the hippocampal formation are very similar in all mammals.
The hippocampus, including the dentate gyrus, has the shape of a curved tube, which has been compared to a seahorse, and to a horn of a ram, which after the ancient Egyptian god often portrayed as such takes the name cornu Ammonis. Its abbreviation CA is used in naming the hippocampal subfields CA1, CA2, CA3, and CA4. It can be distinguished as an area where the cortex narrows into a single layer of densely packed pyramidal neurons, which curl into a tight U shape. One edge of the "U," – CA4, is embedded into the backward-facing, flexed dentate gyrus. The hippocampus is described as having an anterior and posterior part (in primates) or a ventral and dorsal part in other animals. Both parts are of similar composition but belong to different neural circuits. In the rat, the two hippocampi resemble a pair of bananas, joined at the stems by the commissure of fornix (also called the hippocampal commissure). In primates, the part of the hippocampus at the bottom, near the base of the temporal lobe, is much broader than the part at the top. This means that in cross-section the hippocampus can show a number of different shapes, depending on the angle and location of the cut.
In a cross-section of the hippocampus, including the dentate gyrus, several layers will be shown. The dentate gyrus has three layers of cells (or four if the hilus is included). The layers are from the outer in – the molecular layer, the inner molecular layer, the granular layer, and the hilus. The CA3 in the hippocampus proper has the following cell layers known as strata: lacunosum-moleculare, radiatum, lucidum, pyramidal, and oriens. CA2 and CA1 also have these layers except the lucidum stratum.
The input to the hippocampus (from varying cortical and subcortical structures) comes from the entorhinal cortex via the perforant path. The entorhinal cortex (EC) is strongly and reciprocally connected with many cortical and subcortical structures as well as with the brainstem. Different thalamic nuclei, (from the anterior and midline groups), the medial septal nucleus, the supramammillary nucleus of the hypothalamus, and the raphe nuclei and locus coeruleus of the brainstem all send axons to the EC, so that it serves as the interface between the neocortex and the other connections, and the hippocampus.
The EC is located in the parahippocampal gyrus, a cortical region adjacent to the hippocampus. This gyrus conceals the hippocampus. The parahippocampal gyrus is adjacent to the perirhinal cortex, which plays an important role in the visual recognition of complex objects. There is also substantial evidence that it makes a contribution to memory, which can be distinguished from the contribution of the hippocampus. It is apparent that complete amnesia occurs only when both the hippocampus and the parahippocampus are damaged.
### Circuitry
The major input to the hippocampus is through the entorhinal cortex (EC), whereas its major output is via CA1 to the subiculum. Information reaches CA1 via two main pathways, direct and indirect. Axons from the EC that originate in layer III are the origin of the direct perforant pathway and form synapses on the very distal apical dendrites of CA1 neurons. Conversely, axons originating from layer II are the origin of the indirect pathway, and information reaches CA1 via the trisynaptic circuit. In the initial part of this pathway, the axons project through the perforant pathway to the granule cells of the dentate gyrus (first synapse). From then, the information follows via the mossy fibres to CA3 (second synapse). From there, CA3 axons called Schaffer collaterals leave the deep part of the cell body and loop up to the apical dendrites and then extend to CA1 (third synapse). Axons from CA1 then project back to the entorhinal cortex, completing the circuit.
Basket cells in CA3 receive excitatory input from the pyramidal cells and then give an inhibitory feedback to the pyramidal cells. This recurrent inhibition is a simple feedback circuit that can dampen excitatory responses in the hippocampus. The pyramidal cells gives a recurrent excitation which is an important mechanism found in some memory processing microcircuits.
Several other connections play important roles in hippocampal function. Beyond the output to the EC, additional output pathways go to other cortical areas including the prefrontal cortex. A major output goes via the fornix to the lateral septal area and to the mammillary body of the hypothalamus (which the fornix interconnects with the hippocampus). The hippocampus receives modulatory input from the serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine systems, and from the nucleus reuniens of the thalamus to field CA1. A very important projection comes from the medial septal nucleus, which sends cholinergic, and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) stimulating fibers (GABAergic fibers) to all parts of the hippocampus. The inputs from the medial septal nucleus play a key role in controlling the physiological state of the hippocampus; destruction of this nucleus abolishes the hippocampal theta rhythm and severely impairs certain types of memory.
### Regions
Areas of the hippocampus are shown to be functionally and anatomically distinct. The dorsal hippocampus (DH), ventral hippocampus (VH) and intermediate hippocampus serve different functions, project with differing pathways, and have varying degrees of place cells. The dorsal hippocampus serves for spatial memory, verbal memory, and learning of conceptual information. Using the radial arm maze, lesions in the DH were shown to cause spatial memory impairment while VH lesions did not. Its projecting pathways include the medial septal nucleus and supramammillary nucleus. The dorsal hippocampus also has more place cells than both the ventral and intermediate hippocampal regions.
The intermediate hippocampus has overlapping characteristics with both the ventral and dorsal hippocampus. Using anterograde tracing methods, Cenquizca and Swanson (2007) located the moderate projections to two primary olfactory cortical areas and prelimbic areas of the medial prefrontal cortex. This region has the smallest number of place cells. The ventral hippocampus functions in fear conditioning and affective processes. Anagnostaras et al. (2002) showed that alterations to the ventral hippocampus reduced the amount of information sent to the amygdala by the dorsal and ventral hippocampus, consequently altering fear conditioning in rats. Historically, the earliest widely held hypothesis was that the hippocampus is involved in olfaction. This idea was cast into doubt by a series of anatomical studies that did not find any direct projections to the hippocampus from the olfactory bulb. However, later work did confirm that the olfactory bulb does project into the ventral part of the lateral entorhinal cortex, and field CA1 in the ventral hippocampus sends axons to the main olfactory bulb, the anterior olfactory nucleus, and to the primary olfactory cortex. There continues to be some interest in hippocampal olfactory responses, in particular, the role of the hippocampus in memory for odors, but few specialists today believe that olfaction is its primary function.
## Function
### Theories of hippocampal functions
Over the years, three main ideas of hippocampal function have dominated the literature: response inhibition, episodic memory, and spatial cognition. The behavioral inhibition theory (caricatured by John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel as "slam on the brakes!") was very popular up to the 1960s. It derived much of its justification from two observations: first, that animals with hippocampal damage tend to be hyperactive; second, that animals with hippocampal damage often have difficulty learning to inhibit responses that they have previously been taught, especially if the response requires remaining quiet as in a passive avoidance test. British psychologist Jeffrey Gray developed this line of thought into a full-fledged theory of the role of the hippocampus in anxiety. The inhibition theory is currently the least popular of the three.
The second major line of thought relates the hippocampus to memory. Although it had historical precursors, this idea derived its main impetus from a famous report by American neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville and British-Canadian neuropsychologist Brenda Milner describing the results of surgical destruction of the hippocampi when trying to relieve epileptic seizures in an American man Henry Molaison, known until his death in 2008 as "Patient H.M." The unexpected outcome of the surgery was severe anterograde and partial retrograde amnesia; Molaison was unable to form new episodic memories after his surgery and could not remember any events that occurred just before his surgery, but he did retain memories of events that occurred many years earlier extending back into his childhood. This case attracted such widespread professional interest that Molaison became the most intensively studied subject in medical history. In the ensuing years, other patients with similar levels of hippocampal damage and amnesia (caused by accident or disease) have also been studied, and thousands of experiments have studied the physiology of activity-driven changes in synaptic connections in the hippocampus. There is now universal agreement that the hippocampi play some sort of important role in memory; however, the precise nature of this role remains widely debated. A recent theory proposed – without questioning its role in spatial cognition – that the hippocampus encodes new episodic memories by associating representations in the newborn granule cells of the dentate gyrus and arranging those representations sequentially in the CA3 by relying on the phase precession generated in the entorhinal cortex
The third important theory of hippocampal function relates the hippocampus to space. The spatial theory was originally championed by O'Keefe and Nadel, who were influenced by American psychologist E.C. Tolman's theories about "cognitive maps" in humans and animals. O'Keefe and his student Dostrovsky in 1971 discovered neurons in the rat hippocampus that appeared to them to show activity related to the rat's location within its environment. Despite skepticism from other investigators, O'Keefe and his co-workers, especially Lynn Nadel, continued to investigate this question, in a line of work that eventually led to their very influential 1978 book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. There is now almost universal agreement that hippocampal function plays an important role in spatial coding, but the details are widely debated.
Later research has focused on trying to bridge the disconnect between the two main views of hippocampal function as being split between memory and spatial cognition. In some studies, these areas have been expanded to the point of near convergence. In an attempt to reconcile the two disparate views, it is suggested that a broader view of the hippocampal function is taken and seen to have a role that encompasses both the organisation of experience (mental mapping, as per Tolman's original concept in 1948) and the directional behaviour seen as being involved in all areas of cognition, so that the function of the hippocampus can be viewed as a broader system that incorporates both the memory and the spatial perspectives in its role that involves the use of a wide scope of cognitive maps. This relates to the purposive behaviorism born of Tolman's original goal of identifying the complex cognitive mechanisms and purposes that guided behaviour.
It has also been proposed that the spiking activity of hippocampal neurons is associated spatially, and it was suggested that the mechanisms of memory and planning both evolved from mechanisms of navigation and that their neuronal algorithms were basically the same.
Many studies have made use of neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and a functional role in approach-avoidance conflict has been noted. The anterior hippocampus is seen to be involved in decision-making under approach-avoidance conflict processing. It is suggested that the memory, spatial cognition, and conflict processing functions may be seen as working together and not mutually exclusive.
### Role in memory
Psychologists and neuroscientists generally agree that the hippocampus plays an important role in the formation of new memories about experienced events (episodic or autobiographical memory). Part of this function is hippocampal involvement in the detection of new events, places and stimuli. Some researchers regard the hippocampus as part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory (memories that can be explicitly verbalized – these would include, for example, memory for facts in addition to episodic memory). The hippocampus also encodes emotional context from the amygdala. This is partly why returning to a location where an emotional event occurred may evoke that emotion. There is a deep emotional connection between episodic memories and places.
Due to bilateral symmetry the brain has a hippocampus in each cerebral hemisphere. If damage to the hippocampus occurs in only one hemisphere, leaving the structure intact in the other hemisphere, the brain can retain near-normal memory functioning. Severe damage to the hippocampi in both hemispheres results in profound difficulties in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia) and often also affects memories formed before the damage occurred (retrograde amnesia). Although the retrograde effect normally extends many years back before the brain damage, in some cases older memories remain. This retention of older memories leads to the idea that consolidation over time involves the transfer of memories out of the hippocampus to other parts of the brain. Experiments using intrahippocampal transplantation of hippocampal cells in primates with neurotoxic lesions of the hippocampus have shown that the hippocampus is required for the formation and recall, but not the storage, of memories. It has been shown that a decrease in the volume of various parts of the hippocampus in people leads to specific memory impairments. In particular, efficiency of verbal memory retention is related to the anterior parts of the right and left hippocampus. The right head of the hippocampus is more involved in executive functions and regulation during verbal memory recall. The tail of the left hippocampus tends to be closely related to verbal memory capacity.
Damage to the hippocampus does not affect some types of memory, such as the ability to learn new skills (playing a musical instrument or solving certain types of puzzles, for example). This fact suggests that such abilities depend on different types of memory (procedural memory) and different brain regions. Furthermore, amnesic patients frequently show "implicit" memory for experiences even in the absence of conscious knowledge. For example, patients asked to guess which of two faces they have seen most recently may give the correct answer most of the time in spite of stating that they have never seen either of the faces before. Some researchers distinguish between conscious recollection, which depends on the hippocampus, and familiarity, which depends on portions of the medial temporal lobe.
When rats are exposed to an intense learning event, they may retain a life-long memory of the event even after a single training session. The memory of such an event appears to be first stored in the hippocampus, but this storage is transient. Much of the long-term storage of the memory seems to take place in the anterior cingulate cortex. When such an intense learning event was experimentally applied, more than 5,000 differently methylated DNA regions appeared in the hippocampus neuronal genome of the rats at one hour and at 24 hours after training. These alterations in methylation pattern occurred at many genes that were down-regulated, often due to the formation of new 5-methylcytosine sites in CpG rich regions of the genome. Furthermore, many other genes were upregulated, likely often due to the removal of methyl groups from previously existing 5-methylcytosines (5mCs) in DNA. Demethylation of 5mC can be carried out by several proteins acting in concert, including TET enzymes as well as enzymes of the DNA base excision repair pathway (see Epigenetics in learning and memory).
### Role in spatial memory and navigation
Studies on freely moving rats and mice have shown many hippocampal neurons to act as place cells that cluster in place fields, and these fire bursts of action potentials when the animal passes through a particular location. This place-related neural activity in the hippocampus has also been reported in monkeys that were moved around a room whilst in a restraint chair. However, the place cells may have fired in relation to where the monkey was looking rather than to its actual location in the room. Over many years, many studies have been carried out on place-responses in rodents, which have given a large amount of information. Place cell responses are shown by pyramidal cells in the hippocampus and by granule cells in the dentate gyrus. Other cells in smaller proportion are inhibitory interneurons, and these often show place-related variations in their firing rate that are much weaker. There is little, if any, spatial topography in the representation; in general, cells lying next to each other in the hippocampus have uncorrelated spatial firing patterns. Place cells are typically almost silent when a rat is moving around outside the place field but reach sustained rates as high as 40 Hz when the rat is near the center. Neural activity sampled from 30 to 40 randomly chosen place cells carries enough information to allow a rat's location to be reconstructed with high confidence. The size of place fields varies in a gradient along the length of the hippocampus, with cells at the dorsal end showing the smallest fields, cells near the center showing larger fields, and cells at the ventral tip showing fields that cover the entire environment. In some cases, the firing rate of hippocampal cells depends not only on place but also the direction a rat is moving, the destination toward which it is traveling, or other task-related variables. The firing of place cells is timed in relation to local theta waves, a process termed phase precession.
In humans, cells with location-specific firing patterns have been reported during a study of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. They were undergoing an invasive procedure to localize the source of their seizures, with a view to surgical resection. The patients had diagnostic electrodes implanted in their hippocampus and then used a computer to move around in a virtual reality town. Similar brain imaging studies in navigation have shown the hippocampus to be active. A study was carried out on taxi drivers. London's black cab drivers need to learn the locations of a large number of places and the fastest routes between them in order to pass a strict test known as The Knowledge in order to gain a license to operate. A study showed that the posterior part of the hippocampus is larger in these drivers than in the general public, and that a positive correlation exists between the length of time served as a driver and the increase in the volume of this part. It was also found the total volume of the hippocampus was unchanged, as the increase seen in the posterior part was made at the expense of the anterior part, which showed a relative decrease in size. There have been no reported adverse effects from this disparity in hippocampal proportions. Another study showed opposite findings in blind individuals. The anterior part of the right hippocampus was larger and the posterior part was smaller, compared with sighted individuals.
There are several navigational cells in the brain that are either in the hippocampus itself or are strongly connected to it, such as the speed cells present in the medial entorhinal cortex. Together these cells form a network that serves as spatial memory. The first of such cells discovered in the 1970s were the place cells, which led to the idea of the hippocampus acting to give a neural representation of the environment in a cognitive map. When the hippocampus is dysfunctional, orientation is affected; people may have difficulty in remembering how they arrived at a location and how to proceed further. Getting lost is a common symptom of amnesia. Studies with animals have shown that an intact hippocampus is required for initial learning and long-term retention of some spatial memory tasks, in particular ones that require finding the way to a hidden goal. Other cells have been discovered since the finding of the place cells in the rodent brain that are either in the hippocampus or the entorhinal cortex. These have been assigned as head direction cells, grid cells and boundary cells. Speed cells are thought to provide input to the hippocampal grid cells.
### Role in approach-avoidance conflict processing
Approach-avoidance conflict happens when a situation is presented that can either be rewarding or punishing, and the ensuing decision-making has been associated with anxiety. fMRI findings from studies in approach-avoidance decision-making found evidence for a functional role that is not explained by either long-term memory or spatial cognition. Overall findings showed that the anterior hippocampus is sensitive to conflict, and that it may be part of a larger cortical and subcortical network seen to be important in decision-making in uncertain conditions.
A review makes reference to a number of studies that show the involvement of the hippocampus in conflict tasks. The authors suggest that one challenge is to understand how conflict processing relates to the functions of spatial navigation and memory and how all of these functions need not be mutually exclusive.
## Electroencephalography
The hippocampus shows two major "modes" of activity, each associated with a distinct pattern of neural population activity and waves of electrical activity as measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG). These modes are named after the EEG patterns associated with them: theta and large irregular activity (LIA). The main characteristics described below are for the rat, which is the animal most extensively studied.
The theta mode appears during states of active, alert behavior (especially locomotion), and also during REM (dreaming) sleep. In the theta mode, the EEG is dominated by large regular waves with a frequency range of 6 to 9 Hz, and the main groups of hippocampal neurons (pyramidal cells and granule cells) show sparse population activity, which means that in any short time interval, the great majority of cells are silent, while the small remaining fraction fire at relatively high rates, up to 50 spikes in one second for the most active of them. An active cell typically stays active for half a second to a few seconds. As the rat behaves, the active cells fall silent and new cells become active, but the overall percentage of active cells remains more or less constant. In many situations, cell activity is determined largely by the spatial location of the animal, but other behavioral variables also clearly influence it.
The LIA mode appears during slow-wave (non-dreaming) sleep, and also during states of waking immobility such as resting or eating. In the LIA mode, the EEG is dominated by sharp waves that are randomly timed large deflections of the EEG signal lasting for 25–50 milliseconds. Sharp waves are frequently generated in sets, with sets containing up to 5 or more individual sharp waves and lasting up to 500 ms. The spiking activity of neurons within the hippocampus is highly correlated with sharp wave activity. Most neurons decrease their firing rate between sharp waves; however, during a sharp wave, there is a dramatic increase in firing rate in up to 10% of the hippocampal population
These two hippocampal activity modes can be seen in primates as well as rats, with the exception that it has been difficult to see robust theta rhythmicity in the primate hippocampus. There are, however, qualitatively similar sharp waves and similar state-dependent changes in neural population activity.
### Theta rhythm
The underlying currents producing the theta wave are generated mainly by densely packed neural layers of the entorhinal cortex, CA3, and the dendrites of pyramidal cells. The theta wave is one of the largest signals seen on EEG, and is known as the hippocampal theta rhythm. In some situations the EEG is dominated by regular waves at 3 to 10 Hz, often continuing for many seconds. These reflect subthreshold membrane potentials and strongly modulate the spiking of hippocampal neurons and synchronise across the hippocampus in a travelling wave pattern. The trisynaptic circuit is a relay of neurotransmission in the hippocampus that interacts with many brain regions. From rodent studies it has been proposed that the trisynaptic circuit generates the hippocampal theta rhythm.
Theta rhythmicity is very obvious in rabbits and rodents and also clearly present in cats and dogs. Whether theta can be seen in primates is not yet clear. In rats (the animals that have been the most extensively studied), theta is seen mainly in two conditions: first, when an animal is walking or in some other way actively interacting with its surroundings; second, during REM sleep. The function of theta has not yet been convincingly explained although numerous theories have been proposed. The most popular hypothesis has been to relate it to learning and memory. An example would be the phase with which theta rhythms, at the time of stimulation of a neuron, shape the effect of that stimulation upon its synapses. What is meant here is that theta rhythms may affect those aspects of learning and memory that are dependent upon synaptic plasticity. It is well established that lesions of the medial septum – the central node of the theta system – cause severe disruptions of memory. However, the medial septum is more than just the controller of theta; it is also the main source of cholinergic projections to the hippocampus. It has not been established that septal lesions exert their effects specifically by eliminating the theta rhythm.
### Sharp waves
During sleep or during resting, when an animal is not engaged with its surroundings, the hippocampal EEG shows a pattern of irregular slow waves, somewhat larger in amplitude than theta waves. This pattern is occasionally interrupted by large surges called sharp waves. These events are associated with bursts of spike activity lasting 50 to 100 milliseconds in pyramidal cells of CA3 and CA1. They are also associated with short-lived high-frequency EEG oscillations called "ripples", with frequencies in the range 150 to 200 Hz in rats, and together they are known as sharp waves and ripples. Sharp waves are most frequent during sleep when they occur at an average rate of around 1 per second (in rats) but in a very irregular temporal pattern. Sharp waves are less frequent during inactive waking states and are usually smaller. Sharp waves have also been observed in humans and monkeys. In macaques, sharp waves are robust but do not occur as frequently as in rats.
One of the most interesting aspects of sharp waves is that they appear to be associated with memory. Wilson and McNaughton 1994, and numerous later studies, reported that when hippocampal place cells have overlapping spatial firing fields (and therefore often fire in near-simultaneity), they tend to show correlated activity during sleep following the behavioral session. This enhancement of correlation, commonly known as reactivation, has been found to occur mainly during sharp waves. It has been proposed that sharp waves are, in fact, reactivations of neural activity patterns that were memorized during behavior, driven by strengthening of synaptic connections within the hippocampus. This idea forms a key component of the "two-stage memory" theory, advocated by Buzsáki and others, which proposes that memories are stored within the hippocampus during behavior and then later transferred to the neocortex during sleep. Sharp waves in Hebbian theory are seen as persistently repeated stimulations by presynaptic cells, of postsynaptic cells that are suggested to drive synaptic changes in the cortical targets of hippocampal output pathways. Suppression of sharp waves and ripples in sleep or during immobility can interfere with memories expressed at the level of the behavior, nonetheless, the newly formed CA1 place cell code can re-emerge even after a sleep with abolished sharp waves and ripples, in spatially non-demanding tasks.
### Long-term potentiation
Since at least the time of Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934), psychologists have speculated that the brain stores memory by altering the strength of connections between neurons that are simultaneously active. This idea was formalized by Donald Hebb in 1949, but for many years remained unexplained. In 1973, Tim Bliss and Terje Lømo described a phenomenon in the rabbit hippocampus that appeared to meet Hebb's specifications: a change in synaptic responsiveness induced by brief strong activation and lasting for hours or days or longer. This phenomenon was soon referred to as long-term potentiation (LTP). As a candidate mechanism for long-term memory, LTP has since been studied intensively, and a great deal has been learned about it. However, the complexity and variety of the intracellular signalling cascades that can trigger LTP is acknowledged as preventing a more complete understanding.
The hippocampus is a particularly favorable site for studying LTP because of its densely packed and sharply defined layers of neurons, but similar types of activity-dependent synaptic change have also been observed in many other brain areas. The best-studied form of LTP has been seen in CA1 of the hippocampus and occurs at synapses that terminate on dendritic spines and use the neurotransmitter glutamate. The synaptic changes depend on a special type of glutamate receptor, the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, a cell surface receptor which has the special property of allowing calcium to enter the postsynaptic spine only when presynaptic activation and postsynaptic depolarization occur at the same time. Drugs that interfere with NMDA receptors block LTP and have major effects on some types of memory, especially spatial memory. Genetically modified mice that are modified to disable the LTP mechanism, also generally show severe memory deficits.
## Disorders
### Aging
Age-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia (for which hippocampal disruption is one of the earliest signs) have a severe impact on many types of cognition including memory. Even normal aging is associated with a gradual decline in some types of memory, including episodic memory and working memory (or short-term memory). Because the hippocampus is thought to play a central role in memory, there has been considerable interest in the possibility that age-related declines could be caused by hippocampal deterioration. Some early studies reported substantial loss of neurons in the hippocampus of elderly people, but later studies using more precise techniques found only minimal differences. Similarly, some MRI studies have reported shrinkage of the hippocampus in elderly people, but other studies have failed to reproduce this finding. There is, however, a reliable relationship between the size of the hippocampus and memory performance; so that where there is age-related shrinkage, memory performance will be impaired. There are also reports that memory tasks tend to produce less hippocampal activation in the elderly than in the young. Furthermore, a randomized control trial published in 2011 found that aerobic exercise could increase the size of the hippocampus in adults aged 55 to 80 and also improve spatial memory.
### Stress
The hippocampus contains high levels of glucocorticoid receptors, which make it more vulnerable to long-term stress than most other brain areas. There is evidence that humans having experienced severe, long-lasting traumatic stress show atrophy of the hippocampus more than of other parts of the brain. These effects show up in post-traumatic stress disorder, and they may contribute to the hippocampal atrophy reported in schizophrenia and severe depression. Anterior hippocampal volume in children is positively correlated with parental family income and this correlation is thought to be mediated by income related stress. A recent study has also revealed atrophy as a result of depression, but this can be stopped with anti-depressants even if they are not effective in relieving other symptoms.
Chronic stress resulting in elevated levels of glucocorticoids, notably of cortisol, is seen to be a cause of neuronal atrophy in the hippocampus. This atrophy results in a smaller hippocampal volume which is also seen in Cushing's syndrome. The higher levels of cortisol in Cushing's syndrome is usually the result of medications taken for other conditions. Neuronal loss also occurs as a result of impaired neurogenesis. Another factor that contributes to a smaller hippocampal volume is that of dendritic retraction where dendrites are shortened in length and reduced in number, in response to increased glucocorticoids. This dendritic retraction is reversible. After treatment with medication to reduce cortisol in Cushing's syndrome, the hippocampal volume is seen to be restored by as much as 10%. This change is seen to be due to the reforming of the dendrites. This dendritic restoration can also happen when stress is removed. There is, however, evidence derived mainly from studies using rats that stress occurring shortly after birth can affect hippocampal function in ways that persist throughout life.
Sex-specific responses to stress have also been demonstrated in the rat to have an effect on the hippocampus. Chronic stress in the male rat showed dendritic retraction and cell loss in the CA3 region but this was not shown in the female. This was thought to be due to neuroprotective ovarian hormones. In rats, DNA damage increases in the hippocampus under conditions of stress.
### Epilepsy
The hippocampus is one of the few brain regions where new neurons are generated. This process of neurogenesis is confined to the dentate gyrus. The production of new neurons can be positively affected by exercise or negatively affected by epileptic seizures.
Seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy can affect the normal development of new neurons and can cause tissue damage. Hippocampal sclerosis including Ammon's horn sclerosis that is specific to the mesial temporal lobe, is the most common type of such tissue damage. It is not yet clear, however, whether the epilepsy is usually caused by hippocampal abnormalities or whether the hippocampus is damaged by cumulative effects of seizures. However, in experimental settings where repetitive seizures are artificially induced in animals, hippocampal damage is a frequent result. This may be a consequence of the concentration of excitable glutamate receptors in the hippocampus. Hyperexcitability can lead to cytotoxicity and cell death. It may also have something to do with the hippocampus being a site where new neurons continue to be created throughout life, and to abnormalities in this process.
### Schizophrenia
The causes of schizophrenia are not well understood, but numerous abnormalities of brain structure have been reported. The most thoroughly investigated alterations involve the cerebral cortex, but effects on the hippocampus have also been described. Many reports have found reductions in the size of the hippocampus in people with schizophrenia. The left hippocampus seems to be affected more than the right. The changes noted have largely been accepted to be the result of abnormal development. It is unclear whether hippocampal alterations play any role in causing the psychotic symptoms that are the most important feature of schizophrenia. It has been suggested that on the basis of experimental work using animals, hippocampal dysfunction might produce an alteration of dopamine release in the basal ganglia, thereby indirectly affecting the integration of information in the prefrontal cortex. It has also been suggested that hippocampal dysfunction might account for the disturbances in long-term memory frequently observed.
MRI studies have found a smaller brain volume and larger ventricles in people with schizophrenia – however researchers do not know if the shrinkage is from the schizophrenia or from the medication. The hippocampus and thalamus have been shown to be reduced in volume; and the volume of the globus pallidus is increased. Cortical patterns are altered, and a reduction in the volume and thickness of the cortex particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes has been noted. It has further been proposed that many of the changes seen are present at the start of the disorder which gives weight to the theory that there is abnormal neurodevelopment.
The hippocampus has been seen as central to the pathology of schizophrenia, both in the neural and physiological effects. It has been generally accepted that there is an abnormal synaptic connectivity underlying schizophrenia. Several lines of evidence implicate changes in the synaptic organization and connectivity, in and from the hippocampus Many studies have found dysfunction in the synaptic circuitry within the hippocampus and its activity on the prefrontal cortex. The glutamatergic pathways have been seen to be largely affected. The subfield CA1 is seen to be the least involved of the other subfields, and CA4 and the subiculum have been reported elsewhere as being the most implicated areas. The review concluded that the pathology could be due to genetics, faulty neurodevelopment or abnormal neural plasticity. It was further concluded that schizophrenia is not due to any known neurodegenerative disorder. Oxidative DNA damage is substantially increased in the hippocampus of elderly patients with chronic schizophrenia.
### Transient global amnesia
Transient global amnesia is a dramatic, sudden, temporary, near-total loss of short-term memory. Various causes have been hypothesized including ischemia, epilepsy, migraine and disturbance of cerebral venous blood flow, leading to ischemia of structures such as the hippocampus that are involved in memory.
There has been no scientific proof of any cause. However, diffusion weighted MRI studies taken from 12 to 24 hours following an episode has shown there to be small dot-like lesions in the hippocampus. These findings have suggested a possible implication of CA1 neurons made vulnerable by metabolic stress.
### PTSD
Some studies shows correlation of reduced hippocampus volume and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A study of Vietnam War combat veterans with PTSD showed a 20% reduction in the volume of their hippocampus compared with veterans having suffered no such symptoms. This finding was not replicated in chronic PTSD patients traumatized at an air show plane crash in 1988 (Ramstein, Germany). It is also the case that non-combat twin brothers of Vietnam veterans with PTSD also had smaller hippocampi than other controls, raising questions about the nature of the correlation. A 2016 study strengthened theory that a smaller hippocampus increases the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a larger hippocampus increases the likelihood of efficacious treatment.
### Microcephaly
Hippocampus atrophy has been characterized in those with microcephaly, and mouse models with WDR62 mutations which recapitulate human point mutations shown a deficiency in hippocampal development and neurogenesis.
## Other animals
### Other mammals
The hippocampus has a generally similar appearance across the range of mammals, from monotremes such as the echidna to primates such as humans. The hippocampal-size-to-body-size ratio broadly increases, being about twice as large for primates as for the echidna. It does not, however, increase at anywhere close to the rate of the neocortex-to-body-size ratio. Therefore, the hippocampus takes up a much larger fraction of the cortical mantle in rodents than in primates. In adult humans the volume of the hippocampus on each side of the brain is about 3.0 to 3.5 cm<sup>3</sup> as compared to 320 to 420 cm<sup>3</sup> for the volume of the neocortex.
There is also a general relationship between the size of the hippocampus and spatial memory. When comparisons are made between similar species, those that have a greater capacity for spatial memory tend to have larger hippocampal volumes. This relationship also extends to sex differences; in species where males and females show strong differences in spatial memory ability they also tend to show corresponding differences in hippocampal volume.
### Other vertebrates
Non-mammalian species do not have a brain structure that looks like the mammalian hippocampus, but they have one that is considered homologous to it. The hippocampus, as pointed out above, is in essence part of the allocortex. Only mammals have a fully developed cortex, but the structure it evolved from, called the pallium, is present in all vertebrates, even the most primitive ones such as the lamprey or hagfish. The pallium is usually divided into three zones: medial, lateral and dorsal. The medial pallium forms the precursor of the hippocampus. It does not resemble the hippocampus visually because the layers are not warped into an S shape or enfolded by the dentate gyrus, but the homology is indicated by strong chemical and functional affinities. There is now evidence that these hippocampal-like structures are involved in spatial cognition in birds, reptiles, and fish.
#### Birds
In birds, the correspondence is sufficiently well established that most anatomists refer to the medial pallial zone as the "avian hippocampus". Numerous species of birds have strong spatial skills, in particular those that cache food. There is evidence that food-caching birds have a larger hippocampus than other types of birds and that damage to the hippocampus causes impairments in spatial memory.
#### Fish
The story for fish is more complex. In teleost fish (which make up the great majority of existing species), the forebrain is distorted in comparison to other types of vertebrates: most neuroanatomists believe that the teleost forebrain is in essence everted, like a sock turned inside-out, so that structures that lie in the interior, next to the ventricles, for most vertebrates, are found on the outside in teleost fish, and vice versa. One of the consequences of this is that the medial pallium ("hippocampal" zone) of a typical vertebrate is thought to correspond to the lateral pallium of a typical fish. Several types of fish (particularly goldfish) have been shown experimentally to have strong spatial memory abilities, even forming "cognitive maps" of the areas they inhabit. There is evidence that damage to the lateral pallium impairs spatial memory. It is not yet known whether the medial pallium plays a similar role in even more primitive vertebrates, such as sharks and rays, or even lampreys and hagfish.
### Insects and molluscs
Some types of insects, and molluscs such as the octopus, also have strong spatial learning and navigation abilities, but these appear to work differently from the mammalian spatial system, so there is as yet no good reason to think that they have a common evolutionary origin; nor is there sufficient similarity in brain structure to enable anything resembling a "hippocampus" to be identified in these species. Some have proposed, however, that the insect's mushroom bodies may have a function similar to that of the hippocampus.
## Computational models
Thorough research of hippocampus in different organisms, a comprehensive database about morphology, connectivity, physiology and computational models was collected.
## Additional images
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Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi
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Surgeon in the Imperial Japanese Army
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Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi (辰口 信夫, Tatsuguchi Nobuo), sometimes mistakenly referred to as Nebu Tatsuguchi (August 31, 1911 – May 30, 1943), was a Japanese soldier and surgeon who served in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during World War II. He was killed during the Battle of Attu on Attu Island, Alaska, United States, on May 30, 1943.
A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Tatsuguchi studied medicine and was licensed as a physician in the United States (US). He returned to his native Japan to practice medicine at the Tokyo Adventist Sanitarium, where he received further medical training. In 1941, he was ordered to cease his medical practice and conscripted into the IJA as an acting medical officer, although he was given an enlisted rather than officer rank because of his American connections. In late 1942, Tatsuguchi was sent to Attu, which had been occupied by Japanese forces in June 1942. On May 11, 1943, The United States Army landed on the island, intending to retake American soil from the Japanese.
Throughout the ensuing battle, Tatsuguchi kept a diary in which he recorded its events and his struggle to care for the wounded in his field hospital. He was killed on the battle's final day after the remaining Japanese conducted one last, suicidal charge against the American forces.
Tatsuguchi's diary was recovered by American forces and translated into English. Copies of the translation were widely disseminated and publicized in the U.S. after the battle. The American public was intrigued by a Christian, American-trained doctor serving with Japanese forces on the island and by his apparent participation in assisting with the deaths of wounded Japanese soldiers in his field hospital during the battle's final days. Translated excerpts from his diary have been widely quoted in Western historical accounts of the battle, especially his final entry in which he recorded a farewell message to his family.
## Early life
Tatsuguchi's father, Shuichi Tatsuguchi, was born and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, before leaving for the US in 1895 to "explore the new world". He attended Healdsburg College, later renamed Pacific Union College, in Angwin, California. While attending the college, he was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1907, after completing a course of study in dentistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco, Shuichi Tatsuguchi returned to Hiroshima with plans to serve as a medical missionary.
In Hiroshima, Tatsuguchi established a prosperous dental practice and promoted the establishment of the Hiroshima Adventist church. He married Sadako Shibata who was also familiar with the US and spoke fluent English. Shuichi and Sadako had three sons and three daughters. All three sons would eventually attend school in the US. The middle son, born on August 31, 1911, was given the Christian name of Paul and the Japanese name of Nobuo, although he was called "Joseph" at home.
## Schooling and marriage
Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi graduated from middle school in Hiroshima on March 16, 1919. On March 2, 1923, he graduated from Travier English Academy. Paul traveled to California and entered Pacific Union College in 1926 and graduated in May 1932. When his parents both died unexpectedly in 1932, Paul returned to Japan to help settle the family affairs. He returned to California in 1933 and entered the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda University, completing the course of study in June 1937. Paul Tatsuguchi then accepted a year's internship at White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. While studying in America, Tatsuguchi was regarded by his classmates, who called him "Tatsy" or Paul, as a serious student, friendly but not gregarious. Classmate J. Mudry, a year behind Tatsuguchi at Loma Linda University, later said, "I know him well. I always thought Tatsuguchi—we called him Paul—was quite an American."
On September 8, 1938, Tatsuguchi graduated as a Doctor of Medicine and was awarded a California medical license. That same year, he accepted a position at the Tokyo Adventist Sanitarium, an institution founded in part by his father in 1928. As he would be working with tuberculosis patients in Tokyo, Tatsuguchi spent several more months undergoing postgraduate medical studies in California. Also in 1938, Tatsuguchi married a childhood friend, Taeko Miyake, who he proposed to during a trip to Yosemite National Park. Taeko's parents were serving as Adventist missionaries in Honolulu, Hawaii, while Taeko pursued studies at La Sierra Academy in Riverside, California. After a quick sightseeing trip by bus around the US, Paul and Taeko departed the U.S. for Japan in 1939.
## Early military service
In Tokyo, Tatsuguchi was aware of the rising tensions between Japan and the United States. Although he was strongly loyal to his native country, he also shared with Taeko a love of the US, to which they hoped to return to live someday. Tatsuguchi concentrated on his work at the sanitorium, and, with Taeko, supported activities for the Adventist church, of which they were devout members. In September 1940 their first daughter, Joy Misako, was born.
Early the next year, the IJA—the conscription authority in Japan—ordered Tatsuguchi to leave his medical practice and report to the First Imperial Guard Regiment (FIGR) in Tokyo, where he was inducted with the rank of private on January 10, 1941. As he was stationed in Tokyo, Tatsuguchi was occasionally able to visit Taeko and Misako when his duties allowed. Misako said of this time that, "I only have one memory of my father, and that was playing hide and seek with him."
In September 1941, Tatsuguchi entered the IJA's medical school. He graduated in October and was promoted to sergeant major, rejoining the FIGR in January 1942. In the meantime, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the neutral United States at Pearl Harbor. The next day, Japan declared war on the US and its allies. Suspicious of Tatsuguchi's American background, the IJA never gave him officer status, instead designating him as a non-commissioned acting medical officer.
Over the next several months, Tatsuguchi was deployed to the South Pacific in support of IJA units in the Dutch East Indies. During his service, Tatsuguchi kept a diary, recording his first-hand observations of military service as well as his thoughts and feelings about the events in which he was involved. In September 1942, after learning that he would be reassigned to a combat area in Rabaul, New Britain, he noted in his diary, "I feel very happy and I am determined to do my best", adding that he was "determined to destroy the enemy force to the very last soldier".
Tatsuguchi reached Rabaul on October 4, 1942. His stay there was probably short, for his wife recorded that he joined her in Tokyo that same month prior to being redeployed. Tatsuguchi was unable to tell his wife, now pregnant with their second child, where he would be assigned, but she noticed that he studied maps of the North Pacific area. At one point, he remarked to Taeko that he was going to an area where he might meet some of his former classmates from California.
A few weeks after Tatsuguchi left for his new assignment, the IJA delivered a lock of his hair to Taeko. The IJA did this whenever soldiers were sent to a high-risk combat area in case the soldier was killed and it proved impossible to repatriate the remains for proper funeral rites.
## Attu
### Arrival
Japanese forces had first occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska on June 7, 1942, during the Battle of Midway. They abandoned Attu in September 1942, but then decided to reoccupy it. A regiment of IJA soldiers from the Northern Sea Detachment (北海支隊, Hokkai Shitai), a detachment of Imperial Japanese Navy Special Naval Landing Force troops, and support personnel began arriving on Attu in October 1942. The total number of Japanese on the island would eventually be between 2,500 and 2,900 men. Tatsuguchi arrived on Attu on March 10, 1943, on the last full convoy to reach the island. While most of the North Sea Defense Field Hospital located on Kiska, Tatsuguchi was part of a 24-man team who set up a small hospital on Attu.
With an American naval blockade in place, mail between Attu and Japan was infrequent and unscheduled. Tatsuguchi received several small packages from Taeko containing cookies and ointment for his skin, which was chafed by Attu's severe winter winds. Four letters and several postcards from Tatsuguchi reached Taeko. As he was forbidden from discussing his unit's exact location or mission, Tatsuguchi wrote about the weather, the beauty of the snowy and mountainous landscape around him, and his success in catching fish. He was cheered by the news from Taeko that their second daughter, Laura Mutsuko, was born in February. Tatsuguchi reminded Taeko in his letters to play classical music for their daughters.
### Battle of Attu
On May 11, 1943, the American Seventh Infantry Division began landing on Attu to retake the island from the Japanese. The Japanese commander on Attu, Yasuyo Yamasaki, positioned his troops—who were outnumbered five to one—in the mountains from where they temporarily delayed the Americans' advance inland. Tatsuguchi's diary entry on May 12 records the Japanese move into the mountains after the American landings, stating simply "evacuated to the summit. Air raids carried out frequently. Heard loud noise, it is naval gunfire. Prepared battle equipment."
On May 14, American artillery fired phosphorus smoke shells to mark Japanese positions in the mountains. Many Japanese and Americans believed these were poison gas shells. Tatsuguchi noted in his diary that, "In the enemy the U.S. Forces used gas but no damage was done on account of strong wind."
Tatsuguchi recorded in his diary that he was forced to move his field hospital into a cave to escape American naval and aerial bombardment. He relocated the hospital and patients several times as the Japanese forces were pushed back by the Americans. His May 17 entry describes one of the moves:
> At night about 11:30 o'clock under cover of darkness I left the cave. Walked over muddy roads and steep hills of no-man's land. No matter how far or how much we went we did not get over the pass. Sat down after 30–40 steps would sleep dream and wake up, same thing over again. We had few wounded and had to carry them on stretchers. They got frost-bitten feet, did not move after all the effort. After struggling all the time, had expended nine hours, for all this without leaving any patients.
Tatsuguchi refers again and again in his diary to the constant, intense attacks by American aircraft and artillery on his comrades' positions. On May 21, he noted that he "was strafed when amputating a patient's arm" and on May 23 that "by naval gun fire a hit was scored on the pillar pole of tents for patients and the tents gave in and killed two instantly. No food for two days." On May 26, Tatsuguchi recorded that "there was a ceremony of granting of the Imperial Edict. The last line of Umanose [Japanese defensive position] was broken through. No hope for reinforcements. We will die for cause of Imperial Edict."
### Final attack and death
By May 28 about a thousand Japanese remained, compressed into a small pocket. Yamasaki, apparently realizing that help from Japan was not forthcoming, decided on one last, desperate measure to try to save his command from destruction. On May 29, Yamasaki organized a surprise attack on American positions. Yamasaki hoped to break through the enemy's front lines and seize the American artillery batteries, which would then be turned on the rest of the American forces and their ships offshore. Tatsuguchi's last diary entry records Yamasaki's order, the disposition of the wounded in his hospital, and a farewell message to his family:
> Today at 2 o'clock we assembled at Headquarters, the field hospital took also part. The last assault is to be carried out. All the patients in the hospital were made to commit suicide. I am only 33 years old and I am to die. Have no regrets. Banzai to the Emperor. I am grateful that I have kept the peace in my soul which Enkis [believed to mean either Christ or the Edict] bestowed on me at 8 o'clock. I took care of all patients with a grenade. Goodbye Iaeke [Taeko], my beloved wife, who loved me to the last. Until we meet again grant you God-speed Misaka [Misako], who just became four years old, will grow up unhindered. If I feel sorry for you Takiko [Mutsuko] born February this year and gone before without seeing your father. Well goodbye Mitsue, Brothers Hocan, Sukoshan, Masachan, Mitichan, goodbye. The number participating in this attack is a little over a thousand. Will try to take enemy artillery position. It seems the enemy will probably make an all-out attack tomorrow.
Yamasaki launched his attack early in the morning on May 30. Although the attack succeeded in penetrating the enemy lines, American rear-area personnel rallied and killed Yamasaki and the majority of his attacking troops. Most of the remaining Japanese then committed suicide; only 27 were taken prisoner.
Two versions exist of how Tatsuguchi died. One version is that he did not participate in the attack. Later in the day on May 30, two American soldiers, Charles W. Laird and John Hirn, who were searching for remaining Japanese forces following the defeat of Yamasaki's attack, approached the cave containing Tatsuguchi's field hospital. Tatsuguchi emerged from the cave, waving his Bible in the direction of the Americans and yelling in English, "Don't shoot! I am a Christian!" Laird heard and understood what Tatsuguchi was saying and withheld fire. Hirn, however, shot and killed Tatsuguchi. Hirn later stated that he could not hear what Tatsuguchi was saying over the wind and noise of battle and that he thought that the Bible Tatsuguchi was holding was a weapon.
The other version was told to Taeko and Laura by Charles Laird in 1984. Laird, a former US Army sergeant who served on Attu, stated that he was sleeping in a tent the morning of May 30 when Yamasaki's troops broke through the American front lines. A man ran into Laird's tent and Laird shot and killed him, only to discover that the man was American. Then he saw eight Japanese soldiers approaching through the fog, so he shot and killed them too. One of them was Tatsuguchi. Laird said that he found Tatsuguchi's diary and an address book in which he was shocked to see American names and addresses.
J. Mudry and another of Tatsuguchi's Loma Linda classmates, J. L. Whitaker, were medical officers with the US Seventh Division on Attu during the battle. Whitaker was in the path of Yamasaki's final attack, but survived without injury. Whitaker and Mudry were stunned to later learn that their former classmate was on the island with Japanese forces and was killed nearby.
## Diary
After Tatsuguchi's death his Japanese diary, as well as his Bible, a copy of Gray's Anatomy and an address book, were forwarded to the division intelligence section. There, an American Nisei serviceman named Yasuo Sam Umetani drafted the first translation of the diary.
Word of the diary's contents spread quickly through divisional headquarters to the other American troops on Attu. Americans were intrigued by the news that an American-trained doctor had been with the Japanese forces on the island and that Tatsuguchi had described the battle from a Japanese perspective. Unauthorized copies of both Umetani's version and subsequent translations, some of which contained variations, were passed around among the American troops on Attu and to military installations on other Aleutian islands. Civilian crews of transport ships in the area who obtained copies of the diary translation took their copies with them across the United States, where it drew the attention of the press and gained wide public exposure.
Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the US commander of the Alaska Defense Command (ADC), on learning that the diary claimed that the Americans had used poison gas in the Attu battle, ordered that all copies of the translations be confiscated. In transit to Buckner's headquarters, the diary original itself vanished without trace, and its whereabouts are unknown to this day. Japanese versions are translated from the English translation. In early September 1943, the ADC's intelligence section reported that efforts to control the distribution of translated copies of the diary had failed.
Several American newspapers published excerpts from the diary, and most highlighted the possibility that Tatsuguchi, a professed Christian, might have been involved in the killing of wounded patients. The Chicago Tribune on September 9, 1943, published an article headlined "Japs Slew Own Patients on Attu, Diary Discloses". In contrast, the Loma Linda School of Medicine Alumni Journal defended Tatsuguchi as a gentle and caring doctor who was trapped in a situation beyond his control, where his actions violated neither his religious beliefs nor his oaths as a doctor. Most Western historical accounts of the Battle of Attu mention Tatsuguchi and quote from his diary, especially the final entry.
## Family legacy
The Japanese government notified Taeko of her husband's death in August 1943. Taeko and her two daughters survived the remainder of the war on a small widow's pension and with help from relatives. Taeko hoped that her husband was still alive and would return. Just after the war ended, B. P. Hoffman, one of Tatsuguchi's former college instructors and a friend of Taeko's, visited her in Osaka where she was living. Hoffman told her that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had visited him during the war because Hoffman's name was in Tatsuguchi's address book found on Attu. The agent told the story of Tatsuguchi's death to Hoffman, who related it to Taeko. Taeko accepted that her husband would not be coming back.
After the war, Taeko worked for the American occupation forces as a secretary and teacher. In 1954, she and her two daughters, Joy and Laura, left Japan and joined Taeko's parents in Hawaii. All three became naturalized citizens of the US. Joy and Laura both attended Pacific Union College and became nurses. Joy later married a Japanese man and returned to Japan to live. Laura married an American and moved to the Los Angeles area, where Taeko later joined her. In 2005, Taeko told Kyodo News of her husband, "He was a faithful Christian doctor and a gentleman who devoted himself to God and communities."
In May 1993, Laura traveled to Attu and spoke at a 50th Anniversary commemorative event of the Battle of Attu. In her speech at the event, Laura stated "How ironic that my father was killed in combat against his beloved America while in loyal service to his Japanese homeland ... Like my father, I too have a great love for Japan and America."
|
355,236 |
Jules Massenet
| 1,153,269,693 |
French composer (1842–1912)
|
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"Belle Époque",
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"Grand Officers of the Legion of Honour",
"Honorary Members of the Royal Philharmonic Society",
"Male opera composers",
"Musicians from Saint-Étienne",
"Oratorio composers",
"Prix de Rome for composition",
"Pupils of Napoléon Henri Reber"
] |
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (; 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.
While still a schoolboy, Massenet was admitted to France's principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1863, he composed prolifically in many genres, but quickly became best known for his operas. Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public. Despite some miscalculations, he produced a series of successes that made him the leading composer of opera in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Like many prominent French composers of the period, Massenet became a professor at the Conservatoire. He taught composition there from 1878 until 1896, when he resigned after the death of the director, Ambroise Thomas. Among his students were Gustave Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Pierné.
By the time of his death, Massenet was regarded by many critics as old-fashioned and unadventurous although his two best-known operas remained popular in France and abroad. After a few decades of neglect, his works began to be favourably reassessed during the mid-20th century, and many of them have since been staged and recorded. Although critics do not rank him among the handful of outstanding operatic geniuses such as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, his operas are now widely accepted as well-crafted and intelligent products of the Belle Époque.
## Biography
### Early years
Massenet was born on 12 May 1842 at Montaud, then an outlying hamlet and now a part of the city of Saint-Étienne, in the Loire. He was the youngest of the four children of Alexis Massenet (1788–1863) and his second wife Eléonore-Adelaïde née Royer de Marancour (1809–1875); the elder children were Julie, Léon and Edmond. Massenet senior was a prosperous ironmonger; his wife was a talented amateur musician who gave Jules his first piano lessons. By early 1848 the family had moved to Paris, where they settled in a flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Massenet was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis and, from either 1851 or 1853, the Paris Conservatoire. According to his colourful but unreliable memoirs, Massenet auditioned in October 1851, when he was nine, before a judging panel comprising Daniel Auber, Fromental Halévy, Ambroise Thomas and Michele Carafa, and was admitted at once. His biographer Demar Irvine dates the audition and admission as January 1853. Both sources agree that Massenet continued his general education at the lycée in tandem with his musical studies.
At the Conservatoire Massenet studied solfège with Augustin Savard and the piano with François Laurent. He pursued his studies, with modest distinction, until the beginning of 1855, when family concerns disrupted his education. Alexis Massenet's health was poor, and on medical advice he moved from Paris to Chambéry in the south of France; the family, including Massenet, moved with him. Again, Massenet's own memoirs and the researches of his biographers are at variance: the composer recalled his exile in Chambéry as lasting for two years; Henry Finck and Irvine record that the young man returned to Paris and the Conservatoire in October 1855. On his return he lodged with relations in Montmartre and resumed his studies; by 1859 he had progressed so far as to win the Conservatoire's top prize for pianists. The family's finances were no longer comfortable, and to support himself Massenet took private piano students and played as a percussionist in theatre orchestras. His work in the orchestra pit gave him a good working knowledge of the operas of Gounod and other composers, classic and contemporary. Traditionally, many students at the Conservatoire went on to substantial careers as church organists; with that in mind Massenet enrolled for organ classes, but they were not a success and he quickly abandoned the instrument. He gained some work as a piano accompanist, in the course of which he met Wagner who, along with Berlioz, was one of his two musical heroes.
In 1861 Massenet's music was published for the first time, the Grande Fantasie de Concert sur le Pardon de Ploërmel de Meyerbeer, a virtuoso piano work in nine sections. Having graduated to the composition class under Ambroise Thomas, Massenet was entered for the Conservatoire's top musical honour, the Prix de Rome, previous winners of which included Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod and Bizet. The first two of these were on the judging panel for the 1863 competition. All the competitors had to set the same text by Gustave Chouquet, a cantata about David Rizzio; after all the settings had been performed Massenet came face to face with the judges. He recalled:
> Ambroise Thomas, my beloved master, came towards me and said, "Embrace Berlioz, you owe him a great deal for your prize." "The prize," I cried, bewildered, my face shining with joy. "I have the prize!!!" I was deeply moved and I embraced Berlioz, then my master, and finally Monsieur Auber. Monsieur Auber comforted me. Did I need comforting? Then he said to Berlioz pointing to me, "He'll go far, the young rascal, when he's had less experience!"
The prize brought a well-subsidised three-year period of study, two-thirds of which was spent at the French Academy in Rome, based at the Villa Medici. At that time the academy was dominated by painters rather than musicians; Massenet enjoyed his time there, and made lifelong friendships with, among others, the sculptor Alexandre Falguière and the painter Carolus-Duran, but the musical benefit he derived was largely self-taught. He absorbed the music at St Peter's, and closely studied the works of the great German masters, from Handel and Bach to contemporary composers. During his time in Rome, Massenet met Franz Liszt, at whose request he gave piano lessons to Louise-Constance "Ninon" de Gressy, the daughter of one of Liszt's rich patrons. Massenet and Ninon fell in love, but marriage was out of the question while he was a student with modest means.
### Early works
Massenet returned to Paris in 1866. He made a living by teaching the piano and publishing songs, piano pieces and orchestral suites, all in the popular style of the day. Prix de Rome winners were sometimes invited by the Opéra-Comique in Paris to compose a work for performance there. At Thomas's instigation, Massenet was commissioned to write a one-act opéra comique, La grand'tante, presented in April 1867. At around the same time he composed a Requiem, which has not survived. In 1868 he met Georges Hartmann, who became his publisher and was his mentor for twenty-five years; Hartmann's journalistic contacts did much to promote his protégé's reputation.
In October 1866 Massenet and Ninon were married; their only child, Juliette, was born in 1868. Massenet's musical career was briefly interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, during which he served as a volunteer in the National Guard alongside his friend Bizet. He found the war so "utterly terrible" that he refused to write about it in his memoirs. He and his family were trapped in the siege of Paris but managed to get out before the Paris Commune began; the family stayed for some months in Bayonne, in southwestern France.
After order was restored, Massenet returned to Paris where he completed his first large-scale stage work, an opéra comique in four acts, Don César de Bazan (Paris, 1872). It was a failure, but in 1873 he succeeded with his incidental music to Leconte de Lisle's tragedy Les Érinnyes and with the dramatic oratorio, Marie-Magdeleine, both of which were performed at the Théâtre de l'Odéon. His reputation as a composer was growing, but at this stage he earned most of his income from teaching, giving lessons for six hours a day.
Massenet was a prolific composer; he put this down to his way of working, rising early and composing from four o'clock in the morning until midday, a practice he maintained all his life. In general he worked fluently, seldom revising, although Le roi de Lahore, his nearest approach to a traditional grand opera, took him several years to complete to his own satisfaction. It was finished in 1877 and was one of the first new works to be staged at the Palais Garnier, opened two years previously. The opera, with a story taken from the Mahabharata, was a success and was quickly taken up by the opera houses of eight Italian cities. It was also performed at the Hungarian State Opera House, the Bavarian State Opera, the Semperoper in Dresden, the Teatro Real in Madrid, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London. After the first Covent Garden performance, The Times summed the piece up in a way that was frequently to be applied to the composer's operas: "M. Massenet's opera, although not a work of genius proper, is one of more than common merit, and contains all the elements of at least temporary success."
This period was an early high point in Massenet's career. He had been made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1876, and in 1878 he was appointed professor of counterpoint, fugue and composition at the Conservatoire under Thomas, who was now the director. In the same year he was elected to the Institut de France, a prestigious honour, rare for a man in his thirties. Camille Saint-Saëns, whom Massenet beat in the election for the vacancy, was resentful at being passed over for a younger composer. When the result of the election was announced, Massenet sent Saint-Saëns a courteous telegram: "My dear colleague: the Institut has just committed a great injustice". Saint-Saëns cabled back, "I quite agree." He was elected three years later, but his relations with Massenet remained cool.
Massenet was a popular and respected teacher at the Conservatoire. His pupils included Bruneau, Charpentier, Chausson, Hahn, Leroux, Pierné, Rabaud and Vidal. He was known for the care he took in drawing out his pupils' ideas, never trying to impose his own. One of his last students, Charles Koechlin, recalled Massenet as a voluble professor, dispensing "a teaching active, living, vibrant, and moreover comprehensive". According to some writers, Massenet's influence extended beyond his own students. In the view of the critic Rodney Milnes, "In word-setting alone, all French musicians profited from the freedom he won from earlier restrictions." Romain Rolland and Francis Poulenc have both considered Massenet an influence on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande; Debussy was a student at the Conservatoire during Massenet's professorship but did not study under him.
### Operatic successes and failures, 1879–96
Massenet's growing reputation did not prevent a contretemps with the Paris Opéra in 1879. Auguste Vaucorbeil, director of the Opéra, refused to stage the composer's new piece, Hérodiade, judging the libretto either improper or inadequate. Édouard-Fortuné Calabresi, joint director of the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, immediately offered to present the work, and its première, lavishly staged, was given in December 1881. It ran for fifty-five performances in Brussels, and had its Italian premiere two months later at La Scala. The work finally reached Paris in February 1884, by which time Massenet had established himself as the leading French opera composer of his generation.
Manon, first given at the Opéra-Comique in January 1884, was a prodigious success and was followed by productions at major opera houses in Europe and the United States. Together with Gounod's Faust and Bizet's Carmen it became, and has remained, one of the cornerstones of the French operatic repertoire. After the intimate drama of Manon, Massenet once more turned to opera on the grand scale with Le Cid in 1885, which marked his return to the Opéra. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times wrote that with this new work Massenet "has resolutely declared himself a melodist of undoubted consistency and of remarkable inspiration." After these two triumphs, Massenet entered a period of mixed fortunes. He worked on Werther intermittently for several years, but it was rejected by the Opéra-Comique as too gloomy. In 1887 he met the American soprano Sibyl Sanderson. He developed passionate feelings for her, which remained platonic, although it was widely believed in Paris that she was his mistress, as caricatures in the journals hinted with varying degrees of subtlety. For her, the composer revised Manon and wrote Esclarmonde (1889). The latter was a success, but it was followed by Le mage (1891), which failed. Massenet did not complete his next project, Amadis, and it was not until 1892 that he recovered his earlier successful form. Werther received its first performance in February 1892, when the Vienna Hofoper asked for a new piece, following the enthusiastic reception of the Austrian premiere of Manon.
Though in the view of some writers Werther is the composer's masterpiece, it was not immediately taken up with the same keenness as Manon. The first performance in Paris was in January 1893 by the Opéra-Comique company at the Théâtre Lyrique, and there were performances in the United States, Italy and Britain, but it met with a muted response. The New York Times said of it, "If M. Massenet's opera does not have lasting success it will be because it has no genuine depth. Perhaps M. Massenet is not capable of achieving profound depths of tragic passion; but certainly he will never do so in a work like Werther". It was not until a revival by the Opéra-Comique in 1903 that the work became an established favourite.
Thaïs (1894), composed for Sanderson, was moderately received. Like Werther, it did not gain widespread popularity among French opera-goers until its first revival, which was four years after the premiere, by when the composer's association with Sanderson was over. In the same year he had a modest success in Paris with the one-act Le portrait de Manon at the Opéra-Comique, and a much greater one in London with La Navarraise at Covent Garden. The Times commented that in this piece Massenet had adopted the verismo style of such works as Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana to great effect. The audience clamoured for the composer to acknowledge the applause, but Massenet, always a shy man, declined to take even a single curtain call.
### Later years, 1896–1912
The death of Ambroise Thomas in February 1896 made vacant the post of director of the Conservatoire. The French government announced on 6 May that Massenet had been offered the position and had refused it. The following day it was announced that another faculty member, Théodore Dubois, had been appointed director, and Massenet had resigned as professor of composition. Two explanations have been advanced for this sequence of events. Massenet wrote in 1910 that he had remained in post as professor out of loyalty to Thomas, and was eager to abandon all academic work in favour of composing, a statement repeated by his biographers Hugh Macdonald and Demar Irvine. Other writers on French music have written that Massenet was intensely ambitious to succeed Thomas, but resigned in pique after three months of manoeuvring, once the authorities finally rejected his insistence on being appointed director for life, as Thomas had been. He was succeeded as professor by Gabriel Fauré, who was doubtful of Massenet's credentials, considering his popular style to be "based on a generally cynical view of art".
With Grisélidis and Cendrillon complete, though still awaiting performance, Massenet began work on Sapho, based on a novel by Daudet about the love of an innocent young man from the country for a worldly-wise Parisienne. It was given at the Opéra-Comique in November 1897, with great success, though it has been neglected since the composer's death. His next work staged there was Cendrillon, his version of the Cinderella story, which was well received in May 1899.
Macdonald comments that at the start of the 20th century Massenet was in the enviable position of having his works included in every season of the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, and in opera houses around the world. From 1900 to his death he led a life of steady work and, generally, success. According to his memoirs, he declined a second offer of the directorship of the Conservatoire in 1905. Apart from composition, his main concern was his home life in the rue de Vaugirard, Paris, and at his country house in Égreville. He was uninterested in Parisian society, and so shunned the limelight that in later life he preferred not to attend his own first nights. He described himself as "a fireside man, a bourgeois artist". The main biographical detail of note of his latter years was his second amitié amoureuse with one of his leading ladies, Lucy Arbell, who created roles in his last operas. Milnes describes Arbell as "gold-digging": her blatant exploitation of the composer's honourable affections caused his wife considerable distress and even strained Massenet's devotion (or infatuation as Milnes characterises it). After the composer's death Arbell pursued his widow and publishers through the law courts, seeking to secure herself a monopoly of the leading roles in several of his late operas.
A rare excursion from the opera house came in 1903 with Massenet's only piano concerto, on which he had begun work while still a student. The work was performed by Louis Diémer at the Conservatoire, but made little impression compared with his operas. In 1905 Massenet composed Chérubin, a light comedy about the later career of the sex-mad pageboy Cherubino from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Then came two serious operas, Ariane, on the Greek legend of Theseus and Ariadne, and Thérèse, a terse drama set in the French Revolution. His last major success was Don Quichotte (1910), which L'Etoile called "a very Parisian evening and, naturally, a very Parisian triumph". Even with his creative powers seemingly in decline he wrote four other operas in his later years – Bacchus, Roma, Panurge and Cléopâtre. The last two, like Amadis, which he had been unable to finish in the 1890s, were premiered after the composer's death and then lapsed into oblivion.
In August 1912 Massenet went to Paris from his house at Égreville to see his doctor. The composer had been suffering from abdominal cancer for some months, but his symptoms did not seem imminently life-threatening. Within a few days his condition deteriorated sharply. His wife and family hastened to Paris, and were with him when he died, aged seventy. By his own wish his funeral, with no music, was held privately at Égreville, where he is buried in the churchyard.
## Music
### Background
In the view of his biographer Hugh Macdonald, Massenet's main influences were Gounod and Thomas, with Meyerbeer and Berlioz also important to his style. From beyond France he absorbed some traits from Verdi, and possibly Mascagni, and above all Wagner. Unlike some other French composers of the period, Massenet never fell fully under Wagner's spell, but he took from the earlier composer a richness of orchestration and a fluency in treatment of musical themes.
Although when he chose, Massenet could write noisy and dissonant scenes – in 1885 Bernard Shaw called him "one of the loudest of modern composers" – much of his music is soft and delicate. Hostile critics have seized on this characteristic, but the article on Massenet in the 2001 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians observes that in the best of his operas this sensual side "is balanced by strong dramatic tension (as in Werther), theatrical action (as in Thérèse), scenic diversion (as in Esclarmonde), or humour (as in Le portrait de Manon)."
Massenet's Parisian audiences were greatly attracted by the exotic in music, and Massenet willingly obliged, with musical evocations of far-flung places or times long past. Macdonald lists a great number of locales depicted in the operas, from ancient Egypt, mythical Greece and biblical Galilee to Renaissance Spain, India and Revolutionary Paris. Massenet's practical experience in orchestra pits as a young man and his careful training at the Conservatoire equipped him to make such effects without much recourse to unusual instruments. He understood the capabilities of his singers, and composed with close, detailed regard for their voices.
### Operas
Massenet wrote more than thirty operas. Authorities differ on the exact total because some of the works, particularly from his early years, are lost and others were left incomplete. Still others, such as Don César de Bazan and Le roi de Lahore, were substantially recomposed after their first productions and exist in two or more versions. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists forty Massenet operas in all, of which nine are shown as lost or destroyed. The "OperaGlass" website of Stanford University shows revised versions as premieres, and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, does not: their totals are forty-four and thirty-six respectively.
Having honed his personal style as a young man, and sticking broadly with it for the rest of his career, Massenet does not, as some other composers do, lend himself to classification into clearly defined early, middle and late periods. Moreover, his versatility means that there is no plot or locale that can be regarded as typical Massenet. Another respect in which he differed from many opera composers is that he did not work regularly with the same librettists: Grove lists more than thirty writers who provided him with librettos.
The 1954 (fifth) edition of Grove said of Massenet, "to have heard Manon is to have heard the whole of him". In 1994 Andrew Porter called this view preposterous. He countered, "Who knows Manon, Werther and Don Quichotte knows the best of Massenet, but not his range from heroic romance to steamy verismo." Massenet's output covered most of the different subgenres of opera, from opérette (L'adorable Bel'-Boul and L'écureuil du déshonneur – both early pieces, the latter lost) and opéra-comique such as Manon, to grand opera – Grove categorises Le roi de Lahore as "the last grand opera to have a great and widespread success". Many of the elements of traditional grand opera are written into later large-scale works such as Le mage and Hérodiade. Massenet's operas consist of anything from one to five acts, and although many of them are described on the title pages of their scores as "opéra" or "opéra comique", others have carefully nuanced descriptions such as "comédie chantée", "comédie lyrique", "comédie-héroïque", "conte de fées", "drame passionnel", "haulte farce musicale", "opéra légendaire", "opéra romanesque" and "opéra tragique".
In some of his operas, such as Esclarmonde and Le mage, Massenet moved away from the traditional French pattern of free-standing arias and duets. Solos meld from declamatory passages into more melodic form, in a way that many contemporary critics thought Wagnerian. Shaw was not among them: in 1885 he wrote of Manon:
> Of Wagnerism there is not the faintest suggestion. A phrase which occurs in the first love duet breaks out once or twice in subsequent amorous episodes, and has been seized on by a few unwary critics as a Wagnerian leit motif. But if Wagner had never existed, Manon would have been composed much as it stands now, whereas if Meyerbeer and Gounod had not made a path for M. Massenet, it is impossible to say whither he might have wandered, or how far he could have pushed his way.
The 21st-century critic Anne Feeney comments, "Massenet rarely repeated musical phrases, let alone used recurrent themes, so the resemblance [to Wagner] lies solely in the declamatory lyricism and enthusiastic use of the brass and percussion." Massenet enjoyed introducing comedy into his serious works, and writing some mainly comic operas. In Macdonald's view of the comic works, Cendrillon and Don Quichotte succeed, but Don César de Bazan and Panurge are less satisfying than "the more delicately tuned operas such as Manon, Le portrait de Manon and Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, where comedy serves a more complex purpose."
According to Operabase, analysis of productions around the world in 2012–13 shows Massenet as the twentieth most popular of all opera composers, and the fourth most popular French one, after Bizet, Offenbach and Gounod. The most often performed of his operas in the period are shown as Werther (63 productions in all countries), followed by Manon (47), Don Quichotte (22), Thaïs (21), Cendrillon (17), La Navarraise (4), Cléopâtre (3), Thérèse (2), Le Cid (2), Hérodiade (2), Esclarmonde (2), Chérubin (2) and Le mage (1).
### Other vocal music
Between 1862 and 1900 Massenet composed eight oratorios and cantatas, mostly on religious subjects. There is a degree of overlap between his operatic style and his choral works for church or concert hall performance. Vincent d'Indy wrote that there was "a discreet and semi-religious eroticism" in Massenet's music. The religious element was a regular theme in his secular as well as sacred works: this derived not from any strong personal faith, but from his response to the dramatic aspects of Roman Catholic ritual. The mingling of operatic and religious elements in his works was such that one of his oratorios, Marie-Magdeleine, was staged as an opera during the composer's lifetime. Elements of the erotic and some implicit sympathy for sinners were controversial, and may have prevented his church works establishing themselves more securely. Arthur Hervey, a contemporary critic not unsympathetic to Massenet, commented that Marie-Magdeleine and the later oratorio Ève (1875) were "the Bible doctored up in a manner suitable to the taste of impressionable Parisian ladies – utterly inadequate for the theme, at the same time very charming and effective." Of the four works categorised by Irvine and Grove as oratorios, only one, La terre promise (1900), was written for church performance. Massenet used the term "oratorio" for that work, but he called Marie-Magdeleine a "drame sacré", Ève a "mystère", and La Vierge (1880) a "légende sacrée".
Massenet composed many other smaller-scale choral works, and more than two hundred songs. His early collections of songs were particularly popular and helped establish his reputation. His choice of lyrics ranged widely. Most were verses by poets such as Musset, Maupassant, Hugo, Gautier and many lesser-known French writers, with occasional poems from overseas, including Tennyson in English and Shelley in French translation. Grove comments that Massenet's songs, though pleasing and impeccable in craftsmanship, are less inventive than those of Bizet and less distinctive than those of Duparc and Fauré.
### Orchestral and chamber music
Massenet was a fluent and skilful orchestrator, and willingly provided ballet episodes for his operas, incidental music for plays, and a one-act stand-alone ballet for Vienna (Le carillon, 1892). Macdonald remarks that Massenet's orchestral style resembled that of Delibes, "with its graceful movement and bewitching colour", which was highly suited to classical French ballet. The Méditation for solo violin and orchestra, from Thaïs, is possibly the best known non-vocal piece by Massenet, and appears on many recordings. Another popular stand-alone orchestral piece from the operas is Le dernier sommeil de la Vierge from La Vierge, which has featured on numerous discs since the middle of the 20th century.
A Parisian critic, after seeing La grand' tante, declared that Massenet was a symphonist rather than a theatre composer. At the time of the British premiere of Manon in 1885, the critic in The Manchester Guardian, reviewing the work enthusiastically, nevertheless echoed his French confrère's view that the composer was really a symphonist, whose music was at its best when purely orchestral. Massenet took a wholly opposite view of his talents. He was temperamentally unsuited to writing symphonically: the constraints of sonata form bored him. He wrote, in the early 1870s, "What I have to say, musically, I have to say rapidly, forcefully, concisely; my discourse is tight and nervous, and if I wanted to express myself otherwise I would not be myself." His efforts in the concertante field made little mark, but his orchestral suites, colourful and picturesque according to Grove, have survived on the fringes of the repertoire. Other works for orchestra are a symphonic poem, Visions (1891), an Ouverture de Concert (1863) and Ouverture de Phèdre (1873). After early attempts at chamber music as a student, he wrote little more in the genre. Most of his early chamber pieces are now lost; three pieces for cello and piano survive.
### Recordings
The only known recording made by Massenet is an excerpt from Sapho, "Pendant un an je fus ta femme", in which he plays a piano accompaniment for the soprano Georgette Leblanc. It was recorded in 1903, and was not intended for publication. It has been released on compact disc (2008), together with contemporary recordings by Grieg, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and others.
In Massenet's later years, and in the decade after his death, many of his songs and opera extracts were recorded. Some of the performers were the original creators of the roles, such as Ernest van Dyck (Werther), Emma Calvé (Sapho), Hector Dufranne (Grisélidis), and Vanni Marcoux (Panurge). Complete French recordings of Manon and Werther, conducted by Élie Cohen, were issued in 1932 and 1933 and have been republished on CD. The critic Alan Blyth comments that they embody the original, intimate Opéra-Comique style of performing Massenet.
Of Massenet's operas, the two best known, Manon and Werther, have been recorded many times, and studio or live recordings have been issued of many of the others, including Cendrillon, Le Cid, Don Quichotte, Esclarmonde, Hérodiade, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, Le mage, La Navarraise and Thaïs. Conductors on these discs include Sir Thomas Beecham, Richard Bonynge, Riccardo Chailly, Sir Colin Davis, Patrick Fournillier, Sir Charles Mackerras, Pierre Monteux, Sir Antonio Pappano and Michel Plasson. Among the sopranos and mezzos are Dame Janet Baker, Victoria de los Ángeles, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu and Dame Joan Sutherland. Leading men in recordings of Massenet operas include Roberto Alagna, Gabriel Bacquier, Plácido Domingo, Thomas Hampson, Jonas Kaufmann, José van Dam, Alain Vanzo, Tito Schipa and Rolando Villazón.
In addition to the operas, recordings have been issued of several orchestral works, including the ballet Le carillon, the piano concerto in E, the Fantaisie for cello and orchestra, and orchestral suites. Many individual mélodies by Massenet were included in mixed recitals on record during the 20th century, and more have been committed to disc since then, including, for the first time, a CD in 2012, exclusively devoted to his songs for soprano and piano.
## Reputation
By the time of the composer's death in 1912 his reputation had declined, especially outside his native country. In the second edition (1907) of Grove, J A Fuller Maitland accused the composer of pandering to the fashionable Parisian taste of the moment, and disguising a uniformly "weak and sugary" style with superficial effects. Fuller Maitland contended that to discerning music lovers such as himself the operas of Massenet were "inexpressibly monotonous", and he predicted that they would all be forgotten after the composer's death. Similar views were expressed in an obituary in The Musical Times:
> His early scores are, for the greater part, his best ... Later, and for the plain reason that he never attempted to renovate his style, he sank into sheer mannerism. Indeed, one can but marvel that so gifted a musician, who lacked neither individuality nor skill, should have so utterly succeeded in throwing away his gifts. Success spoiled him ... the actual progress of musical art during the past forty years left Massenet unmoved ... he has taken no part in the evolution of modern music.
Massenet was never entirely without supporters. In the 1930s Sir Thomas Beecham told the critic Neville Cardus, "I would give the whole of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos for Massenet's Manon, and would think I had vastly profited by the exchange." By the 1950s critics were reappraising Massenet's works. In 1951 Martin Cooper of The Daily Telegraph wrote that Massenet's detractors, including some fellow composers, were on the whole idealistic, even puritanical, "but few of them have in practice achieved anything so near perfection in any genre, however humble, as Massenet achieved in his best works." In 1955 Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor commented in The Record Guide that, although usually dismissed as an inferior Gounod, Massenet wrote music with a distinct flavour of its own. "He had a gift for melody of a suave, voluptuous and eminently singable kind, and the intelligence and dramatic sense to make the most of it." The writers called for revivals of Grisélidis, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, Don Quichotte and Cendrillon, all then neglected. By the 1990s, Massenet's reputation had been considerably rehabilitated. In The Penguin Opera Guide (1993), Hugh Macdonald wrote that though Massenet's operas never equalled the grandeur of Berlioz's Les Troyens, the genius of Bizet's Carmen or the profundity of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, from the 1860s until the years before the First World War, the composer gave the French lyric stage a remarkable series of works, two of which – Manon and Werther – are "masterpieces that will always grace the repertoire". In Macdonald's view, Massenet "embodies many enduring aspects of the belle époque, one of the richest cultural periods in history". In France, Massenet's 20th-century eclipse was less complete than elsewhere, but his oeuvre has been revalued in recent years. In 2003 Piotr Kaminsky wrote in Mille et un opéras of Massenet's skill in translating French text into flexible melodic phrases, his exceptional orchestral virtuosity, combining sparkle and clarity, and his unerring theatrical instinct. Begun by Jean-Louis Pichon in November 1990, the Massenet Festival in Massenet's native Saint-Étienne have produced biennial performances to promote and celebrate his music.
Rodney Milnes, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), agrees that Manon and Werther have a secure place in the international repertoire; he counts three others as "re-establishing a toehold" (Cendrillon, Thaïs and Don Quichotte), with many more due for re-evaluation or rediscovery. He concludes that comparing Massenet with the handful of composers of great genius, "It would be absurd to claim that he was anything more than a second-rate composer; he nevertheless deserves to be seen, like Richard Strauss, at least as a first-class second-rate one."
## Notes, references and sources
|
23,406,500 |
Western Australian emergency of March 1944
| 1,173,264,825 |
Events related to Australia's defence during World War II
|
[
"1940s in Perth, Western Australia",
"1944 in Australia",
"Indian Ocean operations of World War II",
"March 1944 events",
"Military attacks against Australia",
"Western Australia during World War II"
] |
During March 1944, the Allies of World War II rapidly reinforced the military units located in the state of Western Australia to defend against the possibility that Japanese warships would attack the cities of Fremantle and Perth. This redeployment began on 8 March after concerns were raised about the purpose of Japanese warship movements near the Netherlands East Indies, and ended on 20 March, after it was concluded that an attack was unlikely.
In February 1944, the Allies became alarmed that the movement of the main Japanese fleet to Singapore could be a precursor to raids in the Indian Ocean, including against Western Australia. The emergency began when Allied code breakers detected the movement of a powerful force of Japanese warships in the Netherlands East Indies in early March. After a United States Navy submarine made radar contact with two Japanese warships near one of the entrances to the Indian Ocean on 6 March, the Allied military authorities and Australian Government judged that a fleet may have been heading towards the Perth area. In reality, these warships were undertaking a patrol while awaiting a small raiding force to return from attacking ships in the central Indian Ocean.
In response to the perceived threat, the Allied military units stationed in Western Australia were placed on alert, and reinforcements were dispatched. These included six Royal Australian Air Force flying squadrons. Other Allied air units were held at Darwin in the Northern Territory to respond to raids on that town or reinforce Western Australia if the Japanese fleet was sighted. An air raid warning was sounded in Fremantle and Perth on 10 March, but this proved to be a false alarm. Intensive patrols by the Allied militaries did not detect any Japanese warships off Western Australia, and most units were stood down on 12 March. On the 20th of the month it was concluded that the threat of attack had passed, and the air reinforcements that had been sent to Western Australia returned to their bases.
## Background
### Allied defences
Fremantle, Western Australia, was an important port throughout World War II. From the start of the war, it was the assembly point for convoys of Allied ships travelling between Australia, the Middle East and Europe. Soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the city became a key operating and maintenance location for United States Navy submarines. The Fremantle submarine base was established in March 1942, and eventually became the US Navy's second-largest submarine base after Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Royal Netherlands Navy submarines were also stationed at Fremantle from 1942, and the Royal Navy began transferring submarines there in mid-1944. Allied submarines operating from Fremantle played a key role in the offensive against Japanese shipping; over the course of the war, 154 submarines made 341 combat patrols from the port.
The Australian Government and local civilians regarded the geographically isolated Perth–Fremantle area as being vulnerable to attack. These fears peaked in March 1942 following the rapid Japanese advance through South East Asia during December 1941 and the early months of 1942. No Japanese attack on the region eventuated, though several small towns in the north of Western Australia were bombed. Concerns over Fremantle's security continued; in March 1943 Australian Prime Minister John Curtin noted as part of a message to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the port was vulnerable to bombardment by Japanese warships or aircraft flying from aircraft carriers.
Elements of the Australian and United States militaries were assigned to the defence of the Perth–Fremantle area. Each of the Australian military's three services maintained a separate headquarters in Western Australia, their efforts coordinated by Combined Defence Headquarters. In the event of attack, the Australian Army's III Corps would assume overall control. By early 1944, the forces assigned to the region's defence had been reduced from their peak strength. Nevertheless, several anti-aircraft and coastal defence batteries were located in and near Perth and Fremantle to protect the cities from attack. These units were primarily manned by Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC) part-time personnel, who would be called up if a threat developed. Three Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) flying squadrons were also stationed around Perth; No. 85 Squadron provided air defence with CAC Boomerang fighters, No. 14 Squadron patrolled off the Western Australian coast using Bristol Beaufort light bombers and No. 25 Squadron operated Vultee Vengeance dive bombers. The US Navy's Patrol Wing 10 augmented the Australian forces and conducted long-range patrols over the Indian Ocean from Perth with Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats.
### Japanese redeployments
In February 1944, the Combined Fleet, the Imperial Japanese Navy's main striking force, withdrew from its base at Truk in the Central Pacific to Palau and Singapore. The appearance of a powerful naval force at Singapore alarmed the Allies, as it was feared that these ships would conduct raids into the Indian Ocean and against Western Australia. In response, the Allies strengthened the British Eastern Fleet in the central Indian Ocean by transferring two British light cruisers from the Atlantic and Mediterranean as well as several US Navy warships from the Pacific. The number of air units in Ceylon and the Bay of Bengal region was also increased. Reinforcements for the 16 US Navy submarines based at Fremantle were also dispatched, but most of these boats did not arrive until after mid-March. The submarines were tasked with attacking the Japanese fleet in South East Asian waters.
General Douglas MacArthur's General Headquarters, which was responsible for the South West Pacific Area, assessed in February that the Combined Fleet could potentially attack the port of Fremantle. It was thought that the purpose of any such raid would be to divert Allied forces from the offensives they were about to launch in the Pacific. MacArthur did not move any additional forces to Western Australia at this time, but developed plans to reinforce the area if necessary. It was believed that land-based aircraft would be sufficient to counter any attacks on Fremantle and, on 28 February, General Headquarters directed Lieutenant General George Kenney, the commander of the Allied Air Forces, to prepare to:
> 1\. Concentrate a striking force of sixty heavy bombers in Western Australia on twenty-four hours' notice.
> 2. Reinforce this heavy bomber striking force with medium bombers when directed by this headquarters.
> 3. Provide three fighter squadrons for the defence of Perth.
> 4. Operate heavy and medium bombers from Darwin, Corunna Downs, Geraldton and Carnarvon.
> 5. Supply the air forces operating in Western Australia by air in an emergency.
On 4 March, Curtin sent a cable to Churchill seeking the British Government's assessment of the likelihood of Japanese raids into the Indian Ocean, and the capacity of the Allied forces in the region to defeat any such attacks. Curtin's cable crossed a message Churchill had sent the previous day, which stated that while Japanese forces could conduct raids against Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean, "it is not thought that serious danger, either to India or to Western Australia, is likely to develop". Churchill's cable also noted that the Japanese would likely seek to preserve their remaining major warships for use in the later stages of the war.
Although the Australian Government was reassured by Britain's assessment of the situation, the Allied military units stationed in Western Australia made preparations to resist a possible attack. The RAAF's Western Area Command improved the readiness of its forces near Perth and Exmouth Gulf in the north-west of the state. It also stockpiled bombs at Cunderdin, north-east of Perth, to be used by any heavy bombers sent as reinforcements. The readiness of the Army garrison units in the Perth–Fremantle area was also increased. The Fremantle Fortress command, which was responsible for defending the port against naval bombardment or air attack, was placed on alert and ordered to station more heavy anti-aircraft guns near the city's docks. On 4 March, VDC units were directed to be able to man their assigned anti-aircraft and coastal-defence positions within 6 hours, rather than the normal warning time of 24 hours.
## The emergency
### Japanese movements
Despite the Allied concerns, the Japanese did not intend to send the main body of the Combined Fleet into the Indian Ocean. The ships had been withdrawn from the Central Pacific to avoid a major United States offensive that was expected to be launched against the area. Singapore had been selected as the Fleet's new base as it was close to sources of fuel and had suitable facilities to enable the ships to undertake training and maintenance before counter-attacking the Allies in the Pacific. However, it was decided to send a small force of cruisers into the Indian Ocean to conduct the first raid by Japanese surface ships on the area since early 1942.
In late February 1944, Vice-Admiral Shiro Takasu—the Commander in Chief of Japan's Southwest Area Fleet—ordered the heavy cruisers Aoba, Chikuma, and Tone to raid Allied shipping on the main route between Aden and Fremantle. The three ships departed the Combined Fleet's anchorage in the Lingga Islands near Singapore on 27 February. The light cruisers Kinu and Ōi and three destroyers (which were designated a "Security and Supply Formation") escorted the raiding force through the Sunda Strait on 1 March. These five ships were to remain at sea for the duration of the raid, and then escort the heavy cruisers back through the Sunda Strait. The Allies were not aware of the raiding force or its departure, but Allied code breakers subsequently detected the sailing from Singapore on 4 March of a force comprising two battleships, an aircraft carrier and multiple destroyers, and determined that the ships were headed east towards Surabaya. Rear-Admiral Ralph W. Christie, the commander of the Allied submarines based at Fremantle, believed that this force could attack the Perth–Fremantle area. In response, he ordered the submarine USS Haddo under the command of Lieutenant Commander Chester Nimitz Jr. to patrol the Lombok Strait and report the movement of any Japanese ships into the Indian Ocean.
On 6 March, Haddo briefly made radar contact with, but did not sight, what Nimitz believed may have been at least two large Japanese warships near the Lombok Strait. Nimitz was unsure whether to report this inconclusive contact, but decided to do so to prevent Fremantle from being subjected to a surprise attack; he later wrote that "'Remember Pearl Harbor' was the message that kept sticking in my mind". The Japanese ships detected by Haddo were Kinu and Ōi heading towards the Sunda Strait.
Nimitz's report caused significant concerns. On 8 March, the Australian Chiefs of Staff Committee advised the Australian Government that there was a possibility that the Japanese task force had entered the Indian Ocean with the goal of attacking the Perth–Fremantle area during the full moon period around 9 March. Accordingly, actions were initiated to improve the area's defences. Also on 8 March, the commander of the Eastern Fleet, Admiral James Somerville, directed all Allied ships travelling in the Indian Ocean between 80 and 100° east to divert to the south or west.
Based on the radar contact on 6 March, the phase of the Moon and assumptions of the Japanese force's speed and likely flying-off positions if it included any aircraft carriers, the Allied militaries judged that any attack on the Perth–Fremantle area was most likely to occur during the early hours of 11 March. It was also possible that such an attack could be conducted any time between the night of 9/10 March and the morning of 14 March.
### Allied reinforcements
Allied actions to improve the Perth–Fremantle area's defences began on 8 March. All of the region's defences were manned, air patrols off the coast of Western Australia were increased and the five seaworthy US Navy submarines at the Fremantle submarine base were ordered put to sea and patrol along the expected route of the Japanese force. Two Dutch submarines based at Fremantle took up stations near Rottnest Island, just off the coast of Fremantle. The submariners who were on leave at the start of the emergency were recalled to duty by messages broadcast over public radio stations. The port of Fremantle was closed to shipping, and the merchant ships there at the time were dispersed to the nearby Gage Roads and Cockburn Sound. The two US Navy submarine tenders based at Fremantle sailed to Albany on the south coast of Western Australia. Several US Navy submarines conducting patrols in the Indian Ocean and Netherlands East Indies were also directed to take up stations that would allow them to intercept Japanese ships bound for Fremantle, or attack such a force while it was returning to base.
At a conference held at the Allied Air Headquarters in Brisbane on 8 March, Kenney ordered Air Vice-Marshal William Bostock, the head of RAAF Command, to take personal command of the air defence of Western Australia and to dispatch several RAAF squadrons there as reinforcements. Kenney also directed the United States Army Air Forces' heavy bomber-equipped 380th Bombardment Group to return from New Guinea to Fenton Airfield near Darwin, and be ready to move to Cunderdin or Geraldton if a threat to the Fremantle area developed.
Later on 8 March, Bostock ordered a major redeployment of RAAF units to Western Australia and the Northern Territory in response to the perceived threat. The Supermarine Spitfire-equipped Nos. 452 and 457 Squadrons were directed to move from Darwin to Perth. No. 18 (Netherlands East Indies) and No. 31 Squadrons were dispatched from airfields near Darwin area to "Potshot" airfield in the Exmouth Gulf region; these units operated North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers and Bristol Beaufighter heavy fighters respectively. To bolster "Potshot"'s air defences, No. 120 (Netherlands East Indies) Squadron was ordered to fly its Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk fighters there from Canberra. To replace the two Spitfire squadrons, the Kittyhawk-equipped No. 84 Squadron was directed to redeploy from Horn Island, Queensland, to Strauss Airfield near Darwin. No. 43 Squadron, a maritime patrol unit operating Catalinas, was also ordered to Darwin from Karumba, Queensland.
A large force of USAAF transport aircraft was assigned to help move the squadrons' personnel and equipment, and additional fuel supplies and bombs were also transported to Western Australia. The movement of each squadron took place in two parts: their aircraft and crews travelled together as the first echelon, and maintenance personnel with 14 days' worth of supplies formed the second echelon.
Air Commodore Raymond Brownell, the head of Western Area Command, disagreed with Bostock's decision to station three squadrons at Exmouth Gulf. Brownell believed that Exmouth Gulf was unlikely to be attacked, and units stationed there would be too far from Perth to assist that region if it was the target of a Japanese raid. Bostock believed that the Japanese force might attack the Darwin area, and wanted to retain air units at Exmouth Gulf so they could rapidly redeploy to Darwin if necessary.
The RAAF squadrons received orders to redeploy on 8 March and, after hasty preparations, began to depart their home bases the next day. The two Spitfire squadrons encountered difficult weather conditions during their long trip along the west coast from Darwin to Perth. Inadequate servicing equipment and support personnel at the airfields that they used for refuelling also caused delays. One of the Spitfires crashed at Carnarvon, and another made a forced landing at Gingin near Perth. The two squadrons eventually arrived at Guildford outside of Perth on 12 March, two days later than originally planned. The squadrons' replacement at Darwin, No. 84 Squadron, also experienced difficulty moving from Horn Island. The initial attempt by this unit's 24 P-40 Kittyhawk fighters to fly from Horn Island had to be abandoned when they struck bad weather, one of the Kittyhawk pilots dying when his aircraft crashed. No. 120 (Netherlands East Indies) Squadron's long journey from Canberra to Exmouth Gulf was uneventful. Operations by the squadrons stationed at Exmouth Gulf were greatly disrupted on 10 March when a severe cyclone struck the area and flooded the airfield.
### Perth–Fremantle defences
The Allied air units in Western and Northern Australia conducted patrols into the Indian Ocean in search of the feared Japanese force. These operations included patrols by Catalinas from Patrol Wing 10, as well as RAAF Beauforts based in Western Australia. No. 43 Squadron RAAF's Catalinas also flew night patrols out of Darwin. None of these aircraft sighted Japanese vessels. The cyclone off the coast of Western Australia greatly hampered the flights, and led to concerns that the Japanese force could be approaching under the cover of bad weather.
The air defences of the Perth–Fremantle area were improved in response to the threat of attack. No. 85 Squadron was initially the only fighter squadron available in the region, but the two Spitfire squadrons also assumed responsibility for this task within hours of their arrival on 12 March. No. 25 Squadron was assigned to attack any Japanese warships with its dive bombers. As well as these air units, the light cruiser and heavy cruiser HMS Sussex were anchored near the merchant ships in Gage Roads on 10 March to provide anti-aircraft defence in the event of an attack.
All III Corps units were placed on six hours' notice to respond to attacks from 8 March. Training exercises were cancelled so the Corps' personnel and formations could be concentrated near the threatened region. Soldiers from the 104th Tank Attack Regiment manned anti-aircraft machine gun positions near the flying boat station in the Perth suburb of Crawley. The coastal defences on Rottnest Island were also fully manned, and the 10th Garrison Battalion took up defensive positions on the island. The build-up of the region's defences was noticed by civilians, leading to rumours that a raid or invasion was imminent.
On the afternoon of 10 March, the radar station at Geraldton repeatedly detected what its crew believed was an unidentified aircraft. Acting upon advice from Brownell, the commanding officer of III Corps, Lieutenant General Gordon Bennett, ordered an air raid warning for Fremantle and Perth. This led to No. 85 Squadron being readied, air raid sirens being sounded, air raid wardens taking their posts, and the evacuation of hospitals. No raid eventuated and the "all clear" siren was soon sounded. The military authorities and government did not give any reason for the air raid alert until the next day, when the Western Australian minister with responsibility for civil defence, Alexander Panton, released a brief statement noting that the alarms had been sounded on legitimate grounds and the incident had not been a hoax.
Further military activity took place on 11 March. That morning one of the Allied submarines patrolling off Western Australia reported radar signals from a Japanese warship, but this proved to be a false alarm. Also that day, Adelaide escorted eight merchant ships to sea and then proceeded to Albany to protect the submarine tenders. The 10th Light Horse Regiment established coast-watching positions, and an exercise practising the full activation of VDC-manned coastal and anti-aircraft defences on the night of 11/12 March was held.
Concerns over the prospect of an attack soon dissipated. Air patrols conducted in improving weather conditions on 11 March did not locate any Japanese warships, and most units other than Fremantle Fortress' anti-aircraft and coastal-defence positions were stood down on 12 March. The units normally stationed in Western Australia returned to their usual locations and activities on 13 March, and the submarine tenders were escorted back to Fremantle by Adelaide. On 20 March, Kenney advised Bostock that the threat of attack had passed, and ordered that all the additional RAAF units sent to Western Australia return to their home bases.
The Japanese raiding force dispatched to the Indian Ocean encountered only a single Allied ship: on the morning of 9 March, Tone shelled and sank the British steamer Behar, which was bound from Fremantle to Colombo on a voyage to the United Kingdom. After being attacked, the steamer's crew broadcast a distress signal to warn other Allied ships, causing the commander of the raiding force to abandon the operation. The heavy cruisers were escorted through the Sunda Strait by Kinu, Ōi and five destroyers, and arrived back at the Netherlands East Indies on 16 March. Shortly afterwards, 89 of the 104 Behar survivors who had been rescued by Tone's crew were murdered aboard the cruiser. The commander of the raiding force, Vice Admiral Naomasa Sakonju, and Tone's captain were convicted of this crime after the war. The Allies were unaware of the attack on Behar until a ship that had picked up the steamer's distress signal arrived in Fremantle on 17 March. The orders diverting Allied shipping from the central Indian Ocean were cancelled on 18 March.
## Aftermath
Allied concerns over the Combined Fleet's presence at Singapore eased considerably during March when it was learned that the ships there were being put through a maintenance program and that the Japanese did not intend to undertake major operations in the Indian Ocean area. Allied military commanders believed that the March 1944 emergency had some beneficial effects. Christie judged that military personnel and civilians in Western Australia had become complacent before the emergency, and the mobilisation had gone some way towards addressing this. The RAAF and USAAF regarded the reinforcement of Western Australia as having provided useful experience in rapidly redeploying combat units. The emergency also demonstrated that the VDC could be rapidly mobilised to man fixed defence positions. An editorial published in the newspaper The West Australian on 13 March judged that the air raid alert on 10 March had given Perth's population a reminder of the potential threat posed by "hit and run" raids, but was highly critical of the lack of information regarding the cause of the alert, especially in light of the rumours sweeping the city. The Daily News expressed similar views. The rationale for reinforcing Western Australia and the air raid alarms in March 1944 was not revealed by the Australian Government until 17 August 1945, two days after the end of the war.
|
202,418 |
Atlantic puffin
| 1,170,169,192 |
Species of seabird (Fratercula arctica)
|
[
"Articles containing video clips",
"Birds described in 1758",
"Birds of Europe",
"Birds of Iceland",
"Birds of Scandinavia",
"Birds of the Arctic",
"Fratercula",
"Native birds of Eastern Canada",
"Provincial symbols of Newfoundland and Labrador",
"Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus"
] |
The Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica), also known as the common puffin, is a species of seabird in the auk family. It is the only puffin native to the Atlantic Ocean; two related species, the tufted puffin and the horned puffin are found in the northeastern Pacific. The Atlantic puffin breeds in Russia, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and the Faroe Islands, and as far south as Maine in the west and France in the east. It is most commonly found in the Westman Islands, Iceland. Although it has a large population and a wide range, the species has declined rapidly, at least in parts of its range, resulting in it being rated as vulnerable by the IUCN. On land, it has the typical upright stance of an auk. At sea, it swims on the surface and feeds on small fish and crabs, which it catches by diving underwater, using its wings for propulsion.
This puffin has a black crown and back, pale grey cheek patches, and a white body and underparts. Its broad, boldly marked red-and-black beak and orange legs contrast with its plumage. It moults while at sea in the winter, and some of the brightly coloured facial characteristics are lost, with colour returning during the spring. The external appearances of the adult male and female are identical, though the male is usually slightly larger. The juvenile has similar plumage, but its cheek patches are dark grey. The juvenile does not have brightly coloured head ornamentation, its bill is narrower and is dark grey with a yellowish-brown tip, and its legs and feet are also dark. Puffins from northern populations are typically larger than in the south and these populations are generally considered a different subspecies.
Spending the autumn and winter in the open ocean of the cold northern seas, the Atlantic puffin returns to coastal areas at the start of the breeding season in late spring. It nests in clifftop colonies, digging a burrow in which a single white egg is laid. Chicks mostly feed on whole fish and grow rapidly. After about 6 weeks, they are fully fledged and make their way at night to the sea. They swim away from the shore and do not return to land for several years.
Colonies are mostly on islands with no terrestrial predators, but adult birds and newly fledged chicks are at risk of attacks from the air by gulls and skuas. Sometimes, a bird such as an Arctic skua or blackback gull can cause a puffin arriving with a beak full of fish to drop all the fish the puffin was holding in its mouth. The puffin's striking appearance, large, colourful bill, waddling gait, and behaviour have given rise to nicknames such as "clown of the sea" and "sea parrot". It is the official bird of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
## Taxonomy and etymology
The Atlantic puffin is a species of seabird in the order Charadriiformes. It is in the auk family, Alcidae, which includes the guillemots, typical auks, murrelets, auklets, puffins, and the razorbill. The rhinoceros auklet (Cerorhinca monocerata) and the puffins are closely related, together composing the tribe Fraterculini. The Atlantic puffin is the only species in the genus Fratercula to occur in the Atlantic Ocean. Two other species are known from the northeast Pacific, the tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) and the horned puffin (Fratercula corniculata), the latter being the closest relative of the Atlantic puffin.
The generic name Fratercula comes from the Medieval Latin fratercula, friar, a reference to their black and white plumage, which resembles monastic robes. The specific name arctica refers to the northerly distribution of the bird, being derived from the Greek ἄρκτος (arktos), the bear, referring to the northerly constellation, the Ursa Major (Great Bear). The vernacular name "puffin" – puffed in the sense of swollen – was originally applied to the fatty, salted meat of young birds of the unrelated species Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), which in 1652 was known as the "Manks puffin". It is an Anglo-Norman word (Middle English pophyn or poffin) used for the cured carcasses. The Atlantic puffin acquired the name at a much later stage, possibly because of its similar nesting habits, and it was formally applied to Fratercula arctica by Pennant in 1768. While the species is also known as the common puffin, "Atlantic puffin" is the English name recommended by the International Ornithological Congress.
The three subspecies generally recognized are:
- F. a. arctica
- F. a. grabae
- F. a. naumanni
The only morphological difference between the three is their size. Body length, wing length, and size of beak all increase at higher latitudes. For example, a puffin from northern Iceland (subspecies F. a. naumanii) weighs about 650 g (1 lb 7 oz) and has a wing length of 186 mm (7+5⁄16 in), while one from the Faroes (subspecies F. a. grabae) weighs 400 g (0.9 lb) and has a wing length of 158 mm (6.2 in). Individuals from southern Iceland (subspecies F. a. arctica) are intermediate between the other two in size. Ernst Mayr has argued that the differences in size are clinal and are typical of variations found in the peripheral population and that no subspecies should be recognised.
## Description
The Atlantic puffin is sturdily built with a thick-set neck and short wings and tail. It is 28 to 30 cm (11 to 12 in) in length from the tip of its stout bill to its blunt-ended tail. Its wingspan is 47 to 63 cm (19 to 25 in) and on land it stands about 20 cm (8 in) high. The male is generally slightly larger than the female, but they are coloured alike. The forehead, crown, and nape are glossy black, as are the back, wings, and tail. A broad, black collar extends around the neck and throat. On each side of the head is a large, lozenge-shaped area of very pale grey. These face patches taper to a point and nearly meet at the back of the neck. The shape of the head creates a crease extending from the eye to the hindmost point of each patch, giving the appearance of a grey streak. The eyes look almost triangular because of a small, peaked area of horny blue-grey skin above them and a rectangular patch below. The irises are brown or very dark blue, and each has a red orbital ring. The underparts of the bird, the breast, belly, and under tail coverts, are white. By the end of the breeding season, the black plumage may have lost its shine or even taken on a slightly brown tinge. The legs are short and set well back on the body, giving the bird its upright stance when on land. Both legs and large webbed feet are bright orange, contrasting with the sharp, black claws.
The beak is very distinctive. From the side, the beak is broad and triangular, but viewed from above, it is narrow. The half near the tip is orange-red and the half near the head is slate grey. A yellow, chevron-shaped ridge separates the two parts, with a yellow, fleshy strip at the base of the bill. At the joint of the two mandibles is a yellow, wrinkled rosette. The exact proportions of the beak vary with the age of the bird. In an immature individual, the beak has reached its full length, but it is not as broad as that of an adult. With time the bill deepens, the upper edge curves, and a kink develops at its base. As the bird ages, one or more grooves may form on the red portion. The bird has a powerful bite.
The characteristic bright orange bill plates and other facial characteristics develop in the spring. At the close of the breeding season, these special coatings and appendages are shed in a partial moult. This makes the beak appear less broad, the tip less bright, and the base darker grey. The eye ornaments are shed and the eyes appear round. At the same time, the feathers of the head and neck are replaced and the face becomes darker. This winter plumage is seldom seen by humans because when they have left their chicks, the birds head out to sea and do not return to land until the next breeding season. The juvenile bird is similar to the adult in plumage, but altogether duller with a much darker grey face and yellowish-brown beak tip and legs. After fledging, it makes its way to the water and heads out to sea, and does not return to land for several years. In the interim, each year, it will have a broader bill, paler face patches, and brighter legs and beaks.
The Atlantic puffin has a direct flight, typically 10 m (35 ft) above the sea surface and higher over the water than most other auks. It mostly moves by paddling along efficiently with its webbed feet and seldom takes to the air. It is typically silent at sea, except for the soft purring sounds it sometimes makes in flight. At the breeding colony, it is quiet above ground, but in its burrow makes a growling sound somewhat resembling a chainsaw being revved up.
## Distribution
The Atlantic puffin is a bird of the colder waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. It breeds on the coasts of northwest Europe, the Arctic fringes, and eastern North America. More than 90% of the global population is found in Europe (4,770,000–5,780,000 pairs, equaling 9,550,000–11,600,000 adults) and colonies in Iceland alone are home to 60% of the world's Atlantic puffins. The largest colony in the western Atlantic (estimated at more than 260,000 pairs) can be found at the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, south of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Other major breeding locations include the north and west coasts of Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland and Orkney, the west coast of Greenland, and the coasts of Newfoundland. Smaller-sized colonies are also found elsewhere in the British Isles, the Murmansk area of Russia, Novaya Zemlya, Spitzbergen, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Maine. Islands seem particularly attractive to the birds for breeding as compared to mainland sites, likely to avoid predators.
While at sea, the bird ranges widely across the North Atlantic Ocean, including the North Sea, and may enter the Arctic Circle. In the summer, its southern limit stretches from northern France to Maine; in the winter, the bird may range as far south as the Mediterranean Sea and North Carolina. These oceanic waters have such a vast extent of 15×10^<sup>6</sup>–30×10^<sup>6</sup> km<sup>2</sup> (6×10^<sup>6</sup>–12×10^<sup>6</sup> sq mi) that each bird has more than 1 km<sup>2</sup> of range at its disposal, so is seldom seen out at sea. In Maine, light-level geolocators have been attached to the legs of puffins, which store information on their whereabouts. The birds need to be recaptured to access the information, a difficult task. One bird was found to have covered 7,700 km (4,800 mi) of the ocean in 8 months, traveling northwards to the northern Labrador Sea then southeastward to the mid-Atlantic before returning to land.
In a long-living bird with a small clutch size, such as the Atlantic puffin, the survival rate of adults is an important factor influencing the success of the species. Only 5% of the ringed puffins that failed to reappear at the colony did so during the breeding season. The rest were lost some time between departing from land in the summer and reappearing the following spring. The birds spend the winter widely spread out in the open ocean, though a tendency exists for individuals from different colonies to overwinter in different areas. Little is known of their behaviour and diet at sea, but no correlation was found between environmental factors, such as temperature variations, and their mortality rate. A combination of the availability of food in winter and summer probably influences the survival of the birds, since individuals starting the winter in poor condition are less likely to survive than those in good condition.
## Behaviour
Like many seabirds, the Atlantic puffin spends most of the year far from land in the open ocean and only visits coastal areas to breed. It is a sociable bird and it usually breeds in large colonies.
### At sea
Atlantic puffins lead solitary existences when out at sea, and this part of their lives has been little studied, as the task of finding even one bird on the vast ocean is formidable. When at sea, they bob about like a cork, propelling themselves through the water with powerful thrusts of their feet and keeping turned into the wind, even when resting and apparently asleep. They spend much time each day preening to keep their plumage in order and spread oil from their preen glands. Their downy under plumage remains dry and provides thermal insulation. In common with other seabirds, their upper surface is black and underside white. This provides camouflage, with aerial predators unable to locate the birds against the dark, watery background, and underwater attackers fail to notice them as they blend in with the bright sky above the waves.
When it takes off, the Atlantic puffin patters across the surface of the water while vigorously flapping its wings, before launching itself into the air. The size of the wing has adapted to its dual use, both above and below the water, and its surface area is small relative to the bird's weight. To maintain flight, the wings must beat very rapidly at a rate of several times each second. The bird's flight is direct and low over the surface of the water, and it can travel at 80 km/h (50 mph). Landing is awkward; it either crashes into a wave crest or in calmer water, does a belly flop. While at sea, the Atlantic puffin has its annual moult. Land birds mostly lose their primaries one pair at a time to enable them still to be able to fly, but the puffin sheds all its primaries at one time and dispenses with flight entirely for a month or two. The moult usually takes place between January and March, but young birds may lose their feathers a little later in the year.
### Food and feeding
The Atlantic puffin diet consists almost entirely of fish, though examination of its stomach contents shows that it occasionally eats shrimp, other crustaceans, molluscs, and polychaete worms, especially in more coastal waters. When fishing, it swims underwater using its semi-extended wings as paddles to "fly" through the water and its feet as a rudder. It swims fast and can reach considerable depths and stay submerged for up to a minute. It can eat shallow-bodied fish as long as 18 cm (7 in), but its prey is commonly smaller fish, around 7 cm (3 in) long. An adult bird needs to eat an estimated 40 of these per day – sand eels, herring, capelin, and sprats being the most often consumed.
It fishes by sight and can swallow small fish while submerged, but larger specimens are brought to the surface. It can catch several small fish in one dive, holding the first ones in place in its beak with its muscular, grooved tongue while it catches others. The two mandibles are hinged in such a way that they can be held parallel to hold a row of fish in place and these are also retained by inward-facing serrations on the edges of the beak. It copes with the excess salt that it swallows partly through its kidneys and partly by excretion through specialised salt glands in its nostrils.
### On land
In the spring, mature birds return to land, usually to the colony where they were hatched. Birds that were removed as chicks and released elsewhere were found to show fidelity to their point of liberation. They congregate for a few days on the sea in small groups offshore before returning to the cliff-top nesting sites. Each large puffin colony is divided into subcolonies by physical boundaries such as stands of bracken or gorse. Early arrivals take control of the best locations, the most desirable nesting sites being the densely packed burrows on grassy slopes just above the cliff edge where take-off is most easily accomplished. The birds are usually monogamous, but this is the result of their fidelity to their nesting sites rather than to their mates, and they often return to the same burrows year after year. Later arrivals at the colony may find that all the best nesting sites have already been taken, so are pushed towards the periphery, where they are in greater danger of predation. Younger birds may come ashore a month or more after the mature birds and find no remaining nesting sites. They do not breed until the following year, although if the ground cover surrounding the colony is cut back before these subadults arrive, the number of successfully nesting pairs may be increased.
Atlantic puffins are cautious when approaching the colony, and no bird likes to land in a location where other puffins are not already present. They make several circuits of the colony before alighting. On the ground, they spend much time preening, spreading oil from their preen gland, and setting each feather in its correct position with beak or claw. They also spend time standing by their burrow entrances and interacting with passing birds. Dominance is shown by an upright stance, with fluffed chest feathers and a cocked tail, an exaggerated slow walk, head jerking, and gaping. Submissive birds lower their heads and hold their bodies horizontally and scurry past dominant individuals. Birds normally signal their intention to take off by briefly lowering their bodies before running down the slope to gain momentum. If a bird is startled and takes off unexpectedly, panic can spread through the colony with all the birds launching themselves into the air and wheeling around in a great circle. The colony is at its most active in the evening, with birds standing outside their burrows, resting on the turf, or strolling around. Then, the slopes empty for the night as the birds fly out to sea to roost, often choosing to do so at fishing grounds ready for early-morning provisioning.
The puffins are energetic burrow engineers and repairers, so the grassy slopes may be undermined by a network of tunnels. This causes the turf to dry out in summer, vegetation to die, and dry soil to be whirled away by the wind. Burrows sometimes collapse, and humans may cause this to happen by walking incautiously across nesting slopes. A colony on Grassholm was lost through erosion when so little soil was left that burrows could not be made. New colonies are very unlikely to start up spontaneously because this gregarious bird only nests where others are already present. Nevertheless, the Audubon Society had success on Eastern Egg Rock Island in Maine, where, after a gap of 90 years, puffins were reintroduced and started breeding again. By 2011, over 120 pairs were nested on the small islet. On the Isle of May on the other side of the Atlantic, only five pairs of puffins were breeding in 1958, while 20 years later, 10,000 pairs were present.
### Reproduction
Having spent the winter alone on the ocean, whether the Atlantic puffin meets its previous partner offshore or whether they encounter each other when they return to their nest of the previous year is unclear. On land, they soon set about improving and clearing out the burrow. Often, one stands outside the entrance while the other excavates, kicking out quantities of soil and grit that showers the partner standing outside. Some birds collect stems and fragments of dry grasses as nesting materials, but others do not bother. Sometimes, a beakful of materials is taken underground, only to be brought out again and discarded. Apart from nest-building, the other way in which the birds restore their bond is by billing. This is a practice in which the pair approaches each other, each wagging their heads from side to side, and then rattling their beaks together. This seems to be an important element of their courtship behaviour because it happens repeatedly, and the birds continue to the bill, to a lesser extent, throughout the breeding season.
Atlantic puffins are sexually mature at 4–5 years old. They are colonial nesters, excavating burrows on grassy clifftops or reusing existing holes, and on occasion may nest in crevices and among rocks and scree., in competition with other birds and animals for burrows. They can excavate their own hole or move into a pre-existing system dug by a rabbit, and have been known to peck and drive off the original occupant. Manx shearwaters also nest underground and often live in their own burrows alongside puffins, and their burrowing activities may break through into the puffin's living quarters, resulting in the loss of the egg. They are monogamous (mate for life) and give biparental care to their young. The male spends more time guarding and maintaining the nest, while the female is more involved in incubation and feeding the chick.
Egg-laying starts in April in more southerly colonies but seldom occurs before June in Greenland. The female lays a single white egg each year, but if this is lost early in the breeding season, another might be produced. Synchronous laying of eggs is found in Atlantic puffins in adjacent burrows. The egg is large compared to the size of the bird, averaging 61 mm (2+3⁄8 in) long by 42 mm (1+5⁄8 in) wide and weighing about 62 g (2+3⁄16 oz). The white shell is usually devoid of markings, but soon becomes covered with mud. The incubation responsibilities are shared by both parents. They each have two feather-free brood patches on their undersides, where an enhanced blood supply provides heat for the egg. The parent on incubation duty in the dark nest chamber spends much of its time asleep with its head tucked under its wing, occasionally emerging from the tunnel to flap dust out of its feathers or take a short flight down to the sea.
The total incubation time is around 39–45 days. From above ground level, the first evidence that hatching has taken place is the arrival of an adult with a beak-load of fish. For the first few days, the chick may be fed with this beak-to-beak, but later the fish are simply dropped on the floor of the nest beside the chick, which swallows them whole. The chick is covered in fluffy black down, its eyes are open, and it can stand as soon as it is hatched. Initially weighing about 42 g (1+1⁄2 oz), it grows at the rate of 10 g (3⁄8 oz) per day. Initially, one or the other parent broods it, but as its appetite increases, it is left alone for longer periods. Observations of a nest chamber have been made from an underground hide with a peephole. The chick sleeps much of the time between its parents' visits and also involves itself in bouts of exercise. It rearranges its nesting material, picks up and drops small stones, flaps its immature wings, pulls at protruding root ends, and pushes and strains against the unyielding wall of the burrow. It makes its way towards the entrance or along a side tunnel to defecate. The growing chick seems to anticipate the arrival of an adult, advancing along the burrow just before it arrives, but not emerging into the open air. It retreats to the nest chamber as the adult bird brings in its load of fish.
Hunting areas are often located 100 km (62 mi) or more offshore from the nest sites, although when feeding their young, the birds venture out only half that distance. Adults bringing fish to their chicks tend to arrive in groups. This is thought to benefit the bird by reducing kleptoparasitism by the Arctic skua, which harasses puffins until they drop their fish loads. Predation by the great skua (Catharacta skua) is also reduced by several birds arriving simultaneously.
In the Shetland Islands, sand eels (Ammodytes marinus) normally form at least 90% of the food fed to chicks. In years when the availability of sand eels was low, breeding success rates fell, with many chicks starving to death. In Norway, the herring (Clupea harengus) is the mainstay of the diet. When herring numbers dwindled, so did puffin numbers. In Labrador, the puffins seemed more flexible and when the staple forage fish capelin (Mallotus villosus) declined in availability, they were able to adapt and feed the chicks on other prey species.
The chicks take from 34 to 50 days to fledge, the period depending on the abundance of their food supply. In years of fish shortage, the whole colony may experience a longer fledgling period, but the normal range is 38 to 44 days, by which time chicks have reached about 75% of their mature body weight. The chick may come to the burrow entrance to defecate, but does not usually emerge into the open and seems to have an aversion to light until it is nearly fully fledged. Although the supply of fish by the adults reduces over the last few days spent in the nest, the chick is not abandoned as happens in the Manx shearwater. On occasions, an adult has been observed provisioning a nest even after the chick has departed. During the last few days underground, the chick sheds its down and the juvenile plumage is revealed. Its relatively small beak and its legs and feet are a dark colour, and it lacks the white facial patches of the adult. The chick finally leaves its nest at night, when the risk of predation is at its lowest. When the moment arrives, it emerges from the burrow, usually for the first time, and walks, runs, and flaps its way to the sea. It cannot fly properly yet, so descending a cliff is perilous; when it reaches the water, it paddles out to sea, and maybe 3 km (1.9 mi) away from the shore by daybreak. It does not congregate with others of its kind and does not return to land for 2–3 years.
## Predators and parasites
Atlantic puffins are probably safer when out at sea, where the dangers are more often from below the water rather than above; puffins can sometimes be seen putting their heads underwater to peer around for predators. Seals have been known to kill puffins, and large fish may also do so. Most puffin colonies are on small islands, and this is no coincidence, as it avoids predation by ground-based mammals such as foxes, rats, stoats, weasels, cats, and dogs. When they come ashore, the birds are still at risk and the main threats come from the sky.
Aerial predators of the Atlantic puffin include the great black-backed gull (Larus marinus), the great skua (Stercorarius skua), and similar-sized species, which can catch a bird in flight, or attack one that is unable to escape fast enough on the ground. On detecting danger, puffins take off and fly down to the safety of the sea or retreat into their burrows, but if caught, they defend themselves vigorously with beaks and sharp claws. When the puffins are wheeling around beside the cliffs, a predator concentrating on a single bird becomes very difficult, while any individual isolated on the ground is at greater risk. Smaller gull species such as the herring gull (L. argentatus) and the lesser black-backed gull are hardly able to bring down a healthy adult puffin. They stride through the colony taking any eggs that have rolled towards burrow entrances or recently hatched chicks that have ventured too far toward the daylight. They also steal fish from puffins returning to feed their young. Where it nests on the tundra in the far north, the Arctic skua (Stercorarius parasiticus) is a terrestrial predator, but at lower latitudes, it is a specialised kleptoparasite, concentrating on auks and other seabirds. It harasses puffins while they are airborne, forcing them to drop their catch, which it then snatches up.
Both the guillemot tick Ixodes uriae and the flea Ornithopsylla laetitiae (probably originally a rabbit flea) have been recorded from the nests of puffins. Other fleas found on the birds include Ceratophyllus borealis, Ceratophyllus gallinae, Ceratophyllus garei, Ceratophyllus vagabunda, and the common rabbit flea Spilopsyllus cuniculi.
## Relationship with humans
### Status and conservation
The Atlantic puffin has an extensive range that covers over 1,620,000 km<sup>2</sup> (625,000 sq mi) and Europe, which holds more than 90% of the global population, is home to 4,770,000–5,780,000 pairs (equalling 9,550,000–11,600,000 adults). In 2015, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded its status from "least concern" to "vulnerable". This was caused by a review that revealed a rapid and ongoing population decline in its European range. Trends elsewhere are unknown, although, in 2018, the total global population was estimated at 12–14 million adult individuals. Some of the causes of population decline may be increased predation by gulls and skuas, the introduction of rats, cats, dogs, and foxes onto some islands used for nesting, contamination by toxic residues, drowning in fishing nets, declining food supplies, and climate change. On the island of Lundy, the number of puffins decreased from 3,500 pairs in 1939 to 10 pairs in 2000. This was mainly due to the rats that had proliferated on the island and were eating eggs and young chicks. Following the elimination of the rats, populations were expected to recover, and in 2005, a juvenile was seen, believed to be the first chick raised on the island for 30 years. In 2018, BirdLife International reported that the Atlantic puffin was threatened with extinction.
Puffin numbers increased considerably in the late 20th century in the North Sea, including on the Isle of May and the Farne Islands, where numbers increased by about 10% per year. In the 2013 breeding season, nearly 40,000 pairs were recorded on the Farne Islands, a slight increase on the 2008 census and on the previous year's poor season, when some of the burrows flooded. This number is dwarfed by the Icelandic colonies with five million pairs breeding, the Atlantic puffin being the most populous bird on the island. In the Westman Islands, where about half Iceland's puffins breed, the birds were almost driven to extinction by overharvesting around 1900 and a 30-year ban on hunting was put in place. When stocks recovered, a different method of harvesting was used and now hunting is maintained at a sustainable level. Nevertheless, a further hunting ban covering the whole of Iceland was called for in 2011, although the puffin's lack of recent breeding success was being blamed on a diminution in food supply rather than overharvesting. Since 2000, a sharp population decline has been seen in Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. A similar trend has been seen in the United Kingdom, where an increase in 1969–2000 appears to have been reversed. For example, the Fair Isle colony was estimated at 20,200 individuals in 1986, but it had been almost halved by 2012. Based on current trends, the European population will decline an estimated 50–79% between 2000 and 2065.
SOS Puffin is a conservation project at the Scottish Seabird Centre at North Berwick to save the puffins on islands in the Firth of Forth. Puffin numbers on the island of Craigleith, once one of the largest colonies in Scotland with 28,000 pairs, have declined dramatically to just a few thousand due to the invasion of a large introduced plant, the tree mallow (Lavatera arborea). This has spread across the island in dense thickets and prevents the puffins from finding suitable sites for burrowing and breeding. The project has the support of over 700 volunteers and progress has been made in cutting back the plants, with puffins returning in greater numbers to breed. Another conservation measure undertaken by the centre is to encourage motorists to check under their cars in late summer before driving off, as young puffins, disorientated by the street lights, may land in the town and take shelter underneath the vehicles.
Project Puffin is an effort initiated in 1973 by Stephen W. Kress of the National Audubon Society to restore Atlantic puffins to nesting islands in the Gulf of Maine. Eastern Egg Rock Island in Muscongus Bay, about 10 km (6 mi) from Pemaquid Point, had been occupied by nesting puffins until 1885, when the birds disappeared because of overhunting. Counting on the fact young puffins usually return to breed on the same island where they fledged, a team of biologists and volunteers translocated 10– to 14-day-old nestlings from Great Island in Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock. The young were placed into artificial sod burrows and fed with vitamin-fortified fish daily for about one month. Such yearly translocations took place until 1986, with 954 young puffins being moved in total. Each year before fledging, the young were individually tagged. The first adults returned to the island by 1977. Puffin decoys had been installed on the island to fool the puffins into thinking they were part of an established colony. This did not catch on at first, but in 1981, four pairs nested on the island. In 2014, 148 nesting pairs were counted on the island. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of re-establishing a seabird colony, the project showed the usefulness of using decoys and eventually call recordings and mirrors, to facilitate such re-establishment.
### Pollution
Since the Atlantic puffin spends its winters on the open ocean, it is susceptible to human actions and catastrophes such as oil spills. Oiled plumage has a reduced ability to insulate and makes the bird more vulnerable to temperature fluctuations and less buoyant in the water. Many birds die, and others, while attempting to remove the oil by preening, ingesting, and inhaling toxins. This leads to inflammation of the airways and gut and in the longer term, damage to the liver and kidneys. This trauma can contribute to a loss of reproductive success and harm to developing embryos. An oil spill occurring in winter, when the puffins are far out at sea, may affect them less than inshore birds as the crude oil slicks soon get broken up and dispersed by the churning of the waves. When oiled birds get washed up on beaches around Atlantic coasts, only about 1.5% of the dead auks are puffins, but many others may have died far from land and sunk. After the oil tanker Torrey Canyon shipwreck and oil spill in 1967, few dead puffins were recovered, but the number of puffins breeding in France the following year was reduced to 16% of its previous level.
The Atlantic puffin and other pelagic birds are excellent bioindicators of the environment, as they occupy a high trophic level. Heavy metals and other pollutants are concentrated through the food chain, and as fish are the primary food source for Atlantic puffins, the potential is great for them to bioaccumulate heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic. Measurements can be made on eggs, feathers, or internal organs, and beached bird surveys, accompanied by chemical analysis of feathers, can be effective indicators of marine pollution by lipophilic substances, as well as metals. In fact, these surveys can be used to provide evidence of the adverse effects of a particular pollutant, using fingerprinting techniques to provide evidence suitable for the prosecution of offenders.
### Climate change
Climate change may well affect populations of seabirds in the northern Atlantic. The most important demographic may be an increase in the sea surface temperature, which may have benefits for some northerly Atlantic puffin colonies. Breeding success depends on ample supplies of food at the time of maximum demand, as the chick grows. In northern Norway, the main food item fed to the chick is the young herring. The success of the newly hatched fish larvae during the previous year was governed by the water temperature, which controlled plankton abundance, and this, in turn, influenced the growth and survival of the first-year herring. The breeding success of Atlantic puffin colonies has been found to correlate in this way with the water surface temperatures of the previous year.
In Maine, on the other side of the Atlantic, shifting fish populations due to changes in sea temperature are being blamed for the lack of availability of the herring, which is the staple diet of the puffins in the area. Some adult birds have become emaciated and died. Others have been provisioning the nest with butterfish (Peprilus triacanthus), but these are often too large and deep-bodied for the chick to swallow, causing it to die from starvation. Maine is on the southerly edge of the bird's breeding range, and with changing weather patterns, this may be set to contract northwards.
### Tourism
Breeding colonies of Atlantic puffins provide an interesting spectacle for bird watchers and tourists. For example, 4000 puffins nest each year on islands off the coast of Maine, and visitors can view them from tour boats that operate during the summers. The Project Puffin Visitor Center in Rockland provides information on the birds and their lives, and on the other conservation projects being undertaken by the National Audubon Society, which runs the center. Views of the colony on Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge can be viewed via live cams during the breeding season. Similar tours operate in Iceland, the Hebrides, and Newfoundland.
### Hunting
Historically, Atlantic puffins were caught and eaten fresh, salted in brine, or smoked and dried. Their feathers were used in bedding and their eggs were eaten, but not to the same extent as those of some other seabirds, being more difficult to extract from the nest. In most countries, Atlantic puffins are now protected by legislation, and in the countries where hunting is still permitted, strict laws prevent overexploitation. Although calls have been made for an outright ban on hunting puffins in Iceland because of concern over the dwindling number of birds successfully raising chicks, they are still caught and eaten there and on the Faroe Islands;
Traditional means of capture varied across the birds' range, and nets and rods were used in various ingenious ways. In the Faroe Islands, the method of choice was fleyg, with the use of a fleygingarstong, a 3.6-m-long pole with a small net at the end suspended between two rods, somewhat like a very long lacrosse stick. A few dead puffins were strewn around to entice incoming birds to land, and the net was flicked upwards to scoop a bird from the air as it slowed before alighting. Hunters often positioned themselves on cliff tops in stone seats built in small depressions to conceal themselves from puffins flying overhead. Most of the birds caught were subadults, and a skilled hunter could gather 200–300 in a day. Another method of capture, used in St Kilda, involved the use of a flexible pole with a noose on the end. This was pushed along the ground towards the intended target, which advanced to inspect the noose as its curiosity overcame its caution. A flick of the wrist would flip the noose over the victim's head and it was promptly killed before its struggles could alarm other birds nearby.
### In culture
The Atlantic puffin is the official bird symbol of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. In August 2007, the Atlantic puffin was unsuccessfully proposed as the official symbol of the Liberal Party of Canada by its deputy leader Michael Ignatieff, after he observed a colony of these birds and became fascinated by their behaviour. The Norwegian municipality of Værøy has an Atlantic puffin as its civic emblem. Puffins have been given several informal names including "clowns of the sea" and "sea parrots", and juvenile puffins may be called "pufflings".
Several islands have been named after the bird. The island of Lundy in the United Kingdom is reputed to derive its name from the Norse lund-ey or "puffin island". An alternative explanation has been suggested connected with another meaning of the word "lund" referring to a copse or wooded area. The Vikings might have found the island a useful refuge and restocking point after their depredations on the mainland. The island issued its own coins, and in 1929, its own stamps with denominations in "puffins". Other countries and dependencies that have depicted Atlantic puffins on their stamps include Alderney, Canada, the Faroe Islands, France, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Iceland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, St Pierre et Miquelon, and the United Kingdom.
The publisher of paperbacks, Penguin Books, introduced a range of books for children under the Puffin Books brand in 1939. At first, these were nonfiction titles, but these were soon followed by a fiction list of well-known authors. The demand was so great that Puffin Book Clubs were introduced in schools to encourage reading, and a children's magazine called Puffin Post was established.
A tradition exists on the Icelandic island of Heimaey for the children to rescue young puffins, a fact recorded in Bruce McMillan's photo-illustrated children's book Nights of the Pufflings (1995). The fledglings emerge from the nest and try to make their way to the sea, but sometimes get confused, perhaps by the street lighting, ending up landing in the village. The children collect them and liberate them to the safety of the sea.
|
5,365,289 |
Peter Jones (missionary)
| 1,131,010,830 |
Anglo-Canadian missionary
|
[
"1802 births",
"1856 deaths",
"19th-century translators",
"Canadian Methodist ministers",
"Canadian Methodist missionaries",
"Canadian translators",
"Converts to Methodism",
"Methodist missionaries in Canada",
"Missionary linguists",
"Mississauga First Nation",
"Ojibwe Jones family",
"Ojibwe people",
"Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)",
"Political office-holders of Indigenous governments in Canada",
"Pre-Confederation Ontario people",
"Sermon writers",
"Translators from English",
"Translators of the Bible into indigenous languages of the Americas",
"Translators to Ojibwe",
"Wesleyan Methodists"
] |
Peter Jones (January 1, 1802 – June 29, 1856) was an Ojibwe Methodist minister, translator, chief and author from Burlington Heights, Upper Canada. His Ojibwa name was Kahkewāquonāby (Gakiiwegwanebi in the Fiero spelling), which means "[Sacred] Waving Feathers". In Mohawk, he was called Desagondensta, meaning "he stands people on their feet". In his youth his band of Mississaugas had been on the verge of destruction. As a preacher and a chieftain, as a role model and as a liaison to governments, his leadership helped his people survive contact with Europeans.
Jones was raised by his mother Tuhbenahneequay in the traditional culture and religion of the Mississauga Ojibwas until the age of 14. After that, he went to live with his father Augustus Jones, a Welsh-born United Empire Loyalist. There he learnt the customs and language of the white Christian settlers of Upper Canada and was taught how to farm. Jones converted to Methodism at age 21 after attending a camp-meeting with his half sister. Methodist leaders in Upper Canada recognised his potential as a bridge between the white and Indian communities and recruited him as a preacher. As a bilingual and bicultural preacher, he enabled the Methodists to make significant inroads with the Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee Six Nations of Upper Canada, both by translating hymns and biblical texts in Ojibwe and Mohawk and by preaching to Indians who did not understand English. Beyond his preaching to the Indians of Upper Canada, he was an excellent fundraiser for the Canadian Methodists, and toured the United States and Great Britain giving sermons and speeches. Jones drew audiences of thousands, filling many of the buildings he spoke in, but came to resent the role, believing the audiences came to see Kahkewāquonāby, the exotic Indian, not Peter Jones, the good Christian he had worked so hard to become.
Jones was also a political leader. In 1825, he wrote to the Indian Department; his letter was the first the department had ever received from an Indian. This brought him into contact with Superintendent of the Indian Department James Givins and influential Bishop John Strachan, with whom he arranged the funding and support of the Credit Mission. There he lived and worked as a preacher and community leader, leading the conversion of Mississaugas to a European lifestyle of agriculture and Christianity, which enabled them to compete with the white settlers of Upper Canada. He was elected a chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit Mission in 1829 and acted as a spokesman for the band when petitioning the colonial government and its departments. During his British tours, he had audiences with King William IV and Queen Victoria, directly petitioning the latter on the issue of title deeds for the Mississaugas of Upper Canada. During his life, Jones did manage to obtain some concessions from various provincial governments, such as having control over the trust funds for the Mississaugas of Credit turned over to their chiefs, but he was never able to secure title deeds for the Credit settlement. In 1847, Jones led the band to relocate to New Credit on land donated by the Six Nations, who were able to furnish the Mississaugas with title deeds. The Mississaugas of New Credit have since been able to retain title to the land, where they remain. Jones' health had been declining for several years before the move to New Credit, and he was unable to accompany them to an unconstructed settlement, retiring to a nearby estate outside of Brantford, Canada West, where he died in the summer of 1856.
## Early life
### Raised by his mother
Jones was born on January 1, 1802, in Burlington Heights, Upper Canada. His father was Augustus Jones, an American born surveyor of Welsh descent. His mother was Tuhbenahneequay, a Mississauga woman whose band inhabited the area. His father worked as a surveyor in the land the British planned to settle on; as was common among the European men who worked far from European settlements, he adopted the Indian custom of polygamy. While at his Stoney Creek farm he lived with his legal wife, a Mohawk woman named Sarah Tekarihogan, and while away surveying he lived with Tuhbenahneequay. While both the Mississaugas and Mohawks approved of polygamy, the white Christian settlers did not, and Augustus Jones ended his relationship with Tuhbenahneequay in 1802. Peter and his elder brother John were raised by Tuhbenahneequay in the Midewiwin religion, customs and lifestyle of their Mississauga ancestors, and learned to hunt and fish to support themselves.
He was named Kahkewāquonāby by his maternal grandfather, Chief Wahbanosay, during a dedicated feast. A son of Wahbanosay's who had died at age seven had been given the same name. The name translates into English as "[sacred] waving feathers" and denotes feathers plucked from the eagle, which was sacred to the Mississaugas. This put him under the guardianship of the Mississauga's animikii (thunderbird) manidoo, as the eagle represented this manidoo. His mother was of the Eagle totem and the name belonged to that totem. At the feast Kahkewāquonāby was given a club to denote the power of the thunder spirit, and a bunch of eagle feathers to denote its flight.
Around 1811, Jones was adopted by Captain Jim, a Mississauga chief. Captain Jim's own son, also named Kahkewāquonāby, had died, and he petitioned Tuhbenahneequay to adopt Jones. Tuhbenahneequay approved the adoption, and Jones was sent to the Credit River to live with Captain Jim as one of his own children. During a long episode of drunken frolicking by all the adult Indians in Captain Jim's band, hunger and exposure to the cold crippled Jones, making him unable to stand. After two or three months of this, his mother received news of Jones' condition, and travelled to the Credit River with her relative Shegwahmaig (Zhigwameg, "Marshfish"). The two women carried Jones back to Stoney Creek, where he resumed living with his mother. His lameness subsided with time.
During the War of 1812, Jones' band of Mississaugas experienced a share of the War's hardship. Jones' grandmother Puhgashkish, old and crippled, had been left behind by the band when it was forced to flee the soldiers advancing on York. She was never seen again. The band lost the warrior White John to the fighting, and several more were injured. Although Jones was too young to act as a warrior, he and his brother John visited the site of the Battle of Stoney Creek the day after the fighting, viewing the effects of battle firsthand. The land the band hunted and fished upon was beset with an influx of Indian refugees exceeding in number the population of the band. Jones went on his first vision quest about this time; his lack of visions caused him to question his faith in the Mississauga's religion. His faith was also troubled by the death of chief Kineubenae (Giniw-bine, "Golden Eagle[-like Partridge]"). Golden Eagle was a respected elder of the band, who experienced a vision promising spirits would make him invincible to arrows and bullet. To renew the declining faith of his people, some of whom had begun to adopt the lifestyle of the white settlers, Golden Eagle arranged a demonstration of his spirit-granted invulnerability. He was killed attempting to catch a bullet with a tin pot. Jones witnessed the event.
### Raised by his father
In 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer, severe climate abnormalities caused an abysmal harvest, and the Mississauga band at the head of Lake Ontario was disintegrating. In the preceding twenty years community leaders Head Chief Wabakinine, band spokesman Golden Eagle and Jones' grandfather Wahbanosay had died, and no new leaders had effectively assumed their roles. Alcoholism among the band members was rising. Many members had abandoned the band, travelling west to the Thames River valley or Grand River valley which were more isolated from white settlers.
Augustus Jones had learned of the band's troubles and ventured into the interior to bring Peter and John to live with him at his farm in Saltfleet Township, with their stepmother and halfsiblings. As he knew only a few words of English, Peter was enrolled in a one-room school in Stoney Creek. With the help of the local teacher, George Hughes, Peter learned English. The next year, the family moved to Brantford, where Augustus took Peter out of school and began to instruct him in farming. Sarah Tekarihogan's Iroquois tribe had settled in the Grand River valley in and around Brantford. Here Jones was inducted into the Iroquois tribe and given the Mohawk name "Desagondensta", meaning "he stands people on their feet". Jones was baptised Anglican by Reverend Ralph Leeming at the request of his father in 1820, but internally he did not accept Christianity. Jones would later say that although the instruction he received in Christianity from his father, his stepmother and his old schoolteacher George Hughes had attracted him to the religion, the conduct of the white Christian settlers "drunk, quarreling, fighting and cheating the poor Indians, and acting as if there was no God" convinced him there could be no truth in their religion. He allowed himself to be baptised primarily to become a full member of the white society of Upper Canada, with all the privileges it entailed. Given the behaviour of others who had been baptised, Jones expected it to have no effect upon him. Jones worked with his father farming until the summer of 1822, when he found employment as a brickmaker working for his brother-in-law Archibald Russell to raise money so he might resume his schooling. He attended school in Fairchild's Creek during the winter of 1822–3 studying arithmetic and writing, hoping to obtain work as a clerk in the fur trade. In spring 1823, Jones left the school, returning to his father's farm that May.
## Ministry
### Conversion
Jones had been attracted to the Methodist faith because it advocated teetotalism and that the Indians must convert to the white settler lifestyle. In June 1823, he attended a camp-meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Ancaster Township, along with his half-sister Mary. The camp-meeting touched Jones, who converted there to Christianity. At this time Reverend William Case saw the potential to convert the Mississauga Indians through Jones. Case soon assumed the role of a mentor to Jones as a missionary. As Jones was bilingual and bicultural, he could speak to and relate to the Mississaugas and the white Christian settlers in Upper Canada. Later that year, Reverend Alvin Torry set up a congregation centered around Jones and Chief Thomas Davis (Tehowagherengaraghkwen) composed entirely of Indian members. The pair encouraged converted Indians to settle around Davis' home, which acquired the name "Davis' Hamlet" or "Davisville". Jones and Seth Crawford taught Sunday school for the growing community, which began building a chapel in the spring of 1824. Many of Jones' relatives were quickly converted and moved to Davis' Hamlet, including his mother Tuhbenahneequay, her daughter Wechikiwekapawiqua and Chief Wageezhegome (Wegiizhigomi, "Who Possesses the Day"), Wechikiwekapawiqua's husband and Jones' uncle Joseph Sawyer (Nawahjegezhegwabe (Nawajii-giizhigwabi, "He who Rests Sitting upon the Sky")). Jones received his first official position in the church – exhorter – on March 1, 1825. In this role, he spoke at services after local preachers and assisted travelling preachers during their circuit rides. Church officials including Torry and Case recognised the need for a member fluent in Ojibwe who could translate hymns and bible passages, and present the Christian religion to the Indians in terms they could understand. Jones was put to work as a teacher at the Grand River mission. Around this time he began speaking to groups about Methodism. In 1824, a few of his relatives came to see him speak and stayed at the Grand River mission so they could enroll their children in Jones' day school. The Methodists of Upper Canada commissioned Jones, along with his brother John, to begin translating religious and instructive works in Ojibwe for use in the Methodists' schools. In 1825, over half his band had converted to Christianity, and Jones decided to devote his life to missionary work.
### Credit mission
In 1825, Jones wrote a letter to Indian Agent James Givins regarding the year's delivery of gifts (due from various land purchases) to the Mississaugas. The letter was the first Givins had received that had been written by an Indian. Givins arranged a meeting with Jones during the second week of July. Jones arrived at the Humber River at the prescribed time, leading the approximately 50 Christian Indians, and his former adoptive father Captain Jim arrived leading the approximately 150 non-Christian Indians. At this meeting, a further 50 of the approximately 200 Indians of Jones' band were converted. Givins was accompanied by several members of Upper Canada's aristocracy, including Bishop John Strachan. The Christian dress and style of Jones' band of converts, including their singing of hymns, which had been translated into Ojibwe by Jones, created a favourable impression of the group with Strachan and the other political leaders present. Although Strachan, an Anglican, had strongly denounced the Methodists, he saw in Jones the opportunity to Christianize the Indians of Upper Canada. He hoped to convert Jones (and thereby his followers) to Anglicanism later. The Crown had previously agreed to build a village on the Credit River for the Mississaugas in 1820, but nothing had been done. Strachan told Jones he would make good on this agreement, and after a short meeting, all of the Christian Indians agreed to accept it. Construction of the settlement, called the Credit Mission, was soon underway and Jones moved there in 1826. By the summer of 1826, with construction of the settlement well under way, the rest of the band had joined the Methodist church and settled at the Credit Mission. Among the last holdouts was Jones' former adoptive father, Captain Jim, and his family. At about this time Methodist Reverend Egerton Ryerson was assigned to the Credit Mission, and Jones quickly struck up a friendship with him. Ryerson's work at the camp freed Jones to begin taking lengthy missionary expeditions to other parts of Upper Canada. During the period 1825–27, Jones undertook missionary missions to Quinte, Munceytown, Rice Lake and Lake Simcoe. He preached in the native language, a key factor to helping the Indians understand and accept Christianity; small groups of Indians in these areas soon converted to Christianity.
Jones' knowledge of English and ties to prominent settlers allowed him act as a spokesperson for the band. In 1825, he and his brother John had travelled to York to petition the government to end salmon fishing on the Credit river by European settlers; the petition would be granted in 1829. In 1826, they were back when the Indian Department failed to pay the full annuity due the band from an 1818 land concession, as the band had received only £472 of the £522 the treaty specified. In the settlement, Jones also worked to teach the residents farming practices, which few knew. Jones believed that the acceptance of Christianity by his people, and their conversion to an agricultural lifestyle, would be critical to their survival. By 1827, each family had a 0.25-acre (1,000 m<sup>2</sup>) plot of their own, and a 30-acre (120,000 m<sup>2</sup>) communal plot was farmed. The success of the settlement, and his success converting Indians to Christianity, gave Jones a good reputation in Upper Canada. His sermons while travelling were well attended, and various groups donated money and goods, such as a heating stove for the schoolhouse and a plough for the band. In 1827, Jones was granted a trial preaching license as an itinerant preacher. By 1828, the Methodists' practice of teetotaling had made significant inroads with the Mississaugas; at the annual distribution of presents from the King in 1828, Jones reported seeing a single Indian drunk, while drunkenness had been widespread at the annual distribution as recently as 1826.
In January 1828, Bishop Strachan approached Jones and his brother John, offering to pay them more as Anglican missionaries than the Methodists could afford to, but both brothers declined the offer. At the same time, Strachan and various government officers applied pressure to the Indian communities to abandon Methodism for Anglicanism, refusing to assist the Rice Lake Indians with the construction of a settlement as they had done with the Credit and Bay of Quinte missions, even though the Rice Lake Indians offered to fund the construction from their land surrender annuities. Tension remained between the Upper Canada government and the province's Indians, including the Jones brothers in particular, over their religious affiliation until Lieutenant Governor Peregrine was replaced in late 1828 with Sir John Colborne. Colborne looked far more favourably on the Methodists, but still hoped to replace the influence of American Methodists with British Wesleyans.
### Election as Chief
In 1829, the Mississaugas of the Credit Mission elected Jones one of their three chiefs, replacing the recently deceased John Cameron. His election was influenced by his mastery of English; he was one of the few members of the band who could deal with missionaries and the provincial government. Jones continued his missionary work to other Indian bands of Upper Canada, converting many of the Mississaugas at Rice Lake and at the Muncey Mission, as well as Ojibwas around Lake Simcoe and the eastern shore of Lake Huron. Along with his brother John, Jones began translating the Bible into Ojibwa.
### First British tour
Also in 1829, Jones embarked on a tour of the northern United States with Reverend William Case and several Indian converts to raise money for the Methodist missions in Upper Canada. The tour raised £600, thirty percent of the Methodist Church's annual expenditures across British North America. After his return to Upper Canada, the year's annual Methodist conference named Jones "A Missionary to the Indian Tribes" on Case's urging. The 1830 conference gave him the same appointment. He was also ordained as a deacon then. Upper Canada's Methodists were in desperate need of money by 1831; that spring the church had been unable to pay all the salaries owed. To raise money for the church, Jones travelled with George Ryerson to the United Kingdom that spring where he gave more than sixty sermons and one hundred speeches which raised more than £1000. These sermons were also held with Jones in Indian attire, which combined with his Indian name created curiosity and filled the halls, with four or five thousand attendees at his sermon for the London Missionary Society's anniversary. Jones met with a number of prominent Englishmen, including James Cowles Prichard, who treated him when he fell ill in June 1831, as well as Methodist leaders such as Adam Clarke, Hannah More and Richard Watson. This tour created significant public interest, and Jones met with King William IV on April 5, 1832, shortly before his return to Upper Canada.
During this tour, he met Eliza Field, to whom he proposed. She accepted, and Jones returned to Upper Canada in the spring of 1832. Field came to North America in 1833, arriving in New York City, where the pair married on September 8, 1833. Field had spent the intervening time learning domestic skills such as cooking and knitting to prepare for her new life. She came from a wealthy family and had previously been attended by servants. Field came to Upper Canada and worked along Jones in his ministry work and as a teacher in the Credit River settlement, instructing the Indian girls in sewing and other domestic skills. The Mississaugas of the Credit Mission dubbed Eliza "Kecheahgahmequa" (Gichi-agaamiikwe, "the lady from beyond the [blue] waters"/"woman from across the great shore").
### Wesleyan politics
Jones' translation of the Gospel of Matthew was published in 1832, and around the same time he served as an editor for his brother John's translation of the Gospel of John. Jones was ordained a minister on October 6, 1833, by Reverend George Marsden in York, Upper Canada. He was the first Ojibwa to be ordained as a Methodist preacher. The same year, the Canadian Methodists had unified their church with the British Wesleyans. The combined church was now run by the British, and Jones was passed over for positions within the church in favour of less qualified individuals, and his influence lessened. When the position of head of the Canadian Indian missionaries came open, it was filled by a British Wesleyan with no experience with Indians, Reverend Joseph Stinson. William Case was given the second in command position, with special attention towards translating scriptures into Ojibwe. Case spoke no Ojibwe. Case, whom Jones had seen as a mentor, made his headquarters at the Credit Mission. Jones began to chaff in the church, as he was being given little responsibilities and the church showed no confidence in his abilities. Case told Methodist minister James Evans to begin translating hymns and books of the Bible into Ojibwe, including those Jones had already translated. After the death of Augustus Jones in November 1836, Peter invited his stepmother and two youngest brothers to live at the Credit mission.
### Second British tour
In the mid-1830s, Lieutenant Governor Francis Bond Head devised a plan to relocate the Ojibwa of the Credit River, along with other Indian bands of southern Upper Canada, to Manitoulin Island. Bond Head believed that the Indians needed to be removed completely from the influence of the white settlers of Upper Canada. Jones, allied with Sir Augustus Frederick D’Este and Dr Thomas Hodgkin of the Aborigines' Protection Society in Britain, opposed the move. They knew the poor soil of Manitoulin Island would force the Indian Bands to abandon farming and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. After the surrender of the Saugeen tract, protected by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Jones became convinced the only way to end the perpetual threat of relocation of the Mississaugas was to obtain title deeds to their lands. Jones travelled to England in 1837 to petition the Colonial Office directly on the issue. He was accompanied by his wife and their niece Catherine Sunegoo. The Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg postponed meeting with Jones until the spring of 1838, as he was occupied with the Rebellions of 1837. In the meantime, Glenelg refused to approve Bond Head's proposal. Jones spent the intervening time touring England, preaching, giving speeches and fundraising for the Canadian Methodists. Although Bond Head had sent a letter to Glenelg to discredit Jones, the Minister met with Jones in the spring of 1838. The meeting went very well for Jones, as Glenelg promised to help secure title deeds for the Mississaugas. Glenelg also arranged an audience with Queen Victoria for Jones. Jones met with her in September of that year, and presented a petition to Queen Victoria from the chiefs of the Mississauga Ojibwa community asking for title deeds to their lands, to ensure the Credit Mississaugas would never lose the title to their lands. The petition was written in the Latin script, signed by the chiefs in pictographs and accompanied by wampum supplementing the information of the petition. Jones, dressed in his Ojibwa regalia, presented the petition and interpreted it for Victoria, to ensure accurate and favourable reception. Victoria approved her minister's recommendation that the Mississaugas be given title deeds. He returned to Upper Canada shortly thereafter.
### Fractured community
In Upper Canada, he returned to a community that had begun to question his leadership. William and Lawrence Herchmer led a group within the community that opposed Jones' influence, claiming it was turning the Mississaugas of the Credit Mission into "Brown Englishmen". The brothers, while Christians, objected to the harsh discipline imposed on the young, the use of voting rather than consensus to govern and the loss of Indian lifestyle and culture. By 1840, the settlement was very strained; pressure from white settlers, scarcity of wood and the uncertainty of whether the band had claims to the land they occupied forced the band council to begin considering relocation. 1840 also saw the Methodist church split into two factions, Canadian Methodists and British Wesleyans. Various Indian bands aligned with either church, and competition hampered missionary work. Of Jones' friends within the church, only Egerton Ryerson remained in the Canadian conference. With the background of these conflicts in the Credit Settlement, it became increasingly difficult for Jones to travel.\< Jones influence with the provincial government remained small. Although the Mississaugas of the Credit had been promised title deeds, Jones' meeting with Lieutenant Governor George Arthur failed to produce them. Indian Agent Samuel Jarvis, appointed in 1837, ignored the Mississaugas, failing to issue them the annual reports on their trust funds and failing to respond to letters. The strain of these community splits, combined with Jones' responsibilities as a father after the birth of his first son, Charles Augustus (Wahweyaakuhmegoo (Waawiyekamigoo, "The Round World")) in April 1839, prevented Jones from undertaking many proselytizing tours. As Eliza had previously had two miscarriages and two stillbirths, the couple took great care in raising Charles.
Jones was assigned to the Muncey Mission in 1841. Located south-west of London, the mission proselytized to Indians of three different tribes; Ojibwa, Munsee Delaware, and Oneida. Jones had hoped to relocate the Mississaugas of Credit here if they failed to obtain title deeds for New Credit, but this plan was opposed by Indian Agent Samuel Jarvis. At the Muncey Mission, each tribe spoke a different language, which made the work challenging for Jones, as did the large contingent of non-Christian Indians. Here two more children were born to the couple, John Frederick (Wahbegwuna (Waabigwane, "Have a [White Lily-]Flower")) and Peter Edmund (Kahkewaquonaby (Gakiiwegwanebi, "[Sacred] Waving Feathers")). John was named for Peter's brother John and Eliza's brother Frederick, Peter for Peter himself and Eliza's brother Edmund. The work at Muncey Mission was stressful on Jones, and his health began to deteriorate. The 1844 Methodist conference found him in such ill health that he was declared a supernumerary. The same year, Jarvis was dismissed as chief superintendent of the Indian Agents. With Jarvis removed from office, Jones was able to secure an audience with lieutenant governor Charles Metcalfe. Metcalfe was favourably impressed with Jones; he made available funds to build two schools at the Muncey Mission (a boys' school and a girls' school) and turned over administration of the Credit Mississaugas' finances to their chiefs, making them the first Indian Band in Canada to have control over their trust funds.
### Third British tour
Jones travelled to Great Britain in 1845 for a third fundraising tour, giving speeches and sermons. Wherever he travelled, Jones drew huge crowds, but inwardly he was depressed. He felt the crowds were only there to see the exotic Indian Kahkewāquonāby and his native costume, and did not appreciate all the work he had put into becoming a good Christian. Despite his misgivings about the trip, he raised £1000, about two thirds of that total in Scotland, and one third in England. On August 4, 1845, in Edinburgh Jones was photographed by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill. These were the first photographs taken of a North American Indian.
Jones' health continued to decline, and he travelled to Paris to meet with Dr. Achille-Louis Foville. Foville examined Jones, but did not prescribe any medicine, instead suggesting cold water sponge baths. With this advice but no effective treatment, Jones returned to England to complete his fundraising tour. Jones returned to Canada West in April 1846.
### Mississaugas obtain title deeds
Returning to the Credit Mission, Jones believed the most pressing issue for the Mississaugas was their lack of a clear title to their land. The settlement had established successful farms, and was almost self-sufficient. It was also developing industry, with a pair of carpenters and a shoemaker. The Credit Mission Mississaugas had also funded the construction of a pair of piers at the mouth of the Credit River, the beginning of Port Credit. Although the settlement was prospering, Indian Superintendent Thomas G. Anderson pressured to band to move off the Credit Mission to a different location, hoping to group Indians into larger settlements where schools could be reasonably established and funded. As an inducement to motivate the Mississaugas to move, he promised them the title deeds which were Jones' main goal for the band. The Saugeen Ojibwa invited the Credit Mississaugas to move to the Bruce Peninsula, which was the last large piece of unceded land in southern Ontario. The Credit Mississaugas believed this to be their best chance to obtain deeds to land, and so the band prepared for a move. They turned the Credit lands over to the province in trust, but the first survey of the Bruce returned with terrible news: The soil of the Bruce Peninsula was completely unsuitable for farming. Having already surrendered their land at the Credit Mission, the Mississaugas faced an uncertain situation. The Six Nations, hearing of the Mississaugas' desperate situation offered a portion of their tract to the Credit Mississaugas, remembering that when the Six Nations had fled to Upper Canada the Mississaugas had donated the land the Six Nations. The Mississaugas relocated to this land along the Grand River that was donated by the Six Nations. Founded in 1847, the settlement was named New Credit. Jones would continue in his role as a community leader here, petitioning various branches of government for funding to build the settlement. In 1848, the Wesleyans and Methodists reconciled, and William Ryerson established a mission in New Credit.
Through the 1840s, Jones' health had been in decline. By the time the Mississaugas moved to New Credit, Jones was too ill to move to an unbuilt settlement. Having to abandon the Credit Mission, he returned to Munceytown with his family. Jones resigned his position in the Methodist church, but continued to undertake work here and there as his health permitted. By 1850, his doctor had ordered him to completely stop travelling and performing his clerical duties, but Jones ignored his advice. In 1851, Jones moved to a new estate near Echo Place, which he dubbed Echo Villa. The estate was close to the established town of Brantford, but also allowed him to be close to New Credit. Although he continued to work, his failing health kept him at home often, and he began pursuing more domestic activities. Taking up woodcarving, he won £15 for his bowl and ladle at the annual provincial exhibition. He began writing for the Aborigines Protection Society, acting as their Canadian correspondent for their publication The Colonial Intelligencer; or, Aborigines' Friend. In the 1850s, Peter began to devote his time and efforts more to his wife and children. His son Charles attended Genesee College in Lima, New York, then studied law. Jones continued travelling when his health permitted. In 1851, to Lake of Two Mountains in Canada East; in 1852, through Northern Ontario; in 1853, he travelled to New York City for a missionary meeting; and in 1854, he travelled to Syracuse, New York, for a Methodist convention.
The New Credit settlement met with early difficulties, but soon began to prosper. An early sawmill was destroyed by arson in 1851, but a new one was soon in operation. White squatters were driven off the land by about 1855, although theft of logs remained a problem for several years afterwards.
Jones was struck by illness in December 1855 during a wagon ride home from New Credit to Echo Villa. Unable to shake the illness, Jones died in his home on June 29, 1856. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brantford. His wife Eliza supervised the publication of his books after his death. Life and Journals was published in 1860 and History of the Ojebway Indians in 1861.
## Memorials
In 1857, a monument was erected in Jones' honour at New Credit, inscribed "Erected by the Ojibeway and other Indian tribes to their revered and beloved Chief Kahkewaquonaby (the Rev. Peter Jones)."
At the church in New Credit, built in 1852, an inscribed marble tablet reads:
> In Memory of KAHKEWAQUONABY, (Peter Jones), THE FAITHFUL AND HEROIC OJIBEWAY MISSIONARY AND CHIEF: THE GUIDE, ADVISOR, AND BENEFACTOR OF HIS PEOPLE. Born January 1st, 1802. Died June 29th, 1856. HIS GOOD WORKS LIVE AFTER HIM, AND HIS MEMORY IS EMBALMED IN MANY GRATEFUL HEARTS.
In 1997, Jones was declared a "Person of National Historic Significance" by the Minister of Canadian Heritage Andy Mitchell. To honour Jones and to underscore his role in helping the Mississaugas survive contact with the Europeans, a celebration of his recognition was held at New Credit. As well, the Ontario Archaeological and Historic Sites Board erected an historic plaque detailing Jones' life. The location of the plaque is Echo Villa, the estate where Jones lived from 1851 until his death in 1856.
However, many descendants of the Mississaugan people consider him a sellout, as he completely assimilated to the settlers' ways of life.
|
43,455 |
Tang dynasty
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Imperial dynasty of China from 618 to 907
|
[
"10th century in China",
"10th-century disestablishments in China",
"618 establishments",
"7th century in China",
"7th-century establishments in China",
"8th century in China",
"907 disestablishments",
"9th century in China",
"Dynasties of China",
"Former countries in Chinese history",
"Former empires",
"Imperial China",
"Medieval East Asia",
"States and territories disestablished in 907",
"States and territories established in the 610s",
"Tang dynasty"
] |
The Tang dynasty (/tɑːŋ/, ; ), or the Tang Empire, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Historians generally regard the Tang as a high point in Chinese civilization, and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty.
The Lǐ family (李) founded the dynasty, seizing power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire and inaugurating a period of progress and stability in the first half of the dynasty's rule. The dynasty was formally interrupted during 690–705 when Empress Wu Zetian seized the throne, proclaiming the Wu Zhou dynasty and becoming the only legitimate Chinese empress regnant. The devastating An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) shook the nation and led to the decline of central authority in the dynasty's latter half. Like the previous Sui dynasty, the Tang maintained a civil-service system by recruiting scholar-officials through standardized examinations and recommendations to office. The rise of regional military governors known as jiedushi during the 9th century undermined this civil order. The dynasty and central government went into decline by the latter half of the 9th century; agrarian rebellions resulted in mass population loss and displacement, widespread poverty, and further government dysfunction that ultimately ended the dynasty in 907.
The Tang capital at Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) was then the world's most populous city. Two censuses of the 7th and 8th centuries estimated the empire's population at about 50 million people, which grew to an estimated 80 million by the dynasty's end. From its numerous subjects, the dynasty raised professional and conscripted armies of hundreds of thousands of troops to contend with nomadic powers for control of Inner Asia and the lucrative trade-routes along the Silk Road. Far-flung kingdoms and states paid tribute to the Tang court, while the Tang also indirectly controlled several regions through a protectorate system. In addition to its political hegemony, the Tang exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighboring East Asian nations such as Japan and Korea.
Chinese culture flourished and further matured during the Tang era. It is traditionally considered the greatest age for Chinese poetry. Two of China's most famous poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, belonged to this age, contributing with poets such as Wang Wei to the monumental Three Hundred Tang Poems. Many famous painters such as Han Gan, Zhang Xuan, and Zhou Fang were active, while Chinese court music flourished with instruments such as the popular pipa. Tang scholars compiled a rich variety of historical literature, as well as encyclopedias and geographical works. Notable innovations included the development of woodblock printing. Buddhism became a major influence in Chinese culture, with native Chinese sects gaining prominence. However, in the 840s, Emperor Wuzong enacted policies to suppress Buddhism, which subsequently declined in influence.
## History
### Establishment
The Li family had ethnic Han origins, and it belonged to the northwest military aristocracy prevalent during the Sui dynasty. According to official Tang records, they were paternally descended from the founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu (whose personal name was Li Dan or Li Er), the Han dynasty general Li Guang, and Li Gao, the founder of the Han-ruled Western Liang kingdom. This family was known as the Longxi Li lineage (隴西李氏), and it included the prominent Tang poet Li Bai. Aside from traditional historiography, some modern historians have suggested that the Tang imperial family might have modified its genealogy to conceal Xianbei heritage. The Tang emperors had part-Xianbei maternal ancestry, from Emperor Gaozu of Tang's part-Xianbei mother, Duchess Dugu.
Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang dynasty, was Duke of Tang and governor of Taiyuan, the capital of modern Shanxi, during the collapse of the Sui dynasty. He had prestige and military experience, and was a first cousin of Emperor Yang of Sui (their mothers were both one of the Dugu sisters). Li Yuan rose in rebellion in 617, along with his son and his equally militant daughter Princess Pingyang (d. 623), who raised and commanded her own troops. In winter 617, Li Yuan occupied Chang'an, relegated Emperor Yang to the position of Taishang Huang or retired emperor, and acted as regent to the puppet child-emperor, Yang You. On the news of Emperor Yang's murder by General Yuwen Huaji on June 18, 618, Li Yuan declared himself the emperor of a new dynasty, the Tang.
Li Yuan, known as Emperor Gaozu of Tang, ruled until 626, when he was forcefully deposed by his son Li Shimin, the Prince of Qin. Li Shimin had commanded troops since the age of 18 years old, had prowess with bow and arrow, sword and lance and was known for his effective cavalry charges. Fighting a numerically superior army, he defeated Dou Jiande (573–621) at Luoyang in the Battle of Hulao on May 28, 621. Due to fear of assassination, Li Shimin ambushed and killed two of his brothers, Li Yuanji (b. 603) and Crown prince Li Jiancheng (b. 589), in the Xuanwu Gate Incident on July 2, 626. Shortly thereafter, his father abdicated in his favor and Li Shimin ascended the throne. He is conventionally known by his temple name Taizong.
Although killing two brothers and deposing his father contradicted the Confucian value of filial piety, Taizong showed himself to be a capable leader who listened to the advice of the wisest members of his council. In 628, Emperor Taizong held a Buddhist memorial service for the casualties of war, and in 629 he had Buddhist monasteries erected at the sites of major battles so that monks could pray for the fallen on both sides of the fight.
During the Tang campaign against the Eastern Turks, the Eastern Turkic Khaganate was destroyed after the capture of its ruler, Illig Qaghan by the famed Tang military officer Li Jing (571–649), who later became a Chancellor of the Tang dynasty. With this victory, the Turks accepted Taizong as their khagan, a title rendered as Tian Kehan in addition to his rule as emperor of China under the traditional title "Son of Heaven". Taizong was succeeded by his son Li Zhi (as Emperor Gaozong) in 649 CE.
The Tang dynasty further led the Tang campaigns against the Western Turks. Early military conflicts were a result of the Tang interventions in the rivalry between the Western and Eastern Turks in order to weaken both. Under Emperor Taizong, campaigns were dispatched in the Western Regions against Gaochang in 640, Karasahr in 644 and 648, and Kucha in 648. The wars against the Western Turks continued under Emperor Gaozong, and the Western Turkic Khaganate was finally annexed after General Su Dingfang's defeat of Qaghan Ashina Helu in 657 CE.
Around that time, the Tang court enjoyed the visit of numerous dignitaries from foreign lands. These were portraited in The Gathering of Kings (王會圖, Wanghuitu), probably painted by Yan Liben (閻立本, 601–673 CE). From right to left, the countries are Lu (魯國) which is a reference to the Eastern Wei, Rouran (芮芮國), Persia (波斯國), Baekje (百濟國), Kumedh (胡密丹), Baiti (白題國), Mohe people (靺國), Central India (中天竺), Sri Lanka (獅子國), Northern India (北天竺), Tashkurgan (謁盤陀), Wuxing City of the Chouchi (武興國), Kucha (龜茲國), Japan (倭國), Goguryeo (高麗國), Khotan (于闐國), Silla (新羅國), Dangchang (宕昌國), Langkasuka (狼牙修), Dengzhi (鄧至國), Yarkand (周古柯), Kabadiyan (阿跋檀), Barbarians of Jianping (建平蠻), Nudan (女蜑國).
### Wu Zetian's usurpation
Although she entered Emperor Gaozong's court as the lowly consort, Wu Zetian rose to the highest seat of power in 690, establishing the short-lived Wu Zhou. Empress Wu's rise to power was achieved through cruel and calculating tactics: a popular conspiracy theory stated that she killed her own baby girl and blamed it on Gaozong's empress so that the empress would be demoted. Emperor Gaozong suffered a stroke in 655, and Wu began to make many of his court decisions for him, discussing affairs of state with his councilors, who took orders from her while she sat behind a screen. When Empress Wu's eldest son, the crown prince, began to assert his authority and advocate policies opposed by Empress Wu, he suddenly died in 675. Many suspected he was poisoned by Empress Wu. Although the next heir apparent kept a lower profile, in 680 he was accused by Wu of plotting a rebellion. He was then banished and later obliged to commit suicide.
In 683, Emperor Gaozong died. He was succeeded by Emperor Zhongzong, his eldest surviving son by Wu. Zhongzong tried to appoint his wife's father as chancellor: after only six weeks on the throne, he was deposed by Empress Wu in favor of his younger brother, Emperor Ruizong. This provoked a group of Tang princes to rebel in 684. Wu's armies suppressed them within two months. She proclaimed the Tianshou era of Wu Zhou on October 16, 690, and three days later demoted Emperor Ruizong to crown prince. He was also forced to give up his father's surname Li in favor of the Empress Wu. She then ruled as China's only empress regnant.
A palace coup on February 20, 705, forced Empress Wu to yield her position on February 22. The next day, her son Zhongzong was restored to power; the Tang was formally restored on March 3. She died soon after. To legitimize her rule, she circulated a document known as the Great Cloud Sutra, which predicted that a reincarnation of the Maitreya Buddha would be a female monarch who would dispel illness, worry, and disaster from the world. She even introduced numerous revised written characters to the written language, which reverted to the originals after her death. Arguably the most important part of her legacy was diminishing the hegemony of the Northwestern aristocracy, allowing people from other clans and regions of China to become more represented in Chinese politics and government.
### Emperor Xuanzong's reign
There were many prominent women at court during and after Wu's reign, including Shangguan Wan'er (664–710), a poet, writer, and trusted official in charge of Wu's private office. In 706 the wife of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang, Empress Wei (d. 710), persuaded her husband to staff government offices with his sister and her daughters, and in 709 requested that he grant women the right to bequeath hereditary privileges to their sons (which before was a male right only). Empress Wei eventually poisoned Zhongzong, whereupon she placed his fifteen-year-old son upon the throne in 710. Two weeks later, Li Longji (the later Emperor Xuanzong) entered the palace with a few followers and slew Empress Wei and her faction. He then installed his father Emperor Ruizong (r. 710–712) on the throne. Just as Emperor Zhongzong was dominated by Empress Wei, so too was Ruizong dominated by Princess Taiping. This was finally ended when Princess Taiping's coup failed in 712 (she later hanged herself in 713) and Emperor Ruizong abdicated to Emperor Xuanzong.
During the 44-year reign of Emperor Xuanzong, the Tang dynasty reached its height, a golden age with low economic inflation and a toned down lifestyle for the imperial court. Seen as a progressive and benevolent ruler, Xuanzong even abolished the death penalty in the year 747; all executions had to be approved beforehand by the emperor himself (these were relatively few, considering that there were only 24 executions in the year 730). Xuanzong bowed to the consensus of his ministers on policy decisions and made efforts to staff government ministries fairly with different political factions. His staunch Confucian chancellor Zhang Jiuling (673–740) worked to reduce deflation and increase the money supply by upholding the use of private coinage, while his aristocratic and technocratic successor Li Linfu (d. 753) favored government monopoly over the issuance of coinage. After 737, most of Xuanzong's confidence rested in his long-standing chancellor Li Linfu, who championed a more aggressive foreign policy employing non-Chinese generals. This policy ultimately created the conditions for a massive rebellion against Xuanzong.
### An Lushan Rebellion and catastrophe
The Tang Empire was at its height of power up until the middle of the 8th century, when the An Lushan Rebellion (December 16, 755 – February 17, 763) destroyed the prosperity of the empire. An Lushan was a half-Sogdian, half-Turk Tang commander since 744, who had experience fighting the Khitans of Manchuria with a victory in 744, yet most of his campaigns against the Khitans were unsuccessful. He was given great responsibility in Hebei, which allowed him to rebel with an army of more than 100,000 troops. After capturing Luoyang, he named himself emperor of a new, but short-lived, Yan state. Despite early victories scored by Tang General Guo Ziyi (697–781), the newly recruited troops of the army at the capital were no match for An Lushan's frontier veterans, so the court fled Chang'an. While the heir apparent raised troops in Shanxi and Xuanzong fled to Sichuan province, they called upon the help of the Uyghur Khaganate in 756. The Uyghur khan Moyanchur was greatly excited at this prospect, and married his own daughter to the Chinese diplomatic envoy once he arrived, receiving in turn a Chinese princess as his bride. The Uyghurs helped recapture the Tang capital from the rebels, but they refused to leave until the Tang paid them an enormous sum of tribute in silk. Even Abbasid Arabs assisted the Tang in putting down An Lushan's rebellion. A massacre of foreign Arab and Persian Muslim merchants by Tian Shengong happened during the An Lushan rebellion in the Yangzhou massacre (760). The Tibetans took hold of the opportunity and raided many areas under Chinese control, and even after the Tibetan Empire had fallen apart in 842 (and the Uyghurs soon after) the Tang were in no position to reconquer Central Asia after 763. So significant was this loss that half a century later jinshi examination candidates were required to write an essay on the causes of the Tang's decline. Although An Lushan was killed by one of his eunuchs in 757, this time of troubles and widespread insurrection continued until rebel Shi Siming was killed by his own son in 763.
One of the legacies that the Tang government left since 710 was the gradual rise of regional military governors, the jiedushi, who slowly came to challenge the power of the central government. After the An Lushan Rebellion, the autonomous power and authority accumulated by the jiedushi in Hebei went beyond the central government's control. After a series of rebellions between 781 and 784 in today's Hebei, Shandong, Hubei and Henan provinces, the government had to officially acknowledge the jiedushi's hereditary ruling without accreditation. The Tang government relied on these governors and their armies for protection and to suppress locals that would take up arms against the government. In return, the central government would acknowledge the rights of these governors to maintain their army, collect taxes and even to pass on their title to heirs. As time passed, these military governors slowly phased out the prominence of civil officials drafted by exams, and became more autonomous from central authority. The rule of these powerful military governors lasted until 960, when a new civil order under the Song dynasty was established. Also, the abandonment of the equal-field system meant that people could buy and sell land freely. Many poor fell into debt because of this, forced to sell their land to the wealthy, which led to the exponential growth of large estates. With the breakdown of the land allocation system after 755, the central Chinese state barely interfered in agricultural management and acted merely as tax collector for roughly a millennium, save a few instances such as the Song's failed land nationalization during the 13th-century war with the Mongols.
With the central government collapsing in authority over the various regions of the empire, it was recorded in 845 that bandits and river pirates in parties of 100 or more began plundering settlements along the Yangtze River with little resistance. In 858, massive floods along the Grand Canal inundated vast tracts of land and terrain of the North China Plain, which drowned tens of thousands of people in the process. The Chinese belief in the Mandate of Heaven granted to the ailing Tang was also challenged when natural calamities occurred, forcing many to believe that the Tang had lost their right to rule. Furthermore, in 873 a disastrous harvest shook the foundations of the empire; in some areas only half of all agricultural produce was gathered, and tens of thousands faced famine and starvation. In the earlier period of the Tang, the central government was able to meet crises in the harvest, as it was recorded from 714 to 719 that the Tang government responded effectively to natural disasters by extending the price-regulation granary system throughout the country. The central government was able then to build a large surplus stock of foods to ward off the rising danger of famine and increased agricultural productivity through land reclamation. In the 9th century, however, the Tang government was nearly helpless in dealing with any calamity.
### Rebuilding and recovery
Although these natural calamities and rebellions stained the reputation and hampered the effectiveness of the central government, the early 9th century is nonetheless viewed as a period of recovery for the Tang dynasty. The government's withdrawal from its role in managing the economy had the unintended effect of stimulating trade, as more markets with fewer bureaucratic restrictions were opened up. By 780, the old grain tax and labor service of the 7th century was replaced by a semiannual tax paid in cash, signifying the shift to a money economy boosted by the merchant class. Cities in the Jiangnan region to the south, such as Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou prospered the most economically during the late Tang period. The government monopoly on the production of salt, weakened after the An Lushan Rebellion, was placed under the Salt Commission, which became one of the most powerful state agencies, run by capable ministers chosen as specialists. The commission began the practice of selling merchants the rights to buy monopoly salt, which they would then transport and sell in local markets. In 799 salt accounted for over half of the government's revenues. S.A.M. Adshead writes that this salt tax represents "the first time that an indirect tax, rather than tribute, levies on land or people, or profit from state enterprises such as mines, had been the primary resource of a major state." Even after the power of the central government was in decline after the mid 8th century, it was still able to function and give out imperial orders on a massive scale. The Tangshu (Old Book of Tang) compiled in the year 945 recorded that in 828 the Tang government issued a decree that standardized irrigational square-pallet chain pumps in the country.
> In the second year of the Taihe reign period [828], in the second month ... a standard model of the chain pump was issued from the palace, and the people of Jingzhao Fu (d footnote: the capital) were ordered by the emperor to make a considerable number of machines, for distribution to the people along the Zheng Bai Canal, for irrigation purposes.\|
The last great ambitious ruler of the Tang dynasty was Emperor Xianzong (r. 805–820), whose reign was aided by the fiscal reforms of the 780s, including a government monopoly on the salt industry. He also had an effective and well-trained imperial army stationed at the capital led by his court eunuchs; this was the Army of Divine Strategy, numbering 240,000 in strength as recorded in 798. Between the years 806 and 819, Emperor Xianzong conducted seven major military campaigns to quell the rebellious provinces that had claimed autonomy from central authority, managing to subdue all but two of them. Under his reign there was a brief end to the hereditary jiedushi, as Xianzong appointed his own military officers and staffed the regional bureaucracies once again with civil officials. However, Xianzong's successors proved less capable and more interested in the leisure of hunting, feasting, and playing outdoor sports, allowing eunuchs to amass more power as drafted scholar-officials caused strife in the bureaucracy with factional parties. The eunuchs' power became unchallenged after Emperor Wenzong's (r. 826–840) failed plot to have them overthrown; instead the allies of Emperor Wenzong were publicly executed in the West Market of Chang'an, by the eunuchs' command.
However, the Tang did manage to restore at least indirect control over former Tang territories as far west as the Hexi Corridor and Dunhuang in Gansu. In 848 the ethnic Han Chinese general Zhang Yichao (799–872) managed to wrestle control of the region from the Tibetan Empire during its civil war. Shortly afterwards Emperor Xuānzong of Tang (r. 846–859) acknowledged Zhang as the protector (防禦使, Fangyushi) of Sha Prefecture and jiedushi military governor of the new Guiyi Circuit.
The Tang dynasty recovered its power decades after the An Lushan rebellion and was still able to launch offensive conquests and campaigns like its destruction of the Uyghur Khaganate in Mongolia in 840–847.
### End of the dynasty
In addition to natural calamities and jiedushi amassing autonomous control, the Huang Chao Rebellion (874–884) resulted in the sacking of both Chang'an and Luoyang, and took an entire decade to suppress. It was the Huang Chao rebellion by the native Han rebel Huang Chao that permanently destroyed the power of the Tang dynasty since Huang Chao not only devastated the north but marched into southern China which An Lushan failed to do due to the Battle of Suiyang. Huang Chao's army in southern China committed the Guangzhou massacre against foreign Arab and Persian Muslim, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian merchants in 878–879 at the seaport and trading port of Guangzhou, and captured both Tang dynasty capitals, Luoyang and Chang'an. A medieval Chinese source claimed that Huang Chao killed 8 million people. The Tang never recovered from this rebellion, weakening it for future military powers to replace it. Large groups of bandits in the size of small armies ravaged the countryside in the last years of the Tang. They smuggled illicit salt, ambushed merchants and convoys, and even besieged several walled cities. Amid the sacking of cities and murderous factional strife among eunuchs and officials, the top tier of aristocratic families, which had amassed a large fraction of the landed wealth and official positions, was largely destroyed or marginalized.
During the last two decades of the Tang dynasty, the gradual collapse of central authority led to the rise of two prominent rival military figures over northern China: Li Keyong and Zhu Wen. Tang forces had defeated Huang Chao's rebellion with the crucial aid of allied Shatuo Turkic peoples of what is now Shanxi led by Li Keyong. He was made a jiedushi governor and later Prince of Jin, bestowed with the imperial surname Li by the Tang court. Zhu Wen, originally a salt smuggler who served as a lieutenant under the rebel Huang Chao, surrendered to Tang forces. By helping to defeat Huang, he was renamed Zhu Quanzhong ("Zhu of Perfect Loyalty") and granted a series of rapid military promotions to military governor of Xuanwu Circuit.
In 901, from his power base of Kaifeng, Zhu Wen seized control of the Tang capital Chang'an and with it the imperial family. By 903 he forced Emperor Zhaozong of Tang to move the capital to Luoyang, preparing to take the throne for himself. In 904 Zhu assassinated Emperor Zhaozong to replace him with the emperor's young son Emperor Ai of Tang. In 905 Zhu executed the brothers of Emperor Ai as well as many officials and Empress Dowager He. In 907 the Tang dynasty was ended when Zhu deposed Ai and took the throne for himself (known posthumously as Emperor Taizu of Later Liang). He established the Later Liang, which inaugurated the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. A year later Zhu had the deposed Emperor Ai poisoned to death.
Zhu Wen's hated nemesis Li Keyong died in 908 but, out of loyalty to Tang, Li never claimed the title of emperor. His son Li Cunxu (Emperor Zhuangzong) inherited his title Prince of Jin along with his father's rivalry against Zhu. In 923 Li Cunxu declared a "restored" Tang dynasty, the Later Tang, before toppling the Later Liang dynasty the same year. However, southern China would remain splintered into various small kingdoms until most of China was reunified under the Song dynasty (960–1279). Control over parts of northeast China and Manchuria by the Liao dynasty of the Khitan people also stemmed from this period. In 905 their leader Abaoji formed a military alliance with Li Keyong against Zhu Wen but the Khitans eventually turned against the Later Tang, helping another Shatuo leader Shi Jingtang of Later Jin to overthrow Later Tang in 936.
## Administration and politics
### Initial reforms
Taizong set out to solve internal problems within the government which had constantly plagued past dynasties. Building upon the Sui legal code, he issued a new legal code that subsequent Chinese dynasties would model theirs upon, as well as neighboring polities in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The earliest law code to survive was the one established in the year 653, which was divided into 500 articles specifying different crimes and penalties ranging from ten blows with a light stick, one hundred blows with a heavy rod, exile, penal servitude, or execution.
The legal code distinguished different levels of severity in meted punishments when different members of the social and political hierarchy committed the same crime. For example, the severity of punishment was different when a servant or nephew killed a master or an uncle than when a master or uncle killed a servant or nephew.
The Tang Code was largely retained by later codes such as the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) code of 1397, yet there were several revisions in later times, such as improved property rights for women during the Song dynasty (960–1279).
The Tang had three departments (Chinese: 省; pinyin: shěng), which were obliged to draft, review, and implement policies respectively. There were also six ministries (Chinese: 部; pinyin: bù) under the administrations that implemented policy, each of which was assigned different tasks. These Three Departments and Six Ministries included the personnel administration, finance, rites, military, justice, and public works—an administrative model which would last until the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).
Although the founders of the Tang related to the glory of the earlier Han dynasty (3rd century BC–3rd century AD), the basis for much of their administrative organization was very similar to the previous Northern and Southern dynasties. The Northern Zhou (6th century) fubing system of divisional militia was continued by the Tang, along with farmer-soldiers serving in rotation from the capital or frontier in order to receive appropriated farmland. The equal-field system of the Northern Wei (4th–6th centuries) was also kept, although there were a few modifications.
Although the central and local governments kept an enormous number of records about land property in order to assess taxes, it became common practice in the Tang for literate and affluent people to create their own private documents and signed contracts. These had their own signature and that of a witness and scribe in order to prove in court (if necessary) that their claim to property was legitimate. The prototype of this actually existed since the ancient Han dynasty, while contractual language became even more common and embedded into Chinese literary culture in later dynasties.
The center of the political power of the Tang was the capital city of Chang'an (modern Xi'an), where the emperor maintained his large palace quarters and entertained political emissaries with music, sports, acrobatic stunts, poetry, paintings, and dramatic theater performances. The capital was also filled with incredible amounts of riches and resources to spare. When the Chinese prefectural government officials traveled to the capital in the year 643 to give the annual report of the affairs in their districts, Emperor Taizong discovered that many had no proper quarters to rest in and were renting rooms with merchants. Therefore, Emperor Taizong ordered the government agencies in charge of municipal construction to build every visiting official his own private mansion in the capital.
### Imperial examinations
Students of Confucian studies were candidates for the imperial examinations, which qualified their graduates for appointment to the local, provincial, and central government bureaucracies. Two types of exams were given, mingjing (明經; "illuminating the classics") and jinshi (進士; "presented scholar"). The mingjing was based upon the Confucian classics and tested the student's knowledge of a broad variety of texts. The jinshi tested a student's literary abilities in writing essays in response to questions on governance and politics, as well as in composing poetry. Candidates were also judged on proper deportment, appearance, speech, and calligraphy, all subjective criteria that favored the wealthy over those of more modest means who were unable to pay tutors of rhetoric and writing. Although a disproportionate number of civil officials came from aristocratic families, wealth and noble status were not prerequisites, and the exams were open to all male subjects whose fathers were not of the artisan or merchant classes. To promote widespread Confucian education, the Tang government established state-run schools and issued standard versions of the Five Classics with commentaries.
Open competition was designed to draw the best talent into government. But perhaps an even greater consideration for the Tang rulers was to avoid imperial dependence on powerful aristocratic families and warlords by recruiting a body of career officials having no family or local power base. The Tang law code ensured equal division of inherited property amongst legitimate heirs, encouraging social mobility by preventing powerful families from becoming landed nobility through primogeniture. The competition system proved successful, as scholar-officials acquired status in their local communities while developing an esprit de corps that connected them to the imperial court. From Tang times until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912, scholar-officials served as intermediaries between the people and the government.
Yet the potential of a widespread examination system was not fully realized until the succeeding Song dynasty, when the merit-driven scholar official largely shed his aristocratic habits and defined his social status through the examination system.
> The examination system, used only on a small scale in Sui and Tang times, played a central role in the fashioning of this new elite. The early Song emperors, concerned above all to avoid domination of the government by military men, greatly expanded the civil service examination system and the government school system.
### Religion and politics
From the outset, religion played a role in Tang politics. In his bid for power, Li Yuan had attracted a following by claiming descent from the Taoism sage Lao Tzu ( 6th century BC). People bidding for office would request the prayers of Buddhist monks, with successful aspirants making donations in return. Before the persecution of Buddhism in the 9th century, Buddhism and Taoism were both accepted.
Religion was central in the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756). The Emperor invited Taoist and Buddhist monks and clerics to his court, exalted the Taoist ancient Lao Tzu with grand titles, wrote commentary on the Lao Tzu scriptures, and set up a school to prepare candidates for Taoist examinations. In 726 he called upon the Indian monk Vajrabodhi (671–741) to perform Tantric rites to avert a drought. In 742 he personally held the incense burner while Amoghavajra (705–774, patriarch of the Shingon school) recited "mystical incantations to secure the victory of Tang forces."
Emperor Xuanzong closely regulated religious finances. Near the beginning of his reign in 713, he liquidated the Inexhaustible Treasury of a prominent Buddhist monastery in Chang'an which had collected vast riches as multitudes of anonymous repentants left money, silk, and treasure at its doors. Although the monastery used its funds generously, the Emperor condemned it for fraudulent banking practices, and distributed its wealth to other Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and to repair local statues, halls, and bridges. In 714, he forbade Chang'an shops from selling copied Buddhist sutras, giving a monopoly of this trade to the Buddhist clergy.
### Taxes and the census
The Tang dynasty government attempted to create an accurate census of the empire's population, mostly for effective taxation and military conscription. The early Tang government established modest grain and cloth taxes on each household, persuading households to register and provide the government with accurate demographic information. In the official census of 609, the population was tallied at 9 million households, about 50 million people, and this number did not increase in the census of 742. Patricia Ebrey writes that nonwithstanding census undercounting, China's population had not grown significantly since the earlier Han dynasty, which recorded 58 million people in the year 2. S.A.M. Adshead disagrees, estimating about 75 million people by 750.
In the Tang census of 754, there were 1,859 cities, 321 prefectures, and 1,538 counties throughout the empire. Although there were many large and prominent cities, the rural and agrarian areas comprised some 80 to 90% of the population. There was also a dramatic migration from northern to southern China, as the North held 75% of the overall population at the dynasty's inception, which by its end was reduced to 50%.
Chinese population would not dramatically increase until the Song dynasty, when it doubled to 100 million because of extensive rice cultivation in central and southern China, coupled with higher yields of grain sold in a growing market.
## Military and foreign policy
### Protectorates and tributaries
The 7th and first half of the 8th century are generally considered to be the era in which the Tang reached the zenith of its power. In this period, Tang control extended further west than any previous dynasty, stretching from north Vietnam in the south, to a point north of Kashmir bordering Persia in the west, to northern Korea in the north-east.
Some of the kingdoms paying tribute to the Tang dynasty included Kashmir, Nepal, Khotan, Kucha, Kashgar, Silla, Champa, and kingdoms located in Amu Darya and Syr Darya valley. Turkic nomads addressed the Emperor of Tang China as Tian Kehan. After the widespread Göktürk revolt of Shabolüe Khan (d. 658) was put down at Issyk Kul in 657 by Su Dingfang (591–667), Emperor Gaozong established several protectorates governed by a Protectorate General or Grand Protectorate General, which extended the Chinese sphere of influence as far as Herat in Western Afghanistan. Protectorate Generals were given a great deal of autonomy to handle local crises without waiting for central admission. After Xuanzong's reign, military governors (jiedushi) were given enormous power, including the ability to maintain their own armies, collect taxes, and pass their titles on hereditarily. This is commonly recognized as the beginning of the fall of Tang's central government.
### Soldiers and conscription
By the year 737, Emperor Xuanzong discarded the policy of conscripting soldiers that were replaced every three years, replacing them with long-service soldiers who were more battle-hardened and efficient. It was more economically feasible as well, since training new recruits and sending them out to the frontier every three years drained the treasury. By the late 7th century, the fubing troops began abandoning military service and the homes provided to them in the equal-field system. The supposed standard of 100 mu of land allotted to each family was in fact decreasing in size in places where population expanded and the wealthy bought up most of the land. Hard-pressed peasants and vagrants were then induced into military service with benefits of exemption from both taxation and corvée labor service, as well as provisions for farmland and dwellings for dependents who accompanied soldiers on the frontier. By the year 742 the total number of enlisted troops in the Tang armies had risen to about 500,000 men.
### Eastern regions
In East Asia, Tang Chinese military campaigns were less successful elsewhere than in previous imperial Chinese dynasties. Like the emperors of the Sui dynasty before him, Taizong established a military campaign in 644 against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo in the Goguryeo–Tang War; however, this led to its withdrawal in the first campaign because they failed to overcome the successful defense led by General Yeon Gaesomun. Allying with the Korean Silla Kingdom, the Chinese fought against Baekje and their Yamato Japanese allies in the Battle of Baekgang in August 663, a decisive Tang–Silla victory. The Tang dynasty navy had several different ship types at its disposal to engage in naval warfare, these ships described by Li Quan in his Taipai Yinjing (Canon of the White and Gloomy Planet of War) of 759. The Battle of Baekgang was actually a restoration movement by remnant forces of Baekje, since their kingdom was toppled in 660 by a joint Tang–Silla invasion, led by Chinese general Su Dingfang and Korean general Kim Yushin (595–673). In another joint invasion with Silla, the Tang army severely weakened the Goguryeo Kingdom in the north by taking out its outer forts in the year 645. With joint attacks by Silla and Tang armies under commander Li Shiji (594–669), the Kingdom of Goguryeo was destroyed by 668.
Although they were formerly enemies, the Tang accepted officials and generals of Goguryeo into their administration and military, such as the brothers Yeon Namsaeng (634–679) and Yeon Namsan (639–701). From 668 to 676, the Tang Empire would control northern Korea. However, in 671 Silla broke the alliance and began the Silla–Tang War to expel the Tang forces. At the same time the Tang faced threats on its western border when a large Chinese army was defeated by the Tibetans on the Dafei River in 670. By 676, the Tang army was expelled out of Korea by Unified Silla. Following a revolt of the Eastern Turks in 679, the Tang abandoned its Korean campaigns.
Although the Tang had fought the Japanese, they still held cordial relations with Japan. There were numerous Imperial embassies to China from Japan, diplomatic missions that were not halted until 894 by Emperor Uda (r. 887–897), upon persuasion by Sugawara no Michizane (845–903). The Japanese Emperor Tenmu (r. 672–686) even established his conscripted army on that of the Chinese model, based his state ceremonies on the Chinese model, and constructed his palace at Fujiwara on the Chinese model of architecture.
Many Chinese Buddhist monks came to Japan to help further the spread of Buddhism as well. Two 7th-century monks in particular, Zhi Yu and Zhi You, visited the court of Emperor Tenji (r. 661–672), whereupon they presented a gift of a south-pointing chariot that they had crafted. This 3rd century mechanically driven directional-compass vehicle (employing a differential gear) was again reproduced in several models for Tenji in 666, as recorded in the Nihon Shoki of 720. Japanese monks also visited China; such was the case with Ennin (794–864), who wrote of his travel experiences including travels along China's Grand Canal. The Japanese monk Enchin (814–891) stayed in China from 839 to 847 and again from 853 to 858, landing near Fuzhou, Fujian and setting sail for Japan from Taizhou, Zhejiang during his second trip to China.
### Western and Northern regions
The Sui and Tang carried out successful military campaigns against the steppe nomads. Chinese foreign policy to the north and west now had to deal with Turkic nomads, who were becoming the most dominant ethnic group in Central Asia. To handle and avoid any threats posed by the Turks, the Sui government repaired fortifications and received their trade and tribute missions. They sent four royal princesses to form marriage alliances with Turkic clan leaders, in 597, 599, 614, and 617. The Sui stirred trouble and conflict amongst ethnic groups against the Turks. As early as the Sui dynasty, the Turks had become a major militarized force employed by the Chinese. When the Khitans began raiding northeast China in 605, a Chinese general led 20,000 Turks against them, distributing Khitan livestock and women to the Turks as a reward. On two occasions between 635 and 636, Tang royal princesses were married to Turk mercenaries or generals in Chinese service. Throughout the Tang dynasty until the end of 755, there were approximately ten Turkic generals serving under the Tang. While most of the Tang army was made of fubing Chinese conscripts, the majority of the troops led by Turkic generals were of non-Chinese origin, campaigning largely in the western frontier where the presence of fubing troops was low. Some "Turkic" troops were tribalized Han Chinese, a desinicized people.
Civil war in China was almost totally diminished by 626, along with the defeat in 628 of the Ordos Chinese warlord Liang Shidu; after these internal conflicts, the Tang began an offensive against the Turks. In the year 630, Tang armies captured areas of the Ordos Desert, modern-day Inner Mongolia province, and southern Mongolia from the Turks. After this military victory, On June 11, 631, Emperor Taizong also sent envoys to the Xueyantuo bearing gold and silk in order to persuade the release of enslaved Chinese prisoners who were captured during the transition from Sui to Tang from the northern frontier; this embassy succeeded in freeing 80,000 Chinese men and women who were then returned to China.
While the Turks were settled in the Ordos region (former territory of the Xiongnu), the Tang government took on the military policy of dominating the central steppe. Like the earlier Han dynasty, the Tang dynasty (along with Turkic allies) conquered and subdued Central Asia during the 640s and 650s. During Emperor Taizong's reign alone, large campaigns were launched against not only the Göktürks, but also separate campaigns against the Tuyuhun, the oasis city-states, and the Xueyantuo. Under Emperor Gaozong, a campaign led by the general Su Dingfang was launched against the Western Turks ruled by Ashina Helu.
The Tang Empire competed with the Tibetan Empire for control of areas in Inner and Central Asia, which was at times settled with marriage alliances such as the marrying of Princess Wencheng (d. 680) to Songtsän Gampo (d. 649). A Tibetan tradition mentions that Chinese troops captured Lhasa after Songtsän Gampo's death, but no such invasion is mentioned in either Chinese annals or the Tibetan manuscripts of Dunhuang.
There was a long string of conflicts with Tibet over territories in the Tarim Basin between 670 and 692, and in 763 the Tibetans even captured the capital of China, Chang'an, for fifteen days during the An Shi Rebellion. In fact, it was during this rebellion that the Tang withdrew its western garrisons stationed in what is now Gansu and Qinghai, which the Tibetans then occupied along with the territory of what is now Xinjiang. Hostilities between the Tang and Tibet continued until they signed a formal peace treaty in 821. The terms of this treaty, including the fixed borders between the two countries, are recorded in a bilingual inscription on a stone pillar outside the Jokhang temple in Lhasa.
During the Islamic conquest of Persia (633–656), the son of the last ruler of the Sassanid Empire, Prince Peroz and his court moved to Tang China. According to the Old Book of Tang, Peroz was made the head of a Governorate of Persia in what is now Zaranj, Afghanistan. During this conquest of Persia, the Rashidun Caliph Uthman Ibn Affan (r. 644–656) sent an embassy to the Tang court at Chang'an. Arab sources claim Umayyad commander Qutayba ibn Muslim briefly took Kashgar from China and withdrew after an agreement, but modern historians entirely dismiss this claim. The Arab Umayyad Caliphate in 715 deposed Ikhshid, the king the Fergana Valley, and installed a new king Alutar on the throne. The deposed king fled to Kucha (seat of Anxi Protectorate), and sought Chinese intervention. The Chinese sent 10,000 troops under Zhang Xiaosong to Ferghana. He defeated Alutar and the Arab occupation force at Namangan and reinstalled Ikhshid on the throne. The Tang dynasty Chinese defeated the Arab Umayyad invaders at the Battle of Aksu (717). The Arab Umayyad commander Al-Yashkuri and his army fled to Tashkent after they were defeated. The Turgesh then crushed the Arab Umayyads and drove them out. By the 740s, the Arabs under the Abbasid Caliphate in Khorasan had reestablished a presence in the Ferghana basin and in Sogdiana. At the Battle of Talas in 751, Karluk mercenaries under the Chinese defected, helping the Arab armies of the Caliphate to defeat the Tang force under commander Gao Xianzhi. Although the battle itself was not of the greatest significance militarily, this was a pivotal moment in history, as it marks the spread of Chinese papermaking into regions west of China as captured Chinese soldiers shared the technique of papermaking to the Arabs. These techniques ultimately reached Europe by the 12th century through Arab-controlled Spain. Although they had fought at Talas, on June 11, 758, an Abbasid embassy arrived at Chang'an simultaneously with the Uighur Turks bearing gifts for the Tang Emperor. In 788–789 the Chinese concluded a military alliance with the Uighur Turks who twice defeated the Tibetans, in 789 near the town of Gaochang in Dzungaria, and in 791 near Ningxia on the Yellow River.
Joseph Needham writes that a tributary embassy came to the court of Emperor Taizong in 643 from the Patriarch of Antioch. However, Friedrich Hirth and other sinologists such as S.A.M. Adshead have identified Fu lin (拂菻) in the Old and New Book of Tang as the Byzantine Empire, which those histories directly associated with Daqin (i.e. the Roman Empire). The embassy sent in 643 by Boduoli (波多力) was identified as Byzantine ruler Constans II Pogonatos (Kōnstantinos Pogonatos, or "Constantine the Bearded") and further embassies were recorded as being sent into the 8th century. S.A.M. Adshead offers a different transliteration stemming from "patriarch" or "patrician", possibly a reference to one of the acting regents for the young Byzantine monarch. The Old and New Book of Tang also provide a description of the Byzantine capital Constantinople, including how it was besieged by the Da shi (大食, i.e. Umayyad Caliphate) forces of Muawiyah I, who forced them to pay tribute to the Arabs. The 7th-century Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta wrote about the reunification of northern and southern China by the Sui dynasty (dating this to the time of Emperor Maurice); the capital city Khubdan (from Old Turkic Khumdan, i.e. Chang'an); the basic geography of China including its previous political division around the Yangtze River; the name of China's ruler Taisson meaning "Son of God", but possibly derived from the name of the contemporaneous ruler Emperor Taizong.
## Economy
Through use of the land trade along the Silk Road and maritime trade by sail at sea, the Tang were able to acquire and gain many new technologies, cultural practices, rare luxury, and contemporary items. From Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Tang dynasty were able to acquire new ideas in fashion, new types of ceramics, and improved silver-smithing techniques. The Tang Chinese also gradually adopted the foreign concept of stools and chairs as seating, whereas the Chinese beforehand always sat on mats placed on the floor. People of the Middle East coveted and purchased in bulk Chinese goods such as silks, lacquerwares, and porcelain wares. Songs, dances, and musical instruments from foreign regions became popular in China during the Tang dynasty. These musical instruments included oboes, flutes, and small lacquered drums from Kucha in the Tarim Basin, and percussion instruments from India such as cymbals. At the court there were nine musical ensembles (expanded from seven in the Sui dynasty) that played ecletic Asian music.
There was great interaction with India, a hub for Buddhist knowledge, with famous travelers such as Xuanzang (d. 664) visiting the South Asian state. After a 17-year-long trip, Xuanzang managed to bring back valuable Sanskrit texts to be translated into Chinese. There was also a Turkic–Chinese dictionary available for serious scholars and students, while Turkic folk songs gave inspiration to some Chinese poetry. In the interior of China, trade was facilitated by the Grand Canal and the Tang government's rationalization of the greater canal system that reduced costs of transporting grain and other commodities. The state also managed roughly 32,100 km (19,900 mi) of postal service routes by horse or boat.
### Silk Road
Although the Silk Road from China to Europe and the Western World was initially formulated during the reign of Emperor Wu (141–87 BC) during the Han, it was reopened by the Tang in 639 when Hou Junji (d. 643) conquered the West, and remained open for almost four decades. It was closed after the Tibetans captured it in 678, but in 699, during Empress Wu's period, the Silk Road reopened when the Tang reconquered the Four Garrisons of Anxi originally installed in 640, once again connecting China directly to the West for land-based trade.
The Tang captured the vital route through the Gilgit Valley from Tibet in 722, lost it to the Tibetans in 737, and regained it under the command of the Goguryeo-Korean General Gao Xianzhi. When the An Lushan Rebellion ended in 763, the Tang Empire withdrew its troops from its western lands, allowing the Tibetan Empire to largely cut off China's direct access to the Silk Road. An internal rebellion in 848 ousted the Tibetan rulers, and Tang China regained its northwestern prefectures from Tibet in 851. These lands contained crucial grazing areas and pastures for raising horses that the Tang dynasty desperately needed.
Despite the many expatriate European travelers coming into China to live and trade, many travelers, mainly religious monks and missionaries, recorded China's stringent immigrant laws. As the monk Xuanzang and many other monk travelers attested to, there were many Chinese government checkpoints along the Silk Road that examined travel permits into the Tang Empire. Furthermore, banditry was a problem along the checkpoints and oasis towns, as Xuanzang also recorded that his group of travelers were assaulted by bandits on multiple occasions.
The Silk Road also affected Tang dynasty art. Horses became a significant symbol of prosperity and power as well as an instrument of military and diplomatic policy. Horses were also revered as a relative of the dragon.
### Seaports and maritime trade
Chinese envoys had been sailing through the Indian Ocean to states of India since perhaps the 2nd century BC, yet it was during the Tang dynasty that a strong Chinese maritime presence could be found in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, into Persia, Mesopotamia (sailing up the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq), Arabia, Egypt in the Middle East and Aksum (Ethiopia), and Somalia in the Horn of Africa.
During the Tang dynasty, thousands of foreign expatriate merchants came and lived in numerous Chinese cities to do business with China, including Persians, Arabs, Hindu Indians, Malays, Bengalis, Sinhalese, Khmers, Chams, Jews and Nestorian Christians of the Near East, among many others. In 748, the Buddhist monk Jian Zhen described Guangzhou as a bustling mercantile business center where many large and impressive foreign ships came to dock. He wrote that "many large ships came from Borneo, Persia, Qunglun (Indonesia/Java) ... with ... spices, pearls, and jade piled up mountain high", as written in the Yue Jue Shu (Lost Records of the State of Yue). Relations with the Arabs were often strained: When the imperial government was attempting to quell the An Lushan Rebellion, Arab and Persian pirates burned and looted Canton on October 30, 758. The Tang government reacted by shutting the port of Canton down for roughly five decades; thus, foreign vessels docked at Hanoi instead. However, when the port reopened, it continued to thrive. In 851 the Arab merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir observed the manufacturing of Chinese porcelain in Guangzhou and admired its transparent quality. He also provided a description of Guangzhou's landmarks, granaries, local government administration, some of its written records, treatment of travelers, along with the use of ceramics, rice, wine, and tea. Their presence came to an end under the revenge of Chinese rebel Huang Chao in 878, who purportedly slaughtered thousands regardless of ethnicity. Huang's rebellion was eventually suppressed in 884.
Vessels from other East Asian states such as Silla, Bohai and the Hizen Province of Japan were all involved in the Yellow Sea trade, which Silla of Korea dominated. After Silla and Japan reopened renewed hostilities in the late 7th century, most Japanese maritime merchants chose to set sail from Nagasaki towards the mouth of the Huai River, the Yangtze River, and even as far south as the Hangzhou Bay in order to avoid Korean ships in the Yellow Sea. In order to sail back to Japan in 838, the Japanese embassy to China procured nine ships and sixty Korean sailors from the Korean wards of Chuzhou and Lianshui cities along the Huai River. It is also known that Chinese trade ships traveling to Japan set sail from the various ports along the coasts of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces.
The Chinese engaged in large-scale production for overseas export by at least the time of the Tang. This was proven by the discovery of the Belitung shipwreck, a silt-preserved shipwrecked Arabian dhow in the Gaspar Strait near Belitung, which had 63,000 pieces of Tang ceramics, silver, and gold (including a Changsha bowl inscribed with a date: "16th day of the seventh month of the second year of the Baoli reign", or 826, roughly confirmed by radiocarbon dating of star anise at the wreck). Beginning in 785, the Chinese began to call regularly at Sufala on the East African coast in order to cut out Arab middlemen, with various contemporary Chinese sources giving detailed descriptions of trade in Africa. The official and geographer Jia Dan (730–805) wrote of two common sea trade routes in his day: one from the coast of the Bohai Sea towards Korea and another from Guangzhou through Malacca towards the Nicobar Islands, Sri Lanka and India, the eastern and northern shores of the Arabian Sea to the Euphrates River. In 863 the Chinese author Duan Chengshi (d. 863) provided a detailed description of the slave trade, ivory trade, and ambergris trade in a country called Bobali, which historians suggest was Berbera in Somalia. In Fustat (old Cairo), Egypt, the fame of Chinese ceramics there led to an enormous demand for Chinese goods; hence Chinese often traveled there (this continued into later periods such as Fatimid Egypt). From this time period, the Arab merchant Shulama once wrote of his admiration for Chinese seafaring junks, but noted that their draft was too deep for them to enter the Euphrates River, which forced them to ferry passengers and cargo in small boats. Shulama also noted that Chinese ships were often very large, with capacities up to 600–700 passengers.
## Culture and society
### Art
Both the Sui and Tang Dynasties had turned away from the more feudal culture of the preceding Northern Dynasties, in favor of staunch civil Confucianism. The governmental system was supported by a large class of Confucian intellectuals selected through either civil service examinations or recommendations. In the Tang period, Taoism and Buddhism were commonly practiced ideologies that played a large role in people's daily lives. The Tang Chinese enjoyed feasting, drinking, holidays, sports, and all sorts of entertainment, while Chinese literature blossomed and was more widely accessible with new printing methods.
Rich commoners and nobles who worshipped ancestors and/or gods wanted them to know "how important and how admirable they were", so they "wrote or commissioned their own obituaries" and buried figures along with their bodies that would ward off evil spirits.
### Chang'an, the Tang capital
Although Chang'an was the capital of the earlier Han and Jin dynasties, after subsequent destruction in warfare, it was the Sui dynasty model that comprised the Tang era capital. The roughly square dimensions of the city had six miles (10 km) of outer walls running east to west, and more than five miles (8 km) of outer walls running north to south. The royal palace, the Taiji Palace, stood north of the city's central axis. From the large Mingde Gates located mid-center of the main southern wall, a wide city avenue stretched from there all the way north to the central administrative city, behind which was the Chentian Gate of the royal palace, or Imperial City. Intersecting this were fourteen main streets running east to west, while eleven main streets ran north to south. These main intersecting roads formed 108 rectangular wards with walls and four gates each, and each ward filled with multiple city blocks. The city was made famous for this checkerboard pattern of main roads with walled and gated districts, its layout even mentioned in one of Du Fu's poems. During the Heian period, the city of Heian kyō (present-day Kyoto) of Japan like many cities was arranged in the checkerboard street grid pattern of the Tang capital and in accordance with traditional geomancy following the model of Chang'an. Of these 108 wards in Chang'an, two of them (each the size of two regular city wards) were designated as government-supervised markets, and other space reserved for temples, gardens, ponds, etc. Throughout the entire city, there were 111 Buddhist monasteries, 41 Taoist abbeys, 38 family shrines, 2 official temples, 7 churches of foreign religions, 10 city wards with provincial transmission offices, 12 major inns, and 6 graveyards. Some city wards were literally filled with open public playing fields or the backyards of lavish mansions for playing horse polo and cuju (Chinese soccer). In 662, Emperor Gaozong moved the imperial court to the Daming Palace, which became the political center of the empire and served as the royal residence of the Tang emperors for more than 220 years.
The Tang capital was the largest city in the world at its time, the population of the city wards and its suburban countryside reaching two million inhabitants. The Tang capital was very cosmopolitan, with ethnicities of Persia, Central Asia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, India, and many other places living within. Naturally, with this plethora of different ethnicities living in Chang'an, there were also many different practiced religions, such as Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, among others. With the open access to China that the Silk Road to the west facilitated, many foreign settlers were able to move east to China, while the city of Chang'an itself had about 25,000 foreigners living within. Exotic green-eyed, blond-haired Tocharian ladies serving wine in agate and amber cups, singing, and dancing at taverns attracted customers. If a foreigner in China pursued a Chinese woman for marriage, he was required to stay in China and was unable to take his bride back to his homeland, as stated in a law passed in 628 to protect women from temporary marriages with foreign envoys. Several laws enforcing segregation of foreigners from Chinese were passed during the Tang dynasty. In 779 the Tang dynasty issued an edict which forced Uighurs in the capital, Chang'an, to wear their ethnic dress, stopped them from marrying Chinese females, and banned them from passing off as Chinese.
Chang'an was the center of the central government, the home of the imperial family, and was filled with splendor and wealth. However, incidentally it was not the economic hub during the Tang dynasty. The city of Yangzhou along the Grand Canal and close to the Yangtze River was the greatest economic center during the Tang era.
Yangzhou was the headquarters for the Tang government's salt monopoly, and was the greatest industrial center of China. It acted as a midpoint in shipping of foreign goods that would be organized and distributed to the major cities of the north. Much like the seaport of Guangzhou in the south, Yangzhou boasted thousands of foreign traders from all across Asia.
There was also the secondary capital city of Luoyang, which was the favored capital of the two by Empress Wu. In the year 691 she had more than 100,000 families (more than 500,000 people) from around the region of Chang'an move to populate Luoyang instead. With a population of about a million, Luoyang became the second largest city in the empire, and with its closeness to the Luo River it benefited from southern agricultural fertility and trade traffic of the Grand Canal. However, the Tang court eventually demoted its capital status and did not visit Luoyang after the year 743, when Chang'an's problem of acquiring adequate supplies and stores for the year was solved. As early as 736, granaries were built at critical points along the route from Yangzhou to Chang'an, which eliminated shipment delays, spoilage, and pilfering. An artificial lake used as a transshipment pool was dredged east of Chang'an in 743, where curious northerners could finally see the array of boats found in southern China, delivering tax and tribute items to the imperial court.
### Literature
The Tang period was a golden age of Chinese literature and art. Over 48,900 poems penned by some 2,200 Tang authors have survived to the present day. Skill in the composition of poetry became a required study for those wishing to pass imperial examinations, while poetry was also heavily competitive; poetry contests amongst guests at banquets and courtiers were common. Poetry styles that were popular in the Tang included gushi and jintishi, with the renowned poet Li Bai (701–762) famous for the former style, and poets like Wang Wei (701–761) and Cui Hao (704–754) famous for their use of the latter. Jintishi poetry, or regulated verse, is in the form of eight-line stanzas or seven characters per line with a fixed pattern of tones that required the second and third couplets to be antithetical (although the antithesis is often lost in translation to other languages). Tang poems remained popular and great emulation of Tang era poetry began in the Song dynasty; in that period, Yan Yu (嚴羽; active 1194–1245) was the first to confer the poetry of the High Tang (c. 713–766) era with "canonical status within the classical poetic tradition." Yan Yu reserved the position of highest esteem among all Tang poets for Du Fu (712–770), who was not viewed as such in his own era, and was branded by his peers as an anti-traditional rebel.
The Classical Prose Movement was spurred in large part by the writings of Tang authors Liu Zongyuan (773–819) and Han Yu (768–824). This new prose style broke away from the poetry tradition of the piantiwen (騙體文, "parallel prose") style begun in the Han dynasty. Although writers of the Classical Prose Movement imitated piantiwen, they criticized it for its often vague content and lack of colloquial language, focusing more on clarity and precision to make their writing more direct. This guwen (archaic prose) style can be traced back to Han Yu, and would become largely associated with orthodox Neo-Confucianism.
Short story fiction and tales were also popular during the Tang, one of the more famous ones being Yingying's Biography by Yuan Zhen (779–831), which was widely circulated in his own time and by the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) became the basis for plays in Chinese opera. Timothy C. Wong places this story within the wider context of Tang love tales, which often share the plot designs of quick passion, inescapable societal pressure leading to the abandonment of romance, followed by a period of melancholy. Wong states that this scheme lacks the undying vows and total self-commitment to love found in Western romances such as Romeo and Juliet, but that underlying traditional Chinese values of inseparableness of self from one's environment (including human society) served to create the necessary fictional device of romantic tension.
There were large encyclopedias published in the Tang. The Yiwen Leiju encyclopedia was compiled in 624 by the chief editor Ouyang Xun (557–641) as well as Linghu Defen (582–666) and Chen Shuda (d. 635). The encyclopedia Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era was fully compiled in 729 by Gautama Siddha (fl. 8th century), an ethnic Indian astronomer, astrologer, and scholar born in the capital Chang'an.
Chinese geographers such as Jia Dan wrote accurate descriptions of places far abroad. In his work written between 785 and 805, he described the sea route going into the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and that the medieval Iranians (whom he called the people of Luo-He-Yi) had erected 'ornamental pillars' in the sea that acted as lighthouse beacons for ships that might go astray. Confirming Jia's reports about lighthouses in the Persian Gulf, Arabic writers a century after Jia wrote of the same structures, writers such as al-Mas'udi and al-Muqaddasi. The Tang dynasty Chinese diplomat Wang Xuance traveled to Magadha (modern northeastern India) during the 7th century. Afterwards he wrote the book Zhang Tianzhu Guotu (Illustrated Accounts of Central India), which included a wealth of geographical information.
Many histories of previous dynasties were compiled between 636 and 659 by court officials during and shortly after the reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang. These included the Book of Liang, Book of Chen, Book of Northern Qi, Book of Zhou, Book of Sui, Book of Jin, History of Northern Dynasties and the History of Southern Dynasties. Although not included in the official Twenty-Four Histories, the Tongdian and Tang Huiyao were nonetheless valuable written historical works of the Tang period. The Shitong written by Liu Zhiji in 710 was a meta-history, as it covered the history of Chinese historiography in past centuries until his time. The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, compiled by Bianji, recounted the journey of Xuanzang, the Tang era's most renowned Buddhist monk.
Other important literary offerings included Duan Chengshi's (d. 863) Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, an entertaining collection of foreign legends and hearsay, reports on natural phenomena, short anecdotes, mythical and mundane tales, as well as notes on various subjects. The exact literary category or classification that Duan's large informal narrative would fit into is still debated amongst scholars and historians.
### Religion and philosophy
Since ancient times, some Chinese had believed in folk religion and Taoism that incorporated many deities. Practitioners believed the Tao and the afterlife was a reality parallel to the living world, complete with its own bureaucracy and afterlife currency needed by dead ancestors. Funerary practices included providing the deceased with everything they might need in the afterlife, including animals, servants, entertainers, hunters, homes, and officials. This ideal is reflected in Tang dynasty art. This is also reflected in many short stories written in the Tang about people accidentally winding up in the realm of the dead, only to come back and report their experiences.
Buddhism, originating in India around the time of Confucius, continued its influence during the Tang period and was accepted by some members of imperial family, becoming thoroughly sinicized and a permanent part of Chinese traditional culture. In an age before Neo-Confucianism and figures such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Buddhism had begun to flourish in China during the Northern and Southern dynasties, and became the dominant ideology during the prosperous Tang. Buddhist monasteries played an integral role in Chinese society, offering lodging for travelers in remote areas, schools for children throughout the country, and a place for urban literati to stage social events and gatherings such as going-away parties. Buddhist monasteries were also engaged in the economy, since their land property and serfs gave them enough revenues to set up mills, oil presses, and other enterprises. Although the monasteries retained 'serfs', these monastery dependents could actually own property and employ others to help them in their work, including their own slaves.
The prominent status of Buddhism in Chinese culture began to decline as the dynasty and central government declined as well during the late 8th century to 9th century. Buddhist convents and temples that were exempt from state taxes beforehand were targeted by the state for taxation. In 845 Emperor Wuzong of Tang finally shut down 4,600 Buddhist monasteries along with 40,000 temples and shrines, forcing 260,000 Buddhist monks and nuns to return to secular life; this episode would later be dubbed one of the Four Buddhist Persecutions in China. Although the ban would be lifted just a few years after, Buddhism never regained its once dominant status in Chinese culture. This situation also came about through a revival of interest in native Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism. Han Yu (786–824)—who Arthur F. Wright stated was a "brilliant polemicist and ardent xenophobe"—was one of the first men of the Tang to denounce Buddhism. Although his contemporaries found him crude and obnoxious, he would foreshadow the later persecution of Buddhism in the Tang, as well as the revival of Confucian theory with the rise of Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty. Nonetheless, Chán Buddhism gained popularity amongst the educated elite. There were also many famous Chan monks from the Tang era, such as Mazu Daoyi, Baizhang, and Huangbo Xiyun. The sect of Pure Land Buddhism initiated by the Chinese monk Huiyuan (334–416) was also just as popular as Chan Buddhism during the Tang.
Rivaling Buddhism was Taoism, a native Chinese philosophical and religious belief system that found its roots in the Tao Te Ching (a text attributed to a 6th-century BC figure named Lao Tzu) and the Zhuangzi. The ruling Li family of the Tang dynasty actually claimed descent from the ancient Lao Tzu. On numerous occasions where Tang princes would become crown prince or Tang princesses taking vows as Taoist priestesses, their lavish former mansions would be converted into Taoist abbeys and places of worship. Many Taoists were associated with alchemy in their pursuits to find an elixir of immortality and a means to create gold from concocted mixtures of many other elements. Although they never achieved their goals in either of these futile pursuits, they did contribute to the discovery of new metal alloys, porcelain products, and new dyes. The historian Joseph Needham labeled the work of the Taoist alchemists as "protoscience rather than pseudoscience." However, the close connection between Taoism and alchemy, which some sinologists have asserted, is refuted by Nathan Sivin, who states that alchemy was just as prominent (if not more so) in the secular sphere and practiced more often by laymen.
The Tang dynasty also officially recognized various foreign religions. The Assyrian Church of the East, otherwise known as the Nestorian Church or the Church of the East in China, was given recognition by the Tang court. In 781, the Nestorian Stele was created in order to honor the achievements of their community in China. A Christian monastery was established in Shaanxi province where the Daqin Pagoda still stands, and inside the pagoda there is Christian-themed artwork. Although the religion largely died out after the Tang, it was revived in China following the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.
Although the Sogdians had been responsible for transmitting Buddhism to China from India during the 2nd to 4th centuries, soon afterwards they largely converted to Zoroastrianism due to their links to Sassanid Persia. Sogdian merchants and their families living in cities such as Chang'an, Luoyang, and Xiangyang usually built a Zoroastrian temple once their local communities grew larger than 100 households. Sogdians were also responsible for spreading Manicheism in Tang China and the Uighur Khaganate. The Uighurs built the first Manichean monastery in China in 768, yet in 843 the Tang government ordered that the property of all Manichean monasteries be confiscated in response to the outbreak of war with the Uighurs. With the blanket ban on foreign religions two years later, Manicheism was driven underground and never flourished in China again.
### Leisure
Much more than earlier periods, the Tang era was renowned for the time reserved for leisure activity, especially for those in the upper classes. Many outdoor sports and activities were enjoyed during the Tang, including archery, hunting, horse polo, cuju (soccer), cockfighting, and even tug of war. Government officials were granted vacations during their tenure in office. Officials were granted 30 days off every three years to visit their parents if they lived 1,000 mi (1,600 km) away, or 15 days off if the parents lived more than 167 mi (269 km) away (travel time not included). Officials were granted nine days of vacation time for weddings of a son or daughter, and either five, three, or one days/day off for the nuptials of close relatives (travel time not included). Officials also received a total of three days off for their son's capping initiation rite into manhood, and one day off for the ceremony of initiation rite of a close relative's son.
Traditional Chinese holidays such as Chinese New Year, Lantern Festival, Cold Food Festival, and others were universal holidays. In the capital city of Chang'an there was always lively celebration, especially for the Lantern Festival since the city's nighttime curfew was lifted by the government for three days straight. Between the years 628 and 758, the imperial throne bestowed a total of sixty-nine grand carnivals nationwide, granted by the emperor in the case of special circumstances such as important military victories, abundant harvests after a long drought or famine, the granting of amnesties, the installment of a new crown prince, etc. For special celebration in the Tang era, lavish and gargantuan-sized feasts were sometimes prepared, as the imperial court had staffed agencies to prepare the meals. This included a prepared feast for 1,100 elders of Chang'an in 664, a feast for 3,500 officers of the Divine Strategy Army in 768, and a feast for 1,200 women of the palace and members of the imperial family in the year 826. Drinking wine and alcoholic beverages was heavily ingrained into Chinese culture, as people drank for nearly every social event. A court official in the 8th century allegedly had a serpentine-shaped structure called the 'Ale Grotto' built with 50,000 bricks on the groundfloor that each featured a bowl from which his friends could drink.
### Status in clothing
In general, garments were made from silk, wool, or linen depending on your social status and what you could afford. Furthermore, there were laws that specified what kinds of clothing could be worn by whom. The color of the clothing also indicated rank. During this period, China's power, culture, economy, and influence were thriving. As a result, women could afford to wear loose-fitting, wide-sleeved garments. Even lower-class women's robes would have sleeves four to five feet in width.
### Position of women
Concepts of women's social rights and social status during the Tang era were notably liberal-minded for the period. However, this was largely reserved for urban women of elite status, as men and women in the rural countryside labored hard in their different set of tasks; with wives and daughters responsible for more domestic tasks of weaving textiles and rearing of silk worms, while men tended to farming in the fields.
There were many women in the Tang era who gained access to religious authority by taking vows as Taoist priestesses. The head mistresses of high-class courtesans in the North Hamlet of the capital Chang'an acquired large amounts of wealth and power. Such courtesans, who likely influenced the Japanese geishas, were well respected. These courtesans were known as great singers and poets, supervised banquets and feasts, knew the rules to all the drinking games, and were trained to have the utmost respectable table manners.
Although they were renowned for their polite behavior, the courtesans were known to dominate the conversation among elite men, and were not afraid to openly castigate or criticize prominent male guests who talked too much or too loudly, boasted too much of their accomplishments, or had in some way ruined dinner for everyone by rude behavior (on one occasion a courtesan even beat up a drunken man who had insulted her). When singing to entertain guests, courtesans not only composed the lyrics to their own songs, but they popularized a new form of lyrical verse by singing lines written by various renowned and famous men in Chinese history.
It was fashionable for women to be full-figured (or plump). Men enjoyed the presence of assertive, active women. The foreign horse-riding sport of polo from Persia became a wildly popular trend among the Chinese elite, and women often played the sport (as glazed earthenware figurines from the time period portray). The preferred hairstyle for women was to bunch their hair up like "an elaborate edifice above the forehead", while affluent ladies wore extravagant head ornaments, combs, pearl necklaces, face powders, and perfumes. A law was passed in 671 which attempted to force women to wear hats with veils again in order to promote decency, but these laws were ignored as some women started wearing caps and even no hats at all, as well as men's riding clothes and boots, and tight-sleeved bodices.
There were some prominent court women after the era of Empress Wu, such as Yang Guifei (719–756), who had Emperor Xuanzong appoint many of her relatives and cronies to important ministerial and martial positions.
### Cuisine
During the earlier Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589), and perhaps even earlier, the drinking of tea (Camellia sinensis) became popular in southern China. Tea was viewed then as a beverage of tasteful pleasure and with pharmacological purpose as well. During the Tang dynasty, tea became synonymous with everything sophisticated in society. The poet Lu Tong (790–835) devoted most of his poetry to his love of tea. The 8th-century author Lu Yu (known as the Sage of Tea) even wrote a treatise on the art of drinking tea, called The Classic of Tea. Although wrapping paper had been used in China since the 2nd century BC, during the Tang dynasty the Chinese were using wrapping paper as folded and sewn square bags to hold and preserve the flavor of tea leaves. This followed many other uses for paper such as the first recorded use of toilet paper made in 589 by the scholar-official Yan Zhitui (531–591), confirmed in 851 by an Arab traveler who remarked that Tang Chinese lacked cleanliness because they relied on toilet paper instead of washing themselves with water.
In ancient times, the Chinese had outlined the five most basic foodstuffs known as the five grains: sesamum, legumes, wheat, panicled millet, and glutinous millet. The Ming dynasty encyclopedist Song Yingxing (1587–1666) noted that rice was not counted amongst the five grains from the time of the legendary and deified Chinese sage Shennong (the existence of whom Yingxing wrote was "an uncertain matter") into the 2nd millenniums BC, because the properly wet and humid climate in southern China for growing rice was not yet fully settled or cultivated by the Chinese. Song Yingxing also noted that in the Ming dynasty, seven tenths of civilians' food was rice. During the Tang dynasty rice was not only the most important staple in southern China, but had also become popular in the north where central authority resided.
During the Tang dynasty, wheat replaced the position of millet and became the main staple crop. As a consequence, wheat cake shared a considerable amount in the staple of Tang. There were four main kinds of cake: steamed cake, boiled cake, pancake, and Hu cake. Steamed cake was consumed commonly by both civilians and aristocrats. Like rougamo in modern Chinese cuisine, steamed cake was usually stuffed with meat and vegetables. Shops and packmen regularly sold inexpensive steamed cake on the streets of Chang’an. Boiled cake was the staple of the Northern Dynasties, and it kept its popularity in the Tang dynasty. It included a wide variety of dishes similar to modern wonton, noodles, and many other kinds of food that soak wheat in water. While aristocrats favored wonton, civilians usually consumed noodles and noodle slice soup that were easier to produce. Pancakes was rare in China before the Tang, when it gained popularity. Food shops in Tang cities such as Chang'an commonly sold both pancakes and dumplings. Hu cake, which means "foreign cake", was extremely popular during the Tang. Hu cake was toasted in the oven, covered with sesame seeds, and served at taverns, inns and shops. Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin observed that Hu cake was popular among all of China's civilians.
During the Tang, the many common foodstuffs and cooking ingredients in addition to those already listed were barley, garlic, salt, turnips, soybeans, pears, apricots, peaches, apples, pomegranates, jujubes, rhubarb, hazelnuts, pine nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, yams, taro, etc. The various meats that were consumed included pork, chicken, lamb (especially preferred in the north), sea otter, bear (which was hard to catch, but there were recipes for steamed, boiled, and marinated bear), and even Bactrian camels. In the south along the coast meat from seafood was by default the most common, as the Chinese enjoyed eating cooked jellyfish with cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, cardamom, and ginger, as well as oysters with wine, fried squid with ginger and vinegar, horseshoe crabs and red swimming crabs, shrimp and pufferfish, which the Chinese called "river piglet".
From the trade overseas and over land, the Chinese acquired peaches from Samarkand, date palms, pistachios, and figs from Greater Iran, pine nuts and ginseng roots from Korea and mangoes from Southeast Asia. In China, there was a great demand for sugar; during the reign of Harsha over North India (r. 606–647), Indian envoys to the Tang brought two makers of sugar who successfully taught the Chinese how to cultivate sugarcane. Cotton also came from India as a finished product from Bengal, although it was during the Tang that the Chinese began to grow and process cotton, and by the Yuan dynasty it became the prime textile fabric in China.
Some foods were also off-limits, as the Tang court encouraged people not to eat beef. This was due to the role of the bull as a valuable working animal. From 831 to 833 Emperor Wenzong of Tang even banned the slaughter of cattle on the grounds of his religious convictions to Buddhism.
Methods of food preservation were important, and practiced throughout China. The common people used simple methods of preservation, such as digging deep ditches and trenches, brining, and salting their foods. The emperor had large ice pits located in the parks in and around Chang'an for preserving food, while the wealthy and elite had their own smaller ice pits. Each year the emperor had laborers carve 1000 blocks of ice from frozen creeks in mountain valleys, each block with the dimension of 3 ft (0.91 m) by 3 ft by 3.5 ft (1.1 m). Frozen delicacies such as chilled melon were enjoyed during the summer.
## Science and technology
### Engineering
Technology during the Tang period was built also upon the precedents of the past. Previous advancements in clockworks and timekeeping included the mechanical gear systems of Zhang Heng (78–139) and Ma Jun (fl. 3rd century), which gave the Tang mathematician, mechanical engineer, astronomer, and monk Yi Xing (683–727) inspiration when he invented the world's first clockwork escapement mechanism in 725. This was used alongside a clepsydra clock and waterwheel to power a rotating armillary sphere in representation of astronomical observation. Yi Xing's device also had a mechanically timed bell that was struck automatically every hour, and a drum that was struck automatically every quarter-hour; essentially, a striking clock. Yi Xing's astronomical clock and water-powered armillary sphere became well known throughout the country, since students attempting to pass the imperial examinations by 730 had to write an essay on the device as an exam requirement. However, the most common type of public and palace timekeeping device was the inflow clepsydra. Its design was improved c. 610 by the Sui-dynasty engineers Geng Xun and Yuwen Kai. They provided a steelyard balance that allowed seasonal adjustment in the pressure head of the compensating tank and could then control the rate of flow for different lengths of day and night.
There were many other mechanical inventions during the Tang era. These included a 3 ft (0.91 m) tall mechanical wine server of the early 8th century that was in the shape of an artificial mountain, carved out of iron and rested on a lacquered-wooden tortoise frame. This intricate device used a hydraulic pump that siphoned wine out of metal dragon-headed faucets, as well as tilting bowls that were timed to dip wine down, by force of gravity when filled, into an artificial lake that had intricate iron leaves popping up as trays for placing party treats. Furthermore, as the historian Charles Benn describes it:
> Midway up the southern side of the mountain was a dragon ... the beast opened its mouth and spit brew into a goblet seated on a large [iron] lotus leaf beneath. When the cup was 80% full, the dragon ceased spewing ale, and a guest immediately seized the goblet. If he was slow in draining the cup and returning it to the leaf, the door of a pavilion at the top of the mountain opened and a mechanical wine server, dressed in a cap and gown, emerged with a wooden bat in his hand. As soon as the guest returned the goblet, the dragon refilled it, the wine server withdrew, and the doors of the pavilion closed ... A pump siphoned the ale that flowed into the ale pool through a hidden hole and returned the brew to the reservoir [holding more than 16 quarts/15 liters of wine] inside the mountain.
Yet the use of a teasing mechanical puppet in this wine-serving device wasn't exactly a novel invention of the Tang, since the use of mechanical puppets in China date back to the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC). In the 3rd century Ma Jun had an entire mechanical puppet theater operated by the rotation of a waterwheel. There was also an automatic wine-server known in the ancient Greco-Roman world, a design of the Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria that employed an urn with an inner valve and a lever device similar to the one described above. There are many stories of automatons used in the Tang, including general Yang Wulian's wooden statue of a monk who stretched his hands out to collect contributions; when the number of coins reached a certain weight, the mechanical figure moved his arms to deposit them in a satchel. This weight-and-lever mechanism was exactly like Heron's penny slot machine. Other devices included one by Wang Ju, whose "wooden otter" could allegedly catch fish; Needham suspects a spring trap of some kind was employed here.
In the realm of structural engineering and technical Chinese architecture, there were also government standard building codes, outlined in the early Tang book of the Yingshan Ling (National Building Law). Fragments of this book have survived in the Tang Lü (The Tang Code), while the Song dynasty architectural manual of the Yingzao Fashi (State Building Standards) by Li Jie (1065–1101) in 1103 is the oldest existing technical treatise on Chinese architecture that has survived in full. During the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (712–756) there were 34,850 registered craftsmen serving the state, managed by the Agency of Palace Buildings (Jingzuo Jian).
### Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing made the written word available to vastly greater audiences. One of the world's oldest surviving printed documents is a miniature Buddhist dharani sutra unearthed at Xi'an in 1974 and dated roughly from 650 to 670. The Diamond Sutra is the first full-length book printed at regular size, complete with illustrations embedded with the text and dated precisely to 868. Among the earliest documents to be printed were Buddhist texts as well as calendars, the latter essential for calculating and marking which days were auspicious and which days were not. With so many books coming into circulation for the general public, literacy rates could improve, along with the lower classes being able to obtain cheaper sources of study. Therefore, there were more lower-class people seen entering the Imperial Examinations and passing them by the later Song dynasty. Although the later Bi Sheng's movable type printing in the 11th century was innovative for his period, woodblock printing that became widespread in the Tang would remain the dominant printing type in China until the more advanced printing press from Europe became widely accepted and used in East Asia. The first use of the playing card during the Tang dynasty was an auxiliary invention of the new age of printing.
### Cartography
In the realm of cartography, there were further advances beyond the map-makers of the Han dynasty. When the Tang chancellor Pei Ju (547–627) was working for the Sui dynasty as a Commercial Commissioner in 605, he created a well-known gridded map with a graduated scale in the tradition of Pei Xiu (224–271). The Tang chancellor Xu Jingzong (592–672) was also known for his map of China drawn in the year 658. In the year 785 the Emperor Dezong had the geographer and cartographer Jia Dan (730–805) complete a map of China and her former colonies in Central Asia. Upon its completion in 801, the map was 9.1 m (30 ft) in length and 10 m (33 ft) in height, mapped out on a grid scale of one inch equaling one hundred li (Chinese unit of measuring distance). A Chinese map of 1137 is similar in complexity to the one made by Jia Dan, carved on a stone stele with a grid scale of 100 li. However, the only type of map that has survived from the Tang period are star charts. Despite this, the earliest extant terrain maps of China come from the ancient State of Qin; maps from the 4th century BC that were excavated in 1986.
### Medicine
The Chinese of the Tang era were also very interested in the benefits of officially classifying all of the medicines used in pharmacology. In 657, Emperor Gaozong of Tang (r. 649–683) commissioned the literary project of publishing an official materia medica, complete with text and illustrated drawings for 833 different medicinal substances taken from different stones, minerals, metals, plants, herbs, animals, vegetables, fruits, and cereal crops. In addition to compiling pharmacopeias, the Tang fostered learning in medicine by upholding imperial medical colleges, state examinations for doctors, and publishing forensic manuals for physicians. Authors of medicine in the Tang include Zhen Chuan (d. 643) and Sun Simiao (581–682), the former who first identified in writing that patients with diabetes had an excess of sugar in their urine, and the latter who was the first to recognize that diabetic patients should avoid consuming alcohol and starchy foods. As written by Zhen Chuan and others in the Tang, the thyroid glands of sheep and pigs were successfully used to treat goiters; thyroid extracts were not used to treat patients with goiter in the West until 1890. The use of the dental amalgam, manufactured from tin and silver, was first introduced in the medical text Xinxiu bencao written by Su Gong in 659.
### Alchemy, gas cylinders, and air conditioning
Chinese scientists of the Tang period employed complex chemical formulas for an array of different purposes, often found through experiments of alchemy. These included a waterproof and dust-repelling cream or varnish for clothes and weapons, fireproof cement for glass and porcelain wares, a waterproof cream applied to silk clothes of underwater divers, a cream designated for polishing bronze mirrors, and many other useful formulas. The vitrified, translucent ceramic known as porcelain was invented in China during the Tang, although many types of glazed ceramics preceded it.
Ever since the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), the Chinese had drilled deep boreholes to transport natural gas from bamboo pipelines to stoves where cast iron evaporation pans boiled brine to extract salt. During the Tang dynasty, a gazetteer of Sichuan province stated that at one of these 182 m (600 ft) 'fire wells', men collected natural gas into portable bamboo tubes which could be carried around for dozens of km (mi) and still produce a flame. These were essentially the first gas cylinders; Robert Temple assumes some sort of tap was used for this device.
The inventor Ding Huan (fl. 180 AD) of the Han dynasty invented a rotary fan for air conditioning, with seven wheels 3 m (10 ft) in diameter and manually powered. In 747, Emperor Xuanzong had a "Cool Hall" built in the imperial palace, which the Tang Yulin (唐語林) describes as having water-powered fan wheels for air conditioning as well as rising jet streams of water from fountains. During the subsequent Song dynasty, written sources mentioned the air conditioning rotary fan as even more widely used.
## Historiography
The first classic work about the Tang is the Old Book of Tang by Liu Xu (887–946) et al. of the Later Jin, who redacted it during the last years of his life. This was edited into another history (labeled the New Book of Tang) in order to distinguish it, which was a work by the Song historians Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), Song Qi (998–1061), et al. of the Song dynasty (between the years 1044 and 1060). Both of them were based upon earlier annals, yet those are now lost. Both of them also rank among the Twenty-Four Histories of China. One of the surviving sources of the Old Book of Tang, primarily covering up to 756, is the Tongdian, which Du You presented to the emperor in 801. The Tang period was again placed into the enormous universal history text of the Zizhi Tongjian, edited, compiled, and completed in 1084 by a team of scholars under the Song dynasty Chancellor Sima Guang (1019–1086). This historical text, written with three million Chinese characters in 294 volumes, covered the history of China from the beginning of the Warring States (403 BC) until the beginning of the Song dynasty (960).
|
10,771,083 |
Phan Đình Phùng
| 1,158,389,822 |
Vietnamese revolutionary (1847–1896)
|
[
"1847 births",
"1896 deaths",
"Deaths from dysentery",
"Nguyen dynasty officials",
"People from Hà Tĩnh province",
"Vietnamese Confucianists",
"Vietnamese nationalists"
] |
Phan Đình Phùng (; 1847 – January 21, 1896) was a Vietnamese revolutionary who led rebel armies against French colonial forces in Vietnam. He was the most prominent of the Confucian court scholars involved in anti-French military campaigns in the 19th century and was cited after his death by 20th-century nationalists as a national hero. He was renowned for his uncompromising will and principles—on one occasion, he refused to surrender even after the French had desecrated his ancestral tombs and had arrested and threatened to kill his family.
Born into a family of mandarins from Hà Tĩnh Province, Phan continued his ancestors' traditions by placing first in the metropolitan imperial examinations in 1877. Phan quickly rose through the ranks under Emperor Tự Đức of the Nguyễn dynasty, gaining a reputation for his integrity and uncompromising stance against corruption. Phan was appointed as the Imperial Censor, a position that allowed him to criticise his fellow mandarins and even the emperor. As the head of the censorate, Phan's investigations led to the removal of many incompetent or corrupt mandarins.
Upon Tự Đức's death, Phan almost died during a power struggle in the imperial court. The regent Tôn Thất Thuyết disregarded Tự Đức's will of succession, and three emperors were deposed and killed in just over a year. Phan protested against Thuyết's activities, was stripped of his honours and briefly jailed, before being exiled to his home province. At the time, France had just conquered Vietnam and made it a part of French Indochina. Along with Thuyết, Phan organised rebel armies as part of the Cần Vương movement, which sought to expel the French and install the boy Emperor Hàm Nghi at the head of an independent Vietnam. This campaign continued for three years until 1888, when the French captured Hàm Nghi and exiled him to Algeria.
Phan and his military assistant Cao Thắng continued their guerrilla campaign, building a network of spies, bases and small weapons factories. However, Cao Thắng was killed in the process in late 1893. The decade-long campaign eventually wore Phan down, and he died from dysentery as the French surrounded his forces.
## Court official
Phan was born in the village of Đông Thái in the northern central coast province of Hà Tĩnh. Đông Thái was famous for producing high-ranking mandarins and had been the home of senior imperial officials since the time of the Lê dynasty. Twelve consecutive generations of the Phan family had been successful mandarinate graduates. All three of Phan's brothers who lived to adulthood passed the imperial examinations and became mandarins. Early on, Phan indicated his distaste for the classical curriculum required of an aspiring mandarin. He nevertheless persevered with his studies, passing the regional exams in 1876 and then topping the metropolitan exams the following year. In his exam response, Phan cited Japan as an example of how an Asian country could make rapid military progress given sufficient willpower.
Phan was never known for his scholarly abilities; it was his reputation for principled integrity that led to his quick rise through the ranks under the reign of Emperor Tự Đức. He was first appointed as a district mandarin in Ninh Bình Province, where he punished a Vietnamese Roman Catholic priest, who, with the tacit support of French missionaries, had harassed local non-Catholics. Amid the diplomatic controversy that followed, he avoided blaming the unpopular alliance between Vietnamese Catholics and the French on Catholicism itself, stating that the partnership had arisen out of the military and political vulnerabilities of Vietnam's imperial government. Despite this, the Huế court eventually removed Phan from this post.
Phan was transferred to the Huế court as a member of the censorate, a watchdog body that monitored the work of the mandarinate. He earned the ire of many of his colleagues, but the trust of the emperor, by revealing that the vast majority of the court mandarins were making a mockery of a royal edict to engage in regular rifle practice. Tự Đức later dispatched Phan on an inspection trip to northern Vietnam. His report led to the ousting of many officials who were deemed corrupt or incompetent, including the viceroy of the northern region. He rose to become the Imperial Censor (Sino-Vietnamese: Ngự Sử), a position which allowed him to criticise other high officials and even the emperor for misconduct. Phan openly criticised Tôn Thất Thuyết, the foremost mandarin of the court, believing him to be rash and dishonest. Aside from his work in rooting out corruption, Phan also compiled a historical geography of Vietnam, which was published in 1883.
Despite his prominent position in the Nguyễn dynasty, little is known about Phan's personal stance on Vietnamese relations with France, which was in the process of colonising Vietnam. France had first invaded in 1858, beginning the colonisation of southern Vietnam. Three provinces were ceded under the 1862 Treaty of Saigon, and a further three in 1867 to form the colony of Cochinchina. During the period, there was debate in the Huế court on the best strategy to regain the territory. One group advocated military means, while another believed in the use of diplomacy in addition to financial and religious concessions. By the time of Tự Đức's death in 1883, the whole of Vietnam was colonised, henceforth incorporated with Laos and Cambodia into French Indochina.
Upon his death in 1883, the childless Tự Đức had named his nephew, Kiến Phúc, as his successor, rather than Dục Đức, his most senior heir. Tự Đức had written in his will that Dục Đức was depraved and unworthy of ruling the country. However, led by Thuyết, the regents enthroned Dục Đức under the pressure of the ladies of the court. Phan protested against the violation of Tự Đức's will of succession and refused to sanction anyone other than Kiến Phúc. Lucky to escape the death penalty, Phan was stripped of his positions. Later, Dục Đức was deposed and executed by Thuyết on the grounds of ignoring court etiquette, ignoring the mourning rites for Tự Đức and having affairs with the late emperor's consorts. Phan again protested the regents' actions and was briefly imprisoned by Thuyết, before being exiled to his home province.
## Revolutionary career
### Cần Vương
Phan rallied to the cause of the boy Emperor Hàm Nghi—the fourth monarch in little over a year—after an abortive royal uprising at Huế in 1885. Thuyết and fellow regent Nguyễn Văn Tường had enthroned Hiệp Hòa after disposing of Dục Đức. However, the new emperor was wary of the regents' behaviour and attempted to avoid their influence, leading Thuyết to organise his execution. The teenage Kiến Phúc ascended the throne, but was poisoned by his adoptive mother Học Phi—one of Tự Đức's wives—whom he caught having intercourse with Tường. Kiến Phúc was thus replaced by his 14-year-old brother Hàm Nghi. In the meantime, the French concluded that the regents were causing too much trouble and had to be disposed of.
Thuyết had already decided to place Hàm Nghi at the head of the Phong Trào Cần Vương (Aid the King Movement), which sought to end French rule with a royalist rebellion. Phan helped the cause by setting up bases in Hà Tĩnh and creating his own guerrilla army. Thuyết had hoped to secure support from the Qing dynasty of China, but Phan thought that Vietnam's best chance of effective support came from Siam. Gia Long, the founder of the Nguyễn dynasty and great-grandfather of Tự Đức, had married his sister off to the King of Siam. He had also used Siam as a base-in-exile during his quest for the throne in the 1780s. However, direct appeals to the Siamese government only yielded a few pack trains of firearms and ammunition. In preparation for the revolt, Thuyết had been building up an armed base at Tân Sở for over a year.
In any case, the Cần Vương revolt started on July 5, 1885, when Thuyết launched a surprise attack against the colonial forces after a diplomatic confrontation with the French. Thuyết took Hàm Nghi northwards to the Tân Sở mountain base near the border with Laos after the attack failed. The campaign was launched when the emperor issued the Cần Vương edict that had been prepared by the regent.
Phan initially rallied support from his native village and set up his headquarters on Mount Vũ Quang, which overlooked the coastal French fortress at Hà Tĩnh. Phan's organisation became a model for future insurgents. For flexibility, he divided his operational zone into twelve districts. His forces upheld military discipline and wore uniforms. Phan initially used the local scholar-gentry as his military commanders. Their first notable attack targeted two nearby Catholic villages that had collaborated with French forces. Colonial troops arrived a few hours later, quickly overwhelming the rebels and forcing them to retreat to their home village, where the retribution was heavy. Phan managed to escape but his elder brother was captured by the same former viceroy of northern Vietnam who had been removed from office as a result of Phan's critical report. The disgraced official was now a French collaborator, serving as the governor of Nghệ An Province.
The strategy of attempting to pressure Phan into capitulating was a classical strategy of coercion. The French used an old friend and fellow villager to make an emotional and deeply Confucian appeal for Phan to surrender in order to save his brother, his ancestral tombs and his entire village. Phan was reported to have replied:
(Original Vietnamese)
Nay tôi chỉ có một ngôi mộ rất to nên giữ là nước Việt Nam.
Tôi chỉ có một ông anh rất to là mấy triệu đồng bào.
Nếu về mà sửa sang lại phần mộ tổ tiên riêng mình thì ngôi mộ cả nước ai giữ?
Về cứu sống ông anh của riêng mình thì còn bao nhiêu anh em trong nước ai cứu?
(English)
From the time I joined with you in the Cần Vương movement, I determined to forget the question of family and village.
Now I have but one tomb, a very large one, that must be defended: the land of Vietnam.
I have only one brother, very important, that is in danger: more than twenty million countrymen.
If I worry about my own tombs, who will worry about defending the tombs of the rest of the country?
If I save my own brother, who will save all the other brothers of the country?
There is only one way for me to die now.
Phan was later reported to have simply retorted, "If anyone carves up my brother, remember to send me some of the soup". However, he held no illusions about the prospect of successfully driving out the French, stating "It is our destiny. We accept it."
This incident and Phan's response are often cited as one of the reasons why he was so admired by the populace and among future generations of Vietnamese anti-colonialists: he adhered to the highest personal standards of patriotism. He identified with a countrywide cause, far removed from the questions of family and region.
Phan's men were well-trained and disciplined, and the military inspiration behind his rebellion was derived from Cao Thắng, a bandit leader who had been protected from royal forces by Phan's brother a decade earlier. They operated in the provinces of Thanh Hóa in the north, Hà Tĩnh, Nghệ An in the centre and Quảng Bình in the south, with their strongest areas being the two central provinces. In 1887, Phan concluded that his tactics were misguided, ordering his subordinates to cease open combat and resort to guerrilla tactics. His men built up a network of base camps, food caches, intelligence agents and peasant supply contacts. Phan traveled to the north in the hope of coordinating strategic and tactical plans with other leaders. In the meantime, Cao Thắng led a force of around 1,000 men with some 500 firearms between them. Cao Thắng produced around 300 rifles by disassembling and copying 1874-model French weapons that had been captured. For the purpose of creating such replica guns, they captured Vietnamese artisans. According to French officers who later captured some of the Vietnamese copies, the weapons were proficiently reproduced. The only details in which they were regarded as being defective were in the tempering of the springs, which were improvised with umbrella spokes, and the lack of rifling in the barrels, which curtailed range and accuracy.
Nevertheless, the weaponry used by Phan's rebels was far inferior to that of their adversaries, and their inland positions were within firing range of the French Navy. The Vietnamese could not rely on China to give them material support, and other European powers such as Portugal, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom were unwilling to sell them weapons for various reasons. Thus, Phan had to explore overland routes to procure weapons from Siamese sources—using seafaring transport was impossible due to the presence of the French Navy. He instructed his followers to create a secret route from Hà Tĩnh through Laos into northeastern Siam; one such route from Mount Vũ Quang was believed to have been created around 1888. It is unclear if Phan himself went to Thailand, but a young female supporter named Co Tam was his designated arms buyer in Tha Uthen, which boasted a substantial expatriate Vietnamese community. In 1890, the Siamese Army transported around 1,000 Austrian repeating-rifles from Bangkok to Luang Prabang in Laos. However, it is unclear whether the weapons found their way into Vietnamese hands or whether they were related to Co Tam's activities.
### After Cần Vương
In 1888, Hàm Nghi's Mường bodyguard Trương Quang Ngọc betrayed him, leading to the emperor's capture and deportation to Algeria. Phan and Cao Thắng fought on in the mountainous areas of Hà Tĩnh, Nghệ An and Thanh Hóa. Another 15 bases were built along the mountain to complement the headquarters at Vũ Quang. Each base had a subordinate commander leading units numbering between 100 and 500 men. The operations were funded by local villagers, who were levied with a land tax in silver and rice. Local bases were supported by nearby villages and excess funds were sent to Vũ Quang. Phan's men foraged and sold cinnamon bark to raise funds, while lowland peasants donated spare metals for the production of weapons.
When Phan returned from the north in 1889, his first order was to track down Hàm Nghi's betrayer Ngọc. When he was found, Phan personally executed Ngọc in Tuyên Hóa. He then began a series of small-unit attacks on French installations through the summer of 1890, but these proved indecisive. The French relied mostly on district and provincial colonial units to man their perpetually increasing line of forts, which were usually commanded by a French lieutenant. In late 1890, a French effort to move into the low-lying villages and isolate the populace from the mountainous rebel bases failed. In the spring of 1892, a major French sweep of Hà Tĩnh failed, and in August, Cao Thắng seized the initiative with a bold counterattack on the provincial capital. The rebels broke into the prison and freed their compatriots, killing a large number of the Vietnamese soldiers who defended the penitentiary as members of the French colonial forces. This caused the French to intensify their efforts against Phan, and a counteroffensive was conducted throughout the remainder of 1892, forcing the rebels to retreat back into the mountains. Two of their bases fell and steady French pressure began to break their covert resistance links with lowland villages. This compounded the problems of securing food, supplies, intelligence data and recruits. A ring of French forts continued to be erected, increasingly pinning down Phan's men. The only notable gain for Phan's forces during this period was the acquisition of gunpowder supplies from Siam. This enabled them to mix foreign and local powder in a 50:50 ratio, rather than their previous weaker mixture of 20:80.
Late in the year, the burden on Phan increased after the loss of two Cần Vương allies. In September, Tống Duy Tân—who led the royalists in Thanh Hóa—was captured and publicly executed. Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, who had been active in the northern provinces of Hưng Yên and Hải Dương, fled to Guangxi in China. The supporters of Tân and Thuật moved south and integrated into Phan's force.
In mid-1893, Cao Thắng proposed a full-scale attack on the provincial seat of Nghệ An and the surrounding posts. The plan proposed to Phan included diversions to the south and the training of almost 2,000 men in conventional military tactics. Unconvinced of its viability, Phan reluctantly approved the plan. The troops were eager, but after overpowering several small posts en route, the main force was pinned down while attacking the French fort of No on September 9, 1893. Along with his brother, Cao Thắng was mortally wounded while leading a risky frontal attack with 150 men, and the forces retreated in disarray. Phan regarded the loss of Cao Thắng as a significant one, admitting as much in delivering the eulogy and funeral oration. According to the historian David Marr, there was evidence that Phan clearly realised the advantages and limitations of prolonged resistance. Although Phan had previously stated that he was not expecting ultimate success, the guerrilla leader thought that it was important to keep pressuring the French in order to demonstrate to the populace that there was an alternative to what he felt was a defeatist attitude from the Huế court.
### Downfall
Hoàng Cao Khải, the French-installed viceroy of Tonkin, perceived Phan's intent to a degree that his French masters did not. Khải was from a scholar-gentry family from the same village as Phan. He became the main backer of a determined effort to crush Phan's forces, using every means available: political, psychological and economic. By late 1894, relatives and suspected sympathisers of the insurgents were intimidated and more resistance commanders had been killed. Communications were disrupted, and the rebel hideouts became increasingly insecure. In an attempt to force Phan to surrender, the French arrested his family and desecrated the tombs of his ancestors, publicly displaying the remains in Hà Tĩnh.
Khải delivered a message to Phan via a relative. Phan sent a written reply, allowing their exchange to be studied. Khải recalled the common origins of the pair and promised Phan that he would lobby Governor-General Jean Marie Antoine de Lanessan and other French officials for an amnesty in return for Phan's surrender. Khải credited Phan with righteousness, loyalty and dedication towards the monarchy.
> The situation has changed and even those without intelligence or education have concluded that nothing remains to be saved. How is it that you, a man of vast understanding, do not realise this?... You are determined to do whatever you deem to be righteous... All that matters indeed is giving of one's life to one's country. No one therefore can deter you from your goal.
>
> I have always been taught that superior men should consider the care of the people as fundamental; who has ever heard of men who were loyal to their King but forgot the people's aspirations?... As of now, hundreds of families are subject to grief; how do you have the heart to fight on? I venture to predict that, should you pursue your struggle, not only will the population of our village be destroyed but our entire country will be transformed into a sea of blood and a mountain of bones.
According to Marr, "Phan Dinh Phung's reply was a classic in savage understatement, utilizing standard formalism in the interest of propaganda, with deft denigration of his opponent". Phan appealed to Vietnamese nationalist sentiment, recalling his country's stubborn resistance to Chinese aggression. He cited defensive wars against the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, asking why a country "a thousand times more powerful" could not annex Vietnam. Phan concluded that it was "because the destiny of our country has been willed by Heaven itself".
Phan placed the responsibility for the suffering of the people at the feet of the French, who "acted like a storm". After analysing his own actions, Phan concluded with a thinly veiled attack on Khải and his collaborators.
> If our region has suffered to such an extent, it was not only from the misfortunes of war. You must realise that wherever the French go, there flock around them groups of petty men who offer plans and tricks to gain the enemy's confidence. These persons create every kind of enmity; they incriminate innocent persons, blaming one one day, punishing another the next. They use every expedient to squeeze the people out of their possessions. That is how hundred of misdeeds, thousands of offenses have been perpetrated.
Khải's appeal was rebutted with an appeal to history, nationalist sentiment and a demand that the blame for death and destruction lay with the colonial forces and their Vietnamese assistants. Phan raised the stakes above family and village to the entire nation and its populace.
With Phan's rebuke in his hands, Khải translated both documents into French and presented them to De Lanessan, proposing that it was time for the final "destruction of this scholar gentry rebellion". In July 1895, French area commanders called in 3,000 troops to tighten the cordon around the three remaining rebel bases. The insurgents were able to execute ambushes at night, but Phan contracted dysentery and had to be carried on a stretcher whenever his unit moved. A collaborator mandarin named Nguyễn Thân, who had previous experience in pacification in Quảng Ngãi and Quảng Nam, was drafted in to isolate the insurgents from their supporters in the villages. Cut off from their supplies, the insurgents were left to survive by eating roots and occasional handfuls of dried corn. Their shoes were worn through and most were without blankets. Phan died of dysentery on January 21, 1896, and his captured followers were executed. A report submitted by the De Lanessan to the Minister of Colonies in Paris stated that "the soul of resistance to the protectorate was gone".
## Legacy
Phan's remains were disturbed after his death. Ngô Đình Khả, a Catholic mandarin and father of Ngô Đình Diệm—the first President of South Vietnam—was a member of the French colonial administration. Khả had Phan's tomb exhumed and used the remains in gunpowder used for executing revolutionaries. Many historians also accused Nguyễn Thân for this crime but two others, Nguyễn Quang Tô in 1974, then Tôn Thất Thọ in 2017, considered that is oral, fictitious, unofficial information, not historical data with "black ink and white paper".
Phan is widely regarded by Vietnamese people as a revolutionary hero. Phan Bội Châu, regarded as the leading Vietnamese anti-colonial figure of the early 20th century, strongly praised Phan in his writing, with particular emphasis on his defiance of Khải. During Phan Bội Châu's career as a teacher, he strongly emphasised Phan's deeds to his students. In 1941, after returning to Vietnam after decades in exile, the Marxist revolutionary Hồ Chí Minh, then using the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyễn the Patriot), invoked the memory of Phan in appealing to the public for support for his independence movement. Like Phan, Hồ was a native of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh. In the 1940s, Hồ's Việt Minh named their self-produced style of grenades in honour of Phan. Since then, Hồ's communists have portrayed themselves as the modern day incarnations of revered nationalist leaders such as Phan, Trương Định and Emperors Lê Lợi and Quang Trung, who expelled Chinese forces from Vietnam. Both North and South Vietnam had prominent thoroughfares in their capital cities (Hanoi and Saigon, respectively) named in Phan's honour.
|
29,390,357 |
Almirante Latorre-class battleship
| 1,134,777,912 |
1915 Chilean battleship class
|
[
"Almirante Latorre-class battleships",
"Battleship classes",
"Battleships of the United Kingdom",
"Chile–United Kingdom relations"
] |
The Almirante Latorre class consisted of two super-dreadnought battleships designed by the British company Armstrong Whitworth for the Chilean Navy. They were intended to be Chile's entries to the South American dreadnought race, but both were purchased by the Royal Navy prior to completion for use in the First World War. Only one, Almirante Latorre (HMS Canada), was finished as a battleship; Almirante Cochrane (HMS Eagle), was converted to an aircraft carrier. Under their Chilean names, they honored Admirals (Almirantes) Juan José Latorre and Thomas Cochrane; they took their British names from what was then a dominion of Canada and a traditional ship name in the Royal Navy.
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, Chile was engaged in an intense naval competition with its neighbor Argentina. This ended peacefully in 1902, but less than a decade later Argentina responded to Brazil's order for two dreadnoughts with two of its own. The Chilean congress responded by allocating money for its own dreadnoughts, which were ordered from the United Kingdom despite a strong push from the American government for the contracts, probably due to Chile's traditionally strong ties with the British.
Almirante Latorre, which was closer to completion than its sister, was bought in 1914 and commissioned into British service as HMS Canada in October 1915. The ship spent its wartime service with the Grand Fleet, seeing action in the Battle of Jutland. After the war, HMS Canada was put into reserve before being sold back to Chile in 1920 as Almirante Latorre. The crew of the battleship instigated a naval mutiny in 1931. After several years of inactivity, the ship underwent a major refit in the United Kingdom in 1937, later allowing it to patrol Chile's coast during the Second World War. After a boiler room fire and a short stint as a prison ship, Almirante Latorre was scrapped in 1959. After Almirante Cochrane was purchased by the British in 1918, it was decided to convert the ship into an aircraft carrier. After numerous delays, Almirante Cochrane was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Eagle in February 1924. It served in the Mediterranean Fleet and on the China Station in the inter-war period, and operated in the Atlantic and Mediterranean during the Second World War before being sunk in August 1942 during Operation Pedestal.
## Background
### Argentine–Chilean boundary dispute
Conflicting Argentine and Chilean claims to Patagonia, a geographic region in the southernmost portion of South America, went back to the 1840s. In 1872 and again in 1878, Chilean warships seized merchant ships which had been licensed to operate in the disputed area by Argentina. An Argentine warship did the same to an American ship in 1877. These actions nearly led to war in November 1878, when Argentina dispatched a squadron of warships to the Santa Cruz River. Chile responded with the same, and war was only avoided when the Fierro–Sarratea treaty was hastily signed. Both countries were distracted in the next few years by Argentina's internal military operations against the indigenous population and Chile's War of the Pacific (Guerra del Pacífico) against Bolivia and Peru, but by 1890 a full-fledged naval arms race was underway between the two.
Both sides began ordering warships from the United Kingdom. Chile added £3,129,500 in 1887 to the budget for its fleet, which was centered on two 1870s central battery ironclads, Almirante Cochrane and Blanco Encalada, and a protected cruiser. The battleship Capitán Prat, two protected cruisers, and two torpedo boats were ordered, and their keels were laid in 1890. Argentina responded soon after with an order for two battleships, Independencia and Libertad. The race continued through the 1890s, even after the Chilean Civil War of 1891. The two countries alternated cruiser orders between 1890 and 1895, each ship marking a small increase in capabilities from the ship previous. The Argentines upped the ante in July 1895 by buying an armored cruiser, Garibaldi, from Italy. Chile responded by ordering its own armored cruiser, O'Higgins, and six torpedo boats; Argentina quickly ordered another cruiser from Italy and later bought two more.
The race abated somewhat after a boundary dispute in the Puna de Atacama region was successfully mediated by the American ambassador to Argentina, William Paine Lord, in 1899, but more ships were ordered by Argentina and Chile in 1901. Argentina ordered two Garibaldi-class armored cruisers from Italy, and Chile replied with orders for two Constitución-class pre-dreadnought battleships. Argentina continued by signing letters of intent with Italian engineering company Ansaldo in May 1901 to buy two larger battleships.
The growing dispute disturbed the British government, who had extensive commercial interests in the area. Through their minister to Chile, they mediated negotiations between the two countries. These were successfully concluded on 28 May 1902 with three pacts, Pactos de Mayo. The third limited the naval armaments of both countries; both were barred from acquiring any further warships for five years without giving the other an eighteen months' advance notice. The United Kingdom purchased the two Chilean battleships, while Japan took over the order for the two Argentine armored cruisers; the two Argentine battleships were never ordered. Two Argentine cruisers and Chile's Capitán Prat were demilitarized.
Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1880s, Brazil's navy fell into obsolescence after an 1889 revolution, which deposed Emperor Dom Pedro II, and an 1893 civil war. By the turn of the 20th century it was lagging behind the Chilean and Argentine navies in quality and total tonnage, despite Brazil having nearly three times the population of Argentina and almost five times the population of Chile.
### Dreadnought arms race
By 1904, Brazil—the largest country in South America in both size and population—began to seriously consider upgrading its navy, which had fallen to third in total tonnage. Soaring demand for coffee and rubber brought an influx of tax revenue, used to begin a large naval building plan. The centerpiece of the new navy would be two Minas Geraes-class dreadnoughts built by the United Kingdom. The order for these powerful ships, designed to carry the heaviest armament in the world at the time, shocked Argentina and Chile, causing them to cancel the 1902 armament-limiting pact with immediate effect. Alarmed, the American ambassador to Brazil sent a cablegram to his Department of State, warning them of the destabilizing effects that would occur if the situation devolved into a full naval arms race.
Argentina and other countries attempted to avert a full-scale naval arms race by offering to purchase one of the two dreadnoughts. Brazil refused Argentina's offer. After further tensions over the River Plate (Río de la Plata, literally "Silver River") area and inflammatory newspaper editorials favoring dreadnoughts, Argentina went ahead with a massive naval building plan. After a drawn-out bidding process among fifteen shipyards from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, Argentina ordered two Rivadavia-class dreadnoughts with an option for a third from the United States. They also ordered twelve destroyers from three nations in Europe. With its major rival acquiring so many modern vessels, Chile wanted to respond as early as February 1906, but the country's naval plans were delayed by a major earthquake in 1906 and a financial depression in 1907 brought on by a drastic fall in the nitrate market.
## Bidding, construction, and sale to the British
On 6 July 1910, the National Congress of Chile passed a bill allocating funds for six destroyers, two submarines, and two large battleships, later named Almirante Latorre and Almirante Cochrane. Even before the decision was officially announced, the United Kingdom was widely viewed as the only country with a chance of landing the contract. The Chilean Navy had enjoyed a long-standing close relationship with its British counterpart, the Royal Navy, since the 1830s, when Chilean naval officers were given places on British ships to receive training and experience they could bring back to their country. This relationship had recently been cemented when a British naval mission was requested by Chile and sent in 1911.
Still, the United States made a push to have the orders placed in an American shipyard. The American government sent Henry Prather Fletcher to be the new minister to Chile in September 1910. Fletcher had successfully implemented President William Howard Taft's "Dollar Diplomacy" policy in China. He met with resistance, which he attributed to lingering sentiment from the 1891 Baltimore Crisis: "My advances in the matter have not been met with frankness or encouragement and I feel a spirit of covert opposition. Under a very polite and courteous exterior there still exists a feeling of soreness towards us." The US naval attaché opined that, barring anything short of a revolution, the contracts would be given to the British. Indeed, the bidding process specified ships very close to the armament and armor mounted on recent British warships. Fletcher asked for an extension to the bidding process so that American shipbuilding firms could tailor proposals to these requirements, and this was granted.
During this time, Germany announced plans to send the battlecruiser Von der Tann on a South American cruise. As the ship was "widely advertised as the fastest and most powerful warship then afloat," the United States and United Kingdom felt its presence might give German companies an advantage in potential armament contracts, so they sent ships of their own. The United States sent the new battleship Delaware on a ten-week excursion to Brazil and Chile, carrying the body of the recently deceased Chilean minister, Anibal Cruz, to the United States; the British responded with an armored cruiser squadron. Delaware's captain was ordered to give the Chileans full access to the vessel—the only exception being that he should not give full particulars of the new fire-control system—in an attempt by the Navy Department "to aid the shipbuilding interests of the country [United States] to make contracts for the building of men-of-war for foreign countries." As a further incentive, the US indicated its willingness to provide a \$25 million loan to support the purchase of the ship.
In the event, the efforts made by the United States came to little. The final decision came down to a choice between the American and British tenders, and with a loan from the Rothchilds, Chile awarded one battleship contract to the latter's Armstrong Whitworth on 25 July 1911. The design was drawn up by J.R. Perret, who had also designed Brazil's Rio de Janeiro. The United States still hoped that Chile would order American 14-inch/50 caliber guns for the battleship's main battery armament, but orders came only for coastal artillery. The second dreadnought was awarded to Armstrong in June 1912. Six Almirante Lynch-class destroyers were ordered in 1911 from J. Samuel White to accompany the new dreadnoughts. Before construction began, the Almirante Latorre design was enlarged to mount sixteen 6-inch (152 mm) rather than twenty-two 4.7-inch (119 mm) guns. This increased the displacement by 600 long tons (610 t), to 28,000 long tons (28,449 t), the draft by 6.5 inches (170 mm), to 33 feet (10 m), and made the ship a quarter-knot slower, to 22.75 knots.
Officially ordered on 2 November 1911 and laid down less than a month later on 27 November, the first dreadnought became the largest ship that Armstrong had built. The second dreadnought was ordered on 29 July 1912 and laid down on 22 January 1913, delayed by Rio de Janeiro occupying the slipway in which it would be built. The New York Tribune (2 November 1913) and Proceedings (May and June 1914) reported that Greece had reached an accord to purchase the first battleship counterbalance the Ottoman Empire's acquisition of Rio de Janeiro from Brazil, but despite a developing sentiment within Chile to sell one or both of the dreadnoughts, no deal was made.
Almirante Latorre was launched first, on 27 November 1913, in an elaborate ceremony that was attended by various dignitaries and presided over by Chile's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Agustín Edwards Mac Clure. The battleship was christened by the ambassador's wife, Olga Budge de Edwards, and weighed 10,700 long tons (10,900 t) at the time. After the First World War broke out in Europe, work on Almirante Latorre was halted in August 1914, and it was formally purchased on 9 September after the British Cabinet recommended it four days earlier. Almirante Latorre was not forcibly seized like the Ottoman Reşadiye and Sultân Osmân-ı Evvel (ex-Rio de Janeiro), two other ships being built for a foreign navy, because of Chile's "friendly neutral" status with the United Kingdom. The former Chilean ship was completed on 30 September 1915, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 15 October. Work on the other ship, Almirante Cochrane, was halted after the outbreak of war. The British purchased it on 28 February 1918 to be converted to an aircraft carrier, as the partially completed ship was the only available large and fast hull capable of being modified into a full flush-deck carrier. Low priority and quarrels with shipyard workers slowed completion of the ship.
## Service histories
Almirante Latorre was renamed HMS Canada and slightly modified for British service. The ship completed fitting-out on 20 September 1915, and was commissioned into the Royal Navy on 15 October. It initially served with the 4th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet, and saw action in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916. It fired 42 rounds from its 14-inch guns and 109 6-inch shells during the battle, and suffered no hits or casualties. Canada was transferred to the 1st Battle Squadron on 12 June 1916, received further modifications in 1917 and 1918, and was put into reserve in March 1919.
After the end of the war in Europe, Chile began to seek additional ships to bolster its fleet, and the United Kingdom eagerly offered many of its surplus warships. This action worried the nations of South America, who feared that a Chilean attempt to regain the title of "the first naval power in South America" would destabilize the region and start another naval arms race. Chile asked for Almirante Cochrane in addition to Canada, but would not purchase the ship unless it was reconstructed into the original battleship configuration. The British halted work on the incomplete ship while seriously considering the offer in October 1919. But because of the increased cost of reconverting her—£2.5 million, compared to a potential profit of £1.5 million from selling her—and a desire to test the aircraft carrier concept and especially the viability of island superstructures, the British kept and completed the ship, as HMS Eagle.
In April 1920, Chile only bought Canada and four destroyers, all of which had been ordered by Chile prior to the war's outbreak and requisitioned by the British for the war. Planned replacements for Almirante Cochrane included the two remaining Invincible-class battlecruisers, but a leak to the press of the secret negotiations to acquire them caused an uproar. The most visible dissension came from a block of officers in the navy who publicly opposed any possible purchase and instead promoted a "New Navy" which would acquire submarines and airplanes. They argued that these weapons would cost less and give the country, and its lengthy coastline, better protection from external threats. The ships were not bought for reasons of cost, but neither were the airplanes its supporters had been hoping for.
### Almirante Latorre in Chilean service
Canada was renamed Almirante Latorre once again and formally handed over to the Chilean government on 27 November 1920. It departed Plymouth the same day with two of the destroyers, and they arrived in Chile on 20 February 1921, where they were welcomed by Chile's president, Arturo Alessandri. Almirante Latorre was made the flagship of the navy. The dreadnought was frequently used by Alessandri for various functions, including as transport to Vallenar after a 1922 earthquake, and to Talcahuano for the grand opening of a new naval drydock in 1924. In 1925, with the fall of the January Junta, the ship hosted Alessandri after his return from exile. In September, the last month of his term, Alessandri received the United Kingdom's Edward, Prince of Wales, on board the battleship.
Almirante Latorre was sent to the United Kingdom for a modernization at the Devonport Dockyard in 1929. It lasted for quite some time, but finally left for Valparaíso nearly two years later, on 5 March 1931, and arrived on 12 April. Not long after it returned, crewmembers aboard Almirante Latorre instigated a major mutiny. The revolt was a result of the country's economic woes in the midst of the Great Depression and a recent pay cut. Most of the navy's ships joined Almirante Latorre in the mutiny, but they surrendered five days after it began when an air strike was mounted by government forces. Almirante Latorre ended up in the Bay of Tongoy with Blanco Encalada.
With Chile still in the midst of the depression, Almirante Latorre was deactivated at Talcahuano in 1933 to lessen government expenditures, and only a caretaker crew was assigned to tend to the mothballed ship into the mid-1930s. Soon after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States approached Chile with the aim of purchasing Almirante Latorre, two destroyers, and a submarine tender to bolster the United States Navy, but the offer was declined. Almirante Latorre was used during the Second World War for Chilean neutrality patrols. The ship remained active until 1951, when an accident in its engine room killed three crewmen. Moored at Talcahuano, the battleship became a storage facility for fuel oil. It was decommissioned in October 1958, and was sold in February 1959 to be broken up for scrap in Japan. Almirante Latorre was taken under tow by the tug Cambrian Salvos on 29 May 1959, and reached Yokohama, Japan, at the end of August, though the scrapping process did not begin immediately on arrival.
### Almirante Cochrane/Eagle in British service
Eagle was used for trials throughout 1920. As the concept of aircraft carriers was still very new, the lessons learned were incorporated in a 1921–23 refit. Its official sea trials were conducted in September 1923, and it was commissioned on 26 February 1924. The new ship was sent to the Mediterranean Fleet in June, and alternated between refits in the United Kingdom (1926, 1929) and the Mediterranean until 1931, when Eagle was sent to show the flag on a South American cruise. Between its major refits in 1931–32 and 1936, Eagle was sent to the China Station before rotating back to the Mediterranean. After 1936, it was sent back to the Far East, and was there when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. For the next seven months, Eagle was used for anti-raider patrols, but when one of its own aircraft bombs exploded on board in March 1940, the carrier was forced to sail to Singapore for repairs. Soon after, Eagle was again moved to the Mediterranean, where it protected convoys until May 1941, when it was sent to Gibraltar. The ship spent the next several months in the South Atlantic, on guard against German raiders.
In September, a major fire severely damaged Eagle, so it was sent back to the United Kingdom. The refit lasted from October 1941 to February 1942, and it was quickly sent to reinforce Force H. It was employed to ferry fighters to Malta in attempts to keep the besieged island under British control. As part of this duty, it was used to cover a convoy in August 1942 (Operation Pedestal); during the voyage, Eagle was sunk in four minutes by four torpedoes from the German submarine .
## Specifications
Almirante Latorre closely resembled the British Iron Duke class, the major difference being that the Chilean ship was longer, had less forecastle but more quarterdeck, and had larger funnels along with an aft mast. The ship was 28,100 long tons (28,600 t) standard and 31,610 long tons (32,120 t) at full load. At 661 feet (201 m) overall, it was 39 feet (12 m) longer than the Iron Duke-class; it had a beam of 92 feet (28 m) and a mean draft of 29 feet (8.8 m).
The ship's main battery was composed of ten 14-inch/45 caliber guns mounted in five dual turrets. The arrangement was the same as for the Iron Duke class, with two turrets superfiring forward and a single turret amidships separated from the aft superfiring pair by superstructure and a mast. Built by the Elswick Ordnance Company, the guns were able to fire a 1,586-pound (719 kg) shell at a muzzle velocity of 1507 ft/s (764 m/s) to a maximum range of 24,400 yards (22,300 m). They were able to depress to −5° and elevate to 20°. Fourteen of these guns were manufactured, ten mounted on Almirante Latorre and four kept for use as spares. The latter were kept by the United Kingdom after the sale to Chile and scrapped in 1922, while those built for Almirante Cochrane were at least originally kept for potential later use on Almirante Latorre. The secondary battery was originally composed of sixteen 6-inch Mark XI, two 3-inch 20 cwt anti-aircraft guns, four 3-pounders, and four submerged 21-inch torpedo tubes. The two 6-inch guns located farthest aft were removed in 1916, as they were affected by blast damage from the amidships 14-inch turret. During the 1929 refit in the United Kingdom, four additional anti-aircraft guns were placed in the aft superstructure.
Almirante Latorre was powered by steam turbines manufactured by Brown–Curtis and Parsons, which put out 37,000 shaft horsepower, and 21 Yarrow boilers. Together, these turned four propellers which drove the ship through the water at a maximum speed of 22.75 knots (26.18 mph; 42.13 km/h). 3,300 metric tons (3,200 long tons) of coal and 520 metric tons (510 long tons) of oil could be carried, giving the ship a maximum theoretical range of 4,400 nautical miles (5,100 mi; 8,100 km) at 10 knots (12 mph; 19 km/h).
The battleship's armor was composed of a 9-to-4-inch (229 to 102 mm) belt, 4.5-to-3-inch (114 to 76 mm) bulkheads, 10-to-4-inch (254 to 102 mm) barbettes, 10-inch (254 mm) turret faces, a 4-to-3-inch (102 to 76 mm) turret roof, a 11-inch (280 mm) conning tower, and 4-to-1-inch (102 to 25 mm) armoured decks.
## Endnotes
|
13,380,735 |
Tropical Depression Ten (2007)
| 1,171,669,600 |
Atlantic tropical cyclone
|
[
"2007 Atlantic hurricane season",
"Atlantic tropical depressions",
"Hurricanes in Florida",
"Tropical cyclones in 2007"
] |
Tropical Depression Ten was a short-lived tropical cyclone that made landfall on the Florida Panhandle in September 2007. The system developed as a subtropical depression on September 21 in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico from the interaction of a tropical wave, the tail end of a cold front, and an upper-level low. Initially containing a poorly defined circulation and intermittent thunderstorm activity, the system transitioned into a tropical depression after convection increased over the center. Tracking northwestward, the depression moved ashore near Fort Walton Beach early on September 22 and dissipated over southeastern Alabama shortly thereafter.
Initially the depression was forecast to move ashore as a minimal tropical storm, and the threat of the depression prompted state of emergency declarations in Mississippi and Louisiana. It was the first tropical cyclone to threaten the New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina and the destructive 2005 hurricane season. Overall impact from the cyclone was minor and largely limited to light rainfall. However, the precursor system spawned a damaging tornado in Eustis, Florida, where 20 houses were destroyed and 30 more were damaged.
## Meteorological history
Tropical Depression Ten formed from the complex interaction between an upper-level low, a tropical wave that produced Tropical Storm Ingrid, and the tail end of a cold front. By September 17, the system produced widespread thunderstorm activity over The Bahamas and western Atlantic Ocean. The upper-level low over the Florida Panhandle increased convection across the area, and on September 18 the system began crossing Florida. Initially very disorganized, surface pressures gradually decreased across the region, with a weak low-pressure area developing on September 19.
A reconnaissance aircraft flight into the system on September 20 reported a well-defined low and strong wind gusts in squalls as the system tracked into the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, along with limited and disorganized thunderstorm activity. Convection gradually became better organized, with a well-defined band in its eastern semicircle and intermittent thunderstorm activity near the center. Despite an overall disorganized structure, with a poorly defined circulation and an upper-level low aloft, the National Hurricane Center initiated advisories on Subtropical Depression Ten at 1500 UTC on September 21 while it was located about 40 miles (64 km) south of St. Vincent Island, Florida, citing "the potential for additional development right along the coastline." In post-analysis, it was classified a subtropical cyclone three hours earlier.
With a mid-level ridge to its northwest, the subtropical depression was anticipated to parallel the coastline of the Gulf Coast of the United States. As a result, it was forecast to attain winds of 45 mph (72 km/h) and move ashore along southern Mississippi. The circulation became better defined as convection modestly increased over the center, and within six hours of its development the system transitioned into a tropical depression. The cyclone continued tracking northwestward, making landfall around 0000 UTC on September 22 near Fort Walton Beach, Florida, with winds of 35 mph (56 km/h). The cloud pattern deteriorated as it tracked inland, and 3 hours after it moved ashore the National Hurricane Center issued its last advisory on the depression. As the depression tracked into Alabama, it became increasingly disorganized, and the system dissipated as a tropical cyclone early on September 22. Its remnant surface low continued west-northwest before dissipating near the Louisiana/Texas border early on September 23.
## Preparations and impact
The combination of wind shear and low-level helicity produced moderate convection across central Florida in association with the precursor low pressure system. Late on September 20, a supercell developed near Lake Apopka, and tracking quickly northward it spawned an EF1 tornado near Eustis; the tornado tracked for 1.83 mi (2.95 km) and reached winds of about 100 mph (160 km/h). The tornado destroyed 20 homes, left 30 others severely damaged, injured one person, and caused power outages for about 300 people. Damage totaled \$6.2 million (2007 USD). Tornadoes were also reported near Marianna and Chipley. The precursor low pressure system also generated lightning that struck and killed a man in Hendry County, Florida.
Outer rainbands began affecting coastal sections of the Florida Panhandle by about 12 hours prior to the formation of the depression. Coinciding with the first advisory on the depression, the National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning from Apalachicola, Florida, westward to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Shortly thereafter, an inland tropical storm warning was issued for Pearl River, Walthall, and Pike counties in Mississippi and Washington Parish in Louisiana. Additionally, the New Orleans National Weather Service issued a coastal flood watch for four parishes in southeastern Louisiana. In Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour declared a state of emergency. Officials ordered a mandatory evacuation for residents in shallow areas and in mobile homes for Jackson, Harrison, and Hancock counties. Officials in New Orleans opened three emergency shelters, citing the potential need of shelter for citizens in about 17,000 FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina. Due to the threat of the cyclone, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency and placed the state's National Guard and other disaster services on reserve.
Waves of about 5 ft (1.5 m) and rip currents were reported along the west coast of Florida. However, no beach erosion was reported. Rainfall associated with the system peaked at 7.29 in (185 mm) at Hastings. Elsewhere, rainfall totals reached 1.46 in (37 mm) in Albany, Georgia, and 0.51 in (13 mm) in Dothan, Alabama. Wind gusts from the storm peaked at 46 mph (74 km/h) in Milton, Florida, which blew down a few trees in Escambia County. Overall damage from the depression was minimal. Storm surge ranged from 2.5 to 4.1 feet (0.76 to 1.25 m) along the Panhandle.
Prior to the storm's development, several oil and gas companies removed unneeded workers from offshore oil platforms in the northern Gulf of Mexico; Shell Oil Company evacuated about 700 employees, while Noble Energy removed its workforce of about 300 people from two oil rigs. ExxonMobil cut its output by about 1,000 barrels of oil and 55,000 cubic feet (1,600 m<sup>3</sup>). With 27.7% of the daily crude oil production halted due to the depression, oil prices rose further after days of increasing levels, and on September 20 reached a record rate of over \$84 per barrel.
### Tornadoes
## See also
- List of Florida hurricanes (2000–present)
- Timeline of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season
|
9,930,232 |
Nigel (bishop of Ely)
| 1,151,668,162 |
Treasurer of England (c. 1100–1169)
|
[
"1100s births",
"1169 deaths",
"12th-century English Roman Catholic bishops",
"Anglo-Normans",
"Bishops of Ely",
"Lord High Treasurers of England",
"Year of birth uncertain"
] |
Nigel (c. 1100 – 1169) was an Anglo-Norman clergyman and administrator who served as Bishop of Ely from 1133 to 1169. He came from an ecclesiastical family; his uncle Roger of Salisbury was a bishop and government minister for King Henry I, and other relatives also held offices in the English Church and government. Nigel owed his advancement to his uncle, as did Nigel's probable brother Alexander, who like Nigel was advanced to episcopal status. Nigel was educated on the continent before becoming a royal administrator. He served as Treasurer of England under King Henry, before being appointed to the see, or bishopric, of Ely in 1133. His tenure was marked by conflicts with the monks of his cathedral chapter, who believed that Nigel kept income for himself that should properly have gone to them.
Following the accession in 1135 of Henry's successor, King Stephen, Nigel remained as treasurer only briefly before his family was ousted from political office by the new king. Nigel rebelled and deserted to Stephen's rival Matilda, but eventually reconciled with Stephen. Although he subsequently held some minor administrative posts, he never regained high office under Stephen. On the king's death in 1154, Nigel was returned to the treasurership by the new king, Henry II. Nigel's second tenure as treasurer saw him return the administration to the practices of Henry I. He withdrew from much of his public work after around 1164, following an attack of paralysis. He was succeeded as treasurer by his son, Richard fitzNeal, whom he had trained in the operations of the Exchequer, or Treasury of England. Most historians assess that Nigel's administrative abilities were excellent, and he is considered to have been more talented as an administrator than as a religious figure.
## Background and early life
Nigel's date of birth is uncertain, but it is likely to have been some time around 1100. Historians occasionally refer to him as Nigel Poor or Nigel of Ely, but before his elevation to the episcopate he was commonly known as Nigel, the bishop's nephew, or Nigel, the treasurer. He was probably a Norman by ancestry although he was brought up in England, which in 1066 had been conquered by the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror. Following William's death in 1087 his realm was divided between two of his sons. His middle son, William Rufus, inherited the Kingdom of England, and the Duchy of Normandy passed to his eldest son, Robert Curthose. The youngest son, Henry, received a grant of money, which he used to purchase a lordship in Normandy. The brothers fought amongst themselves for the next twenty years; the initial conflict was between Rufus and Robert, but after Rufus' death in 1100 Henry, who succeeded Rufus as King of England, also became involved. Eventually, in 1106, Henry captured Robert, imprisoned him for life, and took control of Normandy.
Nigel's uncle Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, saw to Nigel's education at the school of Laon in France, where he probably studied mathematics under Anselm of Laon. It is likely that his father was Roger's brother Humphrey. Other students at Laon included William de Corbeil, later Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert de Bethune, who became Bishop of Hereford, Geoffrey le Breton, future Archbishop of Rouen, and other men subsequently to hold bishoprics in the Anglo-Norman dominions.
When he took vows as a cleric is unrecorded, but Nigel held a prebend, an ecclesiastical office in the cathedral, in the see of London before holding one of the offices of archdeacon in the diocese of Salisbury, although which archdeaconry he held is unclear. Most modern historians believe that Nigel was brother to Alexander of Lincoln, later Bishop of Lincoln, but this relationship is not specifically attested in the sources, which state merely that both were Roger's nephews. William of Malmesbury, a medieval chronicler, considered both Alexander and Nigel to be well educated and diligent. Nigel attended the consecration of Bernard as Bishop of St David's at Westminster in 1115, and may have returned to England from Laon by 1112. From the time of his return until around 1120 he served as a royal chaplain and attested a number of royal charters.
## Under Henry I
Nigel first became Treasurer in the reign of Henry I, and seems to have held that office from around 1126. He was already a receiver, or auditor and administrator, in the treasury of Normandy, and he served as treasurer for both realms, moving with the king and court between England and Normandy. The date of his appointment is unclear, as until he became a bishop, royal charters listed him as "nephew of the bishop" (Roger of Salisbury) rather than by any office he held. In 1131, though, he was listed in a papal letter as "Nigel, the treasurer", which securely establishes that he held the office at that date.
In 1133, Roger of Salisbury secured the bishopric of Ely for Nigel. Ely had been without a bishop since 1131; after the two-year vacancy, King Henry made the appointment because he was settling outstanding business before leaving England to return to Normandy. At this time Henry also appointed Geoffrey Rufus to Durham, and Æthelwold to the newly created Diocese of Carlisle. Nigel was consecrated on 1 October 1133 at Lambeth by William de Corbeil – who was by then Archbishop of Canterbury – possibly with the assistance of Roger of Salisbury. Nigel continued to hold the office of treasurer until 1136, when he was replaced by a relative, Adelelm, although the historian C. Warren Hollister placed his departure from the office in 1133 with his appointment to Ely. The Constitutio domus regis, or Establishment of the King's Household, may have been written by Nigel, or possibly for his use, and probably was composed around 1135.
Ely had until 1109 been an independent monastery, but its last abbot, Richard, had proposed to the king a plan by which the abbey would become a bishopric, presumably with the abbot himself as bishop. Richard died before the proposal could be put into operation, but in 1109, the custodian of the vacant abbey secured permission to make the change, and became the first Bishop of Ely. However, the administrative changes needed to make the abbey into a bishopric took longer, and were still unresolved at the time of Nigel's appointment. Regardless, Nigel was constantly at court, as shown by his appearance 31 times as a witness to charters during the last ten years of Henry I's reign. This left little time for administration of his diocese, and Nigel appointed a married clergyman, Ranulf of Salisbury, to administer the diocese. Ranulf seems to have tyrannized the monks of the cathedral chapter, and Nigel appears to have done little to protect his monks from abuse.
Later, during the early years of Stephen's reign, Nigel claimed to have uncovered a plot led by Ranulf to assassinate Normans. The exact nature of the conspiracy is obscure, and it is unclear what prompted it. The medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis claimed that Ranulf planned to kill all the Normans in the government and hand the country over to the Scots. After the discovery of the plot, Ranulf fled the country and Nigel made peace with the monks of his cathedral chapter.
Another source of conflict with his monks was the desire of the cathedral chapter to enjoy the same "liberty" as a corporate body that the bishops did in the diocese. This liberty was a group of rights that the abbey had originally held, and had transferred to the bishop when the abbey became a bishopric. The rights included sake and soke, or the right to command dues from the land, and the right to levy tolls. They also included the right to hold courts dealing with theft. Around 1135, Nigel conceded this point to the monks. Although he restored some of the lands that had been taken from the monks by Ranulf, the Liber Eliensis (the house chronicle of the monks of Ely) continued to decry his administration of the diocese and the lands of the cathedral chapter, alleging that "he kept back for himself some properties of the church which he wanted, and very good ones they were". The chronicle contains a number of complaints that Nigel oppressed the monks or despoiled them.
## Stephen's early reign
Following King Henry's death in 1135, the succession was disputed between the king's nephews – Stephen and his elder brother, Theobald II, Count of Champagne – and Henry's surviving legitimate child Matilda, usually known as the Empress Matilda because of her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V. King Henry's only legitimate son, William, had died in 1120. After Matilda was widowed in 1125, she returned to her father, who married her to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. All the magnates of England and Normandy were required to declare fealty to Matilda as Henry's heir, but when Henry I died in 1135, Stephen rushed to England and had himself crowned before either Theobald or Matilda could react. The Norman barons accepted Stephen as Duke of Normandy, and Theobald contented himself with his possessions in France. Matilda, though, was less sanguine, and secured the support of the Scottish king, David, who was her maternal uncle, and in 1138 also the support of her half-brother, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, an illegitimate son of Henry I.
After Stephen's accession, Nigel was at first retained as treasurer, but the king came to suspect him and his family of secretly supporting Matilda. The prime movers behind Stephen's suspicions against the bishops were the Beaumont family, headed by the twin brothers Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Waleran, Count of Meulan,[^1] who wished to be the main advisors of the king. Roger, Alexander, and Nigel together held key castles, including Salisbury, Devizes, Sherborne, Malmesbury, Sleaford, and Newark. The Beaumonts alleged that Roger and his family were fortifying the castles they held in preparation for turning them over to Matilda. They urged the king to confiscate the castles before they were lost. Although the Gesta Stephani, or Deeds of King Stephen, a medieval chronicle of the events of Stephen's reign, alleges that Roger was disloyal to Stephen, the evidence is against such action by Roger, as he had been an opponent of Matilda since 1126, when she was first put forward as her father's heir. Roger and his family also had been early supporters of Stephen's seizure of the crown after Henry I's death. The contemporary chronicler Orderic Vitalis felt that Roger's family were going to betray the king, but William of Malmesbury believed that the allegations were based on envy from "powerful laymen". Whatever Roger's position, Nigel's own position on Matilda is less clear, and it is possible that he was never as opposed to her as his uncle. No evidence survives that he was estranged from Stephen, however, as Nigel continued to witness charters throughout the first four years of Stephen's reign. According to the historian Marjorie Chibnall, Nigel's family may have been caught up in a dispute between Henry of Blois and the Beaumonts.
## Arrest of the bishops
In 1139 supporters of Roger and his family brawled in public with some men who supported Alan of Brittany. The brawl may have been provoked by the Beaumonts, for Alan was often associated with them. At a court held at Oxford in June 1139, Stephen required Roger of Salisbury, Alexander of Lincoln, and Nigel to surrender their castles as a consequence of the brawl. When Roger and his family delayed, the king ordered their arrest. Nigel managed to escape arrest by fleeing to the castle of Devizes, and the king followed and began a siege. The king threatened to hang Roger in front of the castle unless it capitulated, and Nigel, under pressure from Roger's wife, surrendered the castle after the siege had lasted three days. All three bishops then submitted and surrendered their secular offices and castles. They were, however, allowed to retain their dioceses. Nigel surrendered Newark Castle and Sleaford Castle, both of which had been constructed by Alexander. Stephen promptly gave Newark to Robert, Earl of Leicester, who was in turn excommunicated by Alexander of Lincoln.
Stephen's brother, Henry of Blois, who was Bishop of Winchester and papal legate in England, called an ecclesiastical council at Winchester on 29 August 1139, and summoned the king to answer charges that he had unlawfully arrested clergy. The king refused to attend, and sent a representative instead. After meeting for a few days, the council was dismissed on 1 September without deciding anything except to appeal to the pope. In the end, the appeal never reached Rome. Part of the problem confronting the assembled bishops was that Stephen had not expelled Roger's family from their ecclesiastical offices, merely their secular ones. Stephen's representatives argued that the bishops had given up their castles and money voluntarily to avoid secular charges. The defence taken by the king was not novel; it had been used before by William I and William II against Odo of Bayeux and William de St-Calais, respectively.
Traditionally, the arrest of the bishops has been seen as a turning point in Stephen's reign, and the event that turned the ecclesiastical hierarchy against him. Recent historians have held a lively debate on the issue; a few still hold to the traditional interpretation, but most have decided that reactions in the English church were more ambivalent. One modern historian, David Crouch, believes that the arrest of the bishops signalled the beginnings of the Anarchy, not because of any alienation of the church, but through court politics, where Stephen showed himself incapable of manipulating the factions of his court. The ascendency of the Beaumonts was marked by the placement of one of their protégés, Philip de Harcourt, as Chancellor.
Roger died in December 1139 while in the king's custody. After the death of his uncle, Nigel, then in East Anglia, revolted. In January 1140, he fortified the Isle of Ely, but was soon besieged and forced to flee. Even his own cathedral chapter refused to support him, and his revolt collapsed in January. Nigel took refuge at the court of Stephen's rival, the Empress Matilda, who had landed in England in the south on 30 September 1139 in a bid to take the throne. The revolt stood little chance of succeeding, for there were no supporters of Matilda close to East Anglia, and it is likely that Nigel reacted more out of fear and anger at his uncle's death than anything else. It appears likely that Nigel appealed to Pope Innocent II at this time, for in October 1140 Innocent issued a papal bull, or papal instruction, ordering the restoration to Nigel of the lands of his bishopric, and it appears that after the capture of Stephen, Matilda managed to restore Nigel to Ely briefly. In 1141 Nigel, along with his brother Alexander, was one of the supporters of Matilda who, after the capture of Stephen by Matilda's forces, reached an agreement with Henry of Blois to replace Stephen with Matilda on the throne. Ultimately, this agreement came to nothing when Matilda's chief supporter, her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, was captured and later exchanged for Stephen. Stephen's release meant that the king was free to send Geoffrey de Mandeville against Nigel, and Nigel submitted to the king, probably in 1142.
## Stephen's later reign
In 1143 Nigel became involved in a quarrel with the powerful Henry of Blois. Charges of depriving a priest of a church, giving church property to laymen, and encouraging sedition were brought against Nigel, and he was forced to go to Rome to defend himself, only reaching there in 1144. He did not return to his diocese until 1145. He probably accompanied Theobald of Bec, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who went there around this time on separate business. While he was there, Pope Lucius II issued a number of rulings in Nigel's favour, ordering his restitution to Ely. He was then finally reconciled with Stephen by paying a fine of £200 and offering his son Richard fitzNeal as a hostage. While Nigel was at Rome, Ely was attacked by the king's forces. The monks sent to Geoffrey de Mandeville for aid, and Geoffrey came and occupied the Isle of Ely, while the king's forces occupied the lands of the diocese outside the Isle. Both occupying forces did damage to the lands of the diocese and the cathedral chapter. The monks, in the Liber Eliensis, complained that Nigel had taken items from the church to finance his trip, and that they were required to help contribute to the bribe when Nigel was reconciled with Stephen.
By 1147, Nigel was again witnessing Stephen's charters, and in 1153 or 1154 he was named in a grant of lands to St Radegund's Priory in Cambridge. He assisted with the consecration of Hilary of Chichester as Bishop of Chichester in August 1147. He took part in shire courts in both Norfolk and Suffolk in 1150, and continued to assist with episcopal consecrations throughout the remainder of Stephen's reign. No records exist of him being involved with treasury affairs during this time. His witnessing of charters is sparse, and almost always in company with other bishops; this suggests that he was at court only for councils or other similar events. Nigel was a witness to Stephen's charter that left England to Matilda's son, Henry of Anjou. When Henry succeeded Stephen, Nigel was present at the coronation.
## Return to the Exchequer
After the accession of Henry II, Nigel was summoned to reorganize the Exchequer, or treasury, that was responsible for the production of the government's financial records, including the Pipe Rolls. The king had to ask Nigel several times to return before the bishop agreed, and one reason for Nigel's reluctance may have been that he would have to work with Robert, Earl of Leicester, one of the Beaumonts, who had been responsible for turning Stephen against Nigel's family in 1139. Another of Nigel's colleagues in the administration was a layman, Richard de Lucy, who served as a justice until 1178. Nigel was the only surviving minister of Henry I, and his knowledge of the Exchequer was needed to help reorganize the revenues of the king and restore administrative practices lost during Stephen's reign. The lone pipe roll to survive from Henry I's reign, for the year 1130, may be Nigel's own copy, brought with him to the Exchequer when he returned under Henry II. Nigel was able to increase the revenues compared to what had been collected under Stephen, but he was unable to quickly return them to the amounts collected under Henry I. It may have been Nigel who urged the king to attempt to recover estates that had been alienated during Stephen's reign.
The pipe roll for 1155–1156 has several entries which declare that Nigel was making decisions about monetary affairs and issuing writs, but later pipe rolls do not contain any such entries. It appears likely that after the initial reorganization of the Exchequer, Nigel's involvement lessened. He continued to be active, though, and obtained tax exemptions and other privileges until his death in 1169. His son, Richard fitzNeal, who is the main source for information about Nigel's career in the Exchequer, stated that he fulfilled Nigel's treasury duties when Nigel was ill. Nigel continued to spar with Robert, the Earl of Leicester, and Richard fitzNeal relays a story about Nigel and Robert confronting each other at the Exchequer over traditional exemptions of the barons of the Exchequer, or judges of the Exchequer. Among the reforms carried out by Nigel were the restoration of the "blanch farm" system, whereby a random sample of coins was assayed and any shortage was collected from the sheriff, and the restoration of collections from a swath of counties that had quit paying taxes during Stephen's reign. The most substantial change was the return to a unified system of finances, which in turn required a reconciliation of the two different systems in use by Stephen and Matilda. Despite Nigel's reinstatement to the Exchequer, and the nomination of his son as treasurer, Nigel did not enjoy the power that his uncle had wielded under Henry I. The exact date of Richard's appointment as treasurer is obscure, but it was sometime between 1158 and 1160, as he is securely attested as treasurer in 1160. The Liber Eliensis states that Nigel paid the king £400 to secure the office for Richard. Some historians have seen Nigel as Henry II's "minister of finance".
Nigel also served as a royal justice under Henry II. Although his relations with the government had improved, his relations with the monks of his cathedral chapter, which had never been good, continued to be marked by quarrels. In 1156 the English Pope Adrian IV threatened to suspend Nigel from office unless the bishop restored all the lands that had belonged to the church when Nigel became bishop. The restitution was hampered by the absence of the king from England, and the dispute dragged on until finally it was resolved by Nigel pledging in front of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, to restore the lands. By 1158 Nigel had managed to restore enough possessions that Adrian relaxed the conditions. Even this did not end the quarrels with the monks, as Nigel then named a married clerk as sacrist of Ely, an action which was condemned by Thomas Becket, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Nigel did manage to secure a reduction in the assessment of knight's fees due from the diocese, from the sixty fees that were due under Henry I to forty in 1166.
## Death and legacy
Nigel died on 30 May 1169. In either 1164 or in 1166, or possibly both, he had been struck by paralysis, and after this he seems to have withdrawn from active affairs. He took little part in the disputes between the king and Thomas Becket, although he did agree with his fellow bishops who opposed the king's attempt to reduce clerical benefits. He may have been buried at Ely, where a 12th-century marble slab possibly marks his tomb.
Nigel was a married bishop, and his son Richard fitzNeal was later Lord Treasurer and Bishop of London. Another son was William, called William the Englishman. Richard, who wrote the Dialogus de Scaccario, or Dialogue concerning the Exchequer about the procedures of the Exchequer, had been taught those procedures by his father. Nigel's uncle Roger had at least one son, Roger, who was King Stephen's chancellor; Adelelm, who succeeded Nigel as treasurer after his first term, was probably Roger's son also. Another relative was William of Ely, who succeeded Richard fitzNeal as treasurer in 1196, although the exact relationship is unclear.
Nigel was active in draining the Fens, the swampy land around Ely, to increase the agricultural lands around his bishopric. He also fortified the Isle of Ely with stone defences, probably starting around 1140. The remains of one castle on Cherry Hill in Ely probably date to Nigel's fortifications. Early in his time as bishop he was active in recovering the church's lands that had been granted to knights by his predecessors, and soon after his consecration he ordered an inquest made into the lands actually owned by the diocese and cathedral chapter. The bishop spent most of his life in debt, but in the year he died he managed to clear it with his son's help. The monks of his cathedral chapter did not like the fact that they were required to pay for the bishop's appeals to Rome to recover his see, or pay for regaining the king's favour. Their dislike of their bishop is evident in the Liber Eliensis. The art historian C. R. Dodwell wrote of Nigel's efforts:
> When ... Nigel ... needed to raise money in order to repair his own political fortunes, he stripped down, sold, or used as security, a quite astounding number of Ely's monastic treasures. These numbered Crucifixes of gold and silver from the Anglo-Saxon past, and they included an alb with gold-embroidered apparels, given by St Æthelwold, and a chasuble, given by King Edgar, which was almost all of gold. A gold and bejewelled textile covering ... was sold to the Bishop of Lincoln, Alexander, who took it with him to Rome as a gift of particular splendour. It is a biting commentary on attitudes of the Anglo-Norman episcopy to Anglo-Saxon art, that it was left to the pope to point out that such an artistic heirloom should never have left Ely in the first place and to order its return.
Most historians have seen Nigel as an administrator, not a religious bishop. The historian David Knowles wrote that Nigel "had devoted all his energies and abilities to matters purely secular; in the department of financial administration he was supreme, and more than any other man he helped to ensure the continuity and development of the excellent administrative practice initiated under Henry I". The historian W. L. Warren said that "Stephen probably paid dearly for the dismissal of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and Bishop Nigel of Ely, for the expertise of the exchequer was lodged in their expertise." Whatever Nigel's administrative talent, his ecclesiastical abilities are generally held to be low; the Gesta Stephani'' says both he and Alexander were "men who loved display and were rash in their reckless presumption ... disregarding the holy and simple manner of life that befits a Christian priest they devoted themselves so utterly to warfare and the vanities of this world that whenever they attended court by appointment they ... aroused general astonishment on account of the extraordinary concourse of knights by which they were surrounded on every side."
[^1]: Yoshitake "Arrest of the Bishops" Journal of Medieval History''' p. 98
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