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Spanish flu
| 1,172,812,285 |
1918–1920 global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus
|
[
"1918 disease outbreaks",
"1919 disease outbreaks",
"1920 disease outbreaks",
"20th-century epidemics",
"Pandemics",
"Spanish flu"
] |
The 1918-20 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in the state of Kansas in the United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors in the belligerent countries suppressed bad news to maintain morale, but newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the "Spanish flu" misnomer. Limited historical epidemiological data make the pandemic's geographic origin indeterminate, with competing hypotheses on the initial spread.
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the young and old, with a higher survival rate in-between, but this pandemic had unusually high mortality for young adults. Scientists offer several explanations for the high mortality, including a six-year climate anomaly affecting migration of disease vectors with increased likelihood of spread through bodies of water. The virus was particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm, ravaging the stronger immune system of young adults, although the viral infection was apparently no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, exacerbated by the war, promoted bacterial superinfection, killing most of the victims after a typically prolonged death bed.
The 1918 Spanish flu was the first of three flu pandemics caused by H1N1 influenza A virus; the most recent one was the 2009 swine flu pandemic. The 1977 Russian flu was also caused by H1N1 virus.
## Etymologies
This pandemic was known by many different names—some old, some new—depending on place, time, and context. The etymology of alternative names historicises the scourge and its effects on people who would only learn years later that invisible viruses caused influenza. The lack of scientific answers led the Sierra Leone Weekly News (Freetown) to suggest a biblical framing in July 1918, using an interrogative from Exodus 16 in ancient Hebrew: "One thing is for certain—the doctors are at present flabbergasted; and we suggest that rather than calling the disease influenza they should for the present until they have it in hand, say Man hu—'What is it?'"
### Descriptive names
Outbreaks of influenza-like illness were documented in 1916–17 at British military hospitals in Étaples, France, and just across the English Channel at Aldershot, England. Clinical indications in common with the 1918 pandemic included rapid symptom progression to a "dusky" heliotrope cyanosis of the face. This characteristic blue-violet cyanosis in expiring patients led to the name 'purple death'.
The Aldershot physicians later wrote in The Lancet, "the influenza pneumococcal purulent bronchitis we and others described in 1916 and 1917 is fundamentally the same condition as the influenza of this present pandemic." This "purulent bronchitis" is not yet linked to the same A/H1N1 virus, but it may be a precursor.
In 1918, 'epidemic influenza' (Italian: influenza, influence), also known at the time as 'the grip' (French: la grippe, grasp), appeared in Kansas in the U.S. during late spring, and early reports from Spain began appearing on 21 May. Reports from both places called it 'three-day fever' (fiebre de los tres días).
### Associative names
Many alternative names are exonyms in the practice of making new infectious diseases seem foreign. This pattern was observed even before the 1889–1890 pandemic, also known as the 'Russian flu', when the Russians already called epidemic influenza the 'Chinese catarrh', the Germans called it the 'Russian pest', while the Italians in turn called it the 'German disease'. These epithets were re-used in the 1918 pandemic, along with new ones.
#### 'Spanish' influenza
Outside Spain, the disease was soon misnamed 'Spanish influenza'. In a 2 June 1918 The Times of London dispatch titled, "The Spanish Epidemic," a correspondent in Madrid reported over 100,000 victims of, "The unknown disease...clearly of a gripal character," without referring to "Spanish influenza" directly. Three weeks later The Times reported that, "Everybody thinks of it as the 'Spanish' influenza to-day." Three days after that an advertisement appeared in The Times for Formamint tablets to prevent "Spanish influenza". When it reached Moscow, Pravda announced, "Ispánka (the Spanish lady) is in town," making 'the Spanish lady' another common name.
The outbreak did not originate in Spain (see below), but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale; so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, including King Alfonso XIII's illness, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic. The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected.
In an October 1918 "Madrid Letter" to the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Spanish official protested, "we were surprised to learn that the disease was making ravages in other countries, and that people there were calling it the 'Spanish grip'. And wherefore Spanish? ...this epidemic was not born in Spain, and this should be recorded as a historic vindication." But before this letter could be published, The Serbian Newspaper (Corfu) said, "Various countries have been assigning the origin of this imposing guest to each other for quite some time, and at one point in time they agreed to assign its origin to the kind and neutral Spain..."
#### Other exonyms
French press initially used 'American flu', but adopted 'Spanish flu' in lieu of antagonizing an ally. In the spring of 1918, British soldiers called it 'Flanders flu', while German soldiers used 'Flandern-Fieber' (Flemish fever), both after a famous battlefield in Belgium where many soldiers on both sides fell ill. In Senegal it was named 'Brazilian flu', and in Brazil, 'German flu'. In Spain it was also known as the 'French flu' (gripe francesa), or the 'Naples Soldier' (Soldado de Nápoles), after a popular song from a zarzuela. Spanish flu (gripe española) is now a common name in Spain, but remains controversial there.
Other names derived from geopolitical borders and social boundaries. In Poland it was the 'Bolshevik disease', while the Bolsheviks referred to it as the 'Kirghiz disease'. Some Africans called it a 'white man's sickness', but in South Africa, white men also used the ethnophaulism 'kaffersiekte' (lit. negro disease). Japan blamed sumo wrestlers for bringing the disease home from a match in Taiwan by calling it 'sumo flu' (Sumo Kaze), even though three top wrestlers died there.
World Health Organization 'best practices' first published in 2015 now aim to prevent social stigma by no longer associating culturally significant names with new diseases, listing "Spanish flu" under "examples to be avoided". Many authors now eschew calling this the Spanish flu, instead using variations of '1918–19/20 flu/influenza pandemic'.
### Local names
Some language endonyms did not name specific regions or groups of people. Examples specific to this pandemic include: Northern Ndebele: 'Malibuzwe' (let enquiries be made concerning it), Swahili: 'Ugonjo huo kichwa na kukohoa na kiuno' (the disease of head and coughing and spine), Yao: 'chipindupindu' (disease from seeking to make a profit in wartime), Otjiherero: 'kaapitohanga' (disease which passes through like a bullet), and Persian: 'nakhushi-yi bad' (disease of the wind).
### Other names
This outbreak was also commonly known as the 'great influenza epidemic', after the 'great war', a common name for World War I before World War II. French military doctors originally called it 'disease 11' (maladie onze). German doctors downplayed the severity by calling it 'pseudo influenza' (Latin: pseudo, false), while in Africa, doctors tried to get patients to take it more seriously by calling it 'influenza vera' (Latin: vera, true).
A children's song from the 1889–90 flu pandemic was shortened and adapted into a skipping-rope rhyme popular in 1918. It is a metaphor for the transmissibility of 'Influenza', where that name was clipped to the apheresis 'Enza':
> > I had a little bird,
> > its name was Enza.
> > I opened the window,
> > and in-flu-enza.
## History
### Timeline
#### First wave of early 1918
The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918 with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, United States, despite there having been cases before him. The disease had already been observed 200 miles (320 km) away in Haskell County as early as January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the editors of the U.S. Public Health Service's academic journal Public Health Reports. Within days of the 4 March first case at Camp Funston, 522 men at the camp had reported sick. By 11 March 1918, the virus had reached Queens, New York. Failure to take preventive measures in March/April was later criticized.
As the U.S. had entered World War I, the disease quickly spread from Camp Funston, a major training ground for troops of the American Expeditionary Forces, to other U.S. Army camps and Europe, becoming an epidemic in the Midwest, East Coast, and French ports by April 1918, and reaching the Western Front by the middle of the month. It then quickly spread to the rest of France, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain and in May reached Wrocław and Odessa. After the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), Germany started releasing Russian prisoners of war, who then brought the disease to their country. It reached North Africa, India, and Japan in May, and soon after had likely gone around the world as there had been recorded cases in Southeast Asia in April. In June an outbreak was reported in China. After reaching Australia in July, the wave started to recede.
The first wave of the flu lasted from the first quarter of 1918 and was relatively mild. Mortality rates were not appreciably above normal; in the United States \~75,000 flu-related deaths were reported in the first six months of 1918, compared to \~63,000 deaths during the same time period in 1915. In Madrid, Spain, fewer than 1,000 people died from influenza between May and June 1918. There were no reported quarantines during the first quarter of 1918. However, the first wave caused a significant disruption in the military operations of World War I, with three-quarters of French troops, half the British forces, and over 900,000 German soldiers sick.
#### Deadly second wave of late 1918
The second wave began in the second half of August 1918, probably spreading to Boston, Massachusetts and Freetown, Sierra Leone, by ships from Brest, where it had likely arrived with American troops or French recruits for naval training. From the Boston Navy Yard and Camp Devens (later renamed Fort Devens), about 30 miles west of Boston, other U.S. military sites were soon afflicted, as were troops being transported to Europe. Helped by troop movements, it spread over the next two months to all of North America, and then to Central and South America, also reaching Brazil and the Caribbean on ships. In July 1918, the Ottoman Empire saw its first cases in some soldiers. From Freetown, the pandemic continued to spread through West Africa along the coast, rivers, and the colonial railways, and from railheads to more remote communities, while South Africa received it in September on ships bringing back members of the South African Native Labour Corps returning from France. From there it spread around southern Africa and beyond the Zambezi, reaching Ethiopia in November. On 15 September, New York City saw its first fatality from influenza. The Philadelphia Liberty Loans Parade, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 28 September 1918 to promote government bonds for World War I, resulted in 12,000 deaths after a major outbreak of the illness spread among people who had attended the parade.
From Europe, the second wave swept through Russia in a southwest–northeast diagonal front, as well as being brought to Arkhangelsk by the North Russia intervention, and then spread throughout Asia following the Russian Civil War and the Trans-Siberian railway, reaching Iran (where it spread through the holy city of Mashhad), and then later India in September, as well as China and Japan in October. The celebrations of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 also caused outbreaks in Lima and Nairobi, but by December the wave was mostly over.
The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was much more deadly than the first. The first wave had resembled typical flu epidemics; those most at risk were the sick and elderly, while younger, healthier people recovered easily. October 1918 was the month with the highest fatality rate of the whole pandemic. In the United States, \~292,000 deaths were reported between September–December 1918, compared to \~26,000 during the same time period in 1915. The Netherlands reported over 40,000 deaths from influenza and acute respiratory disease. Bombay reported \~15,000 deaths in a population of 1.1 million. The 1918 flu pandemic in India was especially deadly, with an estimated 12.5–20 million deaths in the last quarter of 1918 alone.
#### Third wave of 1919
Pandemic activity persisted, in general, into 1919 in many places. This persistence in activity is possibly attributable to climate, specifically in the Northern Hemisphere, where it was winter and thus the usual time for influenza activity. The pandemic nonetheless continued into 1919 largely independent of region and climate.
Cases began to rise again in some parts of the United States as early as late November 1918, with the Public Health Service issuing its first report of a "recrudescence of the disease" being felt in "widely scattered localities" in early December. This resurgent activity varied across the country, however, possibly on account of differing restrictions. Michigan, for example, experienced a swift resurgence of influenza that reached its peak in December, possibly as a result of the lifting of the ban on public gatherings. Pandemic interventions, such as bans on public gatherings and the closing of schools, were reimposed in many places in an attempt to suppress the spread.
There was "a very sudden and very marked rise in general death rate" in most cities in January 1919; nearly all experienced "some degree of recrudescence" of the flu in January and February. Significant outbreaks occurred in cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Memphis, Nashville, San Francisco, and St. Louis. By 21 February, with some local variation, influenza activity was reported to have been declining since mid-January in all parts of the country. Following this "first great epidemic period" that had commenced in October 1918, deaths from pneumonia and influenza were "somewhat below average" in the large cities of the United States between May 1919 and January 1920. Nonetheless, nearly 160,000 deaths were attributed to these causes in the first six months of 1919.
It was not until later in the winter and into the spring that a clearer resurgence appeared in Europe. A significant third wave had developed in England and Wales by mid-February, peaking in early March, though it did not fully subside until May. France also experienced a significant wave that peaked in February, alongside the Netherlands. Norway, Finland, and Switzerland saw recrudescences of pandemic activity in March, and Sweden in April.
Much of Spain was affected by "a substantial recrudescent wave" of influenza between January and April 1919. Portugal experienced a resurgence in pandemic activity that lasted from March to September 1919, with the greatest impact being felt on the west coast and in the north of the country; all districts were affected between April and May specifically.
Influenza entered Australia for the first time in January 1919 after a strict maritime quarantine had shielded the country through the latter part of 1918. It assumed epidemic proportions first in Melbourne, peaking in mid-February. The flu soon appeared in neighboring New South Wales and South Australia and then spread across the country throughout the year. New South Wales experienced its first wave of infection between mid-March and late May, while a second, more severe wave occurred in Victoria between April and June.
Land quarantine measures hindered the spread of the disease, resulting in varied experiences of exposures and outbreaks among the various states. Queensland was not infected until late April; Western Australia avoided the disease until early June, and Tasmania remained free from it until mid-August. Out of the six states, Victoria and New South Wales experienced generally more extensive epidemics. Each experienced another significant wave of illness over the winter. The second epidemic in New South Wales was more severe than the first, while Victoria saw a third wave that was somewhat less extensive than its second, more akin to its first.
The disease also reached other parts of the world for the first time in 1919, such as Madagascar, which saw its first cases in April; the outbreak had spread to practically all sections of the island by June. In other parts, influenza recurred in the form of a true "third wave". Hong Kong experienced another outbreak in June, as did South Africa during its fall and winter months in the Southern Hemisphere. New Zealand also experienced some cases in May.
Parts of South America experienced a resurgence of pandemic activity throughout 1919. A third wave hit Brazil between January and June. Between July 1919 and February 1920, Chile, which had been affected for the first time just in October 1918, experienced a severe second wave, with mortality peaking in August 1919. Montevideo similarly experienced a second outbreak between July and September.
The third wave particularly affected Spain, Serbia, Mexico and Great Britain, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was in general less severe than the second wave but still much more deadly than the initial first wave.
#### Fourth wave of 1920
In the Northern Hemisphere, fears of a "recurrence" of the flu grew as fall approached. Experts cited the history of past flu epidemics, such as that of 1889–1890, to predict that such a recurrence a year later was not unlikely, though not all agreed. In September 1919, U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said a return of the flu later in the year would "probably, but by no means certainly," occur. France had readied a public information campaign before the end of the summer, and Britain began preparations in the fall with the manufacture of vaccine.
In Japan, the flu broke out again in December and spread rapidly throughout the country, a fact attributed at the time to the coming of cold weather. Pandemic-related measures were renewed to check the spread of the outbreak, and health authorities recommended the use of masks. The epidemic intensified in the latter part of December before swiftly peaking in January.
Between October 1919 and 23 January 1920, 780,000 cases were reported across the country, with at least 20,000 deaths recorded by that date. This apparently reflected "a condition of severity three times greater than for the corresponding period of" 1918–1919, during Japan's first epidemic. Nonetheless, the disease was regarded as being milder than it had been the year before, albeit more infectious. Despite its rapid peak at the beginning of the year, the outbreak persisted throughout the winter, before subsiding in the spring.
In the United States, there were "almost continuously isolated or solitary cases" of flu throughout the spring and summer months of 1919. An increase in scattered cases became apparent as early as September, but Chicago experienced one of the first major outbreaks of the flu beginning in the middle of January. The Public Health Service announced it would take steps to "localize the epidemic", but the disease was already causing a simultaneous outbreak in Kansas City and quickly spread outward from the center of the country in no clear direction. A few days after its first announcement, PHS issued another assuring that the disease was under the control of state health authorities and that an outbreak of epidemic proportions was not expected.
It became apparent within days of the start of Chicago's explosive growth in cases that the flu was spreading in the city at an even faster rate than in winter 1919, though fewer were dying. Within a week, new cases in the city had surpassed its peak during the 1919 wave. Around the same time, New York City began to see its own sudden increase in cases, and other cities around the country were soon to follow. Certain pandemic restrictions, such as the closing of schools and theaters and the staggering of business hours to avoid congestion, were reimposed in cities like Chicago, Memphis, and New York City. As they had during the epidemic in fall 1918, schools in New York City remained open, while those in Memphis were shuttered as part of more general restrictions on public gatherings.
The fourth wave in the United States subsided as swiftly as it had appeared, reaching a peak in early February. "An epidemic of considerable proportions marked the early months of 1920", the U.S. Mortality Statistics would later note; according to data at this time, the epidemic resulted in one third as many deaths as the 1918–1919 experience. New York City alone reported 6,374 deaths between December 1919 and April 1920, almost twice the number of the first wave in spring 1918. Other U.S. cities including Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis were hit particularly hard, with death rates higher than all of 1918. The Territory of Hawaii experienced its peak of the pandemic in early 1920, recording 1,489 deaths from flu-related causes, compared with 615 in 1918 and 796 in 1919.
Poland experienced a devastating outbreak during the winter months, with its capital Warsaw reaching a peak of 158 deaths in a single week, compared to the peak of 92 reached in December 1918; however, the 1920 epidemic passed in a matter of weeks, while the 1918–1919 wave had developed over the entire second half of 1918. By contrast, the outbreak in western Europe was considered "benign", with the age distribution of deaths beginning to take on that of seasonal flu. Five countries in Europe (Spain, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Switzerland) recorded a late peak between January–April 1920.
Mexico experienced a fourth wave between February and March. In South America, Peru experienced "asynchronous recrudescent waves" throughout the year. A severe third wave hit Lima, the capital city, between January and March, resulting in an all-cause excess mortality rate approximately four times greater than that of the 1918–1919 wave. Ica similarly experienced another severe pandemic wave in 1920, between July and October. A fourth wave also occurred in Brazil, in February.
Korea and Taiwan, both colonies of Japan at this time, also experienced pronounced outbreaks in late 1919 and early 1920.
#### Post-pandemic
By mid-1920, the pandemic was largely considered to be "over" by the public as well as governments. Though parts of Chile experienced a third, milder wave between November 1920 and March 1921, the flu seemed to be mostly absent through the winter of 1920–1921. In the United States, for example, deaths from pneumonia and influenza were "very much lower than for many years".
Influenza began to be reported again from many places in 1921. The pandemic continued to be felt in Chile, where a fourth wave affected seven of its 24 provinces between June and December 1921. The winter of 1921–1922 was the first major reappearance of influenza in the Northern Hemisphere, in many parts its most significant occurrence since the main pandemic in late 1918. Northwestern Europe was particularly affected. All-cause mortality in Holland approximately doubled in January 1922 alone. In Helsinki, a major epidemic (the fifth since 1918) prevailed between November and December 1921. The flu was also widespread in the United States, its prevalence in California reportedly greater in early March 1922 than at any point since 1920.
In the years after 1920, the disease, a novel one in 1918, assumed a more familiar nature, coming to represent at least one form of the "seasonal flu". The virus, H1N1, remained endemic, occasionally causing more severe or otherwise notable outbreaks as it gradually evolved over the years. The period since its initial appearance in 1918 has been termed a "pandemic era", in which all flu pandemics since its emergence have been caused by its own descendants. Following the first of these post-1918 pandemics, in 1957, the virus was totally displaced by the novel H2N2, the reassortant product of the human H1N1 and an avian influenza virus, which thereafter became the active influenza A virus in humans.
In 1977, an influenza virus bearing a very close resemblance to the seasonal H1N1, which had not been seen since the 1950s, appeared in Russia and subsequently initiated a "technical" pandemic that principally affected those 26 years of age and younger. While some natural explanations, such as the virus remaining in some frozen state for 20 years, have been proposed to explain this unprecedented phenomenon, the nature of influenza itself has been cited in favor of human involvement of some kind, such as an accidental leak from a lab where the old virus had been preserved for research purposes. Following this miniature pandemic, the reemerged H1N1 became endemic once again but did not displace the other active influenza A virus, H3N2 (which itself had displaced H2N2 through a pandemic in 1968). For the first time, two influenza A viruses were observed in cocirculation. This state of affairs has persisted even after 2009, when a novel H1N1 virus emerged, sparked a pandemic, and thereafter took the place of the seasonal H1N1 to circulate alongside H3N2.
### Potential origins
Despite its name, historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu. However, several theories have been proposed.
#### United States
The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas, and author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article.
A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.
#### Europe
The major U.K. troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by virologist John Oxford as being at the center of the Spanish flu. His study found that in late 1916 the Étaples camp was hit by the onset of a new disease with high mortality that caused symptoms similar to the flu. According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot, and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu. The overcrowded camp and hospital at Étaples was an ideal environment for the spread of a respiratory virus.
The hospital treated thousands of victims of poison gas attacks, and other casualties of war, and 100,000 soldiers passed through the camp every day. It also was home to a piggery and poultry was regularly brought in from surrounding villages to feed the camp. Oxford and his team postulated that a precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.
A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found evidence that the 1918 virus had been circulating in the European armies for months and possibly years before the 1918 pandemic. Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting the influenza began in Austria in early 1917.
A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found that Spanish flu mortality simultaneously peaked within the two-month period of October and November 1918 in all fourteen European countries analyzed, which is inconsistent with the pattern that researchers would expect if the virus had originated somewhere in Europe and then spread outwards.
#### China
In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators. Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely.
In 2014, historian Mark Humphries argued that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines might have been the source of the pandemic. Humphries, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, based his conclusions on newly unearthed records. He found archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China (where the laborers came from) in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu. Unfortunately, no tissue samples have survived for modern comparison. Nevertheless, there were some reports of respiratory illness on parts of the path the laborers took to get to Europe, which also passed through North America.
China was one of the few regions of the world seemingly less affected by the Spanish flu pandemic, where several studies have documented a comparatively mild flu season in 1918. (Although this is disputed due to lack of data during the Warlord Period, see Around the globe.) This has led to speculation that the Spanish flu pandemic originated in China, as the lower rates of flu mortality may be explained by the Chinese population's previously acquired immunity to the flu virus. In the Guangdong Province it was reported that early outbreaks of influenza in 1918 disproportionately impacted young men. The June outbreak infected children and adolescents between 11 and 20 years of age, while the October outbreak was most common in those aged 11 to 15.
A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers and instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the pandemic. The 2016 study found that the low flu mortality rate (an estimated one in a thousand) recorded among the Chinese and Southeast Asian workers in Europe suggests that the Asian units were not different from other Allied military units in France at the end of 1918 and, thus, were not a likely source of a new lethal virus. Further evidence against the disease being spread by Chinese workers was that workers entered Europe through other routes that did not result in a detectable spread, making them unlikely to have been the original hosts.
## Epidemiology and pathology
### Transmission and mutation
The basic reproduction number of the virus was between 2 and 3. The close quarters and massive troop movements of World War I hastened the pandemic, and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation. The war may also have reduced people's resistance to the virus. Some speculate the soldiers' immune systems were weakened by malnourishment, as well as the stresses of combat and chemical attacks, increasing their susceptibility. A large factor in the worldwide occurrence of the flu was increased travel. Modern transportation systems made it easier for soldiers, sailors, and civilian travelers to spread the disease. Another was lies and denial by governments, leaving the population ill-prepared to handle the outbreaks.
The severity of the second wave has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War. In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave began, and the flu quickly spread around the world again. Consequently, during modern pandemics, health officials look for deadlier strains of a virus when it reaches places with social upheaval. The fact that most of those who recovered from first-wave infections had become immune showed that it must have been the same strain of flu. This was most dramatically illustrated in Copenhagen, which escaped with a combined mortality rate of just 0.29% (0.02% in the first wave and 0.27% in the second wave) because of exposure to the less-lethal first wave. For the rest of the population, the second wave was far more deadly; the most vulnerable people were those like the soldiers in the trenches – adults who were young and fit.
After the lethal second wave struck in late 1918, new cases dropped abruptly. In Philadelphia, for example, 4,597 people died in the week ending 16 October, but by 11 November, influenza had almost disappeared from the city. One explanation for the rapid decline in the lethality of the disease is that doctors became more effective in the prevention and treatment of pneumonia that developed after the victims had contracted the virus. However, John Barry stated in his 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History that researchers have found no evidence to support this position. Another theory holds that the 1918 virus mutated extremely rapidly to a less lethal strain. Such evolution of influenza is a common occurrence: there is a tendency for pathogenic viruses to become less lethal with time, as the hosts of more dangerous strains tend to die out. Fatal cases did continue into 1919, however. One notable example was that of ice hockey player Joe Hall, who, while playing for the Montreal Canadiens, fell victim to the flu in April after an outbreak that resulted in the cancellation of the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals.
### Signs and symptoms
The majority of the infected experienced only the typical flu symptoms of sore throat, headache, and fever, especially during the first wave. However, during the second wave, the disease was much more serious, often complicated by bacterial pneumonia, which was often the cause of death. This more serious type would cause heliotrope cyanosis to develop, whereby the skin would first develop two mahogany spots over the cheekbones which would then over a few hours spread to color the entire face blue, followed by black coloration first in the extremities and then further spreading to the limbs and the torso. After this, death would follow within hours or days due to the lungs being filled with fluids. Other signs and symptoms reported included spontaneous mouth and nosebleeds, miscarriages for pregnant women, a peculiar smell, teeth, and hair falling, delirium, dizziness, insomnia, loss of hearing or smell, and impaired vision. One observer wrote, "One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred". The severity of the symptoms was believed to be caused by cytokine storms.
The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a common secondary infection associated with influenza. This pneumonia was itself caused by common upper respiratory-tract bacteria, which were able to get into the lungs via the damaged bronchial tubes of the victims. The virus also killed people directly by causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lungs. Modern analysis has shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). One group of researchers recovered the virus from the bodies of frozen victims and transfected animals with it. The animals suffered rapidly progressive respiratory failure and death through a cytokine storm. The strong immune reactions of young adults were postulated to have ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune reactions of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.
### Misdiagnosis
Because the virus that caused the disease was too small to be seen under a microscope at the time, there were problems with correctly diagnosing it. The bacterium Haemophilus influenzae was instead mistakenly thought to be the cause, as it was big enough to be seen and was present in many, though not all, patients. For this reason, a vaccine that was used against that bacillus did not make an infection rarer but did decrease the death rate.
During the deadly second wave there were also fears that it was in fact plague, dengue fever, or cholera. Another common misdiagnosis was typhus, which was common in circumstances of social upheaval, and was therefore also affecting Russia in the aftermath of the October Revolution. In Chile, the view of the country's elite was that the nation was in severe decline, and therefore doctors assumed that the disease was typhus caused by poor hygiene, and not an infectious one, causing a mismanaged response which did not ban mass gatherings.
### The role of climate conditions
Studies have shown that the immune system of Spanish flu victims was weakened by adverse climate conditions which were particularly unseasonably cold and wet for extended periods of time during the duration of the pandemic. This affected especially WWI troops exposed to incessant rains and lower-than-average temperatures for the duration of the conflict, and especially during the second wave of the pandemic. Ultra-high-resolution climate data combined with highly detailed mortality records analyzed at Harvard University and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine identified a severe climate anomaly that impacted Europe from 1914 to 1919, with several environmental indicators directly influencing the severity and spread of the Spanish flu pandemic. Specifically, a significant increase in precipitation affected all of Europe during the second wave of the pandemic, from September to December 1918. Mortality figures follow closely the concurrent increase in precipitation and decrease in temperatures. Several explanations have been proposed for this, including the fact that lower temperatures and increased precipitation provided ideal conditions for virus replication and transmission, while also negatively affecting the immune systems of soldiers and other people exposed to the inclement weather, a factor proven to increase likelihood of infection by both viruses and pneumococcal co-morbid infections documented to have affected a large percentage of pandemic victims (one fifth of them, with a 36% mortality rate). A six-year climate anomaly (1914–1919) brought cold, marine air to Europe, drastically changing its weather, as documented by eyewitness accounts and instrumental records, reaching as far as the Gallipoli campaign, in Turkey, where ANZAC troops suffered extremely cold temperatures despite the normally Mediterranean climate of the region. The climate anomaly likely influenced the migration of H1N1 avian vectors which contaminate bodies of water with their droppings, reaching 60% infection rates in autumn. The climate anomaly has been associated with an anthropogenic increase in atmospheric dust, due to the incessant bombardment; increased nucleation due to dust particles (cloud condensation nuclei) contributed to increased precipitation.
## Responses
### Public health management
While systems for alerting public health authorities of infectious spread did exist in 1918, they did not generally include influenza, leading to a delayed response. Nevertheless, actions were taken. Maritime quarantines were declared on islands such as Iceland, Australia, and American Samoa, saving many lives. Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings. Wearing face masks became common in some places, such as Japan, though there were debates over their efficacy. There was also some resistance to their use, as exemplified by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco. Vaccines were also developed, but as these were based on bacteria and not the actual virus, they could only help with secondary infections. The actual enforcement of various restrictions varied. To a large extent, the New York City health commissioner ordered businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subways.
A later study found that measures such as banning mass gatherings and requiring the wearing of face masks could cut the death rate up to 50 percent, but this was dependent on their being imposed early in the outbreak and not being lifted prematurely.
### Medical treatment
As there were no antiviral drugs to treat the virus, and no antibiotics to treat the secondary bacterial infections, doctors would rely on a random assortment of medicines with varying degrees of effectiveness, such as aspirin, quinine, arsenics, digitalis, strychnine, epsom salts, castor oil, and iodine. Treatments of traditional medicine, such as bloodletting, ayurveda, and kampo were also applied.
### Information dissemination
Due to World War I, many countries engaged in wartime censorship, and suppressed reporting of the pandemic. For example, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera was prohibited from reporting daily death tolls. The newspapers of the time were also generally paternalistic and worried about mass panic. Misinformation also spread along with the disease. In Ireland there was a belief that noxious gases were rising from the mass graves of Flanders Fields and being "blown all over the world by winds". There were also rumors that the Germans were behind it, for example by poisoning the aspirin manufactured by Bayer, or by releasing poison gas from U-boats.
## Mortality
### Around the globe
The Spanish flu infected around 500 million people, about one-third of the world's population. Estimates as to how many infected people died vary greatly, but the flu is regardless considered to be one of the deadliest pandemics in history. An early estimate from 1927 put global mortality at 21.6 million. An estimate from 1991 states that the virus killed between 25 and 39 million people. A 2005 estimate put the death toll at 50 million (about 3% of the global population), and possibly as high as 100 million (more than 5%). However, a 2018 reassessment in the American Journal of Epidemiology estimated the total to be about 17 million, though this has been contested. With a world population of 1.8 to 1.9 billion, these estimates correspond to between 1 and 6 percent of the population.
A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses based on data from fourteen European countries estimated a total of 2.64 million excess deaths in Europe attributable to the Spanish flu during the major 1918–1919 phase of the pandemic, in line with the three prior studies from 1991, 2002, and 2006 that calculated a European death toll of between 2 million and 2.3 million. This represents a mortality rate of about 1.1% of the European population (c. 250 million in 1918), considerably higher than the mortality rate in the U.S., which the authors hypothesize is likely due to the severe effects of the war in Europe. The excess mortality rate in the U.K. has been estimated at 0.28%–0.4%, far below this European average.
Some 12–17 million people died in India, about 5% of the population. The death toll in India's British-ruled districts was 13.88 million. Another estimate gives at least 12 million dead. The decade between 1911 and 1921 was the only census period in which India's population fell, mostly due to devastation of the Spanish flu pandemic. While India is generally described as the country most severely affected by the Spanish flu, at least one study argues that other factors may partially account for the very high excess mortality rates observed in 1918, citing unusually high 1917 mortality and wide regional variation (ranging from 0.47% to 6.66%). A 2006 study in The Lancet also noted that Indian provinces had excess mortality rates ranging from 2.1% to 7.8%, stating: "Commentators at the time attributed this huge variation to differences in nutritional status and diurnal fluctuations in temperature."
In Finland, 20,000 died out of 210,000 infected. In Sweden, 34,000 died.
In Japan, the flu killed nearly 500,000 people over two waves between 1918 and 1920, with nearly 300,000 excess deaths between October 1918 and May 1919 and 182,000 between December 1919 and May 1920.
In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), 1.5 million were assumed to have died among 30 million inhabitants. In Tahiti, 13% of the population died during one month. Similarly, in Western Samoa 22% of the population of 38,000 died within two months.
In Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, 6,403 to 10,000 died, giving the city a mortality rate of at least 0.56%.
In New Zealand, the flu killed an estimated 6,400 Pākehā (or "New Zealanders primarily of European descent") and 2,500 indigenous Māori in six weeks, with Māori dying at eight times the rate of Pākehā.
In Australia, the flu killed around 12,000 to 20,000 people. The country's death rate, 2.7 per 1,000 people, was one of the lowest recorded compared with other countries at the time; however, as much as 40 percent of the population were infected, and a mortality rate of 50 percent was recorded by some Aboriginal communities. New South Wales and Victoria saw the greatest relative mortality, with 3.19 and 2.40 deaths per 1,000 people respectively, while Western Australia, Queensland, Southern Australia, and Tasmania experienced rates of 1.70, 1.14, 1.13, and 1.09 per 1,000 respectively. In Queensland, at least one-third of deaths recorded were in the Aboriginal population.
In the U.S., about 28% of the population of 105 million became infected, and 500,000 to 850,000 died (0.48 to 0.81 percent of the population). Native American tribes were particularly hard hit. In the Four Corners area, there were 3,293 registered deaths among Native Americans. Entire Inuit and Alaskan Native village communities died in Alaska. In Canada, 50,000 died.
In Brazil, 300,000 died, including president Rodrigues Alves.
In Britain, as many as 250,000 died; in France, more than 400,000.
In Ghana, the influenza epidemic killed at least 100,000 people. Tafari Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia) was one of the first Ethiopians who contracted influenza but survived. Many of his subjects did not; estimates for fatalities in the capital city, Addis Ababa, range from 5,000 to 10,000, or higher.
The death toll in Russia has been estimated at 450,000, though the epidemiologists who suggested this number called it a "shot in the dark". If it is correct, Russia lost roughly 0.4% of its population, meaning it suffered the lowest influenza-related mortality in Europe. Another study considers this number unlikely, given that the country was in the grip of a civil war, and the infrastructure of daily life had broken down; the study suggests that Russia's death toll was closer to 2%, or 2.7 million people.
#### Devastated communities
Even in areas where mortality was low, so many adults were incapacitated that much of everyday life was hampered. Some communities closed all stores or required customers to leave orders outside. There were reports that healthcare workers could not tend the sick nor the gravediggers bury the dead because they too were ill. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places.
Bristol Bay, a region of Alaska populated by indigenous people, suffered a death rate of 40 percent of the total population, with some villages entirely disappearing.
Nenana, Alaska, managed to avoid the extent of the pandemic between 1918 and 1919, but the flu at last reached the town in spring 1920. Reports suggested that during the first two weeks of May, the majority of the town's population became infected; 10% of the population were estimated to have died, most of whom were Alaska Natives.
Several Pacific island territories were hit particularly hard. The pandemic reached them from New Zealand, which was too slow to implement measures to prevent ships, such as Talune, carrying the flu from leaving its ports. From New Zealand, the flu reached Tonga (killing 8% of the population), Nauru (16%), and Fiji (5%, 9,000 people). Worst affected was Western Samoa, formerly German Samoa, which had been occupied by New Zealand in 1914. 90% of the population was infected; 30% of adult men, 22% of adult women, and 10% of children died. By contrast, Governor John Martin Poyer prevented the flu from reaching neighboring American Samoa by imposing a blockade. The disease spread fastest through the higher social classes among the indigenous peoples, because of the custom of gathering oral tradition from chiefs on their deathbeds; many community elders were infected through this process.
In Iran, the mortality was very high: according to an estimate, between 902,400 and 2,431,000, or 8% to 22% of the total population died. The country was going through the Persian famine of 1917–1919 concurrently.
In Ireland, during the worst 12 months, the Spanish flu accounted for one-third of all deaths.
In South Africa it is estimated that about 300,000 people amounting to 6% of the population died within six weeks. Government actions in the early stages of the virus' arrival in the country in September 1918 are believed to have unintentionally accelerated its spread throughout the country. Almost a quarter of the working population of Kimberley, consisting of workers in the diamond mines, died. In British Somaliland, one official estimated that 7% of the native population died. This huge death toll resulted from an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and the extreme severity of the symptoms, suspected to be caused by cytokine storms.
#### Less-affected areas
In the Pacific, American Samoa and the French colony of New Caledonia succeeded in preventing even a single death from influenza through effective quarantines. However, the outbreak was delayed into 1926 for American Samoa and 1921 for New Caledonia as the quarantine period ended. On American Samoa, at least 25% of the island residents were clinically attacked and 0.1% died, and on New Caledonia, there was widespread illness and 0.1% population died. Australia also managed to avoid the first two waves with a quarantine. Iceland protected a third of its population from exposure by blocking the main road of the island. By the end of the pandemic, the isolated island of Marajó, in Brazil's Amazon River Delta had not reported an outbreak. Saint Helena also reported no deaths.
Estimates for the death toll in China have varied widely, a range which reflects the lack of centralized collection of health data at the time due to the Warlord period. China may have experienced a relatively mild flu season in 1918 compared to other areas of the world. However, some reports from its interior suggest that mortality rates from influenza were perhaps higher in at least a few locations in China in 1918. At the very least, there is little evidence that China as a whole was seriously affected by the flu compared to other countries in the world.
The first estimate of the Chinese death toll was made in 1991 by Patterson and Pyle, which estimated a toll of between 5 and 9 million. However, this 1991 study was criticized by later studies due to flawed methodology, and newer studies have published estimates of a far lower mortality rate in China. For instance, Iijima in 1998 estimates the death toll in China to be between 1 and 1.28 million based on data available from Chinese port cities. The lower estimates of the Chinese death toll are based on the low mortality rates that were found in Chinese port cities (for example, Hong Kong) and on the assumption that poor communications prevented the flu from penetrating the interior of China. However, some contemporary newspaper and post office reports, as well as reports from missionary doctors, suggest that the flu did penetrate the Chinese interior and that influenza was severe in at least some locations in the countryside of China.
Although medical records from China's interior are lacking, extensive medical data were recorded in Chinese port cities, such as then British-controlled Hong Kong, Canton, Peking, Harbin and Shanghai. These data were collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which was largely staffed by non-Chinese foreigners, such as the British, French, and other European colonial officials in China. As a whole, data from China's port cities show low mortality rates compared to other cities in Asia. For example, the British authorities at Hong Kong and Canton reported a mortality rate from influenza at a rate of 0.25% and 0.32%, much lower than the reported mortality rate of other cities in Asia, such as Calcutta or Bombay, where influenza was much more devastating. Similarly, in the city of Shanghai – which had a population of over 2 million in 1918 – there were only 266 recorded deaths from influenza among the Chinese population in 1918. If extrapolated from the extensive data recorded from Chinese cities, the suggested mortality rate from influenza in China as a whole in 1918 was likely lower than 1% – much lower than the world average (which was around 3–5%). In contrast, Japan and Taiwan had reported a mortality rate from influenza around 0.45% and 0.69% respectively, higher than the mortality rate collected from data in Chinese port cities, such as Hong Kong (0.25%), Canton (0.32%), and Shanghai.
However, it is noted that the influenza mortality rate in Hong Kong and Canton are under-recorded, because only the deaths that occurred in colony hospitals were counted. Similarly, in Shanghai, these statistics are limited to that area of the city under the control of the health section of the Shanghai International Settlement, and the actual death toll in Shanghai was much higher. The medical records from China's interior indicate that, compared to cities, rural communities have substantially higher mortality rate. A published influenza survey in Houlu County, Hebei Province, found that the case fatality rate was 9.77% and 0.79% of county population died from influenza in October and November 1918.
### Patterns of fatality
The pandemic mostly killed young adults. In 1918–1919, 99% of pandemic influenza deaths in the U.S. occurred in people under 65, and nearly half of deaths were in young adults 20 to 40 years old. In 1920, the mortality rate among people under 65 had decreased sixfold to half the mortality rate of people over 65, but 92% of deaths still occurred in people under 65. This is unusual since influenza is typically most deadly to weak individuals, such as infants under age two, adults over age 70, and the immunocompromised. In 1918, older adults may have had partial protection caused by exposure to the 1889–1890 flu pandemic, known as the "Russian flu". According to historian John M. Barry, the most vulnerable of all – "those most likely, of the most likely", to die – were pregnant women. He reported that in thirteen studies of hospitalized women in the pandemic, the death rate ranged from 23% to 71%. Of the pregnant women who survived childbirth, over one-quarter (26%) lost the child. Another oddity was that the outbreak was widespread in the summer and autumn (in the Northern Hemisphere); influenza is usually worse in winter.
There were also geographic patterns to the disease's fatality. Some parts of Asia had 30 times higher death rates than some parts of Europe, and generally, Africa and Asia had higher rates, while Europe and North America had lower ones. There was also great variation within continents, with three times higher mortality in Hungary and Spain compared to Denmark, two to three times higher chance of death in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to North Africa, and possibly up to ten times higher rates between the extremes of Asia. Cities were affected worse than rural areas. There were also differences between cities, which might have reflected exposure to the milder first wave giving immunity, as well as the introduction of social distancing measures.
Another major pattern was the differences between social classes. In Oslo, death rates were inversely correlated with apartment size, as the poorer people living in smaller apartments died at a higher rate. Social status was also reflected in the higher mortality among immigrant communities, with Italian Americans, a recently arrived group at the time, were nearly twice as likely to die compared to the average Americans. These disparities reflected worse diets, crowded living conditions, and problems accessing healthcare. Paradoxically, however, African Americans were relatively spared by the pandemic.
More men than women were killed by the flu, as they were more likely to go out and be exposed, while women would tend to stay at home. For the same reason men also were more likely to have pre-existing tuberculosis, which severely worsened the chances of recovery. However, in India the opposite was true, potentially because Indian women were neglected with poorer nutrition, and were expected to care for the sick.
A study conducted by He et al. (2011) used a mechanistic modeling approach to study the three waves of the 1918 influenza pandemic. They examined the factors that underlie variability in temporal patterns and their correlation to patterns of mortality and morbidity. Their analysis suggests that temporal variations in transmission rate provide the best explanation, and the variation in transmission required to generate these three waves is within biologically plausible values. Another study by He et al. (2013) used a simple epidemic model incorporating three factors to infer the cause of the three waves of the 1918 influenza pandemic. These factors were school opening and closing, temperature changes throughout the outbreak, and human behavioral changes in response to the outbreak. Their modeling results showed that all three factors are important, but human behavioral responses showed the most significant effects.
## Effects
### World War I
Academic Andrew Price-Smith has made the argument that the virus helped tip the balance of power in the latter days of the war towards the Allied cause. He provides data that the viral waves hit the Central Powers before the Allied powers and that both morbidity and mortality in Germany and Austria were considerably higher than in Britain and France. A 2006 Lancet study corroborates higher excess mortality rates in Germany (0.76%) and Austria (1.61%) compared to Britain (0.34%) and France (0.75%).
Kenneth Kahn at Oxford University Computing Services writes that "Many researchers have suggested that the conditions of the war significantly aided the spread of the disease. And others have argued that the course of the war (and subsequent peace treaty) was influenced by the pandemic." Kahn has developed a model that can be used on home computers to test these theories.
### Economic
Many businesses in the entertainment and service industries suffered losses in revenue, while the healthcare industry reported profit gains. Historian Nancy Bristow has argued that the pandemic, when combined with the increasing number of women attending college, contributed to the success of women in the field of nursing. This was due in part to the failure of medical doctors, who were predominantly men, to contain and prevent the illness. Nursing staff, who were mainly women, celebrated the success of their patient care and did not associate the spread of the disease with their work.
A 2020 study found that U.S. cities that implemented early and extensive non-medical measures (quarantine, etc.) suffered no additional adverse economic effects due to implementing those measures. However, the validity of this study has been questioned because of the coincidence of WWI and other problems with data reliability.
### Long-term effects
A 2006 study in the Journal of Political Economy found that "cohorts in utero during the pandemic displayed reduced educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income, lower socioeconomic status, and higher transfer payments received compared with other birth cohorts." A 2018 study found that the pandemic reduced educational attainment in populations. The flu has also been linked to the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.
Survivors faced an elevated mortality risk. Some survivors did not fully recover from physiological conditions resulting from infection.
## Legacy
Despite the high morbidity and mortality rates that resulted from the epidemic, the Spanish flu began to fade from public awareness over the decades until the arrival of news about bird flu and other pandemics in the 1990s and 2000s. This has led some historians to label the Spanish flu a "forgotten pandemic". However, this label has been challenged by the historian Guy Beiner, who has charted a complex history of social and cultural forgetting, demonstrating how the pandemic was overshadowed by the commemoration of the First World War and mostly neglected in mainstream historiography, yet was remembered in private and local traditions across the globe.
There are various theories of why the Spanish flu was "forgotten". The rapid pace of the pandemic, which killed most of its victims in the United States within less than nine months, resulted in limited media coverage. The general population was familiar with patterns of pandemic disease in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, and cholera all occurred near the same time. These outbreaks probably lessened the significance of the influenza pandemic for the public. In some areas, the flu was not reported on, the only mention being that of advertisements for medicines claiming to cure it.
Additionally, the outbreak coincided with the deaths and media focus on the First World War. Another explanation involves the age group affected by the disease. The majority of fatalities, from both the war and the epidemic, were among young adults. The high number of war-related deaths of young adults may have overshadowed the deaths caused by flu.
When people read the obituaries, they saw the war or postwar deaths and the deaths from the influenza side by side. Particularly in Europe, where the war's toll was high, the flu may not have had a tremendous psychological impact or may have seemed an extension of the war's tragedies. The duration of the pandemic and the war could have also played a role. The war, however, had initially been expected to end quickly but lasted for four years by the time the pandemic struck.
### In literature and other media
Despite the toll of the pandemic, it was never a large theme in American literature. Alfred Crosby suspects that it may be due to the fact that it occurred after World War I, which was the most important event in that generation's lives. Katherine Anne Porter's 1939 novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of the most well-known fictional accounts of the pandemic. The 2006 novel The Last Town on Earth focuses on a town which attempts to limit the spread of the flu by preventing people from entering or leaving. The Pull of the Stars is a 2020 novel by Emma Donoghue set in Dublin during the Spanish flu. Its final draft was submitted in March 2020, and publishers fast-tracked publication because of the then ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
### Comparison with other pandemics
The Spanish flu killed a much lower percentage of the world's population than the Black Death, which lasted for many more years.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed 17.5 - 31.4 million.
## Research
The origin of the Spanish flu pandemic, and the relationship between the near-simultaneous outbreaks in humans and swine, have been controversial. One hypothesis is that the virus strain originated at Fort Riley, Kansas, in viruses in poultry and swine which the fort bred for food; the soldiers were then sent from Fort Riley around the world, where they spread the disease. Similarities between a reconstruction of the virus and avian viruses, combined with the human pandemic preceding the first reports of influenza in swine, led researchers to conclude the influenza virus jumped directly from birds to humans, and swine caught the disease from humans.
Others have disagreed, and more recent research has suggested the strain may have originated in a nonhuman, mammalian species. An estimated date for its appearance in mammalian hosts has been put at the period 1882–1913. This ancestor virus diverged about 1913–1915 into two clades (or biological groups each descended from a common ancestor), which gave rise to the classical swine and human H1N1 influenza lineages. The last common ancestor of human strains dates between February 1917 and April 1918. Because pigs are more readily infected with avian influenza viruses than are humans, they were suggested as the original recipients of the virus, passing the virus to humans sometime between 1913 and 1918.
An effort to recreate the Spanish flu strain (a subtype of avian strain H1N1) was a collaboration among the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the USDA ARS Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. The effort resulted in the announcement (on 5 October 2005) that the group had successfully determined the virus' genetic sequence, using historic tissue samples recovered by pathologist Johan Hultin from an Inuit female flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost and samples preserved from American soldiers Roscoe Vaughan and James Downs.
On 18 January 2007, Kobasa et al. (2007) reported that monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) infected with the recreated flu strain exhibited classic symptoms of the 1918 pandemic, and died from cytokine storms – an overreaction of the immune system. This may explain why the Spanish flu had its surprising effect on younger, healthier people, as a person with a stronger immune system would potentially have a stronger overreaction.
On 16 September 2008, the body of British politician and diplomat Sir Mark Sykes was exhumed to study the RNA of the flu virus in efforts to understand the genetic structure of modern H5N1 bird flu. Sykes had been buried in 1919 in a lead coffin which scientists hoped had helped preserve the virus. The coffin was found to be split and the cadaver badly decomposed; nonetheless, samples of lung and brain tissue were taken.
In December 2008, research by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin linked the presence of three specific genes (termed PA, PB1, and PB2) and a nucleoprotein derived from Spanish flu samples to the ability of the flu virus to invade the lungs and cause pneumonia. The combination triggered similar symptoms in animal testing.
In June 2010, a team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported the 2009 flu pandemic vaccine provided some cross-protection against the Spanish flu pandemic strain.
One of the few things known for certain about influenza in 1918 and for some years after was that it was, except in the laboratory, exclusively a disease of human beings.
In 2013, the AIR Worldwide Research and Modeling Group "characterized the historic 1918 pandemic and estimated the effects of a similar pandemic occurring today using the AIR Pandemic Flu Model". In the model, "a modern-day 'Spanish flu' event would result in additional life insurance losses of between US\$15.3–27.8 billion in the United States alone", with 188,000–337,000 deaths in the United States.
In 2018, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Arizona who is examining the history of the 1918 pandemic, revealed that he obtained tissue slides created by William Rolland, a physician who reported on a respiratory illness likely to be the virus while a pathologist in the British military during World War One. Rolland had authored an article in the Lancet during 1917 about a respiratory illness outbreak beginning in 1916 in Étaples, France. Worobey traced recent references to that article to family members who had retained slides that Rolland had prepared during that time. Worobey extracted tissue from the slides to potentially reveal more about the origin of the pathogen.
In 2021 an investigation used the virus sequence to obtain the Hemagglutinin (HA) antigen and observe the adaptive immunity in 32 survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic, all of them presented seroreactivity and 7 of 8 further tested presented memory B cells able to produce antibodies that bound to the HA antigen highlighting the ability of the immunological memory many decades after.
## Sex differences in mortality
The high mortality rate of the influenza pandemic is one aspect that sets the pandemic apart from other disease outbreaks. Another factor is the higher mortality rate of men compared with women. Men with an underlying condition were at significantly more risk. Tuberculosis was one of the deadliest diseases in the 1900s, and killed more men than women. But with the spread of influenza disease, the cases of tuberculosis cases in men decreased. Many scholars have noted that tuberculosis increased the mortality rate of influenza in males, decreasing their life expectancy. During the 1900s tuberculosis was more common in males than females, but studies show that when influenza spread the tuberculosis mortality rate among females changed. The death rate of tuberculosis in females increased significantly and would continue to decline until post-pandemic.
Death rates were particularly high in those aged 20–35. The only comparable disease to this was the Black Death, or bubonic plague, in the 1300s. As other studies have shown, tuberculosis and influenza had comorbidities and one affected the other. The ages of males dying of the flu show that tuberculosis was a factor, and as males primarily had this disease at the time of the pandemic, they had a higher mortality rate. Life expectancy dropped in males during the pandemic but then increased two years after the pandemic.
### Island of Newfoundland
One major cause of the spread of influenza was social behavior. Men had more social variation and were mobile more than women due to their work. Even though there was a higher mortality rate in males, each region showed different results, due to such factors as nutritional deficiency. In Newfoundland, the pandemic spread was highly variable. Influenza did not discriminate who was infected, indeed it attacked the socioeconomic status of people. Although social variability allowed the disease to move quickly geographically, it tended to spread faster and affect men more than women due to labor and social contact. Newfoundland's leading cause of death before the pandemic was tuberculosis and this is known to be a severe underlying condition for people and increases the \|mortality rate when infected by the influenza disease. There was diverse labor in Newfoundland, men and women had various occupations that involved day-to-day interaction. But, fishing had a major role in the economy and so males were more mobile than females and had more contact with other parts of the world. The spread of the pandemic is known to have begun in the spring of 1918, but Newfoundland did not see the deadly wave until June or July, which aligns with the high demand for employment in the fishery. The majority of men were working along the coast during the summer and it was typical for entire families to move to Newfoundland and work. Studies show a much higher mortality rate in males compared with females. But, during the first, second, and third waves of the pandemic, the mortality shifted. During the first wave, men had a higher mortality rate, but the mortality rate of females increased and was higher during the second and third waves. The female population was larger in certain regions of Newfoundland and therefore had a bigger impact on the death rate.
#### Influenza pandemic among Canadian soldiers
Records indicate the most deaths during the first wave of the pandemic were among young men in their 20s, which reflects the age of enlistment in the war. The mobility of young men during 1918 was linked to the spread of influenza and the biggest wave of the epidemic. In late 1917 and throughout 1918, thousands of male troops gathered at the Halifax port before heading to Europe. Any soldier that was ill and could not depart was added to the population of Halifax, which increased the case rate of influenza among men during the war. To determine the cause of the death during the pandemic, war scientists used the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which reported under 2 million men and women died during the wars, with a record of those who died from 1917 to 1918. The movement of soldiers during this time and the transportation from United States between Canada likely had a significant effect on the spread of the pandemic.
## See also
- List of epidemics
- List of Spanish flu cases
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Get Back (Demi Lovato song)
| 1,171,258,380 |
2008 single by Demi Lovato
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[
"2008 debut singles",
"2008 songs",
"American power pop songs",
"Demi Lovato songs",
"Hollywood Records singles",
"Music videos directed by Philip Andelman",
"Song recordings produced by John Fields (record producer)",
"Songs written by Demi Lovato",
"Songs written by Joe Jonas",
"Songs written by Kevin Jonas",
"Songs written by Nick Jonas"
] |
"Get Back" is the debut non-soundtrack single by American singer Demi Lovato. It was written by Lovato, Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas and Kevin Jonas and produced by the Jonas Brothers alongside John Fields, for Lovato's debut studio album, Don't Forget. The song features Jack Lawless on drums and John Taylor and the Jonas Brothers on guitars. The initial writing of the song took place when Lovato wanted to write a song about getting back together with an old boyfriend, as opposed to writing mean or heartbroken songs. "Get Back" was released by Hollywood Records as the lead single for Don't Forget on August 12, 2008. Musically, the song is an upbeat punk rock song with a guitar-driven sound.
The song was met with positive reviews from critics and performed average commercially, peaking at number forty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 and ninety-three on the Canadian Hot 100. In Australia, the song peaked at number ten on the ARIA Hitseekers chart. Lovato has performed the song on several occasions, including the 2008 Disney Channel Games, Good Morning America and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
## Background
"Get Back" was written by Lovato, Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas and Kevin Jonas, and produced by the Jonas Brothers alongside John Fields. Lovato wanted to write a song about getting back together with someone, as she believed enough mean and heartbroken songs had already been made. She said, "It's kind of a fun, upbeat song and it's kind of just fun to sing to the person that I wrote it about." The Jonas Brothers provided backing vocals and guitars on the track. In addition to co-producing the song, Fields also provided bass, guitars and keyboards. Jack Lawless played the drums, and John Taylor contributed backing vocals and played the guitar. The song was released as the lead single for Don't Forget on August 12, 2008, in the United States and Canada via digital download.
## Composition
"Get Back" is an upbeat guitar-driven punk rock song. According to the sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the song is set in common time with a tempo of 150 beats per minute. It is performed in the key of G mixolydian, and Lovato's vocal range spans from the low note of B<sub>3</sub> to the high note of G<sub>5</sub>. Ed Masley of The Arizona Republic compared the song's sound to works by Tommy Tutone. Lyrically, the song is about a desire to get back together with an old boyfriend, demonstrated in the lines "I want to get back to the old days", and "Kiss me like you mean it".
## Music video and live performances
"Get Back" was directed by Philip Andelman and shot in one day. The video premiered on Disney Channel on August 22, 2008, following the premiere of The Cheetah Girls: One World. It was later made available for digital download on iTunes Store on September 16, 2008. The video begins with a shot of the Manhattan Bridge, Lovato and her band are then seen on a small stage on top of a building. Lovato sports black clothing, a beaded scarf and red gloves. Throughout the first verse and chorus, Lovato dances around on stage with Manhattan Bridge visible in the background. Following the first chorus, the sun goes down and an aerial shot of the city's nightlife is shown. The second verse and chorus are performed during night. During the song's bridge, a daytime shot is shown of Lovato while sitting alone on the rooftop and looking away from the camera. After this, she is back on stage and performing the last chorus during nighttime with bright lights in the background. The video ends with the performance being finished, with Lovato turning around and walking towards her band.
Lovato performed the song for the first time at the 2008 Disney Channel Games on May 3, 2008. Later, Lovato performed the song during her appearances in Good Morning America and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. On January 19, 2009, Lovato performed the song alongside "La La Land" at the Kids' Inaugural: "We Are the Future" event in Washington, D.C., at the Verizon Center. The event was held to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. On April 24, 2009, Lovato performed an acoustic version of "Get Back" in Radio Disney's network studio. Also in April 2009, the song was performed as part of the iTunes Live from London series. The full performances were released as an iTunes Store-exclusive extended play featuring recorded live versions on May 17, 2009. In May 2009, Lovato performed the song at a Walmart concert, which was released as Demi Lovato: Live: Walmart Soundcheck, featuring recorded live versions on a CD, and the full performances on a DVD.
Lovato performed "Get Back" on her Warm Up Tour and the Jonas Brothers' Burnin' Up Tour, for the latter she served as the opening act during the summer of 2008. Later in 2009, the song was performed during her Summer Tour 2009. The song was performed last, and Ed Masley of The Arizona Republic called it "super-charged". In 2010, she performed the song during her South American tour as the show's finale. Lovato also performed the song as the opening number for her set during the Jonas Brothers Live in Concert World Tour 2010. In September 2011, Lovato performed the song during the revue concert An Evening with Demi Lovato.
## Critical reception
The song received positive reviews from critics. Judy Coleman of The Boston Globe called "Get Back" a "welcome girl-rock hit". Ed Masley of The Arizona Republic included the song at number eight on his "Top 10 from the Disney girls" list, and said, "She wrote this with the Jonas Brothers, but it sounds more like a Tommy Tutone B-side from the early '80s or the sort of thing Greg Kihn was pining for when he sang, 'They don't write 'em like that anymore'". Masley noted that the song sounds better live, as does "nearly everything Lovato touches". Masley concluded, writing, "When she sings 'I want to get back to the old days,' what she means is when her and her boyfriend were happy, but power-pop fans will hear it as a call to get back to much older days than that." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic noted it as one of the best tracks on Don't Forget. Joey Guerra of The Houston Chronicle called it "undeniably kicky, and Lovato manages some surprisingly credible rock wails." Ken Barnes of USA Today called it an "insidious, Go-Go's-like single".
## Chart performance
On August 30, 2008, "Get Back" debuted at its peak position of number at number forty-three on the Billboard Hot 100. The following week, it fell fifty places to number ninety-three. The song spent a total of six weeks on the chart. As of October 2017, it has sold over 586,000 digital copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In Canada, it charted at number ninety-three on the Canadian Hot 100, which was its only appearance on that chart. In Australia, the song peaked at number ten on the ARIA Hitseekers chart on May 11, 2009.
## Track listing
- Digital download
1. "Get Back" – 3:19
- Digital download (Radio Disney version)
1. "Get Back" (Radio Disney version) – 3:19
## Credits and personnel
Recording and management
- Recorded at Wishbone Studio (North Hollywood, California)
- Mixed at Mix LA
- Mastered at Sterling Sound (New York City)
- Seven Peaks Music obo Itself and Demi Lovato Publishing (ASCAP); Jonas Brothers Publishing LLC (BMI)/Sony/ATV Songs LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
Personnel
- Demi Lovato – vocals, songwriting
- Nick Jonas – songwriting, guitars, background vocals
- Joe Jonas – songwriting, background vocals
- Kevin Jonas II – songwriting, guitars, background vocals
- Jack Lawless – drums
- John Fields – bass, guitars, keyboards, programming, production, recording
- John Taylor – guitars, background vocals
- Jonas Brothers – production
- Chris Lord-Alge – mixing
- Nik Karpin – assistant
- Ted Jensen – mastering
Credits adapted from Don't Forget liner notes.
## Charts
## Certifications
|
49,580,722 |
Devil Daggers
| 1,163,371,510 |
2016 video game
|
[
"2016 video games",
"First-person shooters",
"Linux games",
"MacOS games",
"Retro-style video games",
"Single-player video games",
"Steam Greenlight games",
"Video games about demons",
"Video games developed in Australia",
"Windows games"
] |
Devil Daggers is a first-person shooter video game developed and published by indie development team Sorath. Players are tasked with surviving for as long as possible against swarms of demonic enemies on an arena shrouded in darkness. The player character can fire daggers from their fingers to eliminate foes and move about to avoid contact with them. The player dies upon touching an enemy, and as time passes, more threatening creatures begin to appear. Survival times are recorded on a global leaderboard where replays of playthroughs can be accessed and viewed. The deliberate use of unfiltered textures and effects like polygon jitter and texture warping make its visual style reminiscent of early 3D games released in the 1990s.
Devil Daggers was released for Windows in February 2016, after being greenlit for release on digital distribution platform Steam. OS X and Linux versions were released in July and September 2016 respectively. The game received positive reviews and was praised for its sound design, unique visual style and challenging gameplay. However, some reviewers noted that during its latter stages the overwhelming number of enemies and visual style made it difficult to understand what was happening. Critics likened the aesthetics, movement and shooting mechanics of Devil Daggers to Doom, Quake and other first-person shooters of the 1990s.
## Gameplay
Devil Daggers is a shooter video game with gameplay experienced from a first-person perspective. The goal of the game is to kill demonic enemies and survive for as long as possible. Devil Daggers opens with the player character standing in a shadowy room; in front of them is a floating dagger illuminated by a spotlight. Upon retrieving the dagger, the player is transported to a flat, floating platform arena cloaked in darkness. In the arena, demonic enemies begin spawning. Initially, a series of tentacled, towering creatures spawn and start releasing swarms of flying skulls that pursue the player. As time progresses, more exotic creatures that pose a greater threat and exhibit different behaviour begin to appear. Each enemy makes a unique and continuous noise, so that the player is able to recognise what type of enemy is approaching them.
The player kills enemies by firing daggers from their fingers. There are two firing options: clicking the left-mouse button fires a shotgun-like blast of daggers with a wide spread, and holding the mouse button down fires a precise, continuous stream of daggers. Some enemies have weak spots indicated by red crystals on their bodies. Once dead, the red crystals are dropped and can be gathered by the player to obtain attack upgrades, such as increased damage and homing daggers. The player dies when coming into physical contact with an enemy or falling off the stage. At the top of the screen, a timer displays how long the playthrough has lasted. The player's best survival time is published on a global leaderboard. Accessed via the leaderboard, replays of playthroughs can be downloaded and watched from either a first-person view or a top-down perspective.
As enemies accumulate in the arena, the amount of safe space decreases. This, alongside the enemies' aggressive behaviour, encourages constant player movement and spatial awareness. The player character can move at high speed and jump to perform evasive manoeuvres. The game employs advanced movement techniques to increase player speed and jump height. The player can gain a speed boost by strafing while jumping. The shotgun-like blast can supplement the jumping mechanism; the player can be propelled further and perform a double jump by firing downwards while still in the air.
## Development and release
Devil Daggers was developed by Sorath, a Melbourne-based independent video game developer. The development group was formed by Matt Bush, a member of Dustforce creators Hitbox Team. The game's art direction and rendering engine were designed to reimagine the aesthetics and graphical style of video games from the 1990s. This was achieved by making use of unfiltered textures, jagged 3D models, and the deliberate implementation of polygon jitter and texture warping found in early 3D games. Jitter and warping were often considered technical flaws of PlayStation games; however, the recreation of these effects in Devil Daggers is to make enemies shudder and ripple during movement. Enemy designs are hellish, with some entities taking the form of insectoids with skeletal features. Audio is composed largely of distorted and abstract sounds with compressed, digitised screams used to produce unsettling noises for the creatures.
Sorath submitted Devil Daggers to Steam Greenlight, a community selection system, so that the game could be released on digital distribution platform Steam. The game was successfully greenlit and released for Windows on 18 February 2016. On 6 July 2016, Sorath released an OS X version of Devil Daggers. Alongside this release, two new enemy types were added to the game and the Devil Daggers soundtrack was added to the game's directory. Support for vertical sync, increased field of view, and virtual surround sound via HRTF-processing were also added. On 19 September 2016, a Linux version of Devil Daggers was released along with the ability to view replays from a top-down perspective. The update also added more statistics such as tracking a player's total survival time across all runs.
## Reception
Devil Daggers received "generally favourable" reviews from critics according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Critics compared the gameplay and graphics favourably to first-person shooters of the 1990s such as Doom and Quake. Reviewers were pleased with how Devil Daggers offered a stripped-down experience of these games, and provided a fast and pure gameplay experience.
The game's fluid movement system was compared to arena shooters Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 by Edge magazine. They welcomed the inclusion of advanced movement techniques, saying they felt "fresh" when implemented in a survival context. They also thought that Devil Daggers refined on so much of the borrowed elements, that it would be inaccurate to simply call the game a "nostalgic throwback". Devil Daggers was considered to be a perfect distillation of old school arena shooters by Zack Furniss, writing for Destructoid. Kill Screen writer Davis Cox praised the "frenetic, bullet hell" nature of Devil Daggers, but felt that there was opportunity to incorporate more interesting levels and spaces into the game.
Tom Senior of PC Gamer enjoyed the "oppressive" and "hellish" atmosphere created by the deliberate use of old rendering techniques and effects. Both GameSpot and IGN critics agreed that although the retro visual style was fitting, it could also become a hindrance when the excessive clutter of pixelated enemies made it difficult to interpret what was happening on screen. Furniss of Destructoid stated that the visuals might not appeal to everyone, but he loved the horror aspect and sense of nostalgia that it evoked.
The game's sound design was lauded by critics. Reviewers especially liked the practical use of unique and continuous enemy noises. Being able to pinpoint an enemy's location when they were obscured from view was seen as an interesting aspect of the game's audio. The cacophony created by enemies was described as "chilling" by IGN reviewer Chloi Rad. She also felt that the audio combined well with the fluid movement to provide the player with the information and means for dealing with enemies.
Many reviewers discussed the high level of difficulty presented by Devil Daggers, calling the experience "intense" and "brutal", but also "gleeful" and "exhilarating". Edge called the game an "expertly designed test of skill". GameSpot reviewer Mike Mahardy believed that surpassing the 60 second mark in a run was a feat. Eurogamer writer Johnny Chiodini thought the game excelled at being a short experience and highlighted that becoming proficient in Devil Daggers was a process of repetition and refinement. Writing for Hardcore Gamer, Mark Steighner called the game addictive and thought that it was ideal for people obsessed with chasing high scores in games. Critics also liked the replay feature and pointed out that it was a great way to learn from other players and heighten the competitive aspect among the community.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun named Devil Daggers as the best game of 2016. Writers of the website complimented its gameplay, aesthetic, and sound design. In January 2017, they placed Devil Daggers fifth on their list of the fifty best first-person shooters on PC. Chris Thursten of PC Gamer named Devil Daggers as his personal game of the year, calling it "flawlessly designed".
|
47,710,035 |
Millennium (2015 comic book)
| 1,054,737,481 |
Comic book series published by IDW Publishing 2015
|
[
"American comics",
"Comics based on television series",
"Millennium (TV series)"
] |
Millennium is a five-issue comic book series published by IDW Publishing from January and August 2015, based on the television series of the same name. The series was written by Joe Harris with artwork by Colin Lorimer, and featured cover art by menton3.
Millennium focuses on Frank Black, a former offender profiler investigating the Millennium Group, a cult-like organisation which had sought to control the end of the world at the turn of the 3rd millennium. Black learns that the Group is still operating over a decade after their supposed defeat, and have recruited his estranged daughter to combat gathering demonic forces.
The first issue, released on January 21, 2015, saw sales of over 8000 issues, though sales figures would subsequently drop. However, the series has been reviewed positively by critics, with Lorimer's artwork frequently singled out for praise. The complete series was collected in a trade paperback after its run was finished.
## Plot
### Background
Set during the events of the season ten comic book series for The X-Files, the events of Millennium see Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Fox Mulder joining the long-standing crusade of offender profiler Frank Black as he combats the Millennium Group, a doomsday cult entrenched in elements of the United States law enforcement.
### Events
Fox Mulder attends a parole hearing for Monte Propps, a serial killer he helped to apprehend in the late 1980s. Propps' method of killing involved brainwashing his kidnapped victims until they were willing to commit suicide by drowning; however he is now seen as a model reformee and is released. Shortly afterwards, Mulder meets with Frank Black, who warns him of the dangers of the offender's freedom. The two visit the released man's halfway house, arriving shortly after his parole officer; inside they find Propps drowned in his bath. In an alley outside, they parole officer is also found dead, with the ouroboros symbol of the Millennium Group tattooed on her neck. A child in the alley momentarily speaks to Black with the voice of a demonic entity he recognises, warning of impending disaster.
Black attempts to locate further information about the Millennium Group's activity, having believed them defeated in 1999. He finds that his access to their old computer systems still works, and learns that they may know the whereabouts of his daughter Jordan. Spurred on by several momentary encounters with similarly demonic beings, Black returns to his home town of Seattle, Washington. As he visits the grave of his wife Catherine, he is tranquillised and apprehended by Group members. Waking in captivity, he learns that they seek his help against the same demonic forces he has been encountering—and that Jordan is now a willing initiate of the Group. She has now begun to powerfully manifest visions of the future, similar to Black's ability to see the past through others' eyes.
Mulder follows Black to Seattle, arriving at the abandoned ruins of Black's old family home, where he is confronted by the powerful demon Lucy Butler. Black arrives to find Mulder struggling against her attempts to control him, and she threatens to kill them both, before Jordan arrives to intervene. Butler, now appearing in her full demonic form, is eventually banished by Jordan's psychic abilities. Jordan leaves again, knowing that the Group will need this power, as Mulder unsuccessfully tries to persuade Black to rejoin the FBI. Watching this is a black cat, which shapeshifts into Butler's human guise, who vows to wait "a millennium" for revenge.
## Publication
Published by IDW Publishing, Millennium is a five-issue limited series, acting as a spin-off from the seventeenth issue of The X-Files Season 10, itself another IDW title. It is an adaptation of the 1990s television series Millennium, which featured Lance Henriksen as Frank Black. The comic series was written by Joe Harris with art by Colin Lorrimer, and saw Chris Carter, the creator of Millennium, serve as executive producer. Both Harris and Lorimer had previously worked on The X-Files Season 10. Cover art for the series was provided by menton3.
Harris cites the success of the adaptation of The X-Files for providing the impetus for a Millennium comic, noting that IDW editor-in-chief Chris Ryall approached him to write the latter series having seen the reception the former had been receiving. Harris himself had been a fan of the series during its initial broadcast, personally favouring its second season. He also expressed interest in possibly adapting another of Carter's creations, Harsh Realm.
## Release and reception
The first issue was released on January 21, 2015, and featured a variant cover by artist Paul Shipper. The issue sold 8,505 copies in North America, making it the 197th best-selling comic by units for that month. By the release of the second issue, sales had dropped to 6,273 issues, the 263rd highest sales figure for the month. A trade paperback collection comprising all five issues was released on August 12, 2015.
Critical reaction to the series was positive, with review aggregator website ComicBookRoundUp giving the series a score of 8.2 out of 10, based on 20 critics' reviews of individual issues. Reviewing the first issue for We The Nerdy, Taneisha Jane gave a score of 90 out of 100, describing it as having "excellent storytelling that will keep you engaged", and complimenting Lorimer's artwork. Comic Vine's Tony Guerrero praised Lorimer's "creepy" artwork, but felt that the storytelling required too much foreknowledge of the television series to fully understand. He summed the issue up as being "the crossover we've been waiting for". Reviewing the third issue for SciFiPulse, Patrick Hayes praised the series' use of photographic alternate covers for subscribers, and complimented the artwork and colouring throughout. Hayes rated the issue an "A" overall.
|
291,399 |
Citizens' assemblies of the Roman Republic
| 1,170,768,774 |
Political institutions in Roman Republic
|
[
"Government of the Roman Republic",
"Historical legislatures",
"Popular assemblies"
] |
The legislative assemblies of the Roman Republic were political institutions in the ancient Roman Republic. According to the contemporary historian Polybius, it was the people (and thus the assemblies) who had the final say regarding the election of magistrates, the enactment of Roman laws, the carrying out of capital punishment, the declaration of war and peace, and the creation (or dissolution) of alliances. Under the Constitution of the Roman Republic, the people (and thus the assemblies) held the ultimate source of sovereignty.
Since the Romans used a form of direct democracy, citizens, and not elected representatives, voted before each assembly. As such, the citizen-electors had no power, other than to cast a vote. Each assembly was presided over by a single Roman Magistrate, and as such, it was the presiding magistrate who made all decisions on matters of procedure and legality. Ultimately, the presiding magistrate's power over the assembly was nearly absolute. The only check on that power came in the form of vetoes handed down by other magistrates.
In the Roman system of direct democracy, two primary types of gatherings were used to vote on legislative, electoral, and judicial matters. The first was the Assembly (comitia), which was a gathering that was deemed to represent the entire Roman people, even if it did not contain all of the Roman citizens or, like the comitia curiata, excluded a particular class of Roman citizens (the plebs). The second was the Council (concilium), which was a gathering of citizens of a specific class. In contrast, the Convention was an unofficial forum for communication. Conventions were simply forums where Romans met for specific unofficial purposes, such as, for example, to hear a political speech. Voters always assembled first into Conventions to hear debates and conduct other business before voting, and then into Assemblies or Councils to actually vote.
## Assembly procedure
There were no set dates to hold assemblies, but notice had to be given beforehand if the assembly was to be considered formal. Elections had to be announced 17 days before the election took place. Likewise, 17 days had to pass between the proposal of legislation and its enactment by an assembly.
In addition to the presiding magistrate, several additional magistrates were often present to act as assistants. There were also religious officials known as augurs either in attendance or on-call, who would be available to help interpret any signs from the gods (omens). On several known occasions, presiding magistrates used the claim of unfavorable omens as an excuse to suspend a session that was not going the way they wanted. Any decision made by a presiding magistrate could be vetoed by a magistrate known as a Plebeian Tribune. In addition, decisions made by presiding magistrates could also be vetoed by higher-ranking magistrates.
On the day of the vote, the electors first assembled into their conventions for debate and campaigning. In the Conventions, the electors were not sorted into their respective units (curia, centuries or tribes). Speeches from private citizens were only heard if the issue to be voted upon was a legislative or judicial matter. If the purpose of the ultimate vote was for an election, no speeches from private citizens were heard, and instead, the candidates for office used the Convention to campaign. During the Convention, the bill to be voted upon was read to the assembly by an officer known as a "Herald". Then, if the assembly was composed of Tribes, the order of the vote had to be determined. A Plebeian Tribune could use his veto against pending legislation until the point when the order of the vote was determined.
The electors were then told to break up the Convention and assemble into the formal Assembly or Council. The electors voted by placing a pebble or written ballot into an appropriate jar. The baskets that held the votes were watched by specific officers, who then counted the ballots, and reported the results to the presiding magistrate. The majority of votes in any Curia, Tribe, or Century decided how that Curia, Tribe, or Century voted. Each Curia, Tribe, or Century received one vote, regardless of how many electors each Tribe or Century held. Once a majority of Curiae, Tribes, or Centuries voted in the same way on a given measure, the voting ended, and the matter was decided.
If a law was passed in violation of proper procedures (such as failing to wait 17 days before voting on a law), the Senate could declare the law nonbinding.
## Assembly of the Curiae
The Curiate Assembly (comitia curiata) was the principal assembly during the first two decades of the Roman Republic. The Curiate Assembly was organized as an Assembly, and not as a Council even though only patricians were members. During these first decades, the People of Rome were organized into thirty units called Curiae. The Curiae were ethnic in nature, and thus were organized on the basis of the early Roman family, or, more specifically, on the basis of the thirty original Patrician (aristocratic) clans. The Curiae assembled into the Curiate Assembly, for legislative, electoral, and judicial purposes. The Curiate Assembly passed laws, elected Consuls (the only elected magistrates at the time), and tried judicial cases. Consuls always presided over the assembly.
Shortly after the founding of the republic, most of the powers of the Curiate Assembly were transferred to the Centuriate Assembly and the Tribal Assembly. While it then fell into disuse, it did retain some theoretical powers, most importantly, the power to ratify elections of the top-ranking Roman Magistrates (Consuls and Praetors) by passing the statute that gave them their legal command authority, the lex curiata de imperio. In practice, however, they actually received this authority from the Centuriate Assembly (which formally elected them), and as such, this functioned as nothing more than a reminder of Rome's regal heritage. Other acts that the Curiate Assembly voted on were mostly symbolic and usually in the affirmative. At one point, possibly as early as 218 BC, the Curiate Assembly's thirty Curia were abolished, and replaced with thirty lictors, one from each of the original Patrician clans. Since the Curia had always been organized on the basis of the Roman family, the Curiate Assembly actually retained jurisdiction over clan matters even after the fall of the Roman Republic in 27 BC. Under the presidency of the Pontifex Maximus, it witnessed wills and ratified adoptions, inaugurated certain priests, and transferred citizens from Patrician class to Plebeian class (or vice versa). In 44 BC, for example, it ratified the will of Julius Caesar, and with it Caesar's adoption of his nephew Gaius Octavian (the future Roman emperor Augustus) as his son and heir. However, this might not have been the comitia curiata but instead the comitia calata.
## Assembly of the Centuries
The Centuriate Assembly (comitia centuriata or "Army Assembly") of the Roman Republic was originally the democratic assembly of the Roman soldiers. The Centuriate Assembly organized the Roman citizens into economic classes, defined by a means test. The Roman army was divided into units called "Centuries", and these gathered into the Centuriate Assembly for legislative, electoral, and judicial purposes. However, since the number of centuries in each class was fixed, centuries could contain far more than 100 men. Only this assembly could declare war or elect the highest-ranking Roman Magistrates: Consuls, Praetors and Censors. The Centuriate Assembly could also pass a statute that granted constitutional command authority to Consuls and Praetors, and Censorial powers to Censors. In addition, the Centuriate Assembly served as the highest court of appeal in certain judicial cases, and ratified the results of the Census. Although the voters in this assembly wore white undecorated togas and were unarmed, while participating in the Assembly they were classified as soldiers, and as such were not allowed to meet within the physical boundary of the city of Rome. The president of the Centuriate Assembly was usually a Consul (although sometimes a Praetor). Only Consuls (the highest-ranking of all Roman Magistrates) could preside over the Centuriate Assembly during elections because the higher-ranking Consuls were always elected together with the lower-ranking Praetors. Once every five years, after the new Consuls for the year took office, they presided over the Centuriate Assembly as it elected the two Censors.
The Centuriate Assembly was supposedly founded by the legendary Roman King Servius Tullius, less than a century before the founding of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. As such, the original design of the Centuriate Assembly was known as the "Servian organization". Under this organization, the assembly was supposedly designed to mirror the Roman army during the time of the Roman Kingdom. Soldiers in the Roman army were classified on the basis of the amount of property that they owned, and as such, soldiers with more property had more influence than soldiers with less property. The 193 Centuries in the assembly under the Servian Organization were each divided into one of three different grades: the officer class, the enlisted class, and a class of unarmed adjuncts. The officer class was grouped into eighteen Centuries. The enlisted class was grouped into five separate property classes, for a total of 170 Centuries. The unarmed soldiers were divided into the final five Centuries. Of five enlisted classes, the wealthiest controlled 80 of the votes. During a vote, all of the Centuries of one class had to vote before the Centuries of the next lower class could vote. The first candidate to reach a majority of 97 votes was victorious. When a measure or candidate received 97 votes, a majority of the centuries, the voting ended, and as such, many lower ranking Centuries rarely if ever had a chance to actually vote. Combined the 18 equites and the 80 centuries of the first property class had one more century than needed, and a unanimous vote from the elite would thus elect a candidate.
In 241 BC, the assembly was reorganized, though the exact details are uncertain. Some sources have a new total of 373 Centuries, but Cicero still writes of 193 centuries in his era, and most scholars still use that number. It is known that the first property class was reduced from 80 to 70 centuries, and the order of voting was changed so that the first class would go first, and be followed by the equites.
The lowest ranking Century in the Centuriate Assembly was the fifth Century (called the proletarii) of the unarmed adjunct class. This Century was the only Century composed of soldiers who had no property, and since it was always the last Century to vote, it never had any real influence on elections.
During his dictatorship from 82 BC until 80 BC, Lucius Cornelius Sulla restored the old Servian Organization to this assembly. Sulla died in 78 BC, and in 70 BC, the Consuls Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus repealed Sulla's constitutional reforms, including his restoration of the Servian Organization to this assembly. Thus, they restored the newer organization that had originated in 241 BC. The organization of the Centuriate Assembly was not changed again until its powers were all transferred to the Roman Senate by the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, after the fall of the Roman Republic in 27 BC.
## Assembly of the Tribes
The Tribal Assembly (comitia populi tributa) of the Roman Republic was the democratic assembly of Roman citizens. The Tribal Assembly was organized as an Assembly, and not as a Council. During the years of the Roman Republic, citizens were organized on the basis of thirty-five Tribes which included patricians and plebeians. The Tribes gathered into the Tribal Assembly for legislative, electoral, and judicial purposes. The president of the Tribal Assembly was usually either a Consul (the highest ranking Roman Magistrate) or a Praetor (the second-highest ranking Roman Magistrate). The Tribal Assembly elected three different magistrates: Quaestors, Curule Aediles, and Military Tribunes. The Tribal Assembly also had the power to try judicial cases.
In addition to the above-mentioned magistrates, the Tribal Assembly elected the Pontifex Maximus. His was a lifetime appointment, however, and so the Tribal Assembly only elected a new Pontifex Maximus after the previous one died.
The thirty-five Tribes were not ethnic or kinship groups, but rather a generic division into which Roman citizens were distributed. When the Tribes were created the divisions were geographical, similar to modern Parliamentary constituencies. However, since one joined the same Tribe that one's father belonged to, the geographical distinctions were eventually lost. The order that the 35 Tribes voted in was selected randomly by lot. The order was not chosen at once, and after each Tribe had voted, a lot was used to determine which Tribe should vote next. The first Tribe selected was usually the most important Tribe, because it often decided the matter. It was believed that the order of the lot was chosen by the Gods, and thus, that the position held by the early voting Tribes was the position of the Gods. Once a majority of Tribes had voted the same way, voting ended.
## Plebeian Council
The Plebeian Council (concilium plebis) was the principal popular gathering of the Roman Republic. As the name suggests, the Plebeian Council was organized as a Council, and not as an Assembly. It functioned as a gathering through which the Plebeians (commoners) could pass laws, elect magistrates, and try judicial cases. This council had no political power until the offices of Plebeian Tribune and Plebeian Aedile were created in 494 BC, due to the Plebeian Secession that year.
According to legend, the Roman King Servius Tullius enacted a series of constitutional reforms in the 6th century BC. One of these reforms resulted in the creation of a new organizational unit with which to divide citizens. This unit, the Tribe, was based on geography rather than family, and was created to assist in future reorganizations of the army. In 471 BC, a law was passed which allowed the Plebeians to begin organizing by Tribe. Before this point, they had organized on the basis of the Curia. The only difference between the Plebeian Council after 471 BC and the ordinary Tribal Assembly (which also organized on the basis of the Tribes) was that the Tribes of the Plebeian Council only included Plebeians, whereas the Tribes of the Tribal Assembly included both Plebeians and Patricians.
The Plebeian Council elected two 'Plebeian Magistrates', the Plebeian Tribunes and the Plebeian Aediles. Usually the Plebeian Tribune presided over the assembly, although the Plebeian Aedile sometimes did as well. Originally, statutes passed by the Plebeian Council ("Plebiscites") only applied to Plebeians. However, in 449 BC, a statute of an Assembly was passed which gave Plebiscites the full force of law over all Romans (Plebeians and Patricians). It was not until 287 BC, however, that the last mechanism which allowed the Roman Senate to veto acts of the Plebeian Council was revoked. After this point, almost all domestic legislation came out of the Plebeian Council.
## See also
- Cursus honorum
- Byzantine Senate
- Princeps senatus
- Elections in the Roman Republic
- Interrex
- Procurator (Roman)
- Acta Senatus
- Tricameralism
|
12,379,701 |
The Botanic Garden
| 1,151,410,870 |
1791 poem set by Erasmus Darwin
|
[
"1791 books",
"1791 in science",
"18th-century books",
"British poems"
] |
The Botanic Garden (1791) is a set of two poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, by the British poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin. The Economy of Vegetation celebrates technological innovation and scientific discovery and offers theories concerning contemporary scientific questions, such as the history of the cosmos. The more popular Loves of the Plants promotes, revises and illustrates Linnaeus's classification scheme for plants.
The intent of The Botanic Garden, one of the first popular science books, is to pique readers' interest in science while educating them at the same time. By embracing Linnaeus's sexualized language, which anthropomorphizes plants, Darwin intended to make botany interesting and relevant to the readers of his time. Darwin emphasizes the connections between humanity and plants, arguing that they are all part of the same natural world and that sexual reproduction is at the heart of evolution (ideas that his grandson, Charles Darwin, would later turn into a full-fledged theory of evolution). This evolutionary theme continues in The Economy of Vegetation, which contends that scientific progress is part of evolution and urges its readers to celebrate inventors and scientific discoveries in a language usually reserved for heroes or artistic geniuses. Darwin's attempt to popularize science and to convey the wonders of scientific discovery and technological innovation through poetry helped initiate a tradition of popular science writing that continues to the present day.
## Historical background
In the 1760s and 1770s, botany became increasingly popular in Britain because of the translation of Linnaeus's works into English. One of the most prominent books about botany was William Withering's Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain (1776), which used Linnaeus's system for classifying plants. Withering's book went through multiple editions and became the standard text on British plants for a generation. The book delighted and intrigued experts, amateurs, and children alike.
One of the effects of Withering's book was that it provoked a debate over the translation of Linnaeus's works. Withering aimed for an Anglicized translation of Linnaeus's Latin that also stripped the nomenclature of its sexualized language. Although he wanted to make botany widely available, he believed that women readers should be protected from any mention of sexuality. In his preface he writes: "from an apprehension that botany in an English dress would become a favourite amusement with the ladies, . . . it was thought proper to drop the sexual distinctions in the titles to the Classes and Orders."
Darwin held the opposite position; he maintained that Linnaeus's works should be translated as literally as possible and that the sexual references in the nomenclature should be retained. In 1783 and 1787, A Botanical Society, at Lichfield - almost always incorrectly called the Botanical Society of Lichfield, founded by Darwin and several of his friends specifically to translate Linnaeus's works, issued their own English translation, A System of Vegetables, that categorized over 1400 plants. Assisted by Samuel Johnson, they coined over fifty new botanical words; it is this work, along with the group's The Families of Plants that introduced the words stamen and pistil into the English language, for example. By 1796 their translation had prevailed and Withering was forced to adopt their vocabulary in later editions of his work.
### Linnaean system
The reliability and usefulness of the Linnaean system was a subject of much debate when Darwin was composing The Loves of the Plants, leading scholars to conclude that one of his intentions in publishing the poem was to defend the Linnaean classification scheme. Linnaeus had proposed that, like humans, plants are male and female and reproduce sexually; he also described his system using highly sexualized language. Therefore, as scholar Janet Browne writes, “to be a Linnaean taxonomist was to believe in the sex life of flowers.” In his poem, Darwin not only embraced Linnaeus's classification scheme but also his metaphors. At the same time that he was defending Linnaeus's system, however, Darwin was also refining it. Linnaeus classified plants solely on the number of reproductive organs they had, but Darwin's poem also emphasized “proportion, length, and arrangement of the [sexual] organs”.
## Writing and publication
Inspired by his enjoyment of his own botanical garden but primarily by Anna Seward's poem “Verses Written in Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden” (1778), Darwin decided to compose a poem that would embody Linnaeus's ideas. (Darwin would later include an edited version of Seward's poem in The Loves of the Plants without her permission and without acknowledgement. Seward was rankled by this treatment and complained of Darwin's inattention to her authorial rights in her Memoirs of Erasmus Darwin.) According to Seward, Darwin said that “the Linnean System is unexplored poetic ground, and an [sic] happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed.” Darwin may have also thought of The Love of the Plants “as a kind of love song” to Elizabeth Pole, a woman with whom he was in love and would eventually marry. Concerned about his scientific reputation and curious to see if there would be an audience for his more demanding poem The Economy of Vegetation, he published The Loves of the Plants anonymously in 1789 (see 1789 in poetry). He was stunned at its success and therefore published both Loves of the Plants and Economy of Vegetation together as The Botanic Garden in 1791. Joseph Johnson, his publisher, eventually bought the copyright for The Botanic Garden from him for the staggering sum of £800.
When Johnson published the combined and illustrated The Botanic Garden in 1791, he charged twenty-one shillings for it, a hefty price at the time. Seward wrote that "the immense price which the bookseller gave for this work, was doubtless owing to considerations which inspired his trust in its popularity. Botany was, at that time, and still continues a very fashionable study." However, the high price would also have discouraged government prosecution for a book that contained radical political views. Any subversive ideas that the poem contained were therefore initially limited to an audience of educated people who could afford to purchase the book.
Because amateur botany was popular in Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century, The Botanic Garden, despite its initial high cost, was a bestseller. In 1799 it was in a fourth edition as The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts at a smaller and more affordable octavo size, and this was another best-seller. There were three early Irish editions, and a second American edition had appeared by 1807. Despite the huge demand in 1799 and into the early 1800s, and cheaper pirated American and Irish imports, there was room in the market for another edition in Britain 1824 with a reprinting in 1825.
## The Loves of the Plants
### Structure and poetic style
Suggesting the passing of a single day, The Loves of the Plants is divided into four cantos, all written in heroic couplets. A preface to the poem outlines the basics of the Linnaean classification system. Guiding the reader through the garden is a “Botanic Muse” who is described as Linnaeus's inspiration. Interspersed between the cantos are dialogues on poetic theory between the poet and his bookseller. The poem is not a narrative; instead, reminiscent of the picaresque tradition, it consists of discrete descriptions of eighty-three separate species which are accompanied by extensive explanatory footnotes.
In The Loves of the Plants, Darwin claims "to Inlist Imagination under the banner of Science". A believer in Enlightenment ideals, he wanted not only to participate in scientific discovery but also to disseminate its new knowledge in an accessible format. As Darwin scholar Michael Page has written, “Darwin sought to do for Linnaeus . . . what Pope had done for Newton and celestial mechanics in the Essay on Man”
#### Personification
In one of the interludes of The Loves of the Plants, the voice of the Poet, which would seem to be Darwin's voice as well, argues that poetry is meant to appeal to the senses, particularly vision. Darwin's primary tool for accomplishing this was personification. Darwin's personifications were often based on the classical allusions embedded with Linnaeus's own naming system. However, they were not meant to conjure up images of gods or heroes; rather, the anthropomorphized images of the plants depict more ordinary images. They also stimulate the readers' imaginations to assist them in learning the material and allow Darwin to argue that the plants he is discussing are animate, living things—just like humans. Darwin's use of personification suggests that plants are more akin to humans than the reader might at first assume; his emphasis on the continuities between mankind and plantkind contributes to the evolutionary theme that runs throughout the poem.
The Loves of the Plants argues that human emotion is rooted in physiology rather than Christian theology. Darwin would take his materialism even further in The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature, works that have been called atheistic. In describing plants through the language of love and sex, Darwin hoped to convey the idea that humans and human sexuality are simply another part of the natural world. Darwin writes that his poem will reverse Ovid who “did, by art poetic, transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into trees and Flowers; I have undertaken, by similar art, to restore some of them to their original animality”
### Themes
#### Evolution
In his Phytologia (1800), Darwin wrote “from the sexual, or amatorial generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained”. He insisted in The Loves of the Plants that sexual reproduction was at the heart of evolutionary change and progress, in humans as well as plants. Browne writes that the poem may be seen as "an early study in what was to be Darwin's lifelong commitment to the idea of transmutation.” Darwin illustrated not only organic change, but social and political change as well. Throughout The Botanic Garden, Darwin endorses the ideals of the American and French revolutions and criticizes slavery. His celebration of technological progress in The Economy of Vegetation suggests that social and scientific progress are part of a single evolutionary process. Humanity was improving, moving towards perfection, as evidenced by abolitionism and the broadening of political rights.
#### Gender
The Love of the Plants, however, while opening up the world of botany to the non-specialist and to women in particular, reinforced conventional gender stereotypes. Darwin's images “remained deeply polarized between the chaste, blushing virgin and the seductive predatory woman, the modest shepherdess and the powerful queen.”
Although Darwin gives plant-women the central role in each vignette (a reversal of Linnaeus's classification scheme, which focuses on the male), few of the representations stray from stereotypical images of women. When the female and male reproductive organs are in a 1:1 ratio in a plant, Darwin represents traditional couplings. The women are “playful”, “chaste”, “gentle” and “blooming”. When the ratio is 1:2-4, the female becomes a “helpmate” or “associate” to the males, who have separate bonds to their “brothers”. Once he reaches 1:5-6, however, Darwin presents women as “seductive or wanton” or, at the other extreme, “needing protection”. By 1:8+, he presents “unambiguous metaphors of power and command, [with the woman] being pictured as a saint, a reigning sovereign, a sorceress, a proto-industrialist . . . a priestess”. The images also present a largely positive view of the relationship between the sexes; there is no rape or sexual violence of any kind, elements central to much of Ovid and Linnaeus. There is also no representation of the marriage market, divorce or adultery (with one exception); the poem is largely pastoral. There are also no representations of intelligent women or women writers, although Darwin knew quite a few. The exception is the “Botanic Muse”, who has the botanical knowledge that the poem imparts; however, as Browne argues, few readers in the eighteenth century would have seen this as a liberating image for women since they would have been skeptical that a woman could have written the poem and inhabited the voice of the muse (they would have assumed that the anonymous writer was a man).
Despite its traditional gender associations, some scholars have argued that the poem provides “both a language and models for critiquing sexual mores and social institutions” and encourages women to engage in scientific pursuits.
## The Economy of Vegetation
While The Loves of the Plants celebrates the natural world and advances several scientific hypotheses regarding the formation of the cosmos, the moon and the earth, The Economy of Vegetation celebrates scientific progress and technological innovation, such as the forging of steel, the invention of the steam engine and the improvements to gunpowder. It depicts scientists and inventors, such as Benjamin Franklin, responsible for this progress as the heroes of a new age; he “mythologizes” them. The poem at some points goes further, into what would now be called science fiction, forecasting that the British Empire will have giant steam-powered airships ("The flying-chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above") and far-ranging submarines ("Britain's sons shall guide \| Huge sea-balloons beneath the tossing tide; The diving castles, roof'd with spheric glass, Ribb'd with strong oak, and barr'd with bolts of brass, Buoy'd with pure air shall endless tracks pursue").
Although the two poems seem separated, they both endorse an evolutionary view of the world. Darwin did not see a distinction between nature and culture; industrialization and technological progress were part of a single evolutionary process.
Much of The Economy of Vegetation deals with mining and the use of minerals. For example, Darwin describes the great mining capability of the steam engine:
> > The Giant-Power [that] forms earth's remotest caves Lifts with strong arm her dark reluctant waves; Each cavern'd rock, and hidden den explores, Drags her dark Coals, and digs her shining ores.
As such examples demonstrate, The Economy of Vegetation is part of an Enlightenment paradigm of progress while The Loves of the Plants, with its focus on an integrated natural world, is more of an early Romantic work.
Darwin also connected scientific progress to political progress; “for Darwin the spread of revolution meant that reason and equity vanquished political tyranny and religious superstition.” Criticizing slavery, he writes:
> > When Avarice, shrouded in Religion's robe, Sail'd to the West, and slaughter'd half the globe: While Superstition, stalking by his side, Mock'd the loud groan, and lap'd the bloody tide; For sacred truths announced her frenzied dreams, And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.— Hear, Oh Britannia! potent Queen of isles, On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles, Now Afric's coasts thy craftier sons invade, And Theft and Murder take the garb of Trade! —The Slave, in chains, on supplicating knee, Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee; With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress'd, 'Are we not Brethren?' sorrow choaks the rest; —Air! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood Their innocent cries!--Earth! cover not their blood! (I.ii.414-430)
## Reception and legacy
The Botanic Garden was reissued repeatedly in Britain, Ireland and the United States throughout the 1790s. Until the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Darwin was considered one of England's preeminent poets. His poems, with their “dynamic vision of change and transformation”, resonated with the ideals of the French revolution. However, when the revolution entered its more radical and bloody phase, scientific progress became associated with what many started to see as a failed revolution. Anti-Jacobins, who were opposed to the French revolution, denounced the sexual freedom gaining ground in France and linked it to the scientific projects of men like Darwin. George Canning and John Frere published a parody of The Loves of the Plants in the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798 titled “Loves of the Triangles”, suggesting just these connections.
Darwin's poems were not published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century as conservative reaction solidified in Britain, although bowdlerized and sentimentalized poems imitating Darwin's became increasingly popular. The analogy between plants and humans lasted well into the nineteenth century; Alice in Wonderland was one of the many books to employ the image.
Darwin's high poetic style in the manner of Alexander Pope impressed a young Wordsworth, who called it “dazzling", but Coleridge quipped, "I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem", Francis Wrangham, in the (staunchly conservative) British Critic, however, did critique Darwin's style; in a review of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads from 1799, the critic noted, "It is not by pomp of words, but by energy of thought, that sublimity is most successfully achieved; and we infinitely prefer the simplicity, even of the most unadorned tale in this volume, to all the meretricious frippery of the Darwinian taste".
Interest in Erasmus Darwin has increased in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, and the first scholarly edition, with a critical introduction and scholarly apparatus, was produced by Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane, in 2017 and published with Routledge.
## See also
- The Unsex'd Females
- Transmutation of species
- History of evolutionary thought
|
1,108,159 |
Carcharodontosaurus
| 1,173,429,510 |
Genus of carcharodontosaurid dinosaur from the Cretaceous period
|
[
"Apex predators",
"Bahariya Formation",
"Carcharodontosaurids",
"Cenomanian genus extinctions",
"Cenomanian life",
"Fossil taxa described in 1931",
"Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of Africa",
"Taxa named by Ernst Stromer"
] |
Carcharodontosaurus (/ˌkɑːrkəroʊˌdɒntoʊˈsɔːrəs/; lit. 'shark-toothed lizard') is a genus of carnivorous theropod dinosaur that lived in North Africa from about 99 to 94 million years ago during the Albian and Cenomanian stages of the Late Cretaceous. Two teeth of the genus, now lost, were first described from Algeria by French paleontologists Charles Depéret and Justin Savornin as Megalosaurus saharicus. A partial skeleton was collected by crews of German paleontologist Ernst Stromer during a 1914 expedition to Egypt. Stromer did not report the Egyptian find until 1931, in which he dubbed the novel genus Carcharodontosaurus, making the type species C. saharicus. Unfortunately, this skeleton was destroyed during the Second World War. In 1995 a nearly complete skull of C. saharicus, the first well-preserved specimen to be found in almost a century, was discovered in the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco; it was designated the neotype in 1996. Fossils unearthed from the Echkar Formation of northern Niger were described and named as another species, C. iguidensis, in 2007.
Carcharodontosaurus is one of the largest theropod dinosaurs known, with C. saharicus reaching 12–12.5 metres (39–41 ft) in length and approximately 6–6.2 metric tons (6.6–6.8 short tons) in body mass. It had a large, lightly built skull with a triangular rostrum. Its jaws were lined with sharp, recurved, serrated teeth that bear striking resemblances to those of the great white shark, the inspiration for the name. Though giant, its cranium was made lighter by greatly expanded fossae and fenestra, but also making it more fragile than tyrannosaurids'. The forelimbs were tiny whereas the hindlimbs were robust and muscular. Like most other theropods, it had an elongated tail for balance.
Many gigantic theropods are known from North Africa during this period, including both species of Carcharodontosaurus as well as the spinosaurid Spinosaurus and ceratosaur Deltadromeus. This suggests there was niche partitioning between the different groups, with Spinosaurus being piscivorous whereas Carcharodontosaurus consumed sauropod dinosaurs. Studies of the bite force and tooth anatomy of carcharodontosaurids have found them to possess strong, but relatively weak bites compared to other theropod families. North Africa at the time was blanketed in mangrove forests and wetlands, creating a hotspot of fish, crocodilian, and pterosaur diversity.
## Discovery and species
### Initial finds
In 1924, two teeth of Carcharodontosaurus were unearthed from wall cuts in different foggaras near Timimoun, French Algeria. These sedimens came from the Cretaceous-aged Continental intercalaire Formation. The fossils were taken to the governor of Timimoun, Captain Burté, who gave them to French geologist Charles Depéret later that year. In 1925, Depéret and his colleague Justin Savornin described the teeth as syntypes (name-bearing specimens) of a new species of theropod dinosaur, Megalosaurus saharicus. These were the first fossils of theropods to be described from the region. The name saharicus refers to the Sahara Desert where the teeth had been found. The genus Megalosaurus was a wastebasket taxon, with many new species referred to it without justification, including M. saharicus. It was later considered to be a species of Dryptosaurus in 1927, though this is unjustified. By accident, another species of Megalosaurus, M. africanus, was named by German paleontologist Friedrich von Huene based on the teeth. It is therefore considered a junior synonym of M. saharicus. Both syntypic teeth of M. saharicus have since been lost, possibly being kept in a collection in Algeria, Paris, or Lyon, and lack distinguishing characteristics from other carcharodontosaurids. In 1960, French paleontologist Albert-Félix de Lapparent reported the discovery of more teeth and several caudal vertebrae from sites in Algeria belonging to Carcharodontosaurus, though some of these fossils might belong to other genera. Later authors have mentioned finds of teeth and isolated fossils from other provinces of Algeria.
However, fossils of C. saharicus were first found in marls near Ain Gedid, Egypt in early April 1914 by Austro-Hungarian paleontologist Richard Markgraf. Marls from this region derive from the Cenomanian-aged Bahariya Formation, one of many Cretaceous-aged sites of North Africa. In Bahariya, Markgraf did extensive collecting of dinosaur skeletons for his employer, German paleontologist Ernst Stromer of the Paläontologisches Museum München (Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology). The skeleton of Carcharodontosaurus (IPHG 1922 X46) consisted of: a partial skull, including much of the braincase, teeth, three cervical and a caudal vertebra, incomplete pelvis, a manual ungual, femora, and the left fibula. An isolated ilium was also considered to be from C. saharicus, but it is likely from a ceratosaur.
Due to political tensions between the German Empire and then British-owned Egypt, the Carcharodontosaurus skeleton took years to get to Germany. It was not until 1922 that they were transported overseas to Munich where they were described by Stromer in 1931. Stromer recognized that IPHG 1922 X46’s teeth matched the characteristic dentition of those described by Depéret and Savornin, which led to Stromer conserving the species name saharicus. However, he found it necessary to erect a new genus for this species, Carcharodontosaurus, for their similarities, in sharpness and serrations, to the teeth of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). World War II would break out in 1939, leading IPHG 1922 X46 and other material from Bahariya to be destroyed during a British bombing raid on Munich during the night of April 24/25, 1944. An endocast was made and survived the war, being the only remaining relic of the specimen.
### Resurgent discoveries, C. iguidensis, and confusion with spinosaurids
Few discoveries of Carcharodontosaurus material were made until 1995, when American paleontologist Paul Sereno found an incomplete skull during an expedition embarked on by the University of Chicago. This skull (UCRC PV12) was found in the Cenomanian-aged rocks of the Lower Douira Formation, Kem Kem Beds in Errachidia, southeastern Morocco. The specimen was taken to the University of Chicago and described in 1996 by Sereno and colleagues. In a later paper, UCRC PV12 was designated as the neotype of C. saharicus due to the loss of other specimens and the similar age and geographic location to previously noted material. The taxonomy of Carcharodontosaurus was discussed by Chiarenza and Cau (2016), who suggested that the neotype of C. saharicus was similar but distinct from the holotype in the morphology of the maxillary interdental plates. However, paleontologist Mickey Mortimer put forward that the suggested difference between the C. saharicus neotype and holotype was actually due to damage to the neotype.
Several other fossils of C. saharicus have been unearthed from the Kem Kem Beds, such as dentary fragments, a cervical vertebra, and many teeth. Sereno et al also referred a multitude of cervical vertebrae described as the spinosaurids Sigilmassasaurus and "Spinosaurus B" to C. saharicus reasoning that stout cervicals would be needed to carry the skulls of carcharodontosaurids. Later research proved otherwise, with the vertebrae being placed in Spinosaurus aegyptiacus by Ibrahim et al (2020). French paleontologist René Lavocat was the first to note the possible presence of Carcharodontosaurus in Morocco as early as 1954.
In 2007, a novel species of Carcharodontosaurus, C. iguidensis, was dubbed by paleontologists Steve Brusatte and Paul Sereno. Fossils of C. iguidensis had been uncovered during an expedition to the Echkar Formation of Iguidi, Niger, a partial maxilla (MNN IGU2) being designated the holotype. The species name iguidensis is after Iguidi, where the fossils were unearthed. Several other remains such as a braincase, a lacrimal, a dentary, a cervical vertebra, and a collection of teeth were referred to C. iguidensis based on size and supposed similarities to other Carcharodontosaurus bones. Chiarenza and Cau (2016) identified the referred material of C. iguidensis as belonging to Sigilmassasaurus (later referred to Spinosaurus sp.) and a non-carcharodontosaurine, and therefore chose to limit C. iguidensis to the holotype pending future research. Another carcharodontosaurid from the Kem Kem Beds, Sauroniops pachytholus, was dubbed in 2012 based on a single frontal. This species has been proposed to be synonymous with C. saharicus, though this has seen resistance and the validity maintained in most literature. The South American genus Giganotosaurus was synonymized with Carcharodontosaurus by Figueiredo (1998) and Paul (2010), however no authors have since followed this assessment.
#### Other referred specimens
- Lapparent (1951, 1960) described several Carcharodontosaurus teeth from the Continental intercalaire Formation of Guermessa, Tunisia.
- A postorbital bone and several postcranial remains assigned to Carcharodontosaurus were found in the Elrhaz Formation of northern Niger. Taquet (1976) noted that the postorbital was similar to that of Acrocanthosaurus, a relative of Carcharodontosaurus, while the postcranial fossils could belong to other theropods.
- Two braincase fragments, 137 teeth, two caudal vertebrae, and a manual phalanx from the Echkar Formation were referred to as Carcharodontosaurus by Lapparent (1960). A pedal phalanx had also been described as Carcharodontosaurus but it likely is from a spinosaurid instead.
- Many vertebrae, including two associated dorsals, were found in the Early Cretaceous strata of the Irhazer Group of Agadez, Niger. Lapparent mentioned these fossils as C. saharicus in 1960, though they may belong to other theropod genera.
- Caudal vertebrae from the Tefidet and teeth from Akarazeras sites of the Continental intercalaire Formation of Agadez, Niger were recorded by Lapparent (1960) and Taquet (1976) respectively. The vertebrae could be from other theropods.
- From an unknown locale in the Continental intercalaire of the Sahara Desert, Lapparent (1960) documented eight vertebrae, a humerus, and a manual phalanx as coming from C. saharicus. These elements could be from other theropods.
- Two papers, the first in 1978, have described teeth and a caudal vertebra of Carcharodontosaurus from the Chenini Formation of southern Tunisia. However, the caudal vertebra is now labeled Carcharodontosauridae indet.
- Fossils from the Quseir Formation of western Egypt were assigned to Carcharodontosaurus in 1999.
- A 1999 paper described several vertebrae and limb elements of a carcharodontosaurid which were unearthed from the Wadi Milk Formation of Sudan. These were placed only as carcharodontosaurid, but researcher Mickey Mortimer proposed that they belong to Carcharodontosaurus itself based on the presence of pleurocoels (shallow openings) in the caudal vertebrae.
- In 2015, a large neural arch of a dorsal vertebra from the Kem Kem Beds was informally described as belonging to a new genus and species of megaraptoran dubbed "Osteoporosia gigantea". This specimen is owned head of a Polish theme park chain who described it as belonging to a 15 metres (49 ft) long carnosaur similar to Mapusaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. However, it was much smaller than proposed and may belong to C. saharicus or Sauroniops based on its carcharodontosaurid traits and origin.
#### Erroneously assigned specimens
- A maxillary tooth recovered from the Villar del Arzobispo Formation of Spain was referred to Carcharodontosaurus in 1966. However, it lacks the traits of carcharodontosaurid teeth and instead is more similar to that of other allosauroids.
- Bond and Bromley (1970) described teeth deriving from the Gokwe Formation of Zimbabwe as being similar to Carcharodontosaurus, with Mickey Mortimer assigning them to the genus tentatively. However, later studies have found them to be indeterminate.
- Teeth from the Alcantara Formation of Brazil were placed in Carcharodontosaurus in 2002, but this has been disputed based on its geographic origin.
## Description
### Size
Stromer hypothesized that C. saharicus was around the same size as the tyrannosaurid Gorgosaurus, which would place it at around 8–9 metres (26–30 ft) long, based on his specimen IPHG 1922 X46. This individual was around 15% smaller than the neotype, the latter was estimated to be 12–12.5 metres (39–41 ft) in length and approximately 6–6.2 metric tons (6.6–6.8 short tons) in body mass. This makes Carcharodontosaurus saharicus one of the largest known theropod dinosaurs and terrestrial carnivores known, being the 3rd biggest carcharodontosaurid and 5th largest theropod overall according to most estimates. C. iguidensis was much smaller, only reaching 10 metres (33 ft) in length and 4 metric tons (4.4 short tons) in body mass.
### Skull
The largest and most complete skull of C. saharicus would measure 1.6 metres (5.2 ft) when complete, around the same size as the largest Tyrannosaurus skulls. No skulls of the genus preserve premaxillae, complete posterior skull regions, or mandibles. Skulls of carcharodontosaurids tend to be more slender and lightly built than those of later tyrannosaurids, which have robust builds and adaptations for crushing. The neotype cranium tapers towards the front in side view creating a triangular outline. This is similar to that of other carcharodontosaurids like Mapusaurus and Giganotosaurus. Its skull was lighter than that of tyrannosaurids, with the antorbital fenestra composing over 30% of the total skull length as well as being surrounded by fossae in the maxillae (upper jaw bone), nasals (nose bone), jugals (cheekbone), and lacrimals (front orbit bone). Akin to other genera, its nasal is elongated and bears an anterior face covered in a rugose surface. These bumps were likely extended by keratin sheaths, creating a horn-like structure as in Ceratosaurus. A similar rugosity is found on the lacrimal which would also be lengthened by keratin, forming a similar element. The most distinctive trait of Carcharodontosaurus' skull is the sculpted exterior of the maxillae , which is unique to the genus. However, C. iguidensis has antorbital fossae limited to the proximity of the antorbital fenestra, a crest running along the medial face of the maxilla, and a process along its midline. These traits are missing in C. saharicus, differentiating the two species.
The maxilla of IPHG 1922 X46 would have been 70 centimetres (28 in) long when complete, whereas the neotype's complete maxilla is much larger. 14 teeth sockets are present in each maxilla. Parts of the braincase are known though much of their morphology is the same as Giganotosaurus'. However, C. saharicus has a much more prominent nuchal crest, which overhangs the skull roof. The frontal bones are firmly fused, a characteristic evident in most theropods. The jugals are broad and triangle-shaped. The lower jaw articulation was placed farther back behind the occipital condyle (where the neck is attached to the skull) compared to other theropods. Two dentary (lower jaw bone) fragments which were referred to C. saharicus by Ibrahim et al (2020) have deep and expanded alveoli (tooth sockets), traits found in other large theropods. If like Tyrannotitan and Giganotosaurus, the dentary would have 16 alveoli (tooth sockets).
Estimations of the tooth count of Carcharodontosaurus vary, but a recent estimate of 30 dentary, 8 premaxillary, and 24 maxillary teeth for a total of 62 teeth was made. Carcharodontosaurid teeth are some of the largest of any dinosaur group, with a maxillary tooth from IPHG 1922 X46 being 6.8 centimetres (2.7 in) tall and 3.5 centimetres (1.4 in) wide. However, they are extremely thin, with most being under a centimeter thick. Serrations are numerous on the anterior and posterior margins, with over 18 to 20 serrations per centimeter of edge in C. saharicus and up to 32 per centimeter in C. iguidensis. Its teeth are straight, laterally flattened, and spindle-shaped in cross-section. However, dentition towards the back of the mouth became more recurved than those in the maxilla. The posterior margin of these crowns are recurved and convex at its termination. Bowed enamel wrinkles are present on both dorsoventral sides of the crowns. These wrinkles curve towards the marginal serrations, composing a band-shape along the ends.
#### Brain and inner ear
In 2001, Hans C. E. Larsson published a description of the inner ear and endocranium of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus. Starting from the portion of the brain closest to the tip of the animal's snout is the forebrain, which is followed by the midbrain. The midbrain is angled downwards at a 45-degree angle and towards the rear of the animal. This is followed by the hindbrain, which is roughly parallel to the forebrain and forms a roughly 40-degree angle with the midbrain. Overall, the brain of C. saharicus would have been similar to that of a related dinosaur, Allosaurus fragilis. Larsson found that the ratio of the cerebrum to the volume of the brain overall in Carcharodontosaurus was typical for a non-avian reptile. Carcharodontosaurus also had a large optic nerve.
The three semicircular canals of the inner ear of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus—when viewed from the side—had a subtriangular outline. This subtriangular inner-ear configuration is present in Allosaurus, lizards, and turtles, but not in birds. The semi-"circular" canals themselves were very linear, which explains the pointed silhouette. In life, the floccular lobe of the brain would have projected into the area surrounded by the semicircular canals, just like in other non-avian theropods, birds, and pterosaurs.
### Postcrania
Few postcranial elements are confidently known from Carcharodontosaurus, though many isolated bones from the Sahara have been referred to the genus without detailed study. Like other carcharodontosaurids, it was robust with small forelimbs, an elongated tail, and short neck. The most complete specimen was IPHG 1922 X46, but it was destroyed. This specimen preserved 3 cervical vertebrae, which were weathered severely. One is an axis and the other two are articulating anterior cervicals which are longer and wider than the axis. The cervical vertebrae of Carcharodontosaurus are stout and opisthocoelus (concave posterior ends). Cervical vertebrae in this genus, as in Giganotosaurus, are topped by low neural spines joined with sturdy transverse processes which hung over the pleurocoels (shallow depressions on the sides of centra), which would contain pneumatic air sacs to lighten the vertebrae. The centra of these vertebrae are adorned by keels along their ventral sides. An anterior caudal vertebra was also known, which was platycoelous (flat anterior and posterior ends) and short. This caudal was incomplete, missing much of the neural spine, but had diapophyses that would conjugate with the chevrons. The sides of its centrum were pleurocoelus as well. Two blade-like chevrons were preserved in this individual as well.
The pelvis was incomplete, containing both pubes and the left ischium, though complete pelves are known in related genera. The ischium pointed backwards whereas the pubes pointed forwards, a diagnostic trait of saurischians. The pubes were likely nearly 1 metre (3.3 ft) when fully preserved, with shafts that were thin but were transversely expanded at the anterior ends where they connected, creating a V-shape in anterior view. Both femora in addition to the left fibula were recovered, the former element being one of the largest recorded from a theropod at 1.26 metres (4.1 ft) in length. Its femora lacked strong curvature and are mostly straight except for the anterior and posterior ends. The greater trochanter is small but has a notable protrusion, which would attach to the m. caudofemoralis longus muscle of the tail. Its fibula was only 88 centimetres (35 in) long, around 1/3rd the length of the femora. The anterior end was triangular in lateral view with bulging condyles whereas the posterior end is rounded.
## Classification
Carcharodontosaurus is the type genus of the family Carcharodontosauridae and subfamily Carcharodontosaurinae. This subfamily contains Carcharodontosaurus itself as well as the other carcharodontosaurines Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, Meraxes, and Tyrannotitan; however, these genera make up an independent tribe: Giganotosaurini. Carcharodontosauridae was a clade created by Stromer for Carcharodontosaurus and Bahariasaurus, though the name remained unused until the recognition of other members of the group in the late 20th century. He noted the likeness of Carcharodontosaurus bones to the American theropods Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, leading him to consider the family part of Theropoda.
Paul Sereno's description of Carcharodontosaurus fossils in 1996 led to the realization of a transcontinental clade of carcharodontosaurids. As more carcharodontosaurids were discovered, their interrelationships became even clearer. The group was defined as all allosauroids closer to Carcharodontosaurus than Allosaurus or Sinraptor by the paleontologist Thomas R. Holtz and colleagues in 2004. Carcharodontosaurus is more poorly known than most other carcharodontosaurids, with Meraxes and Giganotosaurus represented by nearly complete skeletons. Members of the family have been recognized from the Late Jurassic to Middle Cretaceous of every continent except Oceania and Antarctica.
Canale et al. (2022) recovered Carcharodontosaurus as the earliest diverging member of Carcharodontosaurinae. The cladogram results of their phylogenetic analyses are displayed in the cladogram below:
### Evolution
Coria and Salgado suggested that the convergent evolution of gigantism in theropods could have been linked to common conditions in their environments or ecosystems. Sereno and colleagues found that the presence of carcharodontosaurids in Africa (Carcharodontosaurus), North America (Acrocanthosaurus), and South America (Giganotosaurus), showed the group had a transcontinental distribution by the Early Cretaceous period. Dispersal routes between the northern and southern continents appear to have been severed by ocean barriers in the Late Cretaceous, which led to more distinct, provincial faunas, by preventing exchange. Previously, it was thought that the Cretaceous world was biogeographically separated, with the northern continents being dominated by tyrannosaurids, South America by abelisaurids, and Africa by carcharodontosaurids. The subfamily Carcharodontosaurinae, in which Carcharodontosaurus belongs, appears to have been restricted to the southern continent of Gondwana (formed by South America and Africa), where they were probably the apex predators. The South American tribe Giganotosaurini may have been separated from their African relatives through vicariance, when Gondwana broke up during the Aptian–Albian ages of the Early Cretaceous.
## Paleobiology
### Lifting capabilities
A biomechanical analysis of Carcharodontosaurus' lifting capabilities was conducted by paleontologist Donald Henderson and paleoartist Robert Nicholls in 2015. The authors used 3D models of the animal as well as a subadult sauropod Limaysaurus, which although not found alongside Carcharodontosaurus, is similar to the rebbachisaurids of the Kem Kem Beds. The models included the size of the lungs and other pneumatic structures of the two, fostering an accurate weight simulation of the scenario. Henderson & Nicholls' study found that an adult C. saharicus could hold a maximum of 424 kg (935 lb), half the weight of an adult Limaysaurus. However, two C. saharicus adults could together lift as much as 850 kilograms (1,870 lb).
### Feeding and diet
The dentition of allosauroids is distinct, with carcharodontosaurid teeth bearing distinctly thin and blade-like teeth. However, these teeth are thin and likely could not sustain impact against hard surfaces like bone without potentially bending and snapping. This danger is exacerbated by the straight edges, slightly recurved tips, and sinusoidal shapes observed in their dentition. Despite these traits, the teeth are still much more robust than those of smaller theropods and due to their overall size could take more pressure. Carcharodontosaurus also had a high tooth replacement rate meaning that damaged teeth could be replaced easily in contrast to extant bone-crushing mammals who spend much of their energy maintaining their teeth. Evidence of bone-crunching bites is observed in Allosaurus, which would engage in ritual face-biting with other individuals and bite into the pelves of Stegosaurus as shown by bite marks.
Bite forces of Carcharodontosaurus as well as other giant theropods including Acrocanthosaurus and Tyrannosaurus have been analyzed. Studies reported that carcharodontosaurids had much lower bite forces than Tyrannosaurus despite being in the same size class. The anterior bite force of C. saharicus was estimated in a 2022 paper to be 11,312 newtons while the posterior bite force was 25,449 newtons. This is much lower than that of Tyrannosaurus, implying that it did not eat bones. Finite element accounts of the skulls of theropods have also been taken, which further supported the idea that Carcharodontosaurus ate softer food than tyrannosaurids. Great amounts of stress were recovered in the posterior part of the cranium near the quadrate in Carcharodontosaurus, Spinosaurus, and Acrocanthosaurus. The skulls of these theropods had higher relative stress quantities in opposition to that of smaller genera. This indicates that the crania of giant taxa (ex. Carcharodontosaurus) were unstable due to having large pneumatic structures to save weight instead of creating a firm build. However, Spinosaurus and Suchomimus experienced even greater values of stress meaning that they could only consume light, small prey instead of larger items, which the stronger skull of Carcharodontosaurus could bite while sustaining the stress.
Isotopic analyses of the teeth of C. saharicus have found δ18O values that are higher than that of the contemporary Spinosaurus, suggesting the latter pursued semi-aquatic habits whereas Carcharodontosaurus was more terrestrial. This is further supported by the taphonomy of C. saharicus teeth, which are more often found in land terrains than aquatic ones. Carcharodontosaurus was also a homeotherm with an endotherm-like thermophysiology as inferred by these isotopes meaning that most of its oxygen was accumulated by drinking water rather than being in it.
### Crest function
Theropods such as Carcharodontosaurus, Allosaurus, and Acrocanthosaurus have enlarged lacrimal crests, whose purpose is unknown. Paleontologist Daniel Chure hypothesized that these crests were used for "head-butting" between individuals, but how durable they are has not been studied.
### Vision
A 2006 study by biologist Kent Stevens analyzed the binocular vision capabilities of the allosauroids Carcharodontosaurus and Allosaurus as well as several coelurosaurs including Tyrannosaurus and Stenonychosaurus. By applying modified perimetry to models of these dinosaurs' heads, Stevens deduced that the binocular vision of Carcharodontosaurus was limited, a side effect of its large, elongated rostrum. Its greatest degree of binocular vision was at higher elevations, suggesting that Carcharodontosaurus may have habitually held its head at a downward 40° angle with its eyes facing up accordingly to achieve maximum binocular vision. The range of vision seen in these allosauroids is comparable to that of crocodiles, suggesting that they were ambush predators. They likely sensed prey via motion parallax between prey and background, with a narrow binocular field of vision helping predators judge prey distances and time attacks.
### Pathology
The neotype skull of C. saharicus is one of many allosauroid individuals to preserve pathologies, with signs of biting, infection, and breaks observed in Allosaurus and Acrocanthosaurus among others. This skull bears a circular puncture wound in the nasal and "an abnormal projection of bone on the antorbital rim". A later study theorized that this was the result of craniofacial bites.
## Paleoenvironment
Fossils of Carcharodontosaurus are known from several Cretaceous-age sites across North Africa, similar to the ranges of Spinosaurus and Deltadromeus. North Africa during this period bordered the Tethys Sea, which transformed the region into a mangrove-dominated coastal environment filled with vast tidal flats and waterways. Isotopes from Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus fossils suggest that the Kem Kem Beds witnessed a temporary monsoon season rather than constant rainfall, similar to modern conditions present in sub-tropical and tropical environments in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. These riverine deposits bore large fishes, including the sawskate Onchopristis, coelacanth Mawsonia, and bichir Bawitius. This led to an abundance of piscivorous crocodyliformes evolving in response, such as the giant stomatosuchid Stomatosuchus in Egypt and the genera Elosuchus, Laganosuchus, and Aegisuchus from Morocco. Morocco also bore an abundance of pterosaurs like Siroccopteryx and Nicorhynchus.
The composition of the dinosaur fauna of these sites is an anomaly, as there are fewer herbivorous dinosaur species relative to carnivorous dinosaurs than usual. This indicates that there was niche partitioning between the different theropod clades, with spinosaurids consuming fish while other groups hunted herbivorous dinosaurs. Isotopic evidence supports this, which found greater quantities of sizable, terrestrial animals in the diets of carcharodontosaurids and ceratosaurs from both the Kem Kem Beds and Elrhaz Formation. Some sauropods are known from the Bahariya Formation such as Paralititan and Aegyptosaurus, while Rebbachisaurus is found in the Kem Kem Beds. Carcharodontosaurids are represented by C. saharicus and Sauroniops in the Kem Kem Beds, Eocarcharia and potentially Carcharodontosaurus in the Elrhaz Formation, and C. iguidensis in the Echkar Formation.
|
48,567,047 |
Megan Phelps-Roper
| 1,171,516,193 |
Former member and spokesperson of the Westboro Baptist Church (born 1986)
|
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"American podcasters",
"American women activists",
"American women podcasters",
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"Former members of the Westboro Baptist Church",
"Living people",
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"Washburn University alumni"
] |
Megan Phelps-Roper (born January 31, 1986) is an American political activist who is formerly a member of, and spokesperson for, the Westboro Baptist Church, a Calvinist Christian sect categorized by some watchdog organizations as a hate group. Her mother is Shirley Phelps-Roper, and her grandfather is the church's founder, Fred Phelps. She grew up in Topeka, Kansas, in a compound with other members of the church. As a child, she was taught the Westboro Baptist Church doctrine and participated in the church's pickets against homosexuality, the American response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the funerals of soldiers who died in the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. In 2009, she became active on Twitter to preach the church's doctrine. Phelps-Roper began to doubt her beliefs when Twitter users pointed out contradictions in the Westboro Baptist Church's doctrine, and when elders changed the church's decision-making process.
Phelps-Roper left the church in 2012 after she was unable to reconcile her doubts with her beliefs. Following her departure, Phelps-Roper became a prominent critic of the church's philosophy and practices. She travels around the world to speak about her experience in the church and advocates dialogue between groups with conflicting views. In 2019, she released the memoir Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope.
## Biography
### Early life within Westboro Baptist Church
Megan Phelps-Roper was born in 1986, and is the eldest daughter of Shirley Phelps-Roper and Brent Roper. Her grandfather was Fred Phelps, who founded the Westboro Baptist Church, a Christian sect based on the members' Calvinist interpretation of the bible and categorized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Her parents taught her the doctrine of the Westboro Baptist Church sect from an early age. She grew up on a compound in Topeka, Kansas, that was owned by other church members. When Phelps-Roper was 13, her grandfather baptized her into the Westboro Baptist Church.
After graduating from Washburn University, Phelps-Roper worked at her family's law firm, Phelps Chartered, as a business administrator. She also appeared as a regular guest on the Kansas City morning show Afentra's Big Fat Morning Buzz. In 2011, Phelps-Roper appeared in Louis Theroux's documentary America's Most Hated Family in Crisis, in which she described her contact with four Dutch filmmakers. After watching the documentary, her father insisted that she block the filmmakers on Twitter and limit her time on the social media platform. Phelps-Roper complied, reasoning that removing her focus from earthly matters would increase her spirituality. During this period, her mother was accused of not following church doctrine, and Phelps-Roper replaced her as the scheduler for the church's picketing demonstrations.
### Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
Phelps-Roper has stated that as an adult, she doubted the church's doctrine and noted the existence of many contradictions within the church's beliefs. David Abitbol, a Jewish Twitter user, pointed out the contradictions which he perceived in the church's doctrine, including the fact that the church advocated the death penalty for people who have a child out of wedlock while Phelps-Roper's mother was not married when her first child was born. Phelps-Roper stopped carrying signs which called for the death penalty for sins, but also stopped communicating with Abitbol so that he could not further challenge her beliefs.
Another point of contention that Phelps-Roper cited as increasing her doubts was how decision-making within the church changed. Previously, the church had employed a consensus decision-making model, and women had influential roles in this process. In 2011, a council of nine male church elders met separately from other members and decided to make church decisions by themselves. Later, a member was asked to leave the church by a majority vote instead of unanimous consent. Phelps-Roper felt that both events violated the church's interpretation of scripture and went against the group's concept of leadership.
In November 2012, Brent Roper confronted Phelps-Roper's sister Grace about a relationship which Grace was having with another church member. During this discussion, Phelps-Roper encouraged her sister to leave the church with her, and they announced their intention to their parents. The two sisters spent one night in Topeka where they stayed in the basement of a former teacher before they moved into their cousin's home in Lawrence, Kansas. In February 2013, she announced that she had left the church after its members planned to stage protests at the funerals of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. She stated that she did not want others to believe that her lack of response to the protests constituted tacit approval of the church's actions.
### Life after leaving Westboro Baptist Church
Phelps-Roper and her sister moved to South Dakota after visiting the Black Hills. She is married to Chad Fjelland, an attorney whom she met through Twitter while advocating for the Westboro Baptist Church. Her daughter was born in 2018. In October 2022, Phelps-Roper tweeted that she and Fjelland had had a son.
In 2019, Phelps-Roper appeared in Louis Theroux's third documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church, Surviving America's Most Hated Family. During the taping, Theroux informed Phelps-Roper that two of her siblings were engaged to be married, which upset her greatly. Theroux was criticized for including this scene in the documentary, with one reviewer writing that the revelation exploited Phelps-Roper's emotions and was uncomfortable to watch. Phelps-Roper defended Theroux's inclusion of the footage, stating that she wanted her family members to see her unfiltered reaction to this information. In October 2019, Phelps-Roper released a memoir called Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, which details her upbringing and her decision to leave the Westboro Baptist Church. (It has also been issued as Unfollow: a memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church and as Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism.) In 2023, Phelps-Roper hosted a podcast series titled The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, featuring interviews with Rowling and others on all sides of the cultural conflicts surrounding the author and her views on sex and gender.
## Activism
### Westboro Baptist Church activism
Phelps-Roper participated in her first protest with the church against homosexuality when she was five years old. Early pickets took place in Gage Park, Topeka, as part of her grandfather's campaign to stop homosexuals from allegedly engaging in sexual acts at the park. She participated in protests related to significant historical events, including the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the AIDS pandemic. She also picketed her public school, and local sporting events.
At 11, Phelps-Roper gave her first live interview to radio DJs, who had called her house wanting to interview her mother. When interviewers wanted the perspective of a younger member of the church, her mother would often have them interview Phelps-Roper. She participated in interviews with local news stations, documentary filmmakers, and national talk shows, including The Howard Stern Show.
In 2008, Phelps-Roper joined Twitter but became an active member in 2009 after someone asked if the church was using the service. Phelps-Roper preached the church's doctrine to celebrities and prominent users of the platform. In the late 2000s, Phelps-Roper sent messages to prominent Jewish Twitter users, calling for them to repent and stop their Jewish rituals before they were sent to Hell.
In 2010, Phelps-Roper filed a lawsuit claiming that Nebraska's law against desecrating the American flag infringed on her free speech rights. A federal judge overturned the law, and Phelps-Roper was awarded \$8,000 for her attorney fees, paid by the state of Nebraska.
Phelps-Roper and her family created parodies of pop-culture songs to spread Westboro Baptist Church's theology. One of their parodies was "Ever Burn", based on the Lady Gaga song "Telephone". The parody, sung by Phelps-Roper, changed the lyrics to claim that God will not listen to Lady Gaga's prayers and that she will be sent to Hell.
### Post-Westboro activism
Phelps-Roper has spoken at festivals to groups that she previously protested against, including the Jewlicious Festival in Long Beach, California, and a Jewish cultural festival in Montreal. In October 2015, she spoke at the Anti-Defamation League's Youth Leadership Conference. In January 2017, she presented a TED talk discussing her experiences growing up within the church and her decision to leave. In June 2017, she appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and in 2018 appeared in the first episode of I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman.
In 2023, Phelps-Roper hosted a podcast called The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, which explored Rowling's history, including attacks from both the political right and left in claims that her books promoted witchcraft and regarding her controversial views surrounding transgender people respectively. The seven-part podcast was supported by interviews on Rowling herself.
## Personal beliefs
Phelps-Roper has stated that she believes the Bible is not written by people under God's inspiration. Instead, she thinks it is a document of people trying to understand how to be good, and that other philosophies were developed with the same goals. She has stated that she is a "believer in humanity" and in that way still classifies herself as a believer. Phelps-Roper said that she avoids using the word "cult" to describe the Westboro Baptist Church. She believes that Twitter should disable bots and remove posts that advocate harm to others. She wants companies to hold public debates on controversial ideas, rather than removing these conversations from their platforms.
## See also
- Lauren Drain
- List of people from Topeka, Kansas
- Nathan Phelps
|
904,955 |
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
| 1,173,822,977 |
2000 video game
|
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"BioWare games",
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"Cooperative video games",
"D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Story winners",
"Infinity Engine games",
"MacOS games",
"Multiplayer and single-player video games",
"MumboJumbo games",
"Role-playing video games",
"Video game sequels",
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Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is a role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Interplay Entertainment. It is the sequel to Baldur's Gate (1998) and was released for Microsoft Windows in September 2000. Like Baldur's Gate, the game takes place in the Forgotten Realms—a fantasy campaign setting—and is based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rules. Powered by BioWare's Infinity Engine, Baldur's Gate II uses an isometric perspective and pausable real-time gameplay. The player controls a party of up to six characters, one of whom is the player-created protagonist, while the others are certain characters recruited from the game world.
Set in the fictional Forgotten Realms, much of Baldur's Gate II takes place in and around Athkatla, a city in the country of Amn. Opening shortly after the events of Baldur's Gate, the game continues the story of the protagonist, Gorion's Ward, whose unique heritage has now drawn the attention of Jon Irenicus, a powerful and sinister mage. The storyline revolves around the machinations of Irenicus and the player's encounters with him.
Development began in January 1999. BioWare set out to improve upon the first Baldur's Gate in every way possible. From a list of constructive criticism—compiled from the suggestions of fans, reviews, and internal suggestions—a list of features to be added to the game was distilled: some of these were 800 x 600 resolution, 3D support, and character kits. In Baldur's Gate, the game's engine and content were being developed at the same time; whereas in Baldur's Gate II, the engine was running from the start. Having a completed engine meant they could direct their efforts towards producing content, instead of focusing on basic functionality.
Shadows of Amn received critical acclaim, being praised for its gameplay, artwork, and voice acting, and is often regarded as one of the best video games ever made. GameSpy, GameSpot, and IGN awarded it their "Role-Playing Game of the Year" awards for 2000, and the game has sold more than two million units. An expansion pack, Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, was released in 2001. Besides adding a large dungeon and enhancements to the game, this well-received expansion concluded the Child of Bhaal saga. Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal have also been included together in various compilations. In 2013, an enhanced version of Baldur's Gate II was released, bearing the title Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition and using an updated version of the Infinity Engine. A sequel, Baldur's Gate 3, was developed by Larian Studios and released in August 2023.
## Gameplay
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition computer role-playing game. The central quest of the game consists of about 50 to 60 hours of play, while the full game, including all side quests, is estimated to be between 200 and 300 hours. The player controls a party of up to six characters, one of whom is the protagonist; if the protagonist dies, a saved-game must be loaded, or a new game begun. The game begins with character creation through a series of configuration screens, choosing such things as class, ability scores, appearance, and alignment. Alternatively, an existing character from Baldur's Gate or its expansion Tales of the Sword Coast can be imported. Once in the game world, the player may recruit certain non-player characters (NPCs) to travel with him or her, though only five may do so at a time; and, depending on who is present in the group, bickering, romance, and side quests can result. NPCs in the party often converse with the player or with one another, and at times interject into the player's conversations with others.
The game is played from an isometric perspective, and the screen, which does not need to remain centered on the protagonist, can be scrolled with the mouse or keyboard. Areas are revealed as they are explored by the player's characters. A fog of war effect hides explored areas when the player's characters move away from them. The player can also change the formation in which the party moves. Clicking an area exit, such as a doorway or staircase, causes another area to be loaded. Clicking on the edge of an outside area causes the party to travel there; the game then presents the player with the World Map, from which the player may select a destination.
The player interacts with characters and objects by clicking on them. Clicking on the ground causes the player's selected characters to move. The gameplay, though in real-time, can be paused, whereupon commands may be issued to controllable characters, who will attempt to execute them when the game is unpaused. The game can also be set to pause automatically at certain times. Dialogue is started by NPCs at certain scripted times, or by the player's clicking on NPCs who are not immediately hostile. When speaking to an NPC, the player must often choose what to say from a list of responses. The dialogue may lead to quests or important information. When the player clicks on a hostile being, the currently selected characters will advance to attack it. Information about characters, creatures, items, and buildings in the game environment is shown on a tool tip, which appears when the mouse pointer is held over game elements.
When a character in the group gains the necessary experience points, he or she gains a level. Experience points are awarded for certain player actions, such as killing enemies or completing quests. The party also has a reputation, which is affected by the player's moral actions, and which, along with the party leader's charisma attribute, influences how NPCs in the game world react to the player. The characters in the party will also complain if the party's reputation conflicts with their alignment. Resting heals the characters in the party and refreshes those who are fatigued; also, resting allows a character to memorize spells. The game contains over 300 spells available for memorization. With the exception of sorcerers, magic-users must memorize spells before they can be cast. Spell-casting takes time and may be disrupted by attacks or other spells.
The player can access sub-screens through the interface: area and world maps; the journal, which tracks important information, such as quests and the game's plot; the inventory page, which is used to manage and equip items; the record screen, which is used to view information about, as well as level up, characters in the party; the mage book and priest scroll screens, where spells can be inspected and memorized; and the options screen, where settings may be altered, saved-games loaded, or the game saved or quit.
### Classes and kits
During character creation the player chooses a class: fighter, ranger, paladin, thief, bard, mage, cleric, druid, barbarian, monk, or sorcerer (the last three of which are new for the game). Different classes have different special abilities and restrictions; a thief character, for instance, can find and remove traps, but thieves have limitations on which weapons and armor they may use, and cannot be of lawful good alignment. Most classes also have a subset of kits, or specializations within a class, to choose from. Kits have special advantages and, usually, disadvantages; for example, the cavalier—one of the kits of the paladin class—specializes in fighting monsters such as dragons and demons, but cannot use missile weapons. At some point in the game, the player may join or take over a stronghold. The type of stronghold is determined by the protagonist's class.
### Multiplayer
The game also has a multiplayer mode, in which up to six human players can adventure through the game, controlling player-made characters as well as recruited NPCs. The content of the game is otherwise the same, and one player controls the protagonist.
## Plot
### Setting
The Forgotten Realms, the high fantasy campaign setting in which Baldur's Gate II is set, is a fictional world similar to a medieval Earth, but with its own peoples, geography, and history. In the Realms, as its inhabitants call it, fantastic creatures and magic are common.
Baldur's Gate II takes place mainly in Amn, a country on the subcontinent of Faerûn. This country, known commonly as the Merchant Kingdom, lies south of Baldur's Gate; wealth and trade are the chief concerns of the region. The capital city of Athkatla, around which a fair portion of the game revolves, is the most important in Amn and is ruled by the anonymous Council of Six. The local thieves' guild, the Shadow Thieves, also has considerable power. The group, which operates all along the Sword Coast, is based in Athkatla. Another powerful organization in Amn are the Cowled Wizards, who regulate the use of magic in the region. The Shadow Thieves, the Cowled Wizards, and the Harpers, a semi-secret conglomeration of good organizations, all factor prominently into the story and provide side quests.
Besides Athkatla, other places the player will pass through include: an island, on which stands both the port town of Brynnlaw and the asylum Spellhold; the Underdark; the city of Suldanessellar; and the Astral Plane. There are also other places, which may be explored: the Umar Hills, where people have been disappearing; a temple ruins, fallen under the shadow of the Shade Lord; the de'Arnise Keep, home of the de'Arnises but recently overrun by trolls; the town of Trademeet, under attack by animals; a druid grove connected to Trademeet's woes; the Windspear Hills, where the player becomes entangled in the intrigues of Firkraag, a dragon; the underwater Sahuagin city; and the Planar Prison.
Baldur's Gate II is set in the year 1369 DR (Dale Reckoning), and thus takes place not long after the Time of Troubles (1358 DR), when the Tablets of Fate, powerful magic items which maintain a balance between good and evil, were stolen. Lord Ao, the Overdeity, forced the gods to become mortal until the Tablets were found; some gods died while in this mortal state.
### Characters
Bhaal, the God of Murder, was one such god, slain by an adventurer named Cyric, who himself became a god. But Bhaal foresaw his destruction and walked the land before the other gods. He left behind him "a score of mortal progeny," whose later deaths, when they were slain by heroes, would fuel his rebirth. The game's protagonist is one of these offspring; but, through the choices of the player, may be either good or evil. The character grew up in the library fortress of Candlekeep, watched over by the mage Gorion. Imoen, who grew up there as well, became a close friend. The story of the first Baldur's Gate followed their adventure along the Sword Coast, where the hero learned of their heritage and defeated their half-brother Sarevok, a fellow child of Bhaal.
Some notable characters in Shadows of Amn include: Gaelan Bayle, who offers the party the help of the Shadow Thieves; Aran Linvail, the leader of the Shadow Thieves; Saemon Havarian, who sails the party to an island; Adalon, a silver dragon whose eggs have been stolen and given to drow; Elhan; and Queen Ellesime, the ruler of Suldanessellar. Jon Irenicus and his sister Bodhi are the chief antagonists, Irenicus being the main villain of the game. Celebrated Forgotten Realms character Drizzt Do'Urden also makes an appearance; and if the player solicits his aid, he and his companions will later help the player.
In Baldur's Gate II, several characters from the first game reappear, of which the following can join the player's party: Imoen, who grew up with the protagonist in Candlekeep; Jaheira, who, with her husband Khalid, was a friend of Gorion's; Minsc, a warrior who carries with him a hamster named Boo; Edwin, a Red Wizard of Thay; and Viconia, a dark elf cleric. There are also many new NPCs who may join the party: Aerie, a winged elf who has lost her wings and was sold to the circus by slavers at a young age; Keldorn, an older paladin and a powerful and respected member of the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart; Mazzy, an honorable halfling fighter and "the nearest thing to a paladin that a halfling can aspire to"; Nalia, who is of the upper class, but, though conscious of class distinction, tries to help those less fortunate than herself; Valygar, who is of a family noted for its talented magic-users, but hates the art; Anomen, a member of the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart, and whose wish is to become a full knight; Cernd, a druid; Haer'Dalis, a tiefling bard and one of the actors of an acting troupe; Jan, a gnome, of the Jansen family; Yoshimo, a thief from the land of Kara-Tur; and Korgan, an evil dwarven fighter.
### Story
Shortly after the events of Baldur's Gate, the hero and companions are overcome and taken captive. When the game opens, the player character awakens in a cage and is then experimented on by a wizard, who is aware of the player character's heritage and speaks of "untapped power". The wizard is distracted as his complex is attacked by Shadow Thieves, and disappears to fight them. Imoen, appearing from a side room, frees the player character. Jaheira and Minsc are also held in cells close by. Minsc reveals that his witch Dynaheir was killed sometime after their capture, while Jaheira's husband Khalid is later found tortured to death, leaving Jaheira emotionally devastated. The characters fight their way through the underground complex, learning more and more of their captor's despicable character and that his name is Irenicus. At length, escaping the complex, they emerge into the city of Athkatla and witness Irenicus fighting off some of his attackers, whom he destroys. An argument then ensues, during which Imoen angrily attacks Irenicus using magic. The Cowled Wizards appear and, after a fight, arrest both Irenicus and Imoen for the unsanctioned use of magic, and teleport both of them away.
In the slums of Athkatla, a man named Gaelan Bayle offers the party the help of a powerful organization, who can find Imoen or Irenicus for the large sum of 20,000 gold pieces. The party is approached by and offered the help of another rival guild headed by Bodhi; it is the player's choice whom to side with. Meanwhile, Imoen and Irenicus have been removed to an asylum called Spellhold, which is situated on an island. Irenicus soon breaks his bonds and prepares to experiment on Imoen.
Back in Athkatla, the party raises the money necessary and receives assistance from whichever organization it has decided to work with, and gains passage to the island on a ship sailed by the dubious and treacherous Saemon Havarian. The heroes then manage to get inside Spellhold, but they are captured by Irenicus, who has taken control of the prison and had planned all along to bring the protagonist there. Irenicus then subjects the protagonist to a ritual, taking the latter's soul. Imoen, who turns out to be a Child of Bhaal as well, had earlier undergone Irenicus's ritual, and her soul has gone to Bodhi, Irenicus's sister. Bodhi then abandons the party to the maze beneath Spellhold, so that she can hunt them after a span of time, saying also, as bait, that Irenicus may yet be foiled. When they face her, the now soulless protagonist loses control and transforms into a creature called the Slayer, one of the avatar forms of Bhaal. Bodhi, quite taken aback, retreats to tell Irenicus of it. The player character returns to their normal self after a short while. Soon, with the aid of Spellhold's inmates, the party battles Irenicus, forcing him to retreat. The party follows, and reaches the surface via the Underdark.
Upon reaching the surface, the party encounters the army of the elven city of Suldanessellar. The elves cannot return to the city, for Irenicus has magically hidden it. To gain access to it, the party secures the Rhynn Lanthorn from Bodhi, who has stolen the artifact; upon Bodhi's death, Imoen's soul is restored. The Rhynn Lanthorn lights the way to Suldanessellar, which has been invaded by Irenicus and his minions. The party proceeds through the city and, at the Tree of Life, learns that Irenicus is draining the power of the Tree, which will doom Suldanessellar. The heroes defeat him, but because Irenicus still has the protagonist's soul, the protagonist is dragged with the wizard into Hell, and the rest of the party are dragged along also. When they defeat Irenicus, they return to life and are honored by the elves of Suldanessellar.
## Development
Baldur's Gate II was developed by BioWare and published by Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay Entertainment. The game uses the same Infinity Engine as Baldur's Gate (1998), but with many improvements. Other games that used this engine were Black Isle Studios' Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000). BioWare dedicated Baldur's Gate II to Daniel Walker, who died in 1999 and was the company's second employee.
Though a success, both commercially and critically, Baldur's Gate was the first role-playing game designed by BioWare, and they applied what they learned in the process to Baldur's Gate II. They also felt they did not have enough time to reach their design goals with the first game, due to developing both the content of the game and the Infinity Engine at the same time. In Baldur's Gate II, it was determined that the designers should be allowed "adequate time" so that the game might "reach its full potential". Throughout its development, BioWare focused "on ensuring that Baldur's Gate II is significantly better than Baldur's Gate in every way possible, and to make it appeal not only to fans of the original game but also to make it accessible to new fans who never played the original game".
Development of Baldur's Gate II began in January 1999. From the suggestions of fans on message boards and newsgroups, reviews of Baldur's Gate, and internal suggestions, a list of constructive criticism was compiled; from this list, a slightly shorter one of features to be added to the game was made. Some of the items on this list were: support for higher resolutions, such as 800 by 600 pixels and above; 3D support; non-pausing dialogue in multiplayer; drop off panels in the interface; character kits; dual-wielding of weapons; a streamlined journal and annotable map; deathmatch; and inclusion of famous AD&D monsters such as the dragon. Not many features had to be cut, and they kept as many as they could. Because of the engine's mature state of development, most features were fairly easy to add. Co-Lead Designer James Ohlen wrote that having a completed engine meant they could direct their efforts towards producing content, instead of focusing on "basic functionality". Producer Ben Smedstad said that "the engine was up and running since day one, which is a huge morale booster. When a monster is complete, we put it into the 'override' directory and it appears in the game! This is a huge change from working on the original". Late in the project, deathmatch was removed, while non-pausing dialogue, which proved "the most problematic feature", was removed early on before being reintroduced in early 2000.
Baldur's Gate II reused the Infinity Engine, which had powered Baldur's Gate, but the engine was improved in many ways since development on Baldur's Gate II began: optional 800 x 600 resolution as well as the old 640 x 480 resolution. Drop-away side panels were implemented; and for spells and special effects, 3D support was added. Pathfinding had been improved in Tales of the Sword Coast (the Baldur's Gate expansion), and was improved further in Shadows of Amn through a feature called "bumping", which allowed a character to move another one out of the way if the path was blocked. Also, to aid pathfinding even more, paths in dungeons were widened, so that characters would get stuck less often. The interface was also refined a bit.
To avoid some of the design mistakes made in Baldur's Gate, guidelines were drawn up for each department; the level designers had the longest set of guidelines. These lists continually changed and evolved as the development progressed. The main design guidelines for the entire project were that the players should feel like their actions have an effect on the game world, and good versus evil options should be available depending on which path the player takes. Guidelines for the story were to keep the focus on the player's character, keep the player updated on the activities of the game's villain, add a significant plot twist, and make the ending of the game open enough so that there would be room for more sequels. Environment guidelines were to break the game into chapters, make some locations key to the central plot, keep areas interesting and easy to quickly navigate, and showcase areas before they were available to explore to capture player interest. For the game systems, guidelines focused on character customization and a well-crafted reward system. The writing guidelines were concerned mainly with dialogue: limiting the number of sentences NPCs spoke at a time, keeping the number of player response choices at three as often as possible, avoiding profanity and accents, and having a small set of random dialogue for unimportant NPCs. Many early design decisions did not follow the guidelines, and programming constraints were not always followed by other departments, such as design and art, leading to slowdowns in some parts of the game that were difficult or impossible to fix.
The process for creating levels was long and complicated. It began with the creation of a general layout of the area to be built by designers. They would pass this concept map to the artists, who added models to it, beginning with the largest objects and ending with small items such as individual pieces of furniture. After everything was put in place by the art team, designers took over again, inserting graphical enhancements, effects, and collision detection code. With a functional level, creatures, items, traps, and triggers were added last, then scripts were written for everything to control behavior. The team found it quite difficult to keep track of changes made to levels, and there were sometimes communication problems between different parts of the team, such as the artists and designers, resulting in inconsistencies between their work. Co-executive producer Ray Muzyka wrote, that "they learned to make sure all elements of the team are talking to each other and working as a group, rather than as a bunch of individuals!" They did feel they had done a good job automating the level creation process, as levels were rapidly designed. Muzyka also said that "a designer, might submit a level description and receive it, art complete, a month later ready for scripting, but missing some key features (almost always a door). We would then have to determine whether the omission was important enough to have the art piece redone, or whether we could simply tweak the design of the level to fit the finished art". Areas were made more compact than before, the amount of "dead space" being curtailed, facilitating faster travel between key areas because less distance has to be traveled.
Marcia Tofer, Art Director for Shadows of Amn, worked with a team of 8 to 12 people to create the game's artwork, such as the backgrounds, monsters, etc. Tofer observed that the city of Baldur's Gate had been their first attempt at city building and what they learned there served to make Athkatla "far more diverse and interesting". City renders took from 18 to 24 hours, though they used hardware that was powerful for those days: multiple Dual Pentium IIIs at 500 MHz, coupled with 512 MB of memory.
In traditional mediums like text or film and television, what is read or seen is effectively controlled by the creators. Games are a visual medium, wrote Luke Kristjanson, one of the writers and designers on Shadows of Amn, but they are unlike the traditional ones of film and television. For Baldur's Gate, the developers knew what would be seen on the critical path, but not when players would see it, or whether the right amount of significance would be placed upon it. Kristjanson noted that the character of Imoen was unexpectedly popular with players of the first game, in spite of the fact that she was a late addition during development and was undeveloped as a character. Kristjanson remarked that her lack of interactions with other characters in the first game projected an impression of closeness to the player character, although this was not intended by the developers; this led to her being revealed as the player character's half-sister in its sequel and an integral character to its plot.
In Shadows of Amn, several tools were used to remedy these shortcomings. One of these were in-game cutscenes, which were like small plays, "adding suspense and depth to the world and overall story". Cutscenes had been used in Baldur's Gate, but were employed "more effectively" in Shadows of Amn. Another technique was to increase, to a greater degree than Baldur's Gate, the interactivity of the characters that travel with the player. While the characters in Baldur's Gate possessed "banter", there was a very great increase of this in Shadows of Amn. However, it was not merely an increase in the amount of dialogue and text. NPCs interject, reinforcing "the importance of events [and] contributing their own motivations". They recognize critical junctures in the game, since those are of significance to them as well. They even make comments to each other, as Kristjanson put it: "If Imoen thinks that Jaheira is being too strict she'll say so, and if Jaheira thinks Imoen is being immature she'll counter, and if Minsc thinks the both of them would benefit from getting hamsters of their own [...] he won't hesitate to offer that little nugget of wisdom".
Producer Ben Smedstad, speaking of "crunch time" during the latter stages of a game's development, noted that it was important to begin it at the right time, not too early, nor too late. By July 2000, Shadows of Amn had entered its second phase of crunch, where the hours ran from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Fridays, and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Their first crunch phase had been a normal working week, but hours of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. "As long as it takes" would be the philosophy of the last phase, encompassing the last week of development. Smedstad said that the second phase, which they were working under in July 2000, is where the stress really begins, and that the third phase is actually not as bad as one might think, because by then people are used to the lengthy hours.
During the game's development, a quality assurance department was added to BioWare, and the game's publishers lent their assistance in testing. Muzyka wrote that "because of its immense size, Baldur's Gate II was a tester's nightmare - this was compounded by the fact that we didn't do enough testing as areas were being developed". The game contained about 290 quests, each of which had to be tested in both single- and multi-player modes. BioWare used a method, introduced to them by Feargus Urquhart, Douglas Avery, and Chris Parker of Black Isle Studios, in which the game's quests were listed on whiteboards, with a cross placed beside each quest. Pairs consisting of a designer and tester worked their way through the quests, each pair covering about 6 quests per day. When a quest was verified, its cross was removed.
Muzyka wrote:
> In the final days of working on BG2 there was a strangely serene feeling in the office. We didn't experience the headlong panic that is sometimes prevalent while finishing a game, but we certainly did experience considerable stress as we built 21 final candidates in 3 days. After a few long nights with the whole team playing the game over and over again, we reached a point where we built a good final candidate. Then it was sent to the duplicators!
### Audio
The game's music was composed by Michael Hoenig, a German composer who played with Tangerine Dream. He also composed the music for the first Baldur's Gate.
## Release
Baldur's Gate II was announced in November 1999. The game went gold on September 14, 2000, and shipped in North America on September 21, and in Europe on September 29. Also released was a Collector's Edition, which included the game, a cloth map, eight character-trading cards, a Black Isle Studios writing tablet, and an additional CD containing unique armor and weapons as well as music from the soundtrack. A Macintosh version was ported by MumboJumbo and released on October 15, 2001.
### Expansion pack
Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, an expansion pack for Shadows of Amn, was developed by BioWare and published by Black Isle Studios, and released in June 2001. Throne of Bhaal takes the protagonist's history further, and, being the final chapter, concludes the Baldur's Gate saga. It also added a variety of features to the base game: a new dungeon called Watcher's Keep, which can be accessed from both Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal; new features and enhancements, such as high-level class abilities, a higher experience point cap, and the Wild Mage character class; and new items and spells. Throne of Bhaal was well received: it holds a Metacritic score of 88 and a GameRankings score of 88.73, and won the "PC Role-Playing" award at the 2002 Interactive Achievement Awards. Reviewers generally praised Throne of Bhaal and thought it a spectacular conclusion to the Baldur's Gate saga.
### Re-releases
Shadows of Amn was re-released, along with its expansion, Throne of Bhaal, as Baldur's Gate II: The Collection in 2003. In 2004, they were bundled with the original Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale as Black Isle Compilation Part Two. In 2006, they were re-released with Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast as Baldur's Gate: 4 in 1 Boxset. They were also included in The Forgotten Realms Deluxe Edition, Ultimate Dungeons & Dragons, and Dungeons & Dragons Anthology: The Master Collection. In 2010, Baldur's Gate II Complete was released in digital format on GOG.com. This version includes both Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal. Bundled with it are the game manuals in PDF format, high-definition wallpapers, artwork, avatars, and the Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal soundtracks.
### Enhanced Edition
Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition was released on November 15, 2013. Developed by Overhaul Games, it is an enhanced version of Baldur's Gate II and uses an updated version of the Infinity Engine. The PC version holds a Metacritic score of 78 and a GameRankings score of 77.26; and the iOS version a Metacritic score of 70 and a GameRankings score of 71.25.
## Reception
### Sales
In the United States, Baldur's Gate II entered PC Data's computer game sales charts at \#5 during the September 17–23 period. It rose to second place the following week, behind The Sims: Livin' Large, while its Collector's Edition captured the seventh position. In its first 14 days, Baldur's Gate II drew in revenues of \$4 million across all SKUs in North America, a sales record for an Interplay computer title. The game and its Collector's Edition were ranked 11th and 19th, respectively, on PC Data's monthly chart for September. Entering its third week, the game fell to fifth place on the weekly chart. However, it remained in the top 10 throughout the October 5–28 period, and finished seventh for the month. Afterwards, it was absent from PC Data's weekly top 10 and monthly top 20. PC Data reported Baldur's Gate II's sales at 199,914 copies and its revenues at \$9.2 million in the United States by the end of 2000. The game's success in the country continued during 2001, when it finished 15th for January and sold another 103,144 units between February and the first week of November alone. It tallied 225,763 domestic sales for the full year, which drew \$9.63 million in revenue.
On Media Control's computer game sales rankings for the German market, Baldur's Gate II debuted at \#3 in October 2000. It climbed to second place the following month, before dropping to 12th in December. The Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) presented it with a "Gold" award by the end of 2000, indicating sales of at least 100,000 units across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Media Control proceeded to rank the game 10th, 17th and 23rd during the first three months of 2001, respectively. In the United Kingdom, Baldur's Gate II claimed \#2 for its release month of November 2000, according to Chart-Track. It fell to tenth place in December, and exited the top 10 in January 2001.
The combined global sales of Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, and Baldur's Gate II surpassed 3.5 million copies by March 2001. Baldur's Gate II alone reached almost 1.5 million sales by December 2002, and more than 2 million by November 2005. According to the NPD Group, the game totaled 480,000 sales (\$19.6 million) in the United States by August 2006. At that time, Edge declared it the country's 31st-best-selling computer game released since January 2000.
### Critical reviews
Baldur's Gate II received critical acclaim upon its release, and is listed as the seventh highest-scoring PC game on the review aggregator Metacritic (as of November 2022). GameSpot's reviewer stated that, while it is a very long game, its fine points are what make it so great, and that it was in a class by itself. IGN concluded with a similar sentiment, saying that the game was incomparable and without peers. Though extolling the game immensely and finding only small issues, Computer Gaming World's reviewer noted that he would not trap himself with the "best RPG ever" phrase, but conceded that it "certainly ranks up there with greats like Fallout, Planescape: Torment, and Betrayal at Krondor". Eurogamer lavished much praise upon Baldur's Gate II, and noted that "the story and quests are captivating, the gameplay tried and tested, and the overall feel is professional and entertaining".
GameSpot and IGN felt the game was superior to its predecessor, Baldur's Gate. Computer Games Magazine and Gameplanet noted that it improved upon Baldur's Gate in almost every way. "Polish" or "polished" was a description applied to the game by some reviewers. RPGamer, somewhat more critical of the game than others, concluded: "Maybe it's a bit thin in some areas, but it's still an exemplary game that is well worth the time invested".
Baldur's Gate II's gameplay was called "addicting" by GamePro. RPGamer said that while the game was generally the same as the original Baldur's Gate, the combat was much improved, with less frustration and more strategic options. Computer Gaming World agreed, saying players would put more consideration into designing and implementing combat plans. Eurogamer noted that the interface was "incredibly easy to use". IGN's reviewer observed that many a time the game posed tough decisions that made him think, and also praised the clarity of the quests and ease of moving from one goal to the next. Some reviewers, however, felt the non-player characters in the game were not as powerful as player-made characters. GameSpy said the game is much more difficult than Baldur's Gate and requires more strategy and planning than the original does. GameSpot felt the opening level of the game fell flat, but that it got much better once the player reached Athkatla. IGN noted that the introductory section of the game, while good, was nowhere near as fun as the adventures in Athkatla.
The game's plot was met positively by most reviewers, GameSpy calling it "epic" and GameSpot a "great story". Eurogamer felt the story quite outdid the original. Computer Gaming World, too, observed that it was much improved, adding that the plot style was reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings. He felt the story was somewhere between Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale in terms of depth. RPGamer's reviewer, on the other hand, felt that the plot was lackluster, but approved of the side quests, which, he said, could turn into "minor epics" of their own.
The game's graphics were well received. GamePro praised them, saying, "the backdrops are stunning and the spell effects are impressive". IGN echoed this statement, calling the difference between Baldur's Gate and Shadows of Amn "like looking at a still oil painting, and then turning to see the scene in living motion on a big screen TV". Eurogamer, too, commended the artwork. GameSpot thought both the pre-rendered backgrounds and the animations for characters and monsters were well done. FiringSquad said the game's artwork surpassed that of Planescape: Torment, and called the background artwork "fantastic". The voice acting of Baldur's Gate II was also praised by FiringSquad, who said that "characters sound alive and vivacious (or depressed, crazy—whatever suits them)" and that the quality of the voices drew the player more deeply into the game. IGN called the voice acting "outstanding" and said the variety of personalities would cause players to become "attached" to the characters, only noting with disapproval the dearth of new voices for the player's protagonist. Reviewers generally found the game's music to be well-done; though RPGamer felt it was "inoffensive but unimpressive".
Gameplanet criticized the game's poor support for online multiplayer, saying it was "unstable and quite frustrating". FiringSquad felt that the lack of communication between players in combat during online games was problematic, but that local area network play would be more satisfying. PC Zone said that multiplayer was as unimpressive as it had been in the first game of the series and that the game needed multiplayer maps. IGN, however, felt that multiplayer play was solidly implemented and fun. Pathfinding was sometimes criticized. Criticism was also directed at bugs in the game, such as frequent crashes when trying to access certain locations. According to GameSpy, Baldur's Gate II is "not 100% stable". GameSpot noted that the game's loading times were somewhat long and that the game crashed on occasion, but said that these problems are not significant. IGN, though noting that the game slowed down during combat when a lot of animations were happening simultaneously because of spells or "dazzling backgrounds", said that there were almost no other technical problems. GameSpot also felt that the small number of character portraits to choose from was a disappointment and was displeased that the game reused special effects, audio, and graphics from the first game.
David Simkins reviewed the PC version of the game for Next Generation, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "make no mistake – Baldur's Gate II raises the bar for PC RPGs, elevating the genre to a new level".
GameSpot later called Baldur's Gate II "a towering achievement in the history of role-playing games". In a 2007 Gamasutra article on the "Platinum and Modern Ages" of computer role-playing games (CRPGs), Matt Barton noted contemporary reviewers' universal praise for the game, and said: "I consider it the finest CRPG ever designed". According to GameSpy, "this is easily one of the finest CRPGs ever made and an experience that no RPG fan should miss".
### Awards
Baldur's Gate II has been honored many times. GameSpot, GameSpy, and IGN awarded it their "Role-Playing Game of the Year" awards in 2000, and it won GameSpot's Readers' Choice Game of the Year award for that year. It received three "Gaming Globe" awards from Eurogamer in 2001: Best Game, Best Art Direction, and Best Male Supporting Character (for Minsc). The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences honored Shadows of Amn with the "Character or Story Development" award at the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; it also received nominations for "Game of the Year", "Game Play Engineering", "PC Game of the Year", and "PC Role-Playing". IGN placed it at No. 25 on their 2005 "Top 100 Games of All Time" list. In 2006, though not ranking in the top five games, it earned an "honorable mention" in Gamasutra's Quantum Leap Awards. Baldur's Gate II was inducted into GameSpot's "Greatest Games of All Time" list. In 2009, Game Informer placed Baldur's Gate II at No. 88 on their list of "The Top 200 Games of All Time", calling it "the best Dungeons & Dragons game ever made". This is up one place from their top 100 list in 2001. Empire ranked it No. 19 on their list of the 100 Greatest Games. At the end of 2009, Baldur's Gate II, though not quite making the Top 12 list, received an honorable mention in Gamasutra's Game of the Decade, where readers voted for their best game of the 2000s.
In 2010, on IGN's Top 25 Modern PC Games, Baldur's Gate II clocked in at No. 2. In 2013, it was placed at No. 46 on GamingBolt's "Top 100 greatest video games ever made". IGN ranked Baldur's Gate II No. 1 on their list of "The Top 11 Dungeons & Dragons Games of All Time" in 2014. Ian Williams of Paste rated the game No. 2 on his list of "The 10 Greatest Dungeons and Dragons Videogames" in 2015. IGN ranked Baldur's Gate II No. 3 on their "Top 100 RPGs of All Time" list. In 2016, PC Gamer noted the game on their "best RPGs of all time". It was placed at No. 9 on Game Informer'''s "Top 100 RPGs Of All Time" list, and was included among PCGamesN's "best RPGs on PC" as well.
## Reviews
- Pyramid
## Novel
There is a novelization of the game by Philip Athans. Published in 2000 by Wizards of the Coast, it focuses solely on Abdel, the last of the Bhaalspawn. The novel is the second in the series; the first, also by Athans, is a novelization of Baldur's Gate, and the third, by Drew Karpyshyn, of the Throne of Bhaal expansion.
## See also
- List of Dungeons & Dragons'' video games
|
43,205,958 |
Hurricane Arthur
| 1,167,159,426 |
Category 2 Atlantic hurricane in 2014
|
[
"2014 Atlantic hurricane season",
"Articles containing video clips",
"Category 2 Atlantic hurricanes",
"Hurricanes in Canada",
"Hurricanes in Florida",
"Hurricanes in Massachusetts",
"Hurricanes in North Carolina",
"Hurricanes in the Bahamas",
"Tropical cyclones in 2014"
] |
Hurricane Arthur was the earliest known hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. state of North Carolina during the calendar year. It was also the first hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Hurricane Isaac in 2012. The first named storm of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, Arthur developed from an initially non-tropical area of low-pressure over the Southeastern United States that emerged into the western Atlantic Ocean on June 28. After sufficiently organizing, developing a well-defined circulation and deep convection amid a favorable environment, it was classified as a tropical depression on July 1. The system continued to strengthen and was declared a tropical storm later that day. Drifting northward, the storm reached hurricane status early on July 3 and curved toward the north-northeast. Further structural organization resulted in additional intensification, and by 01:00 UTC on July 4, the system attained its peak winds of 160 km/h (100 mph) as a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale. Arthur made landfall at 03:15 UTC over North Carolina's Shackleford Banks, positioned between Cape Lookout and Beaufort, and intensified slightly further, with a minimum atmospheric pressure of 973 mbar (hPa; 28.70 inHg). The storm then trekked swiftly northeast, weakening as it passed by Cape Cod and Nantucket, before transitioning into an extratropical cyclone and coming ashore at Weymouth, Nova Scotia, on July 5. The remnants continued generally northeastward through Atlantic Canada before ultimately dissipating on July 9 over the Labrador Sea.
Numerous tropical cyclone warnings and watches were issued for areas along the East Coast of the United States. A state of emergency was declared for 26 North Carolina counties, and both mandatory and voluntary evacuations were imposed along the state's coast. Several hundred government personnel were deployed to assist in evacuation and preparation efforts, along with heavy equipment capable of removing sand and debris. Due to the hurricane's timing, many Independence Day activities in the U.S. were cancelled or rescheduled. Damage was limited to strewn debris and inundated roads, and though 44,000 power outages were reported and widespread flooding occurred along northern sections of the coast, no deaths or serious injuries were reported. In New England, Arthur brought flash flooding and caused additional power outages, resulting in widespread road closures and suspension of ferry service. Losses in the country amounted to US\$10 million.
In Atlantic Canada and Quebec, hurricane-force gusts associated Arthur's remnants produced widespread damage. Countless trees and power lines fell across the region, leaving more than 300,000 without electricity. Damage to the power grid in Nova Scotia was regarded as the worst since Hurricane Juan in 2003. Efforts to restore and repair infrastructure were prolonged, with thousands still without power 10 days after the storm. Efforts to restore and repair damage to the electrical grid cost C\$8.4 million (US\$7.9 million). Reviews of Nova Scotia Power (NSP) and New Brunswick Power (NBP) were called upon due to numerous complaints from customers and politicians alike. A communication breakdown between NSP and the public exacerbated problems, and Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil condemned the company's response as "inexcusable." Similarly severe impacts were felt by NBP which suffered a record-breaking C\$23 million (US\$21.6 million) in damage from the storm.
## Meteorological history
On June 25, 2014, an area of showers and thunderstorms developed over the northern Gulf of Mexico ahead of a shortwave trough in Texas. That day, National Hurricane Center (NHC) began monitoring the possibility of tropical cyclogenesis off the Southeast United States over the following week as the system was expected to encounter favorable environmental conditions. An area of low-level vorticity consolidated within the system on June 26 as it moved northeast across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The following day it became intertwined with a frontal boundary over Georgia and South Carolina before emerging over the far western Atlantic Ocean early on June 28. An area of low-pressure soon formed within the system just off the coast of South Carolina. Generally favorable environmental conditions fostered further organization of the low, though convection remained minimal for several days. During the latter half of June 30, a United States Air Force weather reconnaissance mission into the system confirmed the presence of a well-organized circulation; however, displacement of showers and thunderstorms from its center delayed its classification. Subsequent organization of convection into a banding feature along the system's southern flank, as depicted by radar imagery, prompted the NHC to designate the low as Tropical Depression One at 00:00 UTC on July 1. Situated 70 mi (110 km) east-southeast of Fort Pierce, Florida, the newly christened depression moved slowly westward within an area of weak steering currents. A turn northward was forecast as a mid-level ridge built over the Atlantic.
Throughout July 1, steady structural organization ensued. Around 15:00 UTC winds of 38 mph (61 km/h) were measured at Settlement Point on Grand Bahama, prompting the NHC to upgrade the depression to a tropical storm and assign it the name Arthur. Though environmental conditions surrounding the cyclone favored development, moderate wind shear and intrusions of dry air into the circulation prolonged organization. The effects of the shear showed clearly on WSR-88D radar imagery from Melbourne, Florida which depicted a mid-level eye feature displaced 30 to 35 mi (48 to 56 km) from the low-level center. By July 2, Arthur acquired a steady northward track as previously forecast. Throughout the day, convection consolidated around a developing eye as wind shear abated and the storm neared hurricane strength, with winds reaching 70 km/h (45 mph).
Early on July 3, data from hurricane hunters flying in the storm indicated that Arthur attained hurricane-status about 190 mi (310 km) south-southwest of Cape Fear, North Carolina. At this time, the hurricane began turning slightly to the north-northeast as it approached a weakness in the subtropical ridge ahead of a deep-layer trough over the Eastern United States. Continued improvement of the storm's convective structure fostered intensification as the storm neared the North Carolina coastline. At 00:00 UTC on July 4, Arthur reached its peak winds of 100 km/h (60 mph), ranking it as a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale. It was the first hurricane to reach such strength since Hurricane Sandy in the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm featured a well-defined 25 to 30 mi (40 to 48 km) wide eye at this time. Thereafter, the hurricane made landfall at 03:15 UTC over the Shackleford Banks of North Carolina, located between Cape Lookout and Beaufort. Upon doing so, it became the earliest instance of a hurricane making landfall in the state during a calendar year, surpassing the previous record of July 11 set by an unnamed hurricane in 1901. Slight deepening of the cyclone occurred as it moved over Pamlico Sound, with its barometric pressure bottoming out at 973 mbar (hPa; 28.73 inHg). Continuing across Pamlico Sound, Arthur's eye brushed the coastline of Dare County before striking just north of Oregon Inlet at 07:00 and 08:00 UTC, respectively.
After re-emerging over the Atlantic Ocean on July 4 Arthur began to weaken. Though its eye remained well-defined, winds aloft in the storm failed to effectively mix down to the surface. Traversing decreasing sea surface temperatures and amid increasing shear, Arthur began transitioning into an extratropical cyclone later that day. Cloud tops associated with the system warmed and its structure became asymmetric. Reconnaissance continued to indicate strong flight-level winds of 119 mph (192 km/h) but surface winds at the time did not exceed 80 km/h (50 mph). Accelerating ahead of the trough over the East Coast, Arthur's eye dissipated early on July 5; the storm passed within 75 mi (121 km) of Chatham, Massachusetts around 03:00 UTC. Convection became increasingly displaced to the northeast as dry air entrained into the western portions of the circulation. Surface winds decreased below hurricane-force by 06:00 UTC, and Arthur completed its conversion to an extratropical system at 12:00 UTC as it moved over the Bay of Fundy. The NHC subsequently issued its final advisory on the storm and shifted warning responsibility to the Canadian Hurricane Centre.
The remnants of Arthur re-intensified somewhat as it traversed The Maritimes; a sting jet with gusts of 65–80 mph (105–129 km/h) developed along the storm's backside. The former hurricane made an additional landfall in the region near Fundy National Park by 18:00 UTC. By July 6, the sting jet had dissipated, and steady weakening of the cyclone resumed as only a split jet provided upper-level support to the storm. Turning back to the northeast, Arthur moved through Labrador later that day. Once over the Labrador Sea, Arthur turned northwest while weakening before doubling back to the southeast. After weakening below gale-force strength, the extratropical system dissipated late on July 9.
Meteorologists noted to improved accuracy in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting models in predicting the intensity and track of Hurricane Arthur.
## Preparations
Multiple tropical cyclone warnings and watches were posted along the East Coast of the United States in advance of Arthur's impacts in Florida, the Carolinas, New England, and Atlantic Canada. Upon developing into a tropical cyclone early on July 1, a tropical storm watch was issued in Florida from Fort Pierce to Flagler Beach. At 09:00 UTC the next day, the tropical storm watch was discontinued south of Sebastian Inlet, while another one was posted from the Santee River in South Carolina to Bogue Banks in North Carolina. Additionally, a hurricane watch was issued for Oregon Inlet to the North Carolina–Virginia state line. Later on July 2, a tropical storm warning became in effect from the North Carolina side of the Little River Inlet to the state line with Virginia. Simultaneously, the tropical storm watch in Florida was removed.
At 21:00 UTC on July 2, a hurricane warning was posted in North Carolina from Surf City to Duck, including Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. Additionally, a tropical storm warning was issued from the Santee River to Surf City, while another one became in effect from Duck to Cape Charles Light in Virginia, including the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. A tropical storm warning was posted in Massachusetts at 21:00 UTC on July 3, stretching from Provincetown to Chatham along Cape Cod including Nantucket, in addition to a tropical storm watch between Port Maitland and Point Aconi issued by Environment Canada. Around 01:00 UTC on July 4, the hurricane watch was discontinued south of Surf City, while the tropical storm warning was discontinued south of Little River Inlet. Two hours later, the tropical storm warning was canceled south of Cape Fear, North Carolina, and tropical storm watches in Canada were expanded to encompass New Brunswick from the Canada–United States border to Grande Anse, including Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island.
The tropical storm warning from Surf City to Cape Fear was discontinued at 05:00 UTC on July 4. A few hours later, the portion of the hurricane warning south of Bogue Inlet was removed. At 09:00 UTC on July 4, the tropical storm warning in Massachusetts was extended westward to Woods Hole. Around that time, areas west of Cape Lookout in North Carolina were no longer under a hurricane warning. In North Carolina, the hurricane warning was canceled for areas south of Ocracoke Inlet at 11:00 UTC. All hurricane warnings in the state were discontinued four hours later, as was the tropical storm warning at Albemarle Sound; in addition, all tropical storm watches issued by Environment Canada were then converted to tropical storm warnings. By 18:00 UTC on July 4, the tropical storm warning on the east coast of Virginia, including the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, was discontinued. After passing by Nantucket and Cape Cod, the remaining tropical storm warnings in New England were rescinded.
Governor of North Carolina Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency for 25 counties in advance of the hurricane's arrival. Fourteen shelters were opened, and the deteriorating North Carolina Highway 12 Bonner Bridge was closed as a precaution. Mandatory evacuations were declared for Hatteras Island and Richland Township in Beaufort County while voluntary evacuations were announced for Ocracoke Island, Aurora, Pamlico Beach, and Belhaven. Approximately 4,300 individuals fled from Ocracoke Island via ferry despite only being under a voluntary evacuation, and while a mandatory evacuation had been encouraged by Hyde County's emergency management director, other officials turned down the request. Tornado watches were issued for 10 North Carolina counties. In preparation for the possibility that Arthur's storm surge would make North Carolina Highway 12 and Hatteras Island inaccessible, local officials deployed heavy equipment capable of removing sand and other debris.
To assist in storm preparations, 105 North Carolina National Guard members and 400 state highway patrol officers helped facilitate evacuations and storm preparations along the state's coastline. Pamlico Sound ferry service was suspended, and various Independence Day activities rescheduled. Meanwhile, in Ocean City, Maryland, a celebratory fireworks event was postponed to July 5, and in Boston, a Fourth of July Boston Pops concert and fireworks display were rescheduled to July 3. Fireworks displays were also postponed throughout Rhode Island. National Weather Service and Coast Guard officials warned of the potential for rip currents along the East Coast resulting from Arthur. The National Park Service-operated Wright Brothers National Memorial and Cape Lookout National Seashore were closed in anticipation of the storm. Several airlines waived change fees for travelers in areas affected by Arthur. Officials at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base sent more than 54 aircraft to Dayton, Ohio to prevent the occurrence of potential wind damage. In Nantucket, Massachusetts, a school was converted to a temporary shelter in anticipation of Arthur's arrival.
In anticipation of Arthur's arrival, Nova Scotia Power prepared and collected resources in case of power outages and other impacts in the region. Numerous weekend events were called off throughout the Canadian Maritimes, including the Stan Rogers Folk Festival. Multiple boat-owners and fisherman took extra precautions by battening down hatches and tying extra lines to wharves to keep ships and boats from coming loose in the storm. Environment Canada officials issued high wind warnings in addition to earlier tropical storm warnings for the Maritimes and considered imposing rainfall warnings for western portions of Prince Edward Island as well. Province-managed parks in Nova Scotia, including beaches and camping grounds, were shut down prior to Arthur's arrival, and several airlines waived transfer fees. Officials in Moncton stated that city personnel would be prepared to respond to potential issues caused by Arthur, such as flooding or fallen trees, while the Canadian Red Cross readied volunteers in case of the need for emergency assistance. The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station took precautionary measures against the storm, with Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission employees deployed to the site.
## Impact
### Bahamas
Between June 30 and July 1, the outer bands of Arthur produced light rain over the northwestern Bahamas, with 1.26 in (32 mm) measured in Freeport. Winds at Settlement Point on Grand Bahama peaked at 47 mph (76 km/h) with gusts to 61 mph (98 km/h).
### United States
Total damage in the United States was estimated at more than \$10 million.
#### Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina
Although Arthur remained offshore, large scale northerly flow from the west side of the cyclone sparked scattered severe thunderstorms across Florida for several days. Effects from these storms were generally minor with damage amounting to only \$23,000. On July 3 however, one storm produced straight-line winds estimated at 70–80 mph (110–130 km/h) and caused two barns to collapse near Elkton. Similar effects were felt in coastal Georgia with scattered thunderstorms causing minor damage. Farther north in South Carolina, Arthur produced wind gusts up to 42 mph (68 km/h) along coastal areas, resulting in scattered power outages. Heavy rains also fell in and around Myrtle Beach, with a peak of 8.73 in (222 mm) measured just outside the city; this was the highest total observed in relation to the storm throughout the country.
#### North Carolina
Hurricane Arthur was the earliest recorded landfalling North Carolina hurricane, coming onshore at 03:15 UTC on July 4. At Cape Lookout, a peak wind gust of 101 mph (163 km/h) and 1-minute maximum sustained winds of 77 mph (124 km/h) were recorded. A United States Coast Guard station in Cape Hatteras observed a peak gust of 91 mph (146 km/h). An EF1 tornado touched down in Duplin County, damaging two structures and many trees, while a funnel cloud was sighted within the vicinity of Elm City. Another EF1 tornado was reported in Martin County, which knocked a tree onto a house. The highest rainfall total measured as a result of Arthur in North Carolina, 4.20 inches (107 mm), was recorded at Kinston. High tides were reported along the coast, with a peak storm surge of 4.5 ft (1.4 m) at Oregon Inlet.
Arthur caused power outages impacting at least 44,000 customers, of which 16,500 were in Carteret County; another 1,000 outages each occurred in Craven and New Hanover counties. As a result, Duke Energy deployed over 500 personnel to restore electrical service, while Tideland EMC handled more than 2,000 outages in Pamlico, Hyde and Craven counties. Strong winds toppled trees and power poles in Hyde County and Ocracoke Island, and flooding occurred just south of downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. On other areas along the coast, flood waters reached 3 to 6 feet (0.91 to 1.83 m) deep; with widespread coastal erosion observed in many areas. Meanwhile, at Wrightsville Beach, the hurricane tore off shingles and partially defoliated palm trees, and in Manteo, 6 to 8 inches (150 to 200 mm) of water inundated several businesses. Nearby, Kill Devil Hills experienced flooding to numerous residences and roads. Copious rainfall and strong winds were reported along the Outer Banks; at least one additional county was added to the North Carolina's state of emergency declaration, and while officials in Dare County initially intended to cut off access to the county while potential destruction was being surveyed, the curfew ended just after sunrise. Emergency officials announced the intention to begin damage assessments throughout the state as sunrise approached and Arthur departed the region.
After experiencing a "communication failure" with Ocracoke Island officials, a generator and communication equipment were delivered via ferry there. North Carolina Highway 12, the only road linking Hatteras Island to the mainland, remained closed after Arthur's passage, covered under water and sand. The repair cost for the road was less than \$1 million. In Manteo, parts of U.S. Route 64 were shut down due to flooding, and northern portions of the North Carolina coastline also experienced significant flooding. Few flight cancellations were made necessary by Arthur's approach along the East Coast, as the storm's impacts were primarily offshore, and damage was limited to strewn debris and inundated roads. Overall, damage along the North Carolina shoreline was slight, and no fatalities or severe injuries were recorded. Throughout the county a total of 161 structures sustained damage, 16 of which had major damage, while none were destroyed. Damage in North Carolina amounted to \$2.35 million, almost entirely in Dare County alone. The low damage across the state was largely due to the storm's fast motion.
#### Mid-Atlantic and New England
Owing to Arthur's somewhat large size, strong winds and light rains impacted portions of the Delmarva Peninsula. In Virginia, sustained winds peaked at 55 mph (89 km/h) at Rappahannock Light with gusts up to 60 mph (97 km/h). Tropical storm force winds were mostly confined to coastal areas of Delaware and Maryland. Maximum storm surge was 2.38 ft (0.73 m) in Money Point, Virginia and 2.34 ft (0.71 m) in Lewes, Delaware. Notable storm tides also occurred in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, peaking at 3.49 ft (1.06 m) in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Sustained winds of 49 mph (79 km/h) and gusts to 63 mph (101 km/h) were reported near Nantucket Island in Massachusetts as Arthur passed just offshore. Flooding was reported within the vicinity of Broad and Easy streets on Nantucket Island, and heavy rains induced widespread flooding elsewhere as well, with up to 8.00 inches (203 mm) of rain measured at New Bedford, 7.20 inches (183 mm) at Plymouth, and 6.26 inches (159 mm) at Fairhaven. The accumulation at New Bedford ranked Arthur as the ninth wettest tropical cyclone on record in the state. Massachusetts State Police shut down access to parts of Interstate 195, Massachusetts Route 18, and U.S. Route 6 as a precaution. Nearby in Fairhaven, Adams Street was inundated and inaccessible, while the heavy rainfall resulted in flash flooding at New Bedford; as a result, a flash flood emergency was imposed by the National Weather Service. In addition, ferry service to and from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket was suspended. Minor flooding also led to road closures around Boston, including the Interstate 93 tunnel near Leverett Circle. The New Bedford Whaling Museum was also flooded, inundated under 20 inches (510 mm) of water. Several boats were beached, and some flooding occurred at Cape Cod. NSTAR reported 8,451 outages, 7,500 of them on Cape Cod, while National Grid recorded 1,900, of which 1,400 affected customers in Middlesex County. Moisture from Arthur also aided in the development of damaging thunderstorms across western Massachusetts. Total losses in the state amounted to \$889,000. Heavy rain forced a postponement of a game between the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles.
In Maine, tropical storm-force wind gusts downed numerous trees and power lines across eastern portions of the state. Winds on the mainland gusted to 58 mph (93 km/h) while Machias Seal Island observed 71 mph (114 km/h). Outages in Maine affected 20,000–25,000 residences, primarily in Hancock and Washington counties. About 2,800 Central Maine Power customers and 4,390 Emera Maine patrons lost power, mostly due to overturned trees and branches throughout the state. Locally significant damage took place in Aroostook County where heavy rains enabled winds aloft to mix down to the surface. Alongside the winds heavy rainfall affected the state, with a maximum of 6.48 inches (165 mm) near Whiting. Effects from the rains were negligible, with only minor stream flooding reported in Hancock and Washington Counties. Further inland in Vermont, 1,600 customers lost power.
### Atlantic Canada and Quebec
Powerful winds gusted up to 75 mph (120 km/h) across much of Nova Scotia, with a confirmed peak value of 87 mph (140 km/h) in Greenwood and an unconfirmed value of 112 mph (181 km/h) in Yarmouth. Arthur knocked out power to more than 290,000 individuals in the Maritimes; 144,000 of those were customers of Nova Scotia Power (NSP), and 1,500 of Maritime Electric on Prince Edward Island. In New Brunswick, power outages affected upwards of 140,000 individuals, of which 52,000 were situated near Fredericton, forcing the closure of the local University of New Brunswick campus. Copious rainfall was recorded in southwestern parts of New Brunswick, with 5.91 in (150 mm) measured at Gagetown. Flooding at Saint John, New Brunswick made two local streets inaccessible, while winds downed electrical poles in Fredericton. In Onslow, Nova Scotia, firefighters rescued a man trapped under a tree limb, while a sailboat capsized at Charlottetown harbor and another was washed out to sea. The hurricane forced temporary suspension of the MV Nova Star ferry service between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Portland, Maine. The storm caused flight delays and cancellations at Halifax Stanfield International Airport, while LaHave and Tancook Island ferries were shut down; in addition, access to the A. Murray MacKay Bridge was restricted to smaller vehicles. In Stratford, Prince Edward Island, a woman died after being struck by a door that was caught by a gust of wind, and in Woodstock, New Brunswick, a man died when his oxygen support was cut off during a power outage. In some parts of Nova Scotia, damage to the electrical grid was reported to be the worst since Hurricane Juan in 2003. Damage throughout New Brunswick amounted to at least C\$12.6 million (US\$11.8 million).
Effects from Arthur extended as far away as Quebec, where topographic wind enhancement occurred. Gusts of 50 to 62 mph (80 to 100 km/h) affected the Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine region. Locally heavy rains fell in some parts of the province, with maximum amounts reaching 3.1 in (80 mm). The heaviest damage took place along the Chaleur Bay. Numerous trees and power lines were downed by the storm, leaving 23,000 Hydro Québec customers without electricity. A portion of Quebec Route 132 near Carleton-sur-Mer was temporarily shut down due to fallen debris. Severe flooding impacted Mont-Louis, with 40 homes affected, culverts washed away, and roads rendered impassable. A portion of Quebec Route 198 near the area was washed away. In nearby Marsoui, water and sewer service was disrupted with damage estimated in excess of C\$4 million (US\$3.75 million).
## Aftermath
Power outages across Nova Scotia lasted for a week after the storm's passage. This prompted numerous complaints from residents and officials, both criticizing NSP for their slow response. On July 9, NSP President and CEO Bob Hanf issued a public apology for the communication breakdown between his company and customers. By July 11, 2,400 customers remained without electricity with 187 crews working to restore it. The delay in restoration prompted numerous complaints from residents and Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil condemned NSP's response as "inexcusable." McNeil ordered a review of the company to be made by provincial regulators. He and Energy Minister Andrew Younger agreed that there was a total failure of communication, namely through their website, between NSP and residents. One resident in Annapolis Valley stated that the company continuously told her power would be restored soon, when it ultimately took five days for it to return. NSP stated that in the four years prior to Arthur, C\$70 million (US\$65.7 million) had been spent on improving the electrical infrastructure; however, the storm was of a severity beyond any other since Hurricane Juan.
Similar issues occurred in New Brunswick where 18,000 customers remained without power through July 11. More than 310 crews remained deployed throughout the province with electricity expected to be fully restored by the following week. Costs to repair the power grid were estimated in excess of C\$12 million (US\$11.3 million). There was criticism that New Brunswick Power did not appropriately prepare for the storm and actually requested assistance from other public power companies and private contractors after the storm had struck. Two public buildings in Fredericton were utilized as recharging centers for residents to charge their phones and shower. An estimated 6,000 people took advantage of this through July 10. Shaved ice was later distributed from the Grant-Harvey Centre in the city while several waste disposal sites were opened for residents to get rid of spoiled food from power outages. Gaëtan Thomas, president and chief executive officer of NB Power, likened the effects of Arthur in the region to Hurricane Katrina along the United States Gulf Coast in August 2005. He referenced that during Katrina, 50 percent of the affected region lost power, while in the wake of Arthur 57 percent of New Brunswick was in the dark over a similar geographic area. Earlier cuts to the company's tree-trimming budget were cited as a possible cause in the scale of damage. As such, their budget for trimming in 2015 was increased from C\$6 million to C\$8 million.
Emergency management officials in Fredericton stated that it could be years before the city fully recovered from the storm. Power restoration in the province reached over 99 percent on July 16 with only 750 customers still out. However, a thunderstorm that evening revealed the weak nature of the power grid as outages jumped back over 4,000. The following week, Energy Minister Craig Leonard rebutted claims that a public review of NB Power was necessary, despite the longevity and severity of the power outages. New Brunswick's Liberal and Green parties both supported an independent review of the company, while Leonard claimed only an internal review was necessary. The total cost to restore and repair damage to the power grid wrought by the storm amounted to C\$8.4 million (US\$7.9 million). This ranked it as the second-costliest event for Nova Scotia Power from a tropical cyclone, only behind Hurricane Juan. New Brunswick Power reported even greater losses from Arthur with damage amounting to C\$23 million (US\$21.6 million). This marked the costliest disaster in the company's history, surpassing the December 2013 ice storm. In light of the severe damage, NB Power allocated an extra C\$5.1 million (US\$4.8 million) for tree trimming during the 2014–2014 fiscal year.
By July 9, 11 municipalities across Quebec were declared disaster areas and made eligible for federal funding. Ten more municipalities were placed under this declaration on July 11 following further damage assessments. The Canadian Red Cross provided residents in Marsoui with food and aid. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard allocated C\$100,000 in aid for the affected areas and promised further funding.
A few weeks after the storm, a severe outbreak of fire blight, a bacterial infection, occurred in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, affecting as many as 80 percent of the Valley's apple orchards. The storm was blamed for causing microscopic cracks in leaves, which allowed airborne bacteria to enter the plants.
## See also
- Hurricane Juan
- Similar tropical cyclones that struck the Outer Banks of North Carolina
- Hurricane Dorian
- 1945 Outer Banks hurricane
- Hurricane Barbara (1953)
- Hurricane Diana (1984)
- Hurricane Gloria
- Hurricane Emily (1993)
- Hurricane Irene (1999)
- Hurricane Ophelia (2005)
|
27,662,087 |
Ministry of Justice (Soviet Union)
| 1,149,635,754 |
Ministry of the Soviet Union responsible for law
|
[
"1923 establishments in the Soviet Union",
"1936 establishments in the Soviet Union",
"1970 establishments in the Soviet Union",
"Government agencies disestablished in 1991",
"Justice ministries",
"Law of the Soviet Union",
"Ministries established in 1923",
"People's commissariats and ministries of the Soviet Union",
"Politics of the Soviet Union"
] |
The Ministry of Justice of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (Russian: Министерство юстиции СССР, Ministerstvo Yustitsii SSSR), formed on 15 March 1946, was one of the most important government offices in the Soviet Union. It was formerly (until 1946) known as the People's Commissariat for Justice (Russian: Народный комиссариат юстиции, Narodniy Komissariat Yustitsi'i) abbreviated as Наркомюст (Narkomiust). The Ministry, at the All-Union (USSR-wide) level, was established on 6 July 1923, after the signing of the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, and was in turn based upon the People's Commissariat for Justice of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) formed in 1917. The Ministry was led by the Minister of Justice, prior to 1946 a Commissar, who was nominated by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers and confirmed by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and was a member of the Council of Ministers.
The Ministry of Justice was responsible for courts, prisons, and probations. Further responsibilities included criminal justice policy, sentencing policy, and prevention of re-offending in the USSR. The Ministry was organised into All-Union and Union departments. The All-Union level ministries were divided into separate organisations in the Republican, Autonomous Oblast, and provincial level. The leadership of the Ministry of Justice came from notable Soviet law organisations from around the country.
## Duties and responsibilities
According to a decree from 1972, the Ministry of Justice prepared proposals for the codification of law; it carried out methodological management of legal work in the national economy. The Ministry directed and coordinated the work of state bodies and public organisations to promote legal knowledge and to clarify the law among the population about the judicial agencies, as well as general management of the civil registry, state, and legal profession. The Ministry was liable to the Party, the state, and the people. The Ministry's main goal was to strengthen socialist legality and the rule of law within Soviet judicial institutions.
The Ministry was organised into one All-Union (USSR-wide) ministry and 15 Union ministries. The leadership of the ministry consisted of notable figures of the judicial authority of the Soviet Republics, the military tribunals, Bar members, notaries, and other judicial institutions. The leadership's task was to organise and prepare proposals for the codification of legislation. The organisational leadership, and the courts, had full control over the republican, autonomous, and provincial levels of government and the party. On 1 February 1923 the All-Union People's Commissariat for Justice was dissolved, and its responsibilities, duties, and functions were given to the Procurator General. The Department of the Procuracy of the Ministry of Justice, headed by a republican Procurator General, was responsible for limiting the powers of the Procurator General. On the grounds of stopping "unnecessary centralisation", the Ministry of Justice was dissolved both on the Union and the All-Union level. The functions of the Ministry was then handed to the Supreme Court and the Legal Commission of the Council of Ministers. The Ministry was reestablished in 1970 by the Alexei Kosygin government. Extensive regulations on the Ministry were created by the Council of Ministers. The Ministry's main task was to direct and supervise judicially organs, both at the Union and All-Union level, according to a decree from 1975.
The main task of the Ministry was to develop proposals on issues linked to the judicial system; the election of judges, elect the judiciary, organising the judiciary, studying and summarising of the jurisprudence in coordination with the Supreme Court, and to organise work for the maintenance of judicial statistics. According to Soviet law, the Ministry could propose various measures to improve the Soviet court system. According to Article 1 of the People's Commissariat for Justice, the commissariat's main task was to supervise the legal activities of the Soviet central agencies and the people's procurator.
## Organisation
The Ministry of Justice was headed by a Minister who was elected by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet between seasons, and authenticated by a Supreme Soviet convocation. Deputy Ministers were elected by the Council of Ministers; allocation of the deputies was decided by the Ministry of Justice. Each deputy usually headed his or her own department. The minister, the deputies, and other senior officials formed the leadership circle, known as the Board of the Ministry of Justice. The members of this board were approved by the Council of Ministers. The Board of the Ministry held meetings regularly to discuss legal matters nationwide. Decisions made by the board were as a rule implemented nationwide. If the board disagreed they sought the assistance of the Council of Ministers to solve the problem.
The structure and number of employees of the Ministry were approved by the Council of Ministers. Staffing of the central apparatus of the Ministry, as well as provisions of the departments and divisions, were approved by the Ministry of Justice. The seal of the Ministry of Justice was the state emblem of the USSR.
## History
In 1922 Vladimir Lenin chasitised the People's Commissariat for Justice for not dealing firmly enough with political opponents of the Bolsheviks and allowing capitalism to develop outside the framework of state capitalism outlined by the New Economic Policy. Until 1936 the People's Commissariat for Justice existed only in the Union Republican level. Nikolai Krylenko, the first People's Commissar of Justice, said in January 1933 that Soviet law waxed indignant about the leniency of some Soviet officials who objected to the infamous "five ears law":
> We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice."
According to Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, Nikita Khrushchev abolished the Ministry during the height of the Khrushchev Thaw in an attempt to restore the "Leninist norms of socialist legality" which had disappeared under Joseph Stalin's rule. Khrushchev tried to make the Soviet court more independent from central authority by enforcing the 1936 constitution on the country's judicial branch. This would, according to Khrushchev, give the courts further independence from the central authority. The functions, duties, and responsibilities of the Ministry were reassigned to the Supreme Soviet and the Legal Commission of the Council of Ministers at all levels of Soviet society. By the 1960s it became clear that these reforms were not working as planned, and the ministry was reestablished by the Alexei Kosygin government in 1970. The Ministry, along with the majority of other Soviet ministries, was supposed to be abolished in December 1991 on the orders of the State Soviet, this did not happen, and the Soviet Union dissolved itself before this date.
## Commissars and ministers
The following persons headed the Commissariat/Ministry as commissars (narkoms), ministers, and deputy ministers of the Soviet era:
## See also
Law:
- Socialist law
- Law of the Soviet Union
- Constitution of the Soviet Union
Organisations:
- Foreign Legal Collegium
- Procurator General of the USSR
- People's Court of the USSR
- Supreme Court of the USSR
|
2,545,826 |
The Fourth Horseman (Millennium)
| 1,116,944,589 | null |
[
"1998 American television episodes",
"Fiction set in 1986",
"Millennium (season 2) episodes"
] |
"The Fourth Horseman" is the twenty-second episode of the second season of the American crime-thriller television series Millennium. It premiered on the Fox network on May 8, 1998. The episode was written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, and directed by Dwight Little. "The Fourth Horseman" featured guest appearances by Kristen Cloke and Glenn Morshower.
In this episode, offender profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) investigates the initial outbreak of a deadly virus, and discovers that his employers, the Millennium Group may pose a danger to his safety.
"The Fourth Horseman" was written under the belief that the series would soon be cancelled, and inspired in part by the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United Kingdom. The episode has earned positive responses from critics, and was seen by approximately 4.61 million households during its initial broadcast.
## Plot
On a farm in Baraboo, Wisconsin in 1986, a farmer finds his entire warehouse of chickens dead, the floor soaked in blood. He attempts to call for help, but quickly collapses, bleeding profusely and covered in dark lesions.
Twelve years later, Millennium Group member Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) is visited by a retired FBI agent, Richard Gilbert (Glenn Morshower). Gilbert hopes to headhunt Black, a former colleague, for his new private security firm, The Trust. Their meeting abruptly ends when Black receives word that his father has died. At the funeral, Black explains the notion of death to his daughter Jordan (Brittany Tiplady); later that day, he unsuccessfully tries to contact fellow Group member Lara Means (Kristen Cloke), with whom he has lost contact.
Black meets with another Group member, Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn) to investigate the death of Jason Mogilny, who was found at a riverbank surrounded by six pints of spilt blood, with no evidence of murder. Black notices dead birds floating past in the river. A coroner determines that Mogilny drowned when his lungs filled with his own blood, surmising the cause to be a viral infection. Everyone who came into contact with the corpse is isolated in quarantine, waiting to be tested for exposure to any pathogen. While quarantined, Black accuses Watts and the Millennium Group of knowing more about the virus than is apparent; Watts frantically quotes the Bible's Book of Revelation in response. The pair are examined by mysterious doctors in protective suits; shortly afterwards, they are cleared to leave quarantine. Black contacts Gilbert and accepts his offer to join The Trust; however, he first wishes to "rescue" his friends within the Group and asks for Gilbert's help in locating Means.
In El Cajon, California, a family sit down to dinner for Mother's Day, before spontaneously collapsing and bleeding profusely. At home, Black's wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher) tells him that Jordan has been having vivid nightmares about the end of the world, in which she and her parents are isolated in a woodland cabin. Black admits to Catherine that he has come to accept the Group as a cult, and wishes to leave. He arranges to see a doctor, asking that his results remain secret.
Gilbert, finding that Watts has been in contact with Means, puts him under surveillance. Black travels to Means' last known location, where he observes a cult-like ceremony in which Means is ritually inducted into the Group. Contacting Watts, he reveals the results of his tests — they were injected with a vaccine while quarantined. Black insists that the Group is dangerous and they should flee; Watts refuses, predicting that an earthquake will occur the following morning and urging Black to accept full membership in the Group when this comes to pass. The next morning, Black receives a call from Means, who tells him that the Group mean no harm. The line suddenly cuts, and the tremors of an earthquake begin just as Watts had predicted. Black braces himself in a doorway, noticing that his pet bird is dead in its cage, covered in blood.
## Production
"The Fourth Horseman" was written by frequent collaborators Glen Morgan and James Wong. The duo would pen a total of fifteen episodes throughout the series' run. The pair had also taken the roles of co-executive producers for the season. The episode was the second of three to be directed by Dwight Little, who had previously helmed "Midnight of the Century", and would return in the third season for "Borrowed Time".
Written simultaneously with the concluding episode, "The Time Is Now", the episode's script went through several different versions before a final plot was decided upon, as Morgan and Wong believed the series would not be renewed for a third season and wished to write a suitable ending. The idea of depicting an apocalyptic scenario as being the result of a virus came from Morgan's research into possible end-of-the-world scenarios, and was influenced by the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United Kingdom. The build-up to, and depiction of, the viral outbreak was seen by the writing staff as conclusive proof that the series would be cancelled, leading to several writers beginning to look for work on other projects while still officially under contract to work on Millennium.
Actress Brittany Tiplady, who portrays Black's young daughter Jordan, has cited "The Fourth Horseman" as one of the episodes which she considered to have caused her to grow as an actress. Tiplady described her role in the episode as not being "just the cute Jordan Black with easy scenes and lots of giggling", and added that the increased depth her character was given served to heighten her interest in acting.
## Broadcast and reception
"The Fourth Horseman" was first broadcast on the Fox network on May 8, 1998. The episode earned a Nielsen rating of 4.7 during its original broadcast, meaning that 4.7 percent of households in the United States viewed the episode. This represented approximately 4.61 million households, and left the episode the eighty-fifth most-viewed broadcast that week.
"The Time Is Now" received positive reviews from critics. The A.V. Club's Emily VanDerWerff rated the episode an "A". VanDerWerff felt that the two-part finale was "at once haunting and terrifying", finding both "The Fourth Horseman" and "The Time Is Now" to be Millennium's most frightening instalments. VanDerWerff noted that the episode's plotting and symbolism were not always subtle, but felt that this directness suited the series' tone. Bill Gibron, writing for DVD Talk, rated the episode 5 out of 5. Gibron felt that both Cloke and O'Quinn gave particularly strong performances in both this episode and its follow-up. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated "The Fourth Horseman" five stars out of five.
|
33,884,605 |
2012 World Snooker Championship
| 1,163,248,399 |
Professional snooker world championship tournament, April–May 2012
|
[
"2012 in English sport",
"2012 in snooker",
"April 2012 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"May 2012 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Sports competitions in Sheffield",
"World Snooker Championships"
] |
The 2012 World Snooker Championship (officially the 2012 Betfred.com World Snooker Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 21 April to 7 May 2012 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the 36th consecutive year that the World Snooker Championship had been held at the Crucible and the last ranking event of the 2011–12 snooker season. The event was broadcast in the United Kingdom by the BBC, and in Europe by Eurosport.
Ronnie O'Sullivan won his fourth world title by defeating Ali Carter 18–11 in the final. Aged 36, O'Sullivan became the oldest world champion since 45-year-old Ray Reardon in 1978. John Higgins, the defending champion, lost 4–13 to Stephen Hendry in the second round. Hendry made the highest break during the tournament, a maximum break of 147. Hendry, seven-time winner of the event, announced his retirement from professional snooker following his defeat by Stephen Maguire in the quarter-finals.
## Overview
The World Snooker Championship is an annual cue sport tournament and the official world championship of the game of snooker. Invented in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India, the sport was popular in Great Britain. In modern times it has been played worldwide, especially in East and Southeast Asian nations such as China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
In the 2012 tournament, 32 professional players competed in one-on-one snooker matches played over several , using a single-elimination tournament format. The 32 players were selected for the event using the snooker world rankings and a pre-tournament qualification competition. In 1927, the first world championship was won by Joe Davis. The event's final took place in Camkin's Hall, Birmingham, England. Since 1977, the event has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The event was organised by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. Scotsman John Higgins was the defending champion, having defeated Judd Trump 18–15 in the previous year's final. The event was sponsored by sports betting company Betfred.
### Format
The 2012 World Snooker Championship took place from 21 April to 7 May 2008 in Sheffield, England. The tournament was the last of nine ranking events in the 2011–12 snooker season on the World Snooker Tour. It featured a 32-player main draw that was held at the Crucible Theatre, as well as a qualifying draw that was played at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield from 5 to 15 April. This was the 36th consecutive year that the tournament had been staged at the Crucible. The main stages of the event were broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom.
The top 16 players in the latest world rankings automatically qualified for the main draw as seeded players. Higgins was seeded first overall as the defending champion, and the remaining 15 seeds were allocated based on the latest world rankings. The number of frames required to win a match increased throughout the tournament. The first round consisted of best-of-19-frames matches, with the final match being played over a maximum of 35 frames. All 16 non-seeded spots in the main draw were filled with players from the qualifying rounds.
### Prize fund
The prize fund for the championship was divided as follows:
- Winner: £250,000
- Runner-up: £125,000
- Semi-final: £52,000
- Quarter-final: £24,050
- Last 16: £16,000
- Last 32: £12,000
- Last 48: £8,200
- Last 64: £4,600
- Stage one highest break: £1,000
- Stage two highest break: £10,000
- Stage one maximum break: £1,500
- Stage two maximum break: £40,000
- Total: £1,152,500
## Tournament summary
### First round
The first round was played from 21 to 26 April as the best of 19 frames held over two . Three players were making their debut at the event: Jamie Jones, Cao Yupeng, and Luca Brecel. It was also the first time that both Cao and Brecel had qualified for the televised stage of a ranking event. Cao and Jones advanced to the second round by defeating Mark Allen 10–6 and Shaun Murphy 10–8 respectively, whilst Brecel lost 5–10 against Stephen Maguire. Brecel was the youngest player ever to compete at the Crucible, aged 17 years and 45 days old. He was also the first Belgian to play at the Crucible.
Mark Allen, following his first-round defeat by Cao, accused his opponent of cheating. Allen claimed that Cao had not admitted to a at 5–4. However, he also conceded that the Chinese player had outplayed him during the match. World Snooker decided to start disciplinary action against Allen, who later admitted having gone too far. He was later fined a total of £11,000, and warned he would be suspended from the tour for three months if he breached the rules again in the next six months. Allen was also ordered to undergo media training.
In his match against Stuart Bingham, Stephen Hendry made the 10th maximum break to be made at the event. This was the 88th official maximum, and Hendry equalled two records held by Ronnie O'Sullivan: the most official maximum breaks in professional snooker (11) and the most at the venue (3). Hendry won the match 10–4 in a rematch of one of his greatest upset defeats, in the first round of the 2000 World Snooker Championship when Hendry was defending champion and Bingham was making his television debut. Zhu Ying became the first Chinese person to referee a match at the Crucible by officiating the match between Hendry and Bingham. Mark Williams stated on Twitter before the championship that he hated the Crucible and wished that the tournament was played in China. Williams was subsequently booed as he was announced to the crowd before his opening match, and was later fined a total of £4,000.
Ding Junhui and Ryan Day went to a , which was won by Day. Ding said that the table conditions were not right and complained about spectators being disruptive during the match. He was later fined £250, and warned by the chairman of the Disciplinary Committee for swearing during the live press conference. In his match against Ken Doherty, Neil Robertson made three consecutive century breaks, as he completed a 10–4 victory. Andrew Higginson and David Gilbert reached the second round of the event for the first time in their respective careers. Higginson defeated Stephen Lee 10–6, and Gilbert defeated Martin Gould 10–8.
Half of the seeded players were beaten in the first round. Bingham, Graeme Dott, Murphy, Lee, Gould, Ding Junhui, Allen and Selby all lost their places in the tournament. This marked the most top 16 players to suffer defeat in the first round since 1992. There was the most Asian players in the history of the event, five.
### Second round
The second round was played from 26 to 30 April, as the best of 25 frames held over three sessions. Multiple time winners Higgins and Hendry had made 45 appearances at the Crucible between them, having both had played in every tournament since 1995; but this was the only time they ever met at the Crucible. Higgins made the 500th century break of his career in his match against Hendry. Two frames later Hendry made his 775th. Hendry defeated Higgins 13–4 to reach his 19th quarter-final at the event. At that time only eight players had played at the Crucible at least that many times: Hendry, Steve Davis, Jimmy White, Terry Griffiths, John Parrott, Peter Ebdon, Willie Thorne and O'Sullivan. Ali Carter trailed Judd Trump 9–12, but won the next four frames to win 13–12. In the deciding frame Trump needed four and got three, before Carter finally potted the last remaining red ball.
Crucible debutant Jones reached his first ranking event quarter-final by defeating Andrew Higginson 13–10. After the second session Jones led 10–6; before Higginson won the four opening frames of the last session to tie the score 10–10. Jones took the next three frames to win the match. He became the third Welshman into this year's quarter-finals, following Day and Matthew Stevens. Robertson led Gilbert 5–3 and 10–6 before winning 13–9. Day defeated Cao 13–7 to reach the quarter-finals for the third time. Eighth seed Maguire defeated Perry 13–7, whilst O'Sullivan defeated Williams 13–6, having won six frames in a row in the second session.
### Quarter-finals
The quarter-finals were played on 1 and 2 May as the best of 25 frames, held over three sessions. Hendry was defeated by Maguire with a , 13–2. Hendry won only one of the eight frames in the opening session, with Maguire winning the first four frames of the second session. Hendry won frame 13, but Maguire won the next two frames to complete the victory. After the match Hendry announced his immediate retirement from professional snooker, citing dissatisfaction with his standard of play in recent years and difficulty balancing competitive, commercial and personal commitments. Hendry would be in retirement until 2020, when he announced he would play again on the Tour, playing his next professional event at the 2021 Gibraltar Open.
Stevens played Day, but trailed 2–5 in the first session. He won the final frame of that session, all eight frames of the second session, and won the match 13–5 after taking the first two frames of the third session. This was the first time he had reached the semi-finals since he played in the 2005 final. Carter led 2–1 before Jones tied the scores with a break of 127. However, Carter won three of the next four to lead 5–3 after the first session. Jones completed back-to-back centuries in the second session, but still trailed by two frames after the second session, with Carter winning the match 13–11. Robertson took a 5–3 lead over O'Sullivan after the first session of their match, but O'Sullivan won six straight frames to take a 9–7 lead after the second. O'Sullivan won the match 13–10, making a further two century breaks in the final session.
### Semi-finals
The semi-finals were played as the best of 33 frames held over four sessions on 3, 4 and 5 May. Carter met Maguire, and led 5–3 after the first session. Maguire made a 142 break in frame 15, but still trailed after the second session by four frames. The pair shared the eight frames of the third session, with Carter leading 14–10. Carter then won three of the next five to win the match 17–12. Earlier in the season, Carter had considered retiring from the game, due to struggles with Crohn's disease. Hendry, acting as a pundit for BBC Sport, commented how Carter had "frustrated" Maguire during the match.
O'Sullivan met Stevens in the other semi-final. This was O'Sullivan's ninth world championship semi-final, and Steven's fifth. O'Sullivan led the match 5–3 after the opening session, but won six of the eight in the second to lead 11–5. The pair shared the eight frames of the third session, leaving O'Sullivan 15–9 ahead. Stevens took the first frame in the fourth session, before O'Sullivan made a break of 130 in frame 26, and won the next frame to complete a 17–10 victory. Snooker pundit John Parrott likened playing O'Sullivan to be as difficult as "hold[ing] a tiger by the tail".
### Final
The final was played on 6 and 7 May as the best of 35 frames held over four sessions between Carter and O'Sullivan. This was the second time that the pair had met in the final of the event, with O'Sullivan defeating Carter 18–8 in the 2008 final. This was O'Sullivan's fourth world championship final, having won the prior three, whilst Carter was featuring in his second. Carter had never beaten O'Sullivan in 11 previous attempts in ranking events before this match. O'Sullivan made two century breaks in the opening session, including a 141 break in the eighth frame, the highest in a world championship final to date. The previous record was 139 made by O'Sullivan in the 2001 final. The pair were tied at 3–3, but O'Sullivan won the final two frames of the session to lead 5–3. O'Sullivan won four of the next six to lead 9–5, and led 10–7 overnight. A break of 101 by O'Sullivan saw him lead 11–7 and he then won the next three frames to lead 14–7. Carter won the next three frames, including a century break, before O'Sullivan won the final frame of the session to lead 15–10. Only four frames were played in the final session, as O'Sullivan won three of them to complete a 18–11 victory.
This was O'Sullivan's fourth championship, and was the oldest person to win the event since Dennis Taylor in 1985. O'Sullivan praised the work of Steve Peters, his sports psychologist, for the victory, saying: "I wouldn't have been playing if it wasn't for Steve... I've stuck in there. I've had to face things that I didn't want to face." Carter would comment that his opponent was "the better man", but that he was disappointed to lose. This was the twelfth meeting between the pair in ranking competitions, with O'Sullivan winning all of them. Carter would eventually defeat O'Sullivan at the event in the second round of the 2018 World Snooker Championship. After the event, O'Sullivan announced he would take a six months sabbatical from the sport; however, he only played one competitive match before the following year's event, which he also won.
## Main draw
Shown below are the results for each round. The numbers in parentheses beside some of the players are their seeding ranks (each championship has 16 seeds and 16 qualifiers). The draw for the first round took place on 16 April 2012, one day after the qualifying, and was broadcast live by Talksport.
## Qualification draw
### Preliminary qualifying
The preliminary qualifying rounds for the tournament were for WPBSA members not on the Main Tour and took place on 5 April 2012 at the World Snooker Academy in Sheffield.
Round 1
Round 2
### Qualifying
The qualifying rounds 1–4 for the tournament that took place between 6 and 12 April 2012 at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. The final round of qualifying took place between 14 and 15 April 2012 at the same venue. Robert Milkins made the 87th official maximum break during his round four qualifying match against Xiao Guodong on 11 April 2012. This was the second maximum break of Milkins' career.
Round 1
Rounds 2–5
## Century breaks
### Main stage centuries
A total of 71 century breaks were made during the main stage of the World Championship. For every century break that was made during the 17-day championship in Sheffield, the title sponsor, Betfred, donated £200 to World Snooker's official charity for the 2011/2012 season, Haven House Children's Hospice, with the promise of topping it up to £25,000 if 75 centuries were made. However, Betfred boss Fred Done donated the full £25,000, despite being four centuries short of the target.
- 147, 123, 100 – Stephen Hendry
- 142, 125, 117, 101, 101, 101 – Stephen Maguire
- 141, 130, 128, 117, 113, 110, 107, 104, 103, 101, 100, 100 – Ronnie O'Sullivan
- 138, 136, 135, 134, 132, 127, 101 – Jamie Jones
- 136, 109 – Martin Gould
- 134, 132, 118, 112, 105, 101 – Ali Carter
- 133, 124 – John Higgins
- 131, 108, 106, 106, 100, 100 – Neil Robertson
- 125, 113, 108 – Cao Yupeng
- 123, 122, 116, 101 – Matthew Stevens
- 121 – David Gilbert
- 120, 114 – Judd Trump
- 119, 113, 112, 110, 100 – Ryan Day
- 116 – Luca Brecel
- 115, 103 – Joe Perry
- 111 – Andrew Higginson
- 111 – Mark Williams
- 110, 102 – Stephen Lee
- 104 – Ken Doherty
- 102, 101 – Shaun Murphy
- 101 – Mark Allen
- 100 – Ding Junhui
### Qualifying stage centuries
A total of 60 century breaks were made during the qualifying stage of the World Championship, the highest a maximum break made by Robert Milkins.
- 147 – Robert Milkins
- 145, 128 – Ben Woollaston
- 142, 125 – Jamie Burnett
- 140, 134 – Jamie Jones
- 140, 103 – Aditya Mehta
- 140 – Xiao Guodong
- 139, 138, 103 – Liu Chuang
- 136, 107 – Liang Wenbo
- 135, 124, 100 – David Gilbert
- 134, 112, 110 – Ken Doherty
- 134 – Sam Baird
- 129, 107 – Stephen Hendry
- 128, 102 – Anthony Hamilton
- 127, 125 – Barry Hawkins
- 123 – Adam Duffy
- 122 – Passakorn Suwannawat
- 120 – Daniel Wells
- 117 – Nigel Bond
- 116 – Andy Hicks
- 113, 102 – Jimmy Robertson
- 112, 101 – Ryan Day
- 110, 100 – Marco Fu
- 110 – Peter Lines
- 108 – Luca Brecel
- 108 – Fergal O'Brien
- 107, 103 – Jamie Cope
- 107, 102 – Tom Ford
- 106 – Anthony McGill
- 105 – David Grace
- 105 – Michael Holt
- 105 – David Morris
- 103 – Justin Astley
- 103 – Rod Lawler
- 102 – Peter Ebdon
- 102 – Andrew Pagett
- 101 – Cao Yupeng
- 101 – Adrian Gunnell
- 101 – Liam Highfield
- 100 – David Gray
|
69,431,562 |
Soviet frigate Neukrotimyy
| 1,146,022,026 |
Krivak-class frigate
|
[
"1977 ships",
"Cold War frigates of the Soviet Union",
"Krivak-class frigates",
"Krivak-class frigates of the Russian Navy",
"Ships built at Yantar Shipyard",
"Ships built in the Soviet Union"
] |
Neukrotimyy (Russian: Неукротимый, "Inquisitive") was a Project 1135M Burevestnik-class (Russian: Буревестник, "Petrel") Guard Ship (Сторожевой Корабль, SKR) or 'Krivak II'-class frigate that served with the Soviet and Russian Navies. The vessel was known as Komsomolets Litvyy (Russian: Комсомолец Литвы, romanized: "Lithuanian Komsomolets") between 1987 and 1990. Launched on 17 September 1977, Neukrotimyy was designed to operate as an anti-submarine vessel with the Baltic Fleet, using an armament built around the Metel Anti-Ship Complex. The vessel undertook many visits to other countries outside the Soviet Unions, including Angola, East Germany, Nigeria and Poland. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the ship was transferred to the Russian Navy and continued to travel to countries like the Netherlands. Despite being accidentally holed in 2005 and being badly burnt in a fire in 2008, Neukrotimyy remained the penultimate of the class to remain in service, finally being decommissioned on 29 June 2009.
## Design and development
Neukrotimyy was one of eleven Project 1135M ships launched between 1975 and 1981. Project 1135, the Burevestnik (Russian: Буревестник, "Petrel") class, was envisaged by the Soviet Navy as a less expensive complement to the Project 1134A Berkut A (NATO reporting name 'Kresta II') and Project 1134B Berkut B (NATO reporting name 'Kara') classes of anti-submarine ships. Project 1135M was an improvement developed in 1972 with slightly increased displacement and heavier guns compared with the basic 1135. The design, by N. P. Sobolov, combined a powerful missile armament with good seakeeping for a blue water role. The ships were designated Guard Ship (Сторожевой Корабль, SKR) to reflect their substantial greater anti-ship capability than the earlier members of the class and the Soviet strategy of creating protected areas for friendly submarines close to the coast. NATO forces called the vessels 'Krivak II'-class frigates.
Displacing 2,935 tonnes (2,889 long tons; 3,235 short tons) standard and 3,305 t (3,253 long tons; 3,643 short tons) full load, Neukrotimyy was 123 m (403 ft 7 in) long overall, with a beam of 14.2 m (46 ft 7 in) and a draught of 4.5 m (14 ft 9 in). Power was provided by two 22,000-shaft-horsepower (16,000 kW) M7K power sets, each consisting of a combination of a 17,000 shp (13,000 kW) DK59 and a 5,000 shp (3,700 kW) M62 gas turbine arranged in a COGAG installation and driving one fixed-pitch propeller. Design speed was 32 knots (59 km/h; 37 mph) and range 3,900 nautical miles (7,223 km; 4,488 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph). The ship’s complement was 194, including 23 officers.
### Armament and sensors
Neukrotimyy was designed for anti-submarine warfare around four URPK-5 Rastrub missiles (NATO reporting name SS-N-14 'Silex'), backed up by a pair of quadruple launchers for 533 mm (21 in) torpedoes and a pair of RBU-6000 213 mm (8 in) Smerch-2 anti-submarine rocket launchers. Both the URPK-5 and the torpedoes also had anti-ship capabilities. Defence against aircraft was provided by forty 4K33 OSA-M (SA-N-4 'Gecko') surface to air missiles which were launched from two twin-arm ZIF-122 launchers. Two 100 mm (4 in) AK-100 guns were mounted aft in a superfiring arrangement.
The ship had a well-equipped sensor suite, including a single MR-310A Angara-A air/surface search radar, Don navigation radar, the MP-401S Start-S ESM radar system and the Spectrum-F laser warning system. Fire control for the guns was provided by a MR-143 Lev-214 radar. An extensive sonar complex was fitted, including the bow-mounted MG-332T Titan-2T and the towed-array MG-325 Vega that had a range of up to 15 kilometres (9.3 mi). The vessel was also equipped with the PK-16 decoy-dispenser system which used chaff as a form of missile defense.
## Construction and career
Laid down by on 22 January 1976 with the yard number 163 at the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad, Neukrotimyy was launched on 7 September 1977. The ship was the fifth of the class built at the yard. The vessel, named for a Russian word that can be translated as Indomitable, was commissioned on 30 December and joined the Baltic Fleet.
Soon after entering service, Neukrotimyy was sent on missions to foreign missions to promote friendly relationships between the Soviet Union and other nations. Between 5 and 10 June 1978, the vessel visited Rostock in East Germany. In 1982, the vessel travelled to Africa, spending time in Luanda, Angola, between 12 and 18 June and in Lagos, Nigeria, between 25 June and 2 July. In 1985, the ship travelled to Gdynia in Poland with the Project 58 (NATO reporting name Kynda class) cruiser Groznyy to commemorate the end of the Second World War, staying for three days from 5 June before returning to Rostock for four days from 7 October.
In honour of the members of the Young Communist League, or Komsomol, of Lithuania, the ship was renamed Komsomolets Litvyy on 2 November 1987. However, the new name did not last long, reverting back on 27 March 1990. Lithuania had declared independence from the Soviet Union 16 days beforehand. June that year saw Neukrotimyy take another tour of the Baltic Sea, taking in Kiel for three days from 5 June, and Szczecin, Poland, for three days from 21 June. The following year saw the ship travel to the Netherlands, a NATO member, visiting Amsterdam between 2 and 6 September. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, Neukrotimyy was transferred to the Russian Navy. Travels outside the Baltic continued. For example, between 23 and 24 April 1997, the ship could be found at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Neukrotimyy continued to serve into the next decade. However, the new century brought a succession of mishaps. 30 July 2005 saw a celebration of the might of the Russian Navy take place in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Unfortunately, a dummy mine that was to be detonated as part of the spectacle drifted and struck the side of the hull, filling the engine room with water. The swift intervention of the crew saved the ship. Three years later, on 8 December 2008, a fire broke out in the same engine room. Although extinguished, it proved the end for the ship. Neukrotimyy was decommissioned on 29 June 2009. An attempt was made to turn the vessel, the penultimate of the class to be taken out of service, over to a museum, but this failed. Instead the vessel was stored at Baltiysk ready to be broken up but sank in situ on 3 October 2012.
|
1,737,325 |
Anthology (Alien Ant Farm album)
| 1,162,673,216 | null |
[
"2001 albums",
"Albums produced by Jay Baumgardner",
"Alien Ant Farm albums",
"DreamWorks Records albums"
] |
Anthology (stylised as ANThology) is the second studio album by American rock band Alien Ant Farm. It was released on March 6, 2001, through New Noize and DreamWorks Records. Following the self-release of the band's debut studio album, Greatest Hits (1999), they played several showcases in Los Angeles, California. At the end of 2000, Alien Ant Farm started recording their next album with producer Jay Baumgardner at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood, California. An alternative metal and nu metal release, critics compared the album to the works of Incubus and A Perfect Circle.
"Movies" was released as Anthology's lead single in January 2001. Alien Ant Farm signed with Papa Roach's label, New Noize, before embarking on a United States cross-country tour with Linkin Park and Taproot, and supporting Orgy on their headlining tour. Following a two-week stint in Europe supporting Papa Roach, "Smooth Criminal" was released as the album's second single in June 2001. They appeared on that year's Warped Tour, and then re-release "Movies" in early 2002. The band toured Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the US. The third single, "Attitude", was released in May 2002.
Anthology received generally positive reviews from music critics, some of whom commented on Alien Ant Farm's energy and the songs' diversity. The album charted at number 11 on the US Billboard 200, while also reaching the top 40 in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, and New Zealand. It would later be certified platinum in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the US. "Smooth Criminal" peaked at number 23 on the US Billboard Hot 100, alongside performing well on several Billboard component charts, and reached number one in Australia. "Movies" had some success on several Billboard component charts, while "Attitude" only charted in the UK.
## Background and production
Vocalist Dryden Mitchell, guitarist Terry Corso, bassist Tye Zamora, and drummer Mike Cosgrove formed Alien Ant Farm in 1996. Zamora and Cosgrove previously played in a Primus cover band. The same year as forming, the band released their debut EP \$100 EP, and followed it up with their second EP Love Songs in 1998. Alien Ant Farm self-released their debut studio album Greatest Hits through their own record label Chick Music Records. It later won the award for Best Independent Album at the 1999 LA Music Awards. The band promoted the album with a tour in Europe, appearances at various festivals, and played several showcases in Los Angeles, California, in an attempt to secure a deal with another record label. After playing several shows together, Alien Ant Farm became well-acquainted with Papa Roach. When Papa Roach achieved commercial success, they were given ownership of the New Noize record label.
Alien Ant Farm was shopping around for a record deal, and an A&R person from New Noize eventually found them. While Alien Ant Farm was in Europe, producer Jay Baumgardner, known for his work with Korn and Slipknot, attended a Papa Roach show. A demo of Alien Ant Farm covering "Smooth Criminal" (1987) by Michael Jackson was playing over the speakers, which caught Baumgardner's attention. He proceeded to ask the DJ who it was, informing him that it was Alien Ant Farm; Baumgardner was a fan of Jackson's Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). A month following this, after producing Infest (2000) by Papa Roach, the A&R representative for that band contacted Baumgardner: This band, Alien Ant Farm, I think I should sign them.’ I said, ‘Yeah, they do that cover of Michael Jackson. It’s incredible. I think it’s a hit.’ And he said, ‘Would you do the record if I sign them?’ I said, ‘Yeah! By this time, nu metal had becoming the dominant strain of rock music, replacing alternative rock and grunge.
At the end of 2000, Alien Ant Farm were recording their next album at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood, California, with Baumgardner. The band's enjoyed his work with the likes of Orgy and Papa Roach. Alien Ant Farm recorded two songs with him, before spending a month writing material. The rehearsal studio they used was located opposite Baumgardner's studio, which allowed him to witness what the band were working on at any given moment. They would tape ideas with a recorder, by which point, Mitchell would listen to it in his car and they would then come up with parts to add to it. During recording, James Murray acted as engineer and operated Pro Tools, with assistance by Justin Harvey; John Ewing and Brian Viture did additional Pro Tools work. Baumgardner cited Pro Tools as an important piece of equipment as it enabled them to "chop things up and edit things", and said that Linkin Park, one of the band's contemporaries, "epitomized what you could do with Pro Tools in rock". Mitchell said Baumgardner did not alter the songs that much, save for some "real minor stuff", such as switch parts around. Baumgardner mixed the recordings at NRG, with help from Daniel Certa, before Tom Baker mastered Anthology at Precision Mastering in Hollywood.
## Composition and lyrics
Musically, critics have described the sound of Anthology as alternative metal and nu metal, taking influence by alternative rock, and drawing comparisons to Make Yourself (1999) by Incubus and Mer de Noms (2000) by A Perfect Circle. The band attempted vocal harmonies in the vein of the Electric Light Orchestra, Steely Dan, and Queen. Mitchell's vocals were compared to Maynard James Keenan of Tool; he wrote many of the tracks during a breakup. The opening track "Courage" details a relationship which has reached its breaking point. "Movies" uses staccato guitar parts against a funk-esque bassline. Mitchell said the song is about comparing a relationship to cinema. "Flesh and Bone" recalls the Police with Cosgrove's reggae-esque drum rhythms; Tye Zamora's brother Jon contributed additional background vocals to the song. At the suggestion of Zamora, Mitchell wrote the lyrics around religion, asking questions about people's beliefs. "Whisper" is an attack on the music industry; Cosgrove said it was about being turned down by labels after doing showcases for them.
The guitarwork in "Sticks and Stones" earned it a comparison to the work of Helmet and Prong. "Attitude" has a Latin beat, with percussion by Toto member Lenny Castro. The song is from the perspective of a girl expressing her anger, with the narrator explaining that her boyfriend is worse off. "Stranded" includes slide guitar by Dredg vocalist Gavin Hayes; "Wish" is the first-ever song Alien Ant Farm wrote and is indebted to the band's metal roots. "Smooth Criminal" is done in the nu metal style. Mitchell, whose first ever concert experience was seeing Jackson, explained that during one performance, Cosgrove and Zamora played a short snippet of it, which caught the attention of the crowd. Cosgrove subsequently bought a cassette of Bad so that the band could learn the track. The closing track "Universe" features a string arrangement by David Campbell. The hidden track "Orange Appeal" incorporates slide guitar by Hayes and flute by Yanick Vincent. It is a demo that dates from the band's first month of existence; Corso said they "kept putting stuff on top of. It was cool enough in the end to actually go on the album".
## Release and touring
### Initial promotion and "Smooth Criminal" single
"Movies" was released as lead single from Anthology in January 2001. Alien Ant Farm toured the West Coast of the United States in January and February 2001, followed by a cross-country trek with Linkin Park and Taproot. Anthology was released on March 6, 2001, on New Noize and DreamWorks Records. Discussing the album's title, Mitchell said: "We called our first independent record Greatest Hits. And in a sense, a lot of bands' first record is their greatest hits because they are soon gone. [...] So we thought it would be funny to do ANThology for our second record since we already did our greatest hits." Around this time, Alien Ant Farm were supporting Orgy on the Vapor Transmission Tour. The music video for "Movies", which was directed by Marcos Siega, premiered via MTV2 on March 17, 2001. Mitchell said it was filmed over the course of 18 hours, "and no one was feeling the 'movie' vibe". Alien Ant Farm was due to support Papa Roach on a US headliner; however, it was canceled. Instead, they went on a club tour of the US West Coast, and supported Papa Roach on their European tour for two weeks.
"Smooth Criminal" was released as Anthology's second single to US radio stations on June 12, 2001. The band had no plans to release the track as a single until it started gaining airplay from WXRK-FM, based in New York City. The European CD version featured "Orange Appeal", "Denigrate", and the "Smooth Criminal" music video; the UK version swapped "Orange Appeal" for "Movies". The music video for "Smooth Criminal", which was directed by Marc Klasfeld, sees the band performing in the middle of a boxing ring. Mitchell explained that either their label or MTV was attempting to connect the band with a soundtrack for the WWE. Klasfeld, who was living in New York City, had heard the song playing while in a gym. He was a popular video director that mainly worked with hip hop acts by likes of Insane Clown Posse and Nelly. His initial reaction upon hearing the cover was to laugh: "I saw the sense of humor in it. I just thought it was hilarious that a metal band was covering Michael Jackson. It was perfectly within my sensibility". He promptly contacted Alien Ant Farm's label with the aim of working with them, which was in contrast from labels and artists contacting him first.
### "Movies" re-release and further promotion
"Movies" was released in Europe on June 18, 2001, and includes "Pink Tea" and a live acoustic version of "Movies" as the B-sides, alongside the music video for "Movies". Alien Ant Farm appeared on the 2001 Warped Tour between June and August. Afterwards, they performed at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in the United Kingdom. Alien Ant Farm took a few weeks off for the Christmas holidays, before touring Australia and New Zealand in early 2002. "Movies" was re-released as a single on February 4, 2002. The band decided to reissue "Movies", after the success of "Smooth Criminal", in an attempt to get the song to chart. Mitchell said that a number of radio pluggers "felt that ‘Movies’ was a big hit that got yanked a wee bit too early. Now that there’s some familiarity with the band, they want to try it again". The CD version included live versions of "Movies" and "Smooth Criminal", along with a new music video for the former. The new video was shot over three hours with Klasfeld, and was described by Corso as "really moving and action-packed". The video shows the band in a theatre watching a movie; the members jump into the screen and become a part of the film. The rest of the video has the band in costumes, such as the Ghostbusters from Ghostbusters (1984) and Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), as they perform the song.
After a two-week stint in Europe, Alien Ant Farm returned to the US, and toured as part of the 2002 SnoCore Tour. "Attitude" was released as a UK single on May 13, to coincide with a tour there in the same month. The CD version included a remix and live acoustic versions of "Attitude", alongside live versions of "Universe" and "Stranded", and the music videos for the former two tracks. While traveling to a show, Alien Ant Farm was involved in a road accident near to Cáceres, Spain. Initial reporting said that the bus driver was killed, and Mitchell and Zamora ended up in hospital. The following day, the band explained they had been involved in a head-on collision, leaving their driver dead, and their security guard in critical condition. Six of Alien Ant Farm's crew members were also injured and taken to hospital with the band's members. Mitchell had sustained back injuries, and Cosgrove suffered a broken ankle. Zamora had foot injuries, while Cosgrove had cuts and bruises. Mitchell was moved to a special facility in London; he had a vertebral fracture, which prompt a metal rod being inserted into his back to stabilize his condition. A week after the incident, the band canceled all of their shows for the rest of the month, and into June 2002. They returned to performing in December as part of the charity showcase Drum Day in Los Angeles.
### Related events and releases
"Movies", "Attitude" and "Smooth Criminal" were included on the band's first compilation album, The Best of Alien Ant Farm (2008). These three, plus "Sticks and Stones", were included on the band's second compilation album, Icon (2013); the European edition expanded the selection to include "Courage", "Flesh and Bone", "Whisper", "Summer", "Stranded", "Wish" and "Death Day". In January 2016, Alien Ant Farm performed Anthology in full on a tour of the UK, with support from InMe and the Dirty Youth. A second leg was held in October and November 2016 with support from Hed PE, Kaleido and Sumo Cyco.
## Critical reception
Anthology was met with generally favorable reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, the album received an average score of 65, based on six reviews.
Drowned in Sound writer Terry Bezer wrote Alien Ant Farm "offer a widely diverse set of tunes and [sic] all of which are of the highest standard", with Anthology containing "all you could ever want from a debut album and a whole lot more". He cited the band's "[l]ive-wire energy, powerful tunes from start to finish and, most importantly, a sense of unpredictability". Dotmusic's Chris Heath wrote Alien Ant Farm break "new ground [...] by exploring far more than the quiet-loud-rage-quiet formula with real singing and everything and a fair [dose] of pop melody". AllMusic reviewer Mario Mesquita Borges noted the album displays "the band's alternate dexterity, not only due to [...] Mitchell's revealing vocals, but also by virtue of their deliverance of full-blooded melodies". The staff at E! Online called the album "[m]ore diverse than you might think [...] mak[ing] this one Ant Farm that'll keep your attention".
Rolling Stone reviewer Barry Walters wrote that the band "boasts the mosh power of Papa Roach, but with a lot more ingenuity, tunes and chops, as if Korn had half-morphed into Cheap Trick". Sean Richardson of The Boston Phoenix said they were "no carbon-copy P-Roach imitation" as he felt that Mitchell was not as "angry or tortured" as their frontman Coby Dick. Wall of Sound's Daniel Durchholz considered Alien Ant Farm to be showing "some real potential. They're pissed, sure — who isn't these days? But the important thing is that the members of the band have a talent for songcraft." Kitty Empire of NME found Mitchell to be "over-emot[ing] at every turn [...] further slickening 'ANThology's pomp rock gloss". She added that they are "trying to make a mountain of an ant hill, where we'd be content with a record that just rocks". Melodic webmaster Johan Wippsson singled out "Movies" and "Smooth Criminal", before then noting that "the rest of the album isn't that special". He added, "[i]t's not bad at all, just a little bit uninteresting".
## Commercial performance
Anthology peaked at number 11 on the US Billboard 200. Outside of the US, it charted at number 11 in the UK, number 13 in Finland, number 18 in Australia, number 20 in Germany, number 21 in Ireland, number 22 in Belgium, number 24 in New Zealand, number 32 in Austria, and number 40 in Scotland. The album was later certified platinum by Music Canada in Canada, platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) in the UK, platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the US. Additionally, it received a gold certification by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIAA) in Australia.
"Smooth Criminal" reached number 23 on the US Billboard Hot 100. It also appeared on several Billboard component charts: number one on Alternative Airplay, number 12 on Mainstream Top 40, number 17 on Active rock, number 18 on Mainstream Rock Songs, number 23 on Radio Songs, and number 27 on Heritage Rock. Outside of the US, it peaked at number one in Australia, number two in Finland, number three in the UK, number four in New Zealand and Switzerland, number five in Sweden, and number six in Austria. The song was certified double platinum in Australia by the ARIA, and platinum in the UK by the BPI.
"Movies" appeared on several Billboard component charts: number 18 on Alternative Airplay, number 35 on Active Rock, and number 38 on Mainstream Rock Songs. It also charted at number five in the UK, number 29 in Australia, number 35 in New Zealand, and number 62 in Switzerland. "Movies" was certified silver in the UK by the BPI, while "Attitude" reached number 66 in the UK.
## Track listing
Track listing per booklet. All recordings produced by Jay Baumgardner.
## Personnel
Personnel per booklet.
Alien Ant Farm
- Dryden Mitchell – lead vocals, acoustic guitar
- Terry Corso – guitars, acoustic guitar
- Tye Zamora – bass, backing vocals, upright bass, keyboards, additional guitars
- Mike Cosgrove – drums
Additional musicians
- David Campbell – string arrangement on "Universe"
- Lenny Castro – percussion on "Attitude"
- Gavin Hayes – slide guitar on "Stranded" and "Orange Appeal"
- Yanick Vincent – flute on "Orange Appeal"
- Jon Zamora – additional background vocals on "Flesh and Bone"
Production
- Jay Baumgardner – producer, mixing
- Tom Baker – mastering
- James Murray – engineer, Pro Tools
- Justin Harvey – assistant
- Daniel Certa – mix assistant
- John Ewing – additional Pro Tools
- Brian Virtue – additional Pro Tools
- PR Brown – art direction, design and photography
- Ralf Strathmann – band photo
## Charts and certifications
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### Certifications
|
30,234,935 |
Downtown Ossining Historic District
| 1,168,963,036 |
Older core of village in Westchester County, New York
|
[
"Gothic Revival architecture in New York (state)",
"Historic districts in Westchester County, New York",
"Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in New York (state)",
"Italianate architecture in New York (state)",
"National Register of Historic Places in Westchester County, New York",
"Ossining, New York",
"Renaissance Revival architecture in New York (state)",
"U.S. Route 9"
] |
The Downtown Ossining Historic District is located at the central crossroads of Ossining, New York, United States, and the village's traditional business district known as the Crescent. Among its many late 19th- and early 20th-century commercial buildings are many of the village's major landmarks—three bank buildings, four churches, its village hall, former post office and high school. It was recognized as a historic district in 1989 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as one of the few downtowns in Westchester County with its social and historical development intact.
One of its contributing properties, the First Baptist Church of Ossining, was previously listed on the Register in 1973. The Old Croton Aqueduct, a portion of which passes through the district, was listed on the Register the following year and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992. Among the architects represented in the district are Robert W. Gibson, Isaac G. Perry and James Gamble Rogers.
Ossining began developing at the crossroads in the late 18th century, and continued to prosper as industry, along with Sing Sing prison and the railroad, developed along the nearby shore of the Hudson River. It soon became Westchester's first incorporated village. The downtown area was fully developed by the mid-19th century, but two events later in the century reshaped it. The aqueduct was built through the area to carry water to New York City, requiring the demolition of some buildings. In the early 1870s several fires destroyed other buildings, thus most that remain date from that period to the early 1930s.
Later in the 20th century the buildings on the south side of Main Street were demolished as part of urban renewal efforts. Some of the oldest buildings on the other side were also lost in another fire. Little has been built to replace them, and the village has only recently begun serious redevelopment efforts although the area has become home to restaurants and home-furnishings stores that cater to the area's Latin American and Portuguese immigrant populations. A comprehensive plan adopted in the early 21st century has led to new zoning for the area meant to encourage mixed-use development. An expansion of the district to include Highland Cottage and some other buildings, also called for in the plan, was granted in 2013.
## Geography
The district is a 25.8-acre (10.4 ha) area shaped roughly like an upside down "Y". Its boundaries mostly follow property lines and street curbs. It is built around South Highland Avenue (U.S. Route 9), the main north–south through road, and Main Street, which leads west to the river.
At its northern end is 21–22 Croton Avenue, adjacent to the village municipal building along (New York State Route 133). It includes the bank building at the corner with South Highland and then crosses the street to follow the rear line of all the properties on Main Street, the area traditionally known as the Crescent due to the curve resulting from the area's topography. This takes it to the southwest, crossing the aqueduct trailway. At Brandreth Street it veers westward to take in the properties to 55 Central Avenue and, to their south, 107 Main Street.
Then it returns eastward along Main, crossing the aqueduct again to the north side of Church Street. It turns south to follow the rear lines of the properties along South Highland, two commercial buildings and Trinity Episcopal Church, then returns to South Highland at Maple Place. It follows the east side of the road to Emwilton Place, where it turns east to include Ossining United Methodist Church. Past the church it turns north again to include all the buildings of Ossining High School while excluding its more modern athletic facilities. At the high school property's north boundary it turns west again to the rear lines of properties on South Highland, and follows them back to Village Hall.
The 37 buildings and structures within these boundaries are overwhelmingly commercial structures, usually brick buildings of two or three stories. The rest are institutional, either religious or governmental in use. All but 14 are considered contributing properties.
Within the district the land slopes slightly to the north and west, anticipating steeper drops of almost 100 feet (30 m) to the Sing Sing Kill gorge and Hudson. As a result of its proximity to these bluffs the district has a view across the Hudson. To the east and south are the residential neighborhoods of Ossining; in 2013 the district boundary was expanded to include Highland Cottage, also listed on the Register.
The village's 2009 comprehensive plan called for expanding the historic district boundaries, at least for local purposes. Four small areas were proposed for inclusion: the additional properties on Central Avenue, a westward expansion along Main Street, Highland Cottage and the building to the east of the municipal building on Croton Avenue at the northeast corner of the district. These areas were added to the district by the U.S. National Park Service in 2013.
## History
The development of downtown Ossining has several distinct stages. In the early preindustrial period, it was primarily a crossroads. Most of the district's buildings, including the four churches, were built and rebuilt along Main Street in the late 19th century. New construction shifted back to Highland Avenue in the early 20th century and gave the district its important public buildings. Since then the community's focus has been devoted to preserving and redeveloping those buildings.
### 1680s: Formation of the town
Frederick Philipse bought the area which presently constitutes the Town of Ossining from the Sint Sinck Native American tribe in 1685. His Manor extended from Spuyten Duyvil Creek on the border between present day Manhattan and the Bronx to the Croton River. The last Lord of the Manor, Frederick III, a Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War, fled to England afterwards, so the state of New York seized the manor in 1779.
### 1780s–1840s: Crossroads and port
When the vast Philipse family landholdings in today's Westchester and Putnam counties were confiscated by the state of New York they were divided among new owners. Elijah Hunter, an officer during the war, bought the tract just south of Sing Sing Kill. He also started holding prayer meetings at his and other settlers' houses; the group formally became the First Baptist Church in 1790.
The river shoreline became the hub of early development. Produce from farms inland was brought there to be shipped to New York City via what is now Main Street, which connected to the Albany Post Road, now US 9. To open the port to even more farmers, the Croton Turnpike (now NY 133) was built early in the 19th century.
Settlement and development began to concentrate around the crossroads. The Union Hotel, just north of the Croton Turnpike, became the travelers' stop identified with Ossining. The local Presbyterian congregation built its first meetinghouse at the present site of Trinity Episcopal Church in 1803. By 1813 it became Sing Sing, Westchester's first incorporated village. The First Baptist Church built its first building at its current site in 1815. In 1820, a relocation of the Post Road a thousand feet (305 m) to the east benefited the new village at the expense of Sparta, the unincorporated hamlet a mile (1.6 km) to the south, since Sparta was no longer on the road while Sing Sing and the Union Hotel still were. Five years later, the local economy was further bolstered when the state built Sing Sing, one of its first prisons, on the river just to the southwest of the village. Marble quarried by convicts was used to build not only the prison but several other buildings in the area, including Ossining's oldest church, St. Paul's, now Calvary Episcopal Church, downtown outside the historic district, and elsewhere, such as the steps of the state capitol and New York City Hall.
The churches grew with the village. In 1834, the Baptist church was renovated, and the Presbyterians built a new Greek Revival church. Many of the commercial buildings in that style along Main Street west of the crossroads were demolished when the Croton Aqueduct, a masonry tunnel, was built in 1839 to connect Croton Dam with the reservoirs in Central Park. The buildings in that style at 151–155 Main Street, built afterwards further east, survived and were the oldest buildings in the district when it was established, but are no longer extant. Only the clapboard Italianate house at 23 South Highland, one of the few residences in the district and now its oldest building, survives from the pre-Civil War period.
### 1840s–1870: The railroad comes to Ossining
In the middle of the century, the Hudson River Railroad was built along the shoreline. With the village now within an hour's ride of New York City, its population grew over 50 percent between 1845 and 1855. The railroad's effects on the economy were both beneficial and detrimental. It enhanced the agricultural business through the crossroads, and spurred development of industry at the waterfront such as Benjamin Brandreth's pill factory. Industries that had been a source of Ossining's early growth, such as boat-building on the riverside and transportation-related businesses like hotels along Albany Post Road, suffered. In 1850, the First National Bank built its first building at the site occupied by its successor at South Highland and Croton.
Little new construction took place during the 1860s, due to the war and its aftermath. The Second Empire Olive Opera House at 63-67 Central Avenue, built around 1865, remains the district's oldest non-residential property. Croton Avenue saw some development at that time, particularly the rowhouses at 4 and the commercial building at 12. On Main Street the buildings between 157 and 161 also date from this time, but those that remain have been altered enough to no longer be contributing. The building at 121 Main Street, built around 1865, retains enough integrity to contribute. After the war, the village built a monument at South Highland and Croton to the 42 men who had been killed in action with the Union Army.
### 1870–1910: Industrial prosperity
The postwar years, the period later referred to as the Gilded Age, were prosperous for Ossining. While shipbuilding and river shipping finally faded as an industry when the railroad, now part of the New York Central, was fully established, quarrying continued. The village had become an industrial center, with over a hundred small businesses located downtown or on the waterfront, from Brandreth's pill factory to pickle and sleigh manufacturers.
Near the end of that decade the church congregations decided to expand. The Presbyterians needed a larger building. They sold the old one to the new Trinity Episcopal Church, who had split from nearby St. Paul's over differences of opinion about the war. The lot at the Maple Place intersection was ideal for their new building designed by Isaac Perry, later New York's state architect. The stone-trimmed brick structure has design features common to Perry's other churches, all designed during this period.
It was the first of four churches built in downtown Ossining in the late 19th century. The other buildings in the district were primarily built in the wake of four fires. The first, in 1871, primarily affected the corner of the Post Road and Broadway (then called Mill Street) to the north of the district. Its primary casualty was 217 Main Street, rebuilt in brick instead of frame later that year; the village's records, all stored in the basement, were lost. In 1872, the next fire destroyed all the buildings on lower Main Street. In its wake, the Barlow family, who had operated a hardware and furniture business in the original building since 1844, built the block named for them at 129–139 Main Street, retaining the original's bracketed cornice and adding pediments. The Barlows intended for it to be the central commercial location in Ossining.
In 1874, another fire started in the Olive Opera House at Brandreth and Central, seriously damaging it and the neighboring buildings. In the subsequent rebuilding, 145 Main Street was redone in the Renaissance Revival style, with bracketed cornices and pediments and stone trim. On the other side, 61 Central retained its cast iron storefront with columns on high plinth blocks, the only example of that design element in the district.
Further up the street, 187 Main was built in 1874 as well, featuring splayed brick lintels in addition to its bracketed cornice. Across the street, the Baptists replaced the twice-renovated Greek Revival frame church where they had worshipped since 1815. Brooklyn architect J. Walsh's brick Gothic Revival design is one of the highest applications of that style in Ossining.
The last fire, in 1876, burned that block across Main from the Baptist Church, an area the previous fires and the aqueduct construction had left untouched. Again, the rebuilding provided a chance to apply newer architectural styles. The buildings at 191 and 193 Main became Palmer Hall and the Stayver Building, brick structures with Neo-Grec detailing in their metal trim. Italianate detail was added to 199 Main Street, which became the Keenan Building when it was finished in 1878.
In the 1880s, the space left vacant next to the aqueduct along the north side of Main was refilled by 165 and 173–75 Main. Both have since been modified but retain their original metal cornices and segmental-arched lintels. Further east, another Renaissance Revival building, 127 Main Street, was completed in 1885. Its elaborate detail includes two-story brick pilasters supporting a metal roof cornice, and an intermediate cornice supported by cast iron pillars.
That same year the Methodists, who had previously held services in a building on Spring Street, outside the district, finished their new church. That building, at the corner of Highland and Emwilton, was designed by Ebenezer Roberts, architect of several Manhattan churches, and Lawrence P. Valk. The Ossining Methodist church is distinct from Roberts' earlier, more Gothic, churches (all subsequently demolished). Polychrome bands of stone on the exterior, and more elaborate detailing, put it within the High Victorian Gothic style. It features an engaged corner tower and transitional Queen Anne and Shingle Style elements. Louis Comfort Tiffany signed one of the Favrile glass windows he designed for the interior.
The last of the downtown churches was Trinity. After almost two decades in the Presbyterians' former building, the breakaway Episcopalian congregation needed its own new building. It commissioned Robert W. Gibson, whose design was the fifth in a series of English Gothic churches he began in 1884 with Albany's All Saints Cathedral. Trinity has elements in common with the other churches in the series, such as its mix of materials and large rose window, but is unique among them for its U shape, the result of a later expansion. It was completed in 1891, the only Neo-Gothic Revival religious building in the district.
At the beginning of the next decade, another longstanding building from the early years of Ossining, the Union Hotel at South Highland and Church Street, was demolished. A Romanesque Revival doctor's office building replaced it. In 1892 the corner section of the Barlow Block was separated internally from the rest of the building so it could serve as Ossining's post office, the first of two former locations for that facility within the district. The next year the village's electric trolley system was established, with its main line going down Croton Avenue from the then-undeveloped Ossining Heights area in the northeast corner of the village to Main Street, where a spur ran down to Sparta, and then continuing to the train station. Residents could more easily travel downtown, and Ossining Heights soon became the suburban residential area it is today.
The new century brought some major changes to the village, starting with its name. In 1901, it formally changed its name from Sing Sing to Ossining to distance itself from the prison. Residents had come to resent the prison industries' competitive advantages and the prison itself was now associated with the electric chair. Sparta, long bypassed by the region's major transportation arteries, was finally annexed by the village in 1906.
In architecture, the Renaissance Revival style was used for another commercial building, 181–183 Main Street, around 1900. In 1905, the parish hall and cloister were added to Trinity, giving its distinctive U-shaped layout. The next year the corner section of the Barlow Block was remodeled by W.H. Rahman for use by a bank in a higher version of the style. It was refaced in stone, with Doric and Ionic pilasters, terra cotta detailing and full entablature leading up to a tile roof, meant to emulate St. Mark's Library in Venice.
It anticipated the first significant building of the new century, the Bank for Savings Building at 200 Main Street, built the next year on the north corner of the triangular lot occupied by the First Baptist Church for nearly a century. The stone building by Lansing C. Holden, a past president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, is the only example in the village of the Beaux-Arts style. Its classical detailing makes it a focal point for traffic entering Ossining from the north, even as the intersection has become of one of Westchester's busiest.
### 1910–1933: Public buildings
Other new construction continued in previously established styles. In 1911 and 1913 respectively, new brick commercial buildings went up at 189 and 205 Main in the Renaissance Revival style. Their application differed from those that had gone before. On 189 was a belt course and stone quoins; on the other building all the decoration, including the flat-arched lintels and corbeled cornice, was brick.
In 1914, the bank buildings were complemented by the village's own new municipal building. The stone edifice at 16–20 Croton Avenue, the northern end of the district, was in the Classical Revival mode common for most governmental buildings of the era. The upper floors were initially used as a school. It is the only Westchester building by Donn Barber, designer of the Connecticut State Library and the first American admitted to the French Society of Beaux-Arts architects.
Later that year another new architectural style was introduced to the district. The Spanish Colonial Revival commercial building at 201–203 Main Street used a tiled pent-roofed parapet and stucco face. Down the street at 125 Main, a 1920 building is the district's only example of a yellow brick building with limestone trim, in the form of a stone cornice topped with a parapet.
The early 1920s brought changes to Ossinging as the village's population reached 12,000, many moving into former farms newly subdivided into suburban residential neighborhoods on the village's outskirts. In 1920, a new warden at the prison shut down several prison industries, including the quarry. Two years later, the Olive Opera House closed after almost 60 years. It was soon converted into a small factory. Two years after that, in 1924, the trolley system was shut down and dismantled, as more residents owned cars and more of the roads were paved. Bus service replaced it.
The last significant buildings in the future historic district came to South Highland at the end of the decade. On the corner just south of the First Baptist Church, the Cynthard Building, a single-story commercial block faced in terra cotta topped by a polychrome parapet, was erected in 1930; the Romanesque Revival doctor's office that had replaced the Union Hotel in 1890, and a house to the south, were demolished. Also that year, the third and last bank building downtown was built at 13 Croton Avenue, the corner with North Highland. The First National Bank, which had occupied the spot since 1880, moved into the district's only Art Deco building. It has an unusual neoclassical door surround.
Ossining High School was that year's most distinguished addition. Washington School, the village's high school since 1907, was becoming inadequate for the growing student population. After several attempts, voters in 1929 approved a new building when a nearby private school made a donation that helped cover the \$750,000 (\$ in ) construction cost. The new high school was on the site of Careswell, formerly the estate of Henry Baker, the local financier who had helped fund the Methodist church. James Gamble Rogers was the architect. Known for his many buildings on college campuses, the village's high school was one of his few secondary school buildings, and the only public school. The Collegiate Gothic building, taking up the large area of South Highland's west side between the houses and the Methodist church, has some similarities to Harkness Tower at Yale University, also designed by Rogers and considered one of the best examples of that style.
### 1934–present: Preservation, urban renewal and redevelopment
As the Great Depression set in and construction slowed, one more public building completed the district. The post office had outgrown its space at the Barlow Block again, and needed to move. As part of the national relief programs, many new post offices were built. Arthur Ware contributed a restrained Classical Revival one-story brick building at 10 South Highland, between the Cynthard Building and the Presbyterian Church, on the site of what had been the last remaining house on the west side of Main in the district. It was completed in 1933, the newest contributing property in the district.
The district had been built out, but change continued. Woolworth's moved into the space at 201–203 Main in 1934. The government of the Town of Ossining, which surrounds the village on land, moved into Village Hall the next year.
Postwar population growth led to the expansion of two buildings in the late 1950s. The first was the Presbyterian Church, which received a new Sunday School wing in 1955. Two years later the high school across the street, serving more students than it was originally designed for since 1937, followed. Its new wing, completed in 1957, was first used for the junior high school students. It was built of brick and intended to be architecturally sympathetic.
Most significantly, later in the decade the aqueduct began to carry less water. New York City had both eliminated one of the two reservoirs in Central Park that it fed, and developed or planned to develop new reservoirs in the Catskills and further up the Croton River watershed, so it needed less water from the Croton aqueduct. In the early 1950s the city finally stopped using it; some of the communities along the aqueduct kept drawing water from it until 1965.
Automobiles had displaced the railroad as the most common means of transport. Parkways and other dedicated roads had been built from the city in all directions. One proposal, made in the late 1920s, called for a Hudson River Expressway to run along the river's eastern shore, paralleling the railroad, from The Bronx to Beacon, including through downtown Ossining. Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose ancestral estate Kykuit would have been along the route, introduced a shortened version in 1958, a Tarrytown-Beacon Interstate 487. After intense local opposition, he canceled the plan in 1971. The urban renewal funds meant to offset the disruption it would have caused were still available to affected communities.
Like many other established downtowns, Ossining had been adversely affected by the growth of the automobile in the later 20th century. Local shoppers began taking advantage of improved roads to patronize stores in both enclosed shopping malls and strip malls along major highways like Route 9, outside the village's traditional center. The village used its urban renewal grants to demolish the old buildings along the south side of Main Street that year in an attempt to revitalize downtown. Its comprehensive plan drafted but never adopted two years earlier called for mixed-use development projects to replace them. But they were never funded or undertaken, and the spaces were largely used as parking. It was the first of many plans that remained largely unrealized, as Ossining went through 15 different mayoral administrations in the remaining years of the 20th century. During the 1968–74 period, downtown was also the site of several race riots that began at the high school and spilled into the streets. The community responded by redistricting its schools to ensure racial integration in lower grades.
The 1971 plan had recognized the importance of the buildings on the north side of Main, and historic preservation soon played a larger role in downtown planning. In 1973, the First Baptist Church became Ossining's first listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and the aqueduct followed the next year. In 1975, the village followed up with a study of the prospects for rehabilitating and preserving downtown that, for the first time in its planning history, drew on community input. It recommended residential development downtown to sustain the businesses that remained, but no new projects were undertaken. A second plan two years later also failed, but made specific recommendations for preserving historic buildings and called for new development to be on the same scale, rather than the larger structures proposed at the beginning of the decade.
As the village continued to change governments, the social and economic trends affecting downtown continued. All three bank buildings were left vacant. The preeminence of automobiles and roads took a direct toll on the district when a widening of Route 9 cost 217 Main Street several of its bays. It was rebuilt with its overall appearance retained, but the project cost it enough of its historic character that it could no longer be considered contributing when the district, originally called the Main Street Crescent Historic District, was created in 1989. Many businesses that closed or moved out were replaced by new ones, particularly restaurants, that catered to a growing Latin immigrant (at the time, largely Ecuadorean) population that had settled in the neighborhoods nearby.
In the 1990s, the village, under its first stable administration in several decades, began the planning process again, focusing on both downtown and the waterfront. Its second attempt at a farmers' market downtown had begun in 1990 and continues. Extensive public involvement led to the implementation of ideas from earlier plans, such as design guidelines for the district and a Historic Review Commission to enforce them. The new plan recognized the importance of the growing restaurant cluster downtown. In 1992, the aqueduct gained National Historic Landmark status, and the following year the 1840s Greek Revival buildings at 147–55 Main Street burned, creating a new void for redevelopment; the village initially used the space as a parking lot.
Change came to two of the newer buildings on South Highland as the 20th century became the 21st. The post office moved out of its building for a newer facility on the south side of Main Street, in the space cleared three decades earlier by urban renewal opposite the western extent of the district. Its former building was converted to retail use. Just to its north, the Cynthard Building was damaged by a fire in 2003, and was closed for three years while it was repaired and restored. In 2004, the village took possession of the Bank for Savings building, vacant since 1983. Two years later, a developer acquired the Ossining National Bank Building and began restoring it for use as affordable condominiums.
Ossining's first full-time planner was hired in 2005. After extensive community input, a new draft comprehensive plan was completed in 2007, and adopted in 2009. It recommended the creation of a new zoning district, Village Center, for Main Street, which was quickly adopted. In 2011 the village implemented another recommendation, putting out formal requests for redevelopment proposals for both the Bank for Savings building and the 147–155 Main properties. In 2015, Hudson Crossing at Market Square, a complex with residential, restaurant and retail space, was opened in the latter buildings.
## Significant contributing properties
Among the district's 23 buildings and structures are many that are architecturally distinctive or unique, or important to the village's history. Two of them have been listed individually on the Register; one of those, the Old Croton Aqueduct, is a National Historic Landmark.
### National Register of Historic Places
- First Baptist Church of Ossining, 1 Church Street. Brooklyn architect J. Walsh designed this High Victorian Gothic structure, built on the site where the church had stood since 1815. The 1874 church features many triangles and quatrefoils in its decoration, representing the Trinity and four Gospels respectively. It is home to Ossining's oldest congregation, established in the 1780s by founding settler Elijah Hunter. Almost a century later, in 1973, it became Ossining's first property listed on the National Register.
- Highland Cottage, 36 S. Highland Ave. This 1872 Gothic structure was the first concrete house in the county. Later it was used as a business school.
- Old Croton Aqueduct, space between 165 and 173 Main Street. The 5-by-7-foot (1.5 by 2.1 m) masonry tunnel 20 feet (6.1 m) below ground is topped with a walkway (not considered a contributing structure itself since it is too new), paved with brick within the downtown area, that leads north to Croton Dam. An engineering accomplishment when it was built in the late 1830s, it was New York City's first clean municipal water supply and the first in its extensive network of reservoirs and aqueducts upstate. Other city aqueducts have since replaced it, but its northern end has been reopened to supply Ossining and other communities at its north end. It was listed on the Register in 1974 and upgraded to National Historic Landmark status in 1992.
### Other contributing properties
- Bank for Savings, 200 Main Street. Located just north of the Baptist Church at the junction of Main and South Highland, this 1907 stone building is a focal point for traffic coming into downtown Ossining from the north on Route 9. Lansing Holden's design is the only example of the Beaux Arts style in the village.
- Barlow Block, 129–139 Main Street, including Ossining National Bank Building. The Barlow Block is named for the local family who rebuilt the property where their hardware and furniture store had been located after most of the original structure burned down in an 1872 fire. The replacement buildings are ornate Italianate structures with pediments and bracketed cornices. The building at the north end, later modified to be the village's post office, was remodeled into the Renaissance Revival bank building in 1906. After a long period of vacancy in the late 20th century, it has been restored and repurposed as affordable housing.
- Building at 61 Central Avenue. Built in 1875, this two-story, five-bay brick commercial building with a cast iron storefront is the only one in the district to have columns supported by high plinth blocks.
- Building at 125 Main Street. The only building in the district to use yellow brick and limestone trim was constructed in 1920.
- Building at 127 Main Street. This more elaborate Renaissance Revival building, with brick pilasters and a metal cornice with an intermediate cornice, dates to 1885.
- Building at 141–145 Main Street. Another structure rebuilt following one of the fires of the early 1870s, it was the first in the district to use the Renaissance Revival style.
- Building at 189 Main Street. The only Renaissance Revival building in the district with belt courses and stone quoins dates to 1911.
- Building at 201–203 Main Street. The tiled shed roof and parapet on this 1914 building are traits of the Spanish Colonial Revival style. It is the only example in the district.
- Building at 205 Main Street. All the decoration on this 1913 Renaissance Revival building is brick, unique in the district.
- Cynthard Building, 26 South Highland Avenue. This one-story terra cotta-faced building with neoclassical detailing was built in 1929 on the site once occupied by the Union Hotel, an early overnight stop on the Albany Post Road. Renovated after a 2003 fire.
- First National Bank, 13 Croton Avenue. Located at the intersection with North Highland Avenue, it is the only Art Deco building in the district, dating to 1930, and the only one of its three bank buildings still used for that purpose.
- First Presbyterian Church, 34 South Highland Avenue. Isaac G. Perry designed this High Victorian Gothic brick church, brick with white wood trim like the nearby First Baptist Church, in 1870 when the Presbyterians turned their old church over to the breakaway Trinity Episcopalian congregation who had shared it. A Sunday School wing was added in 1955.
- House at 23 South Highland Avenue. This 1840s Italian-villa style wood frame house is the oldest building in the district, and one of only two residences.
- Keenan Building, 199 Main Street. After the original building on the site was damaged by one of the 1870s fires, this replaced it in high Renaissance Revival style.
- Old U.S. Post Office, 30 South Highland Avenue. Arthur Ware designed this detailed Classical Revival building in 1933, part of a massive New Deal rebuilding program. It continued to serve as the post office until the new facility on the south side of Main was built at the end of the century, and is now a retail space. It is the most recent of all the district's contributing properties, and one of only three post offices in New York that contribute to historic districts despite being found ineligible to be listed on the Register individually.
- Olive Opera House, 63–67 Central Avenue. Built in 1865, this three-story brick building with a hipped roof served its original purpose as a performing arts and meeting space until the early 1920s. Since then it has been a factory and, more recently, a commercial building.
- Ossining High School, 29 South Highland Avenue. James Gamble Rogers contributed the original Collegiate Gothic building in 1930. Originally it served all the secondary-level students in the community. The community and district have grown enough that even after a 1958 expansion it now serves only the high school students from the village and town of Ossining, including those portions of nearby Briarcliff Manor within the town, and some portions of neighboring towns within the school district.
- Ossining Municipal Building, 16 Croton Avenue. A stone Classical Revival structure built in 1914 by Donn Barber, it has housed the village government and, since 1934, town government as well.
- Ossining United Methodist Church, South Highland Avenue and Emwilton Place. One of the few surviving churches by Ebenezer Roberts, who collaborated on this 1885 structure with Laurence Valk. Its polychrome stonework and detail put it more firmly in the High Victorian Gothic style than his other churches are known to have been. Louis Comfort Tiffany signed one of his Favrile glass windows inside.
- Palmer Hall and Stayver Building, 191–93 Main Street. Two Renaissance Revival buildings that replaced structures lost to the 1876 fire, they are distinguished by Neo-Grec detail work.
- Trinity Episcopal Church, 7 South Highland Avenue. The fifth of architect Robert W. Gibson's series of English Gothic churches in New York, Trinity was built in 1891 on the site of the former Presbyterian church. It was the last of the district's four churches to be built. The parish house wing, added in 1905, gives it a U-shaped layout unique among Gibson's work.
## Zoning and regulation
The village's zoning code has since the adoption of the 2009 comprehensive plan assigned a unique district, called Village Center, to downtown. It is intended to preserve downtown "as the center of village life" by promoting business uses of greater intensity than elsewhere in the village and encouraging mixed-use development, with upper levels of buildings available for residential use. To that latter end, it requires that residents of a building have an entrance available that is separate from any used for commercial purposes, that no residential use is permitted on the ground floor and that units be at least 450 square feet (42 m<sup>2</sup>) for studio apartments, 600 square feet (56 m<sup>2</sup>) for one-bedrooms, 750 square feet (70 m<sup>2</sup>) for two-bedrooms with 250 square feet (23 m<sup>2</sup>) required for any additional bedroom.
Along with Sparta and the waterfront, the district is covered by a historic overlay district defined elsewhere in the zoning code. They are overseen by the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), a body of seven residents appointed by the village manager. At least one member has to have practical experience in architecture, urban planning, land development or real estate, or live in a historic district or designated local landmark, or have a practical interest in local history or preservation (a single member with all those qualifications can satisfy the statutory requirement). They serve for five-year staggered terms. The HPC considers applications for landmark status, and develops overall preservation strategies for the village, but does not consider applications for redeveloping individual properties.
The village's zoning requires that all new construction, save additions to or expansions of detached single-family homes and residential duplexes, receive site plan approval from the village's Planning Board. This applies to almost all properties in the district. The seven members of the board are, like the HPC members, appointed to five-year terms by the village manager; two must have relevant expertise.
The Planning Board also serves as the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), which has the power to reject proposed buildings for "[i]nappropriateness in relation to the established character of other structures in the immediate area or neighboring areas with respect to significant design features, such as material or quality of architectural design ..." An unsuccessful applicant, or one requiring a variance, can go before the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA). Its five members are, as with the Planning Board and HPC, appointed by the village manager for five-year terms; there are no qualifications on membership.
## Proposals in comprehensive plan
The village's 2009 comprehensive plan identifies three objectives for downtown: to promote it as a business location, create a major downtown draw for visitors and residents, and improve and enhance its amenities. It recommends specific actions to accomplish all three.
To the first end, it recommends making the village's government more user-friendly for existing and prospective businesses, addressing the 18 percent vacancy rate reported in 2007. The Village Board and Planning Board should both be able to provide more information and reach out to local and regional business organizations. The zoning process, the plan contends, could be improved, since many existing businesses downtown are on conditional uses, and site plan approvals should have a time limit, forcing owners to begin development. Creation of a business improvement district and appointment of a Main Street Manager would make the development of downtown businesses more effective and efficient.
During the process of drafting the plan, many residents expressed a desire for a national chain retailer or restaurant to be enticed to locate near or in downtown as a draw. The plan considers this ill-advised and unlikely to happen for several reasons. Chains do not like to pioneer a new area, instead preferring to cluster with each other, and this leads to the development of large strip malls, impractical and undesirable in downtown Ossining, which still shows the scars of previous demolitions for urban renewal. Ossining as a whole is also geographically undesirable for chains, since not only is it neither affluent enough or accessible enough from major highways, the Hudson River cuts the potential trade area for such stores in half.
Instead, it recommends building on the existing clusters of restaurants and home-furnishings stores. Two businesses in each, Doca's Portuguese restaurant and Melita's respectively, draw customers from all over the county. Other regional chainlets could be drawn to Ossining. Restaurants in particular could see more ethnic diversity, widening the existing focus on Latin fare. The plan also recommends both improving cultural offerings downtown, and promoting more residential and office use to increase foot traffic at more times of the day.
Residents also complained that the parking lots opposite the Crescent were unsightly, and that they found it difficult to find parking downtown. The plan recommends creating a village green on part of the lot at the southwest corner of Main and Spring streets, outside the district, as a focal point of downtown. It could retain parking along the sides or even in a garage underneath, a common practice in Europe. Further parking could be added in an aboveground garage on Brandreth Street, outside of downtown. The village should also act to create a consistent downtown environment by encouraging infill development, making signage and lighting consistent, and strengthening and consistently enforcing its historic preservation guidelines.
The plan also recommended improving connections between downtown and the waterfront, where the Metro-North commuter rail station or the Haverstraw–Ossining Ferry could bring visitors into the village without adding to the parking problem. "A synergy between waterfront uses and downtown will enhance both areas, and provide reasons for visitors to stay in Ossining longer", it says. The plan further suggests studying the possibility of establishing a jitney or shuttle bus service that would not only allow visitors to bypass the steep climb up Main Street from the waterfront to downtown but continue westward to the residential areas of the village and town. Other measures to enhance the connection include signage, improved walkways and lighting, and dedicated space for river views.
In 2019, the village began the process of updating the plan. In July, a steering committee, with mayor Victoria Gearity, village trustee Quantel Bazemore, planning board member Jeff Gasbarro and six citizens, was appointed. Several months later the village put out a request for proposal to identify a planning firm as its consultant, and seeking residents willing to serve on the committee.
### Expansion of district and regulatory agencies' powers
The plan recommended that the village expand the historic district, at least as defined within its zoning code. A draft map at its website shows the southern boundary expanding one lot down the west side of South Highland, across Maple Street, to include Highland Cottage, an 1872 reinforced concrete house already listed on the Register. At the northern end, the property at 22–24 Croton Avenue next to the municipal building would be included, and the west end would extend to 55 and 57 Central Avenue and 107–113 Main Street. That boundary increase was approved by the National Park Service at the beginning of 2013.
In addition, the plan recommended that the boundaries of the historic district be signed and maps posted. The powers of the village's regulatory bodies over it should be improved as well. It calls for the HPC's decisions to be made binding, and the draft design guidelines it and the BAR use should be improved and made a formal reference document, in order to ensure that infill development is consistent with the existing buildings in the district.
## See also
- National Register of Historic Places listings in northern Westchester County, New York
- Peekskill Downtown Historic District, another Westchester river-town downtown on the National Register
|
26,500,932 |
Ernest Lucas Guest
| 1,170,344,864 |
Rhodesian politician (1882–1972)
|
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"Alumni of St. Andrew's College, Grahamstown",
"British military personnel of the Second Boer War",
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"Finance ministers of Rhodesia",
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"Members of the Legislative Assembly of Southern Rhodesia",
"People from Makhanda, Eastern Cape",
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"Rhodesian military leaders",
"Rhodesian military personnel of World War I",
"Rhodesian politicians",
"South African Commanders of the Royal Victorian Order",
"South African Companions of the Order of St Michael and St George",
"South African Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire",
"South African emigrants to Rhodesia",
"South African knights",
"South African people of British descent",
"Southern Rhodesian military personnel of World War II",
"White South African people"
] |
Sir Ernest Lucas Guest (20 August 1882 – 20 September 1972) was a Rhodesian politician, lawyer and soldier. He held senior ministerial positions in the government, most notably as Minister for Air during the Second World War.
Guest was born in Grahamstown, Cape Colony. His grandfather had moved the family there, leaving Kidderminster, England, where it had been in the printing business for three generations. He saw active service in the Second Boer War, enlisting despite being underage, and again in the First World War, when he was injured in France. His legal career began while back in Southern Rhodesia between those two wars. He won a case against Sir Charles Coghlan, at the time Premier of Southern Rhodesia, and Coghlan invited him to become a partner in his firm, which became known as Coghlan, Welsh & Guest. On his return from the First World War, Guest took responsibility for the Salisbury practice.
He was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1928 as a member of Coghlan's Rhodesia Party, representing the constituency of Charter, which he held until 1946. He first became a cabinet minister in Godfrey Huggins' government, appointed Minister of Mines and Public Works in June 1938. During the Second World War, Guest was Minister for Air and administered the Rhodesia Air Training Group. After the war he was also Minister of Defence, Minister of Finance and Leader of the House. At the 1946 elections he stood for Salisbury Gardens and held the seat until his retirement from office in 1948.
He married Edith May Jones and had two daughters and twin sons, both of whom were killed in action during the Second World War. At his death, both the High Court and Parliament paid public tributes to him. His continuing legacy is most evident in the Kariba Dam, a project that went ahead with his active support.
## Early life
Ernest Lucas Guest was born in Grahamstown, Cape Colony (in modern South Africa's Eastern Cape province) on 20 August 1882. Guest's grandfather had moved the family to South Africa in 1861 from Kidderminster, England, where they had been involved in the printing business for three generations. His grandfather was appointed manager of the Frontier Times, printed and published in Grahamstown. The family resided there until 1889 when Ernest's father, Herbert Melville Guest, moved them to Klerksdorp, Transvaal, after buying the local newspaper and printing business.
## Military career
### Second Boer War
At the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899, Guest was below the minimum age of 18 for enlisting. He nevertheless managed to join the First City Volunteers, a Grahamstown regiment in which his father had served. Its task of guarding a bridge over a railway line was unappealing, so he took the opportunity of joining the Eastern Province Light Horse, attached to the Highland Brigade, which was recruiting volunteers who could both ride and shoot. Early in the Brigade's advance into the Orange Free State on its way to the relief of Kimberley, Guest got food poisoning and he returned to Grahamstown.
After recovering, he joined the Kimberley Mounted Corps and guided two officers from Lichtenburg to Klerksdorp, where they persuaded the Boers to surrender by bluffing that a strong British force was following close behind. The Boers soon retook the town and Guest was captured. He was sent with other prisoners to Pietersburg to be executed but he managed to escape and travelled to Warmbaths. After satisfying the authorities that he had actually been taken prisoner and had not surrendered voluntarily, he returned to his depot at Kimberley. His unit had been disbanded and he was discharged.
Guest joined up again, enlisting in Kitchener's Fighting Scouts on 2 January 1901. He was given the rank of Sergeant, chasing Boer commandoes without success. He was recommended for a commission and posted to the Johannesburg Mounted Rifles, whose Colonel decided that Guest was too young to lead a force composed of miners who were considerably older than him. Returning to Klerksdorp, Guest learned that the Bechuanaland Rifles were recruiting experienced officers; he went to Mafeking and was accepted into the unit, with whom he served until the end of the war. The Rifles were part of a mobile force, the Divisional Scouting Corps, whose function was to round up Boer detachments and to execute Kitchener's scorched earth policy, destroying Boer farm buildings and crops, and detaining women and children in concentration camps.
### First World War
Great Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, and as part of the British Empire, Southern Rhodesia was also now at war. The British South Africa Company (which then administered the territory) took no steps to aid recruiting for the forces, so many men paid their own fares to England to join up. A number of eligible recruits could not afford to go, so Guest, together with Captain Alwyn Knowles of the Bedfordshire Regiment, who as a reserve officer was awaiting his call-up, organised a private fund to pay their passages. When the recruits arrived in England they were enlisted by Captain (later Colonel) John Banks Brady (who was in 1934 to be elected to the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Assembly as member for Bulawayo North) to form a Rhodesian platoon in the King's Royal Rifle Corps.
Guest and Knowles were summoned to the Defence Department and told to stop recruiting.
`The Administration had decided to raise a regiment in Rhodesia, and Guest joined the Salisbury battalion of the 1st Rhodesian Regiment with the rank of Lieutenant. The battalion was sent to South Africa to assist in suppressing the 1914 Maritz Rebellion by Boers opposed to fighting for Britain. It was not, however, deployed against the Rebellion and when it ended the battalion was sent, with the Imperial Light Horse, to reinforce the South African troops in the South-West Africa Campaign in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. They landed at Lambert's Bay on Christmas morning 1914, but made no contact with the enemy until they were sent to Swakopmund.`
When the campaign came to an end, the battalion returned to Salisbury. Guest then travelled to England and sought a commission, joining the South Lancashire Regiment with the rank of Lieutenant in September 1916. He was later promoted to Captain. He went with his battalion to France where they were posted to the 59th Division, then in the line. The sector they occupied was not very active, but shelling and sniping from both sides were carried out fairly regularly. It was not long before Guest was wounded, and then he fell victim to an irritating and persistent skin complaint which was common in the trenches and did not respond to treatment. He was evacuated to England and after a brief period in hospital was sent to the Imperial Hydro at St Annes, where he was told that he would not be fit to return to his unit for six months.
Through a contact at the War Office, Guest had his name added to a list of officers available for special employment, and was selected to undertake a propaganda tour of the United States, delivering 160 lectures to approximately 282,000 people in total. He was then sent to France to promote the benefits of Southern Rhodesia to the large number of soldiers who had become unsettled and wished to emigrate. Guest then returned to Rhodesia with his family, who had spent most of the war in England.
Other members of the Guest family also served in the First World War. Ivor Guest, Ernest's eldest brother, was a lieutenant in the Witwatersrand Rifles in the South-West Africa Campaign. After the regiment was disbanded at the end of the campaign, he was commissioned as a machine gun officer in the Second Cape Corps for service in East Africa; he was killed in action on 6 November 1917 at the Battle of Mahiwa while checking the advance of a vastly superior enemy force. His gun crew had become casualties and he was handling the gun himself when he was killed.
Guest's two younger brothers also served in the Transvaal Scottish. The elder of them, Duke, was later commissioned in the South African Scottish Regiment and served in France. He was gassed and after a long stay in hospital was declared unfit for further service and remained in England until the end of the war.
## Legal career
### Admission to the Rhodesian High Court
At the start of the Second Boer War, Guest had left school without any educational qualifications. Nevertheless, he managed to start his legal career when a Klerksdorp solicitor, Maurice Rood, offered him a job drawing up claims for compensation by farmers whose properties had been destroyed or damaged by the British forces. The claims were to be submitted to the "Compensation Committee", on which Guest's father served. When the committee ceased to function Rood suggested that Guest become articled to him.
The need to matriculate was an obstacle. He used a family connection with St. Andrew's College, Grahamstown, to attend as a day boy and passed his matriculation. He duly applied to the Supreme Court for admission as an attorney in the Transvaal, was accepted and took the oath. He was offered a post with the leading firm of attorneys in Klerksdorp, but a clause in his articles prohibited Guest from practising in competition with Rood's firm for some years without the latter's permission.
Guest became acquainted with Fred Hopley, who had recently been practising in Bulawayo. He informed Guest that a solicitor in Bulawayo, Louis Champion, wanted someone to take over his practice for six months while he was away on a shooting trip. Guest's application was accepted by return of post and he was asked to report early in July 1910. Champion's practice, as Deputy Sheriff, consisted mainly of debt-collecting and lending money to doubtful borrowers at a high rate of interest.
Guest prepared his petition for admission to the Southern Rhodesian High Court and briefed counsel to represent him before the Chief Justice, Sir Joseph Vintcent. The Judge dispensed with the requirement to apply first for admission in the Cape Colony and admitted him as an attorney of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia.
A few days after Guest's arrival a young man arrived to practise in Bulawayo as an advocate, Robert Hudson. So began a friendship that was to endure for the rest of Hudson's life and through many vicissitudes – in the legal profession, on active service in the First World War, and during the years when they were both members of the Cabinet. Hudson, who for some years was Minister of Justice, became Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia.
### Coghlan, Welsh & Guest
Bryce Hendrie, whose office was next door to Louis Champion's, had been appointed commanding officer of the Rhodesian contingent to attend the coronation of King George V on 22 June 1911. Before his departure to England, he offered Guest the management of his practice during his absence. Hendrie's brother was an estate agent and put all his property transfers through the firm, so Guest gained much valuable experience, especially in conveyancing, through a number of cases in the High Court, in the Magistrate's Court and in the Court of the Mining Commissioner.
Guest came up against Sir Charles Coghlan, the senior partner of Coghlan and Welsh, in a case before the Court of the Mining Commissioner. Coghlan represented a mining company, which had pegged some gold claims on Guest's client's farm. The Commissioner gave judgment in favour of Guest, who had been instructed to oppose their registration. Following this case, although initially irritated by Guest, Coghlan invited him to join his firm in Salisbury, which Guest did in January 1912. The Salisbury office had been opened by Bernard Tancred. His passing away provided the opportunity for Guest to join the firm as a partner. For a while, the firm was known as Coghlan, Welsh, Townsend and Guest, when Townsend, one of the 1820 Settlers in the Eastern Cape, joined the firm in Salisbury. It reverted to Coghlan, Welsh and Guest, when Townsend died a little time later.
On his return to Rhodesia after the First World War, Guest took over the Salisbury practice from Sir Charles, who returned to Bulawayo.
## Politics
### Early career
After the First World War, Guest became involved in municipal affairs. He served on a committee to help returning soldiers adjust to civilian life. He was elected to the Salisbury Town Council, and during his second term was appointed Deputy Mayor. For the best part of a year, he acted as Mayor during the Mayor's absence in the United States.
Guest was one of several prominent citizens who were members of the Rhodesian Union Association, advocating joining the Union of South Africa in the 1922 government referendum; the alternative option was "responsible government", under which Southern Rhodesia would become a self-governing colony of Britain in its own right. The electorate returned a vote for the latter proposition, and in October 1923 Coghlan became the first Premier of Southern Rhodesia. Although Guest was on the opposite side to Coghlan the statesman was impressed by his capabilities, and when he drew up a list of those he would like to see stand for election to the next Legislative Assembly, just before his death, he put Guest's name at the head of it. Guest first stood for Charter, representing the Rhodesia Party at the 1928 elections. Despite the constituency being largely Afrikaans, he won the seat, defeating the incumbent Charles Edward Gilfillan of the Progressive Party with a majority of 283 votes to 211. He held Charter until 1946, being re-elected in 1933, 1934 (unopposed) and 1939. At the 1946 elections he stood for Salisbury Gardens and won, remaining there until his retirement from politics in 1948.
### Cabinet Minister
At the 1933 elections, the Rhodesia Party was defeated by the Reform Party of Godfrey Huggins. Guest was a key advocate of accepting the merger of the two parties under the new name of the United Party and Huggins appointed him to his Cabinet in 1938.
Guest was Minister of Mines and Public Works, from 1 June 1938 to 1 February 1944. The Electricity Supply Commission came under his portfolio. It had responsibility for ensuring that the generation of electricity kept pace with the ever·growing needs of mining, farming and secondary industry. When Guest became Minister, the commission was constructing a thermal power station at Umsweswe, but kept running short of money. The Minister of Finance, Jacob Smit, was reluctant to grant further funds but would support a hydro-electric scheme. Guest proposed Kariba as a source of hydro-electric power and Smit provided the money for further investigation. Guest arranged with a civil engineer named Jeffares, who had earlier surveyed the route of the proposed Sinoia/Kafue railway and knew the country around Kariba, to survey the area, select a site for a power station and submit a report. When he eventually did so, Guest appointed a committee of engineers to examine the proposal. They reported favourably but did not recommend that the scheme be proceeded with immediately. Nor was the Cabinet particularly impressed, and the idea was strongly criticised by the Opposition in Parliament. The outbreak of the Second World War caused the project to be shelved but after the war the project was revived as a joint scheme to serve the two Rhodesias. The eventual construction of Kariba Dam was of enormous value to the development of both Rhodesia and the Zambian Copperbelt, and led to the creation of what was at the time the largest manmade lake in Africa south of the Sahara.
### Second World War
At a special sitting of Parliament on 28 August 1939, Rhodesia determined to stand by Great Britain in the event that war should break out, as was expected. Of a white population of just 65,000, only 10,000 were fit and available for active service. It was decided not to create a full Rhodesian formation: if it were wiped out, the colony's future prosperity would be put at risk. Instead mostly small groups of Rhodesians were distributed throughout the British Army, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force. In the Defence Report of 1939, it was stated that forces would be trained and organised not only for internal security and defence but also to defend British interests in service outside its borders.
#### Empire Air Training Scheme
As early as 1936, an air training scheme was inaugurated at Cranborne, near Salisbury, where the civilian flying school instructed pilots. Facilities were later extended to Bulawayo. In August 1937, Squadron Leader G.A Powell and Flight Lieutenant V.E. Maxwell were seconded from the RAF to oversee service training. In September 1939, the Rhodesian Air Training Group, under the direction of Air Vice Marshal (later Sir) Charles Warburton Meredith, took in 500 recruits at Cranborne. An offer was made to British Air Ministry to run a flying school and to train personnel to man three squadrons, which was duly accepted.
The Southern Rhodesian Air Force effectively ceased to exist after its last training course was completed on 6 April 1940. Its three squadrons became 44, 237 and 266 Squadrons, Royal Air Force, bearing the name of Rhodesia. The Rhodesian Air Training Group invited the public to submit design proposals for the Squadrons' crests.
##### Rhodesia Air Training Group
Meanwhile, preparations were underway in Rhodesia to expand facilities for the training of pilots. In January 1940 the government announced the creation of a Department of Air, completely separate from that of Defence. Guest was appointed Minister of Air, a post he held from 28 March 1940 to 6 May 1946. He inaugurated and administered what became the second largest Empire Air Training Scheme, beginning with the establishment of three units at Salisbury, Bulawayo and Gwelo, each comprising a preliminary and an advanced training school.
Rhodesia was the last of the Commonwealth countries to enter the Empire Air Training Scheme and the first to turn out fully qualified pilots. No.25 Elementary Flying Training School at Belvedere Air Station, Salisbury, was the first school to be opened, on 25 May 1940 by Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. It was followed by a Service School at Cranborne. In Bulawayo, an Elementary School was established at Sauerdale, although due to the unsuitability of the ground surface, it was moved to Induna, with a Service School at Kumalo. Gwelo had an Elementary School at Guinea Fowl and a Service School at Thornhill. The Elementary Schools were equipped with Tiger Moths and the Service Schools, single-engine Harvards and twin-engine Airspeed Oxfords. At Moffat, the first gunners passed out in September 1941 from the only Bombing and Gunnery School in Southern Rhodesia.
The trainees came mainly from Britain, but also from Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, USA, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Fiji and Malta. In total 8,500 British aircrew were trained in Southern Rhodesia during the War.
##### 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron
No. 1 Squadron, Southern Rhodesian Air Force, was among the units posted to East African Force in Kenya in September 1939 to undertake the role of army co-operation, including reconnaissance and air-photography work, as well as dive-bombing operations and ground-strafing, and conducting artillery shoots. On 22 April 1940, the squadron was renamed No. 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron, Royal Air Force and took the Latin motto Primum Agmen in Caelo (The Vanguard in the Sky), being Rhodesia's first in the field.
In September 1940, 237 Squadron was relieved by units of the South African Air Force and redeployed in Sudan, where the Operations Record for the last three months of 1940 showed it was involved in reconnaissance, dive-bombing and pamphlet-dropping. At the start of 1941, the Squadron was re-equipped with less antiquated aircraft. The Hardys were replaced by Westland Lysander II army co-operation planes as well as Gloster Gladiator fighter biplanes. 237 Squadron moved out of East Africa after the defeat of the Italians in May 1941. They had seen active service in Kenya, Sudan, Eritrea and Abyssinia. The Squadron was involved in the Western Desert campaign against Rommel. After a lull in the summer of 1941, it took heavy casualties in the closing months inflicted on it by Me109F and Macchis. It was withdrawn to the Canal Zone in February 1942 after five months in the Western Desert.
The Squadron's crest was presented to it by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder on 30 March 1942.
##### 266 (Rhodesia) Squadron
266 Squadron, RAF, was formed at RAF Sutton Bridge on 30 October 1939. The majority of the Squadron were Rhodesian, with the exception of a few groundstaff and the commanding officer. Equipped with Spitfires, it was the Rhodesian fighter squadron and it took as its motto a Sindebele word Hlabezulu (Stabber of Skies). It first went into action over Dunkirk on 2 June 1940. By June 1941, the Squadron, led by Sqn Ldr T.B. de la P. Beresford, was stationed at RAF Wittering, near Peterborough. Its duties included patrolling, escorting convoys, offensive sweeps of northern France and the Belgian and Dutch coasts, as well as escorting bombing raids over France and the Rhine. In January 1942, the Squadron received Hawker Typhoons and later in the month moved to Duxford.
##### 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron
44 Squadron, RAF, stationed at Waddington, south of Lincoln, was renamed 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron in September 1941, and took as its motto Fulmina Regis Justa (The King's thunderbolts are righteous). The bomber Squadron, equipped with Hampdens, took part in raids on Berlin and many other targets, as well as mine-laying in sea traffic lanes.
It was also in September 1941 that the Squadron received the proto-type Lancaster bomber, the first squadron of the RAF to receive the new aircraft. On a visit to the Squadron in December, Guest and Meredith were taken on a flight in the new plane. Although the order was given in December to cease operations in the Hampdens, it was not until 3 March 1942 that the Lancaster was put on active service on its first battle mission for the entire RAF. The Squadron, with its Lancasters, was given key targets to bomb: on 17 April 1942, six Lancasters from 44 Squadron alongside six from 97 Squadron, bombed the MAN diesel engine factory, which produced more than half of the German U-boats, as well as engines for ships, tanks and transport vehicles. The success – at a cost of five planes and crew to 44 Squadron – earned the thanks of the Prime Minister himself. The Squadron was further involved in the obliteration of Rostock on 8 May and took part in the 1,000-aircraft attack on Cologne on 30 May.
### After the war
From 1944, Guest was Leader of the House until he retired from political office in 1948. He retained his wartime role as Air Minister and Rhodesia capitalised on her experience to form her own highly efficient Air Force. He also tackled the problem of young airmen returning to civilian life, training aircrews for civilian duty as well as helping young men complete their academic education. He continued as Minister of Defence and Air from 7 June 1946 to 15 September 1948. He chaired the South African Air Transport Council in its deliberations in 1947 regarding air traffic control and the establishment of control centres at Nairobi, Salisbury and Johannesburg, as well as communications and the future needs of air transport in southern Africa.
During this time, he was also Minister of Internal Affairs from 1944 to 1946 and briefly Minister of Finance from 7 May 1946 to 26 September 1946. He acted as Prime Minister at various times in 1947 and 1948 during the absence of Huggins and acted for other ministers on a number of occasions.
Although he had retired from political office, Guest continued to be active in public life, for example in organising the 1953 Rhodes Centenary Exhibition in Southern Rhodesia.
## Family
Ernest Guest married Edith May, daughter of Thomas Jones of Singapore. The couple met in Johannesburg, where she had been brought up by an uncle. They had two daughters and twin sons. Both their sons were killed in action in the Second World War.
His second daughter, Maureen Edith Pilling, enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) soon after the outbreak of the Second World War and was eventually promoted to Flight Officer in July 1944. Posted to Cairo and Palestine, she married a Squadron Leader in the RAF and then remained in Cairo until the end of the war.
Ernest Melville Charles Guest (1920–4 October 1943) was commissioned as Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force on 9 October 1939 and eventually promoted to Flight Lieutenant on 9 October 1941. He was initially posted to 206 Squadron in England, flying anti-submarine missions, then to 200 Squadron in West Africa before being transferred to 61 Air School at George in the Western Cape as a navigation instructor. He transferred back to England and soon after was killed in action. A fortnight later, his son, Melville Richard John Guest, was born. He received three Mentions in Despatches and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1942.
John Desmond Thomas Guest (1920–21 November 1941), Melville's twin brother, turned down a Rhodes Scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford as the war broke out and enlisted in England instead, commissioned Second Lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps in June 1940. He served in the Abyssinian campaign and then in the Western Desert, where he was killed in a bayonet charge at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh on 21 November 1941.
## Honours
Guest was appointed and Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1938 Birthday Honours and promoted to a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE; Civil Division) in the 1944 New Year Honours List "for public services, especially in inauguration of Empire Air Training Scheme." He was also appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) by King George VI during the Royal Family's visit to Rhodesia in April 1947, and a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 1949 New Year Honours List. Guest was also awarded the Order of the White Eagle. He was granted the right in December 1948 to retain the title Honourable, having served for more than three years as a member of the Executive Council of Southern Rhodesia.
In 1953, the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, recognised him with an Honorary Degree of a Doctor of Laws (HonLLD).
### Medals and awards
## Death
Sir Ernest Lucas Guest died on 20 September 1972 at the age of 90, in Salisbury, Rhodesia. A special sitting of both divisions of the High Court of Rhodesia was convened to pay tribute to Guest on 27 September 1972. In Parliament, a motion of condolence was moved on 14 November 1972 by Jack Howman, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Public Services – and a partner in Coghlan, Welsh & Guest – as Acting Leader of the House.
|
11,555,735 |
Khumarawayh ibn Ahmad ibn Tulun
| 1,171,433,629 | null |
[
"864 births",
"896 deaths",
"9th-century Tulunid emirs",
"9th-century murdered monarchs",
"9th-century rulers",
"People from Samarra",
"Tulunid emirs"
] |
Abu 'l-Jaysh Khumārawayh ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn (Arabic: أبو الجيش خمارويه بن أحمد بن طولون; 864 – 18 January 896) was a son of the founder of the Tulunid dynasty, Ahmad ibn Tulun. His father, the autonomous ruler of Egypt and Syria, designated him as his successor. When Ibn Tulun died in May 884, Khumarawayh succeeded him. After defeating an attempt to depose him, in 886 he managed to gain recognition of his rule over Egypt and Syria as a hereditary governor from the Abbasid Caliphate. In 893 the agreement was renewed with the new Abbasid Caliph, al-Mu'tadid, and sealed with the marriage of his daughter Qatr al-Nada to the Caliph.
At the height of his power, Khumarawayh's authority expanded from the Byzantine frontier in Cilicia and the Jazira to Nubia. Domestically, his reign was marked by a prodigal squandering of funds on extravagant displays of wealth, construction of palaces, and the patronage of artists and poets. In combination with the need to maintain a sizeable professional army and guarantee its loyalty through rich gifts, this emptied the treasury by the end of his reign. Khumarawayh was murdered by a palace servant in 896, and was succeeded by his son Jaysh, who was deposed after a few months in favour of another son, Harun ibn Khumarawayh. The Tulunid state entered a period of turmoil and weakness, which culminated in its reconquest by the Abbasids in 904–905.
## Biography
Khumarawayh was born at Samarra in 864. His father, Ahmad ibn Tulun, the son of a Turkish slave-soldier, was appointed governor of Egypt in 868. In 871 he expelled the caliphal fiscal agent and assumed direct control of Egypt's revenue, which he used to create an army of slave soldiers (ghilmān) of his own. Relying on this powerful force, and exploiting the rift between the increasingly powerless Caliph al-Mu'tamid and his brother and de facto regent al-Muwaffaq—in 882 al-Mu'tamid even tried to flee Samarra and seek refuge with Ibn Tulun—he managed to gain control over Syria and the frontier zone with the Byzantine Empire (the Thughūr), as well as parts of the Jazira up to Raqqa.
### Succession and relations with the Abbasids
In 882, following a failed rebellion of his elder brother Abbas, who was "regarded as cruel and untrustworthy" (Moritz Sobernheim [de]), Khumarawayh was named as his father's deputy in Egypt and heir-apparent. This position was confirmed by Ibn Tulun at the request of his generals shortly before his death on 10 May 884. With the backing of the Tulunid regime's elites, Khumarawayh's succession was smooth; Abbas was forced to acknowledge Khumarawayh, but was assassinated shortly after. Khumarawayh's accession was an important step in the gradual dissolution of the Abbasid Caliphate: as Thierry Bianquis explains, "this was the first time in Abbasid history with regard to the government of so large and rich a territory, that a wāli, whose legitimacy derived from the caliph who had designated him, was succeeded openly by an amīr who claimed his legitimacy by inheritance".
In his last months, Ibn Tulun had sought to effect a reconciliation with al-Muwaffaq on the basis of the recognition of his authority over Egypt and Syria, but his death interrupted the negotiations. As Khumarawayh was young and untested, one of Ibn Tulun's senior generals, Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Wasiti, encouraged the Abbasids to attack and recover control of the Tulunid territories. The generals Ishaq ibn Kundaj and Ibn Abi'l-Saj attacked the Tulunid domains in Syria. Damascus fell when its governor defected, but their initial gains were rapidly reversed. In the spring of 885, al-Muwaffaq's son Abu'l-Abbas (the future al-Mu'tadid) 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 Abi'l-Saj, the latter abandoned the campaign and withdrew their forces. At the Battle of Tawahin on 6 April, Khumarawayh confronted Abu'l-Abbas in person. The Abbasid prince was initially victorious, forcing Khumarawayh to flee, but was in turn defeated by the Tulunid general Sa'd al-Aysar and fled the battlefield, while much of his army was taken prisoner. Al-Aysar then tried to rebel in Damascus, but Khumarawayh swiftly suppressed his revolt and is said to have killed the rebel with his own hands.
Khumarawayh continued to pursue a rapprochement with the Abbasid court: he treated the prisoners of war from Tawahin with exceptional clemency, giving them the choice of either staying in Egypt under his own service or returning to Iraq without ransom. This policy eventually led to the conclusion of an agreement in December 886, whereby Khumarawayh was recognized as governor over Egypt and Syria, with the right to be succeeded by his offspring, for a period of 30 years, in exchange for an unspecified annual tribute. Between 886 and 890, Khumarawayh went on to defeat Ibn Khundaj and receive the submission of the governor of the Jazira, Ibn Abi'l-Saj. At the same time, the governor of Tarsus, Yazaman al-Khadim, accepted Tulunid suzerainty, bringing the Cilician Thughūr under Tulunid control as well.
The accession of al-Mu'tadid in 892 brought a warming of relations with the Baghdad court. Recognizing that he could not defeat the Tulunids, the new Caliph instead opted to conciliate them: in spring 893, al-Mu'tadid reconfirmed Khumarawayh in his office as autonomous governor over Egypt and Syria, in exchange for an annual tribute of 300,000 dinars and 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. In addition, the prestigious ṭirāz factories in Alexandria and Fustat, which produced government banners and robes of honour, remained under caliphal control. In order to seal the pact, Khumarawayh offered his daughter, Qatr al-Nada as bride to one of the Caliph's sons, but al-Mu'tadid chose to marry her himself. Her arrival in Baghdad was marked by the luxury and extravagance of her retinue, which contrasted starkly with the impoverished caliphal court. 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" (Bianquis), and the lavish marriage ceremonies remained the stuff of folk legends in Egypt until well into the Ottoman period.
### Domestic policies
The extravagant wedding shows Khumarawayh's famous frivolity with money—indeed it has been suggested that the whole affair was, in the words of the historian Ulrich Haarmann [de], "a calculated device on the part of the caliph to wreck the finances of his dangerously wealthy and powerful vassal". Eager to display his wealth, the Tulunid ruler also built numerous palaces for himself and his favourites, and engaged in famous displays of royal extravagance, such as a quicksilver-filled basin in which he was rocked to sleep on top of air-filled cushions, or the blue-eyed lion he kept as a pet at his court. In addition, according to the sources, Khumarawayh never rode the same horse twice. He was nevertheless also a generous patron of the arts, of scholars and of poets. One of his protégés was the grammarian Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Muslim, who was also tutor to his sons, while al-Qasim ibn Yahya al-Maryami wrote panegyrics in his honour. All of this came at a heavy price, however; by the time of his death, the Tulunid treasury (which reportedly had contained ten million gold dinars at the time of his accession) was empty, and the dinar had lost two-thirds of its value. His extravagance brought criticism from religious scholars and from contemporary and later historians alike.
Domestically, his reign was one of "luxury and decay" (Hugh N. Kennedy), but also a time of relative tranquillity in Egypt as well as in Syria, a rather unusual occurrence for the period. Khumarawayh's main power base was the powerful army built by his father, much in the model of the Abbasids themselves after the establishment of a professional military under Caliph al-Mu'tasim. The Tulunid army was mostly composed of Turkish, Byzantine Greek (Rūm), and black African (Sudān) ghilmān, as well as a few Byzantine mercenaries. To them Khumarawayh added a special regiment, the al-mukhtāra ("the elect, picked"), mostly drawn from the Bedouins of the eastern Nile Delta, an area of great importance as it controlled the route connecting Syria and Egypt. A thousand-strong unit made up of black Africans seems to have been a distinct sub-unit of the al-mukhtāra. Despite the undoubted military talent and personal bravery he displayed after Tawahin, Khumarawayh never enjoyed Ibn Tulun's authority over the army. This led to a policy of buying their loyalty with sumptuous donatives, which further drained the treasury. As Hugh N. Kennedy comments, financial difficulties seem to have been inherent in the Abbasid model the Tulunids emulated, resulting from the "inability of the state to fund a large, mostly inactive army on a permanent basis". In an attempt to find the necessary funds, the fiscal administration was entrusted to Ali ibn Ahmad al-Madhara'i, marking the final rise of the al-Madhara'i family to a dominant position in the fiscal and government apparatus of Egypt for the next half-century.
### Death and succession
Khumarawayh was killed on 18 January 896 by one of his servants, who had been conducting an affair with Khumarawayh's favourite wife. When Khumarawayh learned of this, the servant feared for his life, and organized a conspiracy which claimed the Tulunid ruler's life. After Khumarawayh's death, the Tulunid state entered a period of instability under his under-age heirs, with his son Jaysh ibn Khumarawayh being deposed and killed in November, in favour of his younger brother Harun ibn Khumarawayh (r. 896–904). Al-Mu'tadid swiftly took advantage of this: in 897 he extended his control over the border provinces of the Thughūr; forced the Tulunids to hand back all of Syria north of Homs; and increased the annual tribute to 450,000 dinars in exchange for caliphal recognition of Harun. Over the next few years, the Tulunid domains continued to experience domestic turmoil coupled with an escalation of Qarmatian attacks, resulting in the defection of many Tulunid followers to the resurgent Caliphate. Finally, in 904–905 al-Mu'tadid's successor al-Muktafi invaded Egypt and reincorporated the country fully into the Abbasid empire.
|
643,415 |
New York State Route 5
| 1,166,915,776 |
State highway in New York, US
|
[
"Limited-access roads in New York (state)",
"State highways in New York (state)",
"Transportation in Albany County, New York",
"Transportation in Albany, New York",
"Transportation in Buffalo, New York",
"Transportation in Cayuga County, New York",
"Transportation in Chautauqua County, New York",
"Transportation in Erie County, New York",
"Transportation in Genesee County, New York",
"Transportation in Herkimer County, New York",
"Transportation in Livingston County, New York",
"Transportation in Madison County, New York",
"Transportation in Montgomery County, New York",
"Transportation in Oneida County, New York",
"Transportation in Onondaga County, New York",
"Transportation in Ontario County, New York",
"Transportation in Schenectady County, New York",
"Transportation in Seneca County, New York",
"Transportation in Syracuse, New York",
"U.S. Route 20"
] |
New York State Route 5 (NY 5) is a state highway that extends for 370.80 miles (596.74 km) across the state of New York in the United States. It begins at the Pennsylvania state line in the Chautauqua County town of Ripley and passes through Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, and several other smaller cities and communities on its way to downtown Albany in Albany County, where it terminates at U.S. Route 9 (US 9), here routed along the service roads for Interstate 787 (I-787). Prior to the construction of the New York State Thruway, it was one of two main east–west highways traversing upstate New York, the other being US 20. West of New York, the road continues as Pennsylvania Route 5 (PA 5) to Erie.
NY 5 overlaps with US 20 twice along its routing. The second, a 68-mile (109 km) overlap through western and central New York, is the second-longest concurrency in the state, stretching from Avon in Livingston County east to the city of Auburn in Cayuga County. The concurrency is known locally as "Routes 5 and 20". As the route proceeds across the state, it also directly or indirectly meets every major north–south highway in upstate New York, including all three north–south Interstate Highways (I-390 in Avon, I-81 in Syracuse via US 11, and I-87 in Albany).
NY 5 was assigned in 1924 as a true cross-state highway, extending from the Pennsylvania state line in the west to the Massachusetts state line in the east, mostly by way of modern US 20. At the time, modern NY 5 between Buffalo and Albany was designated as New York State Route 5A. By 1926, NY 5 was moved onto the routing of NY 5A while the old routing of NY 5 became NY 7. It was truncated in 1927 to Athol Springs in the west and Albany in the east following the assignment of US 20, and again in 1930 to downtown Buffalo. NY 5 was reextended to the Pennsylvania state line c. 1932 by way of its old routing to Athol Springs, an old alignment of US 20, and a lakeside spur route of US 20 that had been assigned in 1930. Only local realignments have occurred since.
## Route description
Although it is no longer commonly used for long-distance travel, NY 5 is still regionally important. NY 5 is named Main Street in Buffalo, Erie Boulevard and West Genesee Street in Syracuse, State Street in Schenectady, and Central Avenue in Albany, the state capital. It is a major local road in many other locations along its path. NY 5 runs concurrent to US 20 twice between its endpoints: for three miles (5 km) between Silver Creek and Irving and for 68 miles (109 km) across western and central New York. At 67.6 miles (108 km) in length, the eastern overlap between US 20 and NY 5 is the second-longest surface-road concurrency in New York state, behind only the concurrency of I-86 and NY 17 in the Southern Tier.
Maintenance of the majority of NY 5's 371 miles (597 km) is performed by the New York State Department of Transportation. However, locally owned and maintained sections exist in six cities. The city-maintained sections of NY 5 are in Buffalo from NY 16 north to the city line (except of the Goodell Street portion, which is state-maintained); in Syracuse between the western city line and just west of NY 635; in Utica from Leland Avenue east to the city line; in Amsterdam between Division and West Main streets; in Schenectady from Washington Avenue to the eastern city line; and the entirety of NY 5 within Albany.
### Pennsylvania to Buffalo
At the New York–Pennsylvania border in Ripley, PA 5 becomes NY 5 upon entering New York. It very closely follows the shore of Lake Erie through all of Chautauqua County. Once reaching the village of Silver Creek it briefly overlaps US 20 until entering Erie County at the Cattaraugus Reservation and NY 438 where the roads once again split. Once in Erie County, it pulls slightly inward from the lake shore from Brant to the hamlet of Wanakah. Once past Wanakah, the road once again closely borders the lake shore and goes through steadily more heavily developed areas, particularly the Ford Stamping Plant and the Bethlehem Steel plant in the city of Lackawanna. There the road becomes the Hamburg Turnpike and eight wind-powered turbines, which provide power to the national grid, are visible. Near the northern edge of the city, NY 5 begins to ascend onto an elevated roadway as it connects to Ridge Road and the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens by way of an interchange. Here, the route becomes the a limited-access highway with exits for Ohio and Tifft streets and Fuhrmann Boulevard. After a quarter-mile, NY 5 passes seamlessly into the city of Buffalo.
A short distance past the city line, NY 5 passes over the Union Ship Canal on a span of the elevated road known as the Father Baker Bridge. North of the waterway, the elevated section of NY 5 gains a frontage road named Fuhrmann Boulevard. Both the service road and NY 5 run parallel to Lake Erie until the northern end of the Buffalo Outer Harbor. Here, the frontage roads end while NY 5 turns to the northeast, crossing the Buffalo River on the bridge called The Skyway, and entering downtown. On the north bank, the Skyway returns to a northerly routing as it passes KeyBank Center, located directly to the east, and Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park, situated to the west, and meets I-190 at exit 7. Past the interchange, the Skyway ends and the route descends in elevation, becoming an at-grade roadway once more at Church Street in the shadow of Buffalo City Hall. NY 384 begins here, following Delaware Avenue north into the heart of downtown, while NY 5 turns east onto Church.
At Main Street, Church Street splits into a pair of one-way streets and becomes North and South Division Street. The route follows South Division eastward for two blocks to an intersection with Ellicott Street located one block north of Sahlen Field. At the junction, which includes the northern terminus of NY 16, NY 5 turns northward, rejoining NY 5 westbound one block later at North Division. The route continues on Ellicott for nine blocks to the unidirectional East Tupper Street, where NY 5 westbound separates from the route once more. NY 5 eastbound, however, continues north on Ellicott for an additional block to the one-way Goodell Street. NY 5 heads west on Goodell for two blocks before turning north onto Main Street, rejoining NY 5 westbound at the intersection.
The route continues along Main Street throughout the remainder of its length in Buffalo, cutting through the city diagonally from southwest to northeast until it enters the town of Amherst at the intersection of Bailey Avenue (US 62) at the south campus of the University at Buffalo.
### Buffalo to Avon
Once leaving the city of Buffalo, NY 5 heads east through the densely populated suburban town of Amherst, including the hamlets of Snyder and Eggertsville and the village of Williamsville and is heavily developed through the entire length of the town, particularly at the intersection with Transit Road (NY 78). In the town of Clarence, the road dips into a significant depression known as Clarence Hollow. Once leaving Clarence, NY 5 goes through predominantly rural areas until reaching the city of Batavia in Genesee County, closely paralleling the New York State Thruway through much of the county. The road travels eastward until reaching Livingston County and the village of Caledonia.
NY 5 heads southeast from the village of Caledonia, paralleling the former right-of-way of an Erie–Lackawanna Railroad branch line that connected the villages of Caledonia and Avon as it heads through spacious fields containing little more than farmland. At a rural intersection controlled by single-head flashing traffic signals west of Avon, NY 5 meets US 20 for the second time. The routes embark on a second concurrency, merging onto the right-of-way of NY 5 as they cross the Genesee River and enter both the town and village of Avon.
### Avon to Ontario County
US 20 and NY 5 become West Main Street upon entering the village, underscoring the road's status as the primary east–west highway through the town. The route continues southeast from the Genesee, passing through the forested but sparsely populated western area of the village. As the route approaches the Livonia, Avon and Lakeville Railroad (LAL) grade crossing, the number of homes increases rapidly, only to be replaced by businesses in the area surrounding the LAL mainline. Located on the western edge of this transition is NY 39, which terminates at this junction. Past the tracks, West Main intersects Rochester Street, a locally important north–south two-lane arterial that continues north of the village to the Rochester suburb of Brighton as East River Road. Shortly after this intersection, the homes return, following US 20 and NY 5 as West Main enters the heart of the village.
In the centre of Avon, West Main feeds into Park Place, a large traffic circle providing access to two local streets from US 20 and NY 5. The routes follow the circle counterclockwise, departing the roundabout on East Main Street. The street proceeds east, passing through four blocks of densely populated neighbourhoods before exiting the village and abruptly entering vast, barren fields to the east. US 20 and NY 5, now named Avon–Lima Road, intersects NY 15 two miles (3 km) to the east in East Avon, a community based around the intersection and the streets comprising it, and connects to I-390 at exit 10 a half-mile from NY 15. Continuing, the road intersects several county routes over the next four miles (6 km) before becoming West Main Street once more, this time for the village of Lima. At an intersection with NY 15A in the village centre, US 20 and NY 5 become East Main Street, retaining the name to the Ontario County line at Honeoye Creek.
### Western Ontario County
In the town of West Bloomfield, US 20 and NY 5 go unnamed as they proceed eastward. Roughly one mile from the county line in the hamlet of West Bloomfield, US 20 and NY 5 meet the southern terminus of NY 65. Exiting the hamlet, US 20 and NY 5 head through another area dominated by open land, intersecting Elton Road before passing seamlessly into East Bloomfield. A mile and a half from the town line, US 20 and NY 5 intersect NY 64, a road running northwest–southeast from the Monroe County line south to US 20 and NY 5. NY 64, whose right-of-way ends at US 20 and NY 5 at the foot of a small hill, joins the two routes eastward on a triple overlap, entering the village of Bloomfield and intersecting the southern terminus of NY 444 south of the portion of Bloomfield once known as Holcomb. Near the junction with NY 444, US 20, NY 5 and NY 64 take-ups on a due east alignment, absorbing the routing used by Gauss Road west of this point.
A mile to the east at Whalen Road, NY 64 separates from US 20 and NY 5, following the road, and US 20A, which has its eastern terminus at this intersection, south toward Bristol. US 20 and NY 5 continue through rural Ontario County before splitting from its easterly alignment at an intersection four miles (6 km) east of US 20A and NY 64 in the town of Canandaigua. West Avenue, the former routing of US 20 and NY 5 into downtown Canandaigua, continues east from the junction while US 20 and NY 5 turn south onto a bypass around Canandaigua.
#### Canandaigua area
Half a mile from the start of the bypass and a short distance before the arterial makes a turn eastward to traverse Canandaigua Lake to the southeast, US 20 and NY 5 meets NY 21 at a four-way intersection. Like US 20 and NY 5, NY 21 once continued directly into downtown, in this instance via Bristol Street to the east of the junction, but now follows US 20 and NY 5 along the east–west leg of the bypass. Past Bristol Street, the bypass widens from two to four lanes and, after meeting two local streets, enters the city of Canandaigua as the limited-access Western Boulevard, albeit with no exits. The route loses this distinction before intersecting South Main Street, where US 20, NY 5 and NY 21 meet the southern terminus of NY 332. NY 21 departs the bypass, following NY 332 into downtown, while US 20 and NY 5 continue onto the four-lane, median separated Eastern Boulevard, the original section of the US 20 and NY 5 bypasses of Canandaigua. The roadway acts a centre of commerce for the city, sporting restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets along its length within the city limits.
Upon exiting the city, the establishments become a pair of shopping plazas centred around the intersection with the northern terminus of NY 364. Across the town line in Hopewell a quarter-mile to the east, a third plaza, anchored by Runnings, formerly a Walmart, dominates the northeast corner of CR 10 and Eastern Boulevard. On the adjacent parcel is another plaza containing the current Walmart. At the entrance to the second plaza, US 20 and NY 5 intersect Lakeshore Drive, the former routing of US 20 and NY 5 to the south of the bypass. Past the junction, the divided highway comes to an end and, after another half-mile, narrows to two lanes.
### Canandaigua to Auburn
Deeper into Hopewell, the area surrounding US 20 and NY 5 become rural once more. Roughly 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the end of the bypass, US 20 and NY 5 meet NY 247. After 10.3 miles (16.6 km) of eastward progression through open land, the routes meet the northern terminus of both NY 14A and NY 245, concurrent at this location, in the town of Geneva. A half-mile past NY 14A and NY 245, US 20 and NY 5 enter the city of Geneva and widens into a four-lane road. In the city, US 20 and NY 5 intersect NY 14 by way of a pseudo-interchange on the bank of Seneca Lake. US 20 and NY 5 turns into a divided highway again at this point. At the interchange, NY 14 Truck joins US 20 and NY 5, bypassing a sharp turn on NY 14 downtown. US 20 and NY 5 continues as a divided highway around the northern tip of Seneca Lake, crossing the Preemption Line and entering Seneca County at its midpoint. A mile to the east in East Geneva, just east of a railroad underpass, US 20 and NY 5 meet the northern terminus of NY 96A at a former trumpet interchange that has been converted to an intersection with a traffic signal.
From NY 96A east to the village of Waterloo, a distance of roughly four miles, US 20 and NY 5 become a two-lane road and run parallel to the Cayuga–Seneca Canal. In Waterloo, the concurrency meets NY 96 in the village centre. East of the village, the distance between the canal and the roadway decreases, making US 20 and NY 5 the closest road to the water for the next one and a half miles to NY 414 in the town of Seneca Falls. NY 414 joins US 20 and NY 5, overlapping the road for 4.3 miles (6.9 km) into the hamlet of Seneca Falls. At Cayuga Street, NY 414 turns south, crossing the water body that is the canal and the Seneca River and becoming Ovid Street while US 20 and NY 5 turn north onto Cayuga, following the street around the small Van Cleef Lake, through the Finger Lakes Railway grade crossing, and exiting the hamlet. Three miles from NY 414, just west of Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, US 20 and NY 5 meet NY 318 and NY 89 at intersections just 0.1 miles (0.16 km) apart. The intersection with NY 89 has a traffic signal.
About three miles (5 km) later, after entering Cayuga County over the Seneca River/Cayuga and Seneca Canal, just north of Cayuga Lake, the two routes meet NY 90 in the town of Aurelius, at a traffic signal. A few miles east of that intersection, the highway meets the Finger Lakes Railway again but crosses it via an overpass. The routes continue eastward through Aurelius to the city of Auburn where it turns into a divided four-lane highway again. On the western edge of the city, just after passing Finger Lakes Mall, US 20 and NY 5 meet the eastern terminus of NY 326, which is also a four-lane divided highway for a short stretch. In downtown Auburn, US 20 and NY 5's east and west lanes split apart from each other for a short distance as an arterial over the alignments of Clark Street, Franklin Street, and Grant Avenue. The arterial runs concurrent with NY 38 for 0.2 miles (0.3 km). NY 38 then splits from the concurrency and joins NY 34. A quarter-mile to the east, US 20 separates from NY 5 at the northern terminus of NY 38A. NY 5 continues after the split as the four-lane Grant Avenue passing by a high number of shopping areas.
### Auburn to Syracuse
From NY 174 in Camillus to Fairmount, NY 5 is a 5-mile (8 km) limited-access highway traversing the western suburbs of Syracuse. At one time, the highway was to be extended to West Street in Syracuse, via the current Grand Avenue. The freeway has partial access to NY 173 from westbound NY 5. East of NY 173, the freeway connects to NY 695 at a directional T interchange and passes over NY 297 without access. East of Fairmount, NY 5 alters to the south before turning east onto West Genesee Street and converting to grade-level intersections.
In Syracuse, NY 5 is parallel to I-690 for much of its routing but never encounters the highway, thus making the north–south streets that intersect NY 5 entry points to and from I-690. In downtown Syracuse, West Genesee Street becomes James Street. At the southern tip of the interchange between I-690 and I-81, NY 5 transfers onto Erie Boulevard and intersects State Street (US 11), but passes under I-81 without access. From the downtown area to DeWitt, NY 5 is divided. At the Syracuse–DeWitt boundary, NY 5 intersects NY 635 and eastward, it curves to a southeast course. Near the former Shoppingtown Mall, NY 5 turns east onto Genesee Street to begin an overlap with NY 92. Less than a mile east of the mall, NY 5 and NY 92 intersect I-481 at a cloverleaf interchange.
### Syracuse to Utica
NY 5 and NY 92 remain concurrent up to Highbridge Road, where NY 92 splits from NY 5 and heads southeast to Manlius. The segment of the overlap with NY 92 between I-481 and the eastern split is the busiest area of NY 5 in the Syracuse area and in all of Onondaga County. Past the split, NY 5 continues east through Onondaga and Madison counties, passing Fayetteville, Chittenango, and Canastota before entering the vicinity of Oneida. West of the city, NY 5 intersects NY 365A, a spur route of NY 365 leading directly into downtown. To the east, NY 5 (which forms the southern boundary of the city) meets NY 46 before crossing over Oneida Creek and into Oneida County.
Just past the county line in Oneida Castle, NY 5 intersects NY 365, a route leading northward to the New York State Thruway in Verona. NY 5 presses on, passing through the city of Sherrill and the village of Vernon (briefly overlapping NY 31) and the town of Westmoreland to the town of Kirkland, where NY 5 intersects NY 233, crosses over Oriskany Creek, and meets the western terminus of NY 5B. The spur of NY 5 later rejoins its parent yards from where NY 5A departs NY 5 to serve western Utica. NY 5 itself continues eastward through New Hartford, meeting NY 12B before merging with NY 12 at Genesee Street. Both routes continue eastward across the Sauquoit Creek into Utica.
### Utica to Albany
NY 5 enters the city of Utica on a concurrency with NY 12 heading in a northeast direction. It shortly picks up NY 8, and all three cross the city together. NY 5 also intersects with the terminus of NY 840 at this point. Just south of the New York State Thruway, I-790 begins as a short expressway, also including NY 5, NY 8, and NY 12. After crossing out of the city, they meet the Thruway, with NY 8 and 12 continuing northeast, while I-790 and NY 5 turns to the east-south-east, picking up the tail-end of NY 49. These three, still as an expressway, straddle each side of the Thruway for a short way, with I-790 technically ending at the ramps for I-90. NY 5 continues to the end of the expressway, only a few hundred feet later, dropping to Leland Avenue. A few hundred feet to the north of the Thruway, NY 5 turns eastward again to continue down Herkimer Road. It closely parallels the Thruway to Herkimer, where NY 5 moves slightly northward through the centre of the village, becoming State Street, while I-90 crosses the Erie Canal and goes south for a short distance. There is a short concurrency with NY 28 in the village.
After exiting Herkimer, NY 5 continues east, closely paralleling this time the canal, through the city of Little Falls as Main Street, where two more concurrencies occur, with NY 167 and NY 169. NY 5 continues to parallel the canal, and in some instances again, the Thruway, through Amsterdam, becoming Amsterdam Road all the way to Scotia, where it crosses the canal into Schenectady as Mohawk Avenue, turning into State Street upon entering the city limits. It continues fairly straight on a southeast course into Albany as Central Avenue until it reaches Townsend Park. At this point, NY 5 turns into Washington Avenue and all signage referring to NY 5 ceases. The New York State Department of Transportation recognizes the route, however, as it continues down Washington Ave past the New York State Capitol building, turning south for a short distance as Eagle Street. NY 5 then continues east on State Street to Broadway, where it again turns south-east shortly before returning east on a small spur of Broadway, travelling underneath US 9 and I-787. NY 5 ends at the Hudson River.
## History
### Early roads
Soon after the end of the American Revolution in 1783, a surge of westward migration into Central and Western New York began. At the time, most travel west of the Albany area was by water. While rudimentary roads were laid out following the Mohawk River, there were no major land routes west of Fort Schuyler (present-day Utica), except for an old east–west Iroquois trail that was a simple footpath. By the late 1780s, many companies began to set up their operations in the new settlements in the Central and Western New York. As a result, there was a clamour for the building of the main road running west from Utica.
On March 22, 1794, the New York State Legislature passed a law calling for the laying out and improvement of a public road from old Fort Schuyler on the Mohawk River to the settlement of Canawaugus on the Genesee River, in as straight a line as the topography of the land would allow. This road was officially known as the "Great Genesee Road" and is one of the earliest state roads in New York, intended to provide access to the New Military Tract. As planned, it generally followed the old Iroquois trail through Oneida, Manlius, Onondaga Valley (south of modern Syracuse), Skaneateles, Auburn, Seneca Falls, Geneva, and Canandaigua before ending at the Genesee River. Four years later, another legislative act authorized the extension of the Genesee Road to Buffalo.
By the end of the 18th century, while the Genesee Road had been greatly improved and saw heavy traffic, many portions were still substandard and some sections had still not been completed. Partly because of this, and also because of the success of the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania, the state outsourced the task of improving and maintaining the Genesee Road to a private company. On April 1, 1800, the Seneca Road Company was chartered for this purpose and the portion of the Genesee Road from Utica to Canandaigua was improved and operated as a toll road known as the Seneca Turnpike, which was 157 miles (253 km) long and, at the time, the longest turnpike in the state. Three days later, the old road following the Mohawk River between Utica and Schenectady also became a turnpike, known as the Mohawk Turnpike.
With the road leading from Albany northwest to Schenectady having been already established as a turnpike (the Albany and Schenectady Turnpike) in 1797, an all-turnpike route over good quality roads was now available from Albany to Canandaigua. The western extension of the Genesee Road to Buffalo soon followed suit and also became an improved Macadam toll road, the Ontario and Genesee Turnpike, in 1805. The Seneca Road Company was authorized to create a more northerly alternate route of the Seneca Turnpike in 1806. This branch left the original turnpike east of Seneca Falls and crossed more level terrain through Elbridge, Geddes, and Fayetteville before rejoining the old path at Chittenango. As the city of Syracuse developed, traffic patterns changed and the northern branch route became more heavily used than the original road.
The construction and opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 along the same alignment as the Albany to Buffalo route began to eat away at the revenues of these turnpike companies. In time, the turnpike business had become unprofitable and the companies were dissolved by 1852, causing the roads to revert to public control. The Seneca Road Company dissolved in 1852. The old, southern path of the Seneca Turnpike is now Franklin Street and Old Seneca Turnpike from Auburn to Marcellus, NY 175 between Marcellus and Onondaga Hill, and NY 173 from there east to Chittenango.
### Designation
The improvement of the road from Buffalo southwest to Pennsylvania in the mid-19th century soon allowed for continuous travel across the entire state of New York. With the advent of the automobile, the state began to take over and pave major thoroughfares at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1908, the state legislature created a statewide system of unsigned legislative routes. One of the routes assigned at this time was Route 6, an Albany–Buffalo highway that followed the path of the Genesee Road and the Seneca Turnpike from Buffalo to Utica, the Mohawk Turnpike between Utica and Schenectady, and the Albany and Schenectady Turnpike from Schenectady to Albany. From Auburn to Chittenango, Route 6 utilized most of the newer, northern branch of the Seneca Turnpike.
The automobile allowed people to quickly travel long distances and a way to mark routes became needed. One early means of marking routes was the establishment of various auto trail associations in the 1910s. These associations selected good quality roads and marked them with symbols or colors on telephone poles. Most of legislative Route 6 eventually became part of the Yellowstone Trail, a cross-country auto trail established in 1912 that ran from Washington to Massachusetts. In New York, the trail used modern US 20 from Pennsylvania to Silver Creek, most of modern NY 5 from Silver Creek to Albany, and modern US 20 again from Albany to Massachusetts.
In 1924, following what other states did, New York began to assign route numbers to its main thoroughfares. The Albany to Buffalo portion of the Yellowstone Trail, which ran through the cities of Syracuse and Utica, was assigned the number NY 5A. The portion of the Yellowstone Trail southwest of Buffalo and east of Albany became part of NY 5, which bypassed Syracuse and Utica to the south. The Buffalo to Albany portion of NY 5's original alignment used a new road, Broadway Road, from Buffalo to Avon and the old Cherry Valley Turnpike alignment from Skaneateles to Albany. In between Avon and Skaneateles, NY 5 and NY 5A overlapped.
By 1926, however, the Buffalo to Albany section of NY 5 was relocated onto the Genesee Road alignment, replacing NY 5A. NY 5's former, more southerly alignment was redesignated as NY 7. In 1927, the establishment of the U.S. Highway System created more numbering changes. US 20, which mainly followed the Yellowstone Trail elsewhere in the country, was designated in New York along NY 5 southwest of Hamburg and east of Albany and along old NY 7 from Skaneateles to Albany. Between the towns of Hamburg and Avon, the new US 20 used an even more southerly alignment, running via East Aurora and Warsaw. This truncated both ends of NY 5 to Athol Springs (south of Buffalo in the town of Hamburg) in the west, and to Albany in the east.
In the 1930 state highway renumbering, NY 5 was truncated even further to begin in downtown Buffalo. The portion between Buffalo and Athol Springs was assigned as part of NY 62. Southwest of Buffalo, Southwestern Boulevard, an alternate route of US 20 between Irving and Big Tree (east of Athol Springs) became NY 20B. Further southwest, another alternate route of US 20 between the Pennsylvania line and Silver Creek, running along the shore of Lake Erie, was designated as NY 20A. The NY 20A and NY 20B designations proved to be short-lived. US 62 was extended into New York c. 1932, causing NY 62 to be renumbered. Around the same time, US 20 was realigned to follow NY 20B from Irving to Big Tree. NY 5 was extended along part of old NY 62 to Athol Springs, from where it continued to the Pennsylvania state line by way of US 20's old routing to Irving and all of NY 20A.
### Expressway relocations
Originally, NY 5 entered Buffalo from the south on Fuhrmann Boulevard and Michigan Avenue and followed South Park Avenue and Main Street through the city before rejoining its modern alignment at Goodell Street. In the mid-1950s, a new limited-access highway was constructed along Fuhrmann Boulevard from Lackawanna to the Buffalo River. At the river, the new roadway broke from Fuhrmann and continued directly into downtown, returning to grade level two blocks south of Niagara Square. The expressway, known as the Buffalo Skyway, became part of a rerouted NY 5 by 1956. Visually, the Skyway cuts off the city from the Buffalo inner harbor. In 2008 there was momentum to tear it down, but the momentum passed. In 2019 a plan to remove part of the Skyway and close the rest to motorized traffic was proposed as part of a competition. This plan has drawn strong opinions both for and against the removal.
Farther east in Utica, construction began in the early 1950s on a new arterial highway—known as the North–South Arterial—through the city center. The new roadway bypassed NY 5, which was initially routed on Genesee Street and Herkimer Road through Utica. The first portion of the highway to open was the segment north of River Road, which was completed by 1956. It was extended southward to Oriskany Street (NY 5A) by 1961 and completed entirely by 1964, at which time it became part of a rerouted NY 5 and NY 12. Two portions of Genesee Street, from NY 12 in New Hartford to the Utica city line and from NY 5S to Herkimer Road in Utica, remain state maintained to this day as unsigned NY 921E and NY 921C, respectively.
In the Syracuse suburbs of Camillus and Geddes, NY 5 was initially routed on West Genesee Street between the villages of Camillus and Solvay. Construction on a bypass of this segment of NY 5 began in the early 1970s and was completed between NY 695 and Genesee Street by 1977. By the following year, the freeway was open to traffic up to Hinsdale Road; however, NY 5 remained on Genesee Street between Hinsdale and the Solvay village limits. The remainder of the Camillus Bypass was completed c. 1979, at which time NY 5 was realigned to follow the freeway. Genesee Street is now largely maintained by Onondaga County as CR 98; however, two portions of the street remain state maintained. Near the western end of the expressway, the former routing of NY 5 became part of an extended NY 174. Between the Camillus town line and the eastern end of the bypass, Genesee Street is unsigned NY 930W. This particular expressway was meant to link Downtown Syracuse to Auburn, but was never completed past Camillus or Fairmount. Several incomplete ramps mark both ends of this expressway section.
Smaller realignments also took place in other cities along the route. In Canandaigua, NY 5 originally entered the city on West Avenue and followed South Main Street and Lakeshore Drive through the city limits before rejoining its current routing in Hopewell. In the mid-1950s, a new bypass was built north of Lakeshore Drive from South Main Street to Hopewell. It became part of a realigned NY 5 by 1956. The remainder of the bypass around the southwestern extents of the city was built in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The former routing of NY 5 on South Main Street remains state maintained as NY 942T; until 1996, the portion of West Avenue between the west end of the bypass and the Canandaigua city line was maintained by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) as NY 942W. Even though maintenance of the road had been transferred to the town of Canandaigua in 1996, the designation remained in NYSDOT documents until 2007.
In Geneva, NY 5 was initially routed on East North Street and Border City Road, overlapping NY 14 through the city and rejoining its modern routing in East Geneva. The overlap was eliminated c. 1931 when NY 5 was moved onto a new roadway located along the edge of Seneca Lake. NY 5 was realigned again in the 1960s to use a new divided highway built midway between the lake shore road and Border City Road. Border City Road is now maintained by Seneca County as CR 110.
In April 2014 work began on a \$68.3 million project to replace the viaduct over Columbia Street, Lafayette Streets, and Oriskany Boulevard (NY 5A and NY 5S) in Utica. The nearly one mile stretch had signalized at-grade intersections that had been causing safety concerns and some fatalities. In addition to the replacement of the viaduct, the alignment of the arterial was straightened, a new single point urban interchange was built at Court Street, and a pedestrian bridge was built across the roadway. The pedestrian bridge was opened by December 2014, and the remainder of the project was completed by October 2017.
## Major intersections
## Suffixed routes
NY 5 has three suffixed routes, all located in Oneida County, with NY 5S extending eastward into three other counties. The NY 5A designation was also used in the past for two other routes.
### NY 5A
- The NY 5A designation has been used for three distinct highways:
- The first NY 5A was a short-lived designation for the portion of modern NY 5 east of Buffalo. When it existed from 1924 to the mid-1920s, NY 5 was routed on what is now US 20.
- The second NY 5A was a northerly alternate route of NY 5 between Aurelius and Sennett in Cayuga County. It was assigned c. 1933 and renumbered to NY 135 c. 1937. That route was removed c. 1939. Its former routing is now maintained by Cayuga County as CR 10A, CR 10B, and CR 10C.
-
The current NY 5A is a short 5.59-mile-long (9.00 km) alternate route of NY 5 between New Hartford and downtown Utica in Oneida County. It was assigned in the mid-1930s. At its eastern end, NY 5A becomes NY 5S at an interchange with Interstate 790 (I-790), NY 5, NY 8, and NY 12. The route is four lanes wide and passes through mostly commercial areas and connects NY 5 to NY 840 and NY 69.
### NY 5B
NY 5B is a 3.12-mile-long (5.02 km) alternate route southwest of Utica in Oneida County, connecting NY 5 to NY 12B. The route was assigned in April 1935.
### NY 5S
- NY 5S (72.92 miles or 117.35 kilometres) is an alternate route of NY 5 on the south side of the Mohawk River between Utica, Oneida County, and Rotterdam, Schenectady County. The route parallels NY 5 (which follows the north side of the river) and is partially a limited-access highway. It was assigned as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York.
## See also
- New York State Bicycle Route 5
- List of county routes in Onondaga County, New York
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"1969 births",
"American men's basketball players",
"American sports agents",
"Basketball players from Chicago",
"Illinois lawyers",
"Lake Forest High School (Illinois) alumni",
"Living people",
"Los Angeles Lakers executives",
"Michigan Wolverines men's basketball players",
"People associated with Winston & Strawn",
"People from Lake Bluff, Illinois",
"Point guards",
"Ross School of Business alumni",
"Shooting guards",
"University of Michigan Law School alumni"
] |
Robert Todd Pelinka Jr. (born December 23, 1969) is an American basketball executive, lawyer, sports agent, and former college basketball player from Lake Bluff, Illinois in the North Shore of the Chicago metropolitan area. Pelinka is currently the vice president of basketball operations and general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA).
Before joining the Lakers, he was Kobe Bryant's agent and president and CEO of The Landmark Sports Agency, LLC. Pelinka has represented many players who have been top-14 picks since the 2003 NBA draft, including two at the 2010 NBA draft and second-overall 2011 NBA draft selection Derrick Williams. In the 2012 NBA draft, Pelinka represented Dion Waiters and Andre Drummond, who were selected 4th and 9th overall, respectively. Pelinka was formerly Kevin Durant's agent; he resigned as Carlos Boozer's agent following a controversy in which Boozer signed a contract with the Utah Jazz after allegedly promising to re-sign with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Pelinka played basketball for Lake Forest High School, earning All-American honors. As a junior, he led Lake Forest High School to its first conference championship. Entering his senior season, Pelinka was overlooked by many Division I scouts and recruiters. However, his MVP performance in a four-game tournament, where he made all 42 of his free throws, and his impressive season statistics enabled him to become a highly recruited athlete by the end of his senior year. He was selected to several regional all-star lists and to play on several regional all-star teams as a senior.
He was recruited by the University of Michigan, where he has the distinction of being the only person in school history to have been a member of three National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Final Four teams: the 1988–89 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Champion Wolverines basketball team as well as both the 1991–92 and the 1992–93 national championship runners-up, which were best remembered as the Fab Five teams. Pelinka holds a Juris Doctor cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School (1996) and Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business (1993). Pelinka was also named the 1993 NCAA Male Walter Byers Scholar Athlete of the Year.
## Early life
Pelinka is the son of Robert Todd Pelinka Sr., a former high school basketball coach who taught him the fundamentals of basketball.
## High school career
Pelinka became a high school All-American basketball player at Lake Forest High School. Regarded as one of the best shooters in the Chicago area, alongside teammate Coley Brannon. the junior led Lake Forest to their first conference championship as an all-conference guard. However, the team lost in the first round of postseason play in 1987. Pelinka also played in the Chicago pro-amateur leagues where he played against local stars such as Mark Aguirre, Tim Hardaway, Kevin Duckworth and Kendall Gill.
By his senior season, he was listed at , and moved to the point guard position from the shooting guard position in the absence of Douglass, who had graduated and joined future Big Ten opponent Wisconsin, as a starting point guard. As a senior, Pelinka was a preseason selection by the Chicago Sun-Times as one of the top 50 Chicago metropolitan area high school basketball players and top five North Suburban players. However, he was not a national preseason top 500 pick by Street & Smith'''s basketball magazine, which may have been because his senior season marked the first season that the three-point shot was adopted by state high school associations and Pelinka was mainly a shooter. Furthermore, scouts such as Chicago-based David Kaplan, who questioned his true height and dribbling ability, doubted whether he was talented enough to play for either of his targeted colleges (Michigan and Notre Dame) even in late December of his senior year despite his having had multiple 30-point efforts already.
During the four-game December 1987 Elgin tournament, in which he was named MVP, Pelinka made all 41 of his free throws and recorded a tournament record 139 points, including 45 in one game. Pelinka's streak of consecutive free throws made ended at 45, but later recounts showed he had 42 free throws in the tournament and 46 consecutive overall, which ranked fourth in Illinois high school basketball history at the time of his graduation. After his tournament performance, Pelinka responded through the press to a scout who felt he might be limited to Division II or mid-major programs such as William & Mary that since he was able to score 45 points against a player committed to play for DePaul, he could succeed at the Division I high-major level. He had only been recruited by William & Mary, Navy, Wisconsin-Green Bay and Ivy League schools before his tournament performance. Afterwards, at least three Big Ten Conference schools showed interest—Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin—although no scouts were allowed to attend any games before February 8.
By the beginning of February of his senior year, Pelinka was listed as one of the top ten Class AA (the larger school class) basketball players in Illinois by Illinois High School Basketball magazine. By the time of the scouting deadline of February 8, when college scouts could start attending his games, Pelinka was averaging 30 points and 10 rebounds per game; Illinois, Michigan, Notre Dame and North Carolina showed interest in him. Even previously doubtful scout Kaplan noted that of the players who waited until the April signing period instead of signing in November, Pelinka was one of the best in the Chicago area.
At the conclusion of the season, Pelinka had a 30-point-per-game average that benefited from a 41% three-point shot percentage over the course of 208 attempts. Pelinka was named to the post-(regular) season All-Chicago area top 20 players by the Chicago Sun-Times. He was named among the 20 Class AA All-state players in a class that included Eric Anderson, LaPhonso Ellis, Acie Earl, and Deon Thomas. In addition to various all-star lists, Pelinka was selected to play for various regional all-star teams. He earned a coveted spot in the Schlitz League, teaming up with Maurice Cheeks for Luster Premium Hair Products.
Pelinka's final decision came down to a choice between Illinois and Michigan. Pelinka chose Michigan because of its academically stronger law school and business school. After selecting Michigan, he had notable performances in his regional all-star games, including a 27-point performance in the annual City-Suburban all-star game.
In January 2009, Pelinka was one of two players who did not attend the twentieth anniversary reunion of the 1989 championship team. In February, Matt Vogrich broke Pelinka's Lake Forest High School scoring record. Vogrich followed in Pelinka's footsteps, playing as a freshman for the Wolverines basketball team in the 2009–10 season.
## College career
### Freshman season (1988–1989)
As a guard, Pelinka became the first Michigan Wolverine to reach three NCAA Tournament Final Fours during his Michigan Wolverines career. He played in the 1988–89, 1990–91, 1991–92, and 1992–93 seasons; the team reached the championship game of the Final Four in three out of four of those seasons. As a true freshman member of the 1988–89 National Champions, his teammates included Glen Rice, Terry Mills, Loy Vaught, Rumeal Robinson, Sean Higgins, Demetrius Calip, and Mark Hughes. As a redshirt member of the 1991–92 and 1992–93 national runners-up, his teammates included Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson (the Fab Five), and Eric Riley. He was one of several upperclassmen on the Fab Five teams and served as co-captain of the 1992–93 team. As a scholar, he was noted for having a grade point average that rivaled his scoring average.
During Pelinka's freshman season, Michigan was picked by many to win the Big Ten Conference and was ranked number one in the nation, according to some preseason polls. He was the only true freshman to play in either of the first two games of the season. Pelinka's only start of the season came in the December 12, 1988 game against Holy Cross. This game followed the team's first loss of the season, which had come against Division II Alaska–Anchorage, after an 11–0 start and after which coach Bill Frieder benched three starters. Pelinka posted his season highs in points (8), rebounds (5) and minutes (18) in this game. During a practice, Pelinka was knocked unconscious and lost two teeth. As the team entered the March stretch run, Pelinka and Calip were the only reserve guards backing up Robinson and Higgins. The team went on to win the 1989 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament against Seton Hall at the Kingdome in Seattle, Washington. When the team visited the White House, Pelinka held Rumeal Robinson's suit coat, while Robinson and United States President George H. W. Bush reenacted Robinson's game winning free throws.
### Redshirt season (1989–1990)
When tendinitis afflicted his knees, Pelinka redshirted the 1989–90 season. During his redshirt sophomore season, Pelinka was not called on to take many important shots. He did have an opportunity to take a 20-foot shot with five seconds left in what turned out to be a 76–74 loss to Texas on December 29, 1990, but he missed the shot. In this game, he played a season-high twenty-eight minutes in his only start of the season and first of his collegiate career. Pelinka was also instrumental in setting up some key shots such as a pass to Calip during a frenetic sequence to tie Minnesota in the waning minutes of the game. The team finished with at 14–15 overall (7–11 Big Ten) record after losing to in the first round of the NIT.
### Sophomore season (1990–1991)
During his redshirt junior year, he was joined at Michigan by the Fab Five, who were all true freshmen. He was injured for part of the season. When he was healthy, he was an important reserve player. After sitting out the first half, he scored the overtime opening three-point shot and made three of four overtime free throws in an 89–79 road victory against Michigan State at the Breslin Center on January 29, 1992. Pelinka had also contributed an earlier three-point shot as Michigan erased a thirteen-point deficit to force the overtime. Pelinka also contributed his season-high nineteen minutes and a second-half career-high eleven points (eclipsed in his senior season) in a March 11, 1992 70–61 victory against Purdue at the Mackey Arena. Michigan head coach Steve Fisher credited both of these wins to Pelinka and also noted his two important three-point shots against East Tennessee State. The team lost in the final game of the 1992 NCAA Tournament. After the season, he went with the team on a 9-game 16-day European trip. According to press accounts, the team was homesick during the trip and Pelinka got sick from drinking tap water.
### Junior season (1991–1992)
The following season, Michigan returned its top nine scorers and began the season ranked number one in the Associated Press national ranking as Pelinka was part of a quartet of seniors backing up the Fab Five, who had become sophomores. As a 200-pound (91 kg) fifth-year senior, Pelinka started back-to-back games twice during the season. Early in the season, he started in place of the injured Jackson, but Pelinka came down with the flu after two starts against Kansas and Eastern Michigan on December 30, 1992, and January 2, 1993 respectively. During his other set of back-to-back starts against Ohio State and Iowa on January 26 and 31, 1993, Pelinka started even though Jackson played. Pelinka set several season and career highs, including points (16), in the 72–62 home victory over Ohio State. The sixteen points included six free throws that were among the nine consecutive Michigan made in the final 2:13.
### Senior season (1992–1993)
During his senior season, Pelinka was an important role player for the team who drew the most charges on the team and contributed important defensive minutes as the sixth man. During the 1992–93 season, he led all reserves in minutes and assists and was second in points and rebounds (to Eric Riley). Pelinka was also instrumental as a leader during the run to the Final Four. Having been the only member of the team in Seattle for the 1989 championship, when the 1993 team played its regional championship games in Seattle, Pelinka was able to show Webber the spot in the locker room where Rice had taken his pre-game nap. During the Final Four weekend in New Orleans, Louisiana, Chris Webber wore Pelinka's 1989 Championship ring, which only fit on Webber's pinky finger, and slept with it under his pillow. During the national semifinal 81–78 overtime victory against the Kentucky Wildcats, Pelinka played in the clinching overtime period after King fouled out. Nonetheless, despite a pair of early three-point shots by Pelinka after Jackson got two early personal fouls, the team lost in the final game of the 1993 NCAA Tournament against North Carolina. When the team returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan for a rally at Crisler Arena the following day, Pelinka was one of only two Wolverines to speak to the crowd. After his senior season, he played in an NBA Summer Camp in Long Beach, California and considered offers to play professionally in Europe. At this time, he first met sports agent Arn Tellem and decided not to play basketball. As of 2004 he remained in 15th place on the all-time Michigan games played list. Pelinka won the 1993 NCAA Walter Byers Postgraduate Scholarship award (NCAA Male Scholar Athlete of the Year).
## Sports agent career
After passing the Illinois bar examination and receiving his license to practice in 1996, Pelinka joined Mayer Brown. After two years at Mayer Brown, Arn Tellem convinced Pelinka to become a lawyer for SFX management, and after two years at SFX, he became an agent. While with SFX, he worked with Tellem who represented Eddy Curry, Kwame Brown, Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, all of whom went directly from high school to the National Basketball Association. Pelinka had become Bryant's agent by the time of the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case. While at SFX, he also became the agent for several of his current clients. While at SFX in 2004, he was living in Santa Monica, California and dating a pediatrician. NBA agents earn about 4% of the salary and bonus that they negotiate for their clients.
Pelinka then branched out on his own and founded The Landmark Sports Agency. Recently, he has represented several first-round lottery picks: sixth overall 2003 NBA draft selection, Chris Kaman, ninth overall 2004 NBA draft selection, Andre Iguodala, eighth overall 2005 NBA draft selection, Channing Frye, thirteenth overall 2007 NBA draft selection, Julian Wright, seventh overall 2008 NBA draft selection, Eric Gordon, and third overall 2009 NBA draft selection, James Harden, 4th and 13th overall 2010 NBA draft selections, Wesley Johnson and Ed Davis, 2nd overall 2011 NBA draft selection Derrick Williams, and Buddy Hield, the sixth overall pick in 2016.
Among the players he has formerly represented are DeShawn Stevenson and Fred Hoiberg. A Los Angeles resident who was raised in Illinois, Pelinka represents two players who, like him, played high school basketball in the Chicago area (Corey Maggette and Julian Wright) and a third who had been a high school star in Springfield, Illinois (Iguodala). He has represented several Arizona Wildcats players including Andre Iguodala and Channing Frye. Pelinka is regarded as one of the world's leading sports agents according to Business Insider, who ranked him 5th in 2010.
Pelinka is well known as the agent of Kobe Bryant, who retired at the end of the 2015–16 season after 20 seasons as a perennial All-Star guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. In fact, some of his other clients have hired him because of this. During the 2003 sexual assault case against Bryant, Pelinka spent a considerable amount of time with his client. He accompanied him on trips to Eagle, Colorado. It was Pelinka who confirmed the news of Bryant's second child. In 2004, when Bryant was a free agent, Pelinka confirmed Bryant would remain in Los Angeles with either the Lakers or the Los Angeles Clippers while rumors were flying that he was going to sign with the Chicago Bulls. Subsequently, when Rudy Tomjanovich was hired to be the Lakers' head coach, he sent free agent Bryant and Pelinka a video package describing the things he has done for players at Bryant's position. A few days later, Pelinka negotiated a contract for Bryant to remain with the Lakers for \$136.4 million over seven years. When Bryant demanded to be traded during the 2007 offseason, Pelinka confirmed that "Kobe would like to be moved." He was also the godfather of Kobe's daughter, Gianna Bryant.
### Draft success and controversy (2008–2009)
Eric Gordon was drafted seventh overall in the 2008 NBA draft. Sasha Vujačić, a 2008 restricted free agent, left his agent, Bill Duffy, and hired Pelinka to be his new agent in July 2008. He had previously left Pelinka for Duffy. Maggette signed on July 10 with the Golden State Warriors for \$50 million over five years. On July 21, Dooling was traded to the New Jersey Nets from the Orlando Magic in what was described as a sign and trade deal with no terms of the signing revealed. Dooling's 2008–09 cap hold (salary cap allocation) with the Magic was \$7,192,000. On July 25, Vujačić, who had rejected a 3-year \$12 million offer after receiving a qualifying offer of \$2.6 million and had planned to accept an offer to play in Europe, signed a 3-year \$15 million offer to return to the Lakers. However, after signing, some sources listed Vujačić as unaffiliated with any sports agent.
The Philadelphia 76ers made Iguodala a qualifying offer of \$3,800,625 for the 2008–09 season. This gave the 76ers the right to match any superior offer sheet signed by Iguodala and gave Iguodala the option to play under the terms of the qualifying offer for one season in order to be an unrestricted free agent afterwards. In 2007, Iguodala rejected a \$57 million contract extension. Iguodala had a 2008–09 cap hold of \$11,401,875. On August 12, the 76ers and Iguodala agreed to a six-year \$80 million contract.
Gordon withdrew from NBA Summer League play with a strained left hamstring in mid July 2008. However, rookie first round draft picks are on a strict two-year pay scale with team options for the third and fourth year, according to the collective bargaining agreement. Gordon had signed a three-year \$8.4 million contract with the Clippers in early July. The contract has a fourth year qualifying option.
Pelinka's clients made news off the court as Boozer filed for divorce and Bryant's former housekeeper filed suit against him in March.
At the 2009 NBA draft, he represented third overall selection James Harden. Having represented Wright at the 2007 NBA draft and Gordon at the 2008 draft, this marked the third consecutive year that Pelinka represented a high first round client. Harden signed with the Oklahoma City Thunder, but terms were not disclosed. For the 2009–10 NBA season, Wright's contract is at a team option of \$2,000,040, Bryant and Boozer have player's options of \$23,034,375 and \$12,323,900 respectively and Frye's qualifying offer amount was \$4,264,760. Prior to the June 30 decision deadline, Bryant elected not to opt out of his contract and was expected to sign a new three-year extension. Also prior to the deadline, Boozer decided to exercise the final year of his contract with the Jazz. The New Orleans Hornets exercised their team option on Wright. The Portland Trail Blazers decided not to make Frye a qualifying offer, which made him an unrestricted free agent, and prevented the Blazers from having the right to match the two-year offer he agreed to with the Phoenix Suns.
### Large contracts (2010–2011)
Toward the end of the 2009–10 NBA season Pelinka negotiated a three-year extension for Bryant, committing him to the Lakers through the 2013–14 season. Boozer becomes an unrestricted free agent when the 2009–10 season ends. Fisher is also unsigned. Pelinka has signed both Johnson and Davis who were chosen 4th and 13th respectively in the 2010 NBA draft. On July 14, the Lakers announced that they resigned Fisher to what was reported to be a 3-year \$10.5 million contract according to ESPN. NBA.com reported that Boozer signed a 5-year \$75 million contract with the Chicago Bulls.
In addition to 2011 NBA Draft prospect Williams, Pelinka had to represent unsigned Peterson and Vujacic; team option players Gordon and Harden and qualifying option player Wright following the 2010–11 NBA season. Williams was selected 2nd overall. O. J. Mayo signed with Pelinka in the offseason, bringing Pelinka's client list up to 18 NBA players. On June 28, the Oklahoma City Thunder exercised team options on several players including Harden.
At the beginning of the 2011 NBA lockout, Pelinka, who represented 18 NBA players at the time, was considering putting together a touring team to play exhibition games in China. During the lockout Bryant received offers to play for Virtus Pallacanestro Bologna that Pelinka negotiated. Although there were difficulties signing Bryant to play in October to due scheduling conflicts, Virtus made an offer worth over \$3 million for Bryant to play in 10 games starting in November.
Vujacic signed a one-year deal to play with the Anadolu Efes of the Turkish Basketball League. His contract did not have an out clause if the NBA lockout was resolved early enough to salvage the 2011–12 NBA season. On December 13, Williams signed with the Timberwolves. 4-year veteran Wright and 11-year veteran Peterson did not sign with NBA teams.
In February, Durant left long-time agent Aaron Goodwin. The following month he signed with Pelinka who represented his teammate Harden. Pelinka signed Dion Waiters. At the NBA Draft Combine, Pelinka had Waiters stop his workouts and skip the interview portions of the combine. There was speculation that he had a high draft position promise. Pelinka also signed Andre Drummond. Waiters was selected fourth overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers and Drummond was selected ninth overall by the Detroit Pistons. At the end of the 2011–12 NBA season, Kaman, Wallace, Fisher and Dooling were unsigned. The New Jersey Nets had Bird rights to Wallace. Mayo, Gordon, Johnson and newly signed Austin Daye all had options.
Waiters signed a \$16.7 million four-year contract (two years, plus two team options) that was based on the rookie wage scales determined by the collective bargaining agreement. Drummond also signed a multi-year contract. Kaman signed a one-year \$8 million contract with the Dallas Mavericks. Wallace re-signed with the Nets for 4 years and \$40 million. The Memphis Grizzlies did not make Mayo a \$7.2 million qualifying offer, thus allowing him to become an unrestricted free agent. He subsequently signed with the Mavericks for two years (with a player option in the second year). The New Orleans Hornets matched the Phoenix Suns' 4-year \$58 million contract for Gordon.
### Later agent years (2013–2016)
In April 2013, Pelinka was inducted into his high school's wall of fame. Durant left Pelinka in the offseason. Iguodala declined a one-year \$16 million contract from the Denver Nuggets and met with a half dozen teams when the free agency period opened. He then signed a four-year \$48 million contract with the Golden State Warriors. Mayo was also an unrestricted free agent. Pelinka's 2010 fourth overall draftee Johnson signed a one-year deal with the Lakers for the 4th year veteran's minimum salary of \$916,099 after, teaming with Pelinka clients Bryant as well as Kaman, who signed with the Lakers the prior week. Trevor Ariza switched agents to sign with Pelinka one year before his contract with the Washington Wizards was due to expire. On November 25, Bryant signed a two-year contract extension with the Lakers at an estimated value of \$48.5 million that made him the first NBA player to play 20 years with the same franchise. He remained the league's highest-paid player, despite accepting the discounted deal; he had been eligible to receive an extension starting at \$32 million per year.
Pelinka signed Dante Exum, who was selected by the Utah Jazz with the fifth overall pick in the 2014 NBA draft on June 26, 2014. On July 11, 2014, Exum signed with the Jazz. Pelinka also represented Shabazz Napier, chosen 24th overall in the 2014 draft by the Charlotte Hornets, who was later traded to the Miami Heat on draft night.
In the 2014 free agency period, Pelinka represented unsigned players Kaman, Fisher, Ariza, and Johnson; team option Drummond and Williams; qualifying offer player Davis. Kaman signed a two-year \$9.8 million contract to play for the Portland Trail Blazers. Fisher signed a 5-year \$25 million contract to be head coach for the New York Knicks. Ariza agreed to a 4-year \$32 million contract to play for the Houston Rockets. Late in the year, Drummond left Pelinka for Jeff Schwartz.
Pelinka was rumored to be in the running to represent Stanley Johnson, but ultimately lost to Bill Duffy. In May 2015, Pelinka signed Shabazz Muhammad. He represented Tyus Jones at the June 25, 2015 NBA draft, where he was selected 24th by the Cleveland Cavaliers, who then traded him to his hometown Minnesota Timberwolves. Pelinka negotiated Harden a \$200 million contract with Adidas that Nike opted not to match in August.
In January 2016, Avery Bradley left Mitchell Butler to sign with Pelinka after being disappointed with the results of a contract extension. During the lead-up to the 2016 NBA draft, Buddy Hield, the consensus college player of the year in 2015–16, signed with Pelinka. Marquese Chriss also signed with Pelinka. Hield was drafted 6th and Chriss was selected 8th.
## Executive career
### Los Angeles Lakers (2017–present)
On February 21, 2017, media sources reported that the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) were set to hire Pelinka to serve as general manager as part of a management shakeup that included the hiring of Magic Johnson as executive vice president of basketball operations in place of Jim Buss and dismissing former GM Mitch Kupchak. On March 7, Pelinka signed a five-year deal to be the general manager of the Lakers. After he quit the Lakers, Johnson in an interview on ESPN's First Take on May 20, 2019, stated that Pelinka wanted his position and "backstabbed" him. Pelinka has been criticized for his penchant for "storytelling", in other words embellishing or even totally misrepresenting the truth at times throughout his tenure with the Lakers. According to sources, in March 2018, as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson addressed the players on the roster as part of a "Genius Talks" series, Pelinka told a story about his former client Kobe Bryant. In the story, Pelinka stated that after Bryant had seen the Heath Ledger film The Dark Knight, he requested Pelinka set him up with a dinner appointment with Ledger to see how Ledger pushed himself to focus and lock into the role of the Joker. According to Pelinka, Bryant "had dinner with Heath, and he talked about how he locks in for a role... and Kobe used some of that in his game against the Knicks." However, the Dark Knight film was released 6 months after Ledger's death, and a source close to the situation denied that such a dinner had ever taken place. In the words of a 2019 Lakers coaching staff member, "We think, more often than not, he's not being truthful. That goes throughout the organization."
On January 10, 2020, Pelinka was promoted to vice president of basketball operations while also maintaining his role as GM.
In 2020, Pelinka finished in 7th place for the Executive of the Year Award.
## College statistics
The following are Pelinka's career statistics at the University of Michigan:
## Personal life
Pelinka entered the Bachelor of Business Administration program at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business where he accumulated a 3.9/4.0 grade point average. During his time at Michigan, he developed a close relationship with University of Michigan tax law professor Doug Kahn and his wife. In January 1993, Pelinka announced he was accepted to the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law and stated that he hoped to become a professional sports agent after his athletic and academic careers were complete. After Michigan won the 1993 NCAA West Regional Final, Pelinka, who was one of six finalists, flew to St. Louis, Missouri for a final interview for the Walter Byers Scholarship. Later that week, Pelinka was honored with the 1993 Walter Byers Scholar Award as the NCAA's top male scholar athlete. Pelinka earned a variety of other scholar athlete awards.
Instead of playing basketball in Europe, Pelinka chose to attend Michigan Law School after graduation and became a top law student. During his first year of law school, several of his former teammates appeared in Blue Chips: Billy Douglass (Lake Forest), Eric Anderson (Chicago All-star), and Demitrius Calip (Michigan). While in law school, he took several classes from Kahn. During his second year in law school, he became the home game color analyst for Wolverines basketball play-by-play announcer Chuck Swirsky on a 16-station broadcast network that originated from WJR-AM, and he debuted on December 22, 1994, during a game against Jackson State University. While in law school, he interned for Winston & Strawn LLP. Pelinka earned his Juris Doctor cum laude'' in 1996.
## See also
|
192,748 |
Klondike Gold Rush
| 1,173,197,241 |
1896–1899 migration to Yukon, Canada
|
[
"1890s in Yukon",
"1896 in Canada",
"1897 in Canada",
"1898 in Canada",
"1899 in Canada",
"Economic history of Canada",
"History of Yukon",
"Klondike Gold Rush",
"Mining in Yukon",
"Yukon River"
] |
The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of Yukon, in north-western Canada, between 1896 and 1899. Gold was discovered there by local miners on August 16, 1896; when news reached Seattle and San Francisco the following year, it triggered a stampede of prospectors. Some became wealthy, but the majority went in vain. It has been immortalized in films, literature, and photographs.
To reach the gold fields, most prospectors took the route through the ports of Dyea and Skagway, in Southeast Alaska. Here, the "Klondikers" could follow either the Chilkoot or the White Pass trails to the Yukon River, and sail down to the Klondike. The Canadian authorities required each of them to bring a year's supply of food, in order to prevent starvation. In all, the Klondikers' equipment weighed close to a ton, which most carried themselves, in stages. Performing this task, and contending with the mountainous terrain and cold climate, meant those who persisted did not arrive until summer 1898. Once there, they found few opportunities, and many left disappointed.
To accommodate the prospectors, boom towns sprang up along the routes. At their terminus, Dawson City was founded at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers. From a population of 500 in 1896, the town grew to house approximately 30,000 people by summer 1898. Built of wood, isolated, and unsanitary, Dawson suffered from fires, high prices, and epidemics. Despite this, the wealthiest prospectors spent extravagantly, gambling and drinking in the saloons. The indigenous Hän, on the other hand, suffered from the rush; they were forcibly moved into a reserve to make way for the Klondikers, and many died.
Beginning in 1898, the newspapers that had encouraged so many to travel to the Klondike lost interest in it. In the summer of 1899, gold was discovered around Nome in west Alaska, and many prospectors left the Klondike for the new goldfields, marking the end of the Klondike Rush. The boom towns declined, and the population of Dawson City fell. Gold mining production in the Klondike peaked in 1903 after heavier equipment was brought in. Since then, the Klondike has been mined on and off, and today the legacy draws tourists to the region and contributes to its prosperity.
## Background
The indigenous peoples in north-west America had traded in copper nuggets prior to European expansion. Most of the tribes were aware that gold existed in the region, but the metal was not valued by them. The Russians and the Hudson's Bay Company had both explored the Yukon in the first half of the 19th century, but ignored the rumours of gold in favour of fur trading, which offered more immediate profits.
In the second half of the 19th century, American prospectors began to spread into the area. Making deals with the Native Tlingit and Tagish tribes, the early prospectors opened the important routes of Chilkoot and White Pass and reached the Yukon valley between 1870 and 1890. Here, they encountered the Hän people, semi-nomadic hunters and fishermen who lived along the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. The Hän did not appear to know about the extent of the gold deposits in the region.
In 1883, Ed Schieffelin identified gold deposits along the Yukon River, and an expedition up the Fortymile River in 1886 discovered considerable amounts of it and founded Fortymile City. The same year gold had been found on the banks of the Klondike River, but in small amounts and with no claims being made. By late 1886, several hundred miners were working their way along the Yukon valley, living in small mining camps and trading with the Hän. On the Alaskan side of the border Circle City, a logtown, was established 1893 on the Yukon River. In three years it grew to become "the Paris of Alaska", with about 1,200 inhabitants, saloons, opera houses, schools, and libraries. In 1896, it was so well-known that a correspondent from the Chicago Daily Record came to visit. At the end of the year, it became a ghost town, when large gold deposits were found upstream on the Klondike.
## Discovery (1896)
On August 16, 1896, an American prospector named George Carmack, his Tagish wife Kate Carmack (Shaaw Tláa), her brother Skookum Jim (Keish), and their nephew Dawson Charlie (K̲áa Goox̱) were travelling south of the Klondike River. Following a suggestion from Robert Henderson, a Canadian prospector, they began looking for gold on Bonanza Creek, then called Rabbit Creek, one of the Klondike's tributaries. It is not clear who discovered the gold: George Carmack or Skookum Jim, but the group agreed to let George Carmack appear as the official discoverer because they feared that authorities would not recognize an indigenous claimant.
In any event, gold was present along the river in huge quantities. Carmack measured out four claims, strips of ground that could later be legally mined by the owner, along the river; these including two for himself—one as his normal claim, the second as a reward for having discovered the gold—and one each for Jim and Charlie. The claims were registered the next day at the police post at the mouth of the Fortymile River and news spread rapidly from there to other mining camps in the Yukon River valley.
By the end of August, all of Bonanza Creek had been claimed by miners. A prospector then advanced up into one of the creeks feeding into Bonanza, later to be named Eldorado Creek. He discovered new sources of gold there, which would prove to be even richer than those on Bonanza. Claims began to be sold between miners and speculators for considerable sums. Just before Christmas, word of the gold reached Circle City. Despite the winter, many prospectors immediately left for the Klondike by dog-sled, eager to reach the region before the best claims were taken. The outside world was still largely unaware of the news and although Canadian officials had managed to send a message to their superiors in Ottawa about the finds and influx of prospectors, the government did not give it much attention. The winter prevented river traffic, and it was not until June 1897 that the first boats left the area, carrying the freshly mined gold and the full story of the discoveries.
## Beginning of the stampede (July 1897)
In the resulting Klondike stampede, an estimated 100,000 people tried to reach the Klondike goldfields, of whom only around 30,000 to 40,000 eventually did. It formed the height of the Klondike gold rush from the summer of 1897 until the summer of 1898.
It began on July 15, 1897, in San Francisco and was spurred further two days later in Seattle, when the first of the early prospectors returned from the Klondike, bringing with them large amounts of gold on the ships Excelsior and Portland. The press reported that a total of \$1,139,000 (equivalent to \$1 billion at 2010 prices) had been brought in by these ships, although this proved to be an underestimate. The migration of prospectors caught so much attention that it was joined by outfitters, writers and photographers.
Various factors lay behind this sudden mass response. Economically, the news had reached the US at the height of a series of financial recessions and bank failures in the 1890s. The gold standard of the time tied paper money to the production of gold and shortages towards the end of the 19th century meant that gold dollars were rapidly increasing in value ahead of paper currencies and being hoarded. This had contributed to the Panic of 1893 and Panic of 1896, which caused unemployment and financial uncertainty. There was a huge, unresolved demand for gold across the developed world that the Klondike promised to fulfil and, for individuals, the region promised higher wages or financial security.
Psychologically, the Klondike, as historian Pierre Berton describes, was "just far enough away to be romantic and just close enough to be accessible". Furthermore, the Pacific ports closest to the gold strikes were desperate to encourage trade and travel to the region. The mass journalism of the period promoted the event and the human interest stories that lay behind it. A worldwide publicity campaign engineered largely by Erastus Brainerd, a Seattle newspaperman, helped establish that city as the premier supply centre and the departure point for the gold fields.
The prospectors came from many nations, although an estimated majority of 60 to 80 percent were Americans or recent immigrants to America. Most had no experience in the mining industry, being clerks or salesmen. Mass resignations of staff to join the gold rush became notorious. In Seattle, this included the mayor, twelve policemen, and a significant percentage of the city's streetcar drivers.
Some stampeders were famous: John McGraw, the former governor of Washington, joined, together with the prominent lawyer and sportsman A. Balliot. Frederick Burnham, a well-known American scout and explorer, arrived from Africa, only to be called back to take part in the Second Boer War. Among those who documented the rush was the Swedish-born photographer Eric Hegg, who took some of the iconic pictures of Chilkoot Pass, and reporter Tappan Adney, who afterwards wrote a first-hand history of the stampede. Jack London, later a famous American writer, left to seek for gold but made his money during the rush mostly by working for prospectors.
Seattle and San Francisco competed fiercely for business during the rush, with Seattle winning the larger share of trade. Indeed, one of the first to join the gold rush was William D. Wood, the mayor of Seattle, who resigned and formed a company to transport prospectors to the Klondike. The publicity around the gold rush led to a flurry of branded goods being marketed. Clothing, equipment, food, and medicines were all sold as "Klondike" goods, allegedly designed for the northwest. Guidebooks were published, giving advice about routes, equipment, mining, and capital necessary for the enterprise. The newspapers of the time termed this phenomenon "Klondicitis".
## Routes to the Klondike
The Klondike could be reached only by the Yukon River, either upstream from its delta, downstream from its head, or from somewhere in the middle through its tributaries. River boats could navigate the Yukon in the summer from the delta until a point called Whitehorse, above the Klondike. Travel, in general, was made difficult by both geography and climate. The region was mountainous, the rivers winding and sometimes impassable; the short summers could be hot, while from October to June, during the long winters, temperatures could drop below −50 °C (−58 °F).
Aids for the travellers to carry their supplies varied; some had brought dogs, horses, mules, or oxen, whereas others had to rely on carrying their equipment on their backs or on sleds pulled by hand. Shortly after the stampede began in 1897, the Canadian authorities had introduced rules requiring anyone entering Yukon Territory to bring with them a year's supply of food; typically this weighed around 1,150 pounds (520 kg). By the time camping equipment, tools and other essentials were included, a typical traveller was transporting as much as a ton in weight. Unsurprisingly, the price of draft animals soared; at Dyea, even poor quality horses could sell for as much as \$700 (\$19,000), or be rented out for \$40 (\$1,100) a day.
From Seattle or San Francisco, prospectors could travel by sea up the coast to the ports of Alaska. The route following the coast is now referred to as the Inside Passage. It led to the ports of Dyea and Skagway plus ports of nearby trails. The sudden increase in demand encouraged a range of vessels to be pressed into service including old paddle wheelers, fishing boats, barges, and coal ships still full of coal dust. All were overloaded and many sank.
### All water routes
It was possible to sail all the way to the Klondike, first from Seattle across the northern Pacific to the Alaskan coast. From St. Michael, at the Yukon River delta, a river boat could then take the prospectors the rest of the way up the river to Dawson, often guided by one of the Native Koyukon people who lived near St. Michael. Although this all-water route, also called "the rich man's route", was expensive and long – 4,700 miles (7,600 km) in total – it had the attraction of speed and avoiding overland travel. At the beginning of the stampede a ticket could be bought for \$150 (\$4,050) while during the winter 1897–98 the fare settled at \$1,000 (\$27,000).
In 1897, some 1,800 travellers attempted this route but the vast majority were caught along the river when the region iced over in October. Only 43 reached the Klondike before winter and of those 35 had to return, having thrown away their equipment en route to reach their destination in time. The remainder mostly found themselves stranded in isolated camps and settlements along the ice-covered river often in desperate circumstances.
### Dyea/Skagway routes
Most of the prospectors landed at the southeast Alaskan towns of Dyea and Skagway, both located at the head of the natural Lynn Canal at the end of the Inside Passage. From there, they needed to travel over the mountain ranges into Canada's Yukon Territory, and then down the river network to the Klondike. Along the trails, tent camps sprung up at places where prospectors had to stop to eat or sleep or at obstacles such as the icy lakes at the head of the Yukon. At the start of the rush, a ticket from Seattle to the port of Dyea cost \$40 (\$1,100) for a cabin. Premiums of \$100 (\$2,700), however, were soon paid and the steamship companies hesitated to post their rates in advance since they could increase on a daily basis.
#### White Pass trail
Those who landed at Skagway made their way over the White Pass before cutting across to Bennett Lake. Although the trail began gently, it progressed over several mountains with paths as narrow as 2 feet (0.61 m) and in wider parts covered with boulders and sharp rocks. Under these conditions horses died in huge numbers, giving the route the informal name of Dead Horse Trail. The volumes of travellers and the wet weather made the trail impassable and, by late 1897, it was closed until further notice, leaving around 5,000 stranded in Skagway.
An alternative toll road suitable for wagons was eventually constructed and this, combined with colder weather that froze the muddy ground, allowed the White Pass to reopen, and prospectors began to make their way into Canada. Moving supplies and equipment over the pass had to be done in stages. Most divided their belongings into 65 pounds (29 kg) packages that could be carried on a man's back, or heavier loads that could be pulled by hand on a sled. Ferrying packages forwards and walking back for more, a prospector would need about thirty round trips, a distance of at least 2,500 miles (4,000 km), before they had moved all of their supplies to the end of the trail. Even using a heavy sled, a strong man would be covering 1,000 miles (1,600 km) and need around 90 days to reach Lake Bennett.
#### Chilkoot trail
Those who landed at Dyea, Skagway's neighbour town, travelled the Chilkoot Trail and crossed its pass to reach Lake Lindeman, which fed into Lake Bennett at the head of the Yukon River. The Chilkoot Pass was higher than the White Pass, but more used it: around 22,000 during the gold rush. The trail passed up through camps until it reached a flat ledge, just before the main ascent, which was too steep for animals. This location was known as the Scales, and was where goods were weighed before travellers officially entered Canada. The cold, the steepness and the weight of equipment made the climb extremely arduous and it could take a day to get to the top of the 1,000 feet (300 m) high slope.
As on the White Pass trail, supplies needed to be broken down into smaller packages and carried in relay. Packers, prepared to carry supplies for cash, were available along the route but would charge up to \$1 (\$27) per lb (0.45 kg) on the later stages; many of these packers were natives: Tlingits or, less commonly, Tagish. Avalanches were common in the mountains and, on April 3, 1898, one claimed the lives of more than 60 people travelling over Chilkoot Pass.
Entrepreneurs began to provide solutions as the winter progressed. Steps were cut into the ice at the Chilkoot Pass which could be used for a daily fee, this 1,500 step staircase becoming known as the "Golden Steps". By December 1897, Archie Burns built a tramway up the final parts of the Chilkoot Pass. A horse at the bottom turned a wheel, which pulled a rope running to the top and back; freight was loaded on sledges pulled by the rope. Five more tramways soon followed, one powered by a steam engine, charging between 8 and 30 cents (\$2 and \$8) per 1 pound (0.45 kg). An aerial tramway was built in the spring of 1898, able to move 9 tonnes of goods an hour up to the summit.
#### Head of Yukon River
At Lakes Bennett and Lindeman, the prospectors camped to build rafts or boats that would take them the final 500 miles (800 km) down the Yukon to Dawson City in the spring. 7,124 boats of varying size and quality left in May 1898; by that time, the forests around the lakes had been largely cut down for timber. The river posed a new problem. Above Whitehorse, it was dangerous, with several rapids along the Miles Canyon through to the White Horse Rapids.
After many boats were wrecked and several hundred people died, the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) introduced safety rules, vetting the boats carefully and forbidding women and children to travel through the rapids. Additional rules stated that any boat carrying passengers required a licensed pilot, typically costing \$25 (\$680), although some prospectors simply unpacked their boats and let them drift unmanned through the rapids with the intent of walking down to collect them on the other side. During the summer, a horse-powered rail-tramway was built by Norman Macaulay, capable of carrying boats and equipment through the canyon at \$25 (\$680) a time, removing the need for prospectors to navigate the rapids.
#### Parallel trails
There were a few more trails established during 1898 from South-east Alaska to the Yukon River. One was the Dalton trail: starting from Pyramid Harbour, close to Dyea, it went across the Chilkat Pass some miles west of Chilkoot and turned north to the Yukon River, a distance of about 350 miles (560 km). This was created by Jack Dalton as a summer route, intended for cattle and horses, and Dalton charged a toll of \$250 (\$6,800) for its use.
The Takou route started from Juneau and went north-east to Teslin Lake. From here, it followed a river to the Yukon, where it met the Dyea and Skagway route at a point halfway to the Klondike. It meant dragging and poling canoes up-river and through mud together with crossing a 5,000 feet (1,500 m) mountain along a narrow trail. Finally, there was the Stikine route starting from the port of Wrangell further south-east of Skagway. This route went up the uneasy Stikine River to Glenora, the head of navigation. From Glenora, prospectors would have to carry their supplies 150 miles (240 km) to Teslin Lake where it, like the Takou route, met the Yukon River system.
### All-Canadian routes
An alternative to the South-east Alaskan ports were the All-Canadian routes, so-called because they mostly stayed on Canadian soil throughout their journey. These were popular with British and Canadians for patriotic reasons and because they avoided American customs. The first of these, around 1,000 miles (1,600 km) in length, started from Ashcroft in British Columbia and crossed swamps, river gorges, and mountains until it met with the Stikine River route at Glenora. From Glenora, prospectors would face the same difficulties as those who came from Wrangell. At least 1,500 men attempted to travel along the Ashcroft route and 5,000 along the Stikine. The mud and the slushy ice of the two routes proved exhausting, killing or incapacitating the pack animals and creating chaos amongst the travellers.
Three more routes started from Edmonton, Alberta; these were not much better – barely trails at all – despite being advertised as "the inside track" and the "back door to the Klondike". One, the "overland route", headed north-west from Edmonton, ultimately meeting the Peace River and then continuing on overland to the Klondike, crossing the Liard River en route. To encourage travel via Edmonton, the government hired T.W. Chalmers to build a trail, which became known as the Klondike Trail or Chalmers Trail. The other two trails, known as the "water routes", involved more river travel. One went by boat along rivers and overland to the Yukon River system at Pelly River and from there to Dawson. Another went north of Dawson by the Mackenzie River to Fort McPherson, before entering Alaska and meeting the Yukon River at Fort Yukon, downstream to the Klondike. From here, the boat and equipment had to be pulled up the Yukon about 400 miles (640 km). An estimated 1,660 travellers took these three routes, of whom only 685 arrived, some taking up to 18 months to make the journey.
#### "All-American" route
An equivalent to the All-Canadian routes was the "All-American route", which aimed to reach the Yukon from the port of Valdez, which lay further along the Alaskan coast from Skagway. This, it was hoped, would evade the Canadian customs posts and provide an American-controlled route into the interior. From late 1897 onwards 3,500 men and women attempted it; delayed by the winter snows, fresh efforts were made in the spring.
In practice, the huge Valdez glacier that stood between the port and the Alaskan interior proved almost insurmountable and only 200 managed to climb it; by 1899, the cold and scurvy was causing many deaths amongst the rest. Other prospectors attempted an alternative route across the Malaspina Glacier just to the east, suffering even greater hardships. Those who did manage to cross it found themselves having to negotiate miles of wilderness before they could reach Dawson. Their expedition was forced to turn back the same way they had come, with only four men surviving.
### Border control
The borders in South-east Alaska were disputed between the US, Canada and Britain since the American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. The US and Canada both claimed the ports of Dyea and Skagway. This, combined with the numbers of American prospectors, the quantities of gold being mined and the difficulties in exercising government authority in such a remote area, made the control of the borders a sensitive issue.
Early on in the gold rush, the US Army sent a small detachment to Circle City, in case intervention was required in the Klondike, while the Canadian government considered excluding all American prospectors from the Yukon Territory. Neither eventuality took place and instead the US agreed to make Dyea a sub-port of entry for Canadians, allowing British ships to land Canadian passengers and goods freely there, while Canada agreed to permit American miners to operate in the Klondike. Both decisions were unpopular among their domestic publics: American businessmen complained that their right to a monopoly on regional trade was being undermined, while the Canadian public demanded action against the American miners.
The North-West Mounted Police set up control posts at the borders of the Yukon Territory or, where that was disputed, at easily controlled points such as the Chilkoot and White Passes. These units were armed with Maxim guns. Their tasks included enforcing the rules requiring that travellers bring a year's supply of food with them to be allowed into the Yukon Territory, checking for illegal weapons, preventing the entry of criminals and enforcing customs duties.
This last task was particularly unpopular with American prospectors, who faced paying an average of 25 percent of the value of their goods and supplies. The Mounties had a reputation for running these posts honestly, although accusations were made that they took bribes. Prospectors, on the other hand, tried to smuggle prize items like silk and whiskey across the pass in tins and bales of hay: the former item for the ladies, the latter for the saloons.
## Mining
Of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people who reached Dawson City during the gold rush, only around 15,000 to 20,000 finally became prospectors. Of these, no more than 4,000 struck gold and only a few hundred became rich. By the time most of the stampeders arrived in 1898, the best creeks had all been claimed, either by the long-term miners in the region or by the first arrivals of the year before. The Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker and Dominion Creeks were all taken, with almost 10,000 claims recorded by the authorities by July 1898; a new prospector would have to look further afield to find a claim of his own.
Geologically, the region was permeated with veins of gold, forced to the surface by volcanic action and then worn away by the action of rivers and streams, leaving nuggets and gold dust in deposits known as placer gold. Some ores lay along the creek beds in lines of soil, typically 15 feet (4.6 m) to 30 feet (9.1 m) beneath the surface. Others, formed by even older streams, lay along the hilltops; these deposits were called "bench gold". Finding the gold was challenging. Initially, miners had assumed that all the gold would be along the existing creeks, and it was not until late in 1897 that the hilltops began to be mined. Gold was also unevenly distributed, which made the prediction of good mining sites uncertain without exploratory digging.
### Methods
Mining began with clearing the ground of vegetation and debris. Prospect holes were then dug in an attempt to find the ore or "pay streak". If these holes looked productive, proper digging could commence, aiming down to the bedrock, where the majority of the gold was found. The digging would be carefully monitored in case the operation needed to be shifted to allow for changes in the flow.
In the sub-Arctic climate of the Klondike, a layer of hard permafrost lay only 6 feet (1.8 m) below the surface. Traditionally, this had meant that mining in the region only occurred during the summer months, but the pressure of the gold rush made such a delay unacceptable. Late 19th century technology existed for dealing with this problem, including hydraulic mining and stripping, and dredging, but the heavy equipment required for this could not be brought into the Klondike during the gold rush.
Instead, the miners relied on wood fires to soften the ground to a depth of about 14 inches (360 mm) and then removing the resulting gravel. The process was repeated until the gold was reached. In theory, no support of the shaft was necessary because of the permafrost although in practice sometimes the fire melted the permafrost and caused collapses. Fires could also produce noxious gases, which had to be removed by bellows or other tools. The resulting "dirt" brought out of the mines froze quickly in winter and could be processed only during the warmer summer months. An alternative, more efficient, approach called steam thawing was devised between 1897 and 1898; this used a furnace to pump steam directly into the ground, but since it required additional equipment it was not a widespread technique during the years of the rush.
In the summer, water would be used to sluice and pan the dirt, separating out the heavier gold from gravel. This required miners to construct sluices, which were sequences of wooden boxes 15 feet (4.6 m) long, through which the dirt would be washed; up to 20 of these might be needed for each mining operation. The sluices in turn required much water, usually produced by creating a dam and ditches or crude pipes. "Bench gold" mining on the hill sides could not use sluice lines because water could not be pumped that high up. Instead, these mines used rockers, boxes that moved back and forth like a cradle, to create the motion needed for separation. Finally, the resulting gold dust could be exported out of the Klondike; exchanged for paper money at the rate of \$16 (\$430) per troy ounce (ozt)(31.1 g) through one of the major banks that opened in Dawson City, or simply used as money when dealing with local traders.
### Business
Successful mining took time and capital, particularly once most of the timber around the Klondike had been cut down. A realistic mining operation required \$1,500 (\$42,000) for wood to be burned to melt the ground, along with around \$1,000 (\$28,000) to construct a dam, \$1,500 (\$42,000) for ditches and up to \$600 (\$16,800) for sluice boxes, a total of \$4,600 (\$128,800). The attraction of the Klondike to a prospector, however, was that when gold was found, it was often highly concentrated. Some of the creeks in the Klondike were fifteen times richer in gold than those in California, and richer still than those in South Africa. In just two years, for example, \$230,000 (\$6,440,000) worth of gold was brought up from claim 29 on the Eldorado Creek.
Under Canadian law, miners first had to get a licence, either when they arrived at Dawson or en route from Victoria in Canada. They could then prospect for gold and when they had found a suitable location, lay a claim to mining rights over it. To stake a claim, a prospector would drive stakes into the ground a measured distance apart and then return to Dawson to register the claim for \$15 (\$410). This normally had to be done within three days, and by 1897 only one claim per person at a time was allowed in a district, although married couples could exploit a loophole that allowed the wife to register a claim in her own name, doubling their amount of land.
The claim could be mined freely for a year, after which a \$100 (\$2,800) fee had to be paid annually. Should the prospector leave the claim for more than three days without good reason, another miner could make a claim on the land. The Canadian government also charged a royalty of between 10 and 20 percent on the value of gold taken from a claim.
Traditionally, a mining claim had been granted over a 500-foot (150 m) long stretch of a creek, including the land from one side of the valley to another. The Canadian authorities had tried to reduce this length to 150 feet (46 m), but under pressure from miners had been forced to agree to 250 feet (76 m). The only exception to this was a "Discovery" claim, the first to be made on a creek, which could be 500 feet (150 m) long. The exact lengths of claims were often challenged and when the government surveyor William Ogilvie conducted surveys to settle disputes, he found some claims exceeded the official limit. The excess fractions of land then became available as claims and were sometimes quite valuable.
Claims could be bought. However, their price depended on whether they had been yet proved to contain gold. A prospector with capital might consider taking a risk on an "unproved" claim on one of the better creeks for \$5,000 (\$140,000); a wealthier miner could buy a "proved" mine for \$50,000 (\$1,400,000). The well known claim eight on Eldorado Creek was sold for as much as \$350,000 (\$9,800,000). Prospectors were also allowed to hire others to work for them. Enterprising miners such as Alex McDonald set about amassing mines and employees. Leveraging his acquisitions with short-term loans, by the autumn of 1897 McDonald had purchased 28 claims, estimated to be worth millions. Swiftwater Bill Gates famously borrowed heavily against his claim on the Eldorado creek, relying on hired hands to mine the gold to keep up his interest payments.
The less fortunate or less well funded prospectors rapidly found themselves destitute. Some chose to sell their equipment and return south. Others took jobs as manual workers, either in mines or in Dawson; the typical daily pay of \$15 (\$410) was high by external standards, but low compared to the cost of living in the Klondike. The possibility that a new creek might suddenly produce gold, however, continued to tempt poorer prospectors. Smaller stampedes around the Klondike continued throughout the gold rush, when rumours of new strikes would cause a small mob to descend on fresh sites, hoping to be able to stake out a high-value claim.
## Life in the Klondike
The massive influx of prospectors drove the formation of boom towns along the routes of the stampede, with Dawson City in the Klondike the largest. The new towns were crowded, often chaotic and many disappeared just as soon as they came. Most stampeders were men but women also travelled to the region, typically as the wife of a prospector. Some women entertained in gambling and dance halls built by business men and women who were encouraged by the lavish spending of successful miners.
Dawson remained relatively lawful, protected by the Canadian NWMP, which meant that gambling and prostitution were accepted while robbery and murder were kept low. By contrast, especially the port of Skagway under US jurisdiction in Southeast Alaska became infamous for its criminal underworld. The extreme climate and remoteness of the region in general meant that supplies and communication with the outside world including news and mail were scarce.
### Boomtowns
The ports of Dyea and Skagway, through which most of the prospectors entered, were tiny settlements before the gold rush, each consisting of only one log cabin. Because there were no docking facilities, ships had to unload their cargo directly onto the beach, where people tried to move their goods before high tide. Inevitably cargos were lost in the process. Some travellers had arrived intending to supply goods and services to the would-be miners; some of these in turn, realizing how difficult it would be to reach Dawson, chose to do the same. Within weeks, storehouses, saloons, and offices lined the muddy streets of Dyea and Skagway, surrounded by tents and hovels.
Skagway became famous in international media; the author John Muir described the town as "a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick". While Dyea remained a transit point throughout the winter, Skagway began to take on a more permanent character. Skagway also built wharves out into the bay in order to attract a greater share of the prospectors. The town was effectively lawless, dominated by drinking, gunfire and prostitution. The visiting NWMP Superintendent Sam Steele noted that it was "little better than a hell on earth ... about the roughest place in the world". Nonetheless, by the summer of 1898, with a population—including migrants—of between 15,000 and 20,000, Skagway was the largest city in Alaska.
In late summer 1897 Skagway and Dyea fell under the control of Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith and his men, who arrived from Seattle shortly after Skagway began to expand. He was an American confidence man whose gang, 200 to 300 strong, cheated and stole from the prospectors travelling through the region. He maintained the illusion of being an upstanding member of the community, opening three saloons as well as creating fake businesses to assist in his operations. One of his scams was a fake telegraph office charging to send messages all over the US and Canada, often pretending to receive a reply. Opposition to Smith steadily grew and, after weeks of vigilante activity, he was killed in Skagway during the shootout on Juneau Wharf on July 8, 1898.
Other towns also boomed. Wrangell, port of the Stikine route and boom town from earlier gold rushes, increased in size again, with robberies, gambling and nude female dancing commonplace. Valdez, formed on the Gulf of Alaska during the attempt to create the "All-American" route to the Klondike during the winter of 1897–1898, became a tent city of people who stayed behind to supply the ill-fated attempts to reach the interior. Edmonton, Alberta (at that time, the District of Alberta in the Northwest Territories), Canada, increased from a population of 1,200 before the gold rush to 4,000 during 1898. Beyond the immediate region, cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Vancouver and Victoria all saw their populations soar as a result of the stampede and the trade it brought along.
### Dawson City
Dawson City was created in the early days of the Klondike gold rush, when prospector Joe Ladue and shopkeeper Arthur Harper decided to make a profit from the influx to the Klondike. The two men bought 178 acres (72 ha) of the mudflats at the junction of the Klondike and Yukon rivers from the government and laid out the street plan for a new town, bringing in timber and other supplies to sell to the migrants. The Hän village of Tr'ochëk along Deer Creek was considered to be too close to the new town, and the NWMP Superintendent Charles Constantine moved its inhabitants 3 miles (4.8 km) down-river to a small reserve. The town, in the beginning simply known as "Harper and Ladue town site", was named Dawson City after the director of Canada's Geographical Survey. It grew rapidly to hold 500 people by the winter of 1896, with plots of land selling for \$500 (\$14,000) each.
In the spring of 1898, Dawson's population rose further to 30,000 as stampeders arrived over the passes. The centre of the town, Front Street, was lined with hastily built buildings and warehouses, together with log cabins and tents spreading out across the rest of the settlement. There was no running water or sewerage, and only two springs for drinking water to supplement the increasingly polluted river. In spring, the unpaved streets were churned into thick mud and in summer the settlement reeked of human effluent and was plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Land in Dawson was now scarce, and plots sold for up to \$10,000 (\$280,000) each; prime locations on Front Street could reach \$20,000 (\$560,000) while a small log cabin might rent for \$100 (\$2,800) a month. As a result, Dawson's population spread south into the empty Hän village, renaming it Klondike City. Other communities emerged closer to the mines, such as Granville on Dominion Creek and Grand Forks on Bonanza Creek.
The newly built town proved highly vulnerable to fire. Houses were made of wood, heated with stoves and lit by candles and oil lamps; water for emergencies was wanting, especially in the frozen winters. The first major fire occurred on November 25, 1897, started accidentally by dance-hall girl Belle Mitchell. She also accidentally started a second major fire on October 14, 1898, which, in the absence of a fire brigade in Dawson, destroyed two major saloons, the post-office building and the Bank of British North America at a cost of \$500,000 (\$14,000,000). The worst fire occurred on April 26, 1899, when a saloon caught fire in the middle of a strike by the newly established fire brigade. Most of the major landmarks in the town were burned to the ground: 117 buildings were destroyed, with the damage estimated at over \$1 million (\$28,000,000).
#### Logistics
The remoteness of Dawson proved an ongoing problem for the supply of food, and as the population grew to 5,000 in 1897, this became critical. When the rivers iced over, it became clear that there would not be enough food for that winter. The NWMP evacuated some prospectors without supplies to Fort Yukon in Alaska from September 30 onwards, while others made their way out of the Klondike in search of food and shelter for the winter.
Prices remained high in Dawson and supply fluctuated according to the season. During the winter of 1897 salt became worth its weight in gold, while nails, vital for construction work, rose in price to \$28 (\$784) per lb (0.45 kg). Cans of butter sold for \$5 (\$140) each. The only eight horses in Dawson were slaughtered for dog food as they could not be kept alive over the winter. The first fresh goods arriving in the spring of 1898 sold for record prices, eggs reaching \$3 (\$84) each and apples \$1 (\$28).
Scurvy, a potentially fatal illness caused by the lack of vitamin C, became a problem, particularly during the winter where fresh food was unavailable. English prospectors gave it the telling name of "Canadian black leg". It struck, among others, writer Jack London and, although not fatal in his case, brought an end to his mining career. Dysentery and malaria were also common in Dawson, and an epidemic of typhoid broke out in July and ran rampant throughout the summer. Up to 140 patients were taken into the newly constructed St Mary's Hospital and thousands were affected. Measures were taken by the following year to prevent further outbreaks, including the introduction of better sewage management and the piping in of water from further upstream. These gave improvements in 1899, although typhoid remained a problem. The new Hän reserve, however, lay downstream from Dawson City, and here the badly contaminated river continued to contribute to epidemics of typhoid and diphtheria throughout the gold rush.
#### Conspicuous consumption
Despite these challenges, the huge quantities of gold coming through Dawson City encouraged a lavish lifestyle amongst the richer prospectors. Saloons were typically open 24 hours a day, with whiskey the standard drink. Gambling was popular, with the major saloons each running their own rooms; a culture of high stakes evolved, with rich prospectors routinely betting \$1,000 (\$28,000) at dice or playing for a \$5,000 (\$140,000) poker pot. The establishments around Front Street had grand façades in a Parisian style, mirrors and plate-glass windows and, from late 1898, were lit by electric light. The dance halls in Dawson were particularly prestigious and major status symbols, both for customers and their owners. Wealthy prospectors were expected to drink champagne at \$60 (\$1,660) a bottle, and the Pavilion dancehall cost its owner, Charlie Kimball, as much as \$100,000 (\$2,800,000) to construct and decorate. Elaborate opera houses were built, bringing singers and specialty acts to Dawson.
Tales abounded of prospectors spending huge sums on entertainment — Jimmy McMahon once spent \$28,000 (\$784,000) in a single evening, for example. Most payments were made in gold dust and in places like saloons, there was so much spilled gold that a profit could be made just by sweeping the floor. Some of the richest prospectors lived flamboyantly in Dawson. Swiftwater Bill Gates, a gambler and ladies' man who rarely went anywhere without wearing silk and diamonds, was one of them. When he discovered the woman he was in love with (who liked eggs, an expensive luxury) was dining with another man, he allegedly bought all the eggs in Dawson, had them boiled and fed them to dogs. Another miner, Frank Conrad, threw a sequence of gold objects onto a ship as tokens of his esteem when his favourite singer left Dawson City. The wealthiest dance-hall girls followed suit: Daisy D'Avara had a belt made for herself from \$340 (\$9,520) in gold dollar coins; another, Gertie Lovejoy, had a diamond inserted between her two front teeth. The miner and businessman Alex McDonald, despite being styled the "King of the Klondike", was unusual amongst his peers for his lack of grandiose spending.
#### Law and order
Unlike its American equivalents, Dawson City was a law-abiding town. By 1897, 96 members of the NWMP had been sent to the district and by 1898, this had increased to 288, an expensive commitment by the Canadian government. By June 1898, the force was headed by Colonel Sam Steele, an officer with a reputation for firm discipline. In 1898, there were no murders and only a few major thefts; in all, only about 150 arrests were made in the Yukon for serious offences that year. Of these arrests, over half were for prostitution and resulted from an attempt by the NWMP to regulate the sex industry in Dawson: regular monthly arrests, \$50 (\$1,400) fines and medical inspections were imposed, with the proceeds being used to fund the local hospitals. The so-called blue laws were strictly enforced. Saloons and other establishments closed promptly at midnight on Saturday, and anyone caught working on Sunday was liable to be fined or set to chopping firewood for the NWMP. The NWMP are generally regarded by historians to have been an efficient and honest force during the period, although their task was helped by the geography of the Klondike which made it relatively easy to bar entry to undesirables or prevent suspects from leaving the region.
In contrast to the NWMP, the early civil authorities were criticized by the prospectors for being inept and potentially corrupt. Thomas Fawcett was the gold commissioner and temporary head of the Klondike administration at the start of the gold rush; he was accused of keeping the details of new claims secret and allowing what historian Kathryn Winslow termed "carelessness, ignorance and partiality" to reign in the mine recorder's office. Following campaigns against him by prospectors, who were backed by the local press, Fawcett was relieved by the Canadian government. His successor, Major James Morrow Walsh, was considered a stronger character and arrived in May 1898, but fell ill and returned east in July. It was left to his replacement, William Ogilvie, supported by a Royal Commission, to conduct reforms. The Commission, in lack of evidence, cleared Fawcett of all charges, which meant that he was not punished further than being relieved. Ogilvie proved a much stronger administrator and subsequently revisited many of the mining surveys of his predecessors.
### News and mail
In the remote Klondike, there was great demand for news and contact with the world outside. During the first months of the stampede in 1897, it was said that no news was too old to be read. In the lack of newspapers, some prospectors would read can labels until they knew them by heart. The following year, two teams fought their way over the passes to reach Dawson City first, complete with printing-presses, with the aim of gaining control of the newspaper market. Gene Kelly, the editor of the Klondike Nugget arrived first, but without his equipment, and it was the team behind the Midnight Sun who produced the first daily newspaper in Dawson. The Dawson Miner followed shortly after, bringing the number of daily newspapers in the town during the gold rush up to three. The Nugget sold for \$24 (\$680) as an annual subscription, and became well known for championing miners and for its lucid coverage of scandals. Paper was often hard to find and during the winter of 1898–99, the Nugget had to be printed on butcher's wrapping paper. News could also be told. In June, 1898, a prospector bought an edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at an auction and charged spectators a dollar each to have it read aloud in one of Dawson's halls.
Mail service was chaotic during the stampede. Apart from the number of prospectors, two major obstacles stood in its way. To begin with, any mail from America to Dawson City was sent to Juneau in South-east Alaska before being sent through Dawson and then down the Yukon to Circle City. From here it was then distributed by the US Post Office back up to Dawson. The huge distances involved resulted in delays of several months and frequently the loss of protective envelopes and their addresses. The second problem was in Dawson itself, which initially lacked a post office and therefore relied on two stores and a saloon to act as informal delivery points. The NWMP were tasked to run the mail system by October 1897, but they were ill-trained to do so. Up to 5,700 letters might arrive in a single shipment, all of which had to be collected in person from the post office. This resulted in huge queues, with claimants lining up outside the office for up to three days. Those who had no time and could afford it would pay others to stand in line for them, preferably a woman since they were allowed to get ahead in line out of politeness. Postage stamps, like paper in general, were scarce and rationed to two per customer. By 1899, trained postal staff took over mail delivery and relieved the NWMP of this task.
### Role of women
In 1898 eight percent of those living in the Klondike territory were women, and in towns like Dawson this rose to 12 percent. Many women arrived with their husbands or families, but others travelled alone. Most came to the Klondike for similar economic and social reasons as male prospectors, but they attracted particular media interest. The gender imbalance in the Klondike encouraged business proposals to ship young, single women into the region to marry newly wealthy miners; few, if any, of these marriages ever took place, but some single women appear to have travelled on their own in the hope of finding prosperous husbands. Guidebooks gave recommendations for what practical clothes women should take to the Klondike: the female dress code of the time was formal, emphasising long skirts and corsets, but most women adapted this for the conditions of the trails. Regardless of experience, women in a party were typically expected to cook for the group. Few mothers brought their children with them due to the risks of the travel.
Once in the Klondike, very few women—less than one percent—actually worked as miners. Many were married to miners; however, their lives as partners on the gold fields were still hard and often lonely. They had extensive domestic duties, including thawing ice and snow for water, breaking up frozen food, chopping wood and collecting wild foods. In Dawson and other towns, some women took in laundry to make money. This was a physically demanding job but could be relatively easily combined with child care duties. Others took jobs in the service industry, for example as waitresses or seamstresses, which could pay well, but were often punctuated by periods of unemployment. Both men and women opened roadhouses, but women were considered to be better at running them. A few women worked in the packing trade, carrying goods on their backs, or became domestic servants.
Wealthier women with capital might invest in mines and other businesses. One of the most prominent businesswomen in the Klondike was Belinda Mulrooney. She brought a consignment of cloth and hot water bottles with her when she arrived in the Klondike in early 1897, and with the proceeds of those sales she first built a roadhouse at Grand Forks and later a grand hotel in Dawson. She invested widely, including acquiring her own mining company, and was reputed to be the richest woman of the Klondike. The wealthy Martha Black was abandoned by her husband early in the journey to the Klondike but continued on without him, reaching Dawson City where she became a prominent citizen, investing in various mining and business ventures with her brother.
A relatively small number of women worked in the entertainment and sex industries. The elite of these women were the highly paid actresses and courtesans of Dawson; beneath them were chorus line dancers, who usually doubled as hostesses and other dance hall workers. While still better paid than white-collar male workers, these women worked very long hours and had significant expenses. The entertainment industry merged into the sex industry, where women made a living as prostitutes. The sex industry in the Klondike was concentrated in Klondike City and in a backstreet area of Dawson. A hierarchy of sexual employment existed, with brothels and parlour houses at the top, small independent "cigar shops" in the middle, and, at the bottom, the prostitutes who worked out of small huts called "hutches". Life for these workers was a continual struggle and the suicide rate was high.
The degree of involvement between Indigenous women and the stampeders varied. Many Tlingit women worked as packers for the prospectors, for example, carrying supplies and equipment, sometimes also transporting their babies as well. Hän women had relatively little contact with the white immigrants, however, and there was a significant social divide between local Hän women and white women. Although before 1897 there had been a number of Indigenous women who married western men, including Kate Carmack, the Tagish wife of one of the discoverers, this practice did not survive into the stampede. Very few stampeders married Hän women, and very few Hän women worked as prostitutes. "Respectable" white women would avoid associating with Indigenous women or prostitutes: those that did could cause scandal.
## End of the gold rush
By 1899 telegraphy stretched from Skagway, Alaska, to Dawson City, Yukon, allowing instant international contact. In 1898, the White Pass and Yukon Route railway began to be built between Skagway and the head of navigation on the Yukon. When it was completed in 1900, the Chilkoot trail and its tramways were obsolete. Despite these improvements in communication and transport, the rush faltered from 1898 on. It began in summer 1898 when many of the prospectors arriving in Dawson City found themselves unable to make a living and left for home. For those who stayed, the wages of casual work, depressed by the number of men, fell to \$100 (\$2,700) a month by 1899. The world's newspapers began to turn against the Klondike gold rush as well. In the spring of 1898 the Spanish–American War removed Klondike from the headlines. "Ah, go to the Klondike!" became a popular phrase of disgust. Klondike-branded goods had to be disposed of at special rates in Seattle.
Another factor in the decline was the change in Dawson City, which had developed throughout 1898, metamorphosing from a ramshackle, if wealthy, boom town into a more sedate, conservative municipality. Modern luxuries were introduced, including "zinc bath tubs, pianos, billiard tables, Brussels carpets in hotel dining rooms, menus printed in French and invitational balls" as noted by historian Kathryn Winslow. Visiting Senator Jerry Lynch likened the newly paved streets with their smartly dressed inhabitants to the Strand in London. It was no longer attractive for prospectors used to a wilder way of living. Even the formerly lawless town of Skagway had become respectable by 1899.
The final trigger, however, was the discovery of gold elsewhere in Canada and Alaska, prompting a new stampede, this time away from the Klondike. In August 1898, gold had been found at Atlin Lake at the head of the Yukon River, generating a flurry of interest, but during the winter of 1898–99 much larger quantities were found at Nome. In 1899, a flood of prospectors from across the region left for Nome, about 2,500 from Dawson alone during August and September. The Klondike gold rush was over.
## Legacy
### People
Only a few hundred of the 100,000 people who left for the Klondike during the gold rush became rich, and only a handful managed to maintain their wealth. They typically spent \$1,000 (\$27,000) each reaching the region, which when combined exceeded what was produced from the gold fields between 1897 and 1901. Those who did find gold often lost their fortunes in the subsequent years and died penniless attempting to reproduce their earlier good fortune. Businessman and miner Alex McDonald, for example, continued to accumulate land after the boom until his money ran out; he died in poverty, still prospecting. Antoine Stander, who discovered gold on Eldorado Creek, abused alcohol, dissipated his fortune and ended working in a ship's kitchen to pay his way. The three discoverers had mixed fates. George Carmack left his wife Kate—who had found it difficult to adapt to their new lifestyle—remarried and lived in relative prosperity; Skookum Jim had a huge income from his mining royalties but refused to settle and continued to prospect until his death in 1916; Dawson Charlie spent lavishly and died in an alcohol-related accident.
The richest of the Klondike saloon owners, businessmen and gamblers also typically lost their fortunes and died in poverty. Gene Allen, for example, the editor of the Klondike Nugget, became bankrupt and spent the rest of his career in smaller newspapers; the prominent gambler and saloon owner Sam Bonnifield suffered a nervous breakdown and died in extreme poverty. Nonetheless, some of those who joined the gold rush prospered. Kate Rockwell, "Klondike Kate", for example, became a famous dancer in Dawson and remained popular in America until her death. Dawson City was also where Alexander Pantages, her business partner and lover, started his career, going on to become one of America's greatest theatre and movie tycoons. The businesswoman Martha Black remarried and ultimately became the second female member of the Canadian parliament.
The impact of the gold rush on the Native peoples of the region was considerable. The Tlingit and the Koyukon peoples prospered in the short term from their work as guides, packers and from selling food and supplies to the prospectors. In the longer term, however, especially the Hän people living in the Klondike region suffered from the environmental damage of the gold mining on the rivers and forests. Their population had already begun to decline after the discovery of gold along Fortymile River in the 1880s but dropped catastrophically after their move to the reserve, a result of the contaminated water supply and smallpox. The Hän found only few ways to benefit economically from the gold rush and their fishing and hunting grounds were largely destroyed. By 1904 they needed aid from the NWMP to prevent famine.
### Places
Dawson City declined after the gold rush. When journalist Laura Berton (future mother of Pierre Berton) moved to Dawson in 1907 it was still thriving, but away from Front Street, the town had become increasingly deserted, jammed, as she put it, "with the refuse of the gold rush: stoves, furniture, gold-pans, sets of dishes, double-belled seltzer bottles ... piles of rusting mining machinery—boilers, winches, wheelbarrows and pumps". By 1912, only around 2,000 inhabitants remained, compared to the 30,000 of the boom years, and the site was becoming a ghost town. By 1972, 500 people were living in Dawson, while the nearby settlements created during the gold rush had been entirely abandoned. The population has grown since the 1970s, with 1,300 recorded in 2006.
During the gold rush, transport improvements meant that heavier mining equipment could be brought in and larger, more modern mines established in the Klondike, revolutionising the gold industry. Gold production increased until 1903 as a result of the dredging and hydraulic mining, but then declined; by 2005, approximately 1,250,000 pounds (570,000 kg) had been recovered from the Klondike area. In the 21st century, Dawson City still has a small gold mining industry, which together with tourism, taking advantage of the legacy of the gold rush, plays a role in the local economy. Many buildings in the centre of the town reflect the style of the era. The Klondike River valley was affected by the gold rush by the heavy dredging that occurred after it.
The port of Skagway also shrank after the rush, but remains a well-preserved period town, centred on the tourist industry and sightseeing trips from visiting cruise ships. The National Park Service restored Jeff Smith's Parlor, from which the famous con man "Soapy" Smith once operated, during 2010-16. Skagway also has one of the two visitor centres forming the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park; the other is located in Seattle, and both focus on the human interest stories behind the gold rush. By contrast, Dyea, Skagway's neighbour and former rival, was abandoned after the gold rush and is now a ghost town. The railway built for prospectors through White Pass in the last year of the rush reopened in 1988 and is today only used by tourists, closely linked to the Chilkoot trail which is a popular hiking route.
### Culture
The events of the Klondike gold rush rapidly became embedded in North American culture, being captured in poems, stories, photographs and promotional campaigns long after the end of the stampede. In the Yukon, Discovery Day is celebrated on the third Monday in August as a holiday, and the events of the gold rush are promoted by the regional tourist industries. The events of the gold rush were frequently exaggerated at the time and modern works on the subject similarly often focus on the most dramatic and exciting events of the stampede, not always accurately. Historian Ken Coates describes the gold rush as "a resilient, pliable myth", which continues to fascinate and appeal.
Several novels, books and poems were generated as a consequence of the Klondike gold rush. The writer Jack London incorporated scenes from the gold rush into his novels and short stories set in the Klondike, including The Call of the Wild, a 1903 novel about a sled dog. His colleague, poet Robert W. Service, did not join the rush himself, although he made his home in Dawson City in 1908. Service created well-known poems about the gold rush, among them Songs of a Sourdough, one of the bestselling books of poetry in the first decade of the 20th century, along with his novel, The Trail of '98, which was written by hand on wallpaper in one of Dawson's log cabins. The Canadian historian Pierre Berton grew up in Dawson where his father had been a prospector, and wrote several historical books about the gold rush, such as The Last Great Gold Rush. The experiences of the Irish Micí Mac Gabhann resulted the posthumous work Rotha Mór an tSaoil (translated into English as The Hard Road to Klondike in 1962), a vivid description of the period.
Some terminology from the stampede made its way into North American English like "cheechakos", referring to newly arrived miners, and "sourdoughs", experienced miners. The photographs taken during the Klondike gold rush heavily influenced later cultural approaches to the stampede. The gold rush was vividly recorded by several early photographers, for instance Eric A. Hegg; these stark, black-and-white photographs showing the ascent of the Chilkoot pass rapidly became iconic images and were widely distributed. These pictures, in turn, inspired Charlie Chaplin to make The Gold Rush, a silent movie, which uses the background of the Klondike to combine physical comedy with its character's desperate battle for survival in the harsh conditions of the stampede. The photographs reappear in the documentary City of Gold from 1957 which, narrated by Pierre Berton, won prizes for pioneering the incorporation of still images into documentary film-making. The Klondike gold rush, however, has not been widely covered in later fictional films; even The Far Country, a Western from 1955 set in the Klondike, largely ignores the unique features of the gold rush in favour of a traditional Western plot. Indeed, much of the popular literature on the gold rush approaches the stampede simply as a final phase of the expansion of the American West, a perception critiqued by modern historians such as Charlene Porsild.
## Charts and tables
### Maps of routes and goldfields
#### Dyea/Skagway routes and Dalton trail
#### Takou, Stikine and Edmonton routes
#### Goldfields
### Gold production in Yukon, 1892–1912
### Population growth of west coast cities, 1890–1900
### Klondikers supply list
The list was a suggestion of equipment and supplies sufficient to support a prospector for one year, generated by the Northern Pacific Railroad company in 1897. The total weight is approximately 1 ton, and the estimated cost amounted to \$140 (\$3,800).
### Timeline
1896
- August 16: Gold is discovered on Bonanza Creek by George Carmack and Skookum Jim.
- August 31: First claim on Eldorado Creek is made by Antone Stander.
1897
- January 21: William Ogilvie sends news of the Klondike gold discovery to Ottawa.
- July 14: Excelsior arrives at San Francisco with the first gold from the Klondike and starts stampede.
- July 15: Portland arrives at Seattle.
- July 19: First ship leaves for Klondike
- August 16: Ex-mayor Wood from Seattle leaves San Francisco on his ship Humboldt with prospectors for Klondike (reaches St. Michael on August 29, but is forced to spend the winter on the Yukon River).
- September 11: 10% royalty is established on gold mined in Yukon.
- September 27: People without supplies for the winter leave Dawson in search of food.
- November 8: Work begins on Brackett wagon road through White Pass.
1898
- February 25: Troops arrive at Skagway to maintain order. Collection of customs begins at Chilkoot summit.
- March 8: Vigilante activity against Soapy Smith starts at Skagway.
- April 3: Avalanche kills more than 60 at Chilkoot Pass.
- April 24: Spanish–American War begins.
- May 1: Soapy Smith stages a military parade in Skagway.
- May 27: Klondike Nugget begins publication in Dawson.
- May 29: Ice goes out on Yukon River and flotilla of boats sets out for Dawson.
- June 8: First boat with stampeeders reaches Dawson.
- June 24: Sam Steele (NWMP) arrives at Dawson.
- July 8: Soapy Smith is shot to death in Skagway.
- September 22: Gold found at Nome, Alaska
1899
- January 27: The remnants of a relief expedition send out in winter 1897 finally reaches Dawson.
- February 16: First train from Skagway reaches the White Pass summit.
- April 26: Fire destroys business district in Dawson.
- August: 8000 prospectors leave Dawson for Nome, ending the Klondike Gold Rush.
Source:
## See also
- Australian gold rushes
- Cariboo Gold Rush
- Colorado Gold Rush
- Witwatersrand Gold Rush
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2011 NBA lockout
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Fourth lockout in the history of the National Basketball Association (NBA)
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[
"2011 labor disputes and strikes",
"2011–12 NBA season",
"National Basketball Association labor disputes"
] |
The 2011 NBA lockout was the fourth and most recent lockout in the history of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Team owners began the work stoppage upon expiration of the 2005 collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The 161-day lockout began on July 1, 2011 and ended on December 8, 2011. It delayed the start of the 2011–12 regular season from November to December, and it reduced the regular season from 82 to 66 games. The previous lockout in 1998–99 had shortened the season to 50 games. During the lockout, teams could not trade, sign, or contact players. Players additionally did not have access to NBA team facilities, trainers, or staff.
Negotiations between the owners, led by league commissioner David Stern, and the players, headed by director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher of the labor union National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), began in early 2011 and continued through November. The main issues dividing both sides were the division of revenue, the structure of the salary cap and luxury tax. Owners proposed to reduce the players' share of basketball related income (BRI) from 57% to 47%, but the players countered with 53% of BRI. Owners wanted to implement a hard salary cap and a harsher luxury tax, hoping to increase competition among teams, whereas players wanted to keep the current soft salary cap structure intact.
As both sides failed to reach an agreement, the NBA canceled the preseason and all games through December. On November 14, the players dissolved the union, allowing them to file antitrust lawsuits against the league. On November 26, both sides reached a tentative agreement to end the lockout. The new CBA calls for a revenue split of 49-to-51.2% and a flexible salary cap structure with harsher luxury tax. After the tentative deal was reached, owners allowed players to have voluntary workouts at team sites starting December 1. After the deal was ratified on December 8, training camps, trades, and free agency began the next day. During the lockout, some players signed contracts to play in other countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, with most of them having the option to return upon the lockout's conclusion. The lockout also affected the economy outside the league due largely to cities that had teams in the league losing revenue generated by games as well as television networks that broadcast the league losing ratings and advertisement revenue due to games not being played.
## Chronology
- July 1, 2011: The lockout begins.
- September 23, 2011: The NBA canceled training camp, which was to begin October 3, and the first week of preseason games, which were to run October 9 through 15.
- October 4, 2011: The NBA canceled the remainder of the preseason.
- October 10, 2011: The first two weeks of the regular season canceled.
- October 18, 2011: All games through November 30 canceled.
- November 14, 2011: The NBPA dissolves labor union into a trade association.
- November 15, 2011: The NBA canceled all games through December 15. Players filed antitrust lawsuits against the NBA in Chicago and New Mexico federal courts.
- November 26, 2011: The NBA owners and players reached a tentative agreement to end the lockout.
- December 1, 2011: The NBPA re-formed as a union.
- December 8, 2011: The new CBA is ratified, officially ending the lockout.
- December 25, 2011: NBA season begins.
## Background
After the previous lockout, which shortened the 1998–99 season from 82 to 50 games, a six-year deal between the owners, led by commissioner David Stern, and the players, led by director Billy Hunter and president Patrick Ewing of the labor union National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), was reached. As the CBA was set to expire on June 30, 2005, the two sides began to negotiate in early 2005. There were several issues obstructing the new agreement, which included adding an age limit for rookies, toughening the existing drug-testing program and limiting the length of long-term contracts. However, negotiations went smoothly and the two sides were able to reach a deal in June 2005, avoiding the lockout. That deal guaranteed players 57 percent of basketball-related income (BRI) and lasted for six years, until June 30, 2011. A year after signing the deal, eight owners signed a petition requesting Stern address the disparity between small-market and large-market teams. They wrote that "the hard truth is that our current economic system works only for larger-market teams and a few teams that have extraordinary success ...The rest of us are looking at significant and unacceptable annual financial losses."
Derek Fisher succeeded Ewing as NBPA president in 2006. In early 2011, negotiations on a new CBA began. The league claimed that it was losing \$300 million a year (22 out of 30 teams were losing money last season) and proposed to reduce 40% of players' salary (about \$800 million) and institute a hard salary cap (at \$45 million per team) as opposed to a soft cap (at \$58 million) currently in use. The union disputed those figures and steadfastly opposed those changes. Hunter said that he was advising players to prepare for a lockout. In May 2011, the NBPA filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), accusing the league of negotiating in bad faith by failing to provide critical financial data to the union and repeatedly threatening to lock out players. The NBA quickly rejected the complaint, saying that the league complies fully with federal labor laws. The union also considered the option of decertification, which allows players to file an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA.
With time winding down, negotiations continued in May and June. On the salary cap, the owners, in their newest proposal, call for a system called the "flex cap" that limits payroll at \$62 million but penalizes teams if the teams payroll exceeds the league's average payroll of that season. The union argued that it is still a hard cap because the ceiling would kick in eventually. On salary reduction, players offered to cut \$500 million over the next five years (their share of BRI would be reduced from 57 to 54.3 percent). The owners instead proposed to cut \$2 billion over the next 10 years.
As a last-ditch effort to avert a lockout, owners and players met again on June 30, 2011, to negotiate, but both sides failed to reach a resolution on key issues like salary cap and BRI splits. Both Stern and Hunter said that the two sides remained far apart. The owners demanded a larger share, claiming that they were losing money. The players, on the other hand, were willing to make concessions, but they refused to completely cave in to owners' demands. Negotiations broke off, and the CBA expired at midnight.
## Lockout
### Initial months
The lockout was officially started by the owners on July 1, 2011, during which teams could not trade, sign, or contact players, and players could not access NBA team facilities, trainers, or staffs. Negotiations resumed at an August 1 bargaining session, but it fell apart after three hours. On August 2, 2011, the NBA filed two unfair labor practice claims against the NBPA, one at the NLRB and another at a federal district court in New York. The league accused the players of being uncooperative in negotiations by threatening to dissolve their union and file antitrust lawsuits. Hunter, in a statement released by the union, called the lawsuits "without merit" and that the union would seek to dismiss it in court. On August 4, Hunter said that he thought the entire 2011–12 season would likely be canceled.
The NBPA and the owners returned to negotiate again on August 31 with a sense of urgency. No specifics were disclosed although both sides hoped to meet again soon. "Everyone loses if we don't reach an agreement, that's something that I think has always been understood," said union president Derek Fisher. "I will say we are not apart in terms of an agreed urgency on getting a deal done," said NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver.
The union and owners met again on September 13 but the negotiation soon collapsed. The salary cap structure remained the main source of disagreement. Owners wanted to create a hard cap for team payroll. The union wanted to keep the current structure intact, referring to it as a "blood issue". Players were willing to cut salary only if owners agree to compromise on the salary cap. But owners were unwilling to concede, saying that there must be a system in place that allows all teams to compete. Five of the sports agents—Arn Tellem, Bill Duffy, Mark Bartelstein, Jeff Schwartz, and Dan Fegan—who represent one-third of NBA players spoke with each other about decertifying the union. They believed owners have most of the leverage in negotiation and viewed decertification as a way for players to take control. Hunter said however that players had not considered decertification at this point.
On September 15, Fisher sent an email to 400-plus players asking for unity. In the email, he said that recent meetings were "effective". He suggested that the failure of having a deal was not due to disagreement between players and owners, but due to disagreement among owners. Fisher also used the opportunity to counter agents' suggestion of disbanding the union, saying that they were not making "a drastic move that leaves players without a union". According to sources, there was indeed disagreement among the owners. Some thought players' proposal of taking 52% of BRI was fair, and were willing to compromise on things like tying players' future earnings to NBA's future revenue growth and maintaining current salary level. Cavaliers' Dan Gilbert and Suns' Robert Sarver were among the hardliners who oppose the deal while Knicks' James Dolan and the Lakers' Jerry Buss were among the group in favor of it. Stern denied that there was a rift among owners the following day, saying, "I don't know what the basis of Derek's belief is."
### Cancellations
On September 23, 2011, the NBA canceled training camp, which was to begin October 3, and the first week of preseason games, which were to run October 9 through 15. The incident marked only the second time in league history that games had been lost to a labor stoppage. Both the owners and the union had planned to meet on September 30 in New York and pledged to continue through the weekends if progress was being made. A source close to the situation leaked to ESPN that Stern planned to threaten the cancellation of the season if no deal was made, but the union saw this as a scare tactic and not a serious threat. Commentators speculated that Stern wanted to put pressure on the players and prevent negotiation from dragging through the fall. The meeting on September 30 was tense as Dwyane Wade reportedly yelled at Stern after he pointed his finger at Wade. The players nearly stormed out, but they remained in the meeting only after Hunter asked them to. Stern also backed down from his earlier threat that he would cancel the season if there was no deal.
On October 4, the NBA canceled the remainder of the preseason. Stern said the league would lose \$200 million by canceling the preseason, and warned that the first two weeks of the season would be in jeopardy if no deal was reached by October 10. The players proposed that they receive 53% of BRI, while the owners countered with 47%. The two sides then discussed a 50–50 split of BRI, with the owners offering the players 49% of BRI with incentives that would raise the value to 51%. The players countered by asking for 51%, which would increase to 53 percent using those same incentives. It was rejected by the owners. Attempts for the sides to meet on October 7 failed. The union said the NBA demanded a 50–50 revenue split prior to the meeting, while the league refuted making any such demands. After talks on October 9 and 10, the two sides were unable to reach a deal and Stern subsequently canceled the first two weeks of regular-season games, which were originally scheduled to begin on November 1. BRI remained the main issue, but other differences included luxury tax, player contract length, and the mid-level exception. The owners proposed a \$2 tax for every \$1 that a team spent above the tax threshold for player salaries. The tax would rise to as high as \$4 for every \$1 above the limit for teams that were repeat offenders. The previous CBA in comparison called for a \$1 tax for every \$1 over the limit. The players refused to accept a hard salary cap, which they felt the more punitive luxury taxes would effectively create. Stern said the owners felt a harsher luxury tax would make the league more competitive. Wade countered that a small-market team like the San Antonio Spurs had won multiple championships. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College, said that "the statistical correlation between payroll and win percentage is practically nonexistent" in the NBA. ESPN concluded that a team's draft efficiency accounted for 34% of its winning percentage in the past decade, while payroll showed only a 7% correlation. The New York Times noted that a fairer system was needed for the small-market teams, but the league's popularity historically relied on predictably successful teams with multiple superstars.
NBPA leaders met with around 30 players on October 14 and stressed unity. Washington Wizards player JaVale McGee left the meeting early and told reporters there were some players "saying that they're ready to fold", but the majority was united. McGee later denied mentioning that players were ready to fold, but his comment was recorded by reporters. Fisher said McGee had "no ability to make that statement" based on the limited time he spent at the meeting.
Owners and players met again on October 18–20 for 30 hours of talks over three days. They met before a federal mediator, George Cohen—the director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to resolve the 2011 NFL lockout. At the conclusion of the meetings, the sides remained split on the revenue split and the structure of the salary cap. The league proposed a 50–50 split of BRI, and the players proposed a range that would allow them as low as 50% of BRI to a maximum of 53%, depending on the league's revenues. Gilbert told the players to trust that the salary cap issues could be resolved if they accepted the 50–50 proposal. Hunter responded, "I can't trust your gut. I got to trust my own gut." Silver and San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt told reporters that the players refused to negotiate after the 50–50 proposal. Fisher told the press "that you guys were lied to" by the owners. Hunter said the owners told them, "Take it or leave it." Cohen decided that there was "no useful purpose" to continue mediation. Tentative agreements were reached on smaller issues, allowing a one-time exemption for teams to waive players without counting against the salary cap, granting teams an annual exemption to waive players and prorate the impact to the salary cap over multiple years, and a mid-level exception of \$5 million.
Hunter characterized the small-market owners as being inflexible in negotiation. However, The New York Times wrote that the views of individual owners "cannot be easily categorized by market size, revenue, personal wealth or championship aspirations". Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, whose team was in the fifth-largest market and had one of the highest payrolls, and Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen, the 23rd-wealthiest person in America, were as interested as small-market owners in changing the economy of the NBA in an effort to increase competition. While owners of profitable teams like Buss and Dolan were willing to accept modest changes to the CBA, they remained united with the small-market teams based on concerns for the league's long-term health.
Despite the earlier cancellation announcement, the players and the league hoped that a full 82-game schedule could be salvaged if a deal was reached in time. On October 28, Stern announced the cancellation of all games through November 30 after negotiations regarding division of revenue ended without an agreement. He said that Hunter was unwilling "to go a penny below 52%" on BRI, while Hunter stated, "We made a lot of concessions, but unfortunately at this time it's not enough." Stern indicated that an 82-game season was no longer possible. He added that tentative agreement was reached for maximum contract lengths of five years for players staying with their teams or four years when signing with another team.
Reports of division among players and owners surfaced. Jason Whitlock of Foxsports.com wrote that Fisher was privately working with Stern on the 50–50 split and that Hunter confronted Fisher about the issue. Fisher and Stern denied a private meeting took place. In a letter to the players, Fisher called the reports "absurd" and demanded "a retraction for the libelous and defamatory stories" through his attorneys. Hunter said his "relationship with Derek [was] very good. There was no confrontation". Fisher, as union president, was not empowered to make unilateral decisions for the union. While Fisher believed a 50–50 deal could be considered, Hunter maintained that the owners should never "make the same or more than the players". Miami Heat owner Micky Arison, one of the owners willing to settle with players, responded to a fan complaining about greedy owners and players on Twitter, saying that "You are barking at the wrong owner." He was fined \$500,000 by Stern, five times larger than any previous amount against an owner for publicly commenting on the labor situation. Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis and Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan had been previously fined \$100,000 each for public comments on the lockout. Leonsis had commented about the owners' desire for a hard salary cap, while Jordan told an Australian newspaper that the league's business model was "broken", citing the owners' desire for revenue sharing. A group of 10 to 14 hardline owners, led by Jordan, wanted to cap the players' share of BRI at 50% and as low as 47. During the labor dispute in 1998, then-player Jordan told Washington Wizards then-owner Abe Pollin, "If you can't make a profit, you should sell your team." Whitlock called Jordan a "sellout" wanting "current players to pay for his incompetence". He cited Jordan's executive decisions to draft disappointing players Kwame Brown and Adam Morrison.
In early November, about 50 players renewed talks of union decertification if the union went lower than 52.5% of BRI or agreed to additional restrictions on contracts, salary-cap exceptions, or free agency. Decertifying would require that 30% of the union—about 130 players—sign a petition, allowing an election under the auspices of the NLRB by all NBPA members to decertify with a simple majority. The NLRB traditionally did not consider a decertification petition while a charge was pending, such as the NBPA's unfair labor practice charges filed in August.
The owners and players union met on November 6, and they were joined again by federal mediator Cohen. The players proposed that they receive 51% of BRI, with a 1% portion taken out for retired players. The owners offered a "band" that would pay the players 49 to 51%, depending on revenue growth. Jeff Kessler, the union's attorney, said the league's proposal was really 50.2% and called the possibility of reaching 51% an "illusion". The league also proposed restrictions for teams that pay the luxury tax, banning them from sign and trade deals and limiting their use of the mid-level exception. They also proposed a "repeater tax" for teams that exceed the tax threshold thrice in a five-year span. Stern issued an ultimatum, giving the players until November 9 to accept the deal before it was lowered to 47% BRI and a flex salary cap.
On November 15, the NBA canceled all games through December 15.
### Dissolving the union
The union rejected the offer on November 9 and asked for another bargaining session. The two sides met again as the deadline passed. After two days of negotiation, the owners put forth a revised final offer and said that they were done bargaining. If accepted by the players, Stern hoped to start a 72-game season in mid December. On November 14, the union rejected the last offer and dissolved the union. The NBPA was converted into a trade association, enabling the players as individual employees to participate in a class action antitrust lawsuit against the league, calling the lockout an illegal group boycott. Attorney David Boies, who represented the NFL owners in their 2011 lockout, agreed to represent the players and join Keesler, who also represented the players in the NFL lockout. On November 15, one group of NBA players (including Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Kawhi Leonard, and Leon Powe) filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA in a California federal court, while another (including Anthony Tolliver, Ben Gordon, Caron Butler and Derrick Williams) filed their own suit against the NBA in a Minnesota federal court. November 15 was also the day players were to receive their first paychecks if the season was played.
On November 21, the California lawsuit was dropped in order to merge with the Minnesota lawsuit. Boies hoped that the move would speed up the process, since the courts would likely merge the suits as they were similar complaints seeking the same outcome.
### Settlement
On November 23, the league and the players agreed to resume negotiating on November 25. On November 26, after 15 hours of talks, a tentative deal was reached. The NBPA re-formed as a union on December 1, receiving support from over 300 players, exceeding the requirement for at least 260 signatures. Signature cards were sent to the roughly 440 players on rosters at the end of the previous season, as well as to the 60 rookies drafted in 2011 and to players who signed at least two 10-day contracts. The re-formation enabled further negotiations with the league on secondary issues such as the age limit for the NBA draft and rules on players being sent to and recalled from the NBA D-League. The players and owners concluded their voting on the deal on December 8, when the deal was ratified, and the lockout ended after 161 days. The owners approved the deal by a 25–5 vote, while 86% of the more than 200 players who voted approved the deal. The Miami Heat's Micky Arison and the Dallas Mavericks' Mark Cuban were the two owners who publicly disclosed that they voted against the new CBA.
The players would receive 51.2% of BRI in 2011–12, with a 49-to-51 band in subsequent years. Teams were allowed a one-time amnesty exemption to waive one player and remove him from the team's salary cap. The player could be claimed off waivers by the highest bidder; the waiving team would be responsible for the remaining salary without it counting against their cap. In a rule dubbed the "Derrick Rose Rule" after the 2011 NBA Most Valuable Player Award winner, a player finishing his rookie contract could be re-signed at up to 30% of his team's salary cap—an increase from the previous CBA's 25%—if he was either a two-time All-Star starter, twice voted All-NBA Team, or won an MVP award. The maximum salary for a player otherwise would remain unchanged at 25, 30, or 35% of the salary cap, depending on the player's years of service.
### Racial comments
Bryant Gumbel on his HBO Real Sports show in October likened Stern's role in the lockout to a "modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys ... keeping the hired hands in their place". The NBA owners were predominantly white, while the players were mostly black. ESPN noted that William C. Rhoden in his book \$40 Million Slaves had earlier dealt with the topic of players as "slaves" in spite of earning millions of dollars. Stern dismissed Gumbel's comments as "an occupational hazard" of being the NBA commissioner. In early November, NBPA attorney Jeffrey L. Kessler criticized the owners' "take it or leave it" bargaining approach: "instead of treating the players like partners, they're treating them like plantation workers." Hall of Famer Magic Johnson called the comments "ridiculous" and defended Stern's record of promoting black people and players. ESPN The Magazine said that the NBPA did not condone Kessler's statements, and they had intentionally avoided getting involved with Gumbel's earlier remarks. Kessler later apologized for his comments.
### Impact
The revised season schedule with 16 fewer regular-season games and a reduced pre-season caused an estimated loss of \$400 million for both the team owners and the players . According to CNBC, the average player lost \$220,000 after the first missed paycheck on November 15. However, each player did receive \$100,000 from the NBA to compensate for salaries falling below the 57% BRI level in 2010–11. As of October 25, an estimated 400 NBA jobs were lost due to layoffs and attrition since the lockout—around 200 in the league office and another 200 among the 30 teams. As the lockout dragged on toward the holiday season, many NBA arenas workers felt the effect. Many of them worked part-time in order to supplement their income or to simply pay bills and they were unable to recover lost wages that resulted from cancelled games.
## Players' alternatives
### Going overseas
The players union encouraged players to find work overseas, hoping owners would offer better deals if they saw players having more options. Josh Childress, who played for Greek team Olympiacos before returning to the NBA in 2010, said he would not consider playing overseas during the lockout. He cited concerns with reliability of getting paid, differences in coaching styles, and lower standards of business travel compared to the NBA. The International Basketball Federation (FIBA) announced on July 29 that it would allow players under NBA contracts to play overseas, provided that the contracts they signed had opt-out clauses that allowed players to return once the work stoppage ended. Stern said the league would allow players to play overseas, but he warned that it could divide the union and possibly jeopardize players' contracts if they were seriously injured. Most leagues permitted the signing of locked-out NBA players with the option of opting out; the Chinese Basketball Association, however, only allowed its clubs to sign foreign free agents who could play for at least the entire season. Chinese nationals were exempt from this rule; this allowed Yi Jianlian to return to the NBA upon the end of the lockout.
More than 90 players decided to sign with foreign teams during the lockout. The New York Times called the migration of players overseas "one of the most overblown stories of the lockout" with a majority of those signing being "rookies, middling veterans and fringe players". Deron Williams was the only 2011 All-Star going overseas, signing a one-year contract for \$5 million to play for Beşiktaş of the Turkish Basketball League. Former first overall draft pick Kenyon Martin, a free agent, signed a one-year contract with the Xinjiang Flying Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association that would make him the highest paid player in the league's history at \$500,000 a month. Unlike players who signed more lucrative contracts overseas, three-time NBA champion Tony Parker opted to play for the minimum wage of \$2,000 per month with ASVEL Basket, the French team he partly owned. Parker joined several foreign players, such as Leandro Barbosa, Boris Diaw, Rudy Fernández, Andrei Kirilenko and Mehmet Okur, who opted to play in their home countries until the lockout ended.
An NBA player playing in Europe could earn as little as \$50,000–\$75,000 per month, while the average NBA annual salary was \$5.8 million with the minimum around \$500,000. The large contracts signed by Williams and Martin were extreme exceptions. In October after the cancellation of regular season games, it was not anticipated that many additional NBA players would be signed overseas; leagues had started playing, their rosters were full, and new players could disrupt the teams.
### Other alternatives
Many players opted to stay in the United States instead. The New York Times speculated that many Americans would have found it hard to leave and change their lifestyle. Some played in local pick-up games, while others ranging from stars like Kevin Durant to players like Dorell Wright played in the more organized exhibition tournaments such as the Drew League in Los Angeles, the Melo League located in Baltimore, and the Goodman League in Washington, D.C. An exhibition game between two of the leagues was played on August 20, 2011, with the Goodman League defeating the Drew League, 135–134. Drew commissioner Dino Smiley said such pro–am games during the NBA off-season were not new, but that "the lockout has taken these games to a new level". A tournament of NBA-only players was held in September in Las Vegas, Nevada, featuring eight teams with seven to eight players each. Named the Impact Basketball Competitive Training Series, the league was dubbed by The New York Times as the "Lockout League".
Training camp was not expected to be long if there ended up being a season. Some players organized workouts for their teams to build team chemistry. The NBPA announced it was setting up workout centers in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and possibly Miami for players to work out at the union's expense.
The continuing lockout in October and the canceled preseason allowed Renaldo Balkman, José Juan Barea, and Carlos Arroyo to play for Puerto Rico in the Pan American Games that month. Puerto Rico won the gold medal.
## Outside impact
### Olympics
Although the 2012 Olympic men's basketball tournament was then more than a year away, qualifying tournaments in all five of FIBA's continental zones were to be held in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2011 (the traditional basketball offseason throughout the world). The lockout resulted in the suspension of an agreement between the NBA and FIBA by which the NBA would take on most of the costs for insuring the value of its players' contracts in the event they were injured during international competition. As a result, national federations that wish to have NBA players on their squads must now provide full coverage instead of supplemental insurance.
These costs are surprisingly high—one agent who represents an unnamed NBA player set to earn \$10 million in the 2010–11 season said the player had received a \$400,000 quote to insure his contract for his national team's FIBA qualifier. The Spanish Basketball Federation said that insuring all the NBA players on its national team for EuroBasket 2011, which doubles as the European Olympic qualifiers, could cost as much as \$5.67 million. Basketball Australia announced that Andrew Bogut would not be available for the 2011 FIBA Oceania Championship; his agent indicated that the final deal-breaker was when insurers stated that they would not insure his remaining \$39 million in NBA salary unless pre-existing elbow, wrist, and back injuries were excluded from the policy.
The French, Russian, and Argentine federations were able to insure their NBA players, and several other federations were also expected to be able to do so. Over 30 NBA players participated in EuroBasket 2011, while Ben Gordon and Marcin Gortat opted out due to insurance concerns.
### Other sports
A couple of weeks before the NBA season was originally scheduled to start, Reuters and Bloomberg Businessweek speculated on the prospect of increased interest in the National Hockey League (NHL) among NBA fans. The NHL had experienced steady growth since the 2005–06 season after their own lockout canceled the league's 2004–05 season. They again opened the 2011–12 season in early October to record crowds. Businessweek wrote, "Just maybe, the NBA's sketchy situation is already having a positive effect on the NHL." However several NHL teams (nearly half of which do not have an NBA team in their market) had no plans to market directly to NBA fans during the lockout.
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), in its inaugural college football season, drew 40,000 fans to its games in September. The San Antonio Business Journal speculated on UTSA's opportunities to grow its fan base with the canceled NBA games in San Antonio.
Boston Herald speculated that NCAA college basketball would have higher television ratings and attendance during the lockout. However, Sporting News noted that "there was no obvious boost in popularity in the college game" during the previous lockout when college basketball attendance increased by an average of 21 people per game.
### NBA cities
Mayors from 14 NBA cities wrote an open letter to NBA commissioner David Stern and NBPA chief Billy Hunter, requesting that they end the lockout based on "the perspective [of city] residents and the negative impact a canceled season might have on them, our cities, and our local economies". Time noted that arena workers would be affected by the cancellation of games. However, separate studies by University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Lake Forest College found no historic significant effect to the economies of cities with sports franchises affected by work stoppages. Explanations included consumer shifting of spending on sporting events to other forms of entertainment, reduced local government spending on crowd and traffic control, and higher productivity by the general workforce without the distraction of games.
### Other businesses
It was estimated that a complete lockout had cost an upwards of \$1 billion in lost television advertisement revenue. The lockout had dealt a sizable blow to the current licensed product market which was estimated at \$2.7 billion, and had created a big loss in television ratings for networks that cover NBA games such as the regional sports networks, TNT, and ESPN.
## Rescheduled season
The NBA revised the schedule to play two preseason games and a 66-game regular season schedule per team rather than the standard seven preseason games and an 82-game regular season schedule. Teams were allowed to contact players' agents on November 30. Players could begin working out voluntarily at team facilities with trainers on December 1, but coaches and general managers were not allowed to observe the workouts nor could any drills be conducted. NBA teams began talking to free agents on December 5, 2011 at 10 a.m. EST. Training camps and free agency started on December 9 with the regular season beginning on Christmas Day with five games, two more than the original schedule. ESPN/ABC analyst Jeff Van Gundy said about the NBA opening on Christmas Day: "It's a different opening day than has ever happened in the past and Christmas Day games have always been a big day for the NBA. This unique situation combined with the unveiling of a championship banner for the Mavericks in a finals rematch, and then to see the Lakers and the debut of Mike Brown as head coach, those things are all going to be very compelling."
The league built a new schedule from scratch based on available arena dates. In October, the league had allowed arenas in Los Angeles and Chicago to reassign NBA dates for other events. The number of games between conferences was affected as was the case in the 1999 lockout, when each team played only five or six interconference games in a 50-game schedule. Normally, each team plays teams in the other conference twice each. Teams played 48 conference games and 18 non-conference games in a 66-game schedule, compared to 52 conference games and 30 non-conference games in a normal 82-game season. Teams played on average two more games per month and also played three-consecutive games at least once in the season. In total, the league had 42 sets of back-to-back-to-back games, with 11 teams playing two such sets. The three-game set, or "triple", had not occurred since the shortened 1999 season, which featured 64 triples and sloppier play due to tired players. Before that, the last occurrence was two decades earlier. During the season, there were 29 occasions when teams played five games in six days.
With fewer off days during the season, the level of play was lower due to fatigue, and some older players rested to avoid burnout and recuperate from injuries. When the San Antonio Spurs rested Tim Duncan for a game in March at the end of a back-to-back-to-back, coach Gregg Popovich submitted the description of Duncan's absence as "Old". Nonetheless, some players still sustained injuries. In the 2012 playoffs, the Chicago Bulls were eliminated after losing Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah to injuries, and the New York Knicks lost to the Miami Heat while losing Baron Davis and Iman Shumpert to knee injuries. The Heat were not immune, losing Chris Bosh for most of the playoffs en route to their NBA championship. Stern initially said there was no connection between the injuries and the 66-game schedule compressed into 124 days; however, he backed off those comments a week later, saying more research was needed.
## See also
- Suspension of the 2019-20 NBA season
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2001 International Formula 3000 Championship
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[
"2001 in formula racing",
"2001 in motorsport",
"International Formula 3000 seasons"
] |
The 2001 International Formula 3000 Championship was the 35th season of the second-tier motorsport feeder championship of Formula One and the 17th season to be held under the series name. It featured the 2001 FIA International Formula 3000 Championship, a one-make motor racing series, recognised by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), as the second highest class of competition of single seater racing cars. A total of 37 drivers representing 13 teams contested 12 races, starting in Brazil on 31 March and ending in Italy on 15 September as they competed for the Drivers' and Teams' Championships.
The calendar featured two significant changes from the 2000 season. They were the inclusion of a season-opening round at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace in Brazil to bring the series to South America for the first time in the modern era and a year-ending race at Italy's Autodromo Nazionale di Monza. Three teams withdrew from the championship before the season: Fortec Motorsport withdrew after they were unable to sign any suitable drivers and desired to focus on other junior series. MySap.com pulled out when owner David Brown left its parent company McLaren to join the Jordan Grand Prix team in Formula One and the World Racing Team withdrew due to a lack of financing and driver stability.
Justin Wilson of the Coca-Cola Nordic Team won three races over the course of the season and secured the Drivers' Championship with one race to go. He became the first British driver in history to win the International Formula 3000 Championship and accumulated a record-breaking 71 points. The runner-up was Super Nova Racing driver Mark Webber, who was 32 points behind Wilson, after a series of accidents eliminated him from title contention in the final third of the season. Wilson's teammate Tomáš Enge in third tied with Webber on championship points with two race victories. Coca-Cola Nordic Team took the Teams' Championship with two rounds remaining, ahead of Petrobras Junior Team and Super Nova Racing.
## Teams and drivers
The following teams and drivers were under contract to compete in the 2001 International Formula 3000 Championship. As the championship was a spec series, all competitors raced with a Lola B99/50 chassis with a V8 engine developed by Zytek. Teams competed with tyres supplied by Avon.
### Team changes
A total of 30 entries spread across 13 teams were initially entered into the championship with the publication of a drivers' list on 2 December 2000. MySap.com withdrew from the championship after its team principal David Brown left its parent company McLaren and moved to the Jordan team in Formula One. Car owner and former sports car driver Gabriele Rafanelli withdrew the World Racing Team (WRT) from the series to focus on the American Le Mans Series operation, tired of F3000 due to a lack of financing and driver stability. European Formula Racing ended its partnership with the Arrows Formula One team, causing team owner Paul Stoddart to re-brand the team European Minardi F3000. Fortec Motorsport were included on the initial entry list before the team withdrew from the championship because they could not locate any suitable drivers to sign and they wanted to focus on other junior series. Prost Grand Prix changed the name of its team from Gauloises Formula to F3000 Prost Junior Team after they lost sponsorship backing from the tobacco company Gauloises.
### Driver changes
The 2001 season saw several driver changes. Defending series champion Bruno Junqueira left the Petrobras Junior Team and moved to Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) to drive for Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR). His teammate Jaime Melo left the team to join Durango on a one-year contract with the option to extend by another season afterwards, partnering series debutant Gabriele Lancieri, who progressed from the Italian Formula 3000 Championship. Italian series champion Ricardo Sperafico drove the second Petrobras car; his twin brother Rodrigo Sperafico moved from the same championship to join Coloni and partnered Fabrizio Gollin. Fabrice Walfisch, who drove for Coloni and later Astromega, joined the European Touring Car Championship in 2001, and André Couto left the series to drive in a Japan-based series. Nordic Racing employed Tomáš Enge from MySap.com to replace the outgoing Kevin McGarrity.
Team Astromega changed their entire line-up. They signed the German Formula Three (GF3) champion Giorgio Pantano to drive his first season in the championship and the WRT driver Ananda Mikola joined him. Driver Fernando Alonso went to Formula One to join Minardi, and Marc Goossens left the team. DAMS also had a new line-up in its team. Franck Montagny switched to the World Series by Nissan and Kristian Kolby competed in the American Indy Lights. The 1997 Barber Dodge Pro Series champion Derek Hill and the Gauloises Formula racer Sébastien Bourdais replaced them. Antonio García graduated from the World Series by Nissan to join the Red Bull Junior Team to pair with GF3 driver Patrick Friesacher. He replaced Enrique Bernoldi, who moved to the Arrows Formula One team. Super Nova Racing signed Mark Webber from European Arrows and Mário Haberfeld from Fortec. European Minardi employed David Saelens from Super Nova, to partner Andrea Piccini, who left Kid Jensen Racing (KJR) after two seasons.
Nicolas Minassian left Super Nova and the series to join CART as teammate to Junqueira at CGR. KJR released Bas Leinders and he moved to KTR to partner Joël Camathias, who transferred from the World Series by Nissan. Financial concerns meant Jeffrey van Hooydonk was unable to secure a seat in the championship and he went to drive in Belcar; his compatriot Yves Olivier and Christijan Albers of European Arrows entered the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters. Italian F3000 competitors Gabriele Varano and Nicolás Filiberti joined the championship by signing for the Prost Junior Team. KJR employed the Formula Palmer Audi driver Justin Keen and Yann Goudy from Italian F3000 to fill the seats vacated by Piccini and Leinders.
#### Mid-season driver changes
KJR replaced Yann Goudy with Gianluca Calcagni for the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari round. The team later withdrew from the championship before the Circuit de Catalunya event due to ownership problems and Calcagni driving for them in Imola, which created tension with the series' governing body. Shortly before the A1 Ring round, Ananda Mikola's sponsorship money did not arrive in time at Astromega and a poor performance resulted in Astromega replacing him with Dino Morelli for the next four events. Enrico Toccacelo later drove in Morelli's place for the rest of the season.
Stéphane Sarrazin made a one-off appearance for Prost at the Monaco round as a replacement for Filiberti, who was absent due to "personal issues". Prost later replaced the underperforming Filiberti with Zsolt Baumgartner for the rest of the year from the Nürburgring round and the French Formula Three champion and Porsche Supercup driver Jonathan Cochet drove Variano's car. Prost backed the initiative of one of its major sponsors to promote Latin American drivers in its team and the GF3 series winner Norberto Fontana was drafted in place of Cochet for the season's final three rounds. Before the Monaco round, Red Bull terminated García's contract, and they replaced him with Ricardo Maurício.
European Minardi was represented by the Formula Nippon racer and Jaguar test driver Tomas Scheckter in one of its cars for the Hockenheimring race after Saelens sustained an injury in an accident during the Silverstone event. Rodrigo Sperafico ended his campaign after the same event and was replaced at Coloni by Goossens for the rest of the season with new sponsorship brought to them. García replaced Melo at Durango from the Hungaroring round on, and GF3 driver Jaroslav Janiš drove Enge's Nordic car at the season-ending Monza event, while Enge substituted for Luciano Burti at the Prost Formula One team after the latter was injured at the .
## Season calendar
A 12-race season calendar was released by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA; the series' governing body) at a meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council in Seville on 4 October 2000. All events were held in support on the Saturday of Formula One races. The series expanded from 10 to 12 races: a South American event to begin the season was at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace in Brazil for the series' first race to be held outside of Europe in the modern era. The season-ending round was held at Italy's Autodromo Nazionale di Monza. Drivers and teams had most of June off as the Toyota Atlantic Championship supported the .
## Regulation and sporting changes
### Technical changes
Cars were required to have their wheels attached to their primary structures by means of a single tether for each wheel to prevent them from becoming detached in case of an accident. They also had 2 mm (0.079 in) thick anti-intrusion panels installed onto the monocoque sides.
### Sporting changes
Teams who finished 12th or higher in the 2000 International Formula 3000 Teams' Championship were granted automatic entry into the 2001 series. The final three slots were allocated to new entries or those who had won national Formula 3000 series. Had there been not enough entries via that process, the final three teams in the 2000 season received invitations to compete in the order they finished in the championship. The time for a practice session was lengthened, two 45-minute qualifying sessions held in late afternoon took place the day before the event and the overall race distance was decreased to 150 km (93 mi).
## Season report
### Pre-season
The first official pre-season test took place at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari from 14 to 15 February 2001. The two days saw Wilson lap fastest at 1 minute, 37.850 seconds and he later damaged the rear of his car in a collision with a tyre wall. Fernando Alonso helped Minardi's Formula 3000 team with chassis setup and provided its two drivers with a performance benchmark. A second official pre-season test was held at the Silverstone Circuit between 12 and 13 March 2001. Bourdais led overall for DAMS with a 1 minute, 36.326 seconds lap in variable weather.
### Opening rounds
The season began in Brazil. Brazilian drivers took the first four positions in qualifying with Melo claiming pole position for the first time in his career from Ricardo Sperafico, Rodrigo Sperafico and Pizzonia. The stewards neutralised the race on lap one with the safety car to clear the track when Pizzonia swerved to avoid Ricardo Sperafico's vehicle; the latter swerved to avoid other competitors, causing him to spin and crash into the barrier at the bottom of the Senna S chicane. Melo slowed sharply and allowed Pizzonia, Rodrigo Sperafico and Enge to pass him under safety car conditions. At the lap four restart, Wilson overtook Melo into the first corner, and moved into first when Pizzonia, Rodrigo Sperafico and Enge each incurred ten-second stop-and-go penalties for their earlier transgressions. Wilson led the rest of the race to win in motor racing for the first time since the 1998 Formula Palmer Audi, and was the first British driver to win in International Formula 3000 since Jamie Davies won at the Autodromo di Pergusa in the 1997 season. He lost control of his car afterwards and avoided hitting the pit lane wall. Webber, the pre-season favourite, took second from Melo in third, who had engine problems. The stewards later imposed a 25-second time penalty on Webber for passing David Saelens before the start/finish line after the safety car entered the pit lane for the restart. He moved from second to seventh.
Webber took his first Formula 3000 pole position in qualifying for the Imola round by leading both sessions with Patrick Friesacher second and Darren Manning third. He led every lap of the race to take his first win of the season after he took painkillers to ease the effects of a broken rib. The victory drew him to within one point of Wilson. A crash for Varano after losing control on the kerbs on the exit of the Tamburello chicane caused him to become dizzy and prompted the safety car's deployment. In an accordion effect behind the safety car, Hill made contact with the rear of Calcagni's car, who had turned to the right to avoid hitting slower cars ahead of him. Both drivers avoided hitting marshals tending to Varano. Nordic locked out the front row for the first time at the following race in Spain with Wilson on pole position and his teammate Enge second. Enge passed Wilson at the start of the race at the first turn and maintained the lead throughout a processional round for his second Formula 3000 victory. Enge passed Webber for second in the drivers' championship and was one point behind his teammate Wilson. An error from Wilson allowed Bas Leinders to pass him for second.
The A1 Ring in Austria hosted the fourth round of the 2001 championship. Wet weather affected the second qualifying session and a lap from Sébastien Bourdais in the first session was fast enough to earn him the second pole position of his career. A first-lap collision between Bourdais and Friesacher at Castrol Kurve corner caused eight cars to retire and allowed Leinders to move into the lead, just as Wilson progressed to second. After a safety car period to clear the area, Wilson passed Leinders on the outside on the fifth lap and he held off the latter to win for the second time in International Formula 3000. The victory further extended Wilson's championship lead to seven points over his Nordic teammate Enge. During qualifying at Monaco Webber took a second pole position of 2001 despite crashing at the outside of La Rascasse turn late in the second session in a desire to better his lap. Webber held off Wilson at the start of the race and led every lap for his second victory of the year by eight-tenths of a second. Webber thus overtook Enge for second position in the drivers' championship. Two safety car periods for a first lap five-car accident at a hairpin and for separate crashes involving Darren Manning and Antônio Pizzonia slowed the race.
### Mid-season
Heading into round six, Wilson led Webber in second by eleven points and was another two points in front of the third-placed Enge. Pole position for the Nürburgring event was taken by Enge after a duel with Webber and Ricardo Sperafico. Wilson was down in seventh place after he ran wide at a chicane. Enge was unchallenged throughout a noncompetitive race and achieved his second win of the season. The result moved Enge past Webber and into second position in the championship. He stood three points behind his teammate Wilson, who spun into a gravel trap and subsequently retired with a sheared peg on the front-left wheel. One week later at the Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours in France, Enge carried his form over from the Nürburgring round to qualify on pole position for the second race in succession on his second lap of the session with no slower traffic to impede him. Webber, Patrick Friesacher and Wilson were in positions two to four. Webber overtook Enge at the first corner to take the lead and Wilson passed Freisacher for third position. Webber pulled away from the rest of the field to claim victory and drew to within one championship point of Wilson, who finished second after Enge ran wide at a hairpin on the final lap.
Enge took another pole position when he set the fastest lap, ahead of his teammate Wilson and Bourdais at the Silverstone round in the United Kingdom. A major airborne accident at Becketts corner involving Saelens in qualifying caused a long stoppage to allow for him to be extricated from his car with FIA doctor Sid Watkins supervising. Saelens was transported to Northampton General Hospital and was withdrawn from the race with ninth vertebrae and wrist ligament damage. In the race, the Nordic cars of Enge and Wilson collided at Stowe turn on the fourth lap. Wilson ran wide onto the gravel and this elevated Bourdais to second position. A brief rain shower on lap nineteen caused Enge to go onto the gravel at Copse corner and Bourdais took the lead. He held off Wilson to take his first Formula 3000 victory as Enge's engine cut out on the final lap and gave his compatriot Antônio Pizzonia third.
### Final rounds
Ricardo Sperafico beat Wilson by 0.071 seconds to achieve the first pole position of his career in the next round at the Hockenheimring. Sperafico had excess wheelspin off the line; he kept the lead by blocking Wilson, who lost second place to his teammate Enge. Wilson and Pizzonia subsequently took first and second before the latter passed the former on lap three. Pizzonia lead the rest of the race to win for the first time in the series. A second-place result for Wilson and a non-finish for Webber after hitting the rear of Darren Manning's car increased his lead to ten points in the championship. The season resumed three weeks later at the Hungaroring in Hungary. Wilson emerged ahead of Webber in qualifying with pole position, and broke away from the start as Webber had less grip and fell behind Enge and Mauricio. Enge delayed Webber until he made an error at the final turn and the latter passed him. This resulted in contact between Enge and Webber and the latter was imposed a ten-second stop-and-go penalty dropping him to eleventh. With four laps remaining, Webber beached his car upon a kerb and promoted Bourdais to third. Wilson took his third career victory with a margin of 5 seconds over Mauricio. He extended his championship lead over Webber to 20 points and Nordic won the Teams' Championship with two races to go.
Going into the Spa-Francorchamps round, Webber needed to win the final two races and for Wilson not to score any points to win the drivers' championship on countback with more race victories. Wilson required a sixth-place result in either race to secure the title regardless of where Webber finished. Petrobras took the first two positions in qualifying with Ricardo Sperafico on pole position and his teammate Antônio Pizzonia second. Wilson and Webber could only manage third and fifth respectively. The race began in inclement weather and the safety car was used for two laps to allow competitors to familiarise themselves with the wet track. An accident for Webber at Eau Rouge corner early on saw his car destroyed and him taken to a hospital in Verviers for a precautionary x-ray scan that discovered knee ligament damage and no fractured bones. Wilson finished second to clinch the drivers' title with one race remaining as Sperafico led every lap of the event to achieve his first career win. Wilson was the first British driver in history to win the International Formula 3000 Championship.
At the season-ending Autodromo Nationale di Monza race, a deluge caused localised flooding and strong winds blowing natural debris onto the circuit forced the postponement of qualifying. Qualifying was reformatted as a solitary 20-minute session on Saturday afternoon and the race began half an hour later than scheduled. Pizzonia qualified on pole position for the first time in his career and he was joined on the grid's front row by Wilson in second. The start was aborted twice and delayed for 23 minutes because several drivers stalled their cars on the grid. Pantano emerged a Formula 3000 race winner for the first time in his career after he overcame being put onto the grass by Pizzonia at the start, a manoeuvre which entailed a ten-second stop-and-go penalty for the latter. Wilson went on to finish second and Ricardo Sperafico placed third.
Wilson finished on 71 points with Webber and Enge tied for second position with 39 points each. He eclipsed the record of Juan Pablo Montoya from the 1998 season with the most points accumulated in an International Formula 3000 season, which he kept until Björn Wirdheim improved on it en route to winning the 2003 championship.
## Results and standings
### Points system
Points were awarded to the top six classified finishers in every race, using the following structure:
### Drivers' Championship
<sup>†</sup> Driver did not finish the Race but was classified as he completed over 90% of the race distance.
### Teams' Championship
## See also
- 2001 Euro Formula 3000 season
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31,743,909 |
History of the metric system
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History of the metric system measurement standards
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[
"History of measurement",
"History of science",
"Metrication"
] |
The history of the metric system began during the Age of Enlightenment with measures of length and weight derived from nature, along with their decimal multiples and fractions. The system became the standard of France and Europe within half a century. Other measures with unity ratios were added, and the system went on to be adopted across the world.
The first practical realisation of the metric system came in 1799, during the French Revolution, after the existing system of measures had become impractical for trade, and was replaced by a decimal system based on the kilogram and the metre. The basic units were taken from the natural world. The unit of length, the metre, was based on the dimensions of the Earth, and the unit of mass, the kilogram, was based on the mass of a volume of water of one litre (a cubic decimetre). Reference copies for both units were manufactured in platinum and remained the standards of measure for the next 90 years. After a period of reversion to the mesures usuelles due to unpopularity of the metric system, the metrication of France and much of Europe was complete by the 1850s.
In the middle of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell conceived a coherent system where a small number of units of measure were defined as base units, and all other units of measure, called derived units, were defined in terms of the base units. Maxwell proposed three base units for length, mass and time. Advances in electromagnetism in the 19th century necessitated additional units to be defined, and multiple incompatible systems of such units came into use; none could be reconciled with the existing dimensional system. The impasse was resolved by Giovanni Giorgi, who in 1901 proved that a coherent system that incorporated electromagnetic units required a fourth base unit, of electromagnetism.
The seminal 1875 Treaty of the Metre resulted in the fashioning and distribution of metre and kilogram artefacts, the standards of the future coherent system that became the SI, and the creation of an international body Conférence générale des poids et mesures or CGPM to oversee systems of weights and measures based on them.
In 1960, the CGPM launched the International System of Units (in French the Système international d'unités or SI) with six "base units": the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, degree Kelvin (subsequently renamed the "kelvin") and candela, plus 16 more units derived from the base units. A seventh base unit, the mole, and six other derived units were added later in the 20th century. During this period, the metre was redefined in terms of the speed of light, and the second was redefined based on the microwave frequency of a caesium atomic clock.
Due to the instability of the international prototype of the kilogram, a series of initiatives were undertaken, starting in the late 20th century, to redefine the ampere, kilogram, mole and kelvin in terms of invariant constants of physics, ultimately resulting in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, which finally eliminated the need for any physical reference artefacts—notably, this enabled the retirement of the standard kilogram.
A fleeting hint of an ancient decimal or metric system may be found in the Mohenjo-Daro ruler, which uses a base length of 1.32 inches (33.5 mm) and is very precisely divided with decimal markings. Bricks from that period are consistent with this unit, but this usage appears not to have survived, as later systems in India are non-metric, employing divisions into eighths, twelfths, and sixteenths.
## Age of Enlightenment
Foundational aspects of mathematics, together with an increased understanding of the natural world during the Enlightenment, set the stage for the emergence in the late 18th century of a system of measurement with rationally related units and rules for combining them.
### Preamble
In the early ninth century, when much of what later became France was part of the Holy Roman Empire, units of measure had been standardised by the Emperor Charlemagne. He had introduced standard units of measure for length and for mass throughout his empire. As the empire disintegrated into separate nations, including France, these standards diverged. In England, Magna Carta (1215) had stipulated that "There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly."
During the early medieval era, Roman numerals were used in Europe to represent numbers, but the Arabs represented numbers using the Hindu numeral system, a positional notation that used ten symbols. In about 1202, Fibonacci published his book Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) which introduced the concept of positional notation into Europe. These symbols evolved into the numerals "0", "1", "2", etc. At that time, there was dispute regarding the difference between rational numbers and irrational numbers and there was no consistency in the way in which decimal fractions were represented.
Simon Stevin is credited with introducing the decimal system into general use in Europe. In 1586, he published a small pamphlet called De Thiende ("the tenth") which historians credit as being the basis of modern notation for decimal fractions. Stevin felt that this innovation was so significant that he declared the universal introduction of decimal coinage, measures, and weights to be merely a question of time.
### Body measures and artifacts
Since the time of Charlemagne, the standard of length had been a measure of the body, that from fingertip to fingertip of the outstretched arms of a large man, from a family of body measures called fathoms, originally used among other things, to measure the depth of water. An artifact to represent the standard was cast in the most durable substance available in the Middle Ages, an iron bar . The problems of a non-reproducible artefact became apparent over the ages: it rusted, was stolen, beaten into a mortised wall until it bent, and was, at times, lost. When a new royal standard had to be cast, it was a different standard than the old one, so replicas of old ones and new ones came into existence and use. The artefact existed through the 18th century, and was called a teise or later, a toise (from Latin tense: outstretched (arms)). This would lead to a search in the 18th century for a reproducible standard based on some invariant measure of the natural world.
### Clocks and pendulums
In 1656, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, with its pendulum marking the seconds. This gave rise to proposals to use its length as a standard unit. But it became apparent that the pendulum lengths of calibrated clocks in different locations varied (due to local variations in the acceleration due to gravity), and this was not a good solution. A more uniform standard was needed.
In 1670, Gabriel Mouton, a French abbot and astronomer, published the book Observationes diametrorum solis et lunae apparentium ("Observations of the apparent diameters of the Sun and Moon") in which he proposed a decimal system of measurement of length for use by scientists in international communication, to be based on the dimensions of the Earth. The milliare would be defined as a minute of arc along a meridian (such as the Paris meridian) and would be divided into 10 centuria, the centuria into 10 decuria and so on, successive units being the virga, virgula, decima, centesima, and the millesima. Mouton used Riccioli's estimate that one degree of arc was 321,185 Bolognese feet. Mouton's experiments showed that a pendulum of length one virgula would beat 3959.2 times in half an hour. Mouton believed that, with this information, scientists in a foreign country would be able to construct a copy of the virgula for their own use. Mouton's ideas attracted interest at the time; Picard in his work Mesure de la Terre (1671) and Huygens in his work Horologium Oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum ("Of oscillating clocks, or concerning the motion of pendulums", 1673) both proposing that a standard unit of length be tied to the beat frequency of a pendulum.
### The shape and size of the Earth
Since at least the Middle Ages, the Earth had been perceived as eternal, unchanging, and of symmetrical shape (close to a sphere), so it was natural that some fractional measure of its surface should be proposed as a standard of length. But first, scientific information about the shape and size of the Earth had to be obtained. One degree of arc would be 60 minutes of arc, on the equator; one milliare would be one minute of arc, or 1 nautical mile, so 60 nautical miles would be one degree of arc on Earth's surface, taken as a sphere. Thus Earth's circumference in nautical miles would be 21 600 (viz., 60 minutes of arc × 360 degrees in four 90-degree quadrants; a quadrant being the length of the quarter-circle from the North Pole to the equator).
In 1669, Jean Picard, a French astronomer, was the first person to measure the Earth accurately. In a survey spanning one degree of latitude, he erred by only 0.44% (Picard's arc measurement).
In Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1686), Isaac Newton gave a theoretical explanation for the "bulging equator", which also explained the differences found in the lengths of the "second pendulums", theories that were confirmed by the French Geodesic Mission to Peru undertaken by the French Academy of Sciences in 1735.
### Late 18th century: conflict and lassitude
By the mid-18th century, it had become apparent that it was necessary to standardise of weights and measures between nations who traded and exchanged scientific ideas with each other. Spain, for example, had aligned her units of measure with the royal units of France and Peter the Great aligned the Russian units of measure with those of England. In 1783, the British inventor James Watt, who was having difficulties in communicating with German scientists, called for the creation of a global decimal measurement system, proposing a system which used the density of water to link length and mass, and, in 1788, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier commissioned a set of nine brass cylinders (a [French] pound and decimal subdivisions thereof) for his experimental work.
In 1790, a proposal floated by the French to Britain and the United States, to establish a uniform measure of length, a metre based on the period of a pendulum with a beat of one second, was defeated in the British Parliament and United States Congress. The underlying issue was failure to agree on the latitude for the definition, since gravitational acceleration, and, therefore, the length of the pendulum, varies (inter alia) with latitude: each party wanted a definition according to a major latitude passing through their own country. The direct consequences of the failure were the French unilateral development and deployment of the metric system and its spread by trade to the continent; the British adoption of the Imperial System of Measures throughout the realm in 1824; and the United States' retention of the British common system of measures in place at the time of the independence of the colonies. This was the position that continued for nearly the next 200 years.
## Implementation in Revolutionary France
### Weights and measures of the Ancien Régime
It has been estimated that, on the eve of the Revolution in 1789, the eight hundred or so units of measure in use in France had up to a quarter of a million different definitions because the quantity associated with each unit could differ from town to town, and even from trade to trade. Although certain standards, such as the pied du roi (the King's foot) had a degree of pre-eminence and were used by scientists, many traders chose to use their own measuring devices, giving scope for fraud and hindering commerce and industry. These variations were promoted by local vested interests, but hindered trade and taxation.
### Units of weight and length
In 1790, a panel of five leading French scientists was appointed by the Académie des sciences to investigate weights and measures. They were Jean-Charles de Borda, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gaspard Monge, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Over the following year, the panel, after studying various alternatives, made a series of recommendations regarding a new system of weights and measures, including that it should have a decimal radix, that the unit of length should be based on a fractional arc of a quadrant of the Earth's meridian, and that the unit of weight should be that of a cube of water whose dimension was a decimal fraction of the unit of length. The proposals were accepted by the French Assembly on 30 March 1791.
Following acceptance, the Académie des sciences was instructed to implement the proposals. The Académie broke the tasks into five operations, allocating each part to a separate working group:
- Measuring the difference in latitude between Dunkirk and Barcelona and triangulating between them
- Measuring the baselines used for the survey
- Verifying the length of the second pendulum at 45° latitude.
- Verifying the weight in a vacuum of a given volume of distilled water.
- Publishing conversion tables relating the new units of measure to the existing units of measure.
The panel decided that the new measure of length should be equal to one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator (Earth quadrant), measured along the Paris meridian.
Using Jean Picard's survey of 1670 and Jacques Cassini's survey of 1718, a provisional value of 443.44 lignes was assigned to the metre which, in turn, defined the other units of measure.
While Méchain and Delambre were completing their survey, the commission had ordered a series of platinum bars to be made based on the provisional metre. When the final result was known, the bar whose length was closest to the meridional definition of the metre would be selected.
After 1792, the name of the original defined unit of mass, "gramme", which was too small to serve as a practical realisation for many purposes, was adopted, the new prefix "kilo" was added to it to form the name "kilogramme". Consequently, the kilogram is the only SI base unit that has an SI prefix as part of its unit name. A provisional kilogram standard was made and work was commissioned to determine the precise mass of a cubic decimetre (later to be defined as equal to one litre) of water. The regulation of trade and commerce required a "practical realisation": a single-piece, metallic reference standard that was one thousand times more massive that would be known as the grave. This mass unit defined by Lavoisier and René Just Haüy had been in use since 1793. This new, practical realisation would ultimately become the base unit of mass. On 7 April 1795, the gramme, upon which the kilogram is based, was decreed to be equal to "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to a cube of one hundredth of a metre, and at the temperature of the melting ice". Although the definition of the kilogramme specified water at 0 °C—a highly stable temperature point—it was replaced with the temperature at which water reaches maximum density. This temperature, about 4 °C, was not accurately known, but one of the advantages of the new definition was that the precise Celsius value of the temperature was not actually important. The final conclusion was that one cubic decimetre of water at its maximum density was equal to 99.92072% of the mass of the provisional kilogram.
On 7 April 1795, the metric system was formally defined in French law. It defined six new decimal units:
- The mètre, for length—defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris
- The are (100 m<sup>2</sup>) for area [of land]
- The stère (1 m<sup>3</sup>) for volume of firewood
- The litre (1 dm<sup>3</sup>) for volumes of liquid
- The gramme, for mass—defined as the mass of one cubic centimetre of water
- The franc, for currency.
Historical note: only the metre and (kilo)gramme defined here went on to become part of later metric systems. Litres and to a lesser extent hectares (100 ares, or 1 hm<sup>2</sup>) are still in use, but are not official SI units.
Decimal multiples of these units were defined by Greek prefixes: "myria-" (10,000), "kilo-" (1000), "hecto-" (100), and "deka-" (10) and submultiples were defined by the Latin prefixes "deci-" (0.1), "centi-" (0.01), and "milli-" (0.001).
For purposes of commerce, units and prefixed-units of weight (mass) and capacity (volume) were prependable by the binary multipliers "double-" (2) and "demi-" (1⁄2), as in double-litre, demi-litre; or double-hectogramme, demi-hectogramme, etc.
The 1795 draft definitions enabled provisional copies of the kilograms and metres to be constructed.
### Meridional survey
The task of surveying the meridian arc, which was estimated to take two years, fell to Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre. The task eventually took more than six years (1792–1798) with delays caused not only by unforeseen technical difficulties but also by the convulsed period of the aftermath of the Revolution. Apart from the obvious nationalistic considerations, the Paris meridian was also a sound choice for practical scientific reasons: a portion of the quadrant from Dunkirk to Barcelona (about 1000 km, or one-tenth of the total) could be surveyed with start- and end-points at sea level, and that portion was roughly in the middle of the quadrant, where the effects of the Earth's oblateness were expected to be the largest.
The project was split into two parts—the northern section of 742.7 km from the Belfry, Dunkirk to Rodez Cathedral which was surveyed by Delambre and the southern section of 333.0 km from Rodez to the Montjuïc Fortress, Barcelona which was surveyed by Méchain.
Delambre used a baseline of about 10 km in length along a straight road, located close to Melun. In an operation taking six weeks, the baseline was accurately measured using four platinum rods, each of length two toises (about 3.9 m). Thereafter he used, where possible, the triangulation points used by Cassini in his 1744 survey of France. Méchain's baseline, of a similar length, and also on a straight section of road was in the Perpignan area. Although Méchain's sector was half the length of Delambre, it included the Pyrenees and hitherto unsurveyed parts of Spain. After the two surveyors met, each computed the other's baseline in order to cross-check their results and they then recomputed the metre as 443.296 lignes, notably shorter than the 1795 provisional value of 443.44 lignes. On 15 November 1798, Delambre and Méchain returned to Paris with their data, having completed the survey. The final value of the mètre was defined in 1799 as the computed value from the survey.
Historical note: It soon became apparent that Méchain and Delambre's result (443.296 lignes) was slightly too short for the meridional definition of the metre. Méchain had made a small error measuring the latitude of Barcelona, so he remeasured it, but kept the second set of measurements secret.
### The French metric system
In June 1799, platinum prototypes were fabricated according to the measured quantities, the mètre des archives defined to be a length of 443.296 lignes, and the kilogramme des archives defined to be a weight of 18827.15 grains of the livre poids de marc, and entered into the French National Archives. In December of that year, the metric system based on them became by law the sole system of weights and measures in France from 1801 until 1812.
Despite the law, the populace continued to use the old measures. In 1812, Napoleon revoked the law and issued one called the mesures usuelles, restoring the names and quantities of the customary measures but redefined as round multiples of the metric units, so it was a kind of hybrid system. In 1837, after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the new Assembly reimposed the metric system defined by the laws of 1795 and 1799, to take effect in 1840. The metrication of France took until about 1858 to be completed. Some of the old unit names, especially the livre, originally a unit of mass derived from the Roman libra (as was the English pound), but now meaning 500 grams, are still in use today.
## Development of non-coherent metric systems
At the start of the nineteenth century, the French Academy of Sciences' artefacts for length and mass were the only nascent units of the metric system that were defined in terms of formal standards. Other units based on them, except the litre, proved to be short-lived. Pendulum clocks that could keep time in seconds had been in use for about 150 years, but their geometries were local to both latitude and altitude, so there was no standard of timekeeping. Nor had a unit of time been recognised as an essential base unit for the derivation of things like force and acceleration. Some quantities of electricity, like charge and potential, had been identified, but names and interrelationships of units were not yet established. Both Fahrenheit (ca. 1724) and Celsius (ca. 1742) scales of temperature existed, and varied instruments for measuring units or degrees of them. The base/derived unit model had not yet been elaborated, nor was it known how many physical quantities might be interrelated.
A model of interrelated units was first proposed in 1861 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) based on what came to be called the "mechanical" units (length, mass, and time). Over the following decades, this foundation enabled mechanical, electrical, and thermal units to be correlated.
### Time
In 1832, German mathematician Carl-Friedrich Gauss made the first absolute measurements of the Earth's magnetic field using a decimal system based on the use of the millimetre, milligram, and second as the base unit of time. Gauss' second was based on astronomical observations of the rotation of the Earth, and was the sexagesimal second of the ancients: a partitioning of the solar day into two cycles of 12 periods, and each period divided into 60 intervals, and each interval so divided again, so that a second was 1/86,400th of the day. This effectively established a time dimension as a necessary constituent of any useful system of measures, and the astronomical second as the base unit.
### Work and energy
In a paper published in 1843, James Prescott Joule first demonstrated a means of measuring the energy transferred between different systems when work is done thereby relating Nicolas Clément's calorie, defined in 1824 as "the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water from 0 to 1 °C at 1 atmosphere of pressure" to mechanical work. Energy became the unifying concept of nineteenth century science, initially by bringing thermodynamics and mechanics together and later adding electrical technology.
### The first structured metric system: CGS
In 1861, a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) including William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), James Clerk Maxwell, and James Prescott Joule among its members was tasked with investigating the "Standards of Electrical Resistance". In their first report (1862), they laid the ground rules for their work—the metric system was to be used, measures of electrical energy must have the same units as measures of mechanical energy, and two sets of electromagnetic units would have to be derived—an electromagnetic system and an electrostatic system. In the second report (1863), they introduced the concept of a coherent system of units whereby units of length, mass, and time were identified as "fundamental units" (now known as base units). All other units of measure could be derived (hence derived units) from these base units. The metre, gram, and second were chosen as base units.
In 1861, before a meeting of the BAAS, Charles Bright and Latimer Clark proposed the names of ohm, volt, and farad in honour of Georg Ohm, Alessandro Volta, and Michael Faraday respectively for the practical units based on the CGS absolute system. This was supported by Thomson (Lord Kelvin). The concept of naming units of measure after noteworthy scientists was subsequently used for other units.
In 1873, another committee of the BAAS (which also included Maxwell and Thomson) tasked with "the Selection and Nomenclature of Dynamical and Electrical Units" recommended using the cgs system of units. The committee also recommended the names of "dyne" and "erg" for the cgs units of force and energy. The cgs system became the basis for scientific work for the next seventy years.
The reports recognised two centimetre–gram–second based systems for electrical units: the Electromagnetic (or absolute) system of units (EMU) and the Electrostatic system of units (ESU).
### Electrical units
In the 1820s, Georg Ohm formulated Ohm's Law, which can be extended to relate power to current, electric potential (voltage), and resistance. During the following decades, the realisation of a coherent system of units that incorporated the measurement of electromagnetic phenomena and Ohm's law was beset with problems—several different systems of units were devised.
In the three CGS systems, the constants $k_\text{e}$ and $k_\text{m}$ and consequently $\epsilon_0$ and $\mu_0$ were dimensionless, and thus did not require any units to define them.
The electrical units of measure did not easily fit into the coherent system of mechanical units defined by the BAAS. Using dimensional analysis, the dimensions of voltage $\mathsf{M}^\frac{1}{2}\mathsf{L}^\frac{1}{2}\mathsf{T}^{-1}$ in the ESU system were identical to the dimensions of current in the EMU system, while resistance had dimensions of velocity in the EMU system, but the inverse of velocity in the ESU system.
#### Electromagnetic (absolute) system of units (EMU)
The Electromagnetic system of units (EMU) was developed from André-Marie Ampère's discovery in the 1820s of a relationship between currents in two conductors and the force between them now known as Ampere's law:
$\frac {F_\text{m}} {L} = 2 k_\text{m} \frac {I_1 I_2 } {r}$ where $k_\text{m} = \frac {\mu_0}{ 4 \pi} \$ (SI units)
In 1833, Gauss pointed out the possibility of equating this force with its mechanical equivalent. This proposal received further support from Wilhelm Weber in 1851. In this system, current is defined by setting the magnetic force constant $k_\mathrm{m}$ to unity and electric potential is defined in such a way as to ensure the unit of power calculated by the relation $P = VI$ is an erg/second. The electromagnetic units of measure were known as the abampere, abvolt, and so on. These units were later scaled for use in the International System.
#### Electrostatic system of units (ESU)
The Electrostatic system of units (ESU) was based on Coulomb's quantification in 1783 of the force acting between two charged bodies. This relationship, now known as Coulomb's law, can be written
$F_\mathrm{e} = k_\text{e} \frac{q_1q_2}{r^2},$ where $k_\text{e} = \frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0}$ (SI units)
In this system, the unit for charge is defined by setting the Coulomb force constant ($k_\text{e}$) to unity and the unit for electric potential was defined to ensure the unit of energy calculated by the relation $E = QV$ is one erg. The electrostatic units of measure were the statampere, statvolt, and so on.
#### Gaussian system of units
The Gaussian system of units was based on Heinrich Hertz's realisation, while verifying Maxwell's equations in 1888, that the electromagnetic and electrostatic units were related by:
$c^2 = \frac{1}{\epsilon_0 \mu_0}$
Using this relationship, he proposed merging the EMU and the ESU systems into one system using the EMU units for magnetic quantities (subsequently named the gauss and maxwell) and ESU units elsewhere. He named this combined set of units "Gaussian units". This set of units has been recognised as being particularly useful in theoretical physics.
#### Quadrant–eleventhgram–second (QES) or International system of units
The CGS units of measure used in scientific work were not practical for engineering, leading to the development of a more applicable system of electric units especially for telegraphy. The unit of length was 10<sup>7</sup> m (the hebdometre, nominally the Earth quadrant), the unit of mass was an unnamed unit equal to 10<sup>−11</sup> g and the unit of time was the second. The units of mass and length were scaled incongruously to yield more consistent and usable electric units in terms of mechanical measures. Informally called the "practical" system, it was properly termed the quadrant–eleventhgram–second (QES) system of units according to convention.
The definitions of electrical units incorporated the magnetic constant like the EMU system, and the names of the units were carried over from that system, but scaled according to the defined mechanical units. The system was formalised as the International system late in the 19th century and its units later designated the "international ampere", "international volt", etc.
#### Heaviside–Lorentz system of units
The factor $4\pi$ that occurs in Maxwell's equations in the gaussian system (and the other CGS systems) comes from the $4\pi$ steradians surrounding a point, such as a point electric charge. This factor could be eliminated from contexts that do not involve spherical coordinates by incorporating the factor into the definitions of the quantities involved. The system was proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1883 and is also known as the "rationalised Gaussian system of units". The SI later adopted rationalised units based on Heaviside's rationalisation scheme.
### Thermodynamics
Maxwell and Boltzmann had produced theories describing the interrelationship of temperature, pressure, and volume of a gas on a microscopic scale but otherwise, in 1900, there was no understanding of the microscopic nature of temperature.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the fundamental macroscopic laws of thermodynamics had been formulated and, although techniques existed to measure temperature using empirical techniques, the scientific understanding of the nature of temperature was minimal.
## Convention of the metre
With increasing international adoption of the metre, the shortcomings of the mètre des Archives as a standard became ever more apparent. Countries which adopted the metre as a legal measure purchased standard metre bars that were intended to be equal in length to the mètre des Archives, but there was no systematic way of ensuring that the countries were actually working to the same standard. The meridional definition, which had been intended to ensure international reproducibility, quickly proved so impractical that it was all but abandoned in favour of the artefact standards, but the mètre des Archives (and most of its copies) were "end standards": such standards (bars which are exactly one metre in length) are prone to wear with use, and different standard bars could be expected to wear at different rates.
In 1867, it was proposed that a new international standard metre be created, and the length was taken to be that of the mètre des Archives "in the state in which it shall be found". The International Conference on Geodesy in 1867 called for the creation of a new international prototype of the metre and of a system by which national standards could be compared with it. The international prototype would also be a "line standard", that is the metre was defined as the distance between two lines marked on the bar, so avoiding the wear problems of end standards. The French government gave practical support to the creation of an International Metre Commission, which met in Paris in 1870 and again in 1872 with the participation of about thirty countries.
On 20 May 1875, an international treaty known as the Convention du Mètre (Metre Convention) was signed by 17 states. This treaty established the following organisations to conduct international activities relating to a uniform system for measurements:
\* Conférence générale des poids et mesures (CGPM or General Conference on Weights and Measures), an intergovernmental conference of official delegates of member nations and the supreme authority for all actions;
\* Comité international des poids et mesures (CIPM or International Committee for Weights and Measures), consisting of selected scientists and metrologists, which prepares and executes the decisions of the CGPM and is responsible for the supervision of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures;
\* Bureau international des poids et mesures (BIPM or International Bureau of Weights and Measures), a permanent laboratory and world centre of scientific metrology, the activities of which include the establishment of the basic standards and scales of the principal physical quantities, maintenance of the international prototype standards, and oversight of regular comparisons between the international prototype and the various national standards.
The international prototype of the metre and international prototype of the kilogram were both made from a 90% platinum, 10% iridium alloy which is exceptionally hard and which has good electrical and thermal conductivity properties. The prototype had a special X-shaped (Tresca) cross section to minimise the effects of torsional strain during length comparisons and the prototype kilograms were cylindrical in shape. The London firm Johnson Matthey delivered 30 prototype metres and 40 prototype kilograms. At the first meeting of the CGPM in 1889, bar No. 6 and cylinder No. X were accepted as the international prototypes. The remainder were either kept as BIPM working copies or distributed to member states as national prototypes.
Following the Convention of the Metre, in 1889, the BIPM had custody of two artefacts—one to define length and the other to define mass. Other units of measure which did not rely on specific artefacts were controlled by other bodies.
Although the definition of the kilogram remained unchanged throughout the 20th century, the 3rd CGPM in 1901 clarified that the kilogram was a unit of mass, not of weight. The original batch of 40 prototypes (adopted in 1889) were supplemented from time to time with further prototypes for use by new signatories to the Metre Convention.
In 1921, the Treaty of the Metre was extended to cover electrical units, with the CGPM merging its work with that of the IEC.
## Measurement systems before World War II
The 20th century history of measurement is marked by five periods: the 1901 definition of the coherent MKS system; the intervening 50 years of coexistence of the MKS, cgs and common systems of measures; the 1948 Practical system of units prototype of the SI; the introduction of the SI in 1960; and the evolution of the SI in the latter half century.
### A coherent system
The need for an independent electromagnetic dimension to resolve the difficulties related to defining such units in terms of length, mass, and time was identified by Giorgi in 1901. This led to Giorgi presenting a paper in October 1901 to the congress of the Associazione Elettrotecnica Italiana (A.E.I.) in which he showed that a coherent electro-mechanical system of units could be obtained by adding a fourth base unit of an electrical nature (e.g., ampere, volt, or ohm) to the three base units proposed in the 1861 BAAS report. This gave physical dimensions to the constants k<sub>e</sub> and k<sub>m</sub> and hence also to the electro-mechanical quantities ε<sub>0</sub> (permittivity of free space) and μ<sub>0</sub> (permeability of free space). His work also recognised the relevance of energy in the establishment of a coherent, rational system of units, with the joule as the unit of energy, and the electrical units in the International System of Units remaining unchanged. However, it took more than thirty years before Giorgi's work was accepted in practice by the IEC.
### Systems of measurement in the industrial era
As industry developed around the world, the cgs system of units as adopted by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1873 with its plethora of electrical units continued to be the dominant system of measurement, and remained so for at least the next 60 years. The advantages were several: it had a comprehensive set of derived units which, while not quite coherent, were at least homologous; the MKS system lacked a defined unit of electromagnetism at all; the MKS units were inconveniently large for the sciences; customary systems of measures held sway in the United States, Britain, and the British empire, and even to some extent in France, the birthplace of the metric system, which inhibited adoption of any competing system. Finally, war, nationalism, and other political forces inhibited development of the science favouring a coherent system of units.
At the 8th CGPM in 1933, the need to replace the "international" electrical units with "absolute" units was raised. The IEC proposal that Giorgi's 'system', denoted informally as MKSX, be adopted was accepted, but no decision was made as to which electrical unit should be the fourth base unit. In 1935, J. E. Sears proposed that this should be the ampere, but World War II prevented this being formalised until 1946. The first (and only) follow-up comparison of the national standards with the international prototype of the metre was carried out between 1921 and 1936, and indicated that the definition of the metre was preserved to within 0.2 μm. During this follow-up comparison, the way in which the prototype metre should be measured was more clearly defined—the 1889 definition had defined the metre as being the length of the prototype at the temperature of melting ice, but, in 1927, the 7th CGPM extended this definition to specify that the prototype metre shall be "supported on two cylinders of at least one centimetre diameter, symmetrically placed in the same horizontal plane at a distance of 571 mm from each other". The choice of 571 mm represents the Airy points of the prototype—the points at which the bending or droop of the bar is minimised.
## Working draft of SI: Practical system of units
The 9th CGPM met in 1948, fifteen years after the 8th CGPM. In response to formal requests made by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and by the French government to establish a practical system of units of measure, the CGPM requested the CIPM to prepare recommendations for a single practical system of units of measurement, suitable for adoption by all countries adhering to the Metre Convention. The CIPM's draft proposal was an extensive revision and simplification of the metric unit definitions, symbols, and terminology based on the MKS system of units.
Following astronomical observations, the second was set as a fraction of the year 1900. The electromagnetic base unit, as required by Giorgi, was accepted as the ampere. After negotiations with the CIS and IUPAP, two additional units—the degree kelvin and the candela—were also proposed as base units. For the first time, the CGPM made recommendations concerning derived units. At the same time, the CGPM adopted conventions for the writing and printing of unit symbols and numbers and catalogued the symbols for the most important MKS and CGS units of measure.
### Time
Until the advent of the atomic clock, the most reliable timekeeper available to humanity was the Earth's rotation. It was natural, therefore, that the astronomers under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) took the lead in maintaining the standards relating to time. During the 20th century, it became apparent that the Earth's rotation was slowing down, resulting in days becoming 1.4 milliseconds longer each century—this was verified by comparing the calculated timings of eclipses of the Sun with those observed in antiquity going back to Chinese records of 763 BC. In 1956, the 10th CGPM instructed the CIPM to prepare a definition of the second; in 1958, the definition was published stating that the second (called an ephemeris second) would be calculated by extrapolation using Earth's rotational speed in 1900.
### Electrical unit
Per Giorgi's proposals of 1901, the CIPM also recommended that the ampere be the base unit from which electromechanical units would be derived. The definitions for the ohm and volt that had previously been in use were discarded, and these units became derived units based on the ampere. In 1946, the CIPM formally adopted a definition of the ampere based on the original EMU definition and redefined the ohm in terms of other base units. The definitions for the absolute electrical system, based on the ampere, were formalised in 1948. The draft proposed units with these names are very close, but not identical, to the international units.
### Temperature
In the Celsius scale from the 18th century, temperature was expressed in degrees Celsius with the definition that ice melted at 0 °C and (at standard atmospheric pressure) water boiled at 100 °C. A series of lookup tables defined temperature in terms of interrelated empirical measurements made using various devices. In 1948, definitions relating to temperature had to be clarified. (The degree, as an angular measure, was adopted for general use in many countries, so, in 1948, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) recommended that the degree Celsius, as used for the measurement of temperature, be renamed the degree Celsius.)
At the 9th CGPM, the Celsius temperature scale was renamed the Celsius scale, and the scale itself was fixed by defining the triple point of water as 0.01 °C, though the CGPM left the formal definition of absolute zero until the 10th CGPM when the name "Kelvin" was assigned to the absolute temperature scale, and the triple point of water was defined as being 273.16 °K.
### Luminosity
Before 1937, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE from its French title, the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage), in conjunction with the CIPM, produced a standard for luminous intensity to replace the various national standards. This standard, the candela (cd), which was defined as "the brightness of the full radiator at the temperature of solidification of platinum is 60 new candles per square centimetre", was ratified by the CGPM in 1948.
### Derived units
The newly accepted definition of the ampere allowed practical and useful coherent definitions of a set of electromagnetic derived units, including farad, henry, watt, tesla, weber, volt, ohm, and coulomb. Two derived units, lux and lumen, were based on the new candela, and one, degree Celsius, equivalent to the degree Kelvin. Five other miscellaneous derived units completed the draft proposal: radian, steradian, hertz, joule, and newton.
## International System of Units (SI)
In 1952, the CIPM proposed the use of wavelength of a specific light source as the standard for defining length, and, in 1960, the CGPM accepted this proposal using radiation corresponding to a transition between specified energy levels of the krypton 86 atom as the new standard for the metre. The standard metre artefact was retired.
In 1960, Giorgi's proposals were adopted as the basis of the Système International d'Unités (International System of Units), the SI. This initial definition of the SI included six base units, the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, degree Kelvin, and candela, and sixteen coherent derived units.
## Evolution of the modern SI
The evolution of the SI after its publication in 1960 has seen the addition of a seventh base unit, the mole, and six more derived units, the pascal for pressure, the gray, sievert, and becquerel for radiation, the siemens for electrical conductance, and katal for catalytic (enzymatic) activity. Several units have also been redefined in terms of physical constants.
### New base and derived units
Over the ensuing years, the BIPM developed and maintained cross-correlations relating various measuring devices such as thermocouples, light spectra, and the like to the equivalent temperatures.
The mole was originally known as a gram-atom or a gram-molecule—the amount of a substance measured in grams divided by its atomic weight. Originally chemists and physicists had differing views regarding the definition of the atomic weight—both assigned a value of 16 atomic mass units (amu) to oxygen, but physicists defined oxygen in terms of the <sup>16</sup>O isotope whereas chemists assigned 16 amu to <sup>16</sup>O, <sup>17</sup>O and <sup>18</sup>O isotopes mixed in the proportion that they occur in nature. Finally, an agreement between the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) brought this duality to an end in 1959/60, both parties agreeing to define the atomic weight of <sup>12</sup>C as being exactly 12 amu. This agreement was confirmed by ISO and in 1969 the CIPM recommended its inclusion in SI as a base unit. This was done in 1971 at the 14th CGPM.
### Start of migration to constant definitions
The second major trend in the post-modern SI was the migration of unit definitions in terms of physical constants of nature.
In 1967, at the 13th CGPM, the degree Kelvin (°K) was renamed the "kelvin" (K).
Astronomers from the US Naval Observatory (USNO) and the National Physical Laboratory determined a relationship between the frequency of radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom and the estimated rate of rotation of the earth in 1900. Their atomic definition of the second was adopted in 1968 by the 13th CGPM.
By 1975, when the second had been defined in terms of a physical phenomenon rather than the earth's rotation, the CGPM authorised the CIPM to investigate the use of the speed of light as the basis for the definition of the metre. This proposal was accepted in 1983.
The candela definition proved difficult to implement so, in 1979, the definition was revised and the reference to the radiation source was replaced by defining the candela in terms of the power of a specified frequency of monochromatic yellowish-green visible light, which is close to the frequency where the human eye, when adapted to bright conditions, has greatest sensitivity.
### Kilogram artefact instability
After the metre was redefined in 1960, the kilogram remained the only SI base defined by a physical artefact. During the years that followed, the definitions of the base units and particularly the mise en pratique to realise these definitions have been refined.
The third periodic recalibration in 1988–1989 revealed that the average difference between the IPK and adjusted baseline for the national prototypes was 50 μg—in 1889, the baseline of the national prototypes had been adjusted so that the difference was zero. As the IPK is the definitive kilogram, there is no way of telling whether the IPK had been losing mass or the national prototypes had been gaining mass.
During the course of the century, the various national prototypes of the kilogram were recalibrated against the international prototype of the kilogram (IPK) and, therefore, against each other. The initial 1889 starting-value offsets of the national prototypes relative to the IPK were nulled, with any subsequent mass changes being relative to the IPK.
### Proposed replacements for the IPK
A number of replacements were proposed for the IPK.
From the early 1990s, the International Avogadro Project worked on creating a 1 kg, 94 mm, sphere made of a uniform silicon-28 crystal, with the intention of being able replace the IPK with a physical object which would be precisely reproducible from an exact specification. Due to its precise construction, the Avogadro Project's sphere is likely to be the most precisely spherical object ever created by humans.
Other groups worked on concepts such as creating a reference mass via precise electrodeposition of gold or bismuth atoms, and defining the kilogram in terms of the ampere by relating it to forces generated by electromagnetic repulsion of electric currents.
Eventually, the choices were narrowed down to the use of the Watt balance and the International Avogadro Project sphere.
Ultimately, a decision was made not to create any physical replacement for the IPK, but instead to define all SI units in terms of assigning precise values to a number of physical constants which had previously been measured in terms of the earlier unit definitions.
## Redefinition in terms of fundamental constants
At its 23rd meeting (2007), the CGPM mandated the CIPM to investigate the use of natural constants as the basis for all units of measure rather than the artefacts that were then in use.
The following year, this was endorsed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). At a meeting of the CCU held in Reading, United Kingdom, in September 2010, a resolution and draft changes to the SI brochure that were to be presented to the next meeting of the CIPM in October 2010 were agreed in principle. The CIPM meeting of October 2010 found that "the conditions set by the General Conference at its 23rd meeting have not yet been fully met. For this reason the CIPM does not propose a revision of the SI at the present time". The CIPM, however, presented a resolution for consideration at the 24th CGPM (17–21 October 2011) to agree to the new definitions in principle, but not to implement them until the details had been finalised.
In the redefinition, four of the seven SI base units—the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole—were redefined by setting exact numerical values for the Planck constant (h), the elementary electric charge (e''), the Boltzmann constant (k<sub>B</sub>), and the Avogadro constant (N<sub>A</sub>), respectively. The second, metre, and candela were already defined by physical constants and were subject to correction to their definitions. The new definitions aimed to improve the SI without changing the value of any units, ensuring continuity with existing measurements.
This resolution was accepted by the conference, and, in addition, the CGPM moved the date of the 25th meeting forward from 2015 to 2014. At the 25th meeting on 18 to 20 November 2014, it was found that "despite [progress in the necessary requirements] the data do not yet appear to be sufficiently robust for the CGPM to adopt the revised SI at its 25th meeting", thus postponing the revision to the next meeting in 2018.
Measurements accurate enough to meet the conditions were available in 2017 and the redefinition was adopted at the 26th CGPM (13–16 November 2018), with the changes finally coming into force in 2019, creating a system of definitions which is intended to be stable for the long term.
## See also
- History of the International System of Units
- History of the metre
- History of measurement
|
5,408,694 |
Delaware Route 7
| 1,172,602,246 |
State highway in New Castle County, Delaware, United States
|
[
"State highways in Delaware",
"Transportation in New Castle County, Delaware",
"U.S. Route 13"
] |
Delaware Route 7 (DE 7) is a north–south highway in New Castle County, Delaware that connects U.S. Route 13 (US 13) and DE 72 in Wrangle Hill north to the Pennsylvania border near Hockessin, where the road continues into Pennsylvania as State Route 3013 (SR 3013), intersecting Pennsylvania Route 41 (PA 41) at an interchange. Between Wrangle Hill and Christiana, DE 7 runs parallel to the west of the DE 1 freeway through suburban areas, passing through Bear. DE 7 joins DE 1 next to the Christiana Mall and comes to an interchange with Interstate 95 (I-95), where DE 1 reaches its northern terminus, before the freeway ends at the DE 58 interchange. After the freeway segment, DE 7 continues north as an at-grade road concurrent with DE 4 through Stanton. From Stanton to the Pennsylvania border, DE 7 heads northwest through suburban areas, passing through Pike Creek.
What is now DE 7 was built as a state highway during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1936, the route was designated to run along its present alignment between US 13 near Red Lion and the Pennsylvania border. From the 1950s to the 1970s, DE 7 became a divided highway between Christiana and Milltown Road. With the construction of the DE 1 freeway in the 1990s, DE 7 was shifted to a portion of the freeway near the Christiana Mall. The route was also extended south to an intersection with US 13 and DE 72 as a result of the relocation of US 13 onto a portion of the freeway. The road also became a divided highway between Milltown Road and DE 72 in the 1990s. In 1999, an interchange was built at DE 58 as a result of a northward extension of the freeway along DE 7. The interchange with I-95 was reconstructed to include flyover ramps in 2013.
## Route description
DE 7 begins at an intersection with US 13 and DE 72 in the community of Wrangle Hill to the west of the city of Delaware City, where the road continues south as part of US 13. From the southern terminus, the route heads north on four-lane divided South Dupont Highway. The road runs between farmland to the west and warehouses to the east, narrowing to two lanes and crossing Norfolk Southern's Reybold Industrial Track railroad line at-grade before passing under the US 13/DE 1 freeway without an interchange. After this, DE 7 becomes an undivided road called Bear-Corbitt Road, with Old South Dupont Highway branching off to the northeast. The route continues north through woodland and homes, crossing Red Lion Creek before reaching an intersection with DE 71 in Red Lion. The road crosses Norfolk Southern's New Castle Secondary railroad line at-grade and heads into Bear. Here, DE 7 widens into a four-lane divided highway as it enters commercial areas and intersects US 40.
After this intersection, the route becomes Bear-Christiana Road and passes through suburban residential development with some farm fields. Farther north, DE 7 narrows into a two-lane undivided road. The highway comes to an intersection with DE 273, where it is briefly a four-lane divided highway. A park and ride lot is located at the northeast corner of this intersection. Following this, DE 7 becomes East Main Street and narrows into a two-lane undivided road, heading through woods and curving to the northwest as it crosses the Christina River. The route enters Christiana and passes homes, intersecting Old Baltimore Pike. At this point, DE 7 turns north onto North Old Baltimore Pike, with the name changing to Stanton-Christiana Road. The route turns east onto four-lane divided Road A and comes to a partial cloverleaf interchange with the DE 1 freeway and Mall Road southwest of the Christiana Mall, a super-regional shopping mall that is the largest in Delaware, and adjacent retail development.
At this point, DE 7 heads north concurrent with DE 1 on a four-lane freeway. The freeway comes to a southbound exit and northbound entrance with Mall Road that serves the Christiana Mall to the east. DE 1/DE 7 continues to a modified cloverleaf interchange with I-95 (Delaware Turnpike), where DE 1 reaches its northern terminus. The I-95 interchange has flyover ramps from northbound DE 1 to northbound I-95 and from southbound I-95 to southbound DE 1 that includes a ramp to DE 7 from the southbound flyover ramp; the flyover ramps split from DE 1 south of the DE 7 interchange. The road heads through more commercial areas and comes to a partial cloverleaf interchange with DE 58, at which point the freeway segment ends; the DE 58 interchange uses the exit numbers from DE 1. In the southbound direction, a collector/distributor road serves both DE 58 (intersecting that road at-grade) and I-95. Past DE 58, DE 7 continues north at-grade as six-lane divided Stanton-Christiana Road, heading to the west of the Stanton Campus of Delaware Technical Community College before intersecting DE 4. At this point DE 4 turns north for a concurrency with DE 7, running through wooded areas with nearby development, including the Hale-Byrnes House, and passing over Amtrak's Northeast Corridor railroad line and the White Clay Creek and Mill Creek near their confluence. The road heads to the east of Delaware Park, which consists of a Thoroughbred horse racetrack, casino, and golf course. Access to Delaware Park is provided by Delaware Park Boulevard. From here, the roadway curves northeast to enter Stanton. At this point, the two routes continue into a commercial area and split into the one-way pair of Mitch Road eastbound and Main Street westbound.
DE 7 splits from DE 4 by heading northwest on four-lane divided Limestone Road. The road runs through suburban residential neighborhoods, coming to a bridge over CSX's Philadelphia Subdivision railroad line. The route continues into business areas and reaches an intersection with DE 2 in Marshallton. Past this junction, DE 7 heads into residential and commercial areas and turns into a four-lane undivided road. The route becomes a divided highway again as it comes to the Milltown Road intersection in the community of Milltown, with a northbound ramp providing access to eastbound Milltown Road and McKennans Church Road. Following this intersection, DE 7 enters the Pike Creek area. The road curves west, crossing Mill Creek and passing to the north of Carousel Park, before turning northwest again and running to the northeast of a park and ride lot located at a church and southwest of Goldey–Beacom College, a private non-profit college. DE 7 curves to the north and comes to an intersection with the northern terminus of DE 72.
Following this, the road continues through suburban development. At the junction with Little Baltimore Road/Brackenville Road, the route curves to the northwest and narrows to a three-lane undivided road with one northbound lane and two southbound lanes, heading into the Hockessin area. DE 7 turns into a two-lane divided highway as it passes southwest of the Lantana Square shopping center, where a park and pool lot is located, and intersects Valley Road. Past this, the route becomes a two-lane undivided road that runs through fields and residential areas, briefly gaining a second northbound lane as it climbs a hill. DE 7 reaches its northern terminus at the Pennsylvania border, where Limestone Road continues north into that state as SR 3013, an unsigned quadrant route that heads to an interchange with PA 41.
The section of DE 7 between Old Baltimore Pike in Christiana and DE 4 in Stanton is part of the Washington–Rochambeau Revolutionary Route, a National Historic Trail. DE 7 has an annual average daily traffic count ranging from a high of 95,797 vehicles at the south end of the DE 4 concurrency to a low of 3,294 vehicles at the Old Baltimore Pike intersection. The portion of DE 7 from the south end of the DE 1 concurrency to the Pennsylvania border is part of the National Highway System.
## History
What would become DE 7 originally existed as a county road by 1920. By 1924, the road was paved between Christiana and Stanton and was upgraded to a state highway between Capitol Trail and New Linden Hill Road. A year later, the road was upgraded to a state highway between Bear and Christiana and between Paper Mill Road and Brackenville Road, with all the sections south of Bear, between New Linden Hill Road and Paper Mill Road and Brackenville Road and the Pennsylvania border proposed as a state highway. By 1931, these sections of state highway had been completed. DE 7 was designated to run from US 13 south of Red Lion north to the Pennsylvania border by 1936, following its present alignment. In 1937, the narrow swing bridge over the Christina River in Christiana was replaced with a stone bridge. A concrete tied-arch bridge was built over the White Clay Creek in Stanton in 1941. By 1959, DE 7 was widened into a divided highway between Stanton and DE 2. The divided highway was extended north to Milltown Road by 1966. By 1985, DE 273 was realigned to bypass Christiana, removing it from a portion of DE 7 through the town. Also at this time, the route was widened into a divided highway from the Christiana Mall north to Stanton. The route was shifted west to a new alignment passing over the Amtrak tracks and the White Clay Creek.
In the 1980s, a freeway relief route for DE 7 was proposed to run between US 13 in Tybouts Corner and I-95 in Christiana in order to reduce congestion along DE 7. In 1988, this relief route became part of DE 1, a freeway connecting the Wilmington area to Dover. The first section of the DE 1 freeway opened in August 1991 between US 13 in Tybouts Corner and US 40 in Bear. Three months later, the freeway opened north to DE 273 in Christiana. The section of DE 1 between DE 273 and I-95 in Christiana opened in April 1993. As a result, DE 7 was relocated onto the DE 1 freeway for a short distance near the Christiana Mall. The DE 1 freeway was extended from US 13 in Tybouts Corner to St. Georges in December 1995, in which it incorporated a portion of the existing US 13 near Red Lion. US 13 was moved to the new freeway between DE 72 and Tybouts Corner, and DE 7 was extended south along the former alignment of US 13 to end at US 13 and DE 72 in Wrangle Hill. The divided highway portion of DE 7 along Limestone Road was extended north from Milltown Road to DE 72 by 1999. DE 7 from I-95 to north of DE 58 became an extension of the freeway in 1999 with an interchange built at DE 58 in a \$25 million construction project.
The Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) reconstructed the cloverleaf interchange at I-95 to include flyover ramps between southbound I-95 and southbound DE 1 and northbound DE 1 and northbound I-95, aiming to reduce merging and congestion at the interchange. Construction began in 2011 with work to replace the bridge over DE 1/DE 7 leading to the Christiana Mall in order to allow room for the flyover ramps; this bridge was completed in March 2012. The ramp from southbound I-95 to southbound DE 1 opened on August 27, 2013 and the ramp from northbound DE 1 to northbound I-95 opened on October 17, 2013, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Governor Jack Markell and DelDOT secretary Shailen Bhatt. A project widening DE 7 to four lanes between Newtown Drive in Bear and DE 273 in Christiana was completed in early 2014.
DelDOT is planning to widen DE 1 and part of this involves reconstructing its interchange with DE 273. One version of the plan involves moving DE 7 onto DE 1 from DE 273 northward and disconnecting East Main Street from the DE 273 interchange. New ramps would connect the southbound lanes of DE 1 directly to DE 7 where East Main Street once did, and the park and ride lot north of DE 273 would be removed. Local opposition to this project is strong as the nearby Christina River frequently floods and some local residents would not be able to evacuate. Also the Christiana Fire House is located in the center of Christiana and would not be able to continue directly onto DE 7 south, thus adding about 1 mile (1.6 km) and sending trucks onto a frequently congested DE 273 east to reach DE 7 south. This was later revised to have the ramps to and from the southbound lanes of DE 1 merge with DE 7 using a roundabout located at the present entrance to the park and ride lot. A public workshop for the widening project was held on October 27, 2021, with the preferred alternative reconstructing the interchange between DE 1 and DE 273 into a single-point urban interchange and keeping DE 7 along its current alignment.
## Major intersections
## See also
|
31,562,053 |
German destroyer Z25
| 1,173,146,711 |
German World War II destroyer
|
[
"1940 ships",
"Destroyers of the French Navy",
"Ships built in Bremen (state)",
"Type 1936A-class destroyers"
] |
Z25 was one of fifteen Type 1936A destroyers built for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) during World War II. Completed in 1940, the ship spent most of the war in Norwegian waters, escorting German ships and laying minefields, despite venturing to France in early 1942 for the Channel Dash, escorting two battleships and a heavy cruiser home through the English Channel. She was active in attacking the Arctic convoys ferrying war materials to the Soviet Union in 1941–1942 but only helped to sink one Allied ship.
Engine problems in 1943 severely restricted her activities and she was transferred to the Baltic in early 1944 after repairs were completed. Z25 spent most of the rest of the war escorting ships during the German Evacuation of East Prussia and bombarding Soviet forces. The ship was captured by the Allies in May 1945 and spent the rest of the year under British control as the Allies decided how to dispose of the captured German ships.
She was ultimately allotted to France in early 1946 and renamed Hoche. She became operational later that year and cruised to French colonies in Africa during 1947. The ship was placed in reserve in early 1949 before beginning a reconstruction from 1950 to 1953 that converted her into a fast destroyer escort. Worn out by 1956, Hoche was deemed too expensive to repair and decommissioned later that year. The ship was condemned in 1958 and scrapped in 1961.
## Design and description
The Type 1936A destroyers were slightly larger than the preceding Type 1936 class and had a heavier armament. They had an overall length of 127 meters (416 ft 8 in) and were 121.90 meters (399 ft 11 in) long at the waterline. The ships had a beam of 12 meters (39 ft 4 in), and a maximum draft of 4.43 meters (14 ft 6 in). They displaced 2,543 long tons (2,584 t) at standard load and 3,543 long tons (3,600 t) at deep load. The two Wagner geared steam turbine sets, each driving one propeller shaft, were designed to produce 70,000 PS (51,000 kW; 69,000 shp) using steam provided by six Wagner water-tube boilers for a designed speed of 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph). Z25 carried a maximum of 791 metric tons (779 long tons) of fuel oil which gave a range of 2,500 nautical miles (4,600 km; 2,900 mi) at 19 knots (35 km/h; 22 mph). Her crew consisted of 11 officers and 321 sailors.
The ship carried four 15-centimeter (5.9 in) TbtsK C/36 guns in single mounts with gun shields, one forward of the superstructure and three aft. They were designated No. 1 to 4 from front to rear. Her anti-aircraft armament consisted of four 3.7-centimeter (1.5 in) C/30 guns in two twin mounts abreast the rear funnel and five 2-centimeter (0.8 in) C/30 guns in single mounts. Z25 carried eight above-water 53.3-centimeter (21 in) torpedo tubes in two power-operated mounts. Two reloads were provided for each mount. She had four depth charge launchers and mine rails could be fitted on the rear deck that had a maximum capacity of 60 mines. 'GHG' (Gruppenhorchgerät) passive hydrophones were fitted to detect submarines and an S-Gerät sonar was also probably fitted. The ship was equipped with a FuMO 24/25 radar set above the bridge.
### Modifications
Z25's single forward 15 cm gun was exchanged for a 15 cm LC/38 twin-gun turret during her mid-1942 refit. This exacerbated the Type 36A's tendency to take water over the bow and reduced their speed to 32.8 knots (60.7 km/h; 37.7 mph). No. 3 gun was later removed to make room for additional AA guns under the 1944 Barbara program. By the end of the war, her anti-aircraft suite consisted of ten 3.7 cm guns in single and twin mounts and sixteen 2 cm weapons in twin and quadruple mounts. Most, if not all, of the 3.7 cm guns were to be the faster-firing Flak M42 model.
A FuMO 21 radar replaced the FuMO 24/25 in 1944 and FuMB 1 Metox, FuMB 3 Bali, and FuMB 6 Palau radar detectors were added that same year. A FuMO 63 Hohentwiel radar was installed in 1944–1945 in lieu of the aft searchlight.
## Service history
Z25 was ordered from AG Weser (Deschimag) on 23 April 1938. The ship was laid down at Deschimag's Bremen shipyard as yard number W959 on 15 February 1939, launched on 16 March 1940, and commissioned on 30 November. She finished working up on 26 June 1941 and sailed for Norway, but ran aground off Haugesund, damaging both propellers, and had to return to Bremen for repairs. Z25 was assigned to escort the Baltic Fleet, a temporary formation built around the battleship Tirpitz, as it sortied into the Sea of Åland on 23–29 September to forestall any attempt by the Soviet Red Banner Baltic Fleet to breakout from the Gulf of Finland.
Two months later Z25 accompanied her sister ships, Z23 and Z27 from Germany to Norway and arrived in Tromsø on 6 December where she was assigned to the 8. Zerstörerflottile (8th Destroyer Flotilla). After arriving in Kirkenes, the ship replaced Z26 as the flagship of Kapitän zur See (Captain) Hans Erdmenger, commander of the flotilla, as the latter destroyer had engine problems and had to return to Germany for repairs. She led her sisters Z23, Z24 and Z27 out into the Barents Sea on 16 December 1941, searching for Allied ships off the coast of the Kola Peninsula. The following day, Z25's radar spotted two ships in heavy fog at a range of 37.5 kilometers (23.3 mi). The Germans thought that they were Soviet destroyers, but they were actually two British minesweepers, Hazard and Speedy, sailing to rendezvous with Convoy QP 6. The Germans intercepted them, but the heavy fog and icing precluded accurate gunfire. The British ships were able to escape despite four hits on Speedy and the heavy expenditure of ammunition; Z25 and Z27 attempted to fire 11 torpedoes between them, but were only able to launch one each. On 13 January 1942, Z25 escorted Z23 and Z24 as they laid a minefield in the western channel of the White Sea.
On the 29th, Z25 sailed from Kirkenes to rendezvous with the destroyer Z7 Hermann Schoemann at Vlissingen, the Netherlands, before continuing onward together to Brest, France, where they arrived on 7 February as part of the preparations for the Channel Dash. The German ships departed Brest on 11 February, totally surprising the British. During the sporadic attacks by the British, Z25 is not known to have engaged any British ships or aircraft, not was she damaged in any way. Shortly afterwards, the ship joined four other destroyers in escorting the heavy cruisers Prinz Eugen and Admiral Scheer to Trondheim. Heavy weather forced three of the destroyers to return to port before reaching their destination and Prinz Eugen was badly damaged by a British submarine after their separation.
### Anti-convoy operations
On 6 March, Tirpitz, escorted by Z25 and three other destroyers, sortied to attack the returning Convoy QP 8 and the Russia-bound PQ 12 as part of Operation Sportpalast (Sports Palace). The following morning, Admiral Otto Ciliax, commanding the operation, ordered the destroyers to search independently for Allied ships and they stumbled across the 2,815-gross register ton (GRT) Soviet freighter SS Ijora, a straggler from QP 8, later that afternoon and sank her. Tirpitz rejoined them shortly afterwards and Ciliax ordered the destroyers back to Trondheim on the 8th after failing to refuel them the previous night due to heavy seas and icing.
On 28 March, Z26 and her sisters Z24 and Z25 departed the Varangerfjord in an attempt to intercept Convoy PQ 13. Later that night they rescued 61 survivors of the sunken freighter SS Empire Ranger then sank the straggling 4,687 GRT freighter SS Bateau. They rescued 7 survivors before resuming the search for the convoy. The light cruiser HMS Trinidad, escorted by the destroyer HMS Fury, spotted the German ships with her radar at 08:49 on the 29th and was spotted herself around that same time. Both sides opened fire at the point-blank range of 3,200 yards (2,900 m) in a snowstorm. Trinidad engaged the leading German destroyer, Z26, badly damaging her, and then switched to Z25 without making any hits. Between them the destroyers fired 19 torpedoes at the cruiser, all of which missed after Trinidad turned away, and hit her twice with their 15 cm guns, inflicting only minor damage. The British ships maneuvered to avoid torpedoes, which forced them to disengage, and Z26 accidentally became separated from her sisters.
After Fury turned away to render assistance to the cruiser, the destroyer HMS Eclipse took up the pursuit, crippling Z26 by 10:20. Eclipse was maneuvering to give the German destroyer the coup de grâce with a torpedo when the snowstorm ended and visibility increased, revealing Z24 and Z25 approaching. They promptly opened fire at Eclipse, hitting her twice and wounding nine men, before she could find cover in a squall at 10:35. The German ships did not purse Eclipse, preferring to heave to and take off 88 survivors from Z26.
The two destroyers, now reinforced by Z7 Hermann Schoemann and assigned to Zerstörergruppe Arktis (Destroyer Group Arctic), commanded by Kapitän zur See Alfred Schulze-Hinrichs, searched unsuccessfully for Convoys PQ 14 and QP 10 on 11 April. On 30 April torpedoed and crippled the light cruiser Edinburgh, part of the close escort for Convoy QP 11. Later that day, the trio of destroyers were ordered to intercept her. The following afternoon they encountered the main body of the convoy and attacked in limited visibility. Over the next four hours, they made five attempts to close with the convoy, but the four escorting British destroyers were able to keep themselves between the Germans and the convoy. After being rebuffed, Schulze-Hinrichs decided to break off the attack and search for his original objective. The German ships were only able to sink the 2,847 GRT freighter, SS Tsiolkovsky, with torpedoes from Z24 and Z25, and badly damage the escort destroyer Amazon with gunfire. The British ships did not make any hits on the German destroyers.
Later that day, Edinburgh's original escort of two destroyers was augmented by four British minesweepers and a small Russian tugboat. The cruiser was steaming under her own power at a speed of about 3 knots (5.6 km/h; 3.5 mph) by the morning of 2 May with steering provided by the tugboat. She was spotted by the Germans and Z7 Hermann Schoemann exchanged fire with the minesweeper Harrier at about 06:27. Edinburgh then cast off her tow and increased speed to her maximum of about 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph), steering in a circle. While Z7 Hermann Schoemann maneuvered to obtain a good position from which to fire torpedoes, the cruiser opened fire at 06:36, almost immediately severing the main steam line, which disabled the engines. Z25 initially engaged the destroyer Forester, hitting her three times at about 06:50, which disabled two guns and knocked out her power with a hit in her forward boiler room. Her sister Foresight passed in front of Forester a few minutes later to draw the attention of Z24 and Z25, which succeeded all too well as she was hit four times by 07:24, disabling the engines and leaving her with only a single gun operable. In the meantime, the cruiser had been hit once more by a torpedo at 07:02, although it only knocked out her engines and gave her a list to port. Rather than sink any of the three disabled British ships or the lightly armed minesweepers, Z24 and Z25 concentrated on rescuing the crew of the drifting Z7 Hermann Schoemann despite occasional British shells. The former made multiple attempts to come alongside to take off about 210 survivors while the latter laid a smoke screen. Z7 Hermann Schoemann was then scuttled using her own depth charges. Z24 was unscathed during the battle, but Z25 was hit in the radio room, killing four and wounding seven. In Operation Zauberflote (Magic Flute), Z25, the destroyer Z5 Paul Jacobi, and two torpedo boats escorted the badly damaged Prinz Eugen from Trondheim to Kiel from 16–18 May. Shortly after her arrival, the destroyer began a lengthy refit that lasted until November.
On 11 November, the ship escorted the light cruiser Nürnberg from Swinemünde to Trondheim. In February 1943, she sailed to Germany in preparation for continuing onward to France, but engine problems caused that plan to be cancelled on 5 March. Z25 returned to Norwegian waters on April 22, but continuing engine problems kept her mostly inactive before her return to Germany for an overhaul in August. While running sea trials in Danzig Bay, the shock wave from a nearby mine explosion disabled her port turbine and required further repairs.
### Baltic operations
Now assigned to the 6. Zerstörerflotille, Z25 and the other three destroyers of the flotilla were transferred to the Gulf of Finland to support minelaying operations there, Z25 arriving at Reval, Estonia, on 13 February 1944. The flotilla was initially tasked to escort convoys between Libau, Latvia, and Reval, but laid its first minefield in Narva Bay on 12 March while bombarding Soviet positions on the eastern shore of the bay. They were primarily tasked as minelayers through July. In preparation for Operation Tanne West, the occupation of Åland in case of Finnish surrender, the flotilla escorted the heavy cruiser Lützow to the island of Utö on 28 June, but the operation was canceled and the ships returned to port.
On 30 July and 1 August Z25 and three other destroyers of the flotilla sailed into the Gulf of Riga to bombard Soviet positions inland. On 5 August, they escorted Prinz Eugen as she engaged targets on the island of Oesel, Estonia, and in Latvia on 19–20 August. Between 15 and 20 September, the ship helped to evacuate 23,172 people from Reval in the face of the advancing Soviets. On 21 August, the ship, together with the destroyer Z28, ferried 370 people from Baltischport, Estonia, to Libau. The following day, she escorted ships loaded with evacuees from the Sea of Åland to Gotenhafen, Germany. On 10 October, Z25 ferried 200 reinforcements to Memel and evacuated 200 female naval auxiliaries the next day. Upon her return, the ship bombarded targets near Memel. She was then slightly damaged by a presumed near-miss from a torpedo and the vibrations from her own guns caused an oil leak on one of her fuel tanks.
On 4 November, Z25 was transferred to the 8. Zerstörerflotille and supported Lützow and Prinz Eugen as they engaged Soviet positions in Sworbe, on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, between 19 and 24 November. She was refitted in December and then bombarded Soviet troops east and south of Königsberg, together with Prinz Eugen and two torpedo boats on 29–30 January 1945 and again on 2–5 February to allow cut-off German Army units to break through into friendly territory. The ship then escorted many refugee ships carrying evacuees between Gotenhafen and Sassnitz before bombarding Soviet positions near the former city on the 20th. A month later, Z25 and Z5 Paul Jacobi escorted the ocean liner Potsdam, the troopship SS Goya and the target ship Canonier as they ferried 22,000 refugees to Copenhagen, Denmark, on 26 March. The ship continued to escort refugee ships between Hela and friendly territory through April and into May. On the 5th, she helped to convey 45,000 refugees to Copenhagen and returned to ferry 20,000 more to Glücksburg, Germany, on the 9th. The following day, Z25 was decommissioned.
### French service
After the war Z25 sailed to Wilhelmshaven and was overhauled to keep her seaworthy while the Allies decided how to divide the surviving ships of the Kriegsmarine amongst themselves as war reparations. The ship was allotted to Great Britain in late 1945 and arrived in Rosyth, Scotland, on 6 January 1946. Following protests by France over her exclusion, the British transferred four of the destroyers that they had been allotted and Z25 arrived in Cherbourg on 2 February. Two days later, she was commissioned into the French Navy with the name of Hoche, after General Lazare Hoche. The ship was assigned to the 1st Division of Large Destroyers (contre-torpilleurs) and entered service in September when she conducted training with the light carrier Arromanches. In March–June 1947, she formed part of the escort for the battleship Richelieu as the President of France, Vincent Auriol, visited West and North Africa. Hoche visited Portsmouth, England, in December 1948 before she was reduced to reserve on 1 January 1949. From 1950 to 1953, the ship was rebuilt into a escorteur rapide (fast escort destroyer) with new weapons and electronics and was based in Toulon for anti-submarine trials. A major refit was necessary by 1956, but it was not economical and she was placed in reserve on 20 August before being decommissioned on 1 September. Hoche was condemned and redesignated Q102 on 2 January 1958; she was listed for sale on 30 June and scrapped in 1961.
|
226,320 |
Flag of Western Australia
| 1,161,595,238 |
State flag of Western Australia
|
[
"1953 establishments in Australia",
"Black swans",
"Blue Ensigns",
"Flags displaying animals",
"Flags introduced in 1953",
"Flags of Australian states and territories",
"Flags that incorporate the Union Jack",
"Western Australia"
] |
The flag of Western Australia consists of a Blue Ensign defaced with the badge of the state. Adopted in 1953 to replace a similar design used from the time when the state was still a British colony, it has been the flag of Western Australia since 3 November of that year. The design of the present flag entailed reversing the direction of the black swan so that it faced towards the hoist. This was done in order to adhere to vexillological convention. Western Australia's flag is similar to the flags of the other five Australian states, which are also Blue Ensigns with their respective state badges. When flown with those state flags and the national flag, it is sixth in the order of precedence. This is indicative of its position on the Commonwealth Coat of Arms.
## History
The first confirmed European sighting of the western coast of Australia was made by the Dutch East India Company in the early 1600s. During an expedition in January 1697 to what is now Cottesloe, Willem de Vlamingh observed black swans in habitation at the estuary of the river there. He consequently named this body of water the Swan River (Zwaanenrivier in Dutch). However, the Dutch abandoned aspirations to annex the area, having discerned poor prospects for trade or colonisation. The British later established settlements at Fremantle and Perth in June 1829. These were collectively called the Swan River Colony.
The black swan soon became the unofficial symbol of the territory. For instance, it was depicted on its banknotes, which began circulating several years after the establishment of the colony. The bird was also featured on the Swan River Guardian, the settlement's first newspaper, as well as the inaugural issue of the Western Australian Government Gazette. Both of these were first printed in 1836. It was subsequently portrayed on the first postage stamps issued by the colony in 1854.
An Order in Council was promulgated on 17 August 1869, instructing British colonial governors to fly the British ensign defaced with the coat of arms or badge of the territory. On 3 January of the following year, Frederick Weld, the Governor of Western Australia, put forward a proposed design of the badge that depicted a black swan on a yellow backdrop. His reasoning for this sketch was that the colony "at its commencement was usually known as the Swan River Settlement, and the Black Swan is represented upon its seal, and has always been considered as its special badge, or cognizance". The design was officially confirmed in a despatch bearing the date of 27 November 1875 by his successor, William C. F. Robinson. It was retained as the flag of the new state of Western Australia after the Federation of Australia in 1901.
Representatives from the College of Arms in London noted in 1936 that the direction of the swan was out of place. Vexillological convention dictates that all objects on a flag should face towards the hoist, which is the "point of honour". However, nothing was done to address this irregularity until the run-up to the royal visit in 1954. The issue was brought before the Parliament of Western Australia and the direction of the swan was corrected on 3 November 1953.
## Design
### Description
The flag of Western Australia has an aspect ratio of 1:2. The official colour scheme, according to the website of the Government of Western Australia, follows the Pantone Matching System as indicated below. The colour numbers for the flag's black and white shades are not specified.
### Symbolism
The colours and symbols of the flag carry cultural, political, and regional meanings. The Blue Ensign is a conspicuous symbol of Great Britain, Australia's mother country. Consequently, it is preserved on the flags of all six Australian states, with their badges in the fly being the sole difference between them. The black swan alludes to the state of Western Australia itself. It is native to the state, and lent its name to the Swan River Colony (the precursor to modern-day Western Australia). It was subsequently adopted as the bird emblem of the state on 25 July 1973. The black swan has come to be employed as a representation of "an Australian nationalistic identity against the English imperialist master", according to the author Rodney James Giblett.
## Protocol
Advice regarding flag etiquette is the responsibility of the state's Department of the Premier and Cabinet. When flown together with the flag of Australia and the other state and territorial flags, the flag of Western Australia is sixth in the hierarchical order (after the national flag and, in descending order of precedence, the flags of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia). This reflects the position of its state badge on the shield of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms, where it appears as the fifth quarter on the second row.
The guidelines state that the flag is not to touch the ground, nor should it be flown on the same flagpole that displays another flag. It ought to be hoisted not before first light and lowered not later than dusk, unless the flag is illuminated at night. The only exception to this is if the state flag is flown at half-mast, in which case it is never to be flown throughout the night, regardless of whether it would be illuminated. It is not to be displayed in an inverted manner, even if this is intended to serve as a distress signal.
## Variants
## See also
- Flags of the governors of the Australian states
- List of Australian flags
|
14,439,096 |
Joan Curran
| 1,170,909,294 |
Welsh physicist
|
[
"1916 births",
"1999 deaths",
"20th-century British women scientists",
"Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge",
"Deaths from cancer in Scotland",
"Manhattan Project people",
"People associated with radar",
"Scientists from Swansea",
"Weapons scientists and engineers",
"Welsh physicists",
"Welsh women physicists",
"Welsh women scientists",
"Wives of knights",
"Women on the Manhattan Project"
] |
Joan, Lady Curran (26 February 1916 – 10 February 1999), born Joan Elizabeth Strothers, was a Welsh physicist who played important roles in the development of radar and the atomic bomb during the Second World War. She invented chaff, a radar countermeasure technique credited with reducing losses among Allied bomber crews. She also worked on the development of the proximity fuse and the electromagnetic isotope separation process for the atomic bomb.
In later life she became a founding member of the Scottish Society for the Parents of Mentally Handicapped Children.
## Early life
Joan Elizabeth Strothers was born on 26 February 1916 in Swansea, Wales, the daughter of an optician, Charles William Strothers, and his wife, Margaret Beatrice, née Millington. She was educated at Swansea Girls' High School, and in 1934 won an open scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1935, she rowed for the ladies' university eight, in the first real Women's boat race against Oxford. She gained an honours degree in physics, which was not awarded because it was before women were allowed Cambridge degrees. In her seventies, in 1987, she was honoured with the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa by the University of Strathclyde.
Strothers, who "had the scientific equivalent of gardening green fingers", was awarded a government grant to study for a higher degree, and elected to go to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where she joined Sam Curran in a team under the direction of Philip Dee. She soon established a reputation for "extreme dexterity and being outstandingly neat and skilful in the deployment of equipment." In 1939, Dee proposed that the team spend a month at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield. They arrived on 1 September 1939. Two days later, Britain declared war on Germany and thus entered the Second World War.
## Second World War
Instead of returning to the Cavendish, the team moved to Exeter, where Dee and three others worked on developing rockets as anti-aircraft weapons, while Strothers and Curran joined a group under John Coles working on the development of the proximity fuse. Strothers was based at Leeson House and Durnford School. She and Curran developed a workable fuse, which was codenamed VT, an acronym of "Variable Time fuze". The system was a small, short-range, Doppler radar that used a clever circuit. However, Britain lacked the capacity to mass-produce the fuze, so the design was shown to the United States by the Tizard Mission in late 1940. The Americans perfected and mass-produced the fuse. In due course, these proximity fuses arrived in the United Kingdom, where they played an important part in the defence of the kingdom against the V-1 flying bomb.
Strothers married Curran on 7 November 1940. Soon afterwards they were transferred to the Telecommunications Research Establishment near Swanage, where Sam worked on centimetric radar, while Joan joined the Counter Measures Group in an adjoining lab. It was with this group, at Swanage, and later at Malvern, that Joan devised the technique that was codenamed Window, which is also known as chaff. She tried various types of radar reflectors, including wires and sheets, before settling on strips of tin foil 1 to 2 centimetres (0.39 to 0.79 in) wide and 25 centimetres (9.8 in) long that could be scattered from bombers, thus disrupting the enemy's radar. Window was first employed in Operation Gomorrah, a series of raids on Hamburg, and resulted in a much lower loss rate than usual. As part of Operation Taxable on 5–6 June 1944, Window was dropped by Avro Lancasters of 617 Squadron to synthesise a phantom invasion force of ships in the Straits of Dover and keep the Germans unsure as to whether the brunt of the Allied assault would fall on Normandy or in the Pas de Calais area. R. V. Jones later declared: "In my opinion, Joan Curran made an even greater contribution to victory, in 1945, than Sam."
In early 1944 the Currans were part of a group of British scientists invited to go to the US to take part in the Manhattan Project – the Allied project to develop an atomic bomb. They joined the British Mission at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in California, headed by Mark Oliphant, a distinguished Australian scientist that Joan knew from the Cavendish Laboratory. Oliphant also acted as de facto deputy to Ernest Lawrence, the director of the Radiation Laboratory. The mission of the laboratory was to develop the electromagnetic isotope separation process to create enriched uranium for use in atomic bombs.
While at Berkeley, Joan gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Sheena, who was born severely mentally handicapped. They later had three sons, all of whom went on to complete a PhD.
## Later life
After the war ended, Sam took up an offer from Dee to become Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University. In Glasgow, the Currans, together with a few friends, set up the Scottish Society for the Parents of Mentally Handicapped Children (Enable), which eventually grew to 100 branches and more than 5000 members. Later, when Joan was a member of the Greater Glasgow Health Board and the Scottish Special Housing Association, the needs of the disabled were always at the forefront of her mind, and she did much to promote their welfare. She took a close interest in the work of the Council for Access for the Disabled and helped improve the range of facilities, especially for disabled university students.
Sam worked at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston on the development of the British hydrogen bomb from 1955 to 1959. He returned to Glasgow in 1959 as principal of the Royal College of Science and Technology. When it became the University of Strathclyde in 1964, the first new university in Scotland in 384 years, he became its first Principal and Vice Chancellor. While her husband was Principal, Joan founded the Strathclyde Women's Group and became its president. Joan Curran was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Strathclyde in 1987.
During the war the Polish 1st Armoured Division had been based in Scotland, establishing ties between the community and Poland. Joan promoted a special relationship with the Technical University of Lodz, and also devoted care and attention to the children's hospital of that city. Later she established the Lady Curran Endowment fund for overseas, particularly Polish, students.
Sam died on 25 February 1998. While gravely ill with cancer in 1998, Joan unveiled a memorial plaque in Barony Hall, Glasgow, to commemorate her husband, and it was announced that the walled garden at Ross Priory, on Loch Lomondside, was to be named in her honour, and the Joan Curran Summer House would be built there. Joan died on 10 February 1999, and was cremated at the Daldowie Crematorium. Her daughter, Sheena, three sons and three grandsons survived her.
|
1,890,489 |
Arizona State Route 92
| 1,102,334,617 |
Former state highway in Arizona, United States
|
[
"San Pedro Valley (Arizona)",
"Sierra Vista, Arizona",
"State highways in Arizona",
"Transportation in Cochise County, Arizona"
] |
State Route 92 (SR 92) is a state highway in the U.S. state of Arizona. Running roughly in an "L"-shaped pattern, SR 92 begins at SR 90 in Sierra Vista and ends at a traffic circle in Bisbee along SR 80, running entirely within Cochise County. The route was constructed and numbered as SR 92 in the late 1930s with a route that traveled further north past Sierra Vista than it does today. The routing was corrected in the 1960s.
## Route description
SR 92 begins at an intersection with Fry Boulevard in Sierra Vista. SR 90 is the designation along the roads heading north and east from the intersection. From here, SR 92 heads south through Sierra Vista, passing by residential areas in a desert terrain. The road then passes through the town of Nicksville in Sierra Vista Southeast while the west side of the route is flanked by the Coronado National Forest, in which Huachuca Mountains are located. SR 92 then turns eastward, passing within several miles within the Mexico–United States border. The route passes the towns of Miracle Valley and Palominas before turning northeast. The roadway enters the town of Bisbee, meeting its terminus at a traffic circle in the city.
The highway is maintained by the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), which is responsible for maintaining SR 92 like all other highways around the state. As part of this role, ADOT periodically surveys traffic along its routes. These surveys are most often presented in the form of average annual daily traffic, which is the number of vehicles who use the route on any average day during the year. In 2009, ADOT calculated that around as few as 3,700 vehicles used the route daily near Palominas and as many as 31,000 daily near the northern terminus at Sierra Vista. No part of the highway has been listed in the National Highway System, a system of roads in the United States important to the nation's economy, defense, and mobility.
## History
The highway was designated in 1936, originating at SR 82 in Whetstone and heading south into Sierra Vista. From there, it turned east for a stretch and then turned south following its current route to Bisbee. At this time, the section of the route corresponding to the current routing was paved, while the northern section was still a gravel road. The northern section was improved in 1942. In 1961, SR 90 took over the segment of SR 92 north of Sierra Vista, leaving SR 92 to the section south of the city and east to Bisbee. Since then, the routing has not been modified.
## Junction list
|
5,400,592 |
New York State Route 21
| 1,091,195,831 |
New York state highway
|
[
"State highways in New York (state)",
"Transportation in Allegany County, New York",
"Transportation in Ontario County, New York",
"Transportation in Steuben County, New York",
"Transportation in Wayne County, New York",
"Transportation in Yates County, New York"
] |
New York State Route 21 (NY 21) is a state highway extending for about one hundred miles (160.9 km) through the western part of New York in the United States. The southern terminus of the route is at an intersection with NY 417 in the village of Andover, and its northern terminus is at a junction with NY 104 in the town of Williamson. In between, NY 21 serves the cities of Hornell and Canandaigua and intersects several major east–west routes, including the Southern Tier Expressway (I-86/NY 17) near Hornell, the conjoined routes of U.S. Route 20 (US 20) and NY 5 in Canandaigua, the New York State Thruway (I-90) in Manchester, and NY 31 in Palmyra.
NY 21 originally extended from the Pennsylvania state line in the south to Lake Ontario in the north when it was assigned as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York. South of Hornell, the route followed modern NY 36. NY 21 was rerouted to follow its current alignment south of Hornell in the 1950s and truncated on its northern end to Williamson in 1980. Other changes of local importance, mostly realignments to bypass communities along the route, have also occurred at various points in the route's history. NY 21 originally had an alternate route around Canandaigua Lake; however, that highway—designated NY 21A—was eliminated in the 1940s.
## Route description
### Andover to Naples
NY 21 begins at an intersection with NY 417 in the village of Andover. The route heads northward, paralleling the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad (WNYP) through a rural stretch of eastern Allegany County. At Alfred Station, located just east of the village of Alfred, the highway meets the eastern terminus of NY 244. NY 21 and the WNYP head northeast through the village of Almond to the Steuben County line, where the road and rail line begin to turn to the southeast toward Hornell. The portion of NY 21 near Almond briefly parallels the Southern Tier Expressway, designated Interstate 86 (I-86) and NY 17. East of the county line, NY 21 leaves the vicinity of the expressway and passes through another undeveloped stretch to reach the city of Hornell, where it becomes West Main Street.
The highway follows West Main Street for several blocks into the city's downtown district, where it crosses the Norfolk Southern Railway's Southern Tier Line and intersects NY 36. NY 21 turns north onto NY 36, separating from the WNYP and forming a concurrency with NY 36 north along a four-lane divided highway known as the Maple City Bypass. The overlap ends north of the city limits in the town of Hornellsville, where NY 21 splits from NY 36 and resumes its northeasterly track. Not far to the north of this point is exit 34 of the Southern Tier Expressway, accessed by way of NY 36. From Hornell, NY 21 heads northeast through progressively less developed areas as it winds its way across the hilly terrain of the Southern Tier. For the next 15 miles (24 km), NY 21 serves only small, roadside hamlets, such as Fremont, Haskinville, and Loon Lake.
North of Haskinville, NY 21 takes on a more northerly course through the county that eventually brings it to the village of Wayland, where it intersects I-390 at exit 3 south of the village. The interchange also serves as the southern terminus of NY 15 and is adjacent to the north end of NY 415, which terminates north of the exit at NY 21. NY 15 joins NY 21 north into the center of Wayland, where the two routes separate upon intersecting NY 63. While NY 15 continues north from the village into Livingston County, NY 21 leaves Wayland on an east–west alignment, roughly paralleling the northern county line and a B&H Rail Corporation line as it runs through a valley surrounding the Cohocton River. After 6 miles (9.7 km), the road enters the hamlet of North Cohocton, centered around NY 21's junction with the northern terminus of NY 371.
While the river, its valley, and the rail line proceed south from North Cohocton, NY 21 turns to the northeast, ascending out of the valley and finally crossing the county line, at this point bordering Ontario County. The route meanders across another area of hilly, undeveloped terrain to the village of Naples, home to the north end of NY 53 and the south end of NY 245. NY 21 meets the two routes at opposite ends of the community, with NY 53 terminating south of the village center and NY 245 beginning to its north. Naples also serves as NY 21's entrance to the Finger Lakes region; the village itself is located in the southernmost part of the Canandaigua Lake valley.
### Naples to Williamson
NY 21 continues north from Naples, running alongside the western edge of the lake valley, and eventually the lake itself. Near Woodville, a hamlet 3 miles (4.8 km) north of Naples, the route briefly enters Yates County for just over a half-mile (0.8 km) before reentering Ontario County. It serves lakeside homes and cottages in the town of South Bristol for another 2 miles (3.2 km), after which the road begins to climb the side of the valley and meander toward the hamlet of Bristol Springs. Here, the road forks, with NY 64 beginning to the left (west) and NY 21 continuing to the right (north). While NY 64 heads northwest to Rochester, NY 21 progresses to the northeast, overlooking Canandaigua Lake on its way through mostly isolated areas of the town of Canandaigua. The route eventually reaches the outskirts of the city of Canandaigua, where it intersects US 20 and NY 5.
At this point, NY 21 turns east, joining US 20 and NY 5 as all three routes head around the southwestern portion of the city. The primary portion of the bypass ends about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) later at an intersection with South Main Street; the junction also marks the east end of the overlap between the three routes and the south end of NY 332. NY 21 turns north onto South Main Street, following NY 332 through the city's historic downtown district. The two routes pass by 426 South Main Street, Benham House, and the city's former United States Post Office, all properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, before splitting at the junction of Gibson and North Main streets. NY 332 continues north from this point on North Main Street toward Victor while NY 21 follows Gibson Street northeastward through a residential section of the city. It passes Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park and the city's VA Hospital before leaving the Canandaigua city limits.
Outside the Canandaigua city limits, the area surrounding NY 21 becomes rural once again; however, the surrounding terrain is more level than it was south of the city. The route heads northeast through farmland to Chapin, a small hamlet in the town of Hopewell, where it intersects the south end of NY 488 and turns to take on a more northerly course. Not far to the north are the adjacent villages of Shortsville and Manchester, roughly separated by the Ontario Central Railroad. Here, NY 21 passes under the railroad and intersects both NY 96 and the New York State Thruway (I-90) at exit 43 just north of the Manchester village center. Past the Thruway, NY 21 becomes rural in nature once more as it runs across rolling terrain to the Wayne County line.
Within Wayne County, the area around NY 21 becomes more developed as it enters the village of Palmyra, where the road is village-maintained from the southern village line to its junction with NY 31 in the village's historic center. The route briefly overlaps NY 31 along East Main Street before crossing both the Erie Canal and the CSX Transportation-owned Rochester Subdivision on its way out of the village. From Palmyra to Williamson, the land surrounding NY 21 is predominantly rural in nature. However, midway between the two locations, NY 21 comes close to the hamlet of Marion, which it bypasses to the west. In Williamson, NY 21 passes through the town center at a junction with Ridge Road before ending at an intersection with NY 104 in a more commercial section of the town.
## History
### Origins
Prior to the American Revolution, the path of modern NY 21 north of Canandaigua was part of an old Native American trail connecting Seneca Lake to Lake Ontario by way of Canandaigua Lake. The trail began in the vicinity of Geneva and went west to Canandaigua on a path now occupied by US 20 and NY 5. It continued north from Canandaigua, passing through the village of Palmyra and the hamlet of Marion before reaching the Lake Ontario shoreline at Pultneyville. Construction to convert the Canandaigua–Marion section of the trail into a road was completed in 1794. The remainder of the trail north to Pultneyville was converted into a road approximately three years later.
The Canandaigua–Pultneyville highway served as a post road in the years that followed. At some point, the section of the highway between Palmyra and Marion, initially a corduroy road, was rebuilt as a plank road and tolled. The highway fell into disrepair over the years, leading travelers to conceive ways to avoid paying toll. The toll booths were eventually removed, and the road was later covered with dirt and converted into a stage road. By the 1920s, the state of New York had assumed ownership of the Canandaigua–Pultneyville highway. In the mid-1920s, it became part of NY 72, a north–south highway extending from NY 52 in Naples to the Lake Ontario shoreline in Pultneyville by way of the western side of Canandaigua Lake.
### Establishment
In the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, NY 72 became part of NY 21, a new route extending from the Pennsylvania state line at Troupsburg to Pultneyville. It followed what is now NY 36 from the state line to Hornell and modern County Route 121 (CR 121), NY 415, and NY 371 between Loon Lake and North Cohocton (via Cohocton). The remainder of NY 21 roughly followed its current alignment. At the same time, what is now NY 21 from Andover to Hornell was designated as the western half of NY 17F while the section between Loon Lake and modern NY 415 was assigned NY 371. The remaining piece around Wayland was part of NY 2 south of Wayland and part of the new NY 39 from Wayland to Cohocton. NY 39 overlapped NY 21 from Cohocton to Naples, where it forked from NY 21 and continued east on modern NY 245.
Several portions of current NY 21 south of Naples had carried designations prior to 1930. In 1924, the Andover–Hornell segment was designated as part of NY 17; at the same time, the short piece between modern NY 415 and the center of Wayland became part of NY 4. By 1926, the portion connecting Wayland to Naples was included in the new NY 52. NY 4 was renumbered to NY 2 in 1927 to eliminate numerical duplication with the new US 4.
### Realignments and truncations
The alignments of NY 21 and NY 371 between Loon Lake and Cohocton were flipped c. 1937, routing NY 21 through the village of Wayland instead. The realignment extended NY 21's overlap with NY 39 west to Wayland and created an overlap with NY 2 south of the village. NY 2 was absorbed into an extended US 15 (now NY 15) by the following year. In the early 1940s, the NY 17F designation was eliminated and replaced with an extended NY 36 from Andover to Hornell. The alignments of NY 36 and NY 21 south of Hornell were flipped in the early 1950s, placing both routes on their current alignments south of the city.
On April 1, 1980, NY 21 was truncated to its present northern terminus at NY 104 in Williamson as part of a highway maintenance swap between New York State and Wayne County. In the swap, ownership and maintenance of NY 21 north of Williamson was transferred from the state of New York to the county in exchange for maintenance of NY 441 between the Monroe–Wayne county line and NY 350. The former routing of NY 21 north to Lake Road (CR 101) in Pultneyville is now designated as CR 120.
Until the 1980s, NY 21 entered Canandaigua on Bristol Street and followed it to South Main Street (then-US 20 and NY 5), where it joined its current alignment. When the Western Bypass around the southwestern fringe of the city was constructed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, US 20 and NY 5 were realigned to follow the highway around the city. NY 21 was also realigned at this time to follow its modern routing on the bypass and South Main Street. The segment of Bristol Street vacated by NY 21 between the Western Bypass and the Canandaigua city line was maintained by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) as unsigned NY 943A until September 1, 1996, when maintenance of the road was turned over to the town of Canandaigua. However, the designation remained in NYSDOT documents until 2007.
## NY 21A
NY 21A was an alternate route of NY 21 along the eastern side of Canandaigua Lake. When it was assigned as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, it began at NY 21 north of the village of Naples and ran along the east shore of the lake to eastern Canandaigua, where it ended at US 20 and NY 5. In between, NY 21A passed through the lakeside hamlet of Vine Valley. The route was truncated c. 1939 to begin in Vine Valley, separating it from its parent route. It was eliminated entirely in the early 1940s when most of NY 21A was absorbed by NY 364.
## Major intersections
## See also
- List of county routes in Wayne County, New York
|
1,856,635 |
M-20 (Michigan highway)
| 1,166,530,552 |
State highway in Michigan, United States
|
[
"State highways in Michigan",
"Transportation in Bay County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Isabella County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Mecosta County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Midland County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Newaygo County, Michigan",
"Transportation in Oceana County, Michigan",
"U.S. Route 10"
] |
M-20 is a state trunkline highway in the US state of Michigan that runs from New Era to Midland. It crosses through rural Lower Peninsula forest land between the two ends. The highway serves the college towns of Big Rapids and Mt. Pleasant, home of the main campuses of Ferris State University and Central Michigan University, both located near the trunkline.
The original July 1919 routing took M-20 farther north along a corridor now used by US Highway 10 (US 10). The M-20 designation was shifted south to the current corridor in 1926. The eastern end was truncated from Bay City to Midland in 1960, following the opening of a freeway between the two cities. The western end was rerouted from Muskegon to New Era in 1969.
## Route description
M-20 starts near Lake Michigan at the US 31 freeway in New Era where it runs east through the Manistee National Forest, crossing the North Branch of the White River near Ferry and the South Branch near Hesperia on the way to White Cloud. There it turns south along M-37 and then east along a new routing following Baseline and Newcosta roads north of the Hardy Dam to meet the US 131 freeway at exit 131 near Stanwood. M-20 turns north, running concurrently along the US 131 freeway to Big Rapids and joins Business US 131 (Bus. US 131) at exit 139. The section along the freeway is listed on the National Highway System (NHS), a system of highways important to the nation's economy, defense and mobility. Together Bus. US 131/M-20 runs along the Perry Street commercial corridor to State Street near the main campus of Ferris State University. The business loop turns north by the campus and at Maple Street, M-20 turns eastward to cross the Muskegon River in downtown Big Rapids, north of the campus. M-20 zig-zags southeast of town bypassing the Canadian Lakes area and turns due east through rural Remus in Mecosta County and the Isabella Indian Reservation in neighboring Isabella County.
In Mt. Pleasant, M-20 runs near the campus of Central Michigan University crossing the Chippewa River, and the trunkline joins Bus. US 127 along the Mission Street business area to Pickard Road. The highway turns east on Pickard and passes under the US 127 freeway near the Soaring Eagle Casino. From Mt. Pleasant to Midland, M-20 is designed as a four–lane highway with a continuous center turn lane passing through rural forest land. M-20 picks up inclusion on the NHS from this point east.
Once M-20 reaches Midland on Jerome Street, it crosses the Tittabawassee River north of the Tridge, a three-legged bridge over the confluence of the Tittabawassee and Chippewa rivers. There it joins Business US 10 (Bus. US 10) on a pair of one-way streets: Indian Street (westbound) and Buttles Street (eastbound). The two streets pass by Dow Diamond, home to the Great Lakes Loons, the city's minor league baseball team. Bus. US 10/M-20 then passes some Dow Chemical Company buildings and curves into a freeway stub connecting with the US 10 freeway on the east side of town. This short section of business loop freeway has two interchanges before terminating at one final interchange. At this junction, both Bus. US 10 and M-20 have a common eastern terminus. Traffic headed eastbound on the business loop defaults onto eastbound US 10, and traffic destined for the business loop is fed from the westbound direction of the freeway only.
## History
### Previous designation
On July 1, 1919, M-20 was routed from Ludington to Bay City, Michigan by way of Reed City and Clare. This routing was redesignated as US 10 on November 11, 1926. M-20 would be moved to a new routing.
### Current designation
The M-20 designation was moved to a new alignment, roughly today's current routing from Midland through Mt. Pleasant, Big Rapids and White Cloud continuing to Muskegon. The western terminus was extended to end at Muskegon State Park in 1932. The last paving would be completed along M-20 in 1957 in Newaygo County.
The eastern end of M-20 was converted to freeway between Midland and Bay City in 1958. The former alignment along Midland Road, from Midland, going through Auburn, and ending at Euclid Avenue in Bay City, at the junction of what was then US 23, was returned to local control at the time. US 10 was rerouted along this freeway section and the Interstate 75/US 23 freeway in 1960. M-20 was truncated back to Midland with the US 10 rerouting. The west end was rerouted through Muskegon to end at US 16 in 1961. The former routing connecting to Muskegon State Park became a new state route designated M-213. M-213 was ultimately removed from the trunkline system in 1970. M-20 was completely rerouted on the west end in 1969 from White Cloud replacing M-82 to US 31 in New Era.
The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) swapped jurisdiction of M-20 and B-88 with Mecosta and Newaygo counties. The swap was finalized on October 1, 1998. M-20 was rerouted south from Big Rapids, along US 131 from exit 139 to exit 131 at Stanwood. There M-20 replaced B-88 westward to M-37.
## Major intersections
## See also
|
62,822,115 |
The Prince and the Dressmaker
| 1,140,698,685 |
2018 fairytale graphic novel
|
[
"2018 American novels",
"2018 graphic novels",
"American young adult novels",
"Comics about women",
"Cross-dressing in literature",
"Eisner Award winners",
"Fiction about fashion",
"First Second Books books",
"Harvey Award winners",
"LGBT-related graphic novels",
"LGBT-related young adult novels",
"Novels about royalty",
"Novels set in Paris"
] |
The Prince and the Dressmaker is a fairy tale graphic novel written and illustrated by Jen Wang and released in 2018 by First Second Books. Wang's second graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker tells the story of a Prince Sebastian, who dresses as the glamorous Lady Crystallia by night, and his seamstress Frances, who befriends the prince and hopes to make her mark on the world of fashion.
The book has been well-received by critics who have compared it thematically to "Cinderella". The Prince and the Dressmaker won a Harvey Award and Eisner Award and its film rights were purchased in 2018, shortly after its publication.
## Plot
After creating a shocking dress for a young lady attending the 16th birthday party of Crown Prince Sebastian of Belgium, the young seamstress Frances is hired by a mysterious client. The client, who at first keeps their face covered, seeks to have Frances design them a variety of elaborate dresses. After Frances accidentally reveals the client to be Prince Sebastian, she agrees to keep his secret and begins designing dresses for him. The two attend a beauty pageant, which Sebastian wins with the first of Frances's dresses. The judge asks the winner's name and is told it is Lady Crystallia.
Sebastian's father and mother, the king and queen, intend to set Sebastian up with a princess. He lunches with Princess Juliana, and after the date goes poorly, Lady Crystallia and Frances go out to a club. They meet Peter Trippley, who seeks to emulate Crystallia's fashions at his father's new department store, and considers hiring Frances. Tired from nights as Crystallia and days in engagements with princesses, Sebastian's parents send him on vacation. Frances and Crystallia encounter Juliana and her brother, but neither recognizes Crystallia as Sebastian. Crystallia meets with the designer Madame Aurelia, who offers Frances the possibility to work for her. Back in Paris, Frances and Sebastian go out to dinner and nearly kiss.
At a meeting with a princess, Sebastian insists he is not a good fit for her, at which point his father gets angry and collapses. Crystallia and Frances go out to the ballet to show Aurelia Frances's designs, but Crystallia insists that Frances cannot attend the meeting because Frances's status as Sebastian's seamstress is well-known and would give away Crystallia's secret. While Aurelia accepts Frances's designs for a fashion show at Trippley's, Frances is dejected and leaves Sebastian's employment. Sebastian plans to propose to Juliana.
Frances, again working as a low-level seamstress, is asked by Peter Trippley to design pared-down versions of her Crystallia outfits for Trippley's. Crystallia, alone, goes to a music hall and gets drunk, where she encounters Juliana's brother and passes out. Juliana's brother discovers Crystallia's identity and drags her in front of court, revealing her as Sebastian. Sebastian's parents and Juliana turn their backs on him, and he rushes away to a monastery in the mountains. Overhearing gossip of the happenings in court, Frances finds Sebastian's manservant Emile, who tells her that Sebastian left Crystallia's outfits to Frances. When she goes to retrieve them, she meets the king lying among the garments. He admits feeling as though he failed Sebastian; Frances replies that Sebastian was only afraid of what his parents would think.
At the Trippley's show, Sebastian appears backstage after being found by Emile. Frances, unhappy with the way Trippley limited her designs, makes a plan to showcase her more elaborate ones with Sebastian. On the way to dress, Sebastian encounters the king and queen, who reconcile with him and offer their help. Shocking the audience and presenters, Emile walks down the catwalk in one of Crystallia's outfits. Trippley's father demands that Crystallia be seized for ruining his show, but the king, also clad in an ornate dress of Crystallia's, intervenes on behalf of his child and walks the runway himself. Frances kisses Crystallia backstage.
Later, Sebastian is studying in Paris and Frances is apprenticing for Aurelia. Crystallia shows up beneath Frances's window; the two embrace and Frances offers Crystallia her new designs.
## Development
### Writing
The Prince and the Dressmaker was Jen Wang's second graphic novel after In Real Life, which she cowrote with Cory Doctorow. Her initial inspiration for the book came from overlapping interests in writing a contemporary Disney-style fairytale with developing a story about a superhero who could create clothes that transform those who wore them. Interested in stories about gender expression, Wang connected these interests while watching RuPaul's Drag Race after which point she said that "the whole story fell into place pretty quickly."
Wang wrote the character of Sebastian/Crystallia as "someone who identifies with different modes of gender expression and is comfortable alternating between both masculine and feminine", noting that she might call the character genderqueer but that other interpretations of the character's relationship to their gender presented by readers were also valid. Wang originally wrote both Frances and Sebastian as older characters, but adapted the characters to be teenagers which she realized heightened the stakes of the characters' realizations about themselves but otherwise fundamentally changed very little about the story.
### Production
For the clothing illustrations in the book, Wang researched historical materials on Pinterest. Her intention with the outfits was not to mimic historically accurate fashions but for her designs to "feel fairytale-like and contemporary", for which her research provided her context. She drew the book's illustrations on Bristol paper with a mechanical pencil she had owned for six years and inked it with a Winsor & Newton size two Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brush and Winsor & Newton black india ink.
### Publication
The Prince and the Dressmaker was published on February 13, 2018, by First Second Books at a length of 288 pages.
## Reception
Reviewers compared The Prince and the Dressmaker to the tale of "Cinderella", particularly the 1950 Disney film adaptation of the story. Mindy Rhiger, writing for The Comics Journal, described elements of transformation as being present in both stories, and noted that both begin with an invitation to a prince's ball. In the School Library Journal, J. Caleb Mozzacco described the story as a fairytale that rarely feels like one until its happily ever after ending which he described as "about as electric and triumphant a moment in a comic book that I can remember". J. Shapiro of the New York Public Library wrote that the book does not have any explicitly trans characters, but that the need for self-expression by Sebastian might be relatable to those who worry that the world would "shun who they are." Caitlin Chappell of CBR said that the graphic novel captured the romance, scale, and style of Disney films like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella but had a "queer twist." She described Sebastian as moving between being a boy and girl, finding confidence in the identity of Crystallia, a femme identity, and identified the character as genderqueer.
### Accolades
The book won the Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens (ages 13–17) in 2019. It also won Best Children or Young Adult Book at the 2018 Harvey Awards, along with Kay O'Neill's The Tea Dragon Society.
## Adaptation
Film rights to The Prince and the Dressmaker were purchased in April 2018 by Universal Pictures and Marc Platt after what Deadline reported as a "competitive bidding situation". Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez, and Amy Herzog are attached to adapt the story into a movie musical.
|
32,541 |
Vitamin K
| 1,171,897,513 |
Fat-soluble vitamers
|
[
"1,4-Naphthoquinones",
"Antidotes",
"Antihemorrhagics",
"Terpenes and terpenoids",
"Vitamers",
"Vitamin K"
] |
Vitamin K is a family of structurally similar, fat-soluble vitamers found in foods and marketed as dietary supplements. The human body requires vitamin K for post-synthesis modification of certain proteins that are required for blood coagulation (K from koagulation German for "coagulation") or for controlling binding of calcium in bones and other tissues. The complete synthesis involves final modification of these so-called "Gla proteins" by the enzyme gamma-glutamyl carboxylase that uses vitamin K as a cofactor.
Vitamin K is used in the liver as the intermediate VKH<sub>2</sub> to deprotonate a glutamate residue and then is reprocessed into vitamin K through a vitamin K oxide intermediate. The presence of uncarboxylated proteins indicates a vitamin K deficiency. Carboxylation allows them to bind (chelate) calcium ions, which they cannot do otherwise. Without vitamin K, blood coagulation is seriously impaired, and uncontrolled bleeding occurs. Research suggests that deficiency of vitamin K may also weaken bones, potentially contributing to osteoporosis, and may promote calcification of arteries and other soft tissues.
Chemically, the vitamin K family comprises 2-methyl-1,4-naphthoquinone (3-) derivatives. Vitamin K includes two natural vitamers: vitamin K<sub>1</sub> (phylloquinone) and vitamin K<sub>2</sub> (menaquinone). Vitamin K<sub>2</sub>, in turn, consists of a number of related chemical subtypes, with differing lengths of carbon side chains made of isoprenoid groups of atoms. The two most studied ones are menaquinone-4 (MK-4) and menaquinone-7 (MK-7).
Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> is made by plants, and is found in highest amounts in green leafy vegetables, because it is directly involved in photosynthesis. It is active as a vitamin in animals and performs the classic functions of vitamin K, including its activity in the production of blood-clotting proteins. Animals may also convert it to vitamin K<sub>2</sub>, variant MK-4. Bacteria in the gut flora can also convert K<sub>1</sub> into K<sub>2</sub>. All forms of K<sub>2</sub> other than MK-4 can only be produced by bacteria, which use these during anaerobic respiration. Vitamin K<sub>3</sub> (menadione), a synthetic form of vitamin K, was used to treat vitamin K deficiency, but because it interferes with the function of glutathione, it is no longer used this way in human nutrition.
## Definition
Vitamin K refers to structurally similar, fat-soluble vitamers found in foods and marketed as dietary supplements. "Vitamin K" include several chemical compounds. These are similar in structure in that they share a quinone ring, but differ in the length and degree of saturation of the carbon tail and the number of repeating isoprene units in the side chain (see figures in Chemistry section). Plant-sourced forms are primarily vitamin K<sub>1</sub>. Animal-sourced foods are primarily vitamin K<sub>2</sub>. Vitamin K has several roles: an essential nutrient absorbed from food, a product synthesized and marketed as part of a multi-vitamin or as a single-vitamin dietary supplement, and a prescription medication for specific purposes.
## Dietary recommendations
The US National Academy of Medicine does not distinguish between K<sub>1</sub> and K<sub>2</sub> – both are counted as vitamin K. When recommendations were last updated in 1998, sufficient information was not available to establish an estimated average requirement or recommended dietary allowance, terms that exist for most vitamins. In instances such as these, the academy defines adequate intakes (AIs) as amounts that appear to be sufficient to maintain good health, with the understanding that at some later date, AIs will be replaced by more exact information. The current AIs for adult women and men ages 19 and older are 90 and 120 μg/day, respectively, for pregnancy is 90 μg/day, and for lactation is 90 μg/day. For infants up to 12 months, the AI is 2.0–2.5 μg/day; for children ages 1–18 years the AI increases with age from 30 to 75 μg/day. As for safety, the academy sets tolerable upper intake levels (known as "upper limits") for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. Vitamin K has no upper limit, as human data for adverse effects from high doses are not sufficient.
In the European Union, adequate intake is defined the same way as in the US. For women and men over age 18 the adequate intake is set at 70 μg/day, for pregnancy 70 μg/day, and for lactation 70 μg/day. For children ages 1–17 years, adequate intake values increase with age from 12 to 65 μg/day. Japan set adequate intakes for adult women at 65 μg/day and for men at 75 μg/day. The European Union and Japan also reviewed safety and concluded – as had the United States – that there was insufficient evidence to set an upper limit for vitamin K.
For US food and dietary supplement labeling purposes, the amount in a serving is expressed as a percentage of daily value. For vitamin K labeling purposes, 100% of the daily value was 80 μg, but on 27 May 2016 it was revised upwards to 120 μg, to bring it into agreement with the highest value for adequate intake. Compliance with the updated labeling regulations was required by 1 January 2020 for manufacturers with US\$10 million or more in annual food sales, and by 1 January 2021 for manufacturers with lower volume food sales. A table of the old and new adult daily values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.
### Fortification
According to the Global Fortification Data Exchange, vitamin K deficiency is so rare that no countries require that foods be fortified. The World Health Organization does not have recommendations on vitamin K fortification.
## Vitamin deficiency
Because vitamin K aids mechanisms for blood clotting, its deficiency may lead to reduced blood clotting, and in severe cases, can result in reduced clotting, increased bleeding, and increased prothrombin time.
Normal diets are usually not deficient in vitamin K, indicating that deficiency is uncommon in healthy children and adults. An exception may be infants who are at an increased risk of deficiency regardless of the vitamin status of the mother during pregnancy and breast feeding due to poor transfer of the vitamin to the placenta and low amounts of the vitamin in breast milk.
Secondary deficiencies can occur in people who consume adequate amounts, but have malabsorption conditions, such as cystic fibrosis or chronic pancreatitis, and in people who have liver damage or disease. Secondary vitamin K deficiency can also occur in people who have a prescription for a vitamin K antagonist drug, such as warfarin. A drug associated with increased risk of vitamin K deficiency is cefamandole, although the mechanism is unknown.
## Medical uses
### Treating vitamin deficiency in newborns
Vitamin K is given as an injection to newborns to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. The blood clotting factors of newborn babies are roughly 30–60% that of adult values; this appears to be a consequence of poor transfer of the vitamin across the placenta, and thus low fetal plasma vitamin K. Occurrence of vitamin K deficiency bleeding in the first week of the infant's life is estimated at 0.25–1.7%, with a prevalence of 2–10 cases per 100,000 births. Human milk contains 0.85–9.2 μg/L (median 2.5 μg/L) of vitamin K<sub>1</sub>, while infant formula is formulated in range of 24–175 μg/L. Late onset bleeding, with onset 2 to 12 weeks after birth, can be a consequence of exclusive breastfeeding, especially if there was no preventive treatment. Late onset prevalence reported at 35 cases per 100,000 live births in infants who had not received prophylaxis at or shortly after birth. Vitamin K deficiency bleeding occurs more frequently in the Asian population compared to the Caucasian population.
Bleeding in infants due to vitamin K deficiency can be severe, leading to hospitalization, brain damage, and death. Intramuscular injection, typically given shortly after birth, is more effective in preventing vitamin K deficiency bleeding than oral administration, which calls for weekly dosing up to three months of age.
### Managing warfarin therapy
Warfarin is an anticoagulant drug. It functions by inhibiting an enzyme that is responsible for recycling vitamin K to a functional state. As a consequence, proteins that should be modified by vitamin K are not, including proteins essential to blood clotting, and are thus not functional. The purpose of the drug is to reduce risk of inappropriate blood clotting, which can have serious, potentially fatal consequences. The proper anticoagulant action of warfarin is a function of vitamin K intake and drug dose. Due to differing absorption of the drug and amounts of vitamin K in the diet, dosing must be monitored and individualized for each patient. Some foods are so high in vitamin K<sub>1</sub> that medical advice is to avoid those (examples: collard greens, spinach, turnip greens) entirely, and for foods with a modestly high vitamin content, keep consumption as consistent as possible, so that the combination of vitamin intake and warfarin keep the anti-clotting activity in the therapeutic range.
Vitamin K is a treatment for bleeding events caused by overdose of the drug. The vitamin can be administered by mouth, intravenously or subcutaneously. Oral vitamin K is used in situations when a person's International normalised ratio is greater than 10 but there is no active bleeding. The newer anticoagulants apixaban, dabigatran and rivaroxaban are not vitamin K antagonists.
### Treating rodenticide poisoning
Coumarin is used in the pharmaceutical industry as a precursor reagent in the synthesis of a number of synthetic anticoagulant pharmaceuticals. One subset, 4-hydroxycoumarins, act as vitamin K antagonists. They block the regeneration and recycling of vitamin K. Some of the 4-hydroxycoumarin anticoagulant class of chemicals are designed to have high potency and long residence times in the body, and these are used specifically as second generation rodenticides ("rat poison"). Death occurs after a period of several days to two weeks, usually from internal hemorrhaging. For humans, and for animals that have consumed either the rodenticide or rats poisoned by the rodenticide, treatment is prolonged administration of large amounts of vitamin K. This dosing must sometimes be continued for up to nine months in cases of poisoning by "superwarfarin" rodenticides such as brodifacoum. Oral vitamin K<sub>1</sub> is preferred over other vitamin K<sub>1</sub> routes of administration because it has fewer side effects.
### Methods of assessment
An increase in prothrombin time, a coagulation assay, has been used as an indicator of vitamin K status, but it lacks sufficient sensitivity and specificity for this application. Serum phylloquinone is the most commonly used marker of vitamin K status. Concentrations \<0.15 μg/L are indicative of deficiency. Disadvantages include exclusion of the other vitamin K vitamers and interference from recent dietary intake. Vitamin K is required for the gamma-carboxylation of specific glutamic acid residues within the Gla domain of the 17 vitamin K–dependent proteins. Thus, a rise in uncarboxylated versions of these proteins is an indirect but sensitive and specific marker for vitamin K deficiency. If uncarboxylated prothrombin is being measured, this "Protein induced by Vitamin K Absence/antagonism (PIVKA-II)" is elevated in vitamin K deficiency. The test is used to assess risk of vitamin K–deficient bleeding in newborn infants. Osteocalcin is involved in calcification of bone tissue. The ratio of uncarboxylated osteocalcin to carboxylated osteocalcin increases with vitamin K deficiency. Vitamin K2 has been shown to lower this ratio and improve lumbar vertebrae bone mineral density. Matrix Gla protein must undergo vitamin K dependent phosphorylation and carboxylation. Elevated plasma concentration of dephosphorylated, uncarboxylated MGP is indicative of vitamin K deficiency.
### Side effects
No known toxicity is associated with high oral doses of the vitamin K<sub>1</sub> or vitamin K<sub>2</sub> forms of vitamin K, so regulatory agencies from US, Japan and European Union concur that no tolerable upper intake levels needs to be set. However, vitamin K<sub>1</sub> has been associated with severe adverse reactions such as bronchospasm and cardiac arrest when given intravenously. The reaction is described as a nonimmune-mediated anaphylactoid reaction, with incidence of 3 per 10,000 treatments. The majority of reactions occurred when polyoxyethylated castor oil was used as the solubilizing agent.
## Non-human uses
Menadione, a natural compound sometimes referred to as vitamin K<sub>3</sub>, is used in the pet food industry because once consumed it is converted to vitamin K<sub>2</sub>. The US Food and Drug Administration has banned this form from sale as a human dietary supplement because overdoses have been shown to cause allergic reactions, hemolytic anemia, and cytotoxicity in liver cells.
4-amino-2-methyl-1-naphthol ("K<sub>5</sub>") is not natural and hence not a "vitamin". Research with "K<sub>5</sub>" suggests it may inhibit fungal growth in fruit juices.
## Chemistry
The structure of phylloquinone, Vitamin K<sub>1</sub>, is marked by the presence of a phytyl sidechain. Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> has an (E) trans double bond responsible for its biological activity, and two chiral centers on the phytyl sidechain. Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> appears as a yellow viscous liquid at room temperature due to its absorption of violet light in the UV-Vis Spectra. The structures of menaquinones, vitamin K<sub>2</sub>, are marked by the polyisoprenyl side chain present in the molecule that can contain four to 13 isoprenyl units. MK-4 is the most common form. The large size of Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> gives many different peaks in mass spectroscopy, most of which involve derivatives of the naphthoquinone ring base and the alkyl side chain.
### Conversion of vitamin K<sub>1</sub> to vitamin K<sub>2</sub>
In animals, the MK-4 form of vitamin K<sub>2</sub> is produced by conversion of vitamin K<sub>1</sub> in the testes, pancreas, and arterial walls. While major questions still surround the biochemical pathway for this transformation, the conversion is not dependent on gut bacteria, as it occurs in germ-free rats and in parenterally administered K<sub>1</sub> in rats. There is evidence that the conversion proceeds by removal of the phytyl tail of K<sub>1</sub> to produce menadione (also referred to as vitamin K<sub>3</sub>) as an intermediate, which is then prenylated to produce MK-4.
## Physiology
In animals, vitamin K is involved in the carboxylation of certain glutamate residues in proteins to form gamma-carboxyglutamate (Gla) residues. The modified residues are often (but not always) situated within specific protein domains called Gla domains. Gla residues are usually involved in binding calcium, and are essential for the biological activity of all known Gla proteins.
17 human proteins with Gla domains have been discovered; they play key roles in the regulation of three physiological processes:
- Blood coagulation: prothrombin (factor II), factors VII, IX, and X, and proteins C, S, and Z
- Bone metabolism: osteocalcin, matrix Gla protein (MGP), periostin, and Gla-rich protein.
- Vascular biology: Matrix Gla protein, growth arrest – specific protein 6 (Gas6)
- Unknown functions: proline-rich γ-carboxyglutamyl proteins 1 and 2, and transmembrane γ-carboxy glutamyl proteins 3 and 4.
### Absorption
Vitamin K is absorbed through the jejunum and ileum in the small intestine. The process requires bile and pancreatic juices. Estimates for absorption are on the order of 80% for vitamin K<sub>1</sub> in its free form (as a dietary supplement) but much lower when present in foods. For example, the absorption of vitamin K from kale and spinach – foods identified as having a high vitamin K content – are on the order of 4% to 17% regardless of whether raw or cooked. Less information is available for absorption of vitamin K<sub>2</sub> from foods.
The intestinal membrane protein Niemann–Pick C1-like 1 (NPC1L1) mediates cholesterol absorption. Animal studies show that it also factors into absorption of vitamins E and K<sub>1</sub>. The same study predicts potential interaction between SR-BI and CD36 proteins as well. The drug ezetimibe inhibits NPC1L1 causing a reduction in cholesterol absorption in humans, and in animal studies, also reduces vitamin E and vitamin K<sub>1</sub> absorption. An expected consequence would be that administration of ezetimibe to people who take warfarin (a vitamin K antagonist) would potentiate the warfarin effect. This has been confirmed in humans.
## Biochemistry
### Function in animals
Vitamin K is distributed differently within animals depending on its specific homologue. Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> is mainly present in the liver, heart and pancreas, while MK-4 is better represented in the kidneys, brain and pancreas. The liver also contains longer chain homologues MK-7 to MK-13.
The function of vitamin K<sub>2</sub> in the animal cell is to add a carboxylic acid functional group to a glutamate (Glu) amino acid residue in a protein, to form a gamma-carboxyglutamate (Gla) residue. This is a somewhat uncommon posttranslational modification of the protein, which is then known as a "Gla protein". The presence of two −COOH (carboxylic acid) groups on the same carbon in the gamma-carboxyglutamate residue allows it to chelate calcium ions. The binding of calcium ions in this way very often triggers the function or binding of Gla-protein enzymes, such as the so-called vitamin K–dependent clotting factors discussed below.
Within the cell, vitamin K participates in a cyclic process. The vitamin undergoes electron reduction to a reduced form called vitamin K hydroquinone (quinol), catalyzed by the enzyme vitamin K epoxide reductase (VKOR). Another enzyme then oxidizes vitamin K hydroquinone to allow carboxylation of Glu to Gla; this enzyme is called gamma-glutamyl carboxylase or the vitamin K–dependent carboxylase. The carboxylation reaction only proceeds if the carboxylase enzyme is able to oxidize vitamin K hydroquinone to vitamin K epoxide at the same time. The carboxylation and epoxidation reactions are said to be coupled. Vitamin K epoxide is then restored to vitamin K by VKOR. The reduction and subsequent reoxidation of vitamin K coupled with carboxylation of Glu is called the vitamin K cycle. Humans are rarely deficient in vitamin K because, in part, vitamin K<sub>2</sub> is continuously recycled in cells.
Warfarin and other 4-hydroxycoumarins block the action of VKOR. This results in decreased concentrations of vitamin K and vitamin K hydroquinone in tissues, such that the carboxylation reaction catalyzed by the glutamyl carboxylase is inefficient. This results in the production of clotting factors with inadequate Gla. Without Gla on the amino termini of these factors, they no longer bind stably to the blood vessel endothelium and cannot activate clotting to allow formation of a clot during tissue injury. As it is impossible to predict what dose of warfarin will give the desired degree of clotting suppression, warfarin treatment must be carefully monitored to avoid underdose and overdose.
#### Gamma-carboxyglutamate proteins
The following human Gla-containing proteins ("Gla proteins") have been characterized to the level of primary structure: blood coagulation factors II (prothrombin), VII, IX, and X, anticoagulant protein C and protein S, and the factor X-targeting protein Z. The bone Gla protein osteocalcin, the calcification-inhibiting matrix Gla protein (MGP), the cell growth regulating growth arrest specific gene 6 protein, and the four transmembrane Gla proteins, the function of which is at present unknown. The Gla domain is responsible for high-affinity binding of calcium ions (Ca<sup>2+</sup>) to Gla proteins, which is often necessary for their conformation, and always necessary for their function.
Gla proteins are known to occur in a wide variety of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. The venom of a number of Australian snakes acts by activating the human blood-clotting system. In some cases, activation is accomplished by snake Gla-containing enzymes that bind to the endothelium of human blood vessels and catalyze the conversion of procoagulant clotting factors into activated ones, leading to unwanted and potentially deadly clotting.
Another interesting class of invertebrate Gla-containing proteins is synthesized by the fish-hunting snail Conus geographus. These snails produce a venom containing hundreds of neuroactive peptides, or conotoxins, which is sufficiently toxic to kill an adult human. Several of the conotoxins contain two to five Gla residues.
### Function in plants and cyanobacteria
Vitamin K<sub>1</sub> is an important chemical in green plants (including land plants and green algae) and some species of cyanobacteria, where it functions as an electron acceptor transferring one electron in photosystem I during photosynthesis. For this reason, vitamin K<sub>1</sub> is found in large quantities in the photosynthetic tissues of plants (green leaves, and dark green leafy vegetables such as romaine lettuce, kale, and spinach), but it occurs in far smaller quantities in other plant tissues.
Detection of VKORC1 homologues active on the K<sub>1</sub>-epioxide suggest that K<sub>1</sub> may have a non-redox function in these organisms. In plants but not cyanobacteria, knockout of this gene show growth restriction similar to mutants lacking the ability to produce K<sub>1</sub>.
### Function in other bacteria
Many bacteria, including Escherichia coli found in the large intestine, can synthesize vitamin K<sub>2</sub> (MK-7 up to MK-11), but not vitamin K<sub>1</sub>. In the vitamin K<sub>2</sub> synthesizing bacteria, menaquinone transfers two electrons between two different small molecules, during oxygen-independent metabolic energy production processes (anaerobic respiration). For example, a small molecule with an excess of electrons (also called an electron donor) such as lactate, formate, or NADH, with the help of an enzyme, passes two electrons to menaquinone. The menaquinone, with the help of another enzyme, then transfers these two electrons to a suitable oxidant, such as fumarate or nitrate (also called an electron acceptor). Adding two electrons to fumarate or nitrate converts the molecule to succinate or nitrite plus water, respectively. Some of these reactions generate a cellular energy source, ATP, in a manner similar to eukaryotic cell aerobic respiration, except the final electron acceptor is not molecular oxygen, but fumarate or nitrate. In aerobic respiration, the final oxidant is molecular oxygen, which accepts four electrons from an electron donor such as NADH to be converted to water. E. coli, as facultative anaerobes, can carry out both aerobic respiration and menaquinone-mediated anaerobic respiration.
## History
In 1929, Danish scientist Henrik Dam investigated the role of cholesterol by feeding chickens a cholesterol-depleted diet. He initially replicated experiments reported by scientists at the Ontario Agricultural College. McFarlane, Graham and Richardson, working on the chick feed program at OAC, had used chloroform to remove all fat from chick chow. They noticed that chicks fed only fat-depleted chow developed hemorrhages and started bleeding from tag sites. Dam found that these defects could not be restored by adding purified cholesterol to the diet. It appeared that – together with the cholesterol – a second compound had been extracted from the food, and this compound was called the coagulation vitamin. The new vitamin received the letter K because the initial discoveries were reported in a German journal, in which it was designated as Koagulationsvitamin. Edward Adelbert Doisy of Saint Louis University did much of the research that led to the discovery of the structure and chemical nature of vitamin K. Dam and Doisy shared the 1943 Nobel Prize for medicine for their work on vitamin K<sub>1</sub> and K<sub>2</sub> published in 1939. Several laboratories synthesized the compound(s) in 1939.
For several decades, the vitamin K–deficient chick model was the only method of quantifying vitamin K in various foods: the chicks were made vitamin K–deficient and subsequently fed with known amounts of vitamin K–containing food. The extent to which blood coagulation was restored by the diet was taken as a measure for its vitamin K content. Three groups of physicians independently found this: Biochemical Institute, University of Copenhagen (Dam and Johannes Glavind), University of Iowa Department of Pathology (Emory Warner, Kenneth Brinkhous, and Harry Pratt Smith), and the Mayo Clinic (Hugh Butt, Albert Snell, and Arnold Osterberg).
The first published report of successful treatment with vitamin K of life-threatening hemorrhage in a jaundiced patient with prothrombin deficiency was made in 1938 by Smith, Warner, and Brinkhous.
The precise function of vitamin K was not discovered until 1974, when prothrombin, a blood coagulation protein, was confirmed to be vitamin K dependent. When the vitamin is present, prothrombin has amino acids near the amino terminus of the protein as γ-carboxyglutamate instead of glutamate, and is able to bind calcium, part of the clotting process.
## Research
### Osteoporosis
Vitamin K is required for the gamma-carboxylation of osteocalcin in bone. The risk of osteoporosis, assessed via bone mineral density and fractures, was not affected for people on warfarin therapy – a vitamin K antagonist. Higher dietary intake of vitamin K<sub>1</sub> may modestly decrease the risk of fractures. However, there is mixed evidence to support a claim that vitamin K supplementation reduces risk of bone fractures. For women who were post-menopausal and for all people diagnosed with osteoporosis, supplementation trials reported increases in bone mineral density, a reduction to the odds of any clinical fractures but no significant difference for vertebral fractures. There is a subset of literature on supplementation with vitamin K<sub>2</sub> MK-4 and bone health. A meta-analysis reported a decrease in the ratio of uncarboxylated osteocalcin to carboxylated, an increase in lumbar spine bone mineral density, but no significant differences for vertebral fractures.
### Cardiovascular health
Matrix Gla protein is a vitamin K-dependent protein found in bone, but also in soft tissues such as arteries, where it appears to function as an anti-calcification protein. In animal studies, animals that lack the gene for MGP exhibit calcification of arteries and other soft tissues. In humans, Keutel syndrome is a rare recessive genetic disorder associated with abnormalities in the gene coding for MGP and characterized by abnormal diffuse cartilage calcification. These observations led to a theory that in humans, inadequately carboxylated MGP, due to low dietary intake of the vitamin, could result in increased risk of arterial calcification and coronary heart disease.
In meta-analyses of population studies, low intake of vitamin K was associated with inactive MGP, arterial calcification and arterial stiffness. Lower dietary intakes of vitamin K<sub>1</sub> and vitamin K<sub>2</sub> were also associated with higher coronary heart disease. When blood concentration of circulating vitamin K<sub>1</sub> was assessed there was an increased risk in all cause mortality linked to low concentration. In contrast to these population studies, a review of randomized trials using supplementation with either vitamin K<sub>1</sub> or vitamin K<sub>2</sub> reported no role in mitigating vascular calcification or reducing arterial stiffness. The trials were too short to assess any impact on coronary heart disease or mortality.
### Other
Population studies suggest that vitamin K status may have roles in inflammation, brain function, endocrine function and an anti-cancer effect. For all of these, there is not sufficient evidence from intervention trials to draw any conclusions. From a review of observational trials, long-term use of vitamin K antagonists as anticoagulation therapy is associated with lower cancer incidence in general. There are conflicting reviews as to whether agonists reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
|
41,882,360 |
Manchester United F.C.–Arsenal F.C. brawl (1990)
| 1,166,525,794 | null |
[
"1990–91 in English football",
"Arsenal F.C. matches",
"Brawls in team sports",
"Football League First Division matches",
"Manchester United F.C. matches",
"October 1990 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Sports scandals in England"
] |
On 20 October 1990, Manchester United Football Club faced Arsenal Football Club in a Football League First Division fixture at Old Trafford, during the 1990–91 season. Arsenal won by a single goal, but the game was also significant for a brawl between both teams. The Football Association (FA) took the unprecedented step of deducting league points from the two clubs.
The only goal of the match came moments before half-time, scored by Arsenal midfielder Anders Limpar. In the second half, Limpar was involved in a contest for the ball with Manchester United defender Denis Irwin; Limpar's teammate Nigel Winterburn made a tackle on Irwin that precipitated a melee between both sets of players. All but one of the twenty-two players on the field were involved; it lasted no more than 20 seconds and referee Keith Hackett booked only Limpar and Winterburn for their actions.
Manchester United and Arsenal took immediate action by fining a number of their players; Arsenal also punished their manager, George Graham. A month after the game, the FA fined both clubs £50,000 for bringing the game into disrepute. Arsenal were docked two points, one more than Manchester United as they were involved in a similar brawl against Norwich City in 1989. This did not impact on Arsenal's title challenge, however, as they went on to become league champions with just one defeat.
As of 2023, it is the only instance in English league football history in which any team has been docked points due to player misconduct. The match is considered to have instigated the rivalry between the two clubs, who competed with each other for silverware regularly through the 1990s and 2000s.
## Background
Meetings between Manchester United and Arsenal prior to this one were often eventful encounters. In Alex Ferguson's first match against Arsenal at Old Trafford in January 1987, his team prevailed with a 2–0 win to end the visitors' 22-match unbeaten run in all competitions. Arsenal's David Rocastle was sent off in the match for a foul on Norman Whiteside, which led to a confrontation between his teammates and the United coaching staff.
The following season, the teams were drawn together in the 1987–88 FA Cup fifth round for a match at Highbury. With two minutes left and Arsenal winning 2–1, United were awarded a penalty that could have forced a replay. Brian McClair hit the penalty over the crossbar and in the aftermath, Nigel Winterburn began to taunt McClair over the miss. Arsenal had been fined £20,000 within the prior 12 months, for their players' involvement in a 19-man brawl against Norwich City in November 1989.
Both clubs entered the match in differing league form. Manchester United lost 1–0 at home to Nottingham Forest on 29 September; the winning goal was scored by Stuart Pearce in the eighth minute. It was their third league defeat of the season and first at Old Trafford in seven months. By contrast, Arsenal beat Norwich City by two goals on 6 October. Five points separated the two clubs at the start of play, with Arsenal positioned second in the league table on 18 points, behind Liverpool, and Manchester United in sixth. Ferguson assessed United's title chances in his press conference before the game: "At the moment, there is a group of six clubs behind Liverpool at the top of the table. It is up to us to keep up with that group and be ready to seize the opportunity if it presents itself."
## Match
### Team selection
Manchester United replaced Viv Anderson in midfield with Paul Ince, while Denis Irwin reverted to right-back after a cameo in midfield. Club captain Bryan Robson was recovering from an Achilles tendon injury he aggravated playing for England at the 1990 FIFA World Cup, so Neil Webb was named as captain in Robson's place. For Arsenal, Anders Limpar recovered from a calf injury; he escaped a fine from the Swedish Football Association for failing to attend the national team's match against West Germany on 10 October. Michael Thomas was declared fit to start in midfield.
### Summary
United created the first significant opportunity of the game, around the midway point of the first half, when a header from Steve Bruce was inadvertently cleared by his own teammate McClair in the Arsenal goal. In the meantime, Arsenal manager George Graham spotted that the marking in midfield was poor and instructed Limpar and Rocastle to push forward, while striker Paul Merson was given a deeper role to follow Mike Phelan. Arsenal took the lead two minutes before half-time; Limpar made a run across United's penalty area to receive Paul Davis' corner from the right hand side. United "clearly believed this was a dummy run", hence why Phelan made no attempt to challenge. Davis passed the ball short to Limpar, who turned and curled it goalwards into the penalty area with his left foot. Although goalkeeper Les Sealey "did well to get down to the ball", he was unable to hold it; referee Keith Hackett deemed the ball to have crossed the goal line and gave the goal. Ferguson offered no complaints about Hackett's decision afterwards: "The video showed quite clearly the referee was right and the ball crossed the line."
Arsenal missed a chance to double their advantage in the second half; Limpar's pass split the home side's defence and sent Rocastle chasing for the ball. He looked certain to score, but Sealey blocked his effort. United brought on Mark Robins after the 66th minute mark, "but it was essentially a gesture of desperation", said writer and journalist Brian Glanville. It reshaped their attack and meant they ran the risk of further Arsenal counter-attacks.
#### Brawl
The brawl started after the hour mark; Winterburn made a lunging tackle on Irwin, who was challenging Limpar for the ball. McClair and Irwin retaliated against Winterburn and Limpar, whom Ince pushed onto the advertising hoardings. All 11 United players and 10 Arsenal players on the pitch took part in the melee (goalkeeper David Seaman was the only player to remain uninvolved), though most were attempting to calm the situation. The fracas lasted less than 20 seconds; once it died down, Hackett booked Limpar and Winterburn for their involvement, while the United players escaped punishment. Tony Adams, praised by The Guardian correspondent Stephen Bierley for his role in defusing matters, avoided a caution for a professional foul on McClair later on.
### Details
### Statistics
## Post-match and aftermath
Stuart Jones of The Times concluded in his match report that The Football Association (FA) were given no choice, "but to charge Arsenal and Manchester United with misconduct and with bringing the game into disrepute." United took immediate action by conducting an internal enquiry. Ferguson ordered his players to the training ground, where they rewatched the match. It is believed the club later fined Irwin, McClair and Ince. Arsenal followed United's example; participants Davis, Rocastle, Thomas, Limpar and Winterburn were all penalised, as well as manager Graham, who was fined £9,000. Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood said of his decision: "Twice in two years is too often. The name of Arsenal has been sullied and that is why I have taken this action."
Persuaded by the European football body, UEFA, to take action, the FA summoned Hackett and the other match officials for their accounts of the brawl. Three days after the match, both clubs were formally charged. A five-man disciplinary committee later studied three video tapes of how the brawl came about and listened to the defence presented by club representatives. In November 1990, Arsenal and Manchester United were fined £50,000 each and deducted league points; Arsenal lost two points and United one.
The sides faced each other a little over a month later at Highbury in the Football League Cup fourth round. The match passed without much incident as United won the tie 6–2, with 19-year-old winger Lee Sharpe scoring a hat-trick.
At the time of the points deduction, Arsenal were placed second in the league, eight points behind leaders Liverpool and one in front of local rivals Tottenham Hotspur. O'Leary expressed his disappointment at the docked points: "The champagne will be out at Liverpool tonight because this makes our task very much harder." His teammate Limpar was more optimistic: "It seems very harsh. It makes it a little bit harder to catch Liverpool, but it is not impossible." Indeed, Arsenal went on to lose just one game all season and won the First Division title, seven points ahead of runners-up Liverpool.
Arsenal were declared league champions shortly before the reverse league fixture on 6 May 1991, a 3–1 defeat of United courtesy of an Alan Smith hat-trick, after Liverpool's 2–1 loss at Nottingham Forest earlier in the day. They became England's first representatives in the European Cup, for 1991–92, since the ban imposed after the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985 was lifted. Manchester United finished sixth, but did not end the season empty-handed, winning the 1990–91 European Cup Winners' Cup in the first season English clubs were allowed back into UEFA competitions.
According to Emma Barrow of The Daily Telegraph, the match is said to have instigated the rivalry between Arsenal and Manchester United, which continued through the 1990s and 2000s. In later years, Winterburn said of the brawl: "It probably caused a lot of the bad blood between the sides that has lasted for years but I was just competitive and desperate to win. Does it worry me? Not in the slightest. It was just one of those things that happened and is part of the history of the two clubs."
## See also
- Battle of Old Trafford
- Battle of the Buffet
|
4,583,514 |
Typhoon Karen
| 1,169,881,167 |
Pacific typhoon in 1962
|
[
"1962 Pacific typhoon season",
"1962 in Guam",
"1962 natural disasters in the United States",
"Retired Pacific typhoons",
"Typhoons",
"Typhoons in Guam"
] |
Typhoon Karen was the most powerful tropical cyclone to strike the island of Guam, and has been regarded as one of the most destructive events in the island's history. It was first identified as a tropical disturbance on November 6, 1962, well to the southeast of Truk. Over the following two days, the system tracked generally northward and quickly intensified. Karen became a tropical storm late on November 7, and within two days it explosively intensified into a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon on the Saffir–Simpson scale. Turning westward, the typhoon maintained its intensity and struck Guam with winds of 280 km/h (170 mph) on November 11. Once clear of the island, it strengthened slightly and reached its peak intensity on November 13 with winds of 295 km/h (183 mph) and a barometric pressure of 894 mb (hPa; 26.40 inHg). The storm then gradually turned northward as it weakened, brushing the Ryukyu Islands on November 15, before moving east-northeastward over the open waters of the Pacific. Karen continued to weaken and transitioned into an extratropical cyclone on November 17 before losing its identity the following day between Alaska and Hawaii.
Karen devastated Guam with wind gusts estimated up to 280 km/h (170 mph). Ninety-five percent of homes were damaged or destroyed, leaving at least 45,000 people homeless. Communication and utilities were crippled, forcing officials to set up water distribution centers to prevent disease. Total losses on the island amounted to \$250 million. Despite the severity of the damage, only 11 people were killed. In the wake of the storm, a massive relief operation evacuated thousands to California, Hawaii, and Wake Island. Thousands more were sheltered in public buildings, and later tent villages, for many months. More than \$60 million in relief funds were sent to Guam over the following years to aid in rehabilitation. Though the storm was devastating, it spurred new building codes and a revitalized economy.
## Meteorological history
On November 6, 1962, a tropical disturbance was identified over the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles south-southeast of Truk, in the Federated States of Micronesia, by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). Tracking northwestward, the disturbance intensified and was classified as a tropical depression early on November 7. Later that day, the system passed to the east of Truk and turned due north before attaining gale-force winds. Around 18:00 UTC, the JTWC issued their first advisory on Tropical Storm Karen, the 27th named storm of the 1962 season. Several hours later, a reconnaissance mission into the storm revealed a partially closed 35 km (22 mi) wide eye. Over the following 30 hours, Karen underwent a period of explosive intensification as its eye became small and increasingly defined. Between 00:00 UTC on November 8 and 03:40 UTC on November 9, Karen's barometric pressure plummeted from 990 to 899 hPa (29.23 to 26.55 inHg), a drop of 91 hPa (2.69 inHg). At the end of this phase, Karen featured an 8 to 10 km (5 to 6 mi) wide eye and had estimated surface winds of 295 km/h (183 mph), ranking it as a modern-day Category 5-equivalent super typhoon on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale.
After attaining this initial peak intensity on November 9, Karen weakened somewhat as it gradually curved west-northwestward. By 15:14 UTC, the storm began to undergo an eyewall replacement cycle as a larger secondary eyewall, approximately 64 km (40 mi) in diameter, started developing. Although the storm's winds failed to drop significantly, Karen's central pressure rose to 919 hPa (27.14 inHg) during this phase. Accelerating slightly, Karen tracked steadily west-northwestward towards Guam. By November 11, the system had regained a well-defined eye and deepened once more. Between 12:10 and 12:35 UTC on November 11, the 14 km (9 mi) wide eye of Karen passed directly over southern Guam. At this time, the storm was estimated to have had winds of 280 km/h (170 mph), which would have made it the most intense typhoon to strike the island since 1900. However, years of post-storm analyses have indicated that it may have been somewhat weaker when it passed over Guam. At the Weather Bureau station at the north end of Guam, a pressure of 942.4 hPa (27.83 inHg) was measured. Farther south at Anderson Air Force Base, 939.7 mbar (939.7 hPa; 27.75 inHg) was recorded. The lowest verified pressure was 931.9 hPa (27.52 inHg) at the Agana Naval Air Station. Closest to the eye was Naval Magazine where a pressure of 907.6 hPa (26.80 inHg) was estimated but never verified.
Continuing west-northwestward, Karen attained its peak intensity on November 13, with a central pressure of 894 hPa (26.40 inHg). Between November 13 and 14, Karen gradually turned towards the north as it underwent another eyewall replacement cycle. During this time, Karen finally weakened below Category 5 status as its winds dropped below 251 km/h (156 mph). This marked the end of its near-record 4.25-day span as a storm of such intensity, second only to Typhoon Nancy of 1961 which maintained Category 5 status for 5.5 days. Over the following days, the typhoon's structure gradually became disorganized, with its eye no longer well-defined by November 15. By this time, Karen began accelerating northeastward and later east-northeastward over the open ocean. The combination of its rapid movement and entrainment of cold air into the circulation ultimately caused the system to transition into an extratropical cyclone on November 17. The remnants of Karen continued tracking east-northeast and were last noted by the JTWC on November 18 roughly halfway between the southern Aleutian Islands and northern Hawaiian Islands.
## Impact
### Guam
Following the identification of a tropical disturbance on November 6, a level four Typhoon Condition of Readiness (TCOR), the lowest level of alert, was raised for Guam. By November 8, three days prior to Karen's arrival, this was raised to level three, prompting residents and military personnel to stock up on supplies. A public announcement was made that day as well, warning residents that the typhoon would likely strike the island. At 9:00 p.m. on November 10 (11:00 UTC), a level two TCOR was put in place for Guam and a typhoon emergency was declared. Buildings were boarded up and emergency supplies were distributed. By 8:00 a.m. (22:00 UTC on November 10), this was raised to level one, the highest level of warning. At this time, USS Haverfield, USS Brister, USS Wandank, and USS Banner sought refuge from the storm over open waters. All personnel on the island were ordered to evacuate to typhoon-proof shelters and emergency rations were prepared. Strategic air command planes stationed on the island were relocated to avoid damage. Many residents on the island sought refuge in government buildings designed to withstand powerful storms while others evacuated to Wake Island. Roughly 24 hours after the typhoon's passage, all warnings were discontinued.
Striking Guam as a Category 5-equivalent typhoon, Karen produced destructive winds across much of the island. With the eye passing over the southern tip of the territory, the most intense winds were felt over central areas. Wind gusts over the southern tip of Guam were estimated to have peaked around 185 km/h (115 mph). Due to the extreme nature of these winds, all anemometers on the island failed before the most intense portion of the storm arrived, and there were no measurements of the strongest winds; however, post-storm reports estimated that sustained winds reached 250 km/h (160 mph) in some areas. The highest measured gust was 240 km/h (150 mph) at a United States Navy anemometer on Nimitz Hill just before 11:00 UTC on November 11, roughly two hours before the typhoon's eye passed the station. Based on this measurement, a study in 1996 estimated that gusts peaked between 280 and 295 km/h (174 and 183 mph) over southern areas of the island. Newspaper reports indicated that a gust of 272 km/h (169 mph) was measured on the island before the anemometer was destroyed. There was also an unverified report of a 333 km/h (207 mph) wind gust. Nearly all measurements of rainfall during the typhoon were lost; the only known total is 197 mm (7.76 in) at the Weather Bureau station for the period of November 10–12.
Surveys of damage revealed belt-like damage patterns from the winds, with some homes being leveled and others nearby having only minor damage, akin to the impacts of tornadoes. The winds uprooted and snapped palm trees across the island and, in some instances, stripped the bark of tree trunks and branches as if they had been sandblasted. Vegetation was completely defoliated across central areas of the island. In some places, it was described as the aftermath of a forest fire. The winds also blew debris across the island. Metal roofing was found wrapped around trees. In one instance, a twin-engine aircraft was carried 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the hangar it was tied down in. A metal sign bolted into a warehouse was tossed 3.7 km (2.3 mi) and found half-buried in the ground. Elsewhere, a quonset hut was lofted and carried for 125 m (411 ft), intact, before being crushed on impact. Along the coast, USS Arco was torn from her moorings, severing two anchors and shearing a cleat – tested for over 23,000 and 45,000 kg (50,000 and 100,000 lb), respectively – in the process. ROK Han Ra San and RPS Negros Oriental sank in the inner harbor of Guam.
Karen is regarded as the worst typhoon to ever impact Guam. Acting governor Manuel Guerrero stated that "the entire territory was devastated." Almost all structures, both civilian and military, were severely damaged or destroyed. Even reinforced concrete structures at Anderson Air Force Base sustained severe damage. Though these structures withstood the direct impact of winds, sudden drops in pressure caused windows to shatter in most structures, ultimately exposing the interior to water damage. Military structures suffered the most from this phenomenon as the buildings were designed in a way that pressure differences between the interior and exterior would not equal out. Debris from damaged or destroyed homes became projectiles during the storm that created further damage, like "shrapnel or artillery missiles."
George Washington High was destroyed. The Tumon Junior Senior High School, although severely damaged, was re-opened within a month. Guam Memorial Hospital and the island's public works department were extensively damaged. Downtown Hagåtña, Guam's largest city, was flattened. Along the city's main road, Marine Drive, 20 cm (8 in) of sand accumulated from Karen's storm surge. Overall, the city was 85 percent destroyed, while the villages of Yona and Inarajan were 97 and 90 percent destroyed, respectively. Additionally, Agana Heights and Sinajana were reportedly leveled. The communication network on the island was completely destroyed as antennas and transmission equipment were blown away. Approximately 30 percent of telephone poles between the island's naval station and Nimitz Hill and 95 percent of civilian telephone poles were downed. The power grid was also destroyed. The Guam portion of the Pacific Scatter Communications System suffered extensive damage, with all four 61 m (200 ft) antennas at Ritidian Point being reduced to a "mess of tangled, twisted steel and cable." Losses from the antennas alone reached \$1 million. All airstrips on the island were rendered inoperable, hampering initial relief efforts. Numerous roads across the island were also impassable, covered by downed trees and smashed vehicles. The wreckage left in the wake of the storm was described as a "massive junkyard".
Throughout Guam, 95 percent of homes were destroyed, and those left standing were damaged. Nearly every non-typhoon-proof home was severely damaged or destroyed and a majority of typhoon-proof buildings sustained extensive damage. Preliminary surveys by the Red Cross on November 15 indicated that at least 5,000 homes were destroyed and another 3,000 were severely damaged. Approximately 45,000 people, mostly Guamanians, were left homeless. A total of 11 people died and about 100 others were injured. At least four of the deaths were due to collapsed buildings, including three in one home that buckled due to pounding surf. Another death resulted from decapitation by airborne debris. Losses across the island amounted to \$250 million (1962 USD). The damage across Guam was described as "'much more serious" than it had been during the second Battle of Guam, when American troops retook the island from the Japanese. The U.S. Navy described the damage as equal to that of an indirect hit from a nuclear bomb. Guerrero said that the recovery effort of the previous 17 years had been "completely wiped out".
### Elsewhere
In the Mariana Islands, three ships under the command of Rear Admiral J. S. Coye Jr. sank; however, the crew had been evacuated prior to the storm's arrival.
On November 13, a level three TCOR was issued for Okinawa. This prompted military personnel to begin securing the island and preparing planes without hangars for evacuation. Brushing the region as a Category 3-equivalent typhoon, Karen caused considerable disruptions to airlines, trains, shipping, and communications. No serious damage was reported in Okinawa, but the nearby Daiyumaru and another Japanese fishing vessel with a total of 26 crew went missing.
On November 15, residents in Taiwan were urged to take precautions to minimize casualties. Prior to the storm's arrival, USS Duncan, USS Kitty Hawk, and two other aircraft carriers sought refuge in the Taiwan Strait. Despite attempts to escape the storm, large swells exceeding 3.6 m (12 ft) battered the vessels, causing them to pitch up to 59 degrees. At times, the waves crashed onto the deck of USS Kitty Hawk. According to crewmen, waves up to 4.5 m (15 ft) struck Taipei, leaving water marks on many buildings.
## Aftermath
In the immediate aftermath of the typhoon, the Pacific Air Forces were on standby to deliver supplies to Guam, but were delayed by inoperable airstrips. Guam Memorial Hospital was damaged, but other civilian and military installations, including the Navy's hospital, were able to handle injured persons. On November 12, Manuel Guerrero made an urgent appeal to the Government of the United States requesting that aid be rushed to the territory. Additionally, he instituted an island-wide curfew between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time to limit looting. At schools, teachers were called in to guard supplies and equipment. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, under orders from United States President John F. Kennedy, declared Guam a major disaster area later that day, allowing residents to receive federal aid. Additionally, 15 United States Air Force communications technicians were deployed from Manila, Philippines carrying three plane-loads of communication supplies. Guerrero estimated that it would take four months to complete repairs to utilities. It was also estimated that schools on the island would be closed for six months.
Initially, residents across Guam were critical of the delayed response by the U.S. government; no aid had arrived within two days of the storm, but unsafe conditions at airports had prevented aircraft from landing. With the majority of homes destroyed across Guam, structures that remained standing were used as temporary shelter for those left homeless. Similarly, damaged military installations at Anderson Air Force Base were made available to all civilians. By November 14, USS Daniel I. Sultan arrived in Guam with 1,100 troops to provide emergency power. A U.S. Air Force C-130 landed on the island that day carrying the first package of relief supplies. About 400 troops and 80 public works employees were sent from Hawaii on November 14. The Red Cross and civil defense offices were placed in charge of coordinating recovery efforts. Water distribution centers were set up across the island to provide residents with clean drinking water.
On November 15, a massive evacuation of residents began to remove survivors from unsafe conditions. Two flights to California took place on the first day of evacuation, carrying a total of 154 people. Thousands of residents were also brought to Wake Island for shelter. Military Air Transport Service planes from the United States mainland, Japan, the Philippines, and Hawaii were called in for the operation. On November 16, residents were warned of a possible typhoid epidemic and urged to get inoculations for the disease. Over a three-day span, roughly 30,000 people were given preventative shots for the disease. In contrast to their previous ban on alien workers, the Government of Guam requested 1,500 carpenters, masons, and other building workers from the Philippines. By November 21, the Navy Supply Depot planned to have enough supplies for the entire populace shipped until replenishment arrived. In order to shelter homeless, the United States Navy set up tent villages across the island. Military kitchens were also established to provide food. Due to continued rains in the wake of the typhoon, many were unable to get a full meal for Thanksgiving.
On November 21, insurance payments for losses were expected to exceed \$12 million. On January 1, 1963, a \$2 million relief fund was authorized by President Kennedy. Another \$5.4 million in relief funds were provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson on February 15, 1964. The United States Congress provided Guam with \$60 million, including \$45 million through federal loans, mainly to help rebuild the territory and promote expansion of the economy. Additionally, the storm brought about the end of military security on the island, which in turn aided economic growth. Within five years of this decision, Japanese tourism to the island dramatically increased, prompting a major increase in the number of hotels. In the long term, Typhoon Karen, along with other destructive storms, shaped the development of the island's infrastructure. It led to higher quality buildings and more efficient utilities that could withstand powerful typhoons. Since Karen, most buildings on the island have been constructed with concrete and steel.
On April 29, 1963, less than half a year after Karen, Typhoon Olive caused extensive damage in Guam and the Mariana Islands. With many residents living in tents, and debris from the storm still scattered about, severe damage was anticipated. Schools, churches, and other structures were opened as shelters in order to protect those without homes. Ultimately, Guam was spared the worst of the storm though much of Saipan was devastated. The island was again devastated in 1976 by Typhoon Pamela which buffeted the island with destructive winds for 36 hours. Though weaker than Karen, the longer lasting impact of Pamela was regarded as more destructive.
Due to the severity of damage caused by the typhoon in Guam, the name Karen was retired and replaced with Kim.
## See also
- Typhoon Nancy (1961) - Another extremely powerful typhoon that maintained Category 5 status for a similar period of time
- Typhoon Yutu (2018) - Devastated the Northern Mariana Islands in a similar fashion
- Other notable typhoons in Guam
- Typhoon Yuri (1991)
- Typhoon Omar (1992)
- Typhoon Paka (1997)
- Typhoon Chataan (2002)
- Typhoon Pongsona (2002)
- Typhoon Mawar (2023) - A powerful typhoon that brought destructive winds in Guam.
|
66,046,174 |
Cricket Cafe
| 1,161,248,125 |
Restaurant in Portland, Oregon, U.S.
|
[
"Restaurants in Portland, Oregon",
"Sunnyside, Portland, Oregon",
"Year of establishment missing"
] |
Cricket Cafe is a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. The cafe's slogan is "champions of breakfast", offering the meal throughout the day with additional lunch options. It has received a generally positive reception, especially for its Bloody Marys, vegetarian options, and biscuits and gravy. Previously owned by Dan Bartkowski, the cafe closed unexpectedly in June 2017. Gordon Feighner and Katie Prevost reopened Cricket Cafe months later.
## Description
Cricket Cafe is a restaurant on Belmont Street in the retail and residential district of the same name within southeast Portland's Sunnyside neighborhood. The two-level cafe, described by Eater Portland's Mattie John Bamman in 2017 as a "long-running, highly popular breakfast spot" with "huge portions" and "good prices", serves breakfast all day and has a lunch menu as well. In her Food Lovers' Guide to Portland, Oregon (2014), Laurie Wolf said the cafe delivers "hearty and satisfying" meals and "caters to the throngs of people in Portland who love their breakfast". The restaurant operates from 8am to 2:30pm every day, as of 2018.
In 2002, David Sarasohn of The Oregonian said the "resolutely down-home storefront" serves "funky" comfort food. In 2017, Willamette Week's Matthew Korfhage called the restaurant a "quirky", "quaint", and "beloved neighborhood brunch spot". Portland Monthly describes Cricket as an "ever-bustling" and "comfy, unpretentious hipster pit stop", with family-friendly, outdoor dining, and takeout services.
### Menu
The menu includes standard breakfast fare such as eggs, hash browns, pancakes, chilaquiles hash, biscuits and gravy, and toasted pound cake with espresso icing. Vegetarian and sausage versions of biscuits and gravy were available, as of 2002; the former had a milk-and-roux gravy made from roasted green and red bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, zucchini, and spices. The Garden Fried Steak has an egg-dipped and fried Gardenburger. The "trademark lumberjack" Eggs Benedict comes with pepper jack and sausage gravy. The Veggie Skillet has eggs, potatoes, vegetables, cheese, olives, and sour cream. The lunch menu focused on sandwiches, soups, and salads, and the black bean chili was served with biscuits and a salad.
The drink menu known as "Liquid Breakfast" has approximately two dozen options separated into "coolers" and "heaters". Heaters include the Betsy's Demon Hatch (tequila, pomegranate with molasses, and strawberry with lemonade), the Bloody Gary made from jalapeño and vodka and the King of Spain made from espresso, rum, and mocha liquor. Mimosas and several other varieties of Bloody Marys, collectively billed as the "Bloody Bar" and ranked by spiciness, are also available. The least spicy of the Bloody Marys is the Bloody Sunrise, described by Aaron Calvin of Men's Journal as having a "sweet grenadine inflected flavor and sugar rim" whilst the most spicy is the Bloody Hot Bonnet, made with habanero infused vodka. In between is the popular Maven, which has cucumber-infused vodka, sake, and a secret maven mix.
## History
Micah Loiselle served as chef, as of 1999. Cricket Cafe was among several local establishments to host artworks by the Portland-based multi-artist collective Red 76. The group's Art/Stall exhibit in 2002 featured works by 25 artists displayed in public restrooms. In 2010, Cricket Cafe was one of fourteen businesses seeking an exemption to a city ban on the use of public sidewalks for storing trash. Dan Bartkowski was the cafe's owner, as of 2012. Cricket Cafe was vandalized on Christmas in 2016. The front and back windows and a neon sign were damaged; Bartkowski said nothing was stolen but estimated \$10,000–15,000 in damages.
Cricket Cafe closed unexpectedly in June 2017. The surprise closure prompted a local resident to post a sign on the door apologizing for any confusion and confirming that the cafe was "seemingly closed for the foreseeable future". In October, restaurateurs Gordon Feighner and Katie Prevost of the popular brunch restaurant Jam on Hawthorne confirmed plans to reopen Cricket Cafe by the end of November. The duo ate there regularly and planned to keep the menu mostly the same, but offer additional vegan and gluten-free options. Feighner also confirmed that interior walls would continue to display artworks curated by the same individual. He told the Portland Mercury:
> We took over the Cricket because we don't think its time is done. There are so many people in this town who want to keep these great places alive, it just needed a little work and we hope the neighborhood likes what we've done. We have always loved the Cricket and have done our best to keep the spirit and flavors of the place alive while giving it a spruce up and making the operations more efficient. Customers likely won't notice much of a difference except for some new paint and an updated menu, but it is the Cricket's menu, not Jam's.
The restaurant began operating initially from 8:00 pm to 3:00 pm daily; the afternoon closing time was decreased by half an hour in January 2018. Cricket Cafe is a member of the Belmont District Business Association, as of 2020.
## Reception
In 1999, John Foyston of The Oregonian complimented the biscuits and gravy and wrote, "Although the Cricket is relatively new, it feels comfortable and unpretentious and attracts a wide spectrum from its bohemian Belmont neighborhood. There's art on the walls, lots of conversation at the tables and a fine menu." In her 2003 book Secret Portland, Oregon: The Unique Guidebook to Portland's Hidden Sites, Sounds & Tastes, Ann Carroll Burgess called Cricket Cafe "funky, hip, and affordable" and wrote, "The strong points that draw in all comers, from yuppie families to boho singles, include cornbread biscuits to die for and a soothing blend of both vegan and meathead dishes."
In 2007, The Oregonian's Joe Fitzgibbon recommended the cafe for a day out with children because of its "fast service and friendly prices". Cricket Cafe was listed in the breakfast category in the Portland Mercury's "back to school" guides for students in 2007, 2008, and 2010. In his 2009 book Veg Out: Seattle and Portland, George Stevenson gave the restaurant a 2-star rating and recommended Cricket Cafe for vegetarian options in East Portland. Stevenson called the restaurant "clean and friendly but funky enough to be interesting".
Laurie Wolf called the cafe "amazing" and said the pound cake "will knock your socks off". She also recommended the "crazy good" Bloody Marys and said "the whole experience is a great way to start the day". In his 2015 list of the thirteen best Bloody Marys in the U.S., Aaron Calvin of Men's Journal said "you can't beat" the Bloody Bar. In describing the drink menu, Portland Monthly said the Bloody Gary "has the potential to incinerate lingering memories of last night's misdeeds" and the King of Spain "will stoke the coldest engine".
|
4,505,469 |
Brian Traxler
| 1,163,760,511 |
American baseball player (1967-2004)
|
[
"1967 births",
"2004 deaths",
"Albuquerque Dukes players",
"Alcohol-related deaths in Texas",
"American expatriate baseball players in Japan",
"American expatriate baseball players in Taiwan",
"American expatriate baseball players in Venezuela",
"American expatriate baseball players in the Dominican Republic",
"Baseball players from Lake County, Illinois",
"Deaths from liver disease",
"Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks players",
"Fukuoka Daiei Hawks players",
"Indios de Mayagüez players",
"Koos Group Whales players",
"Leones del Caracas players",
"Los Angeles Dodgers players",
"Major League Baseball first basemen",
"New Orleans Privateers baseball players",
"San Antonio Missions players",
"Sioux Falls Canaries players",
"Somerset Patriots players",
"Sportspeople from Waukegan, Illinois",
"Tigres del Licey players",
"University of New Orleans alumni",
"Vero Beach Dodgers players"
] |
Brian Lee Traxler (September 26, 1967 – November 19, 2004) was a first baseman in Major League Baseball (MLB) who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers during their 1990 season. Listed at 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) and 200 pounds (91 kg), Traxler batted and threw left-handed. Throughout his career, he was one of the most popular players on his baseball teams.
Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Traxler began playing baseball while just a toddler. After an All-State career at Waukegan East High School, he attended the University of New Orleans, where he set a school record with 49 home runs in a three-year career. Drafted by the Dodgers in the 16th round of the 1988 MLB draft, he was called up to join the team in 1990. Playing in nine games for Los Angeles, he had one hit, a double against Dennis Martínez.
Most of Traxler's time in the Dodger system was spent with the Triple-A Albuquerque Dukes, with whom Traxler played from 1989 through 1993. He batted over .300 with the team in 1992 and ranked among the Pacific Coast League leaders in several categories in 1993, but he was not called up to the major leagues, as fellow first base prospect Eric Karros had won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1992. Blocked by Karros, Traxler headed to Japan in 1994, playing one season for the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, where he was the only foreign All-Star for the season. He returned to Albuquerque for one final season in 1995.
From 1996 through 2000, Traxler played independent baseball for several teams, as well as a half season with the Ho-Hsin Whales of the Chinese Professional Baseball League in 1998. Retiring after the 2000 season, he served as a hitting instructor from 2001 through 2004 for minor league teams in the Dodgers' system, though his contract was not renewed after the 2004 season. Traxler expected to look for another coaching job at the upcoming Winter Meetings, but he died of alcohol-related liver disease on November 19 at the age of 37.
## Early life
Brian Lee Traxler was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on September 26, 1967 to parents Floyd (nicknamed "Sandy") and Ruth. His father was employed for over 20 years as the chief operator of the North Shore Sanitary District. Brian was the oldest of three siblings, with sisters Kelly and Stacey born two and four years later, respectively.
Both Traxler's parents were athletic, and they purchased Brian his first baseball glove when he was eight months old. His father started playing baseball with him while he was a toddler, and by the age of four, he was demonstrating "keen hand-eye coordination," according to Traxler biographer Rory Costello. He started playing tee-ball at the age of five, usually demonstrating the ability of someone a year or more older. When he turned 10, he started playing sandlot ball from eight o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the evening in the summer months, a practice he continued for six years.
Traxler was an all-state outfielder for Waukegan East High School. He also played basketball and golf for the high school, but not football, because his parents were worried about him getting hurt. Additionally, Traxler played American Legion Baseball for Homer Dahringer Post 281. A left-hander, he was mainly used as a first baseman, though he also was used as a pitcher and left fielder. Though one Major League Baseball (MLB) team offered Traxler a contract when he graduated from Waukegan East in 1985, his parents wanted him to attend college, in order for him to have a backup plan in case an injury derailed his baseball career. Northwestern University offered him a scholarship, but he attended the University of New Orleans (UNO), wanting to play baseball in a warmer area.
## College
At UNO, Traxler exhibited a deep understanding of the game of baseball. Tom Schwaner, the head baseball coach for the Privateers, used Traxler as his unofficial hitting coach. Though first base remained his position, he played every position except second base and shortstop with the Privateers. "He didn’t have the stuff [for pitching]," Schwaner recalled, "but he had the moxie." In one game, he threw a shutout against Wichita State University, a highly-ranked team at the time.
Traxler had a stellar career with the Privateers. He was hit in the head by a pitch in a 1986 game, resulting in a concussion, but he still hit 15 home runs that year. Next season, he hit 20 as the Privateers reached the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) South Division II Regional Tournament. He was a candidate to play in the 1987 Pan American Games for Team USA, but shin splints kept him from participating. He finished his junior season in 1988 with 14 home runs as the Privateers advanced to the NCAA Central Regional, where they were eliminated by the University of Michigan Wolverines. In his three seasons with the Privateers, Traxler set school records for total bases (438), home runs (49), and runs batted in (RBI) (206).
## Early minor league career (1988-1990)
Traxler was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 16th round of the 1988 MLB draft. The 400th overall pick, he was a long shot to reach the major leagues, but his chances were aided when fellow first base prospect Eric Karros negotiated for a higher-paying contract. Because of the delay, Traxler was sent to the Single-A Vero Beach Dodgers of the Florida State League to begin his career while Karros was sent to the Rookie-level Great Falls Dodgers of the Pioneer League, even though Karros had been drafted 10 rounds higher. In 72 games with Vero Beach, Traxler batted .292 with 30 runs scored, 76 hits, two home runs, and 34 RBI.
In 1989, Traxler began the year with the Double-A San Antonio Missions of the Texas League. He batted .346 with 37 runs scored, 79 hits, nine home runs, and 44 RBI in 63 games. Midway through the season, he was promoted to the Triple-A Albuquerque Dukes of the Pacific Coast League (PCL). In 64 games with the Dukes, he batted .301 with 33 runs scored, 72 hits, three home runs, and 30 RBI. Following the minor league season, Traxler played winter baseball with the Leones del Caracas of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League. Nicknamed "El Gordito" by the fans, a reference to his heavy build, he batted .301 with four home runs and 39 RBI in 57 games.
Entering the 1990 season, baseball analyst Bill James described Traxler as an "absolutely square prospect...can hit, and could have a big year at Albuquerque this year. I don’t know how good he’ll be at the major league level, but he’s fun to watch." The Dodgers were worried about the fact that he weighed over 200 pounds, and manager Tommy Lasorda advised him to get in better shape. Traxler responded by losing 20 pounds. He began the season with Albuquerque, as his first seven appearances were in a Dukes uniform.
## Los Angeles Dodgers (1990)
On April 22, 1990, Jeff Hamilton of the Dodgers was placed on the disabled list with a torn rotator cuff. With Kal Daniels temporarily unavailable due to a twisted side, the Dodgers desired another left-handed bat on the roster. They purchased Traxler's contract from Albuquerque and promoted him to the major leagues. He made his MLB debut on April 24, 1990, replacing Eddie Murray at first base after the veteran was ejected from the game by umpire Harry Wendelstedt. In his lone at bat of the contest, he struck out against Bob Tewksbury, but the Dodgers defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 3–0. Traxler got his first and only start in the major leagues at first base on May 8 against the Montreal Expos. He had no hits in two at bats before being pinch-hit for in the seventh inning by John Shelby as the Dodgers lost 9–1. Still batting .000 after his first six games, Traxler got his first career hit on May 10 with a pinch-hit double against Dennis Martínez in an 8–2 loss to the Expos. He would have had another double on May 13 against David Cone of the New York Mets, but the game was rained out, and the statistics from the game did not count. In his ninth game for the Dodgers, on May 21, he played first base for only the third time when he replaced Mickey Hatcher for the final two innings of a 12–3 loss to the Mets. Traxler's family hoped to see him play when the Dodgers travelled to Chicago to take on the Cubs at Wrigley Field on May 23, but the Dodgers sent Traxler back to Albuquerque the day before so that they could activate Pat Perry from the disabled list. In nine games with the Dodgers, he batted .091 with one hit and four strikeouts in 11 at bats.
## Albuquerque Dukes (1990-1993)
Traxler would remain at Albuquerque for the rest of the 1990 season. Bone spurs in his elbow limited him to 98 games with the Triple-A club. He batted .277 with 43 runs scored, 88 hits, seven home runs, and 53 RBI. Traxler had the bone spurs removed in 1991, but the Dodgers sent him back to San Antonio to recover. He spent most of the season with the Double-A team, batting .256 with 50 runs scored, 97 hits, seven home runs, and 61 RBI in 103 games. Traxler also played 18 games for Albuquerque, batting .357 with three runs scored, 10 hits, one home run, and eight RBI. During the 1990-91 offseason, Traxler had skipped playing winter ball because his first child was born. However, he followed up the 1991 season by playing for the Tigres del Licey of the Dominican Winter League. In 47 games, he batted .266 with three home runs and 16 RBI as the Tigres reached the playoffs.
During the 1992 season, Traxler played 127 games for Albuquerque. He batted .303 with 58 runs scored, 119 hits, 11 home runs, and 58 RBI. However, in the major leagues, Karros had taken over from Murray as the everyday first baseman and won the National League (NL) Rookie of the Year Award, diminishing Traxler's chances of returning to the major leagues with the Dodgers. After the season, Traxler returned to the Leones del Caracas, but he batted just .217 this time while only playing 27 games.
Traxler had continued to pitch occasionally, making one appearance on the mound in 1990 and 1992 for Albuquerque. In 1993, he pitched two games for the Dukes, winning one of them, though his earned run average (ERA) was 11.57. Traxler again played 127 games for Albuquerque in 1993, ranking among the PCL leaders in several categories. His .333 batting average was fourth in the league (behind Jim Lindeman's .362, teammate Jerry Brooks's .344, and Brian Johnson's .339), his 81 runs scored were ninth, his 147 hits were fifth, his 36 doubles were tied with Kurt Abbott and Luis López for third (behind James Mouton's 42 and Steve Hosey's 40), his 16 home runs were tied with four other players for eighth, and his 83 RBI were ninth in the league. Despite his strong season, he was not called up by Los Angeles in September. This time, he went to Puerto Rico for winter ball, playing with the Indios de Mayagüez. In 27 games, he batted .256 with three home runs and 16 RBI.
## Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (1994)
Entering the 1994 season, the Colorado Rockies were interested in acquiring Traxler, though they only planned to use him as a pinch hitter. Instead, Traxler cut his season in Puerto Rico short, signing with the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks of the Japanese Pacific League in Nippon Professional Baseball. In Fukuoka, he was used as the everyday first baseman. He had seven RBI in his first game with the team. After a strong first half, he became the only foreign player named to the Japanese All-Star Game. The fans nicknamed him "Koro Koro-chan" (a reference to his heavy build), and a custom solid ceramic figurine (not a bobblehead) the team created sold 6,000 units, prompting the team to make figurines of some other players.
Traxler did not hit quite as well in the second half of the season, finishing the year with a .263 average, 15 home runs, and 29 RBI in 129 games. He did not return to Fukuoka in 1995, as the Hawks replaced him with former NL Most Valuable Player (MVP) Kevin Mitchell at first base.
## Last season with the Dukes, independent baseball (1995-1997)
Traxler returned to the Dodgers organization in 1995, playing one final season for Albuquerque. In 110 games, he batted .283 with 46 runs scored, 100 hits, 11 home runs, and 50 RBI. As this was his sixth year in the minors for the Dodgers, he became a minor league free agent after the season. In his six seasons with the Dukes, Traxler set team records for most games played (544), doubles (122), and total bases (829) in a career. He was inducted into the Albuquerque Professional Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.
In 1996, Traxler joined the independent-league Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks for their inaugural 1996 season. According to Fargo manager Doug Simunic, Traxler "kind of got us started as an organization. He was one of the first guys we signed and he showed a lot of guys how things were supposed to be done." That year, Traxler was one of the top hitters in the Northern League, batting .335 (fifth) with 110 hits (fifth), 16 doubles, and 16 home runs while driving in 75 runs (tied for fifth with Peter Kuld) and scoring 73 times (sixth) in 83 games. In 1997, he followed with a .298 average, 12 doubles, three home runs, 37 RBI, and 29 runs scored in 42 games. With the team not doing as well as it had the year before, the RedHawks decided to release Traxler on July 17, along with six other players. Team management felt that Traxler, who typically served as the cleanup hitter, was not getting enough clutch hits. Traxler said of the release, "I’m not bitter about it, just give me a reason. Give me a real reason." He finished the season with the Northern League's Sioux Falls Canaries, batting .313 with 16 runs scored, 42 hits, three home runs, and 21 RBI in 37 games. In 79 games combined between the two teams, he batted .304 with 45 runs scored, 95 hits, six home runs, and 58 RBI.
## Ho-Hsin Whales, last seasons (1998-2000)
Over the winter between the 1997 and 1998 seasons, Traxler drove a sugar beet truck to make money. He started the 1998 season with the Somerset Patriots of the newly formed, independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. Though primarily playing at first base, Traxler also was used as a designated hitter for the team, which played all its games on the road since its new stadium would not be finished until 1999. In 37 games, he batted .256 with 12 runs scored, 33 hits, five home runs, and 26 RBI.
Traxler's contract with Somerset included a clause that allowed him to opt out if he got offered a spot on a team at a higher level. He took advantage of this clause in early July, when he went to Taiwan to join the Ho-Hsin Whales of the Chinese Professional Baseball League. In 43 games, he batted .287 with 17 runs scored, 37 hits, two home runs, and 21 RBI.
In 1999, Traxler returned to Somerset. On June 19, he hit two home runs in an inning against the Bridgeport Bluefish at The Ballpark at Harbor Yard. For the season, he batted .250 with 34 runs scored, 97 hits, 12 home runs, and 61 RBI in 109 games. Though the scorecard still described him as 5'10" and 200 lbs, author Bob Golon described Traxler as weighing more than 250 lbs. Manager Sparky Lyle later said, "He was by far the best hitter we’ve ever had here."
Traxler returned to Sioux Falls in 2000, playing with the Canaries until the team released him on June 28. In 28 games, he batted .222 with 10 runs scored, 22 hits, three home runs, and 12 RBI.
## Final years
Following his playing days, he became a hitting instructor in the Dodgers minor league system. He served at Great Falls in 2001 and 2002, then helped the Vero Beach Dodgers in 2003. Though he remained in Vero Beach in 2004, it was for the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Dodgers. After the 2004 season, the Dodgers did not renew Traxler's contract. Traxler planned to look for another position at the upcoming Winter Meetings.
On November 4, 2004, Traxler was taken to North Central Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, with alcohol-related liver disease. He slipped into a coma before dying 15 days later at the age of 37. A memorial service was held for him on December 1, and his remains were cremated and scattered at V. J. Keefe Memorial Stadium and Privateer Park. Friend Josh Buchholz recalled that the Dodgers had Traxler in a treatment program at one time. "It was not much else besides beer, just years and years of lifestyle," Buchholz said. "Brian had his demons, and they crept in."
## Personal life
Traxler met his wife, Gabriela “Gabby” Aguayo, in 1989 while he was playing for the Missions. She was a souvenir seller at V. J. Keefe Memorial Stadium. They were married on February 3, 1990. A woman who "loved baseball" by her own admission, she would hit him ground balls and pitch batting practice for him during his offseason workouts. The couple had one daughter, Ashley. Over the winter in 1996–97, the couple separated for what Costello calls "family reasons." "His love was for the game,” Gabby explained. “Without the game, he wouldn't have been who he was. It's a very tough lifestyle; I admire families that can stay with it. But we made the decision together. We remained very good friends and I don't regret it.” They officially divorced in 1999. Towards the end of Brian's life, Gabby came to visit him several times while he was ill in the hospital. Ashley inherited her parents' love of sports, as she went on to play fastpitch softball.
Over the course of his career, Traxler was always a popular player with the fans. He never turned down autograph requests, waiting until lines were empty before he stopped signing. He was "gregarious and approachable, the type of player that fans of all stripes could relate to," according to the Home News Tribune. Off the field, he was a frequent partier who always enjoyed the nightlife. "I like to have a few beers once in a while and I eat what I want to eat," he described himself once, though baseball historian Frank Russo observed that he engaged in "heavy beer consumption".
|
977,412 |
Andreas Thorkildsen
| 1,172,386,187 |
Norwegian javelin thrower
|
[
"1982 births",
"Athletes (track and field) at the 2004 Summer Olympics",
"Athletes (track and field) at the 2008 Summer Olympics",
"Athletes (track and field) at the 2012 Summer Olympics",
"Diamond League winners",
"European Athlete of the Year winners",
"European Athletics Championships medalists",
"IAAF Continental Cup winners",
"IAAF World Athletics Final winners",
"Living people",
"Medalists at the 2004 Summer Olympics",
"Medalists at the 2008 Summer Olympics",
"Norwegian male javelin throwers",
"Olympic athletes for Norway",
"Olympic gold medalists for Norway",
"Olympic gold medalists in athletics (track and field)",
"People educated at Kristiansand Cathedral School",
"Sportspeople from Kristiansand",
"World Athletics Championships athletes for Norway",
"World Athletics Championships medalists",
"World Athletics Championships winners"
] |
Andreas Thorkildsen (born 1 April 1982) is a retired Norwegian track and field athlete who competed in the javelin throw. He was the Olympic Champion in 2004 and 2008, European Champion in 2006 and 2010, and World Champion in 2009. He is the first male javelin thrower in history to simultaneously be European, World and Olympic Champion. He was also a three-time silver medalist at the World Championships, placing second in 2005, 2007 and 2011. His personal best of 91.59 m, set in 2006, is the Norwegian record.
## Personal life
Thorkildsen's father Tomm Thorkildsen is a former javelin thrower, achieving a personal best throw of 71.64 metres in 1974. His mother Bente (née Amundsen) became national champion in the 100 metres hurdles in 1972, representing Hamar IL. He has one older brother. He took his secondary education at Kristiansand Cathedral School.
Relationship with Christina Vukicevic
Thorkildsen's relationship with the Norwegian hurdler Christina Vukicevic generated some unwanted publicity on his part. When Thorkildsen and Vukicevic won kongepokalen for men and women respectively at the 2006 Norwegian championships, Thorkildsen left the stadium to avoid photographers, whom he had shown the finger the previous day. In March 2011 Vukicevic and Thorkildsen announced in the Norwegian media that they no longer were a couple.
Modelling
In 2007, Thorkildsen performed as a fashion model for former footballer Martin Dahlin, fronting his winter and autumn collections.
## Career
Thorkildsen took up javelin throwing at the age of 11, and was coached by his father Tomm until 1999. He established numerous national boys' records as a teenager. In 1996 he set a national record for the 14 years' class (53.82 m), in 1998 for the 16 years' class (61.57 m), in 1999 for the 17 years' class (72.11 m), and in 2000 a record for the 18 years' class (77.48 m). In 1999 he finished seventh at the European Junior Championships.
In 2000 Thorkildsen took his first medal at the Norwegian championships, finishing in silver medal position behind Ronny Nilsen. His form earned Thorkildsen his first call-up to the Norwegian European Cup team. In October he participated at the World Junior Championships and received a silver medal behind winner Gerhardus Pienaar from South Africa.
### 2001–2003
In 2001 Thorkildsen moved to Oslo and started competing for the club SK Vidar under coach Åsmund Martinsen, a former javelin thrower who won the bronze medal at the 1994 Norwegian Championships, and had a career best throw of 68.12 metres. The cooperation proved fruitful as Thorkildsen soon broke the 80 metre barrier, throwing 83.87 metres at Fana stadion in June. This was a world junior record till 2011. Participating in his second European Junior Championships, he won a silver medal behind Aleksandr Ivanov. Both competed at the World Championships in Edmonton, but while Ivanov managed to reach the final, Thorkildsen finished last in the entire competition with only 68.41 metres. When asked to comment on his own throwing he described it as "completely awful".
At the national level Thorkildsen became Norwegian champion for the first time. In August he competed in a discus throw meet at Sognsvann, establishing a personal best of 38.02 metres. He has not competed on national level in other athletic events.
In 2002, he recorded a season best of 83.43 metres in June before witnessing his form gradually declining over the next months. At his first European Championships, which were held in August in Munich, he again failed to progress from the qualifying round. With a best throw of 78.36 metres he finished fifteenth overall, 68 centimetres behind Ari Pakarinen who secured the last spot in the final. Although Thorkildsen only managed to take silver at the Norwegian championships behind Pål Arne Fagernes, his result of 83.43 metres was enough to front the national top list in javelin throw for the first time.
Next year he finished eleventh at the 2003 World Championships in Paris, his first major international final. His performance and throw of 77.75 metres was slightly disappointing as he had thrown 79.44 metres in the qualifying round, having travelled to Paris with a personal best of 85.72 metres, established in June in Ventspils. On the lighter side he took his second national title, consolidating his spot as Norway's leading javelin thrower.
### 2004
In 2004 Thorkildsen faced competition from Ronny Nilsen, who threw 84.73 metres in May. Although Thorkildsen did not retake the national number one spot right away, he did display increasing form in the preparations for the Olympic Games. He qualified for the Olympics with an 84.12 m throw at the Bergen Bislett Games, an event which was won by Breaux Greer with a North American record and world leading throw of 87.39 metres. On 27 July Thorkildsen took his first victory in an IAAF Grand Prix meet, beating Breaux Greer by a comfortable margin at the DN Galan meet in Stockholm. Three days later he improved his season best to 84.45 metres at the London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace.
Even though several throwers, including Nilsen, still towered above Thorkildsen on the world list, the Olympic javelin contest was regarded as widely open – "one of the most open finals in Olympic history", according to the IAAF Olympic coverage. Thorkildsen threw 81.74 m in the qualification round, barely earning a mention in the event report as he safely passed the automatic qualifier mark of 81 metres to go through to the final. Breaux Greer won the qualification with 87.25 m, but left the stadium in a limping state. In the javelin final held two days later, Thorkildsen opened with an 84.82 m release which saw him ranked third at the end of the first round. Vadims Vasiļevskis of Latvia had thrown a personal best of 84.95 m to earn a surprising lead ahead of reigning World champion Sergey Makarov. In the second round Thorkildsen threw a personal best of 86.50 metres. As neither Aleksandr Ivanov, Greer nor anyone else managed to beat this, Thorkildsen won a surprising Olympic gold medal with Vasiļevskis and Makarov staying in place to take the silver and bronze medals respectively. Thorkildsen became the second Norwegian man to win the Olympic gold medal in javelin throw, after Egil Danielsen in 1956. Commenting on his win, Thorkildsen described the feeling as "completely insane". A second place behind Breaux Greer at the World Athletics Final in Monte Carlo rounded off the season.
### 2005
The most important event of 2005 was the World Championships. The preparations for this event looked promising for Thorkildsen as he improved his personal best to 86.82 metres in Kuortane in June, beating the Norwegian record of Pål Arne Fagernes. Tero Pitkämäki from Finland, who achieved a world leading result of 91.53 metres in the same competition, seemed a likely contender for the world champion title. In July, When Thorkildsen further improved his national record to 87.66 metres at the Bislett Games, reigning world champion Sergey Makarov had already thrown 90.33 metres two weeks earlier at the Russian Championships in Tula. Going into the World Championships, Pitkämäki was still in first place on the world top list ahead of Makarov and Thorkildsen, who in turn was ahead of Breaux Greer by one centimetre.
In the qualification round at the World Championships, held in windy conditions on the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, only Pitkämäki, Makarov and Thorkildsen managed to beat the automatic qualification mark of 81 metres. Rain supplemented the wind the following day, constituting difficult weather conditions for the javelin final. Thorkildsen, in the lead after three rounds with 86.18 metres, eventually finished in silver medal position behind Andrus Värnik of Estonia as the latter threw 87.17 metres in the fourth round.
Pitkämäki, who finished a disappointing fourth at the World Championships, bounced back to win the World Athletics Final ahead of Thorkildsen, despite the latter improving his national record to 89.60 metres. 89.60 metres was enough to finish third on the world top list that season, behind Pitkämäki and Makarov.
### 2006–2008
In 2006 Thorkildsen returned to his original club Kristiansands IF, having represented SK Vidar in competitions the five previous seasons. In May he broke the 90 metre barrier for the first time, with 90.13 metres from the Doha Super Grand Prix. At the Bislett Games he yet again improved his record to 91.59 metres, reaching his goal of 300 feet. As no one managed to top his 91.59 metre result, he entered the 2006 European Championships as a favorite, together with Tero Pitkämäki who had won the IAAF Golden League meet in Paris. Thorkildsen won the event with 88.78 metres, having led the competition since the second round. Thorkildsen finished the season by winning his first World Athletics Final as well as the 2006 IAAF World Cup. With 91.59 metres he finished on top of the world list for the first time.
Thorkildsen's main goals for the 2007 season were the Bislett Games and the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, as well as winning the Golden League jackpot. In addition he aimed to beat the old record of Terje Pedersen, who threw 91.72 metres with the old javelin implement, by throwing in the range of 93 to 94 metres. The season started in a mediocre manner as he threw 81.10 metres in Dakar and 86.39 m in Doha. He recovered his form at the world championships, but once again could only achieve a silver medal, this time losing to Pitkämäki finally fulfilling his potential with a throw of 90.33 (though he'd already been assured the medal by this point).
In 2008 Thorkildsen won the Golden League event at Bislett in Oslo, his main goal besides the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He won a gold medal in the Olympics where he set a new Olympic record with 90.57 metres. Thorkildsen dominated the competition, leading it from his first throw and making the two longest throws in the competition without using his last attempt. All of his 5 throws would have given a medal. Thorkildsen also won the javelin competition of the 2008 IAAF Golden League in Zürich on 29 August.
### 2009–2016
He became the first male javelin thrower in history to hold all three titles of European champion, World champion and Olympic champion, winning IAAF World Championship in Berlin with 89.59 m. Thorkildsen also had the season's leading throw, with 91.28 m achieved in Zürich on 28 August.
He opened his 2010 season with a large throw of 90.37 metres at the Florö Track & Field Festival in May and went on to score a victory over Pitkämäki in their first match up in the 2010 IAAF Diamond League at the Bislett Games, finishing with a best throw of 86.00 m. On 31 July he defended his European title with a throw of 88.37, finishing ahead of second-placed Matthias de Zordo. De Zordo got his revenge next year when he won World Championship on 3 September at Daegu with Thorkildsen finishing second with a throw of 84.78.
In 2012 Thorkildsen finished fourth at European Championships in Helsinki only managing three throws with the best result of 81.55 metres after picking up an injury during warm-up. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London he threw 82.63 and finished sixth which became fifth several years later after disqualification of the original silver medalist Oleksandr Pyatnytsya for doping offence. Next year's World Championships at Moscow brought Thorkildsen a sixth place with a throw of 81.06 in what turned out to be his last appearance at a major championship competition. Injuries forced him to bring his 2014 season to a premature end before the European Championships. He later decided to sit out the entire 2015 season but aimed at comeback in 2016. However, in May 2016 Thorkildsen announced his retirement from sports.
## Awards
At the end of 2004 Thorkildsen was selected Norwegian Sportsperson of the Year by Norwegian sports journalists.
In 2008 he was awarded the European Athlete of the Year trophy by the European Athletic Association, announced on 2 October 2008, and to be presented at the European Athletics Awards Dinner in Amsterdam on 18 October. The Association cited Thorkildsen's success at the Beijing Olympics and his breaching of the 90-metre barrier as part of their reasoning for the award.
## Seasonal bests by year
- 1998 – 61.57
- 1999 – 72.11
- 2000 – 77.48
- 2001 – 83.87
- 2002 – 83.43
- 2003 – 85.72
- 2004 – 86.50
- 2005 – 89.60
- 2006 – 91.59
- 2007 – 89.51
- 2008 – 90.57
- 2009 – 91.28
- 2010 – 90.37
- 2011 – 90.61
- 2012 – 84.72
- 2013 – 84.64
- 2014 – 80.52
|
63,690 |
Palantír
| 1,173,415,486 |
Fictional magical artefact from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy legendarium
|
[
"Fictional balls",
"Magic items",
"Middle-earth objects"
] |
A palantír (/pæˈlænˌtɪər/; ) is one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. The word comes from Quenya palan 'far', and tir 'watch over'. The palantírs were used for communication and to see events in other parts of Arda, or in the past.
The palantírs were made by the Elves of Valinor in the First Age, as told in The Silmarillion. By the time of The Lord of the Rings at the end of the Third Age, a few palantírs remained in existence. They are used in some climactic scenes by major characters: Sauron, Saruman, Denethor the Steward of Gondor, and two members of the Fellowship of the Ring: Aragorn and Pippin.
A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to "possess great strength of will and of mind" to direct the stone's gaze to its full capability. The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable. Commentators such as the Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda. Tom Shippey suggests that the message is that "speculation", looking into any sort of magic mirror (Latin: speculum) or stone to see the future, rather than trusting in Providence, leads to error.
## Fictional artefact
### Origins
In Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings, the palantírs were made by the Elves of Valinor in the Uttermost West, by the Noldor, apparently by Fëanor himself from silima, "that which shines". The number that he made is not stated, but there were at least eight of them. Seven of the stones given to Amandil of Númenor during the Second Age were saved by his son Elendil; he took them with him to Middle-earth, while at least the Master-stone remained behind.
Four were taken to Gondor, while three stayed in Arnor. Originally, the stones of Arnor were at Elostirion in the Tower Hills, Amon Sul (Weathertop), and Annuminas: the Elostirion stone, Elendil's own, looked only Westwards from Middle-earth across the ocean to the Master-stone at the Tower of Avallonë upon Eressëa, an island off Valinor. The stones of Gondor were in Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Osgiliath, and Minas Ithil.
By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the stone of Orthanc was in the hands of the wizard Saruman, while the stone of Minas Ithil, (by then Minas Morgul, the city of the Nazgûl), had been taken by the dark lord Sauron. That of Minas Tirith remained in the hands of the Steward of Gondor, Denethor. The stone of Osgiliath had been lost in the Anduin when the city was sacked.
### Characteristics
A single palantír enabled its user to see places far off, or events in the past. A person could look into a palantír to communicate with anyone looking into another palantír. They could then see "visions of the things in the mind" of the person looking into the other stone.
The stones were made of a dark crystal, indestructible by any normal means, except perhaps the fire of Orodruin. They ranged in size from a diameter of about a foot (30 cm) to much larger stones that could not be lifted by one person. The Stone of Osgiliath had power over other stones including the ability to eavesdrop. The minor stones required one to move around them, thereby changing the viewpoint of its vision, whereas the major stones could be turned on their axis.
A wielder of great power such as Sauron could dominate a weaker user through the stone, which was the experience of Pippin Took and Saruman. Even one as powerful as Sauron could not make the palantírs "lie", or create false images; the most he could do was to selectively display truthful images to create a false impression in the viewer's mind. In The Lord of the Rings, four such uses of the stones are described, and in each case, a true image is shown, but the viewer draws a false conclusion from the facts. This applies to Sauron when he sees Pippin in Saruman's stone and assumes that Pippin has the One Ring, and that Saruman has therefore captured it. Denethor, too, is deceived through his use of a palantír, this time by Sauron, who drives Denethor to suicide by truthfully showing him the Black Fleet approaching Gondor, without telling him that the ships are crewed by Aragorn's troops, coming to Gondor's rescue. Shippey suggests that this consistent pattern is Tolkien's way of telling the reader that one should not "speculate" – the word meaning both to try to double-guess the future, and to look into a mirror (Latin: speculum 'glass or mirror') or crystal ball – but should trust in one's luck and make one's own mind up, courageously facing one's duty in each situation.
The English literature scholar Paul Kocher similarly noted the hand of providence: Wormtongue's throwing of the stone providentially leads to Pippin's foolish look into the stone, which deceives Sauron; and it allows Aragorn to claim the stone and use it to deceive Sauron further. This leads him to assume that Aragorn has the One Ring. That in turn provokes Sauron into a whole series of what turn out to be disastrous actions: a premature attack on Minas Tirith; a rushed exit of the army of Minas Morgul, thus letting the hobbits through the pass of Cirith Ungol with the One Ring, and so on until the quest to destroy the ring succeeds against all odds.
The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance Nitzsche writes that Saruman's sin, in Christian terms, is to seek Godlike knowledge by gazing in a short-sighted way into the Orthanc palantír in the hope of rivalling Sauron. She quotes Tolkien's description in The Two Towers, which states that Saruman explored "all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom". She explains that he is in this way giving up actual wisdom for "mere knowledge", imagining the arts were his own but in fact coming from Sauron. This prideful self-aggrandisement leads to his fall. She notes that it is ironic in this context that palantír means "far-sighted".
Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the seeing stones to "broadcast propaganda and sow the seeds of despair among his enemies" with the communications technologies used to spread propaganda in the Second World War and then the Cold War, when Tolkien was writing.
## In film
A palantír appears in the film director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films. The Tolkien critic Allison Harl compares Jackson to Saruman, and his camera to a palantír, writing that "Jackson chooses to look through the perilous lens, putting his camera to use to exert control over the [original Tolkien] text." Harl cites Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" which describes "scopophilia", the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, based on Sigmund Freud's writings on sexuality. Harl gives as an example the sequence in The Two Towers where Jackson's camera "like the Evil Eye of Sauron" travels towards Saruman's tower, Isengard and "zooms into the dangerous palantír", in her opinion giving the cinema viewer "an omniscient and privileged perspective" consisting of a Sauron-like power to observe the whole of Middle-earth. The sequence ends fittingly, in her opinion, with Mordor and the Eye of Sauron, bringing the viewer, like Saruman, to meet the Enemy's gaze. As a consequence of Jackson's exclusion of The Scouring of the Shire, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue much earlier (at the beginning of the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), while Gandalf acquires the Orthanc palantír after Pippin retrieves it from Saruman's corpse, instead of having Wormtongue throw it from a window of the tower. Further, Sauron uses the Palantír to show Aragorn a dying Arwen, (a scene from the future) in the hope of weakening his resolve.
## Influence
The software data-collection company Palantir Technologies was named by its founder, Peter Thiel, after Tolkien's seeing stones.
An astronomical telescope at the Lowell Observatory, using a main mirror with spherical curvature, has the acronym PALANTIR. This stands for Precision Array of Large-Aperture New Telescopes for Image Reconstruction, and is meant to reference the "far-seeing stones in [The] Lord of the Rings".
|
546,023 |
Bobby Pulido
| 1,168,680,742 |
American singer (born 1971)
|
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"1973 births",
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"American male television actors",
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"American musicians of Mexican descent",
"American philanthropists",
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"Singers from Miami",
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"Tejano musicians"
] |
Jose Roberto Pulido Jr. (born April 25, 1971), known professionally as Bobby Pulido, is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actor. He is acclaimed for pioneering the dissemination of Tejano music to a youthful audience, subsequently ascending as a teen idol and becoming one of the most influential Tejano recording artists among Mexican American teenagers.
In 1995, Pulido debuted on the music scene as the frontman of his eponymous band. During the same year, he forged a recording contract with EMI Latin and released his debut album, Desvelado. The album peaked at number nine on the United States Billboard Top Latin Albums chart and at number three on the US Billboard Regional Mexican Albums chart. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album platinum, denoting shipments of 100,000 units. The titular track propelled Pulido into a celebrated Tejano singer, albeit drawing criticism from veteran musicians who opined that his success in the genre derived from the preexisting musical impact of his father, Roberto Pulido.
Pulido's album Enséñame (1996), which peaked at number two on the Billboard Regional Mexican Albums chart, garnered him a nomination for the Tejano Music Award for Male Entertainer of the Year and the Lo Nuestro Award for Regional Mexican New Artist of the Year. In 1998, Pulido performed a sold-out performance at the Auditorio Coca-Cola in Monterrey, the first Tejano artist to achieve this feat. Pulido became the youngest honoree to receive the Orgullo de la Frontera accolade by the Fiestas Mexicanas in February 1999. In 1998, the singer was recognized with the Male Entertainer of the Year award at the Tejano Music Awards for three consecutive years. By 2000, the waning popularity of Tejano music resulted in Pulido's subsequent albums failing to make an impact on music charts.
In 2003, Pulido made his acting debut, assuming the lead role in the made-for-television film La Decada Furiosa. He also appeared in the telenovelas Fuego en La Sangre and Qué pobres tan ricos. Pulido encountered commercial disappointment with his album Enfermo de Amor (2007), prompting a three-year hiatus, he resurfaced with the release of Dias de Ayer (2010). Concurrently, Pulido renewed his foray into the acting realm, making a guest appearance in the film Noches Con Platanito.
## Life and career
### 1971–94: Early life and career beginnings
Jose Roberto Pulido Jr. was born on April 25, 1971, in Edinburg, Texas. He is the oldest child of Roberto Pulido, an award-winning Tejano music singer; and Diana Montez, daughter of norteño musician Mario Montez of Los Donneños. Known professionally as Bobby Pulido, he attended Edinburg High School and became a member of the school's mariachi ensemble before embarking on a journey with his father's band, Los Clásicos, where he contributed as a saxophonist and backup vocalist. In 1994, EMI Latin unveiled a compilation album titled Branding Icons, that showcased Pulido's collaborative effort with his father on "Contigo". Pulido was accepted at St. Mary's University, where he pursued a major in business management. Following the album's release, Pulido abandoned his collegiate pursuits and venture into a singing career during the golden age of Tejano music.
### 1995–99: Debut album and commercial success
Pulido spearheaded the establishment of his own band, enlisting guitarist Gilbert Trejo, bassist Mike Fox, drummer and uncle Jimmy Montez, keyboardist Rey Gutierrez, and Frank Caballero, who assumed the role of the band's accordion virtuoso. Initially, Pulido encountered censure from Tejano musicians, who contended that the vocalist was capitalizing on the prestige amassed by his father's well-established musical career. In May 1995, Pulido inked a recording agreement with EMI Latin, culminating in the release of his debut album, Desvelado, that September. President of EMI Latin, Jose Behar, shared with Billboard his ardent optimism for the singer's propects within the country music market. His debut single "No Se Por Que" peaked at number 33 on the United States Billboard Hot Latin Tracks chart in December 1995. Debuting at number 44 on the Top Latin Albums, Desvelado propelled Pulido's eponymous title track, where it peaked at number 21, establishing Pulido as one of the most popular Tejano artists. In April 1996, the album peaked at number nine on the Top Latin Albums chart and number three on the Billboard Regional Mexican Albums chart. Billboard's John Lannert, lauded Pulido's chart placement as "impressive", hailing the singer as a "fast-rising artist". It was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), signifying shipments of 100,000 units in the US. Pulido ended 1996 as the eighth best-selling regional Mexican artist and Desvelado ended the year as the eleventh best-selling regional Mexican album. The album reached sales of 100,000 units by the end of 1999. At the 1996 Tejano Music Awards, Pulido tied first place with Eddie Gonzales for Best New Rising Male Tejano Artists.
In July 1996, Pulido married Eliza Anzaldua, prompting a brief hiatus from his career. Pulido persisted in the promotion of his second album, Enséñame, which was released a month following his marriage. Billboard, recognizing the essence of Enséñame as a resounding ranchera album infused with catchy cumbia undertones, surmised that Pulido aimed to emulate Emilio Navaira, who sought to crossover and establish himself as a country music singer. Writing in the San Antonio Express-News, Ramiro Burr affirmed that Pulido's vocals had undergone significant refinement compared to the preceding recordings. Enséñame peaked at number ten on the Top Latin Albums and number two on the Regional Mexican Albums charts. The album generated three Regional Mexican Airplay tracks that secured spots within the top 20; "Enséñame", "Se Murió De Amor", and "La Rosa". The album earned Pulido a nomination for the Tejano Music Award for Male Entertainer of the Year and the Lo Nuestro Award for Regional Mexican New Artist of the Year. In collaboration with Graciela Beltrán, the Barrio Boyzz, Emilio Navaira, Pete Astudillo, and Jennifer Peña, Pulido contributed to the rendition of "Viviras Selena" for the 1997 soundtrack to the biopic film about Selena, referred to as the "Queen of Tejano music" who was shot and killed in March 1995. By 1997, Pulido had gained recognition for his role in introducing Tejano music to a younger demographic in the US.
In 1998, Pulido released his third studio album Llegaste a Mi Vida, where it peaked at number two on the Regional Mexican Albums chart and at number eleven on the Top Latin Albums chart. The only single to appear on the Latin singles chart, "Pedire", peaked at number 28 on the Hot Latin Songs. Llegaste a Mi Vida garnered Pulido five of twelve nominations at the 1998 Tejano Music Awards; winning Male Vocalist of the Year, Male Entertainer of the Year, Tejano Crossover Song of the Year for "¿Dónde Estás?", and Tejano Album of the Year. The same year, Desvelado and Llegaste a Mi Vida, each sold 100,000 units in Mexico—an unprecedented milestone for the singer. In September 1998, Pulido released his first live album En Vivo: Desde Monterrey Mexico, which was recorded on April 24, 1998. The album became the singer's fourth top-ten US recording and peaked at number 21 on the Top Latin Albums chart. Performing at a sold-out concert at the Auditorio Coca-Cola in Monterrey, Pulido became the first Tejano grupo musician to accomplish this feat. In March 1999, he released his fourth studio album El Cazador, which produced the top-thirty Regional Mexican Airplay single "Cantarle a Ella". Pulido became the youngest recipient to be awarded the Orgullo de la Frontera from the Fiestas Mexicanas in February 1999. In an April 1999 interview, Pulido expressed interest in recording a Latin pop album, resolutely asserting his disinterest in crossover over and recording English-language albums.
### 2000–09: Decline in popularity, acting debut, and hiatus
By 2000, Tejano music's popularity continued to wane, despite music critics' projections that the genre would recover by this time. Critics observed the dominance of more established Tejano singers like Navaira, Selena, Mazz, Michael Salgado, and Pulido on the airwaves of the US, where older generations of singers were not able to compete. Pulido became a teen idol among Mexican American teenage girls and one of the most influential Tejano recording artists in the same demographic. In March 2000, Pulido released Zona de Peligro, though it failed to match the singer's previous work's commercial success. None of its singles were commercially successful, though Pulido won the Tejano Music Award for Male Entertainer of the Year—his third consecutive win. According to musicologist Guadalupe San Miguel, Tejano musicians in the late 20th century and the early 21st century rendered their individuality indiscernible. Pulido released his sixth studio album, Siempre Pensando En Ti, in March 2001; it fared less commercially successful, peaking at number 50 on the Top Latin Albums chart. The album marked Pulido's final recording to impact a music chart on Billboard. In 2002, Pulido orchestrated the Celebrity Golf Classic, a philanthropic endeavor that raised \$50,000 (2002 USD) for the Easter Seals program. McAllen Mayor Leo Montalvo announced at the event that November 2, 2002, would be "Bobby Pulido Day".
Pulido released his eponymous album, Bobby, which spawned the top 40 US single "Vanidosa". He recorded a cover version of Mexican singer Juan Gabriel's 1999 single "Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez" for Bobby. His following albums, Montame (2003) and Vive (2005), failed to chart, ending his eight-year presence on Billboard. In 2003, Pulido made his acting debut in the telenovela television movie La Decada Furiosa, in which he played himself. Two years later, he appeared as a guest on the reality television show Big Brother México. Pulido performed and recorded "Ya Ves" for the live televised benefit concert, Selena ¡VIVE!, in April 2005. His following album, Enfermo de Amor, was released in August 2007. AllMusic's Evan Gutierrez complimented Pulido's use of mixing genres without "[pushing] the envelope very far", and said the album "sound[s] fresh rather than repetitive", though found it lacking in production quality. He called the title track and "Una Más" a roots rock recording, and "Desvelado Acústico" a "sophisticated acoustic" Latin pop track. After the album's release, Pulido guest starred in three episodes of the telenovela series Fuego en La Sangre as himself.
### 2010–present: Return to music and acting
Pulido returned to recording music in 2010 and released Dias de Ayer in March. It earned Pulido a nomination for the Tejano Music Award for Male Vocalist of the Year; the first time since 2003. Two years later, he released Lo Mio, his first album on Apodaca Records. In 2013, Pulido recorded with former Aventura vocalist Henry Santos on Santos' song "No Sé Vivir Sin Tí". Pulido returned to acting and guest starred as himself in two episodes of the telenovela Noches Con Platanito (2013–15). In 2014, he landed a regular, minor role as himself in the telenovela Qué pobres tan ricos. In November 2015, Pulido released "No Es Como Tú", a track from his twelfth studio album, Hoy. The album is Pulido's first as sole songwriter for any of his albums. Pulido told the Mexican newspaper Publimentero that Hoy will be released as a strategic plan to "help fight the war" on physical music consumption; he is against the digital age of downloading and music streaming in the popular market. The album was expected to be released only through Pulido's social networking sites to combat piracy. In a May 2016 concert, Pulido performed "Si No Te Hubiera Conocido", a song he recorded with Miguel Luna that was shelved and forgotten during his career. At the 2022 Latin Grammy Awards, Pulido won Best Tejano Album for his album, Para Que Baile Mi Pueblo (2021).
## Personal life
Pulido married Eliza Anzaldua in July 1996. They had three sons; Remy Pulido (born 1996), Darian Pulido (born 1998), and Trey Pulido (born 2005). However, Pulido filed for divorce in September 2013, after 17 years of being married and four months of separation. He married Mariana Morales in November 2018 and his fourth son Rodrigo Pulido was born in December 2019. He currently resides in Miami, Florida and enjoys working out, eating healthy, and playing golf; his favorite pastime is playing guitar and he finds composing songs therapeutic.
During his musical career, Pulido's fans questioned his sexuality; he said he is not homosexual but rumors that he had slept with men continued to circulate. Pulido spoke to a Mexican television news program in 2013 and told viewers he is straight and that he has gay fans, which he said did not concern him. In April 2010, media outlets questioned Pulido after he released a music video in which he plays a stereotypical gay male; the singer said he wanted to "try something different [in his music videos]" and defended his gay followers, saying he has nothing against the LGBT community. After Puerto Rican pop singer Ricky Martin came out, Pulido defended Martin's decision, saying "he is living his dreams".
Pulido has been an outspoken opponent of former US President Donald Trump. On his Instagram account, Pulido uploaded a picture of himself "urinating" on Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
## Discography
- Desvelado (1995)
- Enséñame (1996)
- Llegaste A Mi Vida (1997)
- El Cazador (1999)
- Zona de Peligro (2000)
- Siempre Pensando En Ti (2001)
- Bobby (2002)
- Móntame (2003)
- Vive (2005)
- Enfermo De Amor (2007)
- Dias De Ayer (2010)
- Lo Mio (2012)
- Hoy (2016)
- Para Que Baile Mi Pueblo (2021)
## Filmography
## See also
- Music of Texas
- List of Hispanic and Latino Americans
|
522,070 |
Ode to Billie Joe (song)
| 1,171,736,623 |
1967 Bobbie Gentry song
|
[
"1967 debut singles",
"1967 songs",
"Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles",
"Bobbie Gentry songs",
"Capitol Records singles",
"Cashbox number-one singles",
"Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance",
"Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)",
"Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients",
"Margie Singleton songs",
"Nancy Wilson (jazz singer) songs",
"RPM Top Singles number-one singles",
"Songs about Mississippi",
"Songs about rivers",
"Songs about suicide",
"Songs written by Bobbie Gentry",
"Teenage tragedy songs",
"The Detroit Emeralds songs",
"United States National Recording Registry recordings"
] |
"Ode to Billie Joe" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry released by Capitol Records in July 1967, and later used as the title-track of her debut album. Five weeks after its release, the song topped Billboard's Pop singles chart. It also appeared in the top 10 of the Adult Contemporary and Hot R&B singles charts, and in the top 20 of the Hot Country Songs list.
The song takes the form of a first-person narrative performed over sparse acoustic guitar accompaniment with strings in the background. It tells of a rural Mississippi family's reaction to the news of the suicide of Billie Joe McAllister, a local boy to whom the daughter (and narrator) is connected. The song received widespread attention, leaving its audience intrigued as to what the narrator and Billie Joe threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Gentry later clarified that she intended the song to portray the family's indifference to the suicide in what she deemed "a study in unconscious cruelty," while she remarked the object thrown was not relevant to the message.
"Ode to Billie Joe" was nominated for eight Grammy Awards; Gentry and arranger Jimmie Haskell won three between them. Gentry's writing was adapted for the 1976 film Ode to Billy Joe. The song appeared on Rolling Stone's lists, 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and Greatest Country Songs, while Pitchfork featured it on their 200 Best Songs of the 1960s list. In 2023, the song was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
## Background and recording
Singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. After her parents divorced, she continued to live there with her paternal grandparents. At age 13, Gentry moved to California to live with her mother. She graduated from high school and entered UCLA as a philosophy major, before transferring to the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. After she met Jody Reynolds at one of his concerts, Gentry took part in a recording session with him to sing two duets. Singer-songwriter Jim Ford introduced Gentry to record companies and music publishers. Ford took Gentry to Del-Fi Records, where he presented "Ode to Billie Joe" to the label's A&R man Barry White. Ford claimed credit for writing the song, telling White he had brought Gentry along because he felt he could not sing it himself. The composition impressed White, and Ford expressed an interest in selling it to him. White took the song to Del-Fi Records president Bob Keane, who did not like it and refused to make a purchase.
Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon received Gentry's demo for "Mississippi Delta". Gordon liked it, and he asked for a B-side for the song. Gentry planned to sell "Ode to Billie Joe" to Capitol Records, and she decided that recording the demo herself was cheaper than using a professional singer. The song's recording happened soon after Gentry's session that yielded "Mississippi Delta" in February 1967, while Bobby Paris assisted her in the studio in exchange for guitar session work on some of his own studio recordings. Gentry intended to have Lou Rawls record the song. Larry Shayne, Gentry's publisher, warned Gordon against adding a rhythm section to the track. Shayne was a friend of David Axelrod, Capitol Record's main A&R man. He sold Axelrod recording rights to the song for \$10,000 (). Gordon liked Gentry's vocals on the demo, but he decided to add a sparse instrumental arrangement to the recording. Gordon called Jimmie Haskell, who prepared an arrangement for string sextet with four violins and two cellos. Jesse Erlich played one cello like a double bass. Haskell felt the song sounded like a film and decided to write the arrangement as if it were a score. Gordon then overdubbed Gentry's recording with the strings. He determined that "Ode to Billie Joe" would be the A-side of the single.
Haskell later claimed that a seven-minute recording of the song existed, but that Gordon cut it to under five minutes for radio airplay. The existence of a seven-minute version has not been confirmed. Meanwhile, a manuscript of a draft of the song donated by Gentry to the University of Mississippi contained verses that were not included on the final recording.
## Content
"Ode to Billie Joe" takes the form of a first-person narrative by the young daughter of a Mississippi Delta family. It offers fragments of dinnertime conversation on the day that a local boy, an acquaintance of the narrator, jumped to his death from a nearby bridge. The account is interspersed with everyday, polite, mealtime conversation. The song's last verse conveys the passage of events over the following year.
The song begins on June 3 with the narrator, her brother and her father returning from farming chores to the family house for dinner. After reminding them to wipe their feet, the mother announces she received news from Choctaw Ridge: "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." The verse is repeated through the song as the story develops to "heighten the mystery." Unmoved, the father comments that "Billie Joe never had a lick of sense" before asking for the biscuits and adding "there's five more acres in the lower forty, I've got to plow." The brother then expresses his surprise, but continues eating his meal.
The mother notices her daughter is distraught and not eating. She mentions the "young preacher" Brother Taylor visited the house earlier and that they would have dinner with him on Sunday. As an afterthought, the mother adds the preacher saw Billie Joe with a girl that "looked a lot" like the daughter and that "she and Billie Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge." A year later, the brother marries and moves to Tupelo, Mississippi, while the father dies of an unnamed virus. Even though she expresses no sadness over her father's death, the daughter notices her mother is still distraught by it. Rather than consoling her, she routinely picks flowers and throws them off the bridge.
The song became a success because it created listener curiosity, given that Gentry did not mention what was thrown off of the bridge or why Billie Joe committed suicide. It features perfect rhymes from the first to the sixth line of every verse. Meanwhile, the fifth and sixth lines of the song repeat the rhyme of "ridge" and "bridge" in every stanza. The composition does not have a chorus. The musical phrases begin with pickup notes, while melismas and downbeats are used for the rhymes.
### Gentry's comments on the lyrics
In August 1967, Gentry told the Los Angeles Times she wanted to show "people's lack of ability" to empathize with others' "tragedy." She pointed out the mother, who noticed but did not understand her daughter's lack of appetite, while later the daughter is unaware of the similarity of her mother's behavior after the father dies. Gentry explained that both characters had "isolated themselves in their own personal tragedies" and remained unconcerned for the others. The songwriter compared the end product to a play. On the object thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, she commented that the audience had found more meanings than she had intended. Gentry mentioned that theories of the time included a baby, a wedding ring and flowers. While she indicated that what happened at the bridge was the motivation behind Billie Joe's suicide, she also left it open to the listener's interpretation. Gentry said she had no answer and her sole motivation was to show "people's apathy".
In an interview with the Associated Press in November 1967, Gentry called the song "a study in unconscious cruelty." She also said that audiences were still asking her what was thrown off the bridge rather than noticing "the thoughtlessness of people expressed in the song," adding that what had been thrown was unimportant. She said people suggested to her it was a draft card, or a bottle of LSD pills. The songwriter clarified that she knew what it was, but said she considered it irrelevant to the story and deliberately left that interpretation open. Gentry remarked that the song's message revolved around the "nonchalant way" the family discussed the suicide. She also said that what was thrown off of the bridge was included because it established a relationship between Billie Joe and the daughter, providing "a possible motivation for his suicide the next day". The interview ended with Gentry's suggestion that it could have been a wedding ring. Gentry told The New York Times in 1969: "I had my own idea what it was while I was writing it, but it's not that important. Actually it was something symbolic. But I've never told anyone what it was, not even my own dear mother."
## Release and reception
The single "Mississippi Delta"-"Ode to Billie Joe" was released in July 1967. Paris was given a co-producer credit on the single with Gordon. Five weeks after its release, it reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. By the sixth week, the single had sold one million copies. It also appeared at number 7 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, at number 8 on the Hot R&B singles chart, and number 17 on the Hot Country Songs chart. Billboard's year-end chart placed the song at number 3, while Canada's RPM placed it at number 16.
In Australia, the song reached number 4 on Go-Set's National Top 40. Meanwhile, it peaked at number 6 on the Irish Singles Chart. On the New Zealand Listener chart, the song reached number 3.
In November 1967, Life published an article about the song's success after a visit with Gentry and her parents in Mississippi. Gentry showed the journalists a bridge in Money, Mississippi, that featured the characteristics of the one she wrote about as she clarified: "this is what I had in mind" she continued: "The river isn't very deep here, but the current is strong." Gentry was photographed crossing the bridge for the story. The single was nominated in eight categories at the 10th Annual Grammy Awards and won three: Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Best New Artist, and Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals. By 1969, Gentry estimated the single had sold three million copies.
Gentry sued Paris to have his co-producer credit removed, claiming she was the recording's sole producer. Paris's credit was removed on the album release. Soon after she left Capitol Records, Paris sued Gentry for \$100,000 and the label for \$300,000 in punitive damages for failing to pay him one fifth of the royalties from the song's sales. Gentry and Paris testified against one another in the 1973 case. The jury awarded Paris one percent of the total royalties from "Ode to Billie Joe" and "Mississippi Delta", that amounted to \$32,277.40 (). Gentry told Penny Anderson of the New York Times in 1974 that she originally produced "Ode To Billie Joe" and most of her recordings, adding that "a woman doesn't stand much chance in a recording studio. A staff producer's name was nearly always put on the records." Gentry expressed the desire to gain more control over the production of her songs and recordings.
### Critical reception
The staff of Billboard welcomed the release as "fascinating material and performance" with a "potent lyric content that is worth the unusual length of the disk". The Los Angeles Times critic Leonard Feather considered it an "aural parallel" to the film In the Heat of the Night (1967), deeming them both "sardonic, knife-edge studies of human nature". Feather concluded Gentry added "a durable new dimension" to American "contemporary folklore". The New York Times commented on the success of the song four weeks after its release. Critic John S. Wilson felt the song was "a most unlikely candidate for success," as it was "long by radio programming standards" and he considered the topic "nothing startling, nothing strange, nothing particularly original," Wilson remarked the lyrics had "something to say about indifference ... which, after a couple of clarifying hearings, drifts off into the midst of forgotten poesy".
Nixon Smiley wrote in his piece for the Miami Herald that "not since William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying has anything come out of Mississippi as earthy and as fundamental" as 'Ode to Billie Joe.'" Smiley determined that upon "casual hearing there seems to be nothing great about the song, the lyrics or the rendition," but that it "captivated both the young and old." He noted disc jockeys were "surprised, even flabbergasted," and "sometimes disgusted".
The Montgomery Advertiser found the song "hard to classify." It remarked that it "has [a] rhythm and blues beat, and it's clever," and also noted the presence of mystery. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram called it "one of the most haunting songs of the year." The Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote that "the lyrics are too much" and that "after a few listenings, the subject matter becomes clear, and the message gets across." The review pointed out that "musically, the song is as fine as it is lyrically inventive" and that it "grips with heretofore taboo themes."
## Legacy
Following the success of the single, Capitol Records received 500,000 pre-orders for Ode to Billie Joe, surpassing the label's record held by the Beatles's Meet the Beatles! Gentry began receiving offers to make a motion picture based on the film in 1967, but she rejected them, preferring to wait for an offer from a movie maker who would "portray Billie Joe and his girlfriend in a serious, sensitive manner." In 1975, Gentry and Shayne accepted an offer from Max Baer Jr., who decided to direct the film. Baer said his interest was to have two unknown young people "because the audience has to believe they are Bobbie and Billie Joe." The film would be shot on location in Mississippi with a budget of \$1.5 million (equivalent to \$ million in ). Warner Bros. commissioned Herman Raucher to write an adaptation of the song for the upcoming film; Raucher's adaptation and novel were both titled Ode to Billy Joe. Gentry was present during the shooting and contributed a musical score. At the time of the production, she told United Press International that the film would "answer many questions left unanswered by the song." The film starred Robby Benson as Billy Joe and Glynnis O'Connor as Bobbie Lee. In the adaptation, the pair throw a rag doll off of the bridge, while a homosexual experience with the owner of the sawmill is established as the reason for Billy Joe's suicide.
"Ode to Billie Joe" reappeared on the charts in 1976. It charted at number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, and in Canada at numbers 92 and 42 on the RPM Top Singles and Adult Contemporary charts, respectively.
After hearing "Ode to Billie Joe" on the radio, Tony Joe White was inspired to write songs. White felt that his own life experience resembled that of Billie Joe, as he inhabited a similar place during his childhood and he remarked that the song was "real." Soon after, White composed "Polk Salad Annie" (1969). By 1969, Leflore County established a fine of \$180 () for people who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge and the other bridges of the area. The county estimated that between 40 and 50 men had jumped off the 20-foot-high (6.1 m) structure, but none had died. The bridge collapsed in June 1972 after a fire and a new one was built in its place. In 2013, a memorial marker for the song was added south of the new bridge as part of the Mississippi Country Music Trail.
Rolling Stone included "Ode To Billie Joe" at number 419 on its 2003 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. The publication also listed it at number 47 on its 100 Greatest Country Songs in 2014; Richard Gehr deemed the track a "sultry country blues that drifts downstream on Gentry's ominous acoustic guitar." Meanwhile, Pitchfork placed it at number 144 on its 200 Best Songs of the 1960s list. The song was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023, based on its "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."
### Other versions
In August 1967, Margie Singleton released a cover of the song that reached number 40 on Billboard's Hot Country Singles. Ray Bryant's version reached number 89 on Billboard's Hot 100 and number 34 on their Adult Contemporary chart soon after. King Curtis charted with his cover at number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100, also in 1967, and at number 6 on the R&B chart. Also in 1967, Joe Dassin released a cover of the song in French, entitled "Marie-Jeanne." In the song, the main character is a man, while Marie-Jeanne jumps off of the Garonne bridge.
A parody by Bob Dylan entitled "Clothes Line Saga", originally recorded in 1967, was released on the 1975 album The Basement Tapes. It mimicked the conversational style of "Ode to Billie Joe" with lyrics concentrating on routine household chores. The shocking event buried in all the mundane details is a revelation that "The Vice-President's gone mad!." Dylan's song was originally titled "Answer to 'Ode'".
A 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live parodied the song where Kristen Wiig and host Paul Rudd play a married singer-songwriter couple who perform "Ode to Tracking Number." Jill Sobule's album California Years (2009) featured "Where is Bobbie Gentry?", which used the same melody in a lyrical sequel. The narrator, seeking the reclusive Gentry, claims to be the abandoned child of Gentry and Billie Joe. In 2016, Lorrie Morgan covered the song at a slower pace for her 2016 album Letting Go ... Slow. Morgan commented on recording the song with producer Richard Landis: "Richard purposely slowed the record down to make the musical passages through there really feel kind of spooky and eerie. Everything just felt so swampy and scary. Everybody has their own interpretation of that song and just what they threw off of the Tallahatchie Bridge."
## Chart performance
### Bobbie Gentry
#### Weekly charts
#### Year-end charts
#### All-time charts
### Other artists
## See also
- Harper Valley PTA
|
48,122,556 |
Ant-Man and the Wasp
| 1,171,551,987 |
2018 Marvel Studios film
|
[
"2010s American films",
"2010s English-language films",
"2010s adventure films",
"2010s science fiction adventure films",
"2010s superhero comedy films",
"2018 3D films",
"2018 action films",
"2018 science fiction action films",
"American action comedy films",
"American chase films",
"American science fiction action films",
"American science fiction comedy films",
"American sequel films",
"Ant-Man (film series)",
"Films about ants",
"Films about parallel universes",
"Films about quantum mechanics",
"Films about size change",
"Films directed by Peyton Reed",
"Films scored by Christophe Beck",
"Films set in 1987",
"Films set in 2018",
"Films set in San Francisco",
"Films shot at Pinewood Atlanta Studios",
"Films shot in Atlanta",
"Films shot in Georgia (U.S. state)",
"Films shot in Hawaii",
"Films shot in San Francisco",
"Films shot in Savannah, Georgia",
"Films using motion capture",
"Films with screenplays by Chris McKenna",
"Films with screenplays by Erik Sommers",
"Films with screenplays by Paul Rudd",
"IMAX films",
"Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Three films",
"Superheroine films"
] |
Ant-Man and the Wasp is a 2018 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics featuring the characters Scott Lang / Ant-Man and Hope Pym / Wasp. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the sequel to Ant-Man (2015) and the 20th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film was directed by Peyton Reed and written by the writing teams of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, and Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari. It stars Rudd as Lang and Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, alongside Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Hannah John-Kamen, David Dastmalchian, Tip "T.I." Harris, Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale, Randall Park, Abby Ryder Fortson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Douglas. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, the titular pair work with Hank Pym (Douglas) to retrieve Janet van Dyne (Pfeiffer) from the Quantum Realm.
Talks for a sequel to Ant-Man began shortly after that film was released. Ant-Man and the Wasp was officially announced in October 2015, with Rudd and Lilly returning to reprise their roles. A month later, Ant-Man director Reed was officially set to return. He had joined the first film later in its production and was excited to develop this one from the beginning. He also looked forward to introducing Hope van Dyne as the Wasp in this film, and insisted on treating Lang and her as equals. Filming took place from August to November 2017, at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayette County, Georgia, as well as Metro Atlanta; San Francisco; Savannah, Georgia; and Hawaii.
Ant-Man and the Wasp had its world premiere in Hollywood on June 25, 2018, and was released in the United States on July 6, 2018, as part of Phase Three of the MCU. The film was a critical and commercial success, receiving praise for its performances (particularly those of Rudd and Lilly), humor, and levity, and grossing over \$622 million worldwide. A sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was released in February 2023.
## Plot
Two years after Scott Lang was placed under house arrest due to his involvement with the Avengers, in violation of the Sokovia Accords, Hank Pym and his daughter Hope van Dyne briefly manage to open a tunnel to the Quantum Realm. They believe Pym's wife Janet van Dyne might be trapped there after shrinking to sub-atomic levels in 1987. When he had previously visited the Quantum Realm, Lang had unknowingly become quantumly entangled with Janet, and now he receives an apparent message from her.
With only days left of house arrest, Lang contacts Pym about Janet, despite the strained relationship they have because of Lang's actions with the Avengers. Hope and Pym kidnap Lang, leaving a large ant with Lang's ankle-monitor on as a decoy so as not to arouse the suspicions of FBI agent Jimmy Woo. Believing the message from Janet is confirmation that she is alive, the trio work to build a stable quantum tunnel so they can take a vehicle to the Quantum Realm and retrieve her. They arrange to buy a part needed for the tunnel from black-market dealer Sonny Burch, but Burch realizes the potential profit to be made from Pym's research and double-crosses them. Donning the Wasp outfit, Hope fights off Burch and his men until she is attacked by a quantumly unstable masked woman. Lang tries to help fight off this "ghost", but the woman escapes with Pym's lab, which has been shrunk down to the size of a suitcase.
Pym reluctantly takes Hope and Lang to visit his estranged former partner Bill Foster, who gives them a way to locate the lab. After they find it, the ghost captures the trio and reveals herself to be Ava Starr. Her father, Elihas, was another of Pym's former partners who died along with his wife during an experiment that caused her unstable state. Foster enters and reveals that Ava is dying and in constant pain as a result of her condition. They plan to cure her using Janet's quantum energy. Believing that this will kill Janet, Pym refuses to help them and escapes with Hope, Lang, and the lab.
Opening a stable version of the tunnel, Pym, Hope, and Lang are able to contact Janet, who gives them a precise location to find her but warns that they only have two hours before the unstable nature of the Quantum Realm separates them for a century. Using a truth serum, Burch learns the trio's location from Lang's business partners Luis, Dave, and Kurt, and informs a contact at the FBI. Luis warns Lang, who rushes home before Woo can see that he is violating his house arrest. Pym and Hope are arrested by the FBI, allowing Ava to take the lab.
Lang is soon able to help Pym and Hope escape custody, and they find the lab. Lang and Hope distract Ava while Pym enters the Quantum Realm to retrieve Janet, whom he finds alive. Meanwhile, Lang and Hope are confronted by Burch and his men, and following a lengthy chase across San Francisco, Ava regains control of the lab, allowing her to begin taking Janet's energy by force. Luis, Dave, and Kurt incapacitate Burch and his men so that Lang and Hope can stop Ava. Pym and Janet return safely from the Quantum Realm, and Janet voluntarily gives some of her energy to Ava to temporarily stabilize her. Lang returns home once again, in time for a now-suspicious Woo to release him at the end of his house arrest. Ava and Foster go into hiding.
In a mid-credits scene, Pym, Hope, and Janet send Lang into the Quantum Realm to harvest quantum energy in a plan to help Ava remain stable. Before they can retrieve Lang, the other three turn to dust.
## Cast
- Paul Rudd as Scott Lang / Ant-Man:
A former petty criminal who acquired a suit that allows him to shrink or grow in scale while also increasing in strength. Following the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016), in which Lang escapes from the Raft prison, director Peyton Reed said that "he's a fugitive in most of the first Ant-Man (2015) movie. He's just a bigger fugitive now." Rudd was interested in Lang being a regular person rather than "innately heroic or super", and to be driven by his desire to be a responsible parent.
- Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne / Wasp:
The daughter of Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne who is handed down a similar suit and the Wasp mantle from her mother. The writers were excited to be able to give the character a proper introduction as the Wasp, showing her "power set, how she fights, and what are the injustices that matter to her". Lilly felt the character receives "incredible satisfaction" from becoming the Wasp, "something that she has been waiting for her whole life, which is essentially an affirmation from her father." Her relationship with Lang is more complicated than in the first film, and includes anger towards his actions during Captain America: Civil War. Lilly felt it was important that Hope "be an extremely empathetic and compassionate person" and that she should "always push for feminine qualities to be apparent when she is dealing with situations." In her fight sequences, Lilly wanted to move away from the more masculine Muay Thai and MMA-style of fighting that she had learned for the first film, noting that Hope moves differently from a man, so her fights should have "elegance, grace and femininity" with "a signature style" young girls could enjoy and emulate. Lilly worked with the writers to help ensure that Hope was able to "represent a modern woman" without becoming the stereotype of a motherly figure. Madeleine McGraw portrays a young Hope van Dyne.
- Michael Peña as Luis:
Lang's former cellmate and a member of his X-Con Security crew. There was less opportunity for Peña to improvise compared to the first film, where he and Rudd were still developing the character during filming. The creative team wanted to feature another scene of Luis "riffing a long story" as he did in the first film, but did not want to repeat themselves; they were able to take a different approach by giving the character truth serum in a scene for this film.
- Walton Goggins as Sonny Burch: A "low-level criminal-type" who wants Pym's technology to sell on the black market.
- Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr / Ghost:
A woman with molecular instability, who can phase through objects; she is only considered a "villain" because her attempts at survival clash with the heroes' goals. The character is traditionally portrayed as male in the comics, but the creative team believed that the character's gender was irrelevant, and felt that casting a woman would be more interesting. It also allowed them to continue the fathers-and-daughters theme that embraced other characters in the film. John-Kamen enjoyed the "blank-slate" situation, which allowed her to make the character her own. Producer Stephen Broussard said that they wanted to cast a lesser-known actress to help maintain the mystery of the character, and John-Kamen "blew us away". RaeLynn Bratten portrays a young Ava Starr.
- David Dastmalchian as Kurt: A member of Lang's X-Con Security crew. Dastmalchian stated that the character's last name is Goreshter.
- Tip "T.I." Harris as Dave: A member of Lang's X-Con Security crew.
- Judy Greer as Maggie: Lang's ex-wife.
- Bobby Cannavale as Jim Paxton: A police officer, married to Lang's ex-wife, Maggie.
- Randall Park as Jimmy Woo: An FBI agent and Lang's parole officer.
- Abby Ryder Fortson as Cassie: The daughter of Lang and Maggie.
- Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet van Dyne:
Pym's wife, Hope's mother, and the original Wasp, who is lost in the Quantum Realm. Pfeiffer was Reed's dream casting for the role when he was working on the first film and he ensured that he received her input on the character. He noted that the character has spent 30 years in the quantum realm, so there is a question regarding how that has affected her. Producer Kevin Feige explained that the character ages over those 30 years, even though time works differently in the quantum realm, to avoid any "sci-fi weirdness" that could take away from the emotional reunions with Pym and Hope in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer was de-aged to portray young Janet van Dyne, with Hayley Lovitt acting as a reference double. Lovitt portrayed Janet in the first film, before Pfeiffer became involved with the franchise. Reed explained that Lovitt had been cast for the first film because of her "saucer-like, Michelle Pfeiffer eyes."
- Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster:
An old friend of Pym, who was once his assistant on Project Goliath. Fishburne approached Marvel about joining the MCU, pitching them a few ideas about whom he could portray, before Marvel offered him the role of Foster in this film. Fishburne had already played Perry White for the DC Extended Universe, but he said that he had always fantasized about being in an MCU film, admitting that he considers himself a "Marvel guy". Reed likened the rivalry between Foster and Pym to that of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and wanted an actor who could go "toe-to-toe" with Michael Douglas. Laurence Fishburne was de-aged to portray young Bill Foster, with Langston Fishburne, Laurence's son, acting as a reference double.
- Michael Douglas as Hank Pym:
An entomologist, physicist, and former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, who became the original Ant-Man after discovering the subatomic particles that make the transformation possible. Pym has grown a lot closer to his daughter Hope since the first film, and according to Feige, he has "that joy of fatherhood" in watching her become a superhero in her own right. Reed was attracted to the "morally dubious" decisions Pym sometimes makes. Douglas was de-aged to portray young Hank Pym, with Dax Griffin acting as a reference double, having done so for the first film as well.
Additionally, Stan Lee, co-creator of the titular heroes, has a cameo in the film as a man whose car is shrunk by accident. Michael Cerveris appears as Ava's father Elihas Starr, while Riann Steele plays his wife and Ava's mother Catherine. Tim Heidecker and Brian Huskey appear in cameos as a whale boat captain named Daniel Gooobler and a teacher at Cassie's school, respectively. Sonny Burch's team of men includes Divian Ladwa as Uzman, Goran Kostić as Anitolov, and Rob Archer as Knox, while Sean Kleier portrays Stoltz, Burch's FBI inside man and Jimmy Woo's subordinate. Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster of The Best Show were planned to make brief appearances as Burch's SUV drivers, but their scene was ultimately cut.
## Production
### Development
In June 2015, Ant-Man director Peyton Reed expressed interest in returning for a sequel or prequel to that film, saying that he had "really fallen in love with these characters" and felt "there's a lot of story to tell with Hank Pym". A month later, Pym actor Michael Douglas said he was not signed for any additional films, but "would look forward to more if it comes my way", and expressed the desire to have his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones cast as Janet van Dyne for a potential follow-up. Evangeline Lilly—who played the daughter of Pym and Van Dyne, Hope van Dyne—wanted to see Michelle Pfeiffer in the role. Producer Kevin Feige revealed that the studio had a "supercool idea" for the next Ant-Man film, and "if audiences want it, we'll find a place to do it." Reed also mentioned that there had been talks of making a standalone adventure with Hank Pym as Ant-Man, possibly including the original opening to Ant-Man featuring Jordi Mollà which was cut from the final film. Eric Eisenberg of Cinema Blend opined that a standalone adventure with Pym and the cut sequence would be a good candidate to revive the Marvel One-Shots short film series. By the end of July, David Dastmalchian expressed interest in returning for a sequel as Kurt.
In October 2015, Marvel Studios confirmed the sequel, titled Ant-Man and the Wasp, with a scheduled release date of July 6, 2018. Reed was in negotiations to direct the sequel by the end of the month, and announced his return in November, along with the confirmation of Paul Rudd and Lilly returning as Scott Lang / Ant-Man and Hope van Dyne / Wasp, respectively. Despite being offered the chance to direct sequels in the past, Reed had never done so out of a lack of interest, but was excited to work on Ant-Man and the Wasp because there was "a lot more story to tell with these characters that I have a genuine affection and kind of protective feeling about". He was also able to build the sequel "from the ground up", as he joined the first film late in the process following the departure of original writer and director Edgar Wright, and wanted to explore elements that he had set up in the first film. He first began work on an outline for the sequel, which he thought could be "weird, unique and different" now that the characters' origins had been established. On being the first MCU film to have a female character in the title with the Wasp, Reed called it "organic" and noted the Wasp's final line in Ant-Man—'It's about damn time'—as "very much about her specific character and arc in that movie, but it is absolutely about a larger thing. It's about damn time: We're going to have a fully realized, very very complicated hero in the next movie who happens to be a woman." Reed would push to ensure the Wasp received equal publicity and merchandise for the film, and wanted to explore the backstory of Janet van Dyne as well. He had "definite ideas" of who should portray that character. Reed said the alternate title Wasp and the Ant-Man was briefly considered, but was not chosen due to fan expectation given the comics history of the phrase "Ant-Man and the Wasp". That month, Adam McKay, one of the writers of Ant-Man, expressed interest in returning to write the film, and Douglas confirmed that he was in talks to return as well.
Reed stated in early December that the film may "call back" to the heist film genre and tone of Ant-Man, but that Ant-Man and the Wasp would "have an entirely different genre template". He hoped to incorporate additional flashback sequences in the film, as well as explore Pym's various identities from the comics and his psychology. Reed also said he was "excited" about exploring and discovering the film version of the Ant-Man and Wasp relationship that is "a romantic partnership and a heroic partnership" in the comics, a "different dynamic than we've seen in the rest of the [MCU], an actual partnership." Additionally, Reed mentioned that pre-production would "probably" start in October 2016, with filming scheduled for early 2017. Production writers for the first film, Gabriel Ferrari and Andrew Barrer, signed on to write the script along with Rudd, with writing starting "in earnest" in January 2016. The next month, McKay stated that he would be involved with the film in some capacity. By April, the four writers and Reed had been "holed up in a room ... brainstorming the story", with Reed promising that it would have "stuff in it that you've never ever seen in a movie before". Feige added that they wanted to "stay true to what made [Ant-Man] so unique and different", and teased the potential of seeing the Giant-Man version of Lang that had been introduced in Captain America: Civil War (2016). Despite being "intimately involved in the writing and the development of the script", Reed did not take or receive a writing credit on the film.
In June 2016, Reed said that for inspiration from the comics he had been looking at "early Avengers stuff and all the way up to the Nick Spencer stuff now", and was focusing on iconic images that could be replicated in the film over story beats from the comics. He added that there was "definitely a chance" for Michael Peña, Tip "T.I." Harris, and Dastmalchian to reprise their respective roles as Luis, Dave, and Kurt from the first film. At San Diego Comic-Con 2016, Feige stated that Reed and Rudd were still working on the script, and that filming was now expected to begin in June 2017. Rudd elaborated that they had "turned in a treatment, but it's so preliminary. We'll see. We have an idea of what it might look like, but it could change a lot from where we're at now." The next month, Peña was confirmed to be returning as Luis, while filming was revealed to be taking place in Atlanta, Georgia. In early October, an initial script had been completed for the film that was awaiting approval from Marvel. Reed later revealed that early drafts of the script included a cameo appearance from Captain America, appearing during Luis' flashback sequences as he was recapping Lang's involvement in the airport battle in Captain America: Civil War. However, the writers chose to remove the appearance in the final script since the events of Civil War were already referenced frequently in the film, and this instance "didn't feel organic to the story."
### Pre-production
At the start of November 2016, Reed said that the film's production would transition from "the writing phase" to "official prep" that month, beginning with visual development. Reed reiterated his excitement for introducing the Wasp and "really designing her look, the way she moves, the power set, and figuring out, sort of, who Hope van Dyne is as a hero". Reed was inspired by the films After Hours (1985), Midnight Run (1988), and What's Up, Doc? (1972) for the look and feel of Ant-Man and the Wasp. While the first film was more of a heist film, Reed described this as part action film, part romantic comedy, and was inspired by the works of Elmore Leonard where there are "villains, but we also have antagonists, and we have these roadblocks to our heroes getting to where they need to be". He also stated his disappointment in the Giant-Man introduction happening in Civil War, rather than an Ant-Man film, but noted that the appearance provided character development opportunities between Lang, Pym, and Van Dyne since Pym is "very clear in the first movie about how he feels about Stark and how he feels about the Avengers and being very protective of this technology that he has", and so Reed thought Pym would be "pissed" and Van Dyne would feel betrayed, which was Reed's "in" for those characters' starting dynamics. Reed added that he spends "a lot of time" talking with the other writers and directors of MCU films, and that he and the writers on this film wished to maintain "our little Ant-Man corner of the universe. Because it's a whole different vibe tonally". Quantum physicist Spyridon Michalakis from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at the California Institute of Technology returned to consult on the film, after doing the same on Ant-Man, and explained the science behind getting extremely small to the filmmakers. Michalakis described the subatomic realm as "a place of infinite possibility, an alternative universe where the laws of physics and forces of nature as we know them haven't crystallized" and suggested it should be represented in the film by "beautiful colors changing constantly to reflect transience."
In February 2017, Douglas confirmed that he would reprise his role as Hank Pym in the film. During the Hollywood premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in April, Dastmalchian confirmed his return as Kurt, and a month later, Harris confirmed his return as Dave as well. Through that May, Marvel was meeting with several actresses for a "key role" in the sequel, with Hannah John-Kamen cast in the part at the beginning of June. The following month, Randall Park joined the cast as Jimmy Woo, and Walton Goggins was cast in an undisclosed role. At San Diego Comic-Con 2017, Park's casting was confirmed; John-Kamen and Goggins' roles were revealed to be Ghost and Sonny Burch, respectively; and the casting of Pfeiffer as Janet van Dyne and Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster was announced. Judy Greer was confirmed to be reprising her role as Maggie from the previous film the following week. Louise Frogley served as costume designer on the film after doing so for Marvel's Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), and worked with Ivo Coveney to create the superhero suits for the film. Based on designs by Andy Park, the suits are updated for the film from the 1960s-inspired designs used in the first Ant-Man to more modern designs. The Wasp suit included practical wings which were replaced with digital wings for when they are expanded and ready for flight.
The Russo brothers, directors of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which were filming while Ant-Man and the Wasp was preparing to film, were in constant discussion with Reed in order to ensure story elements would line up between the films. Joe Russo added that Ant-Man and the Wasp would have "some [plot] elements that stitch in" closely with Avengers: Infinity War, more so than some of the other films leading up to the Avengers films. Reed knew Ant-Man and the Wasp would be "a fairly stand-alone movie but... could not ignore the events of Infinity War", with the biggest connection occurring in the film's mid-credit scene. Since the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp occur over 48 hours, the timeline in relation to Infinity War was "left purposefully ambiguous" with Reed noting there had been discussions of placing "little Easter eggs along the way, to start to reveal to the audience where the movie takes place in the timeline, [but t]hat felt not very fun to us and kind of obvious." Reed also liked how the film ends with closure and on a positive note "and then to BANG — give the audience a gut punch right after the main credits", with the sequence showing Hank Pym, Janet van Dyne, and Hope van Dyne disintegrating due to the Blip featured at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. The film also has a post-credit scene that shows the ant who doubled for Lang while under house arrest performing a drum solo.
### Filming
Principal photography began on August 1, 2017, at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayette County, Georgia, under the working title Cherry Blue; Dante Spinotti served as director of photography, shooting on Arri Alexa 65 cameras, with some sequences being shot with a Frazier lens. At the start of filming, Marvel revealed that Bobby Cannavale and Abby Ryder Fortson would also reprise their roles from the first film, respectively as Paxton and Cassie, and that Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers had contributed to the screenplay.
The film's lab and quantum tunnel set was inspired by The Time Tunnel (1966–67), and was the largest physical set built for an MCU film, which Reed jokingly said was "a little counter-intuitive". For the sequence where Janet van Dyne communicates through Lang, inspiration was taken from All of Me (1984) in which Lily Tomlin's character is trapped in the body of Steve Martin's character. There were discussions about having Pfeiffer perform the scene first to give Rudd an idea of how she would act, but the group ultimately decided to let Rudd invent the scene completely himself. For the chamber in Ghost's lair, the production team under production designer Shepherd Frankel wanted to create an environment that was unique to the MCU, and designed the chamber with fresnel lenses to give it concentric-circle patterns that served a practical purpose for the film's story as well as differentiating the aesthetics of it from other sets and creating mystery about the character. The chamber is surrounded by "support shapes" to "create this feeling of desperation and yearning for family and stability".
Filming also took place in Metro Atlanta, with filming locations including the Atlanta International School, the Midtown and Buckhead districts of Atlanta, and the Samuel M. Inman Middle School in the city's Virginia-Highland neighborhood; as well as Emory University and the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia. Additional filming took place in San Francisco in September 2017, in Savannah, Georgia in late October, and in Hawaii. Production wrapped on November 19, 2017.
### Post-production
In late November, Lilly said that the characters would try to enter the Quantum Realm in the film, and their potential success would "open a whole entire new multi-verse to enter into and play around in" for the MCU. Patrick Burleigh, who was part of Marvel's writers program, did uncredited work on the script ahead of the film's reshoots. The film includes a clip from Animal House (1978), which Reed was reminded of while discussing the quantum realm science for the film. Reed insisted that the film be shorter than two hours since it would be following the "massive epic" Infinity War and because it is "an action/comedy, and it didn't want to overstay its welcome". Dan Lebental and Craig Wood edited the film. The film's main credits sequence is a "table-top" version of its action sequences, and was created by Elastic. An alternative idea that had been considered was to create a "fake behind-the-scenes documentary" that would have made the film look like it was a 1950s-era Godzilla movie with "people in suits stomping on model cityscapes".
#### Visual effects
Visual effects for the film were created by DNEG, Scanline VFX, Method Studios, Luma Pictures, Lola VFX, Industrial Light & Magic, Cinesite, Rise FX, Rodeo FX, Crafty Apes, Perception NYC, Digital Domain, and The Third Floor.
DNEG worked on over 500 shots, including the effects for Ghost—which were shared with the other vendors—the third act chase sequence, and the final Ghost fight as Hank and Janet are returning from the quantum realm. For the "macro-photography" sequences in the film, DNEG took a different approach from their work in Ant-Man due to issues including trying to get a camera to seem small enough to capture the small actions. Though some of the film was shot with a Frazier lens that provides extra depth of field, DNEG would still need to "re-project the road higher and "raise the floor level" to simulate a tiny sized camera". As the third act chase sequence was mainly shot in Atlanta, while being set in San Francisco, DNEG VFX Supervisor Alessandro Ongaro noted it required "extensive environment work" with background elements in some shots not being salvageable at all. DNEG ultimately created 130 unique environments for the chase. Clear Angle aided DNEG with the Lidar surveying and photography of San Francisco, and were able to get their information for Lombard Street down to the millimeter resolution. DNEG also handled the stereo conversion on the film to release it in both 2.39:1 and 1.90:1 (for IMAX) aspect ratios. The squarer frame of the IMAX ratio was used as the basis for the visual effects, with the 2.39:1 version then being letterboxed from the finished IMAX version.
Lola once again worked on the de-aging sequences with Douglas, Pfeiffer, and Fishburne. The flashback sequences featuring a younger Hank Pym were set around the same time as the flashback sequences of Ant-Man, so Lola were able to use a similar process, referencing Douglas' appearance in Wall Street (1987) and having the actor on set in a different wardrobe and wig. Lola VFX Supervisor Trent Claus felt Pfeiffer's was less complicated, since "she has aged incredibly well" and still has big hair and a big smile. Pfeiffer's work from Ladyhawke (1985) and other films around that time was referenced. For Fishburne, his son served as his younger double, and helped inform Lola how the older Fishburne's skin would have looked in certain lighting situations. The films Lola looked to for Fishburne's younger self included Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Deep Cover (1992). Lola also made Fishburne thinner, and all actors had their posture adjusted.
Luma worked on the scenes where Ant-Man and the Wasp infiltrate Ghost's hideout, where they had to recreate the entire environment with CGI. They also created the first quantum tunnel sequence where Ghost receives her powers, and the flashback missile launch, which had to be replicated exactly from how it appeared in Ant-Man. The new version of the quantum realm, designed by Reed and production VFX supervisor Stephane Ceretti, was created by Method. Method Studios VFX Supervisor Andrew Hellen, explained, "We did a lot of research into macro and cellular level photography, and played with different ways to visualize quantum mechanics. It has a very magical quality, with a scientific edge. We also used glitching effects and macro lensing to ground the footage, and keep it from feeling too terrestrial." Method also worked on the sequence when Lang is the size of a preschooler, and created the digital doubles for Ant-Man and Wasp; Method used the same level of detail on the digital double suits regardless of what scale they were.
## Music
In June 2017, Reed confirmed that Christophe Beck, who composed the score for Ant-Man, would return for Ant-Man and the Wasp. Beck reprised his main theme from Ant-Man, and also wrote a new one for Wasp that he wanted to be "high energy" and show that she is more certain of her abilities than Lang. When choosing between these themes for specific scenes throughout the film, Beck tried to choose the Wasp theme more often so there would be "enough newness in the score to feel like it's going new places, and isn't just some retread." Hollywood Records and Marvel Music released the soundtrack album digitally on July 6, 2018.
## Marketing
Concept art and "pre-CGI video" for the film was shown at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con. In January 2018, Hyundai Motor America announced that the 2019 Hyundai Veloster would play a significant role in the film, with other Hyundai vehicles also appearing. The first trailer for the film was released on January 30, 2018, on Good Morning America, and used the guitar riff from Adam and the Ants' "Ants Invasion". David Betancourt of The Washington Post called the release, the day after the widely praised Black Panther premiere, a "smart move"; with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War also releasing in 2018, "it can be easy [to] forget that hey, there is an Ant-Man sequel coming this year... So Marvel Studios giving us a quick reminder with this trailer release is logical". Tracy Brown, writing for the Los Angeles Times, praised how the trailer prominently featured Lilly's Van Dyne showing "she was always meant to be a superhero".
A second trailer was released on May 1, 2018, following a teaser video featuring the Infinity War cast asking "where were Ant-Man and The Wasp?" in that film. Graeme McMillan of The Hollywood Reporter felt the trailer made the film feel "very much like an intentional antidote for, or at least alternative to, the grimness of Infinity War's downbeat ending", calling it "a smart move" since it could be considered "a palate cleanser and proof that Marvel has more to offer... before audiences dive back into the core narrative with next year's Captain Marvel." In June 2018, Feige presented several scenes from the film at CineEurope. Ant-Man and The Wasp: Nano Battle!, an attraction inspired by the film, opened at Hong Kong Disneyland on March 31, 2019. It features Rudd and Lilly reprising their roles in clips that were made during the film's reshoots. Promotional partners for the film included Dell, Synchrony Financial, and Sprint. Disney spent around \$154 million worldwide promoting the film.
## Release
### Theatrical
Ant-Man and the Wasp had its world premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood on June 25, 2018, and was released in the United States on July 6, 2018, where it opened in 4,206 theaters, of which 3,000 were in 3D, 403 were in IMAX, over 660 were in premium large format, and over 220 were in D-Box and 4DX. The film is part of Phase Three of the MCU.
The film was scheduled to be released in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2018, but was rescheduled in November 2017 to August 3, 2018, in order to avoid competition with the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Charles Gant of The Guardian and Screen International noted, "The worry for film distributors is that audiences will be caught up in the tournament. So it's easier to play safe and not date your film at this time, especially during the group stage, when all the qualifying nations are competing." Tom Butler of Yahoo! Movies UK added that, unlike the first film, which was one of the lowest-grossing MCU films in the UK, anticipation levels for the film "are at an all-time high following the events of Infinity War" and "UK audiences will probably have found out what happens in the film well before it opens in UK cinemas, and this could have a negative impact on its box office potential." Butler and Huw Fullerton of Radio Times both opined the delay could also be in part because of Disney also delaying the United Kingdom release of Incredibles 2 to July 13, 2018 (a month after its United States release), and not wanting to compete with itself with the two films. This in turn led fans in the country to start a Change.org petition to have Disney move the release date up several weeks, similarly to how Avengers: Infinity War's United States release was moved up a week the previous May.
### Home media
Ant-Man and the Wasp was released on digital download by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on October 2, 2018, and on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 16. The digital and Blu-ray releases include behind-the-scenes featurettes, an introduction from Reed, deleted scenes, and gag reels. The digital release also features a look at the role concept art plays in bringing the various MCU films to life and a faux commercial for Online Close-Up Magic University. The IMAX Enhanced version of the film was made available on Disney+ beginning on November 12, 2021.
## Reception
### Box office
Ant-Man and the Wasp grossed \$216.6 million in the United States and Canada, and \$406 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of \$622.7 million. Following its opening, Deadline Hollywood estimated the film would turn a net profit of around \$100 million. It became the eleventh-highest-grossing film of 2018.
Ant-Man and the Wasp earned \$33.8 million on its opening day in the United States and Canada (including \$11.5 million from Thursday night previews), and a total opening weekend of \$75.8 million; this was a 33% improvement over the first film's debut of \$57.2 million. Its opening included \$6 million from IMAX screens. In its second weekend, the film earned \$28.8 million, coming in second behind Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, and in its third weekend grossed \$16.1 million, coming in fourth. The film placed sixth in its fourth weekend, seventh in its fifth weekend, and tenth in its sixth weekend.
Outside the United States and Canada, the film earned \$85 million from 41 markets, where it opened number one in all except New Zealand. Its South Korea opening was \$20.9 million (which included previews). The \$15.5 million opening from the market without previews was the second-best opening of 2018 behind Avengers: Infinity War. In its second weekend, playing in 44 markets, it remained number one in Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore. The film opened in France in its third weekend, earning \$4.1 million, and opened in Germany in its fourth, where it was number one and earned \$2.8 million, including previews. The next weekend saw Ant-Man and the Wasp open at number one (when including previews) in the United Kingdom, where it earned \$6.5 million, and two weeks later, Italy opened number one with \$2.7 million (including previews). In its eighth weekend, the film's \$68 million opening in China was the fourth-best MCU opening in China and the third-highest Hollywood film opening of 2018. \$7.2 million was from IMAX, which was the best August IMAX opening in China. The film opened in Japan the next weekend, earning \$3.7 million, which was the top Western film for the weekend. As of September 9, 2018, the film's largest markets were China (\$117.5 million), South Korea (\$42.4 million), and the United Kingdom (\$21.5 million).
### Critical response
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of , with an average score of , based on reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "A lighter, brighter superhero movie powered by the effortless charisma of Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, Ant-Man and The Wasp offers a much-needed MCU palate cleanser." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 56 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, down from the "A" earned by the first film.
Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and praised Rudd and Lilly, saying, "The secret of Ant-Man and the Wasp is that it works best when it doesn't try so hard, when it lets charm trump excess and proves that less can be more even in the Marvel universe." Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the lightweight tone as a treat and a breath following the "dramatically heavy conclusion" of Avengers: Infinity War. He also praised the cast, especially Rudd and Fortson, as well as the visual effects and inventive use of shrinking and growing in the action scenes. Manohla Dargis at The New York Times felt the film's "fast, bright and breezy" tone was a vast improvement over the first film, praising Reed's direction. She also praised Rudd, felt Lilly found "her groove" in the film, and wrote that the supporting cast all had "scene-steal[ing]" sequences. Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com said the film was "good enough", a "messy, but satisfying" sequel that he felt managed to juggle its many subplots while giving Rudd's Lang some decent character development.
Variety's Owen Gleiberman called the film "faster, funnier, and more cunningly confident than the original," and felt Reed was able to give the film enough personality to overcome its two-hour runtime and effects-heavy climax. He did caution that this was "not quite the same thing as humanity. But it's enough to qualify as the miniature version." At The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday called the film "instantly forgettable" and criticized its plot, which she felt included some "filler" subplots, but found the film to be "no less enjoyable" because of this. She particularly praised Rudd along with the action and effects. Writing for The Boston Globe, Ty Burr called the film the perfect "summer air-conditioning movie", finding it fun, funny, superficial and an improvement over the first. He also wrote that the film had too many subplots and not enough of Pfeiffer, but was pleased with the lack of connection that the overall story had to the rest of the MCU, and with the focus on "pop trash" comedy. Stephanie Zacharek, writing for Time, said it was "hard to actively dislike" the film, which she thought had reasonably fun action and stand-out moments between Rudd and Fortson; but she was not as impressed with the larger, effects-heavy action sequences and felt the focus on Lilly as a better hero than Rudd was "just checking off boxes in the name of gender equality."
### Accolades
## Sequel
A sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was released on February 17, 2023, with Reed returning to direct and Jeff Loveness writing the script. Rudd, Lilly, Douglas, and Pfeiffer reprise their roles, while Kathryn Newton takes over as Cassie Lang. Jonathan Majors joins as Kang the Conqueror.
## See also
- "What If... Zombies?!", an episode of the MCU television series What If...? that reimagines some events of this film
|
21,756,360 |
Return to Sender (Dexter)
| 1,138,555,262 | null |
[
"2006 American television episodes",
"Dexter (TV series) episodes"
] |
"Return to Sender" is the sixth episode of the first season of the American television drama series Dexter, which first aired on November 5, 2006 on Showtime in the United States. The episode was written by Timothy Schlattmann and was directed by Tony Goldwyn. In the episode, Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) investigates a murder scene where one of his own victims has returned after he disposed of the body. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Rita Bennett (Julie Benz) tries to prevent her husband Paul from attending their daughter's birthday party, and Lt. María LaGuerta (Lauren Vélez) considers adopting a young witness of the murder whom she finds at the crime scene.
Though set in Miami, Florida, the episode was filmed at various locations in and around Los Angeles, California including a salvage yard, a field by Tujunga Wash and a waterfront house on Hibiscus Island. Goldwyn, who Erik King said was "a joy to work with", allowed actor C.S. Lee to improvise and David Zayas to memorize his Spanish lines in English and translate them mentally during each take. "Return to Sender" received generally positive reviews from critics.
## Plot
While eating breakfast with Rita, Dexter is called to a crime scene, only to discover that it is the salvage yard where he committed a double murder the previous night. He finds Valerie Castillo's body lying in the Airstream trailer where he killed her and her husband Jorge, despite having thrown the corpses into the ocean. He deduces that the Ice Truck Killer retrieved and planted the body. LaGuerta, Doakes, and Debra discover a young Cuban boy, Oscar, who claims to have seen somebody take Valerie into the trailer. Dexter begins to fear discovery, and has a nightmare of Debra being a serial killer with a modus operandi similar to his own.
As the investigation proceeds, Dexter attempts to discredit each of his colleagues' leads on the case. When Debra asks him to read her report on the killer, profiling a man sharing many of Dexter's characteristics, he second-guesses her theory. Worried about coming under suspicion, he throws his knives into the ocean. However, while looking at the blood drops from his victims, he notices that Valerie's slide has a happy face etched into her sample. Dexter realizes that this is a hint from the Ice Truck Killer, leading him to go to the salvage yard and plant Jorge's fingerprints and a knife bearing a dry drop of Valerie's blood for Doakes' men to find. After successfully framing Jorge for Valerie's murder, Dexter discovers that Oscar's description of the man who "saved" him from Valerie is in fact Jesus Christ.
Meanwhile, Rita learns that her abusive husband Paul has been released from prison, and she forbids him from attending their daughter Astor's birthday party. Doakes takes Debra to dinner with his mother and sisters, while LaGuerta bonds with Oscar and considers adopting him until his uncle arrives to take him home. In flashbacks, a teenaged Debra pleads with her father Harry to bring her on his and Dexter's hunting trips. When Harry forbids her from joining them, she steals his gun and practices shooting cans by herself. Later, Debra lashes out at Dexter in jealousy of the time that he spends time alone with their father.
## Production
The day of filming in the salvage yard, which took place at LA Japanese Auto Parts in Sun Valley, California, was abnormally hot according to Lauren Vélez. The Airstream trailer in which Dexter's victim is found was brought into the salvage yard for filming externally, but was assembled on a studio sound stage for shooting scenes inside the trailer. Erik King remarked that the trailer was dirty, odorous and humid—"all the things we needed it to be". Other filming locations included a waterfront house on Hibiscus Island in Biscayne Bay, Florida as the Castillos' home, an empty field next to Sun Valley's Tujunga Wash where a young Debra practices shooting with Harry's pistol, and a house in a residential neighborhood of Long Beach, California which stands in for Dexter's childhood home.
King said that Tony Goldwyn was "a joy to work with", while Vélez called him "an absolute actors' director". Shooting a scene in which Det. Angel Batista converses with a witness entirely in Spanish, David Zayas did not feel confident to memorize all of his Spanish lines. Instead, he learned his lines in English and translated the dialogue mentally during each take. In a scene between Dexter and Vince Masuka (C.S. Lee), Masuka pauses after examining a corpse and says, "I'm hungry." Michael C. Hall said that "C.S. [Lee's] ad libs are different every time. When he said, 'I'm hungry,' that was the only take that I didn't laugh." When asked about improvising on the show, Lee said that the writers "come up with some good lines themselves. [...] So I pretty much leave it up to them."
## Reception
"Return to Sender" was generally praised by critics. Eric Goldman of IGN wrote that the episode's "most interesting facet" was its flashbacks to Dexter's youth from Debra's perspective, though he felt that the young Debra's hasty apology to Dexter after insulting him was "a slightly cheesy moment". He thought that LaGuerta's bonding with Oscar "was okay, but [the storyline] fell a little flat". TV Guide's Paula Paige "love[d]" the episode, saying that "It just keeps getting better and better", but was unsure "what Deb having dinner with the Doakes' family has to do with anything". Writing for TV Squad, Jonathan Toomey opened his review of "Return to Sender" by saying, "Dexter did it again. Wowed me. Amazed me. Edge of my seat for the whole hour." He was amused that Debra's profile of Valerie's murderer matched Dexter, but was uninterested in Rita's storyline with her husband.
Both Malene Arpe of the Toronto Star and Daniel Fienberg of Zap2it were disappointed with the episode's audio commentary featuring Jennifer Carpenter, Erik King, Lauren Vélez and David Zayas on the first season DVD.
|
7,372,243 |
Hurricane Paul (2006)
| 1,171,667,342 |
Category 2 Pacific hurricane in 2006
|
[
"2006 Pacific hurricane season",
"2006 in Mexico",
"Category 2 Pacific hurricanes",
"Pacific hurricanes in Mexico",
"Tropical cyclones in 2006"
] |
Hurricane Paul was a hurricane that ultimately struck Mexico as a tropical depression in October 2006. It developed from an area of disturbed weather on October 21, and slowly intensified as it moved into an area of warm waters and progressively decreasing wind shear. Paul attained hurricane status on October 23, and later that day it reached its peak intensity of 105 mph (169 km/h), a strong Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. A strong trough turned the hurricane to the north and northeast into an area of strong vertical shear, and Paul weakened to a tropical storm on October 24. It accelerated northeastward, and after passing a short distance south of Baja California Sur the low level circulation became decoupled from the rest of the convection. Paul weakened to a tropical depression on October 25 a short distance off the coast of Mexico, and after briefly turning away from the coast it made landfall on northwestern Sinaloa on October 26.
Paul was the third hurricane to threaten western Mexico in the season, the others being Hurricanes John and Lane. Rough surf killed two people along Baja California Sur, while flooding was reported in Sinaloa. Damage totaled more than \$35 million (2006 MXN, \$3.2 million 2006 USD).
## Meteorological history
A tropical wave moved off the coast of Africa on October 4. It moved westward across the Atlantic Ocean without development, and entered the eastern Pacific Ocean on October 18. The next day, it combined with a previously existing area of disturbed weather, resulting in a large area of convection extending northward into southern Mexico. The broad and disorganized system moved westward at 10–15 mph (16–24 km/h). On October 20, the system developed an area of low pressure, and began to show signs of organization. It continued to organize, and developed into Tropical Depression Seventeen-E on October 21 while located about 265 miles (426 km) south-southwest of Manzanillo. Upon forming, the depression possessed a small, tight low-level circulation beneath a well-defined mid-level circulation. Easterly wind shear initially restricted upper-level outflow as the cyclone moved to the west, a motion due to a subtropical ridge to its north.
The cloud pattern of the depression quickly became better organized as a curved band developed around intensifying deep convection, and it is estimated the system intensified into Tropical Storm Paul just six hours after forming. Easterly wind shear exposed the low level circulation to the east of the area of deep convection, though Paul continued to intensify as it moved through an area of warm waters and progressively weakening wind shear. The low level circulation gradually became more embedded within the convection as the cloud pattern improved. Computer models had troubles in forecasting the future of the storm early in its life; the GFDL model forecast Paul to reach winds of 119 mph (192 km/h), while global models expected the system to dissipate in 48–72 hours. Early on October 22, wind shear began to decrease, which coincided with an increase of outflow on its eastern side. The storm temporarily degraded in appearance as it turned to the northwest. However, shear sharply abated over Paul late on October 22, resulting in the storm quickly gaining organization and intensifying. An eye began to develop within the convection, and Paul intensified into a hurricane early on October 23.
Located in an area of warm water temperatures and light wind shear, Hurricane Paul continued to intensify and organize; its well-defined eye was surrounded by a ring of deep convection while outflow remained strong to the north and south. On October 23, while located 465 miles (748 km) south-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Paul reached its peak intensity of 105 mph (169 km/h), a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. A large trough located off the west coast of California turned the hurricane to the north-northwest, and later to the north. The combination of increasing shear and dry air quickly weakened Paul to a tropical storm on October 24 as its low-level circulation became detached from the diminishing convection. The storm then turned to the northeast after passing near Socorro Island. Despite increasing wind shear of over 50 mph (80 km/h), Paul remained a tropical storm while its circulation remained on the southwest side of its developing deep convection. Early on October 25, the storm passed about 100 miles (160 km) south of the southern tip of Baja California. The circulation briefly became involved with the deep convection as it accelerated northeastward, though as it approached the coast of Sinaloa, the center again decoupled from the upper-level circulation. Later that day, Paul weakened to a tropical depression a short distance off the coast of Mexico, and turned to the north. Early the next day, the depression, devoid of any deep convection, made landfall near Isla Altamura in northwestern Sinaloa. Hours later, the National Hurricane Center issued the last advisory on the dissipating tropical depression.
## Preparations
As Paul became a hurricane, the government of Mexico issued a hurricane watch for Baja California Sur from Agua Blanca on the west coast to La Paz on the east coast. When a weakening trend was evident as the storm turned to the northeast, the hurricane watch was replaced with a tropical storm warning. 45 hours before the storm struck land, the government of Mexico issued a tropical storm watch from Mazatlán to San Evaristo along the coast of Sinaloa. When Paul was expected to weaken to a tropical depression before landfall, the tropical storm watch for mainland Mexico was discontinued. When Paul retained tropical storm status for longer than expected, and was now expected to make landfall as a tropical storm, a tropical storm warning was issued from Mazatlán to Atlata, which was later discontinued as Paul weakened to a tropical depression.
Emergency officials near the southern tip of Baja California closed schools, while rescue workers ordered for the evacuation of more than 1,500 people from shanty towns. Local police officers went door-to-door to inform the potentially affected residents. Buses carried the evacuated citizens to schools temporarily set up as shelters. A hotel in Cabo San Lucas informed its guests of the approaching storm, and organized indoor activities for those that stayed. Several tourists ended their vacations early and left through local airports. The threat of the storm closed the port at Cabo San Lucas, causing delays in a local fishing competition. In Sinaloa, authorities evacuated over 5,000 families in risk of flooding.
## Impact
The National Hurricane Center noted that the precursor disturbance had the potential to drop heavy rainfall which could result in life-threatening flash flooding or mudslides in Oaxaca and Guerrero. However, no damage reports were received there.
In southern Baja California, a fisherman slipped off rocks due to strong seas, while an American tourist was swept out to sea due to rough surf; both were killed. Two others were killed in Sinaloa when their truck was swept away by a swollen river. Paul was the third hurricane in the year to threaten Los Cabos, the others being John and Lane. The hurricane caused little damage in the area, only producing gusty winds and some rainfall. Paul dropped moderate rainfall across mainland Mexico, including a 24-hour total of 2.3 inches (58 mm) in Mazatlán, Sinaloa and over 8 inches (200 mm) in isolated locations. The rainfall led to flooding, the worst of which occurred in Villa Juarez. There, a canal overflowed, while the rainfall flooded streets with up to 3.3 feet (1.0 m) of water. 5,000 houses were damaged from the flooding, displacing 20,000 people. The storm damaged more than 3,700 acres (15 km<sup>2</sup>) of crop lands, primarily beans and corn. Damage totaled more than \$35 million (2006 MXN, \$3.2 million 2006 USD).
## See also
- Other storms of the same name
- Hurricane Sandra (2015)
|
23,124,364 |
1957 NCAA University Division basketball championship game
| 1,170,770,276 |
Men's college basketball tournament game
|
[
"1956–57 NCAA University Division men's basketball season",
"1957 in sports in Missouri",
"20th century in Kansas City, Missouri",
"Basketball competitions in Kansas City, Missouri",
"College sports tournaments in Missouri",
"Kansas Jayhawks men's basketball",
"March 1957 sports events in the United States",
"NCAA Division I men's basketball championship games",
"North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball"
] |
The 1957 NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game took place on March 23, 1957, between the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Kansas Jayhawks at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri. The matchup was the final one of the nineteenth edition of the single-elimination tournament now known as the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament—commonly referred to as the NCAA Tournament—organized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It was used to crown a national men's basketball champion in the NCAA's University Division, known since 1973 as the NCAA Division I.
After surviving numerous close games during the regular season, the conference tournament, and lastly, a triple-overtime game against Michigan State in the national semifinal, North Carolina came into the National Championship game with an unblemished record of 31–0. Led by coach Frank McGuire and Helms Foundation College Basketball Player of the Year Lennie Rosenbluth, the Tar Heels were ranked first overall in the AP Poll. Kansas came into the National Championship game with two losses, which were credited to poor ball control on the Jayhawks' part. The Jayhawks, led by sophomore phenom and first-team All-American Wilt Chamberlain, were favored to win against the Tar Heels.
The game attracted heavy media attention with over ten television stations and sixty–three news reporters in attendance. The North Carolina Tar Heels jumped out to an early 19–7 lead in the first half until the Jayhawks reduced the Tar Heels' lead to seven points (29-22) at halftime. In the second half, the Jayhawks took the lead. The Tar Heels tied the game in the final minute, sending the game into overtime. In the first overtime, each team scored a basket before time ran out; in the second overtime, no points were scored due to lack of offensive execution by both teams. More action took place in the third overtime. The Tar Heels won the game 54–53 as Joe Quigg made two free throws in the closing seconds to give them their first NCAA Men's Basketball National Championship.
The team received a large welcome at Raleigh–Durham International Airport when they arrived back in North Carolina. Due to the successful televising of the National Championship game in North Carolina, the broadcasting of Atlantic Coast Conference collegiate basketball games expanded greatly. Kansas' Chamberlain was criticised for his inability to win the National Championship. He eventually left Kansas after his junior year to join the Harlem Globetrotters.
## Background
### North Carolina Tar Heels
The North Carolina Tar Heels were coached by Frank McGuire, who was in his fifth season as the team's head coach. His offensive philosophy centered around passing before shooting. McGuire's starting line up, and most of the roster, consisted primarily of players from New York state due to McGuire's connections in the area from his time as St. John's head coach. Carolina squads prior to McGuire usually had several in-state players and select out of state talent. Tommy Kearns and Pete Brennan were two offensive specialists. Center Joe Quigg provided a solid presence in the paint (free throw lane) and grabbed almost nine rebounds per game. Guard Bob Cunningham was one of the team's best defensive players. Lennie Rosenbluth, who averaged almost twenty-eight points a game and served as the team's clutch performer, led the team.
North Carolina began their 1956–57 campaign with three straight wins by a wide margin of victory. In their fourth game, the Tar Heels traveled to Columbia, South Carolina, to play the South Carolina Gamecocks. They took the Tar Heels to overtime before North Carolina was able to come away with a four-point victory. Near the end of December, the Tar Heels participated in the annual Dixie Classic. They won it and remained undefeated after beating the Wake Forest Demon Deacons in the championship game. North Carolina then won five more games before going into double overtime against the Maryland Terrapins winning the game 65–61 to earn their seventeenth consecutive victory. In the following game, the Duke Blue Devils and North Carolina were tied with 73 points each before Tar Heel Kearns sank two free throws to give North Carolina a two-point lead before the game ended. The Tar Heels closed out the regular season with six more victories to finish with a record of 24–0. North Carolina won their quarterfinal match-up in the ACC tournament by twenty points to advance to the semifinals against Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons were leading 59–58 as the game entered the final minute. With time running out, Rosenbluth made a two-point shot but was fouled in the act of shooting, which sent him to the line to shoot a free throw; he made the free throw and the Tar Heels won 61–59. The Tar Heels then beat South Carolina in the championship to earn a berth in the NCAA Tournament.
The Tar Heels defeated the Yale Bulldogs 90–74 in the NCAA East Regional Quarterfinal to advance to the semifinal against Canisius College. North Carolina won the game by twelve points allowing them to move on to the NCAA East Regional Final against the Syracuse Orange. The final, and the semifinal, was held at the Palestra in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Syracuse Orange fell to the Tar Heels 67–58 allowing them to advance to the Final Four in Kansas City, Missouri. The Tar Heels' opponent for the national semifinal was the Michigan State Spartans. The Tar Heels were tied with the Spartans as regulation time was winding down. Michigan State's Jack Quiggle made a half court shot that would have given the Spartans the lead, but it left his hands after time expired, nullifying the basket. In the first overtime, Michigan State had a two-point lead with eleven seconds remaining and had a player at the foul line. The Spartan missed both shots. Carolina's Brennan gathered the rebound, dribbled down the court, and made a shot as time expired to send the game to a second overtime. The Tar Heels pulled away in the third overtime to win the game 74–70. The game saw the lead change thirty-one times before the Tar Heels were able to emerge victorious after three overtime periods.
### Kansas Jayhawks
Dick Harp was in the midst of his first season as head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks when the team entered the National Championship game. Kansas began the season favored to win the national title. This was due in large part to Wilt Chamberlain joining the varsity team after finishing his freshman year on the freshman team per NCAA rules. At the beginning of the season, the Jayhawks starting line up consisted of seniors Gene Elstun, Maurice King, John Parker, Lew Johnson, and sophomore Chamberlain. Ron Loneski replaced Johnson in the starting line up during the season. Harp began the season with a man-to-man defense, but later switched to a zone defense to give the Jayhawks an advantage in rebounding the basketball.
The Jayhawks began the regular season with twelve consecutive victories before losing to the Iowa State Cyclones by two points having lost the lead in the closing seconds of the game. Kansas' next game was against Iowa State; this time, the Jayhawks won the game by a margin of nine points. The Jayhawks won their next four games before losing to the Oklahoma State Cowboys in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The shot clock was not in use in 1957 allowing the Cowboys to hold the ball for the final three and a half minutes and win the game 56–54. Both of the Jayhawks' regular season losses were due in part to their poor ball control. The Jayhawks' squad closed out the regular season with four more victories, finishing the regular season with a conference best 11–1 record, earning them the Big Seven Conference regular season crown and a berth in the NCAA Tournament.
In the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the Jayhawks faced the Southern Methodist Mustangs and were forced into an overtime period. With 36 points from Chamberlain, the Jayhawks won 73–65 to advance to the regional finals. There, they defeated the Oklahoma City Stars 81–61 to reach the Final Four. Chamberlain posted 30 points in the contest, adding 15 rebounds. The two-time defending NCAA Tournament champions, the San Francisco Dons, faced Kansas at the Final Four's host site, Kansas City. With a field goal percentage of almost 60 percent, the Jayhawks posted an 80–56 win to advance to the championship game against undefeated North Carolina, the number one-ranked team in the country. Even though the Tar Heels were undefeated, and ranked number one in the nation, Kansas entered the game as a three-point favorite, mostly because playing in Kansas City—close to nearby Lawrence, the school's location—was virtually a home game.
### Team rosters
## Broadcasting
The national semifinal between Kansas and San Francisco was not televised, while the North Carolina-Michigan State Spartans match-up was broadcast in some areas. Plans to televise the national championship game were made in advance in anticipation that the Kansas Jayhawks would reach the championship game. By the time the match-up was set between the Jayhawks and the Tar Heels, an eleven-station network had been organized. Castleman D. Chesley, a local television producer, broadcast the game in North Carolina on five stations. After the Tar Heels won the Eastern Regional, Chesley managed to get announcers, sponsors and five stations to set up a network to broadcast North Carolina's Final Four games from Kansas City. Locally, the game was to appear on channels 9 and 13. The 1957 National Championship game saw the largest media crowd to date for a men's basketball game. Over eleven television stations, 73 radio stations, and 63 news writers were represented.
## Game summary
### First half
The game began with a tip-off between Kansas' seven foot tall Chamberlain and North Carolina's Kearns, who was not even six feet tall. Coach McGuire used Kearns after he had talked down Chamberlain the night before. The rest of the North Carolina squad set up in their zone defense rather than around the center circle as McGuire requested to "show them the zone we were going to use." The Jayhawks were unable to score on their opening possession and set up in their defense as the Tar Heels came down the court with the ball. Kansas' initial defense was a box-and-one, which consisted of four players in a box around a basket while one player, King, played defense on North Carolina's Rosenbluth. Kearns received a pass along the baseline and was fouled in the act of shooting. He missed the shot, but made both free throws to give Carolina the early 2–0 lead. Kansas missed a jump shot, and North Carolina's Joe Quigg converted a 12-foot baseline shot. Kansas scored their first points from two free throws.
The Tar Heels' began to strain Kansas' defense with several players making perimeter shots. When combined with Kansas' inability to convert from the field, this allowed the Tar Heels to jump out to an 11–4 lead. This led Harp to change Kansas' defensive formation to a 2–3 zone defense, with Chamberlain under the basket. Rosenbluth—who was now relatively unguarded compared to Kansas' previous formation—made a contested seventeen-foot jumper. Kansas retaliated by giving the ball to Chamberlain who was then fouled as he went up for a shot. He went to the free-throw line and made one of two shots. As Kansas went up the floor coach Harp ordered his squad to revert to their original box–and–one. Carolina's Kearns made a jumper from the floor after pump faking to lose a defender, which brought the score to 15–7 in favor of Carolina. Kansas came up the floor and missed their shot, but Chamberlain grabbed the rebound and was then fouled in the air. He went to the line for a one–and–one and missed the first shot, while Rosenbluth caught the rebound.
During the following possession, Harp changed Jayhawks' defense to a man-to-man. This caused the Tar Heels to become more active with several screens and movement on offense. The possession resulted in an off-the-ball foul that sent Rosenbluth to the free-throw line where he made both shots. Kansas pushed the ball up the court quickly with King taking an eight-foot shot. Carolina collected the rebound and continued to slow the tempo in the half-court as Kansas shifted back into a 2–3 zone. The Tar Heels passed the ball back and forth until the Jayhawks broke from their zone and went into a man-to-man again. Kearns made a close-quarters shot near the basket. Kansas stepped up their defense at the behest of coach Harp and held Carolina scoreless for two minutes. During that time Kansas made four free throws to cut their deficit to two points—the score now 19–17. The Tar Heels continued to slow the pace and work the ball around to get the open shot, while the Jayhawks would rush up the court and attempt to give the ball to Chamberlain before taking a poor shot. This resulted in moderate success for both teams as North Carolina scored eight points to Kansas' three before the final two minutes began. In the closing two minutes, the two teams both scored two free throws to bring the score to 29–22 in favor of North Carolina.
### Second half
The second half began with another jump ball between the two competing teams. Chamberlain won the tip as Carolina sent out Quigg this time to contest the jump, not Kearns. Both teams failed to score on their first possession, but after Carolina missed their opening shot, Kansas scored on a fast-break pull-up shot. Kansas scored once more—from a lob to Chamberlain—before the Tar Heels were able to score with a baseline jump shot from Quigg to bring the score to 31–26. Kansas closed the lead to 31–30 with a basket and a pair of free throws from Chamberlain. Carolina's Kearns returned with an acrobatic layup to extend the lead to three points.
After Kansas failed to convert a shot on their next possession, North Carolina proceeded to pass the ball around the perimeter of the court for close to two minutes. After finding the right setup, Rosenbluth drove to the basket and scored. Following that possession, Kansas began to make outside jump shots. When combined with Carolina's inability to score, Kansas' improved jump shots led to a 10–2 Kansas run, with Kansas taking the lead nine minutes into the second half. In addition, as North Carolina players continued to foul Chamberlain to make him score from the free throw line, they began to get into foul trouble. Kansas' coach Harp had his team hold the ball beginning with their next possession. This plan worked for a while and Carolina was unable to overcome Kansas' three-point lead; Kansas did not attempt a shot for over five minutes.
With 1:45 remaining in the game, Kansas' Elstun was fouled by Rosenbluth on a lay-up attempt. This was Rosenbluth's fifth foul, which disqualified him for the rest of the game. Elstun missed the two free throws from the foul, and Carolina got the rebound. The Jayhawks were able to score only two points after Rosenbluth's disqualification. North Carolina then began to rally after scoring a basket and then an accompanying free throw. Bob Young—who had replaced Rosenbluth after his fifth foul—scored a lay-up bringing Carolina to within two points. Carolina tied the game at 46–46 after Kearns made a free throw in the closing seconds. The Tar Heels got the ball back and held it for one final possession. The ball was passed to Cunningham who missed his initial shot, but was able to get the rebound. Cunningham went up for another shot, but received heavy contact from Chamberlain. No foul was called and the time ran out, sending the game to overtime.
### Overtime periods
Overtime began with a jump ball won by Chamberlain for Kansas. He quickly passed the ball to King who took a jump shot that missed. Carolina's Cunningham grabbed the rebound. The Tar Heels traversed the court and Young managed to score a basket to give Carolina the edge. However, North Carolina was unable to stop Kansas during the ensuing drive as Chamberlain scored a basket to bring the score to 48–48. After Kansas scored the tying basket, North Carolina proceeded to hold the ball for one final shot before the overtime period ended. Carolina's Kearns drove and put up a shot that was blocked by Chamberlain as time ran out.
North Carolina's first possession of the second overtime period ended with a turnover, while Kansas missed a long jump shot in theirs. North Carolina's Brennan boxed out Chamberlain who went over him to collect the rebound and was called for over the back. Joe Quigg turned the ball over after traveling, while Chamberlain threw the ball out of bounds on the subsequent possession. Carolina failed to capitalize on Chamberlain's error when Kearns missed the front end of a one-and-one. Kansas came down the court and passed the ball to Chamberlain who was then fouled hard by Cunningham. This sparked an altercation between the teams, resulting in Chamberlain being hit in the stomach with a megaphone and his knee being scarred by a Carolina cheerleader. The referees stopped the commotion, and Chamberlain was sent to the free-throw line. He missed both shots, and Carolina got the rebound. The Tar Heels aimed to hold the ball for a final, shot but they turned the ball over to Kansas with ten seconds to go. Then the Jayhawks called a timeout with six seconds left. The ball went to Kansas' Loneski who missed a shot, and the game remained tied at 48.
After a one-minute break between periods, the third overtime began with another jump ball again won by Chamberlain. After King missed the opening shot of the period, Carolina's Kearns made a right-handed lay-up to bring the score to 50–48. Kansas failed to score again, and this time Kearns missed his shot after being fouled; he then made both free throws. Off a pass from Loneski, Chamberlain made a shot, was fouled, and made the ensuing free throw to complete the three-point play and bring the Jayhawks within one point. Cunningham was fouled after being trapped in a double team and then missed the first shot of the one-and-one. The Jayhawks' Loneski missed a contested, close layup, but King got the offensive rebound and was fouled on a put back shot. King made one of the free throws and tied the score at 52–52.
On the next possession, Kansas' John Parker stole the ball and crossed half court when coach Harp called a timeout. Chamberlain received the ball in the post, went up for a shot and received some contact; however, no referee called a foul and the ball rolled out of bounds off Carolina. On the next play, Elstun was run into by a Tar Heel and went to the foul line for two shots with 31 seconds remaining; he missed the first and made the second shot. Out of timeouts, Kearns drove into the lane and put up a shot that was blocked out of bounds by Chamberlain. The following play, Quigg pump-faked and went up for a shot that Chamberlain blocked; however, simultaneously King made contact with Quigg's body while he was shooting and the referees called a shooting foul. Quigg went to the free-throw line for two shots with six seconds to go and made both, giving the Tar Heels the lead 54–53. Kansas called a timeout and in-bounded to Loneski who then passed the ball towards Chamberlain who was under the basket. The pass was underthrown, and Quigg tipped the ball away from Chamberlain. Kearns grabbed it and got away from a defender before he threw the ball into the air to run out the clock. Time expired as the ball was in the air and the Tar Heels won the National Championship.
## Box score
Source:
## Aftermath
Despite his team losing the championship game, Kansas' Chamberlain was named the NCAA tournament's Most Outstanding Player. He was also named to the Consensus All-American squad for the 1956–57 season. North Carolina's Rosenbluth was named the Helms Foundation College Basketball Player of the Year for his performance throughout the basketball season, as well as a Consensus All-American. The Tar Heels' coach McGuire was named UPI College Basketball Coach of the Year for leading North Carolina to a win in the National Championship game and a perfect record of 32–0.
While coach McGuire and Rosenbluth boarded a plane to New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, the rest of the Tar Heels returned to North Carolina two days later where they landed at Raleigh–Durham International Airport (RDU). Over 10,000 fans greeted the North Carolina squad. Some players were carried by members of the crowd from the airport ramp to the terminal. The airport manager believed the crowd gathered to meet the Tar Heels was the biggest in RDU's history. It was so big it prevented Chancellor Robert House from giving a planned speech for the team. The size of the crowd at the airport was credited to the broadcast of both the national semifinal and National Championship games on television around North Carolina.
In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Tar Heel fans who had watched the game on television flooded Franklin Street after the victory over the Jayhawks. Over two thousand people rushed the street preventing cars from passing for over an hour. Police were required to help maintain order. This has since turned into a tradition where people overrun Franklin Street following a Tar Heel win over the Duke Blue Devils or whenever they have won a National Championship.
Chamberlain was criticized for his inability to lead Kansas to a win in the National Championship game; He later admitted this loss was the most painful in his life. He returned to Kansas for his junior year and to play another season under coach Harp. Chamberlain quickly became frustrated with the opposing teams' way of playing him, which consisted primarily of double- or triple-teaming him to limit his offensive production and effectiveness. In addition, many teams resorted to running out the time on the clock when they had the lead over the Jayhawks to increase their odds of winning the game. After the Jayhawks failed to qualify for the NCAA Tournament that year, Chamberlain decided to forgo his senior season to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. He did not return to Kansas' campus for over 40 years after leaving for the Globetrotters; he finally returned in 1998, the year before his death, when his jersey was retired.
The 1957 North Carolina players were awarded watches for their part in the winning the national championship. (In the 1990s, the players were given rings to commemorate their win in the national championship game at the insistence of then-North Carolina coach Dean Smith.) Coach McGuire was given a brand new Carolina blue and white Cadillac by the university and signed a new five-year contract worth \$11,500 per year. After seeing the success of televising the tournament's final games, Castleman Chesley believed, "ACC basketball could be as popular as any TV show in North Carolina." The broadcast of North Carolina's national semifinal and National Championship games led to increased awareness and attention towards basketball around the state. It also led to Chesley and the Atlantic Coast Conference agreeing to a television contract whereby he would broadcast twelve ACC games league-wide during the 1957–58 season. The games aired on Saturdays the following season were called the ACC Game of the Week. The television contract allowed the league to expand and increase the conference's visibility. It also led to an increase in ticket sales for the members of the ACC. More children began to pick up the sport of basketball as a result of the increase in the number of ACC games being televised.
|
61,670,516 |
Dracophyllum arboreum
| 1,143,819,302 |
Species of tree in the heath family from the Chatham Islands
|
[
"Dracophyllum",
"Endemic flora of New Zealand",
"Flora of the Chatham Islands",
"Plants described in 1902",
"Taxa named by Leonard Cockayne",
"Trees of New Zealand"
] |
Dracophyllum arboreum, commonly known as Chatham Island grass tree and tarahinau (Moriori), is a species of tree in the heath family Ericaceae. Endemic to the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, it reaches a height of 18 m (60 ft) and has leaves that differ between the juvenile and adult forms.
D. arboreum has wide light green leaves in its juvenile form, which become thin needles as it gains maturity. Flowering occurs from November through to February, yielding small white flowers which later become tiny brown fruit. It inhabits many different types of vegetation communities from near sea level to 270 m (886 ft), including swamps, cliffs, bogs, and shrublands. It has a range restricted to three Islands some 800 km (497 mi) east of New Zealand: the Chatham, Pitt, and Rangatira Islands.
It was first described by the British botanist Joseph Hooker in 1864 as a variety of the species D. latifolium, but was first given the status as a species itself in 1902 by the New Zealand botanist Leonard Cockayne. Another New Zealand botanist, Thomas Cheeseman, demoted it once again to a variety in 1925, this time of D. scoparium, but this change has not been recognised by other botanists and institutions. The New Zealand naturalist Walter Oliver placed it in the subgenus Oreothamnus in 1928. A cladistic analysis in 2010 revealed through genetic sequencing that it was part of a paraphyletic group and not directly related to D. patens, as Oliver had suggested in his 1952 supplement, but to D. scoparium, as he had originally thought.
## Description
Dracophyllum arboreum is a tree which grows to a height of 4–18 m (13–59 ft). It has greyish brown bark with new growth a reddish brown to yellow. Its leaves are dimorphic, meaning they differ between the juvenile and adult stages dramatically. The juvenile leaves are green 10–22 by 1–1.8 cm (3.94–8.66 by 0.39–0.71 in) and leathery. The juvenile leaves are also completely hairless, except for dense, tiny hairs along the edges. The adult leaves, on the other hand, are narrow, 25–90 by 1–2 mm (0.98–3.54 by 0.04–0.08 in), and needle-like. They are hairless, except for a margin that is covered with many tiny hairs, as well as a tuft of hair at the base of the top side.
Flowering occurs from November to February, producing spiked terminal inflorescences (flower clusters) with 4 – 9 flowers on each. They grow off of lateral branchlets, and are 15–38 mm (0.59–1.50 in) long (shorter than the leaves), while the inflorescence bract is 18–20 by 3–5 mm (0.7–0.8 by 0.1–0.2 in). As with the leaves, they are mostly hairless, except for hairs around the margins and many at the base of the upper side. The flowers are sessile, meaning they are attached directly to the stem, white, elliptically-shaped, and 5.5–9 by 2.5–3 mm. The corolla, or petals, is also white and cylindrically shaped, with a size of 4–5 by 2.5–3.0 mm, and has reflexed triangle-shaped lobes. Its sepals (the leafy part) are white, egg-shaped, and 4.0–7.0 by 2.5–3.0 mm, which is longer than the corolla tube. The stamens are found in the upper third of the corolla and are made up of a 0.3–0.4 mm long light yellow anther on top of a 0.3–1 mm long filament, the length of which varies between populations. In addition to this it has a 1.7–2 by 1–2 mm hairless elliptically-shaped ovary and 1.0–1.2 by 0.5–0.8 mm rectangular nectary scales. The style is 2– 2.5 mm long and hairless.
Fruiting occurs year round, yielding sessile 1.2–1.5 by 1–1.5 mm dark brown and rectangular-shaped fruit, contained in which is a 0.6–0.65 mm long yellowish-brown and egg-shaped seed. D. arboreum is similar to D. scoparium and D. cockayneanum, but differs mainly by the fact that it has juvenile leaves, which D. scoparium lacks. D. cockayneanum is more similar, but can be distinguished by its much smaller, hairy juvenile leaves as well as floral bracts which aren't persistent. D. arboreum's adult leaves also taper to a point and only have hairs on the edges and bottom of the top side, as opposed to those of D. cockayneanum, which are more rounded and are covered with hairs all over.
## Taxonomy
D. arboreum was first described by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1864 as a variety of D. latifolium, called D. latifolium var. ciliolatum. He noted that the variety was found in the Chatham Islands and had leaves with margins covered with many small hairs, hence the name ciliolatum from ciliolate, meaning covered with tiny hairs. Leonard Cockayne first gave it species status in the 1901 issue of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, then known as the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, but only published in July 1902. Although not a full description, he cited that the differences in foliage between the juvenile and adult forms where more than enough to classify it as separate from D. scoparium, despite their similar flowers. Thomas Cheeseman demoted D. aboreum to a variety of D. scoparium, called D. scoparium var. major, due to its height, stoutness, and more dense hairs on its leaves. In Stephanus Venter's 2009 thesis and 2021 revision of the genus, this variant is listed as a synonym of D. arboreum, as is the Dracophyllum scoparium described by the German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller in 1864, though he accepts the one described by Hooker in the same year.
### Etymology
Dracophyllum is from the genus's similarity to the species in the genus Dracaena from the Canary Islands and is from the Ancient Greek for "dragon-leaf." The specific epithet arboreum means "tree-like," in reference to its tree growth habit.
### Classification and Evolution
In a 1952 supplement of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, W. R. B. Oliver published a revised taxonomic arrangement of the genus Dracophyllum which he had first attempted in 1928. In this supplement he moved D. arboreum from the group containing D. scoparium into the group of D. sinclairii, along with D. patens and D. viride (now regarded as a synonym of D. sinclairii), citing their similar life history and "general resemblance," and kept it in the subgenus Oreothamnus. Oliver, however, conducted his research based purely on morphological characteristics such as growth habit, leaves, and flowers. In 2010 several botanists, including Stephanus Venter, published an article on the genus Dracophyllum in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden. In it they performed a cladistic analysis and produced a phylogenetic tree of the tribe Richeeae and other species using genetic sequencing. They found that only the subgenus Oreothamnus and the tribe Richeeae were monophyletic. The paraphylly of the genus Dracophyllum, as well as the polyphyly of the closely related genus Richea, they argued, suggested that a major taxonomic revision was required. Venter revised the genus in 2021, merging the genus Richea into two subgenera, named D. subg. Cystanthe and D. subg. Dracophylloides, of Dracophyllum. Though he noted that because the 2010 study was based on plastid sequence data and did not attain some species with strong enough evidence, the subgenera are instead based on morphological characteristics.
D. arboreum is placed in the clade formed by several subgenus Oreothamnus species, with D. strictum (in the subgenus Dracophyllum) as sister to this clade. Its placement can be summarised in the cladogram at right.
## Distribution and habitat
Endemic to the Chatham Islands, an island chain around 800 km (500 mi) east of the south Island, it is found on the Chatham, Rangiuria and Rangatira Islands. It is in abundance on the southern tableland of Chatham Island in lowland forests and in the drier regions of swamps, as well as in the transition section between moorland and forest in association D. paludosum–particularly in its juvenile form. On Rangiuria Island, also known by its English name Pitt Island, D. arboreum dominates the upland forest with Rautini (Brachyglottis huntii) and various species of tree ferns. It grows from close to sea level to 270 m (886 ft), on cliffs, hillsides, streams, gullies and valley floors. Typical vegetation in these areas is made up of forests, shrublands, bogs and grasslands, whilst the soil content is often boggy and peaty. D. arboreum typically prefers full sun, though will also grow in light shade. The New Zealand Threat Classification System classified it in 2017 as "Naturally Uncommon," giving it an estimated area of inhabitation of 10 km<sup>2</sup> (1,000 ha).
The forests it is found in are made up of mainly Plagianthus regius subsp. chathamicus, while the shrublands are made up of either: large-leaved muehlenbeckia (Muelenbeckia australis); or species in the genus Coprosma together with Chatham Island aster (Olearia semidentata); or Olearia chathamica.
## Ecology
The Chatham Islands are extremely windswept, receiving an average annual wind speed of 24 km/h (13 kn) as well as having record wind speeds of 157 km/h (85 kn) in January 1993 and 124 km/h (67 kn) just a few months later. To adapt to this D. arboreum has evolved to be heteroblastic, developing large leaves as juveniles which become thin, wind-resistant needles as they gain maturity. Many species in mainland New Zealand are heteroblastic as well, such as the lancewood, but probably because of large, now extinct, browsing birds such as the moa. The Chatham Islands have never had these which means D. arboreum has likely evolved in this way due to climatic factors such as the wind; the thinner leaves reducing stress on the stalks.
D. arboreum can also grow as an epiphyte, beginning its life typically in a tree fern, before extending its roots downwards and eventually gaining a trunk.
## Cultivation
D. arboreum can be cultivated from seed but will be difficult to maintain and prefers a damp, acidic, peaty soil – like its habitat on Chatham Island.
|
35,520,741 |
Art in Medieval Scotland
| 1,048,847,900 |
None
|
[
"Culture of medieval Scotland",
"Medieval art",
"Scottish art",
"Western art"
] |
Art in Medieval Scotland includes all forms of artistic production within the modern borders of Scotland, between the fifth century and the adoption of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. In the early Middle Ages, there were distinct material cultures evident in the different federations and kingdoms within what is now Scotland. Pictish art was the only uniquely Scottish Medieval style; it can be seen in the extensive survival of carved stones, particularly in the north and east of the country, which hold a variety of recurring images and patterns. It can also be seen in elaborate metal work that largely survives in buried hoards. Irish-Scots art from the kingdom of Dál Riata suggests that it was one of the places, as a crossroads between cultures, where the Insular style developed.
Insular art is the name given to the common style that developed in Britain and Ireland from the eighth century and which became highly influential in continental Europe and contributed to the development of Romanesque and Gothic styles. It can be seen in elaborate jewellery, often making extensive use of semi-precious stones, in the heavily carved high crosses found particularly in the Highlands and Islands, but distributed across the country and particularly in the highly decorated illustrated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, which may have been begun, or wholly created at the monastic centre of Iona.
Scotland adopted the Romanesque style relatively late and retained and revived elements of its style after the Gothic style had become dominant from the thirteenth century. Much of the best Scottish artwork of the High and Late Middle Ages was either religious in nature or realised in metal and woodwork, and has not survived the impact of time and the Reformation. However, examples of sculpture are extant as part of church architecture, including evidence of elaborate church interiors. From the thirteenth century there are relatively large numbers of monumental effigies. Native craftsmanship can be seen in a variety of items. Visual illustration can be seen in the illumination of charters and occasional survivals of church paintings. Surviving copies of individual portraits are relatively crude, but more impressive are the works or artists commissioned from the continent, particularly the Netherlands.
## Early Middle Ages
### Pictish stones
About 250 Pictish stones survive and have been assigned by scholars to three classes. Class I stones are those thought to date to the period up to the seventh century and are the most numerous group. The stones are largely unshaped and include incised symbols of animals such as fish and the Pictish beast, everyday objects such as mirrors, combs and tuning forks and abstract symbols defined by names including V-rod, double disc and Z-rod. They are found between from the Firth of Forth to Shetland. The greatest concentrations are in Sutherland, around modern Inverness and Aberdeen. Good examples include the Dunrobin (Sutherland) and Aberlemno stones (Angus).
Class II stones are carefully shaped slabs dating after the arrival of Christianity in the eighth and ninth centuries, with a cross on one face and a wide range of symbols on the reverse. In smaller numbers than Class I stones, they predominate in southern Pictland, in Perth, Angus and Fife. Good examples include Glamis 2, which contains a finely executed Celtic cross on the main face with two opposing male figures, a centaur, cauldron, deer head and a triple disc symbol and Cossans, Angus, which shows a high-prowed Pictish boat with oarsmen and a figure facing forward in the prow. Class III stones are thought to overlap chronologically with Class II stones. Most are elaborately shaped and incised cross-slabs, some with figurative scenes, but lacking idiomatic Pictish symbols. They are widely distributed but predominate in the southern Pictish areas.
### Pictish metalwork
Items of metalwork have been found throughout Pictland. The earlier Picts appear to have had a considerable amount of silver available, probably from raiding further south, or the payment of subsidies to keep them from doing so. The very large hoard of late Roman hacksilver found at Traprain Law may have originated in either way. The largest hoard of early Pictish metalwork was found in 1819 at Norrie's Law in Fife, but unfortunately much was dispersed and melted down. Over ten heavy silver chains, some over 0.5 metres (1.6 ft) long, have been found from this period; the double-linked Whitecleuch Chain is one of only two that have a penannular ring, with symbol decoration including enamel, which shows how these were probably used as "choker" necklaces. The St Ninian's Isle Treasure of 28 silver and silver-gilt objects, contains perhaps the best collection of late Pictish forms, from the Christian period, when Pictish metalwork style, as with stone-carving, gradually merged with Insular, Anglo-Saxon and Viking styles.
### Irish-Scots art
Thomas Charles-Edwards has suggested that the kingdom of Dál Riata was a cross-roads between the artistic styles of the Picts and those of Ireland, with which the Scots settlers in what is now Argyll kept close contacts. This can be seen in representations found in excavations of the fortress of Dunadd, which combine Pictish and Irish elements. This included extensive evidence for the production of high status jewellery and moulds from the seventh century that indicate the production of pieces similar to the Hunterston brooch, found in Ayrshire, which may have been made in Dál Riata, but with elements that suggest Irish origins. These and other finds, including a trumpet spiral decorated hanging bowl disc and a stamped animal decoration (or pressblech), perhaps from a bucket or drinking horn, indicate the ways in which Dál Riata was one of the locations where the Insular style was developed. In the eighth and ninth centuries the Pictish elite adopted true penannular brooches with lobed terminals from Ireland. Some older Irish pseudo-penannular brooches were adapted to the Pictish style, for example the Breadalbane Brooch (British Museum). The eighth century Monymusk Reliquary has elements of Pictish and Irish style.
### Early Anglo-Saxon art
Early examples of Anglo-Saxon art are largely metalwork, particularly bracelets, clasps and jewellery, that has survived in pagan burials and in exceptional items such as the intricately carved whalebone Franks Casket, thought to have been produced in Northumbria in the early eighth century, which combines pagan, classical and Christian motifs. There is only one known pagan burial in Scotland, at Dalmeny Midlothian, which contains a necklace of beads similar to those found in mid-seventh-century southern England. Other isolated finds include a gold object from Dalmeny, shaped like a truncated pyramid, with filigree and garnet, similar to sword harness mounts found at Sutton Hoo. There is also a bun-shaped loom from Yetholm, Roxburghshire and a ring with an Anglian runic inscription. From eastern Scotland there is a seventh-century sword pommel from Culbin Sands, Moray and the Burghead drinking horn mount. After Christianisation in the seventh century artistic styles in Northumbria, which then reached to the Firth of Forth, interacted with those in Ireland and what is now Scotland to become part of the common style historians have identified as Insular or Hiberno-Saxon.
### Insular art
Insular art, or Hiberno-Saxon art, is the name given to the common style produced in Scotland, Britain and Anglo-Saxon England from the seventh century, with the combining of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon forms. Surviving examples of Insular art are found in metalwork, carving, but mainly in illuminated manuscripts. In manuscripts surfaces are highly decorated with intricate patterning, with no attempt to give an impression of depth, volume or recession. The best examples include the Book of Kells, which may have been wholly or partly created in Iona, and the Book of Durrow, which may be from Ireland or Northumbria. Carpet pages are a characteristic feature of Insular manuscripts, although historiated initials (an Insular invention), canon tables and figurative miniatures, especially Evangelist portraits, are also common. The finest era of the style was brought to an end by the disruption to monastic centres and aristocratic life of the Viking raids in the late eighth century.
Christianity discouraged the burial of grave goods so the majority of examples of insular metalwork that survive from the Christian period have been found in archaeological contexts that suggest they were rapidly hidden, lost or abandoned. There are a few exceptions, notably portable shrines ("cumdachs") for books or relics, several of which have been continuously owned, mostly by churches on the Continent—though the Monymusk Reliquary has always been in Scotland. The highest quality survivals are either secular jewellery, the largest and most elaborate pieces probably for male wearers, tableware or altarware. The finest church pieces were probably made by secular workshops, often attached to a royal household, though other pieces were made by monastic workshops. There are a number of large brooches, each of their designs is wholly individual in detail, and the workmanship is varied. Many elements of the designs can be directly related to elements used in manuscripts. Surviving stones used in decoration are semi-precious ones, with amber and rock crystal among the commonest, and some garnets. Coloured glass, enamel and millefiori glass, probably imported, are also used. None of the major insular manuscripts, like the Book of Kells, have preserved their elaborate jewelled metal covers, but documentary evidence indicates that these were as spectacular as the few remaining continental examples.
The most significant survivals in sculpture are in High crosses, large free-standing stone crosses, usually carved in relief with patterns, biblical iconography and occasionally inscriptions. The tradition may have begun in Ireland or Anglo-Saxon England and then spread to Scotland. They are found throughout the British Isles and often feature a stone ring around the intersection, forming a Celtic cross, apparently an innovation of Celtic Christianity, that may have begun at Iona. Distribution in Scotland is heaviest in the Highlands and Islands and they can be dated to the period c. 750 to 1150. All the surviving crosses are of stone, but there are indications that large numbers of wooden crosses may also have existed. In Scotland biblical iconography is less common than in Ireland, but the subject of King David is relatively frequently depicted. In the east the influence of Pictish sculpture can be seen, in areas of Viking occupation and settlement, crosses for the tenth to the twelfth centuries have distinctive Scandinavian patterns, often mixed with native styles. Important examples dated to the eighth century include St Martin's Cross on Iona, the Kildalton Cross from the Hebrides and the Anglo-Saxon Ruthwell Cross. Through the Hiberno-Scottish mission to the continent, insular art was highly influential on subsequent European Medieval art, especially the decorative elements of Romanesque and Gothic styles.
### Viking age art
Viking art avoided naturalism, favouring stylised animal motifs to create its ornamental patterns. Ribbon-interlace was important and plant motifs became fashionable in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Most Scottish artefacts come from 130 "pagan" burials in the north and west from the mid-ninth to the mid-tenth centuries. These include jewellery, weapons and occasional elaborate high status items. Amongst the most impressive of these is the Scar boat burial, on Orkney, which contained an elaborate sword, quiver with arrows, a brooch, bone comb, gaming pieces and the Scar Dragon Plaque, made from whalebone, most of which were probably made in Scandinavia. From the west, another boat burial at Kiloron Bay in Colonsay revealed a sword, shield, iron cauldron and enamelled scales, which may be Celtic in origin. A combination of Viking and Celtic styles can be see in a penannular brooch from Pierowall in Orkney, which has a Pictish-style looped pin. It is about two inches in diameter, with traces of gilding, and probably housed a piece of amber surrounded by interweaving ribbons. After the conversion to Christianity, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, stone crosses and cross-slabs in Viking occupied areas of the Highlands and Islands were carved with successive styles of Viking ornament. They were frequently mixed with native interlace and animal patterns. Examples include the eleventh-century cross-slab from Dóid Mhàiri on the island of Islay, where the plant motifs on either side of the cross-shaft are based upon the Ringerike style of Viking art. The most famous artistic find from modern Scotland, the Lewis Chessmen, from Uig, were probably made in Trondheim in Norway, but contain some decoration that may have been influenced by Celtic patterns.
## Late Middle Ages
### Architecture and sculpture
Architectural evidence suggests that, while the Romanesque style peaked in much of Europe in the later eleventh and early twelfth century, it was still reaching Scotland in the second half of the twelfth century and was revived in the late fifteenth century, perhaps as a reaction to the English perpendicular style that had come to dominate. Much of the best Scottish artwork of the High and Late Middle Ages was either religious in nature or realised in metal and woodwork and has not survived the impact of time and the Reformation. However, examples of sculpture are extant as part of church architecture, a small number of significant crafted items have also survived and, for the end of the period, there is evidence of painting, particularly the extensive commissioning of works in the Low Countries and France.
The interiors of churches were often more elaborate before the Reformation, with highly decorated sacrament houses, like the ones surviving at Deskford and Kinkell. The carvings at Rosslyn Chapel, created in the mid-fifteenth century, elaborately depicting the progression of the seven deadly sins, are considered some of the finest in the Gothic style. Monumental effigies began to appear in churches from the thirteenth century and they were usually fully coloured and gilded. Many were founders and patrons of churches and chapels, including members of the clergy, knights and often their wives. In contrast to England, where the fashion for stone-carved monuments gave way to brass etchings, they continued to be produced until the end of the Medieval period, with the largest group dating from the fifteenth century, including the very elaborate Douglas tombs in the town of Douglas. Sometimes the best continental artists were employed, as for Robert I's elaborate tomb in Dunfermline Abbey, which was made in his lifetime by the Parisian sculptor Thomas of Chartres, but of which only fragments now survive. The greatest group of surviving sculpture from this period are from the West Highlands, beginning in the fourteenth century on Iona under the patronage of the Lordship of the Isles and continuing until the Reformation. Common motifs were ships, swords, harps and Romanesque vine leaf tracery with Celtic elements.
### Decorative arts
Survivals from late Medieval church fittings and objects in Scotland are exceptionally rare even compared to those from comparable areas like England or Norway, probably because of the thoroughness of their destruction in the Scottish Reformation. The Scottish elite and church now participated in a culture stretching across Europe, and many objects that do survive are imported, such as Limoges enamels. It is often difficult to decide the country of creation of others, as work in international styles was produced in Scotland, along with pieces retaining more distinctive local styles.
Two secular small chests with carved whalebone panels and metal fittings illustrate some aspects of the Scottish arts. The Eglington and Fife Caskets are very similar and were probably made by the same workshop around 1500, as boxes for valuables such as jewellery or documents. The overall form of the caskets follows French examples, and the locks and metal bands are decorated in Gothic style with "simple decorations of fleurons and debased egg and dart" while the whalebone panels are carved in relief with a late form of Insular interwoven strapwork characteristic of late Medieval West Scotland.
Key examples of native craftsmanship on items include the Bute mazer, the earliest surviving drinking cup of its type, made of maple-wood and with elaborate silver-gilt ornamentation, dated to around 1320. The Savernake Horn was probably made for the earl of Moray in the fourteenth century and looted by the English in the mid-sixteenth century. A few significant reliquaries survive from West Scotland, examples of the habit of the Celtic church of treating the possessions rather than the bones of saints as relics. As in Irish examples these were partly reworked and elaborated at intervals over a long period. These are St Fillan's Crozier and its "Coigreach" or reliquary, between them with elements from each century from the eleventh to the fifteenth, the Guthrie Bell Shrine, Iona, twelfth to fifteenth century, and the Kilmichael Glassary Bell Shrine, Argyll, mid-twelfth century. The Skye Chess piece is a single elaborate piece in carved walrus ivory, with two warriors carrying heraldic shields in a framework of openwork vegetation. It is thought to be Scottish, of the mid-thirteenth century, with aspects similar to both English and Norwegian pieces.
One of the largest groups of surviving works of art are the seal matrices that appear to have entered Scottish usage with feudalism in the reign of David I, beginning at the royal court and among his Anglo-Norman vassals and then by about 1250 they began to spread to the Gaelicised areas of the country. They would be made compulsory for barons of the king in a statute of 1401 and seal matrices show very high standards of skill and artistry. Examples of items that were probably the work of continental artists include the delicate hanging lamp in St. John's Kirk in Perth, the vestments and hangings in Holyrood and the Medieval maces of the Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow.
### Illumination and painting
Manuscript illumination continued into the late Middle Ages, moving from elaborate gospels to charters, like that confirming the rights of Kelso Abbey from 1159. Very little painting from Scottish churches survives. There is only one surviving Doom painting in Scotland, at Guthrie near Arbroath, which may have been painted by the same artist as the elaborate crucifixion and other paintings at Foulis Easter, eighteen miles away. As in England, the monarchy may have had model portraits of royalty used for copies and reproductions, but the versions of native royal portraits that survive are generally crude by continental standards. Much more impressive are the works or artists imported from the continent, particularly the Netherlands, generally considered the centre of painting in the Northern Renaissance. The products of these connections included a fine portrait of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen (1488–1514); the images of St Catherine and St John brought to Dunkeld; Hugo van Der Goes's altarpiece for the Trinity College Church in Edinburgh, commissioned by James III, and the work after which the Flemish Master of James IV of Scotland is named. There are also a relatively large number of elaborate devotional books from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, usually produced in the Low Countries and France for Scottish patrons, including the prayer book commissioned by Robert Blackadder, Bishop of Glasgow, between 1484 and 1492 and the Flemish illustrated book of hours, known as the Hours of James IV of Scotland, given by James IV to Margaret Tudor and described as "perhaps the finest medieval manuscript to have been commissioned for Scottish use".
## See also
- Architecture of Scotland
- Medieval art
|
2,120,273 |
Pacific Mall
| 1,164,150,141 |
Shopping centre in Markham, Canada
|
[
"Buildings and structures in Markham, Ontario",
"Chinese-Canadian culture in Ontario",
"Ethnic shopping centers",
"Shopping malls in the Regional Municipality of York",
"Tourist attractions in Markham, Ontario"
] |
Pacific Mall is an Asian shopping mall in Markham, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest indoor Asian shopping mall in North America and has been reported as the largest Asian shopping mall in the Western world. The mall is located on the northeast corner of Steeles Avenue and Kennedy Road, along the city limits with Toronto. Opened in the mid-1990s amid a period of significant Chinese immigration to Canada, the mall operates as a condominium corporation with 450 individual units. The mall also includes Heritage Town, a food court and market that functions as a notable tourist destination in the Greater Toronto Area.
The Remington Centre, a proposed shopping mall first announced in 2005, would occupy the site formerly held by Market Village, a now-defunct mall adjacent to Pacific Mall. The expansion would see the construction of a structure that would bring the combined size of the malls to 1,000,000 square feet (90,000 m<sup>2</sup>), though the project has faced numerous delays. Pacific Mall is further noted as a location for the sale of counterfeit goods; stores in Pacific Mall have been raided multiple times by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and in 2018 the mall was listed as a notorious market by the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
## History
### Prior use
Pacific Mall is built on the site formerly occupied by Cullen Country Barns, a farm-themed complex opened in 1983 that housed shops, a theatre, and restaurants. The complex was established by Len Cullen, the founder of Cullen Gardens and Miniature Village in Whitby, Ontario, and consisted of two barn wings with gambrel roofs and a concrete silo. None were historic structures dating back to the time when the site was a working farm, but they were acquired by Cullen and moved from Pickering, Ontario, to Markham in the 1970s. A fire damaged part of the complex in 1988, and it was demolished in 1994; some portions of the former Market Village, a shopping complex adjacent to Pacific Mall, mimicked the Cullen complex.
### Development
Planning for Pacific Mall began in the late 1980s amid the formation of Chinese immigrant communities in suburban Toronto and a flourishing of ethnic malls in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Scarborough. The mall was planned and constructed amid the so-called "Hong Kong Tide" of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw an increase in immigration to Canada by highly educated, skilled migrants from Hong Kong who were frequently wealthy entrepreneurs and investors. This immigration was influenced by a range of factors, notably the handover of Hong Kong, and new Canadian open-door immigration policies that recruited based on merit rather than national origin. The passage of the Investment Canada Act, which sought to direct business migrants and foreign capital into Canada, is also noted as a factor. Of additional note is the implementation of the Canadian Immigrant Investor Program (CANIIP), which granted landed immigrant status to individuals with least CAD\$500,000 in wealth who agreed to invest \$250,000 in Canadian business ventures. As a result of this immigration, Markham's ethnic Chinese population rose 15 percent in 1995, resulting in nearly 30 percent of Markham's population being of Chinese origin; by 1999, there would be a total of 58 Asian shopping malls in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Scarborough.
A large-scale, indoor Asian mall to be built on the former site of Cullen Country Barns was formally proposed in 1993 by Torgan Group, an Israeli-Canadian development company, with the Fairchild Group as a partner. The mall would operate as a condominium corporation, where shop units are owned by individuals who determine the store's inventory and business hours, and can sell the unit at will. The developers of Pacific Mall claimed they were the first mall in North America to use this business model, though Pacific Mall was preceded by the condominium mall Chinatown Centre in West Chinatown, Toronto, which opened in 1989.
The mall's construction was opposed by some long-term residents of Markham, and was delayed numerous times from 1993 to 1996. Concerns were raised by Markham City Council over the impact the mall would have parking and traffic volume, the style of the building that would replace Cullen Country Barns, and challenges in dealing with multiple owners in a condo-style mall. The Council commissioned an independent study on retail condominiums by John Winter and Associates, which concluded that retail condos are a positive means of diversifying developments. Pacific Mall's application underwent a nine-month review, with a building permit granted in May 1995.
Historian Erica Allen-Kim argues that Pacific Mall was "a weathervane for Markham's ongoing transformation from a rural township to an ethnoburb." Then-deputy mayor of Markham Carole Bell received criticism for her statement that "everything's going Chinese" in response to the proliferation of ethnic malls. She attempted to implement by-laws that would have forbid the rezoning of industrial areas for retail condominiums and made English-language signs mandatory on all structures. Then-mayor of Markham Don Cousens formed an advisory council of eleven Markham residents and three members of council to "address associated multicultural issues affecting planning decisions."
### Opening and continued operation
Sources report Pacific Mall as opening either in 1996 or 1997. Its Cantonese name, "太古廣場" (Tai Gu Gwong Cheung), is derived from Pacific Place in Hong Kong. At the time of its opening, Pacific Mall was the only mall of any kind of its scale in Scarborough and Markham. The mall's 715 retail condos were presold by 1993 for an average of \$200 per square foot, and were priced from \$59,800 to \$249,800. A majority of condo buyers originated from Hong Kong, where Pacific Mall units were advertised extensively; many investors purchased units in Pacific Mall in order to fulfill the \$250,000 investment requirement of CANIIP.
After business at the mall was initially slow, half of the unused second floor (which is owned and operated by Torgan Group, rather than condo leasees) was renovated in 1999 into Heritage Town, a food court and market that contains approximately 100 vendors. Aimed at attracting tourists and non-Chinese customers, Torgan Group commissioned artists and sculptors in China to make custom decorations for Heritage Town, including a large bas-relief of a dragon, 300 lanterns, an emperor's chair, a wood-work bridge, and terracotta soldiers. Heritage Town was successful in attracting additional business, prompting the mall to seek and be awarded designation as a Canadian Tourist Attraction. As such, Pacific Mall is exempt from the Retail Business Holiday Act and is open year-round, including statutory holidays.
Today, Pacific Mall remains a major destination for tourism in Canada, and promotes itself through pamphlets at airports and tourist information centers in major North American cities. As demographics of Chinese migrants to Canada shifted in 2010s, and immigrants from mainland China form a greater proportion of Chinese immigrants, many businesses at Pacific Mall have opted to hire salespeople fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Though stores in the mall are noted for having relatively high turnover, many stores continue to be operated by their initial Hong Kong-originating owners.
## Features
### Stores
Pacific Mall is the largest indoor Asian shopping mall in North America and has been reported as the largest Asian shopping mall in the Western world. The mall is surrounded by an existing shopping plaza, including remnants of the former Market Village, which collectively encompass over 500 stores and 1,500 indoor and outdoor parking spaces. Stores range in size from 300 to 800 square feet (28 to 74 m<sup>2</sup>) and sell a wide variety of goods, including traditional Chinese clothing, contemporary fashion, jewelry, herbal medicine, tea, electronics, mobile phones, ornaments, food, and printed material such as Chinese books, magazines and newspapers. A "diminishing number" of stores sell both legitimate and pirated CDs and DVDs; the decline in the sale of these goods can be attributed to regular police raids and the growing ubiquity of this material online.
As a condominium corporation, store owners elect representatives to form a management board, which oversees the operation of the mall.
### Design
Pacific Mall was designed by Wallman Clewes Bergman Architects, who built the structure in a combination of red brick, steel beams, and glass. The firm sought to create a "fabulous transparent building as different as possible from its surrounding," but rather than emulate Chinese architecture, sought to create a building that complimented Markham's suburban architecture. The mall's market-style interior with exposed roof trusses, pipes, and roof decks is described as "good representation of shed typology that is characterized by mass production, cost efficiency, and fast construction."
The mall has two floors and a basement level that leads to an underground parking lot. The hallways of the main floor are arranged in a grid, with each hallway given a street name: hallways running north–south are named after streets in Hong Kong, such as Hennessy Avenue, Hollywood Avenue, Pacific Avenue, Queen's Avenue, and Nathan Avenue, while hallways running east–west are numerical with numbers associated with affluence and luck in Cantonese, such as 218th Street and 188th Street. The centre of the mall contains an indoor courtyard with a cathedral dome ceiling and stage that hosts cultural programs and trade fairs. The second floor contains a food court, entertainment centre, medical offices, additional shops, and Heritage Town.
### Future expansion
On June 15, 2005, Pacific Mall and Market Village announced a 400,000-square-foot (37,000-square-metre) expansion that would see the construction of additional retail space, a luxury hotel, condominiums, and a multi-level parking structure that would bring the combined size of the malls to 1,000,000 square feet (90,000 m<sup>2</sup>). In 2009, the developers announced they would instead demolish Market Village and construct a new adjoining mall, the Remington Centre. The project has faced numerous delays; while the expansion plan was endorsed by Markham City Council in 2011, it requires additional approvals from the municipal government of Toronto and a majority of the ownership of Pacific Mall, 40 percent of which is composed of individual retailers.
## Controversies
### Counterfeit merchandise
Pacific Mall is noted for its sale of counterfeit and pirated goods, including video games, movies, music, electronic devices, cosmetics, apparel, and fragrances. In January 2018, the mall was listed as a notorious market by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which noted that vendors in Pacific Mall “operate largely with impunity” despite requests for assistance from law enforcement. Pacific Mall management responded that they were "deeply disturbed" by the designation, and stated that they would give warnings to vendors who sold illicit goods.
The mall has been raided multiple times by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). On May 5, 2005, the RCMP seized over \$800,000 worth of counterfeit goods, including 30,000 DVDs and 3,000 video games. On July 13, 2006, over 1,000 copies of pirated video game software were seized. On May 6, 2009, over 49,000 DVDs, 217 DVD burners, and over 100,000 blank DVDs were seized; four individuals were charged with multiple counts under the Copyright Act. On December 3, 2012, over \$3 million worth of counterfeit goods were seized from Pacific Mall as a part of "Project Consumer Safety." On June 27, 2018, seven search warrants were executed for stores in Pacific Mall, resulting in the seizure of clothing, handbags, and cell phone accessories; eight individuals were charged with knowingly or recklessly making false representation to the public and selling or distributing goods in association with a trademark on May 28, 2019 as a result of the seizures and subsequent police investigation.
In March 2009, the RCMP teamed with the York Regional Police and commenced uniformed foot patrols in shopping malls located in south Markham, including Pacific Mall, in an effort to curb the sale of counterfeit items.
### Traffic congestion
Pacific Mall is a major contributor to traffic congestion in southern Markham. The surrounding road infrastructure, which was built only to accommodate Market Village, is insufficient in accommodating the large volume of vehicle traffic that the mall receives. Pacific Mall also suffers from a parking shortage; though the mall contains an underground garage facility, no additional parking has been added since the mall's opening.
### February 2009 shooting
On February 20, 2009, Kit Chen "Daniel" Cheong, 26, was shot and killed at the XSITE Cell Phones store in Pacific Mall. The primary suspect in the case was identified as Bryan Valentine Gardner from security camera footage; Gardner was arrested in London, Ontario, on September 2, 2010, 18 months after the incident. On August 28, 2013, Gardner was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2026.
## Transportation access
Pacific Mall is located at the corner of Steeles Avenue and Kennedy Road in Markham, along the city limits with Toronto. It is served by both the Toronto Transit Commission (routes 43 Kennedy and 53 Steeles East) and York Region Transit (Route 8 Kennedy) buses, and is located within walking distance of the Milliken GO Station, which connects to the Stouffville line. The two street entrances to the mall are located at Redlea Avenue and Clayton Drive.
## See also
- Splendid China Mall
- Chinese Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area
|
108,122 |
New Jersey Route 55
| 1,147,415,885 |
State highway in southern, New Jersey, US
|
[
"Freeways in the United States",
"Limited-access roads in New Jersey",
"State highways in New Jersey",
"Transportation in Cumberland County, New Jersey",
"Transportation in Gloucester County, New Jersey"
] |
Route 55 is a state highway in the southern part of the U.S. state of New Jersey that is built to freeway standards. Also known as the Veterans Memorial Highway, it runs 40.54 miles (65.24 km) from an intersection with Route 47 in Port Elizabeth north to an interchange with Route 42 in Gloucester County. The Route 55 freeway serves as a main road through Cumberland and Gloucester counties, serving Millville, Vineland, and Glassboro. It is used as a commuter route north to Philadelphia and, along with Route 47, as a route from the Delaware Valley to the Jersey Shore resorts in Cape May County. Route 55 has a posted speed limit of 65 miles per hour (105 km/h) for most of its length.
What is now Route 55 was originally proposed in the 1950s as a toll road called the Cape May Expressway that was to run from the Walt Whitman Bridge to Cape May. In 1962, the New Jersey Expressway Authority was created to build the Cape May Expressway and the Atlantic City Expressway. However, by 1965, the road to Cape May was turned over to the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) and designated as Route 55, which was to run from Westville to Cape May Court House. The first portion of the route opened around Millville in 1969 while the section bypassing Vineland was completed in the 1970s. Route 55 was completed north to Deptford in 1989.
Meanwhile, the portion between Route 47 in Port Elizabeth and the Garden State Parkway in Middle Township was canceled in 1975 due to the impact the highway would have on the surrounding environment.
## Route description
### Cumberland and Salem counties
Route 55 begins at a signalized intersection with Route 47 in the Port Elizabeth section of Maurice River Township, Cumberland County, heading to the north as a two-lane undivided road through wooded areas. At the southern terminus, the road continues south as part of Route 47. A short distance after beginning, the road widens into a four-lane divided freeway and comes to a southbound exit and northbound entrance with Schooner Landing Road. Past this interchange, Route 55 enters Millville and crosses over the Manantico Creek as it heads into built-up areas. The freeway continues north to an interchange with Route 49.
Past the Route 49 interchange, Route 55 continues through Millville, passing over County Route 552 Spur (CR 552 Spur). The route passes to the east of WheatonArts, which is also home to the Creative Glass Center of America, before turning northwest and crossing into Vineland, where it interchanges with CR 555.
The freeway turns to the west past the CR 555 interchange and crosses over Conrail Shared Assets Operations' Vineland Secondary railroad line before entering Millville again. At this point, the route comes to a modified cloverleaf interchange with Route 47 adjacent to the Cumberland Mall. From Route 47, the freeway enters forested areas again and makes a turn to the north, crossing back into Vineland. In Vineland, it interchanges with CR 552 near Inspira Medical Center Vineland. This exit also serves the Rowan College of South Jersey Cumberland Campus to the east.
Route 55 continues between rural areas near the Maurice River to the west and development to the east, coming to a cloverleaf interchange with Route 56. Past this interchange, the route passes over a Winchester and Western Railroad line before crossing over CR 540. Farther north, a modified cloverleaf interchange serves CR 674 (Garden Road), which provides access to the northern part of Vineland. Past the Garden Road interchange, Route 55 continues through farmland and woodland, passing to the east of Rudys Airport. The freeway crosses Scotland Run and briefly runs through Pittsgrove Township in Salem County.
### Gloucester County
Route 55 continues northwest into Franklin Township, Gloucester County, and reaches a cloverleaf interchange with U.S. Route 40 (US 40). Past this interchange, the freeway heads north, crossing over CR 538. Route 55 comes to a diamond interchange with Little Mill Road before entering Clayton and turning to the west. A short distance later, Route 55 continues into Elk Township and comes to an interchange with CR 553.
The route continues north into Glassboro, where it has an interchange with CR 641. Past this interchange, Route 55 crosses into Harrison Township and meets US 322 and CR 536 at a cloverleaf interchange near Inspira Medical Center Mullica Hill. US 322 heads east into Glassboro and serves Rowan University.
Past the US 322 interchange, the freeway continues through agricultural areas and enters Mantua Township, where it turns northeast and crosses under CR 553 Alternate. Route 55 passes under Conrail Shared Assets Operations' Vineland Secondary railroad line before intersecting CR 553 again at a modified cloverleaf interchange. This interchange provides access to The Broadway Theatre of Pitman.
Past CR 553, the route turns north again and passes near more suburban surroundings, briefly entering Washington Township before crossing into Deptford Township. In Deptford Township, Route 55 comes to a cloverleaf interchange with Route 47. Northbound Route 47 heads toward the Rowan College of South Jersey Gloucester Campus in Sewell. It crosses CR 534 before coming to a trumpet interchange with Deptford Center Road that provides access to CR 621 and the Deptford Mall. Past this interchange, Route 55 passes under CR 544 and CR 621 before merging onto Route 42 and coming to an end.
## History
Following the completion of the Walt Whitman Bridge in the 1950s, two controlled-access toll roads were proposed to connect the bridge to Atlantic City and to Cape May. In 1962, the New Jersey Expressway Authority Act was signed into law. This act created the New Jersey Expressway Authority, which was to manage both the Atlantic City and Cape May expressways.
While the Atlantic City Expressway was completed by the authority in 1965, the Cape May Expressway was turned over to the state about this time. The Cape May Expressway was designated Route 55 and legislated to run from US 130 in Westville to US 9 near Cape May Court House. This proposed freeway was projected to cost \$90 million (equivalent to \$ in 2023) and be completed in 1975.
In 1969, the first segment of Route 55 opened between Maurice River Township and the Vineland-Millville border, connecting to Route 47 at both ends. In the 1970s, the planned northern terminus of Route 55 was moved to Route 42 in Deptford. The portion of Route 55 between Route 47 in Millville and US 40 in Franklin Township was completed in the mid-1970s while the portion between US 40 and Route 42 was completed in October 1989. The Route 55 freeway has been instrumental in bringing economic development to southern New Jersey. The most common use of the highway is as a commuting route northward to Philadelphia. Following its completion, residential development in the southern part of Gloucester County has increased.
While the freeway was under construction in 1983, it was discovered that it ran through Native American burial grounds in Deptford. This revelation led to unsuccessful lawsuits to cease construction of the route. After the lawsuits, a couple of incidents happened to construction workers, including a construction worker being run over by an asphalt truck, another being blown off a bridge by strong winds, and a van carrying five construction workers randomly erupting into flames.
Meanwhile, the portion of freeway south of Route 47 in Maurice River Township was not yet built. In 1972, NJDOT wanted to provide adequate access to the Cape May Peninsula by extending the freeway southeast from the current terminus to the Garden State Parkway in Middle Township. NJDOT conducted an environmental study on this proposal in 1975. The route was projected to cost \$155 million (equivalent to \$ in 2023) and be finished by 1995. Plans resurfaced for a southern extension in 1993 when a feasibility study was conducted to see if the extension of Route 55 could be built. This study, which estimated the extension would cost between \$423 million and \$483 million (equivalent to \$ and \$ in 2023), concluded that the road should not be built because it crossed too many wetlands.
The Route 55 freeway, like many other highways in New Jersey, once had solar-powered emergency call boxes every mile (about 1.6 km); the use of the call boxes became limited due to the increasing popularity of cell phones. To save on maintenance costs, NJDOT removed these call boxes in 2005.
Despite the fact that the southern extension was held up for decades, it was revisited due to the disturbing images of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005 in the Gulf states. Route 55 could have been extended in order to provide a proper evacuation route for Cape May Peninsula and surrounding area. In addition, traffic jams along Route 47 during the summer also led to a possible revival of the proposal. There were efforts and studies to consider finishing the remaining 20 miles (32 km) of the missing freeway.
In 2009, State Senator Jeff Van Drew introduced a plan for an extension of Route 55 into Cape May County where the South Jersey Transportation Authority would build the road. In order to reduce the impact on the environment, the freeway would have been elevated. The extension of Route 55 would have been tolled. This effort followed two years of failed attempts for a feasibility study to relieve traffic on Route 47.
However, all of these efforts faced considerable environmental opposition, which has been successful in blocking these plans, which were estimated to cost as much as \$2 billion.
## Public transportation
In 1975, the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) proposed that a Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) rail line be added along the median of Route 55 between Deptford and Glassboro; however, plans were canceled. In the 2000s, another proposal resurfaced to add a PATCO line along the Route 55 corridor. The alternative called for park and ride lots to be constructed along the Route 55 corridor, providing access to the line. Phase I would have run to Glassboro (Rowan University) and Phase II would have extended down to the Millville area and service the Cumberland Mall area.
New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine and the DRPA announced a comprehensive transportation plan for South Jersey on May 12, 2009. This plan would introduce express bus service along the Route 55 freeway and the adjacent Route 42 freeway. It would also include a diesel light rail line called the Glassboro–Camden Line between Camden and Glassboro via Woodbury over an existing railroad right-of-way (as opposed to the expanded PATCO line via Route 55), improvements to NJ Transit's Atlantic City Line, and enhanced connections to the Atlantic City International Airport.
## Exit list
Exit numbers are based on the originally planned terminus of Route 55 in Cape May County, a distance of approximately 20 miles (32 km).
## See also
|
73,294,263 |
Polttoainehankinta
| 1,172,686,509 |
Finnish 1952 defence plan
|
[
"1952 establishments",
"Cold War military history of Finland",
"Military plans"
] |
Polttoainehankinta (lit. 'Fuel Procurement') was a secret Finnish Defence Forces operations order approved on 13 June 1952. It is notable as the first Finnish operations order following the end of World War II. It described on a high level the Finnish response to an attack from northern Norway by Western Powers, potentially in conjunction with naval attacks from the Baltic Sea. A Soviet attack was not officially considered a possibility due to the Finno-Soviet Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance of 1948.
The plan divided Finland into four areas of responsibility that were expected to conduct operations independently if they lost contact with the Finnish High Command. Troops from areas of responsibilities not under active combat, together with strategic reserves of the High Command, would be used to counter-attack any enemy forces that threatened to penetrate out of other areas of responsibility.
The plan was criticized for being unrealistic in terms of the tasks expected of the Finnish Air Force, having an overtly complex chain of command, and being too slow to implement in the context of the threat scenarios. In addition, the high level of secrecy prevented key civilian leaders from being contacted before mobilization. Polttoainehankinta was replaced with operations plan Valpuri in 1958, following the Soviet return of the Porkkala peninsula in 1956.
## Historical background
From Finland's independence in 1917 to World War II, the Finnish Defence Forces were organized around the singular task of defeating an attack by the Soviet Union on the Karelian Isthmus. In the case of an attack, the peace-time army would fight a delaying action while the full wartime army was mobilized. After mobilization, the army would continue to delay Soviet forces until international aid could be organized. The only exception to this focus on the Soviet Union was a short-lived 1919–1921 defensive plan aimed at Sweden caused by the Åland Islands dispute. These plans were abandoned following a League of Nations decision that the islands belonged to Finland.
Finnish participation in World War II is thought of as consisting of three distinct phases of military action. The 1939–1940 Winter War began on 30 November 1939 when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, ending in Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. Following several months of peace, Finland launched the Continuation War, the Finnish component of Operation Barbarossa, by attacking the Soviet Union alongside Germany. As part of the Finno-German cooperation, German forces entered Finland in early June, launching Operation Silver Fox from northern Norway and Finnish Lapland on 22 June. Finnish forces crossed the Finno-Soviet border during the night of 9–10 July 1941. Finland sought to exit the war in 1944, following the Soviet Vyborg–Petrozavodsk offensive. Hostilities between Finnish and Soviet forces ended on 19 September 1944, but German operations in northern Finland continued. As part of the Moscow Armistice, Finns were required to expel remaining German forces from Finland. This led to the Finno-German Lapland War, where a demobilizing Finnish Army attacked the German forces remaining in the country. The last German forces left Finnish soil by 27 April 1945. This practically ended hostilities, but no official treaty stating this was ever signed.
Following the end of the Finno-Soviet hostilities, the principally Soviet Allied Control Commission entered Finland. The principally Soviet commission's role was to observe and ensure that Finland abided by the armistice agreement. As such, its members complete access to any and all information and locations the commission deemed necessary for their work. Finland also leased Porkkala to the Soviet Union. The Porkkala peninsula, located only 30 kilometres (20 mi) west of the Finnish capital of Helsinki, became a Soviet naval base, severely limiting the Finnish ability to defend their capital against a potential Soviet attack. Finland also agreed to demilitarize the Åland islands and reduce the Finnish Defence Forces to a size of 37,000 men.
The subsequent Paris Peace Treaty placed restrictions on Finnish armaments. The treaty banned motor torpedo boats, submarines, bombers, guided missiles and nuclear weapons and limited the number of naval vessels and aircraft allowed. The maximum size of Finnish military forces was modified to 41,900 including border guards. According to Finnish military historians Tynkkynen and Jouko, the most problematic aspect of the treaty was a requirement for Finland to forfeit or destroy all armaments (including e.g. small arms) beyond those needed by the 41,900 sized defence forces: doing so would have effectively preventing a larger Finnish mobilization. Disagreements between Soviet Union and the United Kingdom on what, exactly, was to be done to the extraneous armaments allowed Finland to simply not act on this latter requirement.
In 1948, Finland signed the Finno-Soviet Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, also known as the FMCA treaty. The treaty alleviated some of the worst Finnish fears about the intentions of the Soviet leadership and a potential occupation: while it contained a requirement for Finland to resist any outside invasion of Finnish soil by "Germany or its allies", it explicitly forbade the Soviet Union from unilaterally deciding that Soviet military assistance was necessary. Another significant development in vicinity of Finland was the joining of Norway into NATO in 1949.
## Planning and assumptions
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, in late 1945, Finnish Defence Forces produced rough plans for mobilization. According to these plans, each military district would first mobilize a battalion-sized formation using cached weapons. These formations would then be expanded to up to a total of 12 brigade-sized formations in a second stage of mobilization. A following third stage of mobilization would then bring the army to its full strength using the post-Winter War procedures. The size of the army had been 15 divisions at the end of the Continuation War.
Planning activities were, however, stopped in January 1946 to "avoid accusations of provocation". This ban on planning activities resulted from the Allied Control Commission hearing that the Finns were refreshing their mobilization plans based on the post-Winter War procedures, while the armistice agreement required Finland to adopt the pre-Winter War plans. The Allied Control Commision left Finland in 1947. Soon after, the production of military plans resumed on 13 March 1948 with the permission of President J. K. Paasikivi.
The planning of the operations orders began in 1950. The first plans were produced for an "auxiliary complement" (täydennyskokoonpano) of a Finnish Army consisting of 41,900 men, since that was the maximum size of the Finnish Army as approved by the Paris Peace Treaty. In this configuration, the forces would enhance border control, secure important military and civilian targets, and prepare to defend the areas assigned to them. The plans also called for Finnish forces to enter the demilitarized Åland, and the Finnish Navy to lay naval mines.
Planning continued in 1951 based on three threat scenarios or models produced by the Operations Department of the Finnish High Command. Because of the FMCA treaty, these threat models officially viewed the threat on Finland as coming strictly from the west.
Scenario A concerned an attack via northern Norway, with the attacker having no access to Swedish territory. It was also assumed that the Danish straits would not be open for the attacker, preventing a naval landing. It was assumed that the attacker was seeking to gain access to airports to extend their reach further into the Soviet Union, and to prevent the Soviet Union from using its warm-water ports. Scenario B modified scenario A by assuming the Danish straits would remain open to the attacker, and that the enemy would also seek to capture Åland and the Hanko Peninsula, thus denying most of the Baltic from the Soviet Navy. Scenario C further extended the previous scenarios by assuming Sweden had joined the invading powers or at least given them access to Swedish areas. In the latter scenarios, the naval invasion in south-western Finland would support a larger attack on the Soviet heartland. Later modifications to the scenarios assumed that, rather than conducting a full naval invasion, the enemy would conduct limited warfare and raids seeking to force Soviet forces to be tied down in Finland.
Irrespective of the exact formulations of the scenarios, the fact that all scenarios included an attack on Northern Finland was a significant change from Finnish pre-World War II defence plans, which treated the northern parts of the country as militarily insignificant. It was assumed that the Northern Finland component of the invasion would consists of at most 6 or 7 divisions, which would attack along two routes. One force would attack along the route Enontekiö – Muonio – Tornio – Kittilä – Rovaniemi, while another force would attack from the direct north along the route Ivalo – Sodankylä – Rovaniemi – Kemijärvi.
Of the three threat scenarios, option C was considered the most dangerous and formed the basis for defence planning. The planning proceeded based on a division of Finland into five areas of responsibility, with each area's commander being responsible for the local planning and preparations. These were quickly reduced to four by merging the Uusimaa Area of Responsibility and the Southwestern Area of Responsibility into a Southern Area of Responsibility. In an event where contact with higher command was lost, the areas would continue operations on their own.
Continued planning in 1951 expanded the plans for two larger configurations of the Finnish Defence Force. The first of these was a "protective forces" (suojajoukot) or "fast deployment forces" configuration of 320,000 men, intended for defence of Finnish borders and the safeguarding of Finnish neutrality. This was followed by a full wartime composition of over 500,000 men.
## Overview
Polttoainehankinta was approved on 13 June 1952 as the first complete post-war operations order of the Finnish Army. Sources describe the operations order as both number 8 and number 10. The operations order was kept highly secret and the planning was masked as various training activities. Only 15 copies of the operations order were produced, of which only the three held at the General Headquarters were complete. For example, commanders of military districts were not – at least initially – allowed copies of the order, and instead were limited to reviewing the content in person and only for those parts relevant to their own planning. According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, it would have been normal that of the staff of an infantry brigade, only the commander would have been even aware of the brigade's wartime mission, and that neither the Finnish Ministry of Defence nor even the president of the republic were automatically notified about the plans.
The operations order assumed that fighting could not be contained to border regions in the same way as had been possible in World War II. Thus, all national resources would be required to halt an enemy attack. This was reflected in the division of the country to four areas of responsibility. In doing so, it was the first operations order to embrace the concept of "territorial defence".
The Northern Area of Responsibility would use limited forces in the immediate border regions, with a priority of preventing a penetration to the Jäniskoski hydroelectric station or to the nickel mines in Pechengsky. Most forces would be positioned in southern Lapland, where they would maintain control of the militarily important infrastructure in the region. As a final defensive zone, they were to prevent enemy forces from penetrating southwards to the Inland Area of Responsibility. This southernmost area was to be the location of either counter-attacks by forces held elsewhere, or of persistent guerilla warfare if the first was not feasible.
The Ostrobothnia Area of Responsibility would protect critical infrastructure (including ports), prevent attacks from Sweden over the sea, and block any attacks that penetrated the Northern Area of Responsibility. If not under attack, the forces of the Ostrobothnia Area of Responsibility would be employed as a strategic reserve.
The Southern Area of Responsibility was to focus its efforts on defending the Finnish archipelago and the immediate coastal regions using primarily coastal artillery and a mobile reserve. Any landings were to be repulsed immediately at the coast, using counter-attacks by strategic reserves if necessary. It was also responsible for securing Åland, first with a single brigade and then with a two-brigade corps.
The Inland Area of Responsibility was considered a somewhat safer area, and thus held important defence industry such as ammunition plants and supply depots, as well as units that were to be used as the strategic reserve for counter-attacks. It was tasked with repulsing any airborne invasions in its area, and reacting to any enemy actions that threatened to penetrate out of the other areas of responsibility. As a more focused task, it was also to ensure the land connection to the Soviet base in Porkkala.
In total, the forces available to the various areas of responsibility at the different stages of mobilization were as follows:
According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, the Finnish Army had sufficient pools of equipment in 1952 to arm the fast deployment complement "tolerably well". Ammunition shortages were, however, expected and "gaping deficiencies" remained in some armaments. For example, a 1956 report concluded that field guns and mortars only had between 10 and 20 percent of the ammunition they were expected to require for a six month campaign.
### Role of the Finnish Air Force
Each area of responsibility was associated with a geographically equivalent flight district, each of which was allocated one air brigade. The air force was defined as having four fighter squadrons and one transport squadron in the auxiliary configuration. If a broader mobilization was needed, it would skip the fast deployment configuration and go directly to a full wartime strength of 14 fighter squadrons supported by a transport squadron, a reconnaissance squadron and two night fighter squadrons. The concentration of these assets was to be dependent on whether Sweden was part of the conflict, but six fighter squadrons were assigned to the Northern Area of Responsibility in any scenario.
Anti-aircraft artillery units were to protect priority targets around the country, with the units of the Inner Area of Responsibility acting as reserve for the southern regions. In total, the anti-aircraft artillery forces not assigned as organic components of other units consisted of 57 heavy batteries, 85 light batteries, 10 battalions, and a small number of railway-mounted units. These would be commanded by 15 regimental command posts, 21 heavy artillery battalion command posts and 28 artillery battalion command posts.
The air force was to take a defensive stance, preventing incursions into the Finnish airspace with the help of a country-spanning air surveillance and a radar network. In this defensive role, it would prevent enemy incursions and protect both civilian targets and the logistics network. According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, the plans for air defence were seen as unrealistic even at the time, with the "actual combat effectiveness" of the air force being "regarded as virtual nil" because the available equipment was insufficient. At the time, the Air Force was equipped with a fleet based on the Messerschmitt Bf 109, and did not possess any jet aircraft.
### Role of Finnish Navy
Similar to the air force, the Finnish Navy was to largely skip a medium level of mobilization. In the event of mobilizing beyond the auxiliary component, the auxiliary component size navy would form a "general force" and the freshly mobilized forces would form three maritime districts, namely the Archipelago Maritime District (headquartered in Turku naval base), the Gulf of Bothnia Maritime District (headquartered with the Ostrobothnia Maritime Frontier Guard), and the Gulf of Finland Maritime District (Headquartered in the Helsinki naval base). These districts were known collectively as the "local forces". The most important tasks of the general forces was to secure Åland and the Archipelago Sea.
Defensive operations would involve heavy use of naval mines, deployed flexibly based on the scenario. Coastal artillery was to be employed together with the mines to prevent an enemy incursion into the archipelago area and the capture of ports in southern and southwestern Finland. A key task assigned to the Gulf of Finland Maritime District was to safeguard shipping to and from the Soviet-held Porkkala naval base.
Tynkkynen and Jouko describe the Finnish Navy's situation as "equally desperate" to that of the Finnish Air Force. It was limited to 10,000 tonnes by the Paris Peace Treaty, and was forced to scrap its submarine fleet. Restrictions also mandated that all motor torpedo boats had to be rearmed as gunboats. The navy was forbidden from using non-contact naval mines, thus limiting the effectiveness of its "principal weapon system". Stocks of naval mines were also low, at only half of what was viewed as the minimum requirement.
## Plans against Soviet Union
Tynkkynen and Jouko observe that the threat modeling underlying Polttoainehankinta was "politically appropriate", and that some of the officers working at the Operations Department of the General Headquarters indicated in 2006 interviews that the scenarios were "militarily unrealistic". A 1960 memo by defence officials further acknowledged that a NATO attack from Norway was unlikely, that only the Soviet Union would be able to fully occupy Finland, and that the largest threat in an unexpected crisis was that posed by the Soviet Union. A similar sentiment was expressed by President Paasikivi, who noted in his diary that "[one] must fulfill the requirements of the FCMA treaty while preparing for the Soviet Union breaking the treaty and attempting to enter the country by force."
Tynkkynen and Jouko state that a highly secret set of plans for a Soviet invasion were produced in parallel with the Polttoainehankinta plans. These alternative plans focused on halting a Soviet surprise attack along the coastal roads of south-eastern Finland with river Kymi being the main defensive line. According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, similar parallel plans were made for subsequent operations orders as well. As evidence, they point to fragments remaining of a plan codenamed Matkakertomus (lit. 'Travelogue') that was developed concurrently with Valpuri. A plan entitled "Strategic general plan KALERVO for defence of the realm" was developed concurrently with an operations order accepted in 1966.
Tynkkynen attributes the lack of archival evidence for early post-World War II defensive plans focusing on the Soviet Union to the FCMA treaty, which would have required Finns to display their defensive plans to the Soviet Union upon request. As such, very little east-facing planning was put in writing, and what was written down was only known to a highly limited number of people.
## Western plans and perceptions
A 1948 British threat assessment was concerned about a potential Soviet attack by between one and three divisions through northern Finland towards northern Norway and, potentially, Sweden. Such an attack would support a broader effort to secure the Baltics by capturing the Danish straits. Otherwise Finland was seen as a buffer zone, both in general and for Leningrad in specific.
Further US and UK assessments in the early 1950s found that any Soviet actions in the north would be unlikely except as part of a larger Central European operation. In such a scenario, it was believed the Soviets could deploy some 10 divisions in northern Scandinavia. The majority of these would be focused on attacking Sweden through northern Finland. UK assessments concluded that Finland was likely to allow the Soviet Union access for such attacks on Sweden and Norway, assuming that the requests were indeed limited to northern Finland. In case of requests to access southern Finland, the Finns were expected to oppose any Soviet attempts.
Both Swedish and American estimates were skeptical of the Finns' ability to oppose any Soviet attempt to establish passage to the Swedish border beyond a day or two. Tynkkynen and Jouko observe, however, that these estimates appear to assume the Finns would only mobilize to the lowest Treaty of Paris compliant level. At the same time, US estimates determined that any Soviet attack on Finland would result in guerilla warfare, making an attack on Finland alone not worth the effort.
## Modifications and replacement
Polttoainehankinta had to be updated almost immediately, when many peacetime regiments were merged into brigades to reduce the number of garrisons. These modifications came into effect in July 1953 under the codename Aluetuotanto (lit. 'Area(l) Production'). According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, the most common criticism related to the "complex command structure and slow execution of the system." A mobilization plan that would take weeks or even months to implement was seen as incompatible with a threat analysis which was most concerned with a surprise attack. Also problematic was the very high level of secrecy, where key civilian authorities could not be contacted or briefed before mobilization.
The return of Porkkala in January 1956 launched an effort to completely renew the operations order, and a revised operations order codenamed Valpuri was approved in December 1957. Following the approval of Valpuri, copies of Polttoainehankinta were largely destroyed.
|
43,420,240 |
Sea Mither
| 1,173,554,144 |
Creature in Orcadian folklore
|
[
"Orcadian culture",
"Orkney",
"Scottish coast",
"Scottish folklore",
"Scottish legendary creatures",
"Water spirits"
] |
Sea Mither, or Mither of the Sea, is a mythical being of Orcadian folklore that lives in the sea during summer, when she confines the demonic nuckelavee to the ocean depths. Each spring she battles with her arch-enemy Teran, another spirit of Orcadian legend capable of causing severe winter storms, to gain control of the seas and the weather. Eventually Sea Mither overcomes Teran and sends him to the depths of the ocean, but the effort of keeping him confined there along with her other benevolent labours during the summer exhaust her, until in the autumn Teran takes advantage of her weakness to wrest control from her once again.
Stories of the Sea Mither and Teran are among Orkney's oldest legends, perhaps invented to explain the vagaries of weather and other naturally occurring events. In Shetland, fishermen petition Sea Mither to afford them protection from the Devil.
## Etymology
Mither is defined in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue as the Scots variant of "mother", which may particularly reflect oral Orcadian use. The name of her opponent, Teran, is local Orkney dialect meaning "furious anger", and may be a derivative of tyrren, Norse for "angry".
## Folk beliefs
### Description and common attributes
Sea Mither is a spirit of summer days that quells the turbulent sea waters around the northern isles of Scotland. Shetland islanders, particularly fishermen, seek her protection from the Devil. Control of the seas is maintained by Teran, the spirit of winter, until Sea Mither arrives around the time of the vernal equinox in mid-March. Both spirits are invisible to humans. Teran is her arch-enemy and the pair fight bitterly, often for weeks as she tries to gain control. Their arguments cause gale-force winds and heavy tumultuous seas as she tries to wrest control from him. Teran's screeches are carried by the howling gales as the two spirits try to oust each other. The period of the spring combat between the pair is termed the "Vore tullye" or the "spring struggle". Eventually Sea Mither overcomes Teran, relegating him to the depths of the ocean; inclement summer weather is caused by Teran's attempts to escape.
During summer months the Sea Mither also keeps the demonic nuckelavee creature confined, and undertakes benevolent labours: she empowers aquatic creatures with the ability to reproduce; warms and calms the seas; and instils a softer song-like quality to the gentle summer breeze. According to folklorist and Orkney resident Walter Traill Dennison, during Sea Mither's reign in summer the conditions reported by islanders may have "tempted one to believe that the Orkney archipelago had become the islands of the blessed." But the continual work she undertakes to keep everything calm and the strain of maintaining control over Teran gradually tires her.
As autumn approaches, Teran takes advantage of Sea Mither's exhaustion to break free, and conflict between the two starts again. The power struggles cause the weather to change with darkening skies and howling winds. This time, Teran triumphs in the conflict termed the "Gore vellye". Control of the ocean and weather is returned to Teran and Sea Mither is forced to leave. No details are given as to where she spends the winter, but during the storms caused by Teran the fishermen were consoled that Sea Mither would return refreshed and powerful in the spring, to again oust Teran from his malevolent grip over the seas.
## Origins
Orcadian tales were strongly influenced by Scandinavian mythology with a blending of traditional Celtic stories. Folklorist and writer Ernest Marwick describes the Sea Mither and Teran as "pure personifications of nature." Several ancient myths were based upon the natural elements of the turbulent and ever changing sea surrounding Orkney, but the stories of the two spirits are among the oldest legends on the islands. People had to be able to explain the vagaries of weather and other natural life cycles without the benefit of science; Traill Dennison hypothesises that this is why "the imagination of some half savage" may have formed the foundations of the myth.
|
11,094,733 |
Dougherty Valley High School
| 1,163,073,262 | null |
[
"2007 establishments in California",
"Educational institutions established in 2007",
"High schools in Contra Costa County, California",
"Public high schools in California",
"San Ramon, California"
] |
Dougherty Valley High School (commonly Dougherty, Dougherty Valley, Dougherty Valley High, DVHS, or DV High) is a public high school located in the Windemere development of San Ramon, California, United States. The valley name comes from James Witt Dougherty, a 19th-century landowner and local politician.
It is one of four high schools in the San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD), along with California High School, San Ramon Valley High School, and Monte Vista High School. Constructed by Shapell Industries of California and Windemere Ranch Partners BLC, Dougherty was the first developer-built school in the SRVUSD. The school opened its doors in 2007.
Dougherty's nickname is the Wildcats, and its school colors are navy, Columbia blue, and silver. It is known for its state-of-the-art campus, which features a performing arts center and aquatics center in a joint-use agreement with the city. Dougherty is the top school in the district based on Academic Performance Index. The school is also home to over 200 clubs and many afterschool activities.
## History
### Conception (1988–2006)
Dougherty Valley High School was built by Shapell Industries of California and Windemere Ranch Partners BLC, which were also the two main developers of the Dougherty Valley area in general. Shapell was obligated through a December 1988 agreement with the SRVUSD to "contribute its fair share of the cost of additional high school space needed to serve students generated by the project," with the project mentioned being the construction of 11,000 houses in the area. Dougherty is the first developer-built high school in the SRVUSD, in contrast with the typical method of a developer and the state funding the school district for construction of any necessary schools. The district and developers began further negotiations regarding the school's construction in 2001.
The school's name was chosen from more than 150 suggestions submitted to an online survey, although the name, school colors, and mascot had to be approved by the Board of Education. The school logo was designed in 2006 by Jennifer Wong, at the time a senior at Monte Vista High School, after winning a student logo design contest with 12 other entries.
Wong received \$500 for her design and was honored alongside the contest's runners-up at a school board meeting. Denise Hibbard, who had been an assistant principal at California High School for six years, was chosen as Dougherty's first principal.
### Construction (2005–2007)
An official groundbreaking at the school was held on September 23, 2005, with school board members Nancy Petsuch, Greg Marvel, and San Ramon Mayor H. Abram Wilson in attendance. The construction of the school was divided into two phases. The first phase, which involved site grading, utilities, and paving, commenced in May 2005 and was completed by January 2006; the second phase, which involved constructing buildings, landscaping and creation of ball fields, commenced in February 2006 and was completed by August 2007. In a December 2006 meeting, the San Ramon city council approved the construction of a performing arts center and aquatics center for joint-use between the city and the SRVUSD. Total construction took 16 months, five months less than predicted.
The construction of the school cost approximately \$128 million, and the total cost, including inspections and management, was about \$150 million. The costs of the performing arts center, to which the city contributed \$4 million, and the aquatics center, to which the city contributed \$9.2 million, were expected to exceed revenues by \$400,000 each.
According to city council member Scott Perkins, "Other cities have stand-alone [aquatic] facilities that cost \$35 million. Were getting 90 percent of that use for a quarter of the price." In addition, the city approved the \$4 million construction of an independent study school on Dougherty's campus, to replace the area's older independent study school built in the 1970s. The expenses of construction were shared between Windemere BLC, Shapell, the school district, and the city of San Ramon.
### Inauguration and beyond (2007–present)
The SRVUSD opened both Dougherty and Live Oak Elementary School on August 25, 2007. Dougherty began its inaugural school year on August 27, 2007, becoming the first high school in 34 years to open in the SRVUSD. History teacher James Corcoran noted that working at the first year school was an opportunity to develop its community, saying "You oftentimes will go into a school as a teacher, or even a principal, and it's 'This is the way we do it around here.' It's hard to change that once it's been set." Elaine O'Hanlon, founding president of the Dougherty Parent-Teacher Association, said that parent volunteering would be encouraged at the new school.
In 2009, the SRVUSD was affected by a major statewide school budget crisis. 236 layoff notices were sent to teachers within the district, more than half of whom worked at Dougherty. All permanent teachers were rehired with the help of a \$144 per-parcel tax measure passed in May 2009, expected to raise \$6.7 million yearly.
During the 2009 flu pandemic in the United States, one tenth grade student at Dougherty was known to have been infected with the Influenza A/H1N1 virus; however, closure of the school did not occur, as it was found to be unnecessary and inconvenient. According to Principal Hibbard, "We just have to make sure we educate parents", and the school administration reacted to the outbreak by sending out an email to parents with advice from the Center for Disease Control.
In the summer of 2011, SunPower began construction and installation of solar panels in the school parking lot. The school district used federal funds from low-interest qualified school construction bond as part of government stimulus from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for the project. When completed, the panels will reportedly provide the school with between two-thirds to 80 percent of its energy needs.
## Enrollment
In the 2008-2009 year, 1,001 students were enrolled in Dougherty. Admission is based primarily on the location of students' residency, although birth date documentation and immunization records are also required from new students. The school opened in 2007 with 570 students, fitting the initial prediction of between 450 and 600 students. 95 of these students had transferred to Dougherty from another school in the district, and the majority of the freshmen came from Windemere Ranch Middle School. The school started with only ninth grade freshmen and tenth grade sophomores in 2007, and in each successive school year another grade was added until the standard ninth to twelfth grade range was reached in 2009.
In 2007, Dougherty had 277 female students, representing approximately 48.6% of the total student population, and 293 male students, representing approximately 51.4% of the total student population. Nestled in the culturally integrated Windemere development, Dougherty consists of students from many different backgrounds and is the most diverse in the district. Because of its diversity, San Ramon parks and community services division manager John Skeel said in 2007 that "We know that with the new high school (Dougherty Valley High School) and all the new schools, it's important to stay on top of race issues. With the mixture of middle- and low- income housing in newer neighborhoods, that could be an issue as well." Dougherty's 2007 enrollment included a large population of Asian students, accounting for 41.2% of the student body. 32.5% of the school identified themselves as White, 6.5% as Filipino, 6.1% as African American, 4.9% as Hispanic or Latino, 0.7% as Pacific Islander, 0.2% as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 7.9% with more than one ethnicity or no response.
## Academics
Greatschools.com awarded the school a perfect ten out of ten score, based on a comparison between the school's standardized test scores and those statewide; it is one of the few schools in California to be distinguished as such. In 2009, Dougherty had an Academic Performance Index rank of 905 out of a possible 1000, growing from the 2008 base score of 891. The school was the highest ranked high school in the SRVUSD, the 27th highest high school in the state, and the 744th highest school in the country by API score. In 2011, Dougherty Valley improved by 12 points the previous year with an API score of 921, making it the third highest high school in Contra Costa County as well as the top high school in SRVUSD. Dougherty Valley further improved with an API score of 937 in 2012.
In 2013, the school was awarded a gold medal, and ranked among the top 500 schools in the country by U.S. News.
## School facilities
Dougherty occupies approximately 54 acres (220,000 m<sup>2</sup>) of land and can accommodate up to 2,200 students. Space has been left open to potentially expand the campus in the future, which would allow for 200 more students to attend. Considered to be state-of-the-art, the campus received the award for best of California in the K-12 category for northern California from California Construction magazine.
There are 11 major buildings on campus, including four two-story classroom buildings, a career tech facility, a library, a commons building, an administration building, and two gymnasiums. The school has 80 classrooms. For athletic purposes, the school has a 2,800-seat stadium with lights, a press box, and a track. Also at Dougherty are two baseball fields, two softball fields and eight tennis courts. The campus is home to the area's 11,222 square feet (1,042.6 m<sup>2</sup>) venture independent study school.
Dougherty shares a performance arts center and aquatics center with the city of San Ramon under a joint-use agreement. The performing arts center includes a 600-seat proscenium theater, a 3,500-square-foot (330 m<sup>2</sup>) rehearsal room, a box office, lobby, dressing rooms, rooms for vocal and instrumental music, and city offices. In addition to school productions and concerts, alternative rock band Gin Blossoms, stand-up comedian Caroline Rhea, and others have put on shows at the performing arts center. The purpose of the performing arts center in relation to the school is twofold: students are able "to work with some of the professional artists in mentoring and master class programs", and, according to the school's principal, it allows for "larger presentations that can serve all our schools in the area". The aquatics center features a 50-meter Olympic-size swimming pool and locker rooms.
## Notable alumni
- Austin Larkin, NFL player
## Extracurricular activities
### Science Bowl
The DVHS National Science Bowl team has won multiple regional championships. It has won the regional championship again in 2019 and won the National Science Bowl in 2020.
### Athletics
The Dougherty Valley Athletic Department offers several sports, including cross country, football, golf, tennis, water polo, volleyball, cheerleading, basketball, soccer, wrestling, baseball, lacrosse, softball, swimming, diving, badminton, and track and field. Most of the sports have separate men's and women's teams, and golf and tennis for men occur in a later season than for women. Current coaches include former Major League Baseball player Darren Lewis for the varsity baseball team.
The school was part of the East Bay Athletic League (EBAL) for its first year, but has since moved to the Diablo Foothill Athletic League (DFAL). Dougherty's main rival is considered to be Dublin High School, due to the close proximity of the two schools and past controversy between the schools' respective coaches. In 2016, Dougherty returned as a member of the East Bay Athletic League.
### The Wildcat Tribune
The Wildcat Tribune is Dougherty's official student newspaper. Published every three weeks in print and updated regularly online features sections on news, editorials, opinions, features, entertainment, and sports.
The Tribune was the first print publication to interview Chesley Sullenberger after the pilot's emergency water landing of US Airways Flight 1549, in a February 2009 special edition of the Tribune with an article titled "Heroism & Humility on the Hudson." Sullenberger and his wife, both residents of San Ramon, decided with CBS to grant his first interview to a student journalist, and Dougherty was attended by one of their daughters. Sullenberger met with the principal and Jega Sanmugam prior to the interview, and all preparation was done in secrecy. Sanmugam conducted the interview at Sullenberger's home hours before Katie Couric interviewed Sullenberger for 60 Minutes. An additional interview with Couric, about her career and the state of journalism, was also published in the Tribune. Alex Clemens, a representative of the Sullenberger family, said: "The Sullenberger family is grateful to CBS for actively demonstrating a commitment to student journalism."
|
639,558 |
Pall Mall, London
| 1,169,640,720 |
Street in Central London
|
[
"1661 establishments in England",
"A4 road (England)",
"Catherine of Braganza",
"Streets in the City of Westminster",
"Transport infrastructure completed in 1661"
] |
Pall Mall /ˌpæl ˈmæl/ is a street in the St James's area of the City of Westminster, Central London. It connects St James's Street to Trafalgar Square and is a section of the regional A4 road. The street's name is derived from pall-mall, a ball game played there during the 17th century, which in turn is derived from the Italian pallamaglio, literally "ball-mallet".
The area was built up during the reign of Charles II with fashionable London residences. It is known for high-class shopping in the 18th century until the present, and gentlemen's clubs in the 19th. The Reform, Athenaeum and Travellers Clubs have survived to the 21st century. The War Office was based on Pall Mall during the second half of the 19th century, and the Royal Automobile Club's headquarters have been on the street since 1908.
## Geography
The street is around 0.4 miles (0.64 km) long and runs east in the St James's area, from St James's Street across Waterloo Place, to the Haymarket and continues as Pall Mall East towards Trafalgar Square. The street numbers run consecutively from north-side east to west and then continue on the south-side west to east. It is part of the A4, a major road running west from Central London. London Bus Route 9 runs westwards along Pall Mall, connecting Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly and Hyde Park Corner.
## History and topography
### Early history and pall-mall field
Pall Mall was constructed in 1661, replacing an earlier highway slightly to the south that ran from the Haymarket (approximately where Warwick House Street is now) to the royal residence, St James's Palace. Historical research suggests a road had been in this location since Saxon times, although the earliest documentary references are from the 12th century in connection with a leper colony at St James's Hospital. When St. James's Park was laid out by order of Henry VIII in the 16th century, the park's boundary wall was built along the south side of the road. In 1620, the Privy Council ordered the High Sheriff of Middlesex to clear a number of temporary buildings next to the wall that were of poor quality.
Pall-mall, a ball game similar to croquet, was introduced to England in the early 17th century by James I. The game, already popular in France and Scotland, was enjoyed by James' sons Henry and Charles. In 1630, St James's Field, London's first pall-mall court, was laid out to the north of the Haymarket – St James road.
After the Restoration and King Charles II's return to London on 29 May 1660, another pall-mall court was constructed in St James's Park just south of the wall, on the site of The Mall. Samuel Pepys's diary entry for 2 April 1661 records: "[I] went into St. James's Park, where I saw the Duke of York playing at Pelemele, the first time that I ever saw the sport". This new court suffered from dust blown over the wall from coaches travelling along the highway. In July 1661 posts and rails were erected, stopping up the old road. The court for pall-mall was very long and narrow, and often known as an alley, so the old court, namely St James's Field, provided a suitable route for relocating the eastern approach to St James's Palace. A grant was made to Dan O'Neale, Groom of the Bedchamber, and John Denham, Surveyor of the King's Works, allocating a 1,400-by-23-foot (427 by 7 m) area of land for this purpose. The grant was endorsed 'Our warrant for the building of the new street to St James's'.
A new road was built on the site of the old pall-mall court, and opened in September 1661. It was named Catherine Street, after Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II, but was better known as Pall Mall Street or the Old Pall Mall. The pall-mall field was a popular place for recreation, and Pepys records several other visits. By July 1665 Pepys used "Pell Mell" to refer to the street as well as the game.
### 17th- and 18th-century buildings
In 1662, Pall Mall was one of several streets "thought fitt immediately to be repaired, new paved or otherwise amended" under the Streets, London and Westminster Act 1662. The paving commissioners appointed to oversee the work included the Earl of St Albans. The terms of the act allowed commissioners to remove any building encroaching on the highway, with compensation for those at least 30 years old. The commissioners determined that the real tennis court and adjoining house at the northeast corner of Pall Mall and St James's Street should be demolished, and in 1664 notified Martha Barker, the owner of the Crown lease, to do so. Although Barker initially rejected £230 compensation, the court was demolished by 1679.
The street was developed extensively during 1662–1667. The Earl of St Albans had a lease from the Crown in 1662 on 45 acres (18 ha) of land previously part of St James's Fields. He laid out the site for the development of St James's Square, Jermyn Street, Charles Street, St Albans Street, King Street and other streets now known as St James's. The location was convenient for the royal palaces of Whitehall and St James and the houses on the east, north and west sides of the square were developed along with those on the north side of Pall Mall, each constructed separately as was usual for the time. Houses were not built along the square's south side at first, or the adjoining part of Pall Mall. The Earl petitioned the King in late 1663 that the class of occupants they hoped to attract to the new district would not take houses without the prospect of eventually acquiring them outright. Despite opposition from the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Southampton, on 1 April 1665 the King granted the Earl of St Albans the freehold of the St James's Square site, along with all the ground on the north side of Pall Mall between St James's Street and the east side of St James's Square. The freehold of the north side of Pall Mall subsequently passed to other private owners.
The Crown kept the freehold of the land south of the street except for No. 79, which was granted to Nell Gwyn's trustees in 1676 or 1677 by Charles II. The buildings constructed on the south side of Pall Mall in subsequent years were grander than those on the north owing to stricter design and building standards imposed by the crown commissioners. When the main road was relocated further north, some houses suddenly had their backs facing the main road, losing available land for gardening. In 1664, residents filed a petition to turn the old road into gardens, which was successful. The trustees of the Earl of St Albans received a sixty-year lease on most of this from April 1665 so that trustees could issue sub-leases to their tenants.
Several other portions of the old highway were leased for construction. At the east end, land was leased to Sir Philip Warwick who built Warwick House (now the location of Warwick House Street) and to Sir John Denham; this parcel of land became part of the grounds of Marlborough House. Portions leased at the west end included the land between St James's Palace and the tennis court at the corner of St James's Street, and a parcel of land leased to the Duchess of Cleveland that became the site of 8–12 Cleveland Row and Stornoway House. The 18th-century London bookseller Andrew Millar also lived in a townhouse designed by Robert Adam, at 34 Pall Mall.
104 Pall Mall was rebuilt in 1761–2 by John, second Earl of Egmont. Sir John Soane remodelled the house in 1793–4 for Lady Louisa Manners, Countess of Dysart who lived there until 1831. From 1831 to 1836 it was used for the storage and exhibition of the Royal picture collection. In 1836 it was acquired by the Reform Club.
### Later history
By the 18th century, Pall Mall was well known for its shops as well as its grand houses. The shops included that of the Vulliamy family who made clocks at No. 68 between 1765 and 1854. Robert Dodsley ran a bookshop at No. 52, where he suggested the idea of a dictionary to Samuel Johnson. Writers and artists began to move to Pall Mall during this century; both Richard Cosway and Thomas Gainsborough lived at Schomberg House at Nos. 80–82.
The street was one of the first in London to be lit by gas after Frederick Albert Winsor set up experimental lighting on 4 June 1807 to celebrate King George III's birthday. Permanent lighting was installed in 1820. The eastern end of Pall Mall was widened between 1814 and 1818; a row of houses on its north side was demolished to make way for the Royal Opera Arcade.
Pall Mall is known for the various gentlemen's clubs built there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 and moved to No. 49 Pall Mall in 1822. Its current premises at No. 106 were built in 1823 by Charles Barry. The Athenaeum Club took its name from the Athenaeum in Rome, a university founded by the Emperor Hadrian. The club moved to No. 107 Pall Mall in 1830 from tenements in Somerset House. Its entrance hall was designed by Decimus Burton. The Reform Club at Nos. 104–105 was founded for the British Radicals in 1836. The Army and Navy Club at Nos. 36–39 was founded in 1837. The name was suggested by the Duke of Wellington in order to accommodate Royal Navy members. Other clubs on Pall Mall include the United Service Club (now occupied by the Institute of Directors), the Oxford and Cambridge Club and the Royal Automobile Club.
Pall Mall was once the centre of London's fine art scene; in 1814 the Royal Academy, the National Gallery and Christie's auction house were all based on the street.
The freehold of much of the southern side of the Pall Mall is owned by the Crown Estate. In addition to St James's Palace, Marlborough House, which was once a royal residence, is its neighbour to the east, opening off a courtyard just to the south of the street. It was built for Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough who laid the foundation stone in 1709, with building complete by 1711. The house reverted to Crown ownership in 1817; the future King George V was born here in 1865 and briefly lived in the house as Prince of Wales during the reign of his father, Edward VII. It became government-owned in 1959 and houses now the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth Foundation. The Prince Regent's Carlton House was built at the eastern end of Pall Mall in 1732 for Frederick, Prince of Wales and later inhabited by his widow, Princess Augusta. A ball was held at the house on 19 June 1811 to celebrate the start of the Prince's regency, but ultimately he did not decide to stay in the house upon ascending the throne, and it was demolished. John Nash built Carlton House Terrace on its site between 1827 and 1832.
Pall Mall was the location of the War Office from 1855 to 1906, with which it became synonymous (just as Whitehall refers to the administrative centre of the UK government). The War Office was accommodated in a complex of buildings based on the ducal mansion, Cumberland House. The office subsequently moved to Whitehall.
The street contained two other architecturally important residences. Schomberg House, at Nos. 80–82 Pall Mall was built in 1698 for Meinhardt Schomberg, 3rd Duke of Schomberg and divided into three parts in 1769. The eastern section of the house was demolished in 1850, but reconstructed in the mid-1950s for office use. Buckingham House was the London residence of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos. It was rebuilt in the 1790s by Sir John Soane and sold by the Buckingham estate in 1847. The house was demolished in 1908 to make way for the Royal Automobile Club.
No 77-78 Pall Mall was the home of the Marquess of Ailesbury from 1840. In 1892, it was inherited by the Marchioness' nephew, Viscount de Vesci who leased the building to the Office of Works. In 1902, it was granted to Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Helena and her husband Prince Christian as a grace and favour residence and retained as a home by their daughters, Princess Helena Victoria and Princess Marie Louise until 1947. In 1951, the property was divided: No.77 was occupied by the Oxford and Cambridge University Club, and no.78 by the Eagle Star Insurance Company.
The Institute of Directors was founded in 1903 and received a royal charter in 1906. The former branch of the Midland Bank at Nos. 69–70 Pall Mall was designed by Edwin Lutyens and constructed between 1922 and 1927. The original plan to redevelop No. 70 proved impractical so the two premises were demolished to provide a site for the current premises. The cigarette manufacturer Rothmans has its head office at No. 65 Pall Mall, in a building designed by Norman Shaw, while P&O Ferries' main administrative office is at No. 79.
## Cultural references
Giacomo Casanova lived in Pall Mall during 1761 as "Chevalier de Seingalt" and documented the stay in his memoirs. When the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray visited Dublin in 1845, he compared Pall Mall to O'Connell Street (then known as Upper Sackville Street). In 1870, Henry Benjamin Wheatley wrote "Round about Piccadilly and Pall Mall", documenting changes in and around the street over the century. A compilation of Oscar Wilde's works, A Critic in Pall Mall : Being Extracts From Reviews And Miscellanies, was published in 1919, comprising essays he wrote for newspapers and journals from the 1870s to the 1890s.
Pall Mall is the location of the fictional Diogenes Club in the Sherlock Holmes stories, written by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Princess Elizabeth mentioned Pall Mall in her diary on celebrations on VE day: "Out in crowd again," she wrote, "Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12.30 am – ate, partied, bed 3am!"
Pall Mall is part of a group of three squares on the British Monopoly board game, alongside Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue. All three streets converge at Trafalgar Square. Rising house prices across London mean a small flat on Pall Mall, which is in the lowest-priced third of properties on the board, now sells for over £1 million.
## See also
- 77–78 Pall Mall
- Pall Mall Gazette
- List of gentlemen's clubs in London
|
191,398 |
HMS Kent (1901)
| 1,092,639,694 |
Monmouth-class armoured cruiser finished in 1903
|
[
"1901 ships",
"Monmouth-class cruisers",
"Ships built in Portsmouth",
"World War I cruisers of the United Kingdom"
] |
HMS Kent was one of 10 Monmouth-class armoured cruisers built for the Royal Navy in the first decade of the 20th century. She was placed in reserve when completed in 1903, but was recommissioned for the China Station in 1906. She remained there until she returned home in 1913 for a lengthy refit.
At the beginning of World War I in August 1914, she was still refitting. In October Kent was ordered to the South Atlantic to join Rear-Admiral Christopher Cradock's squadron in their search for the German East Asia Squadron, but arrived at the Falkland Islands after the British squadron had been destroyed in the Battle of Coronel. During the subsequent Battle of the Falkland Islands at the end of 1914, the ship sank the German light cruiser Nürnberg. Several months later she discovered the sole surviving German ship from that battle and forced the light cruiser Dresden to scuttle herself in the Battle of Más a Tierra. She was assigned to patrol the South American coast for the rest of 1915, but was transferred to the Cape Station in early 1916 to begin convoy escort duties along the West African coast until mid-1918 when she returned to the China Station. In early 1919 the ship was deployed to Vladivostok to support the Siberian Intervention against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. She did little militarily there, although she contributed some crewmen to man gunboats supporting the Whites opposing the Bolsheviks. Kent was sold for scrap in China in 1920.
## Design and description
The Monmouths were intended to protect British merchant shipping from fast cruisers like the French Guichen, Châteaurenault or the Dupleix class. The ships were designed to displace 9,800 long tons (10,000 t). They had an overall length of 463 feet 6 inches (141.3 m), a beam of 66 feet (20.1 m) and a deep draught of 25 feet (7.6 m). They were powered by two 4-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one shaft using steam provided by 31 Belleville boilers. The engines produced a total of 22,000 indicated horsepower (16,000 kW) which was designed to give the ships a maximum speed of 23 knots (43 km/h; 26 mph). Kent, however, was one of three of the Monmouths that failed to meet her designed speed. She carried a maximum of 1,600 long tons (1,600 t) of coal and her complement consisted of 678 officers and ratings.
The Monmouth-class ships' main armament consisted of fourteen breech-loading (BL) 6-inch (152 mm) Mk VII guns. Four of these guns were mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one each fore and aft of the superstructure, and the others were positioned in casemates amidships. Six of these were mounted on the main deck and were only usable in calm weather. Ten quick-firing (QF) 12-pounder (3-inch (76 mm)) 12-cwt guns were fitted for defence against torpedo boats. Kent also carried three 3-pounder 1.9 in (47 mm) Hotchkiss guns and two submerged 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes.
Beginning in 1915, the main deck six-inch guns of the Monmouth-class ships were moved to the upper deck and given gun shields. Their casemates were plated over to improve seakeeping. The twelve-pounder guns displaced by the transfer were repositioned elsewhere. At some point in the war, a pair of three-pounder anti-aircraft guns were installed on the upper deck.
The ship's waterline armour belt was four inches (102 mm) thick amidships and two-inch (51 mm) forward. The armour of the gun turrets, their barbettes and the casemates was four inches thick. The protective deck armour ranged in thickness from 0.75–2 inches (19–51 mm) and the conning tower was protected by ten inches (254 mm) of armour.
## Construction and service
Kent, named to commemorate the English county, was laid down at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard on 12 February 1900 and launched on 6 March 1901 (one day late due to weather), when she was christened by Lady Hotham, wife of Admiral Sir Charles Frederick Hotham, GCB, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. She was completed on 1 October 1903 and was initially placed in reserve. On 15 March 1905 she ran aground in the Firth of Forth. The ship was assigned to the China Station between 1906 and 1913 and returned to Portsmouth Dockyard for a refit in September 1913.
She was still refitting in August 1914 when the war began and was ordered south to join Cradock's squadron searching for the East Asia Squadron after completing her sea trials in October. Kent, however, was diverted en route to hunt for the German light cruiser Karlsruhe in the Cape Verde – Canary Islands area. When the news of the disastrous Battle of Coronel reached the Admiralty in early November, she was at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and was ordered to resume her original mission. She reached the Abrolhos Archipelago where she was to rendezvous with Rear-Admiral Archibald Stoddart's force. While awaiting them, she patrolled the coast down to Montevideo, Uruguay, and fired her six-inch guns at targets for the first time after her refit. During this time the ship evidenced the results of a too-hastily completed refit with condenser problems and engine defects that sometimes left her unable to steam faster than 10 knots. Vice-Admiral Doveton Sturdee's battlecruisers arrived on the 26th and he took Stoddart's ships under his command and then proceeded to the Falkland Islands two days later.
### Battle of the Falklands
Upon arrival at Port Stanley on 7 December, Sturdee ordered Kent to anchor in the outer harbour and be prepared to relieve the armed merchant cruiser as the harbour guardship the following morning. He planned to recoal the entire squadron the following day from the two available colliers and to begin the search for the East Asia Squadron the day after. Vice-Admiral Maximilian von Spee, commander of the German squadron, had other plans and intended to destroy the radio station at Port Stanley on the morning of 8 December. The appearance of two German ships at 07:30 caught Sturdee's ships by surprise although they were driven off by 12-inch (305 mm) shells fired by the predreadnought battleship Canopus when they came within range around 09:20. Kent, though, had been ordered out of the harbour at 08:10 to protect Macedonia and keep the Germans under observation. This gave time for the squadron to raise steam, although the cruisers had not yet begun to recoal. The squadron cleared the harbour by 10:30 and Sturdee ordered, "general chase". His two battlecruisers were the fastest ships present and inexorably began to close on the German cruisers. They opened fire at 12:55 and began to straddle the light cruiser Leipzig, the rear ship in the German formation. It was clear to Spee that his ships could not outrun the battlecruisers and that the only hope for any of his ships to survive was to scatter. So he turned his two armoured cruisers around to buy time by engaging the battlecruisers and ordered his three light cruisers to disperse at 13:20.
In accordance with Sturdee's plans, Kent, her sister ship, Cornwall, and the light cruiser Glasgow immediately set off in pursuit while the battlecruisers and the slow armoured cruiser Carnarvon dealt with the German armoured cruisers. At 14:45 Glasgow, the fastest of the British cruisers, was close enough to Leipzig to open fire and the two ships exchanged salvos, scoring the occasional hit. An hour later, the Germans scattered in different directions; Cornwall and Glasgow pursued Leipzig while Kent went after Nürnberg. Short on coal, her crew threw in everything burnable, and she reached 24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph) in her pursuit; she closed to within 11,000 yards (10,000 m) when the German cruiser opened fire at 17:00. Kent replied nine minutes later with her forward guns; neither ship hit anything at that time. At 17:35 two of Nürnburg's worn-out boilers burst, which reduced her speed to 19 knots (35 km/h; 22 mph). As Kent continued to close, the German ship turned about for a fight when the range was down to 4,000 yards (3,700 m).
Most of the German 105-millimetre (4.1 in) shells failed to damage the British ship, but one did burst inside a gun position, killing or wounding most of its crew, and another burst inside the wireless compartment and knocked out her radio transmitter. The British shells battered Nürnburg severely; she was dead in the water by 18:25 with only two guns able to fire. Ten minutes later not a gun could shoot and the cruiser was aflame. She did not strike her colours until 18:57 and then lowered a boat filled with some of her wounded men. It promptly sank and Kent had to repair the splinter holes in her own boats before they could be launched. Nürnburg capsized half an hour later and Kent continued to search until 21:00, but only rescued a dozen men, five of whom later died. She had been hit 38 times, but none of them penetrated her armour. One shell passed through the radio office without detonating and disabled Kent's transmitter. Another shell burst outside a midships casemate and ignited several bags of cordite. The flash fire travelled down the ammunition hoist, but quick action by a Royal Marine in the ammunition party in removing the cordite charge ready to be hoisted, closing the door to the magazine and promptly using a fire hose prevented a catastrophe. The ship suffered six crewmen were killed and eight seriously wounded during the battle; ten of these were in the casemate where the cordite ignited. Kent was critically short of coal and had to steam slowly enough that she did not arrive at Port Stanley until the following afternoon.
### Battle of Más a Tierra
Sturdee's ships continued to search for Dresden even after he returned to England. The German cruiser successfully evaded the searching British for months by hiding in the maze of bays and channels surrounding Tierra del Fuego. She began moving up the Chilean coast in February 1915 until she was unexpectedly spotted by Kent at a range of 11,000 yards on 8 March when a fog burned off. The British cruiser tried to close the distance, but Dresden managed to break contact after a five-hour chase. Kent, however, intercepted a message during the pursuit from Dresden to one of her colliers to meet her at Robinson Crusoe Island in the Juan Fernández Islands. Dresden arrived there the next day, virtually out of coal.
International law allowed the German ship a stay of 24 hours before she would have to leave or be interned and her captain claimed that his engines were disabled which extended the deadline to eight days. In the meantime, Kent had summoned Glasgow and the two ships entered Cumberland Bay in the island on the morning of 14 March and found Dresden at anchor. The German ship trained her guns on the British ships and Glasgow opened fire, Captain John Luce justifying his action by deeming it an unfriendly act by an interned ship that had frequently violated Chilean neutrality. Dresden hoisted a white flag four minutes later as she was already on fire and holed at her waterline. A boat brought Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris to Glasgow to complain that his ship was under Chilean protection. Luce told him that the question of neutrality could be settled by diplomats and that he would destroy the German ship unless she surrendered. By the time that Canaris returned to Dresden, her crew had finished preparations for scuttling and abandoned ship after opening her Kingston valves. It took 20 minutes before the cruiser capsized to port and sank. The British shells had killed one midshipman and eight sailors and wounded three officers and twelve ratings.
### Subsequent activities
Kent patrolled the Chilean coast for the next several months, searching for German colliers. The ship was refitted at Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard in British Columbia from 25 May to 9 July. She resumed patrolling the Pacific coast of South America until she arrived at the Falklands on 7 March 1916 and departed on 6 April to unsuccessfully search for Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition on South Georgia Island and then Simon's Town, South Africa, where they arrived on the 23rd. Refitting until 29 May, Kent was running trials and working up until 15 June. She then began escorting convoys between South Africa and West African ports, or the Cape Verde Islands. She escorted a convoy to England where she arrived at Devonport on 7 January 1917 and then resumed her convoy escort duties along the African coast. The ship arrived in England on 4 June 1918 to begin a refit at HM Dockyard, Devonport, but as Kent was preparing to leave the convoy a little after midnight, she apparently steered for , causing that ship to turn to avoid being rammed and cutting off the stern of the destroyer Rival. That caused a depth charge to detonate underneath Kenilworth Castle, blowing a hole in that ship's hull although she successfully made it to port.
Kent was refitting until 14 July when she departed for Siberia to relieve her sister Suffolk. After arriving at Simon's Town, the ship sailed for Singapore on 24 August. She arrived there on 20 September and then continued onwards to Hong Kong which she reached on 10 October. Kent remained there with engine problems until 21 December when she departed for Vladivostok via Shanghai, China, and Nagasaki, Japan. The ship arrived there on 4 January 1919 to support American and Japanese forces in action against the Bolsheviks. About half of her Royal Marines and a few crewmen volunteered to man a six-inch gun and some 12-pounder guns left behind by Suffolk in Omsk on 6 April. They converted a tugboat in Perm to mount the 12-pounders and modified a large barge for the six-inch gun. On 23 May they engaged a Bolshevik river flotilla near Elabuga and drove three of the Communists' ships ashore and set one afire. Their victory did little to effect the strategic situation as the Bolsheviks drove the Whites back to Perm. Kent's troops were able to transfer the guns to railroad cars before the city was captured on 30 June and they were sold to the Whites once the men reached Omsk. They arrived back at Vladivostok on 18 August to find out that Kent had ordered to Hong Kong in their absence.
On 13 May, Kent accompanied the Russian steamship SS Georgie carrying troops to seize Tetyukhe; the ships later loaded refugees and arrived back at Vladivostok three days later. Kent departed Vladivostok on 23 June bound for Hong Kong via Weihaiwei, China. She arrived at her destination on 2 July and was paid off on 7 August. The ship was listed for sale there in March 1920 and sold for scrap on 20 June.
In 1964 a Falklands Islands commemorative stamp incorrectly pictured HMS Glasgow instead of Kent.
|
1,896,765 |
George Griffith
| 1,173,381,691 |
British science fiction writer (1857–1906)
|
[
"1857 births",
"1906 deaths",
"19th-century British novelists",
"British atheists",
"British male novelists",
"British science fiction writers",
"British socialists",
"Deaths from cirrhosis",
"Writers from Plymouth, Devon"
] |
George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones (20 August 1857 – 4 June 1906) was a British writer. He was active mainly in the science fiction genre—or as it was known at the time, scientific romance—in particular writing many future-war stories and playing a significant role in shaping that emerging subgenre. For a short period of time, he was the leading science fiction author in his home country both in terms of popularity and commercial success.
Griffith grew up with his parents and older brother, receiving homeschooling and moving frequently during his childhood due to his father's career as a clergyman. Following his father's death when Griffith was 14 years old, he went to school for little over a year before leaving England and travelling the world, returning at the age of 19. He then worked as a teacher for ten years before pursuing a career in writing. After an initial setback that left Griffith without the means to provide for himself, he was hired by C. Arthur Pearson in 1890. Griffith made his literary breakthrough with his debut novel The Angel of the Revolution (1893), which was serialized in Pearson's Weekly before being published in book format. He signed a contract of exclusivity with Pearson and followed it up with the likewise-successful sequel Olga Romanoff (1894).
Griffith was highly active as a writer throughout the 1890s, producing numerous serials and short stories for Pearson's various publications. He also wrote non-fiction for Pearson and went on various travel assignments. Among these were an 1894 publicity stunt circumnavigating the world in 65 days, an 1895 journey to South America where he covered the various revolutionary movements active there at the time, and an 1896 trip to Southern Africa that resulted in Griffith writing the novel Briton or Boer? (1897) anticipating the outbreak of the real Boer War (1899–1902). Griffith's career declined in the latter part of the 1890s, in part due to being surpassed by H. G. Wells as the favourite science fiction writer of both Pearson and the reading public. His last outright success was A Honeymoon in Space (1901), and he parted ways with Pearson shortly thereafter. With his health in decline, likely due to alcoholism, he continued writing prolifically up until his death at the age of 48.
Griffith was both successful and influential as a writer at the peak of his career, but he has since descended into obscurity. Retrospective assessments have found his works to have been timely and prescient—in particular with regard to the importance of aerial warfare—but not timeless, and he is commonly regarded as a relatively poor writer, especially when compared to his main rival Wells. He regularly incorporated his personal viewpoints into his fiction, and anti-American sentiments expressed in this way ensured that he never established a readership in the United States as publishers there would not print his works. He was irreligious and in his youth advocated fiercely for secularism. Politically, Griffith was early an outspoken socialist, though he is believed to have gradually shifted towards more right-leaning sympathies later in his life. Socially, he has been described as embodying Victorian ideals, including social conservatism and staunch pro-British views.
## Biography
### Early life
George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones was born in Plymouth on 20 August 1857. His parents were the colonel-turned-clergyman George Alfred Jones and Jeanette Henry Capinster Jones. The family, which also included Griffith's older brother, moved repeatedly during his childhood due to his father's career. They moved from Plymouth to Tring in 1860, then on to two poverty-stricken parishes in the Greater Manchester area: first to Ashton-under-Lyne in 1861, and then to Mossley where his father was appointed vicar in 1864.
Owing to the family's financial situation, Griffith was homeschooled, with his mother teaching him French and his father Latin and Greek. He also spent considerable time exploring his father's extensive library, which was filled with the works of authors who would later serve as Griffith's literary influences, including Walter Scott and Jules Verne. Following the death of his father in January 1872, he studied at a private school in Southport. There the limits of his homeschooling soon became apparent, the lack of any mathematical proficiency in particular, but through concerted effort he progressed to being the second-best pupil in his class.
Griffith left the school after fifteen months there out of economic necessity—his father had had less than £300 to his name, all of which went to his wife in the absence of a will—and joined a sailing ship as an apprentice at the age of 15. He deserted his ship in Melbourne after eleven weeks at sea, having found the experience highly instructive but the corporal punishment in particular gruelling. He then took various employments in Australia—chiefly manual labour, but also briefly serving as a tutor—before using his earnings to travel. He later claimed both to have received an offer to marry a Polynesian princess and to have circumnavigated the globe six times; about the latter, Sam Moskowitz says that "the variety of locales for his stories would tend to substantiate this claim." He returned to England at the age of 19.
### Teaching career
Griffith started working as a schoolmaster in 1877, six months after his return to England, teaching English at the preparatory school Worthing College in Sussex. At this time, he had no formal qualifications and studied nights to be able to give lessons in the daytime. He left Worthing to study at a university in Germany, returning a year later to teach at Brighton. He continued to study at nights to get the necessary teaching diplomas for a career in education. He started his writing career while at Brighton, writing for local papers among others. He then took a job teaching at Bolton Grammar School in 1883, and while there published his first two books: the poetry collections Poems (1883) and The Dying Faith (1884), both published under his pen name Lara. At Bolton he met Elizabeth Brierly (1861–1933); they married in February 1887 and eventually had two sons and a daughter. He passed the College of Preceptors exam the same year, thus completing his formal education in teaching, and promptly quit that line of work in favour of pursuing a career in writing. He would later describe his time working as a teacher as "ten years' penal servitude".
### Writing career
#### Early career
Griffith and Brierly moved to London, and he started working as a journalist at a paper there in 1888. He quickly rose through the ranks to become the magazine's editor, and eventually took over as owner. At the time, Griffith was highly politically active, advocating for socialism and secularism. His political activism resulted in the paper being the target of a libel suit; Griffith decided against hiring an attorney, opting instead to represent himself, and ended up losing the case which led to the paper going out of business. Griffith was thus unemployed, and while he continued to pen political and religious pamphlets for a while as a freelancer, it was not enough to provide a living.
A friend of Griffith's wrote him a letter of introduction to publisher C. Arthur Pearson. He got a job at the newly founded Pearson's Weekly in 1890, initially tasked by the editor Peter Keary with writing addresses on envelopes for the magazine's competitions. He made a good impression on Keary through his skill as a conversationalist, largely owing to his background travelling the world, and was soon promoted to columnist. He carried on in this capacity for the rest of the decade.
#### Breakthrough
Griffith made his literary breakthrough in 1893 with what was then known as a scientific romance—an exciting adventure story, or "romance", with cutting-edge science playing a key role—and would later be called science fiction. The future war genre had been popular since the publication of George Tomkyns Chesney's novella "The Battle of Dorking" (1871), and rival magazine Black & White had just had a major success in the genre with the serialized novel The Great War of 1892 (1892) by Philip Howard Colomb. Pearson wanted to capitalize on both of these trends; Pearson's Weekly had from the start published short stories, and the staff discussed internally who could try their hand at a future-war serial, to which Griffith volunteered. He brought in a synopsis the following day, and got the assignment; the synopsis was published in Pearson's Weekly on 14 January 1893, before the story itself had been written. The next week's edition saw the publication of the first of 39 weekly instalments of Griffith's story, The Angel of the Revolution. The name of the author was not revealed until the final issue on 14 October 1893. The serial received positive reviews and the magazine saw a sharp increase in number of issues sold. Griffith's first son was born during the serialization on 13 June 1893 and named Alan Arnold Griffith, after two characters in The Angel of the Revolution.
The London-based Tower Publishing Company quickly secured the book rights to The Angel of the Revolution, publishing an abridged hardcover edition in October 1893. The book version was likewise a success, receiving rave reviews and becoming a bestseller; it was printed in at least eleven editions, and a review in The Pelican declared Griffith to be "a second Jules Verne". Pearson responded by signing a contract of exclusivity with Griffith and providing him with a secretary for dictation. The Angel of the Revolution was not, however, published in the United States in either book or serial format. Due to anti-American sentiments expressed in Griffith's work—in the story, the Constitution of the United States is physically destroyed and it is stated that "there were few who in their hearts did not believe the Republic to be a colossal fraud", for instance—US publishers wanted nothing to do with him or his stories. During Griffith's lifetime, none of his books were published in the US, and it would not be until 1902 that the first and only serial of his was published in a US magazine.
#### Mid-1890s
The success of The Angel of the Revolution quickly led to the announcement of a sequel, The Syren of the Skies, in the 23 December 1893 issue of Pearson's Weekly. It was serialized in 32 instalments from 30 December 1893 to 4 August 1894, and published in hardcover format by Tower in November 1894 under the title Olga Romanoff. The story was another bestseller, though not quite reaching the heights achieved by its predecessor. It also received critical acclaim, with a reviewer for The Birmingham Chronicle declaring Griffith "the English Jules Verne". Parallel to the serialization of The Syren of the Skies, Griffith carried out a publicity stunt on behalf of Pearson by travelling around the world in as little time as possible, emulating the fictional journey in Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Pearson's Weekly had serialized Elizabeth Bisland's 14 November 1889 – 30 January 1890 circumnavigation under the title "Round the World in 76 Days", starting with the magazine's very first issue on 26 July 1890 and finishing on 25 October, and Pearson thought Griffith an ideal candidate for surpassing that accomplishment, given his experience travelling. Griffith accomplished the feat in 65 days, starting on 12 March 1894 and finishing on 16 May. The tale of his journey was told in Pearson's Weekly in 14 parts between 2 June and 1 September 1894, bearing the title "How I Broke the Record Round the World". Around this time, he legally changed his name to George Griffith.
Pearson tasked Griffith with writing a new future-war serial to boost sales of Short Stories, a magazine he had acquired in mid-1893. This became The Outlaws of the Air, serialized between 8 September 1894 and 23 March 1895. It was the last of Griffith's stories to be published by Tower before the company folded; while the hardcover released in June 1895 sold well, he likely never received payment for it. The story mostly reiterated the main points of The Angel of the Revolution on a smaller scale, and while reviews were good, it was largely overshadowed by the release of Olga Romanoff. Griffith's next novel was the fantasy Valdar the Oft-Born, serialized 2 February – 24 August 1895 in Pearson's Weekly and published in book format by C. Arthur Pearson Ltd the same year. It is a tale of an immortal, an intentional imitation of Edwin Lester Arnold's The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890)—such imitation being common in the literature of the time. It was fairly well received by audiences, albeit not as warmly as Phra the Phoenician had been.
Griffith travelled to Peru on assignment in February 1895. Large portions of the South American continent was undergoing political turmoil at the time, and Griffith covered the various revolutionaries in harshly critical terms, viewing them as aspiring oppressors. This appeared in Pearson's Weekly in a three-article series called "Election by Bullet" starting on 7 September 1895, after Griffith's return to England. During his trip Griffith also continued to write fiction, sending his works to England by boat. Six short stories were thus published under his pen name Levin Carnac in Pearson's Weekly in April and May 1895. Griffith later claimed to have found the source of the Amazon River; Moskowitz speculates that this could have happened during this assignment. His time in Peru also inspired him to write Golden Star, which he began working on during his return voyage. The story is a fantasy wherein the title character, an Inca princess, and her brother enter suspended animation ahead of the Spanish conquest in the hopes of one day restoring their rule. It was serialized in Short Stories between 7 September and 21 December 1895, but not published as a book until Griffith had found a new publisher to replace the defunct Tower Publishing Company—Pearson having ceased to publish his works in book format. This was to be F. V. White [Wikidata], introduced to him by William Le Queux—author of The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), and whom Griffith had previously recommended Tower as a publisher. The story was thus published in book format under the title The Romance of Golden Star in June 1897; White would publish the majority of Griffith's books thereafter.
At this time, Pearson was expanding his business. He launched a new all-serial magazine called Pearson's Story Teller on 9 October 1895, for which Griffith wrote the historical adventure story The Knights of the White Rose. Pearson discovered new talents such as Louis Tracy and attracted established ones to his ventures, and launched the monthly periodical Pearson's Magazine in January 1896, intended as a prestige competitor to The Strand Magazine. Feeling that Griffith's serials were a poor fit for the new magazine, Pearson relegated him to writing ancillary materials for the publication. These included a March 1896 article harshly critical of US involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal and of the Monroe Doctrine more generally, titled "The Grave of a Nation's Honour", and the short story "A Genius for a Year" published under his pseudonym Levin Carnac in June 1896. H. G. Wells, whose The Time Machine (1895) had been a major hit, wrote "In the Abyss" for the August 1896 issue of Pearson's Magazine and quickly replaced Griffith as Pearson's favourite science fiction writer. During the second half of the 1890s, Wells also supplanted Griffith as the best-selling and most acclaimed science fiction writer by the public. Pearson would go on to publish Wells's The War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine April–December 1897 and The Invisible Man in Pearson's Weekly 12 June – 7 August 1897 as well as in an expanded book format in September 1897; the enormous success of the former meant Wells could work for whomever he pleased and name his price, and he would only write sporadically for Pearson thereafter.
In 1896, Griffith went on another travel assignment for Pearson, this time to Southern Africa. He had been asked to assess the political situation and write about possible future developments, and was given free rein to travel the region to that end. Griffith thus travelled to the British colonies of Cape Colony and Natal, the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and Portuguese Mozambique. He interviewed among others Transvaal President Paul Kruger, and came to the conclusion that a war between the British and the Boers was on the horizon. He wrote Briton or Boer? about such a war based on his research, and it was serialized in Pearson's Weekly starting on 1 August 1896—three years before the outbreak of the real Boer War on 11 October 1899. The serial concluded on 9 January 1897, and in February 1897 it became the first of Griffith's works to be published in book format by F. V. White. It sold well, with an eighth edition going into print in May 1900.
#### Decline
By the late 1890s, Griffith's career was in decline. Pearson had promised him the position of editor for a new publication with an international angle: The Passport, to be launched in 1897; the magazine never went to press. Griffith nevertheless continued his prolific writing, with his serial The Gold Magnet appearing in Short Stories starting on 16 October 1897 and the short story "The Great Crellin Comet" appearing in the special Christmas issue of Pearson's Weekly the same year. The former was later published in book format as The Gold-Finder by F. V. White in 1898, and the latter was included in Griffith's short story collection Gambles with Destiny, published by White in 1899. He returned to the future war genre with The Great Pirate Syndicate, which was serialized in another of Pearson's magazines, Pick-Me-Up, 19 February – 23 July 1898. It was a middling commercial success, and F. V. White published it in book format in 1899.
Feeling the need for a change of pace, Griffith then turned to writing historical novels. He next wrote The Virgin of the Sun, a fictionalized but non-fantastical account of Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru in the 1530s, inspired by his South American journey a few years prior. Unusually, Pearson forwent serializing the story in favour of publishing it directly in book format in April 1898. After this, Griffith wrote The Rose of Judah, about the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE. It was serialized in Pearson's Weekly 8 October 1898 – 23 January 1899 and published in book format by Pearson in 1899. He also continued writing short stories. Among these were "A Corner in Lightning", wherein a man attempts to monopolize the newly-widespread commodity of household electricity, published in Pearson's Magazine in March 1898; "Hellville, U.S.A.", a story of a penal colony in Arizona that devolves into debauchery, published in Pearson's Weekly on 6 August 1898; and a series of detective stories appearing in Pearson's Magazine throughout 1898. "A Corner in Lightning" and "Hellville, U.S.A." were included in Gambles with Destiny alongside "A Genius for a Year" and "The Great Crellin Comet" in 1899.
By 1899, Griffith had moved from his Kensington home in London to Littlehampton to be able to engage in sailing, a favourite pastime of his. That year, he appeared in the British Who's Who, and wrote the short stories "The Conversion of the Professor" and "The Searcher of Souls", published in the May issue of Pearson's Magazine and the Christmas number of Pearson's Weekly, respectively. Both stories would be incorporated into novels by Griffith towards the end of his life: the former into The Mummy and Miss Nitocris (1906) and the latter into A Mayfair Magician (1905); Brian Stableford comments that this was a forerunner to the concept of fix-up novels that would later become commonplace within science fiction. As he had done so many times before, Griffith travelled abroad, this time to Australia, and unusually at his own expense rather than as part of an assignment. During his time there, he wrote for the first time in several years a scientific romance novel: A Honeymoon in Space. The narrative portrays a newlywed couple traversing the Solar System. In a first for Griffith, it was serialized in the upmarket Pearson's Magazine—albeit in an abridged form—in six parts under the title Stories of Other Worlds, January–July 1900. Pearson published the full story under Griffith's original title in 1901. It was the last outright success of Griffith's career.
Following the turn of the century, Griffith and Pearson parted ways. His last piece of fiction writing published by Pearson was "The Raid of Le Vengeur" in Pearson's Magazine in February 1901 and his last non-fiction was an essay in Pearson's Magazine in November 1902. Griffith nevertheless continued writing prolifically, though he did not meet with much success. In 1901 he wrote two novels dealing with the occult—a subject he had previously touched upon in The Destined Maid in 1898—Denver's Double, which deals with hypnotism and spiritual possession, and Captain Ishmael, a story about an immortal that features the legendary Wandering Jew as a side character. They were published by F. V. White in April and Hutchinson in October, respectively; neither was serialized. Supernatural and otherwise fanciful elements also appeared in a couple of short stories in the later years of Griffith's career: "The Lost Elixir" about an undead mummy, published in The Pall Mall Magazine in October 1903, and "From Pole to Pole" about a tunnel connecting the Earth's poles, published in The Windsor Magazine in October 1904. Both were included in the Griffith short story collection "The Raid of Le Vengeur and Other Stories", edited by Moskowitz and published in 1974.
#### Final years
The twilight years of Griffith's career were marked by a return to the future war genre, a great quantity of such stories being produced towards the end of his life. The Lake of Gold, where the discovery of the titular reservoir results in the US conquering Europe, became the only of Griffith's works to be serialized in a US magazine when it appeared in Argosy in eight instalments between December 1902 and July 1903, and was published in book format by White in 1903. The World Masters, where the US similarly establishes dominance by what The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes as a disintegrator ray, was published by John Long Ltd in 1903. The Stolen Submarine, about the then-ongoing Russo-Japanese War, was published by White in 1904. The year 1904 also saw the publication by John Long of A Criminal Croesus, where a war of South American unification is financed by a lost race that lives underground.
Griffith's health was failing. With his finances likewise deteriorating as a result of decreasing book sales after 1904, he moved with his family to Port Erin on the Isle of Man where the cost of living was lower. He continued to write in spite of his worsening condition. Thus, when The Great Weather Syndicate—wherein weather control is weaponized—was published by White in May 1906, Griffith was largely confined to his bed. Griffith's last novel was The Lord of Labour, which he dictated on his deathbed against his doctor's advice. The story concerns a war between Britain and Germany, armed respectively with rifles firing explosive radium pellets and a ray that turns metals brittle. It was not published until nearly five years after his death, by White on 11 February 1911, the last of several posthumous works by Griffith.
### Death
Griffith died at his home in Port Erin on 4 June 1906, at the age of 48. The death certificate listed his cause of death as cirrhosis of the liver. Moskowitz notes that malaria (which Griffith contracted in Hong Kong, and which Peter Berresford Ellis writes at least contributed to Griffith's deteriorating condition) can have a similar clinical presentation, but nevertheless concludes—primarily from Griffith's self-description as "a waterlogged derelict"—that his early death was most likely the result of alcoholism. As corroborating evidence, Moskowitz cites an increasing prominence of alcohol in Griffith's later works and the appearance of something akin to Alcoholics Anonymous in one of his books. Stableford, who similarly concludes that Griffith likely started consuming alcohol excessively no later than the mid-1890s, additionally points to what he describes as "a seemingly alcoholic quality about the garrulous fluency of his later works".
## Legacy
### Place in science fiction history
In his time, Griffith was both successful and influential in his home country. Following the publication of The Angel of the Revolution in 1893, he was the most popular science fiction writer in England until the appearance of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine in 1895, and the best-selling one until Wells's The War of the Worlds was released in book format in 1898. E. F. Bleiler, in the 1990 reference work Science-Fiction: The Early Years, comments that Griffith may be considered the first professional English-language science fiction author. He is credited by among others The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Don D'Ammassa with shaping the burgeoning future war genre, in particular by engaging more with the political aspects, and Darren Harris-Fain [Wikidata] similarly writes that he played a key role in the development of the scientific romance genre. More modestly, Brian Stableford writes that Griffith contributed to the establishment of a new literary niche and laid the groundwork for more sophisticated exponents of the craft, but concludes that it is likely that somebody else would have played that part if Griffith had not done so. On the subject of specific authors who were influenced by Griffith, Peter Berresford Ellis lists several including M. P. Shiel and Fred T. Jane, and Sam Moskowitz posits that George du Maurier drew direct inspiration from The Angel of the Revolution sequence for Trilby (1895) and The Martian (1898). The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction credits Griffith with the first known use of several terms, including "death ray", "homeworld", and "space explorer". In spite of all this, Griffith and his works have now descended into obscurity, something several modern writers have remarked upon as being peculiar. A commonly cited explanation is that his works were timely but not timeless; Moskowitz writes that "He has not survived because his literary output was for the most part a reflection, not a shaper, of the feelings of the period. He danced to the beat of the nearest drummer." Griffith's failure to establish himself in the US has also been proposed as a contributing factor.
### Literary proficiency
Later appraisals of Griffith's skill as a writer have often found it to be lacking. Bleiler summarizes Griffith as "Historically important, but a bad writer technically"; Harris-Fain outlines his principal failings as "an uninspired, if not clichéd, style, poor characterization, weak ideas, and repetition". Stableford calls Griffith "rather inept" and views him as lacking originality, noting that he would often name his sources of inspiration outright; The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction similarly describes him as borrowing themes "more conspicuously from earlier texts than was the custom then". Many have noted an apparent prioritization of quantity over quality especially in the later years of his career, and his earlier works are commonly regarded as broadly superior to his later ones, with some critics such as Stableford and Darko Suvin opining that he peaked as early as his debut novels in The Angel of the Revolution sequence. Stableford comments that Griffith's second novel Olga Romanoff left no room for further escalation in scope, and that toning the extravagance down for later works drained his stories of their initial vibrancy. The serial format has also been noted as detrimental to the quality of several of his works, where being written piece-by-piece to meet tight deadlines and provide cliffhangers resulted in uneven pacing, poor structure, and unsatisfying resolutions. Stableford further identifies Griffith's apparent alcoholism as a likely cause of declining quality over time.
Among Griffith's strengths, a certain prescience is often cited. John McNabb [Wikidata] writes that "Griffith was conscious of the possibilities of science and his technological descriptions were informed by contemporary debate". He is noted for predicting technologies that had not yet been invented; among these are heavier-than-air aircraft, radar, sonar, and air-to-surface missiles. He is similarly credited with anticipating developments in warfare, in particular the coming importance of aerial warfare, but also in terms of military tactics including the use of poison gas. He is recognized as having correctly predicted the outbreak of the Boer War, though Moskowitz comments that doing so did not require particularly keen foresight. Ellis writes that while Griffith's repeated motif of a war between Britain and the US never came to pass, it has since been revealed that both countries did in fact plan for such an eventuality up until the lead-up to World War II. Beyond this, Moskowitz finds Griffith to exhibit "a fine imagination, a reasonably good flair for characterization, and an excellent storyteller's sense of pace" while acknowledging that he lacked "the literary touch"; McNabb similarly opines that "what Griffith lacked in literary style, he made up for in imaginative and exuberant story telling", comparing him in this regard to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Moskowitz and Ellis both commend Griffith on portraying women as equals to men, commenting that he was ahead of his contemporaries on that point; Barbara Arnett Melchiori, by contrast, finds Griffith to portray women as little more than the private property of men.
### In relation to H. G. Wells
During Griffith's lifetime, comparisons were frequently made between his works and those of H. G. Wells—to the chagrin of Wells, who viewed himself as producing literature of a higher class than Griffith. Wells reviewed Griffith's The Outlaws of the Air in Saturday Review in 1895, finding it passable but not living up to its potential. Wells quickly overtook Griffith in reputation, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that Griffith attempted in vain to garner critical praise by covering different literary ground in order to get out of Wells's shadow.
Comparisons have continued to be made long after both men's deaths. Wells is known to have read Griffith's works and is widely believed by scholars on Griffith to have been influenced by them. Scholars on Wells, by contrast, usually do not consider Griffith to have been an important influence. Wells's The War in the Air (1908) contains a passage that describes Griffith's The Outlaws of the Air as an "aeronautic classic"; Griffith's biographer Moskowitz takes this as evidence that Wells held professional respect for Griffith, while Harry Wood in The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society instead interprets the apparent praise as backhanded. Wood argues that although the two were contemporaries chronologically, that term may be considered inappropriate when considering their ideological differences, with Griffith embodying Victorian ideals and Wells embracing Edwardian ones. Says Wood, "Where Wells critically analysed the present and offered shrewd insight on the future, Griffith celebrated the present as the glorious inheritance of a reified Victorian past". Wood nevertheless identifies several similarities in their works, including a focus on speculative aeronautics with a grounding in contemporary science and the use of fiction as a vehicle for social commentary. Steven Mollmann [Wikidata], in a 2015 Science Fiction Studies article comparing The Angel of the Revolution and The War in the Air, characterizes both books as examples of what he terms "revolutionary sf", where technological revolution (here in the form of airships) brings about political revolution.
Wells is generally regarded as the superior writer. Harris-Fain states that while both writers had "imaginative ideas and exciting stories", only Wells was able to incorporate "serious themes and philosophical speculations". Wood and Mollmann both comment that Wells more accurately predicted the future of warfare than did Griffith; Wood focuses on Wells depicting aerial warfare as insufficient to maintain control on the ground and draws comparisons to strategic bombing during World War II, while Mollmann focuses on Wells portraying technological developments being adopted by all warring parties roughly at the same time—thus leading to more destructive warfare but not to anybody having a decisive technological advantage—and draws comparisons to World War I.
## Personal views
### Religion
Griffith was irreligious, and in his youth he wrote for the freethinker magazine Secular Review. Stableford comments that being a freethinker whose father was a clergyman was a background Griffith shared with many other scientific romance authors. He advocated fiercely for secularism as a young man; Stableford writes that he evidently tempered his opinions on this later in his life, as he wrote the serial "Thou Shalt Not—" for a religious audience in Pearson's The Sunday Reader in 1899. Moskowitz further writes that Griffith appears to have taken up an interest in the occult in the later years of his life.
### Politics
Politically, Griffith was early an outspoken socialist. He incorporated his political views into his fiction, and much has been written about what can be gleaned from his writings about his viewpoints. Melchiori writes that there are a number of inconsistencies in his debut novel The Angel of the Revolution which indicate to her that Griffith "had by no means fully absorbed the doctrine that he was preaching". In particular, Melchiori highlights Griffith's vision of the abolition of private property as incomplete, suggesting that the concept was so deeply ingrained in his worldview that he could not properly imagine its absence. Bleiler similarly describes Griffith's works as characterized by "ambivalence toward various social movements of the day". Stableford writes that Griffith's works reveal a successive shift to increasingly right-leaning sympathies, with anarchists being portrayed positively alongside socialists in his very earliest stories but quickly rejected afterwards, and the socialists in turn being displaced by capitalists in the later works.
### Social matters
On Griffith's social views, Stableford contrasts Griffith's gradually shifting views on economics with the observation that he consistently portrayed aristocrats positively from the very start. Wood writes that "Griffith's fiction celebrates social conservatism and British global predominance, preaching the maintenance of this status quo". McNabb identifies themes of social Darwinism, eugenics, and outright race war, while commenting that there is a notable lack of the antisemitism that often accompanied such stories. He writes that Griffith's works reinforced then-common beliefs among his readers about their own inherent superiority. Melchiori similarly says about Griffith's views on internationalism that "In theory he accepts it, but in practice he is very strongly pro-British", and Wood comments that "Irishness could only exist for Griffith, it seems, as a constituent part of Britishness". Bleiler summarizes Griffith as "in ideology, the embodiment of what was wrong with the British Victorian Weltanschauung.
|
253,108 |
Sakura Wars
| 1,173,014,269 |
Japanese media franchise
|
[
"ADV Films",
"Alternate history video games",
"Anime OVAs",
"Bishōjo games",
"CloverWorks",
"Dating sims",
"Dengeki Bunko",
"Dreamcast games",
"Funimation",
"Harem anime and manga",
"Japan-exclusive video games",
"Mecha anime and manga",
"PlayStation 2 games",
"PlayStation Portable games",
"Production I.G",
"Red Entertainment games",
"Sakura Wars",
"Sega Games franchises",
"Sega Saturn games",
"Sega video games",
"Shueisha manga",
"Steampunk video games",
"Tactical role-playing video games by series",
"Takarazuka Revue",
"Video game franchises",
"Video game franchises introduced in 1996",
"Video games about demons",
"Video games about mecha",
"Video games adapted into television shows",
"Video games set in the 1920s"
] |
is a Japanese steampunk media franchise created by Oji Hiroi and owned by Sega. It is focused around a series of cross-genre video games. The first game in the series was released in 1996, with five sequels and numerous spin-off titles being released since then. The series—set during a fictionalized version of the Taishō period—depicts groups of women with magical abilities using steam-powered mecha to combat demonic threats.
The original Sakura Wars was an ambitious title for the then-in-production Sega Saturn. The first game's overlap of the tactical role-playing, dating sim and visual novel genres prompted Sega to classify it as a "dramatic adventure", a moniker which has endured during the series' lifetime. Both Red Entertainment and Sega co-developed most of the games until 2008, when the series went on hiatus. Sega rebooted the series as sole developer because of fan demand. Recurring elements include anime cutscenes created by notable studios including Production I.G, and music by composer Kohei Tanaka.
The series has sold over 5.8 million copies as of 2022, and garnered both critical and popular acclaim. The original Sega console games have been voted among the most popular for the Saturn and Dreamcast. The Sakura Wars franchise includes numerous anime productions, manga, and other media projects such as stage shows. With the exception of So Long, My Love and Shin Sakura Wars, the video game series has not been released in English. Several of the anime series have been localized for English territories.
## Games
The first installment was released on September 27, 1996. Many Sakura Wars games have been localized for markets in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia on numerous video game consoles, personal computers (PC), and mobile phones. As of December 2019, the series includes the main installments from the 1996 Sakura Wars to the 2019 Sakura Wars, as well as direct sequels and spin-offs, both released and confirmed as being in development. Most of the older games have been remade or re-released on multiple platforms.
### Main series
The original Sakura Wars was released in 1996 for the Sega Saturn. It was ported to a number of platforms including Dreamcast, Microsoft Windows and mobile devices. A remake for the PlayStation 2 (PS2), Sakura Wars: To My Heating Blood, was released in 2003. The remake includes additional voice acting, redone graphics and battle system based on later entries. Its sequel Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die was released for the Saturn in 1998. It was the last title developed for the platform, receiving ports to Dreamcast and Windows, and as a bundle with the first game to the PlayStation Portable (PSP).
The next entry, Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning?, was released in 2001 for the Dreamcast. It was later ported to Windows, and then to the PS2 with Dreamcast-exclusive features redesigned to work on the PS2. Sakura Wars 4: Fall in Love, Maidens was released in 2002 for the Dreamcast. It was the last Sakura Wars game produced for Sega hardware, and was later ported to Windows.
The fifth game, Sakura Wars V: Farewell, My Lovely, was first released for the PS2 in Japan in 2005. It was the first mainline Sakura Wars game to be produced after Sega abandoned game console production. In North America, Europe, and Australia, the game was localized as Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love and published by NIS America for the PS2 and the Wii in 2010; this release removed the number from the title. The sixth entry is a soft reboot of the series, titled Shin Sakura Wars (Sakura Wars in the west). The game carries over multiple elements while featuring a new cast and action-based combat system. It was released for the PlayStation 4 (PS4) in 2019 in Asia, and 2020 worldwide.
### Spin-offs
In addition to the main series, numerous spin-off games covering multiple genres were released. The first spin-off title was Hanagumi Taisen Columns, released for the Saturn in 1997. A sequel for the Dreamcast was released in 2000. A spin-off set just after Sakura Wars for the Game Boy Color, Sakura Wars GB, was developed by Jupiter and released by Media Factory in 2000. A direct sequel was released the following year. A small peripheral titled Pocket Sakura was also developed by Jupiter and released alongside the first Game Boy Color title.
A small group of spin-off titles were developed under the umbrella title Sakura Wars World Project. Sakura Wars Story: Mysterious Paris, a visual novel adventure set after the events of Is Paris Burning?, was released in 2004 for the PS2. A prequel to So Long, My Love, Sakura Wars V Episode 0: Samurai Daughter of the Wild, was also released for the PS2 that year. The gameplay deviated from the main series in featuring hack and slash action. A Nintendo DS dungeon crawler spin-off, Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Wars — Because You Were There, was developed by Neverland and released in 2008, featuring the casts of all mainline games up to that point.
Other releases included fan discs, supplementary materials related to Sakura Wars and its first sequel, and Sakura Wars-themed pachinko machines. Multiple mobile titles based on the series were also released, beginning in 2001 with Sakura Wars: Keitai Club. Sakura Wars Online for the Dreamcast was released in 2001 with two character packs, one themed after the Tokyo Flower Division and one after the Paris Flower Division. It operated until Sega closed down its servers in 2005.
A mobile game by Sega and Delight Works, Sakura Kakumei \~Hana Saku Otome-tachi\~ for iOS and Android devices was announced for a 2020 release in September. The game is set in 2011, (Taisho 100) after a great calamity 16 years earlier, a new combat revue known as B.L.A.C.K. has risen to defend the citizen of Japan from new demon hordes and unravel a deep government conspiracy. Anime studio, CloverWorks produced a short anime for streaming to promote the new game.
## Recurring elements
### Setting and characters
The Sakura Wars series is set during a fictionalised version of the Taishō period, with the chronology currently running from 1923 (Taisho 12) to 1940 (Taisho 29). The games are set in the cities of Tokyo, Paris and New York. The setting combines real locations with fantastical events and steampunk-based technology. The central conflict of the series is between demonic forces created by the ingrained darkness in human hearts. To combat this in Tokyo, the Japanese government created a unit of steam-based mecha called Koubu powered by spirit energy. While a few men are capable of using them, women form the main combat units because of their stronger spiritual power. This group is known as the Imperial Assault Force, based in a theater and working undercover as the Imperial Theater Revue. The group to which the protagonists belong is the Flower Division (Hanagumi), the main combat troop. Other groups make cameo appearances in the story if present.
The first four games follow the military and romantic exploits of Imperial Army officer Ichiro Ogami. Originally assigned to the Imperial Assault Force in Tokyo, he later traveled to Paris and trained the newly formed Paris Assault Force before returning to Tokyo and commanding the two united Flower Divisions during the events of Sakura Wars 4. For So Long, My Love, the lead protagonist was changed to Ogami's nephew Shinjiro Taiga, who is sent in place of Ogami to train the New York Combat Revue. The 2019 soft reboot, Shin Sakura Wars takes place in 1940, twelve years after an event called the "Great Demon War" saw the destruction of all three original Flower Divisions. New divisions were created across the world and began competing with each other, with the newly reformed Tokyo Flower Division being the main protagonists.
### Gameplay
The gameplay of Sakura Wars incorporate role-playing, dating sim and visual novel elements. This blend of genres and styles resulted in it being labeled as a new genre dubbed "dramatic adventure" in its marketing. The original combination of narrative and tactical role-playing gameplay was inspired by the Fire Emblem series. The gameplay is split between adventure-style segments where the player explores environments and interacts with cast members; and battle sections where choices during the adventure segments come into play. With the main female cast, the protagonist can pursue a romance. Romance options can be carried between the first four titles using save data.
Throughout the series, the games have used different battle systems. The first Sakura Wars and its sequel made use of a traditional turn-based battle system on a tilted two-dimensional grid-based battlefield. Each unit has two actions from a selection of five. The sequel expanded the selection to six, and included cinematic attacks. The leader could also issue commands to the entire squad to take specific battle formations. Sakura Wars 3 introduced the "Active & Realtime Machine System" (ARMS), which takes place in three-dimensional battle arenas. Under this system, units have an allotment of Action Points (AP). AP are used up by moving around the battlefield. Units can perform one of six actions, with two actions per turn as in earlier titles. Each unit has special abilities, and attack ranges based on their weaponry. For the 2019 Sakura Wars, the battle system was redesigned to use action-based combat, focusing on free movement within large arenas.
Central to all the games and most spin-off titles is the "Live & Interactive Picture System" (LIPS). During conversations with characters and key story sections, the player is faced with critical choices with an imposed time limit. The concept behind LIPS was to maintain player engagement while making narrative rather than freezing time and allowing prolonged time for thought, a trend the staff found annoying. The most basic version was established in the first Sakura Wars, then later expanded into "Double LIPS" with the incorporation of a personality meter which could indicate a character's feelings towards the player. Between Is Paris Burning? and So Long, My Love, a version called "Analog LIPS" was used. This allowed players to alter the intensity of a single response. It also included interacting with the character and environments. So Long, My Love expanded it further with quick time events using the control sticks and buttons. The 2019 Sakura Wars continues this use of the LIPS system, featuring Analog LIPS and new free-roaming elements. Choices made during LIPS sections directly impact character performance in battle.
## History
### Origins and development
In 1990, Oji Hiroi at Red Entertainment (formally Red Company) decided to create Sakura Wars. Hiroi drew inspiration from Japanese stage shows when creating the project, initially titled "Sakura" (桜). Because of a lack of interest from publishers, Hiroi shelved the project until he was approached by Sega vice president Shoichiro Irimajiri to develop a new project for the Saturn. Successfully pitching his project to Irimajiri, the game began production under the title Sakura Wars. While the scenario and gameplay went through multiple redrafts, Sakura Wars always made use of a steampunk setting, a female lead and mecha combat. Development lasted three years, double the original estimate, and was Sega's most expensive project at the time. Many within both Red Company and Sega were skeptical of the game's success, but Hiroi remained confident. Following the critical and commercial success of Sakura Wars, Sega and Red Company expanded the original premise into a franchise, starting with Thou Shalt Not Die. A recurring feature from Thou Shalt Not Die onwards was the use of subtitles drawn from famous poetry or other types of fiction related to a game's location or mood. A recurring poet was Akiko Yosano, whom Hiroi admired.
Following Thou Shalt Not Die, the team moved onto the Dreamcast to develop Sakura Wars 3, rebuilding the game engine and utilising the console's functions for gameplay elements. Following the release of Sakura Wars 3, Sega discontinued the Dreamcast because of declining console sales, transitioning to a software developer and publisher. Rather than move their planned next entry to the PlayStation 2, the team created a final Dreamcast entry as a celebratory title for series fans. This became Sakura Wars 4, which was completed in 10 months as opposed to the usual two year development period of other entries. The original story planned for Sakura Wars 4 was moved for the team's next entry on the PlayStation 2.
In 2005, Red Entertainment split from Sega after it bought back its majority share holding, although it continued to be involved in the Sakura Wars series. The next entry, Sakura Wars V, formed part of a seven-game group dubbed "Sakura Wars World Project"; the aim was to release these games overseas. In the event, only Sakura Wars V was published overseas as Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, and only three of the other planned games were released. The remaining three titles were cancelled in 2008. Sega and Red Entertainment greenlit Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Wars in an attempt to revitalise the franchise using a new gameplay genre. In August 2008, Sega decided to end the franchise, with the final Sakura Wars-themed event being a concert that month. Red Entertainment was bought by Chinese company UltaZen in 2011, with Sega retaining the Sakura Wars property. Fan demand eventually persuaded Sega to greenlight a new title in the series, which would both continue the narrative and feature a new cast.
### Staff
All titles from 1996 to 2005 were developed by the same central team. These included writer Satoru Akahori, artists Kōsuke Fujishima and Hidenori Matsubara, director and later chief director Tomoyuki Ito, producer and later executive producer Noriyoshi Ohba, and designer Takaharu Terada. Hiroi had contributed to all the projects as a general producer. Red Entertainment co-developed the games with an internal Sega team which shifted identity over the years—originally known as CS2 R&D during development of the first two Sakura Wars, the team was renamed Overworks in 2000 when Sega consolidated its 9 semi-autonomous subsidiaries into six studios; they worked on the series between Sakura Wars 3 and Sakura Wars V: Episode 0. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love was developed by the same team as part of Sega's GE2 R&D division, the same team which would develop Valkyria Chronicles. Shin Sakura Wars was developed by a team within Sega's CS2 R&D division, a newer group including Sonic Team. New team members included character designer Tite Kubo, and writers Jiro Ishii and Takaaki Suzuki, all famous names in anime and video games respectively. Hiroi remained in a supervisory role, and also wrote the theme song lyrics.
Other developers worked on the series alongside Sega and Red Entertainment, including Idea Factory, who created the Wii port of So Long, My Love; Jupiter Corporation, producers of the Sakura Wars GB duology and the Pocket Sakura peripheral; and Neverland, who developed Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Wars. A notable feature of the series is its FMV anime sequences. The first game's scenes were animated by Sega's animation subsidiary, Kyokuichi Tokyo Movie (now known as TMS Entertainment). From Thou Shalt Not Die to Fall in Love, Maidens, they were produced by Production I.G. For So Long, My Love, the scenes were primarily produced by M.S.C. In Shin Sakura Wars, the anime FMV sequences were produced by Sanzigen.
### Music
The Sakura Wars series features a variety of music, and frequently reuses themes. Kohei Tanaka is the chief music composer of the series. Tanaka's first major work in the video game industry, it brought him widespread recognition. Tanaka was among the first to support Hiroi with Sakura Wars, having worked with him during work on an original video animation (OVA) of Tengai Makyou: Ziria. Tanaka acted as a teacher figure for the rest of the development team. At that time, rhythm and percussion dominated Japanese popular music rather than melody. Both Tanaka and Hiroi wanted to reintroduce younger Japanese to beautiful melodies. Tanaka has been involved to some degree in most of the Sakura Wars games, composing the music for all mainline entries, and several spin-off titles. A recurring theme in the series is a piece called "Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan". Tanaka wrote the theme based on Hiroi's request to combine the music of a Super Sentai opening theme with the vocal style of the title song for the film Aoi sanmyaku (1949). Versions of it were included in Sakura Wars 2, Sakura Wars 4, and the 2019 soft reboot of Sakura Wars.
### Localization
While Hiroi wanted the series to be released worldwide, nearly all games in the Sakura Wars series remain exclusive to Asian territories. Early efforts at localizing the series were not undertaken because of Sega's uncertainty over whether the game's blend of genres would find a large enough audience outside Japan to be profitable. An unspecified attempt by Sega to localize the game stalled during the concept approval stage. No official reason was ever given. The PSP ports of Sakura Wars and Thou Shalt Not Die were scheduled for the North American market, but it were canceled. It was later explained that Sony classified Sakura Wars as a text novel, which made then-future licensing for importation and translation difficult.
A Korean translation of So Long, My Love was published in South Korea by Sega in 2006. The PC CD-ROM versions of Sakura Wars and its sequel were localized and released in Russia by Akella in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Dysin Interactive published the PC versions of Sakura Wars to Is Paris Burning? in China, and Fall in Love, Maidens was released in the region by Beijing Entertainment All Technology.
The first official English release in the Sakura Wars series is So Long, My Love, which was translated by NIS America in collaboration with Red Entertainment and Idea Factory. The dub was produced at Bang Zoom! Entertainment, and included actors from NIS America's localization of the Disgaea series. The team also included the Japanese voice track in the PlayStation 2 version, with a dedicated translation which preserved the original character names being created for it. The localization took two years to complete, becoming NIS America's largest localization effort to date. For Shin Sakura Wars, Sega brought on Yakuza 0 translators Inbound Games to localise the game. The localised version uses the Japanese audio with subtitles in other languages, and renames the game with the series namesake only.
## Reception and sales
Between the series' debut in 1996 and 2010, the series has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. Each entry on Sega hardware rank among the best-selling titles for their respective hardware. The original Sakura Wars was an immediate success, with several stores being sold out of copies within hours of its release. Sakura Wars 2 remains the best-selling title in the series, with over 500,000 copies sold on the Saturn alone, making it one of the console's best-selling titles in Japan. So Long, My Love is the worst-selling mainline entry to date, and was a commercial failure in the West.
Japanese website 4Gamer.net described the series as a "legendary" property connected to Sega, citing several elements such as the anime-style presentation and blend of genres that were hardly seen in gaming at the time. Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell wrote a retrospective on the series in 2009, calling Sakura Wars "an odd series [...] that defies genres". In a 1999 IGN article on the franchise following the announcement of Sakura Wars 3, journalist Anoop Gantayat described it as "probably the greatest series of games to never make their way stateside", citing its unprecedented success when compared to other games on Sega hardware at the time.
The series has been popular with both journalists and fans in Japan since the first game's release. At the inaugural CESA Awards, Sakura Wars won the Grand Award, as well as awards in the Best Director, Best Main Character and Best Supporting Character categories. Sakura Wars 2 won the Packaged Work Award at the 1998 Animation Kobe event. The soundtrack album of Sakura Wars 4 won in the "Animation – Album of the Year" category at the 2003 Japan Gold Disc Awards. Prior to release, Sakura Wars was the second most-wanted game in a Famitsu poll in 1996, coming in behind Final Fantasy VII. The first four games all appeared on a public Famitsu poll from 2006 of the 100 best games of all time. A second later poll ranked the Sakura Wars games as among the best on the Saturn and Dreamcast. Sakura Wars heroine Sakura Shinguji was rated in 2009 by Famitsu as the 17th best Japanese video game character.
## Related media
Red Company and Sega have expanded the Sakura Wars series into various media. These include anime, manga, stage shows, several light novels, concerts and CD album releases of soundtracks. The latter have met with substantial commercial success. Despite a shared identity, Hiroi took care to keep each of these elements distinct and separate from each other. A dedicated themed cafe and merchandise store based in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo, Sakura Wars Taisho Romando, opened in 1998. Taisho Romando remained open for ten years until it closed in March 2008.
A prominent feature was an annual stage show dubbed Sakura Wars Kayou Show supervised by Hiroi, for which new musical numbers were created by Tanaka. The show featured the cast reprising their roles and performing stage shows drawn from the series. Each character had songs themed after their characters. The cast, which grew to include those of later games, remained for the entire run with the exception of actress Michie Tomizawa who retired from the series and her role as character Sumire Kanzaki in 2002. Tomizawa appeared as a guest in later revival concerts. The original stage shows ran regularly from 1997 to 2006. Since then, it has seen irregular revivals with both the first cast and later additions. The stage shows were originally meant to end in 2008 along with the franchise, but fan support allowed future revivals. A stage adaptation of the 2019 game was planned to run from March 5–8, 2020 at Sogetsu Hall. However, on February 26, 2020, Sega announced that the event would not take place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The play will now be postponed to winter 2020 with precautions to protect the spread of the virus.
Hiroi wrote a manga adaptation of the first Sakura Wars, which began serialization in 2002. The original run finished in December 2008, but its popularity led to a second series continuing the narrative. Since 2003, the manga has been published as tankōbon by Kodansha. A comedy manga titled Sakura Wars: Show Theater, which featured comedy skits of characters from each main Sakura Wars location, was serialised between 2005 and 2009, and published by Kodansha in four volumes between 2006 and 2009. A manga adaptation, Shin Sakura Taisen: The Comic, began serialization in 2019 by Shueisha. It was written by Ishii, and illustrated by Koyuri Noguchi.
A spin-off manga Sakura Wars: Kanadegumi was created by Chie Shimada, based on concepts from the Sakura Wars team, and published in the shojo magazine Hana to Yume published by Hakusensha. In contrast to the main series, it was aimed at a female audience and shifted the narrative to a male harem set-up; main protagonist Neko Miyabi is assigned to the titular Kanadagumi, and develops relationships with its five male members. Originally a two-chapter special published between November and December 2011, it was expanded into a full series in February 2012. The manga ran from 2012 to 2013. Between its debut and final issue, the manga inspired both an anime short and a dedicated stage show. It was published in four tankōbon by Hakusensha between September 2012 and July 2013.
### Film and television
Multiple anime films, television series and original video animations (OVAs) have been produced that are based either on individual Sakura Wars games or on the series as a whole. The first was an OVA, titled Sakura Wars: The Gorgeous Blooming Cherry Blossoms. The OVA was released as four 30-minute episodes from 1997 to 1998, following the cast of the first game. A second OVA series, The Radiant Gorgeous Blooming Cherry Blossoms, was released as six 30-minute episodes from 1999 to 2000, relating side stories from between Sakura Wars and the end of Thou Shalt Not Die. Further OVA series based around the characters of Is Paris Burning? and So Long, My Love (École de Paris; Le Nouveau Paris; Sumire; New York, New York) were released from 2003 to 2007. The OVAs were produced by Radix Ace Entertainment until New York, New York in 2007, when production shifted by Anime International Company.
An anime television series based on the first game was produced by Madhouse. The 25-episode series was broadcast on Tokyo Broadcasting System Television from April 8 to September 23, 2000. While based on the first game's narrative and preserving Hiroi's vision, the series changed and added in several events. A major problem was remaining faithful to the source material within a TV format. In 2001, an animated theatrical film, Sakura Wars: The Movie, was released. The film takes place between Is Paris Burning? and Fall in Love, Maidens and features new character Ratchet Altair who would later appear in So Long, My Love. The film was animated by Production I.G; production took three years and was inspired by the wish to expand the series animation beyond what the short cutscenes and OVA projects had achieved. A second anime television series, titled Sakura Wars the Animation and serving as a sequel to the 2019 Sakura Wars, premiered on April 3, 2020. It is animated by Sanzigen, which helped create the animated sequences for the game.
In North America, the first two OVA series and the television series were localised by ADV Films. École de Paris and Sumire were dubbed and released by Funimation, The film was released in North America by Pioneer Entertainment in 2003, and later by Funimation in 2013. Funimation is streaming the 2020 anime for a simulcast release in North America and the United Kingdom.
## See also
- List of Sega video game franchises
- List of Japanese role-playing game franchises
|
21,438,802 |
Marcus Adams (Canadian football)
| 1,171,111,771 |
American gridiron football player (born 1979)
|
[
"1979 births",
"African-American players of American football",
"African-American players of Canadian football",
"American football defensive tackles",
"Canadian football defensive linemen",
"Colorado Crush players",
"Eastern Kentucky Colonels football players",
"Edmonton Elks players",
"Living people",
"Peoria Pirates players",
"Players of American football from Indianapolis",
"Players of Canadian football from Indianapolis",
"Saskatchewan Roughriders players",
"Spokane Shock players"
] |
Marcus "Chunky" Adams (born July 20, 1979) is a Canadian football defensive tackle who played for the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League (CFL) for eight seasons. He also was on the rosters of the Edmonton Eskimos of the CFL, the Colorado Crush and Spokane Shock of the Arena Football League, and the Peoria Rough Riders of af2 throughout his professional career. He played college football at Eastern Kentucky.
Adams was a backup at various defensive line positions for four seasons before he was given the opportunity to consistently start for the Roughriders. He had a breakout season in 2007, when he made a career-high 35 tackles and six sacks on his way to winning his first and only Grey Cup championship. After eight seasons with the Roughriders, Adams was released and spent brief periods of time with the Edmonton Eskimos and Spokane Shock before retiring. He finished his career with 130 tackles and 12 sacks, appearing in eight playoff games and three Grey Cups.
## Early career
Adams played high school football for the Giants at Ben Davis High School, where he was an all-state defensive tackle and was named a top player by USA Today. The Evansville Courier & Press reported that Adams was both fast and strong for a high school tackle, with a 40-yard dash time of 4.9 seconds and the strength to bench press 350 pounds (160 kg).
Adams went on to play four seasons of college football with the Eastern Kentucky Colonels, a member of the Division I Football Championship Subdivision (then known as Division I-AA). Starting in 33 games, Adams received several accolades while playing for the Colonels, including being named a Division I-AA third team All-American, a two-time first team All-Conference player, and a second team All-Conference player. In September 2002, he was selected as the Ohio Valley Conference Defensive Player of the Week for his effort in a game against the Florida Atlantic Owls, where he made 5 total tackles and repeatedly pressured the quarterback (including for one sack). Adams continued his successful senior year by recording 81 defensive tackles and five sacks.
## Professional career
### Saskatchewan Roughriders
On March 21, 2003, the Saskatchewan Roughriders announced that they signed Adams as a free agent. Adams went on to play eight seasons with the Roughriders.
#### 2003 season
Adams received an early opportunity to start for the Roughriders after Ray Jacobs was suspended for missing practice in the preseason. Adams made his CFL debut as a defensive end on June 19, 2003 against the Toronto Argonauts. He went on to play in nine regular season games and record 13 tackles in his rookie season, both due to Jacobs' continued suspension and injuries to other defensive linemen later in the season.
#### 2004 season
Adams remained with the Roughriders for the 2004 season, but he did not play in any regular season games.
#### 2005 season
Between the 2004 and 2005 seasons, Adams played indoor football with the Colorado Crush of the Arena Football League and the Peoria Rough Riders of af2. On May 9, 2005, Adams left the Peoria Rough Riders to attend training camp with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He acted as a backup for the Roughriders throughout the 2005 season. In July, he started in place of Nate Davis, who was unable to play due to back spasms. Adams went on to play in only five regular season games, where he made two sacks and four tackles.
#### 2006 season
Adams was again used primarily as a backup in the 2006 season, playing in only five games. He played in place of Nate Davis and T. J. Stancil when both players dealt with injuries. In September, Adams was placed on the injured list. He finished the season with seven tackles and a sack.
#### 2007 season
After Nate Davis was released from the Roughriders in the offseason, Adams took over as a starting defensive tackle. By mid-July, Adams was leading the CFL with four sacks. While Adams was injured in November, he did not miss serious time, and he played a major role in the Roughriders' playoff run. In the Western final, Adams effectively ended a BC Lions drive late in the fourth quarter by sacking opposing quarterback Dave Dickenson for a 14-yard loss. The drive ended in a punt, and the Roughriders went on to win 26–17 to move on to the Grey Cup. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the 95th Grey Cup, defeating the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 23–19. In the championship game, Adams was part of a defense that was described as "domineering" by The Gazette. He finished the season with 35 tackles, six sacks, and one pass deflection in 16 regular season games, all of which were career highs.
#### 2008 season
Adams faced the possibility of becoming a free agent after the 2007 season, but he re-signed with the Roughriders by February 2008. Adams was challenged by Brent Curvey and Ronald Flemons in training camp, but he won the starting role for the 2008 season. Playing in 14 games, he made 11 tackles and two fumble recoveries. Adams missed a regular season game in July to visit his mother, who was undergoing cancer surgery, and he also spent time on the injured list due to a finger injury and sprained ankle. The Roughriders made the playoffs, but lost to the BC Lions 33–12 in the West Semi-Final.
#### 2009 season
Adams continued to start in the 2009 season, and he recorded 33 tackles, a sack, and a pass deflection while playing in all 18 regular season games. The Roughriders made it to the 97th Grey Cup, where Adams forced a fumble that was recovered by teammate Keith Shologan. Facing the Montreal Alouettes, the Roughriders lost 28–27, preventing Adams from winning his second championship.
#### 2010 season
Adams again became a free agent before the 2010 season, but he re-signed with the Roughriders. He continued to regularly start and be featured in the rotation at the defensive lineman position. Adams missed Week 13 due to an injury. He finished the season with 27 tackles, two sacks, and a fumble recovery across 16 regular season games. The Roughriders again made it to the Grey Cup, but they lost to the Alouettes 21–18.
### Retirement
Following the 2010 season, the Roughriders chose not to re-sign Adams. The Edmonton Eskimos expressed interest, and Adams signed a contract with them for the 2011 season. He never played a regular season game for the Eskimos, and was eventually released. Adams later returned to the Arena Football League and signed with the Spokane Shock in 2012 before retiring from professional football.
### Season statistics
## Personal life
Marcus was born to a family of athletes, with his father and uncles boxing professionally.
Adams was active in the Saskatchewan community throughout his time with the Roughriders. In March 2008, he helped coach a pee wee hockey team during a charity benefit for Dustin Lemire, a child diagnosed with leukemia. Adams also coached that year in a high school training camp hosted by Matt Dominguez, a fellow Roughrider, and in a skills camp for the Ehrlo Monday Night Football League.
|
69,402,722 |
2022 Serbian constitutional referendum
| 1,160,106,063 | null |
[
"2022 in Serbia",
"2022 referendums",
"Constitutional referendums",
"January 2022 events in Serbia",
"Referendums in Serbia"
] |
A constitutional referendum was held in Serbia on 16 January 2022, in which voters decided on changing the Constitution in the part related to the judiciary.
To bring the judiciary into line with European Union legislation, the government had previously proposed changing the way judges and prosecutors are elected, and the National Assembly adopted it by a two-thirds majority on 7 June 2021, shortly before the parliamentary election in which the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won a supermajority of seats. The proclamation of the referendum was preceded by the adoption of changes to the law on referendum and people's initiative, which was initially supposed to get implemented shortly after the enactment of the 2006 constitution. The law, which was met with opposition from non-governmental organisations and activists, abolished the 50% turnout that was required for referendums to be considered valid. President Aleksandar Vučić amended the law following the escalation of environmental protests in December 2021.
Proposed changes included the elimination of several offices, expansion of the public prosecutor's office into a collective body, and changes regarding the election of judges. Government officials stated their support for such changes, while the opposition remained divided; most stated their objection to the referendum while some even called for a boycott or for the referendum to be postponed. The "yes" option prevailed over the "no" option in the referendum, although turnout was reported to be the lowest since 1990, at only 30% of voters in total. Non-governmental organisations reported irregularities at polling stations, and had also claimed voter fraud. Constitutional changes were adopted by the National Assembly on 9 February.
## Background and timeline
In January 2020, state secretary Radomir Ilić called for the constitution to be changed to adopt "external control", which would give powers to the president of Serbia to appoint and remove judges. This statement was met with opposition from several former judges, who claimed it would weaken the principle of judicial independence. The justice ministry claimed that "external control would be controlled by citizens through the election of members of the High Judicial Council", while Ilić stated that "external control isn't political". This suggestion wasn't implemented in the end.
In the 2020 parliamentary election, the ruling Serbian Progressive Party won a supermajority of seats in the National Assembly amidst a boycott by major opposition parties. Soon after, the government of Serbia submitted a constitutional amendment to the National Assembly. The desire to implement these changes was first expressed by the government back in 2011. The implementation of said changes was planned for 2017 in the National Strategy for Judicial Reform, which was adopted by the National Assembly in 2013, and by the government in 2015. According to the document, Serbia was supposed to finish the amendments to the text of the constitution by the end of 2016. On 3 December 2020, the National Assembly adopted the proposal for the change of the constitution. Another proposal for amendment of the constitution was sent to the parliament in late April 2021, and it was accepted on 7 June 2021.
### Referendum law
The law on referendum and people's initiative, which had been on the waiting list since the implementation of the 2006 constitution, was adopted by the National Assembly on 11 November 2021. It was mainly criticised by non-governmental organisations and opposition politicians due to the abolishment of the 50% turnout for a referendum to pass, and the possibility of abusing the law on cases such as Rio Tinto. The law was passed by the National Assembly on 25 November 2021, and signed by Vučić on the same day. Following the escalation of environmental protests in late November, demonstrators demanded the law on referendum to be repealed. Vučić announced on 8 December that he would amend the law, and on 10 December, the National Assembly passed the amendments.
## Conduct
The right to vote in a referendum in Serbia is held by citizens who, in accordance with the regulations on elections, reside in a territory for which the referendum is being called, and are registered in the voter list. Referendums can't be held during a state of emergency or martial law. Citizens vote via the secret ballot method.
The government of Kosovo declined to organise the referendum in its territory, although it was later revealed that the government of Serbia didn't request the referendum to be held there. Prime Minister Albin Kurti stated that "the referendum won't be held on Kosovo's territory", and that the Assembly of Kosovo would instead debate on 15 January whether the referendum should be held in Kosovo. The Assembly then unanimously passed a resolution which rejected holding the referendum on its territory. Serbian citizens from Kosovo were restricted to vote by mail or through the Serbian Liaison Office, although the Republic Election Commission (RIK) later announced that they would be able to vote in Kuršumlija, Raška, Vranje, and Novi Pazar. Serbian government officials stated that "it's not a surprise [to us]" and claimed that Kurti allegedly "harasses Serbs", while the pro-SNS Serb List organised a minor protest.
The Serbian diaspora also had the right to vote, although this time, only in eleven countries including Kosovo.
## Proposed changes
The government of Serbia had committed itself to these constitutional changes in the process of joining the European Union. After several delays, the changes were first presented in a document in December 2020. For the proposed changes to be implemented, a referendum was required to take place. The president of the National Assembly Ivica Dačić stated that in case of early elections, the referendum should be held before elections. Initially, the referendum was supposed to be held in fall of 2021, although on 30 November, Dačić announced that the referendum would be held on 16 January.
After the adoption of constitutional changes, the National Assembly would have less influence on the election of certain judicial factors, such as the president of the Supreme Court of Cassation, court presidents, public prosecutors, judges, and deputy public prosecutors. The National Assembly would then only elect four members of the High Judicial Council, High Prosecutorial Council, and the Supreme Public Prosecutor office. The High Judicial Council would instead get a more important role by electing all judges, while the High Prosecutorial Council would elect prosecutors. The Supreme Court of Cassation's name would also be changed to the "Supreme Court" and its work would be more regulated.
Five members of the High Council of Prosecutors would be elected by public prosecutors, four by the National Assembly on the proposal of the competent committee by a two-thirds majority, while the Supreme Public Prosecutor and Minister of Justice will be ex officio members. Judges who would take the office for the first time have a term of three years, although with these changes term limits would be abolished, and the judges would instead serve until their retirement or dismissal. The amendments also envisage the "ban on political activities of judges", and that the High Judicial Council would be an independent body that would ensure the independence of courts, judges, court presidents and lay judges. It would consist eleven members in total of which six judges would be elected by already-picked judges, four lawyers would be elected by the National Assembly, and the president of the Supreme Court. The lawyers would have to have at least 10 years of experience to be elected. The most powerful public prosecutor's office would become the Supreme Public Prosecutor's office, a collective body of all prosecutors that would be elected by the National Assembly for six years. The head of the prosecutor's office will have the possibility of issuing orders to the remaining prosecutors, but there will also be legal remedies against the authority they possess, which will exclude the possibility of abuse.
The question on the referendum paper was posed as "Are you in favor of confirming the act on changing the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia?" (Serbian Cyrillic: Да ли сте за потврђивање акта о промени Устава Републике Србије?, romanized: Da li ste za potvrđivanje akta o promeni Ustava Republike Srbije).
## Reception
Analysts had concluded that the turnout and success of the referendum were equally important for the government, but that due to the April general elections, the campaign for the constitutional changes would be restrained. Experts also noted that "the changes are good and crucial, although a possibility of abuse still exists". The European Union, including the governments of the France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and United States welcomed the referendum. Additionally, Josep Borrell had called Kosovo to allow the collection of votes on its territory under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
### "Yes" campaign
Aleksandar Vučić stated that "if the referendum doesn't pass, European integrations will stop for one year", while Ivica Dačić expressed his hope for the referendum to pass. On 11 January, Vučić called for citizens to vote on the referendum, and said that he would vote for the "yes" option. Prime minister Ana Brnabić also stated her support for the "yes" option, as did political parties such as the Socialist Party of Serbia, Party of United Pensioners of Serbia, United Serbia, Justice and Reconciliation Party, and the Social Democratic Party of Serbia.
The incumbent justice minister Maja Popović, who participated in the talks and the formation of the final document, was also supportive of such changes. The Venice Commission also stated their support, and that the changes were met with most of their recommendations. Lawyer Milan Antonijević also expressed his support for the referendum.
### "No" campaign
Some members of the National Assembly that were a part of the ruling parties, such as Vladimir Đukanović (SNS) and Toma Fila (SPS), voiced their opposition to the constitutional changes, as well as opposition MPs Shaip Kamberi and Vladan Glišić. Non-parliamentary parties also stated their dissatisfaction such as the Movement of Free Citizens, Do not let Belgrade drown, Together for Serbia, League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, Social Democratic Party, New Party, Civic Democratic Forum, and Serbian Party Oathkeepers. The Democratic Party of Serbia and POKS also voiced their opposition to such changes, and called for citizens to vote "no" on the referendum. Political activists Srđan Škoro, Đorđe Vukadinović, and Boris Malagurski also stated their support for the "no" option, including several university professors.
Enough is Enough and Healthy Serbia stated their opposition to the referendum. On 30 November they formed the "Souverainist bloc", and shortly after they began their campaign. In December 2021, historian Čedomir Antić and anti-vax activist Jovana Stojković joined their campaign. They had claimed that if the referendum passes, Rio Tinto would allegedly appoint their "team of judges" that would overturn any decision that is in their interest, and that the judiciary would lose all of its power. They also claimed that "George Soros is behind the referendum". Dveri and Serbian Radical Party officials also stated that citizens should vote "no", and that "Serbia should not obey the demands of the European Union".
Miroslav Parović, the leader of the People's Freedom Movement, and the Liberation Movement, led by Mlađan Đorđević, had instead called for the referendum to be postponed. The Party of Freedom and Justice, Democratic Party, and Party of Democratic Action of Sandžak had called for boycott, while the People's Party stated their opposition to constitutional changes, although some individuals like Miroslav Aleksić and Vuk Jeremić were in favour of boycott, while Vladimir Gajić and Sanda Rašković Ivić had stated to vote for the "no" option.
### Overall positions
### Opinion polls
### Debates
## Results
Polling stations were opened from 07:00 (UTC+01:00) to 20:00, and there were 6,510,233 registered voters in total. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Serbia and due to the increase in the number of infected, epidemiological measures were applied at polling stations. According to RIK, voters that were infected with COVID-19 were able to vote in front of their front door in an indirect contact with the voting assistant.
According to RIK, the "no" option prevailed in major cities such as Belgrade, Niš, and Novi Sad. Additionally, in the diaspora, a majority of voters voted against the proposed changes. Voting was repeated at nine polling stations on 23 January, while on 2 February voting was repeated at one polling station in Voždovac. Official results were published on 4 February.
## Aftermath
CeSID had initially reported no major incidents during the first couple of hours, although later through the day irregularities and incidents occurred at polling stations. CRTA, a non-governmental organisation, stated that "a great unpreparedness of polling boards was noticed". It was reported that a non-registered voter was allowed to cast their vote. Former MP Srđan Nogo broke a ballot box after voting, and was arrested and detained soon after. Later that day, a group of activists from the "1 of 5 million" organisation were issued a warrant after they had tried to enter the building of Republic Electoral Commission. In Vršac, it was reported that the members of the Election Committee were recording the voters. In some cities across Serbia, it was also reported that members of Election Committees were signing voters that did not vote. In Novi Pazar, where 88% of the voters voted for the "yes" option, irregularities were reported in multiple polling stations across the city.
Shortly after 22:00 (UTC+01:00), Vučić announced "preliminary results" during a conference in which he stated that 60.48% votes went for the "yes" option while 39.52% went to "no". During the conference, official preliminary results were still not available to the public. He had also stated that in Belgrade 54% votes went to the "no" option. On 18 January, Vučić stated that "SNS is most capable of calculating results". According to CRTA, 29.6% of eligible voters cast their vote with "yes" winning 57.4% of the votes and "no" winning 41.6% votes. At one polling station, turnout was reported to be 100%.
The referendum turnout was initially reported to be 3.6% at 10:00, a third of the turnout seen in the 2020 parliamentary election at the same hour. The turnout was reported to be the lowest one since the re-introduction of parliamentarism in 1990. Several parties and movements such as Dveri, Enough is Enough, and 1 of 5 million had accused the government of electoral fraud. Protests which were organised by Dveri, Serbian Party Oathkeepers, Healthy Serbia, and POKS were held a day later after the referendum in front of the building of RIK. MP Vladan Glišić submitted a objection to RIK, in which he claimed that votes were falsified in 3,393 polling stations. The objection was rejected by RIK.
The V-Dem Institute, an independent research institute, concluded the previous year that Serbia could be categorised as an electoral autocracy. The institute had also concluded that its standards of judiciary and electoral integrity had declined in the past ten years. Analysts had concluded during the aftermath that "the results of the referendum show that there is a potential for change, but also a potential bait for the opposition", and that "the government interpreted the results more as their victory and less as a referendum solution to judiciary issues". Some had also stated that "the results of the referendum suits both the government and the opposition", and that the "record low turnout raised the question of the legitimacy of constitutional changes". The National Assembly adopted the constitutional changes on 9 February. In the general elections, which were held in April 2022, Vučić won a majority of votes in the presidential election, while his Serbian Progressive Party lost its parliamentary majority. Non-governmental organisations had reported that electoral irregularities had also occurred during the election day.
### Reactions
Prime minister Brnabić congratulated citizens and added that "for the first time in recent history, Serbia will get an independent judiciary". European Union representatives had welcomed the changes. Olivér Várhelyi stated that "the voters in Serbia supported the change of the constitution to strengthen the independence of the judiciary". On 25 January, Brnabić met with EU representatives to discuss about the continuation of judiciary reforms.
Miloš Jovanović and Pavle Grbović, presidents of the Democratic Party of Serbia and Movement of Free Citizens respectively, had stated that "SNS was defeated in the referendum" and had pointed out that "control of polling stations will be of key importance for the 3 April elections". The Do not let Belgrade drown movement stated that "future changes are possible to happen". Đorđe Vukadinović stated that "the level of turnout was expected due to low public interest" and that "it is a relative victory for citizens who have shown the strength that both the government and opposition must count on". Political scientist Cvijetin Milivojević stated that "the government nor the opposition won, but that the citizens lost instead".
|
862,594 |
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
| 1,166,073,997 |
1901 book by Beatrix Potter
|
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"British children's books",
"British picture books",
"Children's books about rabbits and hares",
"Children's books adapted into films",
"Children's books adapted into television shows",
"Frederick Warne & Co books",
"Peter Rabbit"
] |
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter that follows mischievous and disobedient young Peter Rabbit as he gets into, and is chased around, the garden of Mr. McGregor. He escapes and returns home to his mother, who puts him to bed after offering him chamomile tea. The tale was written for five-year-old Noel Moore, the son of Potter's former governess, Annie Carter Moore, in 1893. It was revised and privately printed by Potter in 1901 after several publishers' rejections, but was printed in a trade edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902. The book was a success, and multiple reprints were issued in the years immediately following its debut. It has been translated into 36 languages, and with 45 million copies sold it is one of the best-selling books in history.
Since its release, the book has generated considerable merchandise for both children and adults, including toys, dishes, foods, clothing, and videos. Potter was one of the first to be responsible for such merchandise when she patented a Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and followed it almost immediately with a Peter Rabbit board game. Peter Rabbit has remained popular amongst children for more than a century and continues to be adapted into new book editions, television programmes, and films.
Scholars of literature have commented on themes in the book, such as its radical quality, Peter Rabbit's rebellious nature, and the story's ruthlessness, stating that these offer readers a chance to imagine going to similar extremes.
## Context
In 1893, Beatrix Potter heard that the 5-year-old son of a friend, Annie Moore, was convalescing after scarlet fever. Potter decided to entertain the boy, Noel, with an illustrated letter. With her pet rabbit named Peter Piper in mind, she wrote a very short story "about four little rabbits", and illustrated it in the letter. Further letters about other animals followed, until in 1900, Annie Moore proposed to Potter that the illustrated letters could be made into books.
## Plot
The story focuses on Peter, a young rabbit, and his family. Peter’s mother, Mrs. Rabbit, intends to go shopping for the day and allows Peter and her other three children, Peter’s sisters: Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail to go playing. She tells them they can go anywhere they like, but not to enter the vegetable garden of an old man named Mr. McGregor, whose wife, Mrs. McGregor, put their father in a pie after he entered and got caught by Mr. McGregor. Peter's three younger sisters obediently stay away from Mr. McGregor’s garden, choosing to go down the lane and gather blackberries, but Peter enters Mr. McGregor’s garden in the hopes of eating some vegetables.
Peter eats more than is good for him and goes looking for parsley to cure his stomach ache. Peter is seen by Mr. McGregor, who chases Peter. Peter gets caught in a net and three friendly sparrows comfort him. Peter manages to escape Mr. McGregor just in time, but loses his blue jacket and shoes while running off. He hides in a greenhouse, ultimately jumping into a watering can for protection. Unfortunately there is water inside the watering can so Peter gets wet and sneezes, alerting Mr. McGregor. When Mr. McGregor gets tired running after Peter and resumes his work, Peter tries to escape, but is completely lost in the huge garden. Peter tries getting a young mouse to help him, however she is collecting food for her family and cannot help. Peter also notices a cat sitting by a pond. Peter considers asking for directions, but ultimately decides not to, having been warned about cats by his cousin. However, Peter sees that Mr. McGregor is "gone" and it buys him some time to escape to the gate. Peter sees from a distance the gate where he entered the garden and heads for it, despite being noticed and chased by Mr. McGregor again. With difficulty, he wriggles under the gate, and escapes from the garden. His abandoned clothing is used by Mr. McGregor to dress a scarecrow.
After returning home late, a sick Peter is reprimanded by his mother for losing his shoes and his jacket (the second jacket and shoes he has lost in a fortnight). Peter’s mother puts him to bed early without supper. To cure his stomach-ache, Mrs. Rabbit gives Peter a teaspoon of chamomile tea. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail, meanwhile, enjoy a delicious dinner of milk, bread and blackberries.
## Characters
- Peter - Peter is a naughty rabbit who disobeys his mother. (He is the eldest of the four little rabbits.)
- Flopsy - Flopsy is Peter's sister who is a good rabbit. (She is the second youngest the four siblings.)
- Mopsy - Mopsy is a rabbit and Peter's sister who always obeys her mother. (She is the second oldest of the four.)
- Cotton-tail - Cotton-tail is a sweet rabbit and Peter's sibling. As her name says, she is soft as cotton. (She is the youngest of the four.)
- Mr. McGregor - Mr. McGregor owns a beautiful garden that is filled with delicious fruits and vegetables. Peter's father was put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor.
## Publication history
The Tale of Peter Rabbit was first published in the United Kingdom by Frederick Warne & Co. as a small hardback book in October 1901; Potter created both the text and the illustrations. The first edition had a print run of 250, with monochrome illustrations. Warne published the first full-colour edition in 1902. The blocks for the illustrations and text were sent to the printer Edmund Evans for engraving, and Potter adjusted the page proofs. The book was soon on sale in shops in London, including Harrods department store, accompanied by the world's first licensed character, a soft toy of Peter Rabbit. By December 1903 the book had sold 50,000 copies. The book's success prompted Warne to obtain more stories from Potter, starting in 1903 with both The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
The book has since been reprinted many times, and after 100 years had never gone out of print. Warne did not copyright the book when it was published in the United States; unlicensed editions of the book were produced, the first published by Henry Altemus Company in 1904. The book has been translated into 36 languages. Over 45 million copies have been sold, making it one of the best-selling books in history.
## Reception
Scholars have identified a variety of themes in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Eliza Dresang suggests that the book is "radical" in multiple ways. The first of these is its child-centred size, easy to hold. It is radical, too, in its nonlinear quality, with the images not immediately beside the text they illustrate (and sometimes before that text), and with sentences that often start with the result, and end with the actor, as in "But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr. McGregor!" The meaning, too, has more than one layer, not least in the dressed animals, which are at once experienced by the reader as animals and as humans. And the book's start, with the death of Peter Rabbit's father, is a radical innovation for a book for small children.
Katie Mullins describes Peter's rebellious nature, which is seen in the book's first dialogue, when Mrs. Rabbit forbids Peter to go into Mr. McGregor's garden. Mullins comments that the garden is stated to be dangerous, as it is where Peter's father met his death. She cites Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott's description of Peter as a "naughty boy who values his independence and whose desire to transgress boundaries far outweighs his mother’s warnings or his personal safety".
Judith Robertson and colleagues examine the element of ruthlessness in the story. In their view, Peter Rabbit's qualities such as ruthlessness and defiance allow Potter to speak of her own self-knowledge; this serves both as an outlet for a woman in the strict Victorian era, and as a place for her young readers to imagine going to similar extremes.
School Library Journal included the book at \#19 on their Top 100 Picture Books list in 2012.
## Adaptations
### Merchandising
Potter asserted her tales would one day be nursery classics, and part of the "longevity of her books comes from strategy", writes Potter biographer Ruth MacDonald. She was the first to exploit the commercial possibilities of her characters and tales; between 1903 and 1905 these included a Peter Rabbit stuffed toy, an unpublished board game, and nursery wallpaper.
### Book
The scholar Margaret Mackey writes that Warne was still attempting to prevent other publishers from printing The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1993, despite the failure to protect the copyright 90 years earlier. In her view "the battle has clearly been lost", as multiple editions and formats exist in North America, and some "even in Britain" where the book was still protected at that time. Some use both Potter's words and her illustrations, though sometimes too small to read. Warne itself has issued a large-format book, The Complete Adventures of Peter Rabbit, printing several of the original pages "as panels on a larger page". Mackey comments that this at once loses the subtlety of the original's layout and book design. In 1989, Warne further printed Scenes from The Tale of Peter Rabbit with "five three-dimensional cut-out pictures from the book, tagged with quotations from the story." Among the seemingly-pirated editions, one by Ottenheimer Publishers in 1993 printed only a selection of the illustrations with the text, with larger but fewer pages. In Mackey's view, "this version is simply an example of diminishment and loss", as the rhythm of the original is dislocated. Other editions dispense with Potter's text altogether, using a selection of her illustrations. One such is Warne's Meet Peter Rabbit, a board book for babies with five pictures inside and one on the front cover, along with Beatrix Potter's name. The text "barely mention[s] Mr. McGregor."
### Film
In 1938, shortly after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney became interested in making an animated film based on The Tale of Peter Rabbit. However, in a letter to a friend, Potter wrote that she refused Walt Disney's "scheme to film Peter Rabbit", saying, "I am not very hopeful about the result. They propose to use cartoons; it seems that a succession of figures can be joggled together to give an impression of motion. I don't think the pictures would be satisfactory... I am not troubling myself about it!"
In 1935, the story was loosely adapted in the Merrie Melodies short film, Country Boy. It shows some modifications in relation to Beatrix Potter's original story, most notably the Rabbit family surname is changed to "Cottontail" and Peter having two brothers and a sister rather than 3 sisters. In 1971, Peter Rabbit appeared as a character in the ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter. In late 1991, HBO aired an animated musical adaptation of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, narrated by Carol Burnett, as part of the network's Storybook Musicals series, which was later released to VHS by Family Home Entertainment under HBO licence. In 1992, the tale was adapted to animation again for the BBC anthology series, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, along with The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. In 2006, Peter Rabbit was heavily referenced in a biopic about Beatrix Potter entitled Miss Potter. In December 2012, a new CGI-animated children's TV series titled Peter Rabbit premiered on Nickelodeon, with a full series run beginning in February 2013.
In February 2018, a 3D live-action/CGI animated feature film titled Peter Rabbit, directed by Will Gluck, was released. Voice roles were played by James Corden, Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie, and Elizabeth Debicki, and live action roles played by Domhnall Gleeson, Rose Byrne, and Sam Neill. A sequel was released in 2021.
|
1,849,758 |
Mickie James
| 1,173,307,517 |
American professional wrestler and country singer
|
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"1979 births",
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"21st-century American women singers",
"21st-century female professional wrestlers",
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"LGBT characters in professional wrestling",
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"Professional wrestling managers and valets",
"Sportspeople from Richmond, Virginia",
"TNA/Impact Knockouts World Champions",
"Virginia Republicans",
"WWE Divas Champions",
"WWF/WWE Women's Champions"
] |
Mickie Laree James (born August 31, 1979) is an American professional wrestler and country singer. She is currently signed to Impact Wrestling, where she was a five-time Impact Knockouts World Champion. She is best known for her tenures in WWE and in National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
James began her wrestling career in 1999 as a valet on the independent circuit, where she was known under the name Alexis Laree. She trained in several camps to improve her wrestling abilities before working for NWA: Total Nonstop Action (NWA: TNA, later Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, now Impact Wrestling) in 2002, where she gained national attention. After only a few appearances, she joined a stable called The Gathering and was written into storylines with the group. She is the only woman to be involved in the promotion's Clockwork Orange House of Fun matches.
James made her World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) main roster debut in 2005 and was placed in a storyline with Trish Stratus, in which James' gimmick was that of Stratus' biggest fan turned obsessed stalker, an angle which ran over eight months. She received a push and she won her first WWE Women's Championship at WrestleMania 22, a title she has held a total of five times. James also won her first Divas Championship defeating Maryse Ouellet at Night of Champions in 2009, to become the second of five Divas to hold both the Women's and Divas titles. She is one of only five women who have held six or more WWE women's championships, the others being Charlotte Flair, Trish Stratus, Becky Lynch & Sasha Banks. She was released from the company in April 2010, after which she returned to TNA, where she became a three-time TNA Knockouts Champion. James returned to WWE in 2013 as a guest trainer, then officially returned in 2016 before she was once again released in 2021. James would then make occasional appearances from then and would ultimately return to Impact Wrestling in 2021, winning her fourth and fifth Knockouts Championship, making James a total 11-time women's world champion between WWE and Impact.
## Early life
James was born at Richmond Memorial Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Stuart James, a retired wastewater-treatment worker, landscaper, and VAIL League Division 3 Championship coach and Sandra Knuckles, a teacher and real-estate agent. Her parents divorced while she was young. She has a sister, a half-sister, a half-brother, and three stepbrothers. She grew up in Montpelier, Virginia, and graduated from Patrick Henry High School in 1997. While growing up, she spent a lot of time on her grandmother's horse farm, and developed a keen interest in equestrian sports. She played violin for five years. James is part Native American of the Powhatan tribe.
## Professional wrestling career
### Independent circuit (1999–2003)
A fan of professional wrestling from an early age, James attended a professional wrestling school in the Washington, D.C., area at the suggestion of a friend. She made her professional debut on the independent circuit on 28 August 1999, as a valet for KYDA Pro Wrestling under the ring name Alexis Laree, a name created as the result of a combination of her stage name from when she was a dancer and her middle name. Laree went on to manage several male wrestlers, including managing Tommy Dreamer to win the KYDA Pro Heavyweight Championship. In March, she wrestled in her first match, an intergender tag team match with Jake Damian against American Mike Brown and Candie. She trained to improve her wrestling abilities by attending training camps such as the Funking Conservatory, a workshop run by Dory Funk Jr., and an Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) dojo. She also started competing for Maryland Championship Wrestling (MCW), where she trained at camps run by Ricky Morton and Bobby Eaton. Beginning in 2002, she also made appearances for Ring of Honor.
Due to the low salary of the independent shows, James supplemented her income by working as a waitress at an Olive Garden restaurant, and posing nude for adult fetish magazines Leg Show and Naughty Neighbors in the early 2000s, before gaining fame and being subsequently signed by World Wrestling Entertainment in 2003.
### Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2002–2003)
While working in Ring of Honor for a year, James also debuted as Alexis Laree in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) on the company's first ever weekly pay-per-view, introduced as a participant in the lingerie battle royal, which occurred the following week. She was not prominently featured until March 26, 2003, when she teamed with Amazing Red as part of his feud against the X Division Champion Kid Kash and Trinity. Laree competed in her first singles match with the promotion on April 2, 2003, in a losing effort against Trinity. Weeks later, she became the first member of The Gathering, a stable led by Raven in his feud against NWA World Heavyweight Champion Jeff Jarrett. On April 16, Laree became the first (and thus far, only) woman to compete in a Clockwork Orange House of Fun match, after the Gathering challenged and defeated Jarrett. She continued to wrestle with the stable while they feuded with The Disciples of the New Church, taking part in an angle with Father James Mitchell burning her with a fireball and wrestling in another Clockwork Orange House of Fun match before leaving the company.
### World Wrestling Entertainment
#### Ohio Valley Wrestling (2003–2005)
After two years of sending tapes and making phone calls as well as wrestling a tryout dark match with Dawn Marie, James was signed to a developmental contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), who sent her to train at Ohio Valley Wrestling (OVW), their then-developmental territory, in August 2003. Still using the ring name Alexis Laree, she began making television appearances for OVW on January 29, 2004, and competed in several tag team matches throughout the year. She also won a Halloween costume contest on October 30, and defeated Jillian Hall in a \$1,000 match on November 12.
On May 17, 2005, Laree was placed into a tournament for the OVW Television Championship. She defeated Mike Mondo in the first round, only to lose to Blaster Lashley in the next round. She began a feud with Beth Phoenix on July 20 after Phoenix interrupted Laree during an interview, setting up a match on July 29, which Laree lost. Their angle continued into September, with Shelly Martinez being added to the storyline to side with Phoenix against Laree. On October 12, she appeared in OVW under her real name, and finished the year on the losing end of matches against Martinez and Jillian Hall.
#### Storyline with Trish Stratus (2005–2006)
Under her real name, she debuted in WWE on the October 10, 2005, episode of Raw as a face under the gimmick of WWE Women's Champion Trish Stratus' biggest fan. The angle had the two Divas competing together in tag team matches, with James' character becoming increasingly obsessed with Stratus. The storyline included a Halloween costume contest, in which James was dressed like Stratus and helped Stratus retain the Women's Championship in a Fulfill Your Fantasy battle royal at Taboo Tuesday by eliminating herself and Victoria at the same time. James even began utilizing Stratus' signature finishing moves as her own during matches. James later became the number one contender for the WWE Women's Championship on December 12, by defeating Victoria in a match to determine who would face Stratus at New Year's Revolution. Subsequently, the storyline between Mickie and Stratus developed into a lesbian angle, after James kissed Stratus under a sprig of mistletoe. In the championship match at the pay-per-view, James lost to Stratus.
Despite the defeat, James continued to be enamored of Stratus, which made Stratus uncomfortable. On March 6, 2006, the storyline had Stratus confronting James, telling her that they needed time apart from each other. Through the early part of 2006, Mickie would attack Ashley Massaro several times due to Massaro calling her "crazy". At the Royal Rumble pay-per-view, James defeated Massaro with then-Women's Champion, Trish Stratus, as the special guest referee. James would also confess her love for Stratus at the event. Massaro got revenge one week later on Raw.
James and Stratus teamed together at the March 18, 2006 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXII to defeat Candice Michelle and Victoria. After the match, James agreed to honor Stratus' wishes and attempted to kiss her. After Stratus pushed her away, James attacked Stratus and vowed to destroy her, turned heel in the process. The feud between James and Stratus culminated in a Women's Championship match at WrestleMania 22, which James won, to earn her first Women's Championship in what was looked at as one of the best female matches ever produced at WrestleMania. Her angle with Stratus continued into Backlash during a rematch, after Stratus legitimately dislocated her shoulder when James threw her out of the ring. The feud would come to an end on the June 26 episode of Raw, when Mickie defeated Stratus in a Women's Championship match.
#### Women's Champion (2006–2008)
James dropped the WWE Women's Championship on August 14 to Lita, after Lita hit James with the title belt. After the Women's Championship was vacated due to the retirement of Trish Stratus, James entered a tournament to determine the new champion. She defeated Victoria and Melina en route to the finals at Cyber Sunday, where she lost to Lita. James transitioned into a face after she and Lita wrestled in a series of matches in which Lita chose stipulations to hinder Mickie's wrestling ability. The feud between James and Lita ended at Survivor Series, where James defeated Lita, in the latter's retirement match, to win her second Women's Championship.
James then began an angle with Melina on January 29, 2007, when Melina became the number one contender for the Women's Championship. Following a successful title defense on February 5, James teamed with Super Crazy in a mixed tag team match against Melina and Johnny Nitro. After Melina pinned James for the victory, she challenged her to a rematch for the title. James would subsequently lose the Women's Championship to Melina on February 19 and, in continuation of their storyline feud, failed to regain the title during the first women's Falls Count Anywhere match in WWE history. During the finish of the match, James fell from the top turnbuckle and landed on her neck, which resulted in a rushed finish. James, however, was not seriously injured in the incident.
The scripted feud between James and Melina was rekindled during her photo op on Raw. At a house show in Paris on April 24, James won her third Women's Championship during a triple threat match that also involved Victoria. Since Mickie pinned Victoria and not Melina, an immediate rematch was scheduled, in which James dropped the title back to Melina, giving her the shortest Women's Championship reign in WWE history. James later received a rematch for the title at Backlash, but was unsuccessful. After Backlash, James would only make sporadic appearances on television, wrestling occasionally in tag-matches and rarely in singles competition. On the November 26 episode of Raw, James defeated Melina in a number one contender's match for Beth Phoenix's Women's Championship, setting up a title match between the two at Armageddon, in which Phoenix retained the title.
On the April 14, 2008, episode of Raw, held in London, England, James defeated Beth Phoenix to win her fourth Women's Championship. At Judgment Day, James successfully defended her title against Melina and Beth Phoenix in a triple-threat match. Mickie re-entered the feud against Phoenix in mid-2008, where she and Kofi Kingston teamed up against Phoenix and Santino Marella at SummerSlam in a Winner Takes All tag team match for both the Women's and Intercontinental Championships, in which Mickie and Kingston lost their titles to Phoenix and Marella. After James lost the championship, she had two rematches for the title, but was unsuccessful in regaining it. At Survivor Series in November, James was part of the victorious Raw Diva team which defeated the SmackDown Divas in a five-on-five elimination match; she eliminated Michelle McCool, before being eliminated by Maryse. The following month at Armageddon, James teamed with Maria, Michelle McCool and Kelly Kelly in a winning effort against Jillian Hall, Maryse, Victoria and Natalya.
#### Divas and Women's Champion and departure (2009–2010)
Following an appearance in the 25-Diva battle royal at WrestleMania XXV, James began feuding with the WWE Divas Champion Maryse heading into Night of Champions on July 26. At the event, James defeated Maryse to win her first Divas Championship, becoming only the second Diva in history to have held both the Women's and Divas titles. Throughout the Summer, Mickie successfully defended the title against Gail Kim and Beth Phoenix on episodes of Raw, and against Alicia Fox at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view on October 4. Two weeks later on Raw, James lost the title to Jillian Hall after an approximate three month title reign. After the show, James was traded to the SmackDown brand for the first time in her career, due to a Diva trade made by Raw guest host Nancy O'Dell.
James made her debut with the brand on the October 23 episode of SmackDown, defeating Layla. On the October 30 episode of SmackDown, a controversial angle began that saw WWE Women's Champion Michelle McCool and Layla, collectively known as LayCool, bully James. On the November 20 episode of SmackDown, after James defeated Layla, McCool gave James the nickname "Piggy James", that sent James to tears, resulting in a five-on-five Survivor Series match at the November pay-per-view Survivor Series, where James' team prevailed over McCool's team, with James and Melina as the sole survivors. On the December 4 episode of SmackDown, James became the number one contender for McCool's Women's Championship by defeating Beth Phoenix and Natalya in a triple threat match. The following week, James challenged McCool for the championship at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, but was unsuccessful after interference from Layla. On the January 22 edition of Smackdown, another controversial segment in the feud took place when Laycool beatdown James, force-fed her a pig shaped cake and dumped a bowl of punch on her head, leaving her sobbing and defeated in the ring. The storyline feud continued into the Royal Rumble on January 31, 2010, where James finally defeated McCool in 20 seconds to become a five-time Women's Champion, the second most reigns with the old WWE Women's Championship after Trish Stratus, who has had 7 reigns. Over the following couple of weeks, SmackDown consultant Vickie Guerrero was introduced into the rivalry, choosing to side with LayCool over James. On the February 26 episode of SmackDown, McCool used her rematch clause to face James for the Women's Championship, with Guerrero acting as special guest referee. After Guerrero slapped James, McCool pinned her to regain the title.
On March, James was diagnosed with a staph infection on her right knee, putting her out of action for three weeks. She returned on the March 22 episode of Raw, where alongside Kelly Kelly, she accompanied Eve Torres, Beth Phoenix, and Gail Kim in their losing effort against McCool, Maryse and Layla, who had Vickie Guerrero and Alicia Fox in their corner. This set up a 10-Diva tag team match at WrestleMania XXVI, in which James made an unsuccessful in-ring return after Vickie pinned Kelly. James made her last appearance on Raw during a rematch, where her team was victorious. James' final match in WWE aired on the April 23 episode of SmackDown where she teamed with former long-time rival Beth Phoenix against LayCool in a losing effort when she was pinned by Layla. James was released from WWE one day earlier on April 22, having pre-taped her SmackDown match. According to James, WWE explained the decision as due to desiring to "move in a new direction with their women's division".
Sporadic appearances (2013)
In November 2013, James served as guest trainer at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida, for a week, training NXT's female wrestlers. James also attended that week's NXT live event in Tampa, Florida.
### Return to the independent circuit (2010–2016)
James made her return to the independent circuit in April 2010, as part of World Wrestling Council (WWC), teaming with Carlito to defeat the team of ODB and Christopher Daniels. James won the bout after pinning Daniels. On July 11, as part of their Anniversary weekend, she defeated ODB in a singles match. On the last day of that month, James returned to one of her early promotions, Maryland Championship Wrestling (MCW), to wrestle Mia Yim in a winning effort. The following month, she contested for the Women Superstars Uncensored (WSU) Championship against Mercedes Martinez, but she was unsuccessful. She also returned to Dory Funk's promotion, recording a tag team match for !Bang! TV. James also accompanied Dory Funk Jr. during his match, and sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" during !Bang! TV's tribute to the troops. On September 18, James served as a special guest referee for a three-way match between ODB, Persephone and Kristin Flake for the SCWA Ladies' Title during Southern California Wrestling Association's (SCWA) CAGED event in Wentworth, North Carolina, where all matches took place in a cage.
In early 2011, James began appearing for Covey Promotions. At All or Nothing 5 on April 30, James defeated Hannah Blossom to become the first Covey Pro Women's Champion. During her time with TNA, James made several appearances for independent wrestling promotions such as Pro Championship Wrestling, Legends of the Ring, Northeast Wrestling and National Wrestling Superstars. On November 11, 2011, James lost the Covey Pro Women's Championship to the debuting Jessie Belle Smothers.
James made her debut for Pro Wrestling Elite (PWE) in Ayr, Scotland on September 15, 2012, at History Is Born, where she wrestled Kay Lee Ray to a no contest. After the match, James teamed up with Ray in a winning effort against Carmel and Nikki Storm. The following night, James competed against Carmel in a winning effort. James returned to Pro Wrestling Elite at their two-year anniversary event Elite Bro on July 20, 2013, in a winning effort against Nikki Storm. On September 21, James made an appearance at the Wrestling Spectacular 2 all-female event in Edison, New Jersey, alongside many former WWE and TNA female wrestlers, such as Angelina Love, Katarina Waters, Rosita and Brooke Adams. James and Love fought in the main event, with Candice Michelle as the special guest referee, where Love pinned James after interference from Velvet Sky. James made appearances for Big Time Wrestling in August 2013, doing so as a villainess wrestling Reby Sky several times in different dates and locations, winning in all bouts against Sky. On October 12, Mickie again appeared for the promotion, beating Quebec's Midianne in Bristol, Connecticut. On February 8, 2014, James returned to Maryland Championship Wrestling for the Anniversary 2014 event in Joppa, Maryland, to face Angelina Love, promoted as "Battle of the Bombshells". Although originally promoted as a singles match, interference by MCW's Renee Michelles' and Jessie Kayes' rivalry occurred during the match, resulting in the match being turned into a tag team match with Mickie and Michelle facing Angelina and Kayes, which James and Michelle won.
On April 25, 2014, at the Berkeley Springs High School theater in West Virginia, James headlined the Covey Promotion 3rd Annual Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony, as she was inducted into the Covey Pro Hall Of Hame Class of 2014. The next day, during the All or Nothing 8! event which was aired on May 17 as the 154th episode of Covey Pro TV, James was interrupted during an interview by Amber Rodriguez, who mocked James on her legitimate pregnancy and gave her a pie as a tease, and in return, James shoved the pie in Amber's face. Jessie Belle Smothers came to the rescue and battled Rodriguez as James was escorted out by security. Two months after giving birth to her child, James returned to in-ring competition at Queens Of Combat 3 on November 30, where she defeated Tessa Blanchard after turning heel during the match and resorting to villainous tactics. On May 16, James debuted for First State Championship Wrestling (1CW) unsuccessfully challenging Kacee Carlisle for the 1CW Women's Championship after getting herself disqualified.
On June 19, 2015, at Maryland Championship Wrestling's Ladies Night event, James defeated Amber Rodriguez (with Lisa Marie Varon as the special guest referee and Melina as the enforcer) to win the MCW Women's Championship, despite being attacked by the villainous Melina during the match. On November 13, Kimber Lee defeated James to win the MCW Women's Championship after interference from Amber Rodriguez. The following night, James gained a measure of revenge by defeating Rodriguez in a Loser Leaves MCW match, causing Rodriguez to leave the company. On February 2, 2016, James made an appearance for Chikara in a losing effort against Grand Champion Princess Kimber Lee. On April 1, 2016, James returned to Queens of Combat and defeated LuFisto at Queens of Combat 10.
On September 2, 2016, James made her debut for Chikara, when she entered the 2016 King of Trios tournament as part of Team Original Divas Revolution, alongside Jazz and Victoria. They defeated Team Shimmer (Candice LeRae, Crazy Mary Dobson and Solo Darling) in their first round match. The following day, Team Original Divas Revolution was eliminated from the tournament by The Warriors Three (Oleg the Usurper, Princess KimberLee and ThunderFrog).
James worked as head trainer for the Virginia based promotion Ground Xero Wrestling (GXW) Training Academy. She trained students at the Richmond location. James beat Renee Michelle for the GXW Women's Championship while with the promotion.
### Return to TNA
#### Feud with Madison Rayne (2010–2011)
On September 22, 2010, it was reported that James had signed a contract with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA). James returned to the promotion on October 7's Before The Glory special episode of Impact!, when she was introduced as the special guest referee for the TNA Knockouts Championship match between Angelina Love, Velvet Sky, Madison Rayne and Tara at Bound for Glory. At the pay-per-view, James counted the pinfall which made Tara the new Knockouts Champion, prompting Rayne to shove James amidst an argument with Tara, and James replying with a punch. On the following episode of Impact!, Tara lost the title to Rayne, while James made her intentions for the Knockouts title clear, after a confrontation with the new champion. James wrestled her return match the following week, defeating Sarita, before being attacked by Rayne's ally, Tara. James wrestled her first TNA pay-per-view match at Turning Point, where she battled Tara to a double disqualification.
On the November 18 episode of Impact! James defeated Angelina Love to become the number one contender to the championship. At Final Resolution, James was defeated by Tara in a Falls Count Anywhere match, following interference from Madison Rayne after she sprayed a fire extinguisher and hit James with the Knockouts title belt. On the following episode of Impact!, James defeated Tara in a steel cage match. On January 9, 2011, at Genesis, James lost her match against Rayne for the Knockouts Championship due to interference from Tara. The following month at Against All Odds, James once again failed to win the Knockouts Championship, this time losing to Rayne in a Last Knockout Standing match, after another interference by Tara. On the March 17 episode of Impact!, Rayne agreed to give James another title match at Lockdown, with the added stipulation that should James fail to win the title, she would have to shave her hair off. On March 18, James legitimately separated her shoulder at a TNA house show in Jacksonville, Florida. James's injury was put into a storyline, where it was caused by Rayne and Tara running over her with Tara's motorcycle.
#### Knockouts Championship reigns (2011–2013)
On April 17, James defeated Madison Rayne in a steel cage match, which lasted less than a minute, to win the TNA Knockouts Championship for the first time. With the win, James became the first woman in history to have held the WWE Women's Championship, the WWE Divas Championship, and the TNA Knockouts Championship. On the May 5 episode of Impact!, James made her first successful title defense against Ms. Tessmacher. On May 15 at Sacrifice, James successfully defended her title against Madison Rayne and in the process helped Tara get a release from her alliance with Rayne. The following month at Slammiversary IX, James successfully defended her title against Angelina Love, however after the match both Love and Winter attacked her. On June 18, James made her debut for TNA's Mexican partner Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide (AAA) at Triplemanía XIX, where she teamed with Angelina Love, Sexy Star and Velvet Sky to defeat Cynthia Moreno, Faby Apache, Lolita and Mari Apache in an eight-woman tag team match. James returned to AAA on July 9, teaming with Sexy Star to defeat the Apaches in a tag team match, after which she challenged Mari to a match for her AAA Reina de Reinas Championship. On July 31 at Verano de Escándalo, James competed in an eight-way match for the Reina de Reinas Championship, becoming the last person eliminated by the new champion, Pimpinela Escarlata. On the June 23 episode of Impact Wrestling, James was defeated by Winter in a non-title Street Fight, following outside interference from Love. This led to a match on August 7 at Hardcore Justice, where James lost the Knockouts Championship to Winter, following multiple interferences from Love and a red mist from Winter. On the following episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Madison Rayne to earn a rematch for the title. On the September 1 episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Winter to win her second TNA Knockouts Championship. On September 11 at No Surrender, James dropped the title back to Winter. On the September 22 episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Ms. Tessmacher to earn another shot at the championship at Bound for Glory, in a four-way match with defending champion Winter, Madison Rayne and Velvet Sky, which Sky would win.
On the November 17 episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated nine other Knockouts in a gauntlet match to earn a championship match with the new champion, Gail Kim. On December 11 at Final Resolution, Gail defeated James to retain the championship, following a distraction from Madison Rayne. In the main event of the December 29 episode of Impact Wrestling, James challenged Kim for the championship, but was defeated following interference from Rayne. On the January 5, 2012, episode of Impact Wrestling, James and Traci Brooks failed to capture the TNA Knockouts Tag Team Championship from Kim and Rayne. Three days later at Genesis, James lost another championship match against Kim, after being disqualified for using the brass knuckles that were thrown into the ring by Rayne, who was locked in a cage suspended in the air during the match. On the January 19 episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Rayne in a steel cage match. On the January 26 episode of Impact Wrestling, James and Velvet Sky were defeated by Tara in a three-way number one contender's match for the Knockouts Championship. On the April 5 episode of Impact Wrestling, James was defeated by Sky in a six-way number one contenders match, also involving Angelina Love, Madison Rayne, Tara, and Winter. On the June 7 episode of Impact Wrestling, James again failed to earn a shot at the Knockouts Championship when she was defeated by Ms. Tessmacher in a four-way match that also included Tara and Velvet Sky, while also showing signs of a heel turn due to jealousy of Sky. On the June 21 episode of Impact Wrestling, James was chosen over Sky as the next challenger for the Knockouts Championship, but failed to recapture the title from Ms. Tessmacher. James' storyline with Sky ended abruptly the following month, when Sky was granted her release from TNA. On the August 2 episode of Impact Wrestling, James unsuccessfully competed in a four-way number one contenders match involving Gail Kim, Tara and the eventual winner Madison Rayne. After a three-month absence, James returned on the November 15 episode of Impact Wrestling, winning a Knockouts battle royal to become the number one contender to the Knockouts Championship. On December 9 at Final Resolution, James was unsuccessful in winning the championship from Tara after a distraction from her boyfriend Jesse. James received another shot at the championship on the December 20 episode of Impact Wrestling, but was again defeated by Tara. On January 13, 2013, at the Genesis pay-per-view, James competed in a five-woman gauntlet match to determine the number one contender to the Knockout Championship, but was eliminated by Gail Kim.
On the April 18 of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Ms. Tessmacher to become the number one contender to the Knockouts Championship. James began turning heel during her title match against defending champion Velvet Sky on the following week, when she targeted Sky's injured knee; James was defeated Sky. On the May 23 episode of Impact Wrestling, James defeated Sky after attacking her injured knee to become a three-time Knockouts Champion. The following week, James continued portraying a villainous persona by calling out Velvet Sky, acting sarcastic and pompous towards her, and also did not help Sky when she was attacked by Gail Kim. James cemented her heel turn on the June 13 episode of Impact Wrestling, when she attacked Sky when the latter said that she was ready for a rematch. James and Sky had their rematch on the June 27 episode of Impact Wrestling, where James retained her championship. On the July 4 episode of Impact Wrestling, James justified her actions by claiming that getting to the top of the Knockouts division requires "clawing and scratching your way to the top"; James also claimed that "no woman would ever be as great as her" and she'll "stand atop the division as the greatest Knockouts Champion of all time". On the July 25 episode of Impact Wrestling, James successfully defended the championship against Gail Kim. At the September 6 airing of Knockout Knockdown, James defeated Serena Deeb to qualify for the gauntlet battle royal finals, in which James was lastly eliminated by Gail Kim. James lost the Knockouts Championship on the September 19 episode of Impact Wrestling to ODB. Four days later, it was revealed that James had failed to come to terms on a contract renewal with TNA. James later stated in an interview that she technically wasn't under contract with TNA, but she did not confirm that she was gone. On November 15, 2013, James appeared in an interview on WWE.com, discussing her history with WWE and the possibility of making a return to the company. At the December 6 airing of World Cup of Wrestling, James was a member of Team USA, along with James Storm, Christopher Daniels, Kazarian and Kenny King. James was defeated by Team Aces & Eights' Ivelisse Vélez following interference from the other members of Aces & Eights. Team USA would go on to defeat Team Aces & Eights in a 5-on-5 elimination tag team match, in which James gained a measure of retribution by eliminating Vélez during the match; James and Storm were presented with the trophy afterward.
### Second return to TNA (2015)
James made a surprise return to TNA as a fan favorite, after a year and a half absence from the company, on January 30, 2015, during the tapings of Impact Wrestling in Glasgow, Scotland. James would then have several confrontations with Bram over his actions towards her real life fiancé, Magnus. On the April 24 episode of Impact Wrestling, James retired from wrestling to focus on becoming a full-time mother, but James Storm talked her into having one more match. On the June 3 episode of Impact Wrestling, James declined an offer by Storm to join The Revolution, which resulted in him intentionally shoving her onto a train track in the storyline, which sparked controversy. This was done to write off James from television, as she had no more dates set with the company at the time. James made her return on the July 1 episode of Impact Wrestling, confronting Storm and challenging him to an intergender tag team match. After the match, James got revenge on Storm and she delivered a jumping DDT on him. On the July 29 episode of Impact Wrestling, James and Magnus defeated Storm and his partner Serena, when James pinned Serena.
### Global Force Wrestling (2015–2016)
On July 7, 2015, James signed with Global Force Wrestling (GFW). On July 24, at GFW's inaugural tapings in Las Vegas, Nevada, James lost a three-way GFW Women's Championship tournament qualifying match that also included Lei'D Tapa and the ultimate winner, Christina Von Eerie. On January 22, Christina Von Eerie defeated James and Kimber Lee to retain the GFW Women's Championship.
### Return to WWE
#### Alliance and feud with Alexa Bliss (2016–2019)
On October 13, 2016, it was announced that James would return to WWE's developmental brand NXT at the NXT TakeOver: Toronto event on November 19, competing against Asuka for the NXT Women's Championship. On the October 26 episode of NXT, James cut a promo where she formally re–introduced herself and challenged Asuka for the championship. At the event, James was defeated and after the match Asuka refused to shake her hand as a sign of disrespect. On December 8, it was announced that James had signed a multi–year contract with WWE. According to James, she asked to return under her previous character, which she later would see as a "throwback".
On the January 17, 2017, episode of SmackDown Live, James made her return by helping Alexa Bliss retain her SmackDown Women's Championship against Becky Lynch in a Steel Cage match, revealing herself as the woman under the "La Luchadora" gimmick and establishing herself as a heel character, while also allying with Bliss in the process. She competed in her first match in nearly seven years in a WWE ring on January 29, 2017, at the Royal Rumble pay–per–view, teaming with Bliss and Natalya against Lynch, Naomi, and Nikki Bella in a losing effort. James went on to face Lynch at the Elimination Chamber pay–per–view in another losing effort. She would defeat Lynch in a rematch on the edition of February 14 of SmackDown, but would lose a Two-Out-of-Three Falls match two weeks later to end the storyline. In March, James turned face after hitting Bliss with a Mick Kick, ending their brief alliance and leading to a non-title match between the two on the edition of March 14 of SmackDown, in which James was victorious. At WrestleMania 33, James took part in a six–pack challenge for Bliss’ SmackDown Women's Championship, which saw Naomi winning the title.
Shortly after Wrestlemania, James was drafted to Raw as part of the 2017 Superstar Shake–Up. In October, after being named the No. 1 Contender by Raw General Manager Kurt Angle, James faced Bliss for the Raw Women's Championship at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs, but was unsuccessful in capturing the title. A few weeks later on the edition of October 30 of Raw, James once again challenged Bliss for the title in the main event but came up short. On January 28, 2018, at the Royal Rumble, James entered the first-ever women's Royal Rumble match at No. 26 and lasted over 8 minutes before being eliminated by long–time rival Trish Stratus. The following month, James competed in the first-ever women's Elimination Chamber match at the namesake pay–per–view, where she entered at No. 5 and eliminated Sonya Deville after a diving Lou Thesz press off the top of a pod before being eliminated by Bayley.
On the February 26 episode of Raw, James proceeded to turn heel and realigned herself with Bliss. At WrestleMania 34, James participated in the first-ever WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal for the WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal Trophy, but was eliminated from the match by Ruby Riott. Later that night, she had planned to manage Bliss to her title defense against Nia Jax, but was attacked and ejected by Jax before the match began. In May, James competed unsuccessfully in a Triple Threat match against Bliss and Bayley, as well as a Gauntlet match in attempts to qualify for the women's Money in the Bank ladder match. In August, James returned from a brief hiatus at the sides of Alexa Bliss and Alicia Fox. With Bliss, the tandem began a scripted feud with her former rivals and WWE Hall of Famers Trish Stratus and Lita, setting up a tag team match at WWE Evolution, WWE's first-ever all-women's pay–per–view. Just three days before the event on October 25, however, it was announced that Bliss was pulled out of the match due to a concussion, and that Fox would be her replacement. In the event's opening contest, James and Fox were unsuccessful against Stratus and Lita.
On November 18 at Survivor Series, James was selected by Bliss to be a part of Team Raw along with Nia Jax, Tamina, Bayley and Sasha Banks to go against Team SmackDown's Naomi, Carmella, Sonya Deville, Asuka and Mandy Rose. Team Raw came out victorious after Jax was the sole survivor. The victory also upped James’ undefeated streak to 5–0 at Survivor Series. The next night on Raw, James was selected by “General Manager-Elect” Baron Corbin to answer an open-challenge by Raw Women's Champion Ronda Rousey, but lost the title match via submission. Meanwhile, James and Bobby Lashley were announced as one of the teams that would be competing in season 2 of Mixed Match Challenge. Despite pulling ahead with a 3–0 lead on the competition, the duo lost to Bayley and Finn Bálor in the playoffs and were eliminated from the tournament. Back on Raw, James made history on the edition of December 17 by competing in the most matches by a female Superstar in the show's 25-year history with 164 total combined matches by this point. On January 27, 2019, at the Royal Rumble, James entered the second women's Royal Rumble match at number 5 and lasted over 11 minutes before being eliminated by Tamina. The following night on Raw, James once again aligned herself with Bliss in hopes of qualifying for the Elimination Chamber event to crown the first-ever WWE Women's Tag Team Champions, but the long-time allies lost their tag team match to Nia Jax and Tamina. James would later compete in the second-annual WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal at WrestleMania 35 for the trophy, eliminating Mandy Rose from the match before subsequently being eliminated by Sonya Deville.
#### Brand switches and departure (2019–2021)
As part of the 2019 Superstar Shake-up, James was drafted back to the SmackDown brand. During a live event on June 1, it was reported that James had suffered a torn ACL. On July 16, James underwent successful knee surgery and would be out of action for seven to nine months. During her recovery from injury, James would become a commentator for Main Event.
After 14 months of injury, James returned on the August 10, 2020, episode of Raw as a face, only to have her interview interrupted by Natalya and Lana. This set up a singles match against Natalya the following week, which saw James lose by countout thanks to interference from Lana. On the August 31 episode of Raw, James confronted the Raw Women's Champion Asuka, stating her intentions of going after the title. During this exchange, Lana and Natalya interrupted staking their claims, leading to a singles match between James and Lana in which James defeated her via pinfall. On the September 14 episode of Raw, James challenged Asuka for the Raw Women's Championship, but lost after a botched finish due to the referee believing that James could no longer compete. In the 2020 WWE Draft in October, James went undrafted.
Her first post-draft appearance occurred on January 4, 2021, during the special "Legends Night" episode of Raw, appearing alongside several other WWE legends. That same month, James competed in the women's Royal Rumble match entering at No. 19, but was eliminated by Lacey Evans. In April, she appeared on stage during the opening of WrestleMania 37 alongside the rest of the active roster. On April 15, 2021, WWE announced that they had released Mickie James along with several other talent. Prior, she had participated in commentary on shows such as Main Event and NXT. Her release was met with some controversy, as she claimed her belongings were sent to her in a trash bag. Several other former talent such as Jillian Hall, Maria Kanellis and Gail Kim voiced similar experiences when they were fired. The senior employee responsible for this was let go, and James received a public apology from Stephanie McMahon.
### National Wrestling Alliance (2021–2022)
James made her National Wrestling Alliance debut on the June 8, 2021, episode of NWA Powerrr, announcing that she will serve as an executive producer for the first all-female event, NWA EmPowerrr. On June 23, James announced on an Instagram video that she will be returning to the ring and delivers an open challenge to anyone to wrestle her at the NWA 73rd Anniversary Show. The challenge was answered by Kylie Rae, which James has defeated.
James last appearance on NWA was on the May 3, 2022, of Powerrr, where she defeated Kenzie Paige.
### Third return to Impact Wrestling
#### Fourth Knockouts championship reign (2021–2022)
At Slammiversary on July 17, 2021, James made her third return to TNA, now known as Impact Wrestling, after a six-year absence, inviting Impact Knockouts Champion Deonna Purrazzo to defend the title at NWA EmPowerrr, where she is executive producer, only for Purrazzo to give her disrespect, then James kicked Purrazzo in the face. Purrazzo would eventually accept James' invite, successfully defending the Knockouts Championship against Melina at NWA EmPowerrr. The next night, at NWA 73, Purrazzo attacked James after the latter's match with Kylie Rae. On the September 23 episode of Impact!, it was announced that James would make her in-ring return to Impact, as she challenged Purrazzo for the Knockouts Championship at Bound for Glory. On the September 30 episode of Impact!, Purrazzo attacked James at her home and wild brawl ensued with Purrazzo coming out on top after dunking James head in a bucket of water and leaving her laid out in a field. At Bound for Glory, James defeated Purrazzo to win the Impact Knockouts Championship for the fourth time. At Turning Point, after successfully retained the title against Mercedes Martinez, James was attacked by Purrazzo, who announced that she would invoke her rematch clause at Hard To Kill. At the event, on January 8, 2022, James successfully retained the title against Purrazzo in a Texas Deathmatch.
#### One night WWE crossover (2022)
On the January 7, 2022, episode of SmackDown, James was announced as a participant in the women's Royal Rumble match at Royal Rumble, while being acknowledged as Impact Knockouts World Champion. Later that night, Impact Wrestling also promoted her upcoming appearance. During the Royal Rumble, she entered at No. 20 with her Impact theme (Hardcore Country) and with the Impact Knockouts World Championship belt. She lasted just under 12 minutes in the match, managing to eliminate her former rival Michelle McCool and was later eliminated by another former rival, Lita.
#### The Last Rodeo (2022–2023)
At Sacrifice, James lost her Knockouts World Championship to Tasha Steelz, ending her fourth reign at 133 days. During a rematch, James was betrayed by best friend Chelsea Green, who turned heel. After teasing retirement on Twitter, James returned on the September 1, 2022, edition of Impact!, to announce that she would retire after she lost her next match unless she won the Knockouts World Championship once more, while also naming her final run The Last Rodeo. She went on to win every match after this announcement, defeating Gisele Shaw at Victory Road, Mia Yim at Bound for Glory, Taylor Wilde at Over Drive, and eventually Jordynne Grace at Hard To Kill to end The Last Rodeo, winning the Knockouts World Championship for the fifth time in the process. On February 28, at No Surrender, James successfully defended the title against Masha Slamovich. James was scheduled to defend the title against Grace at Sacrifice on March 24, however, it was revealed that James would not be able to defend the title due to real-life injury. On the April 13 episode of Impact! upon Rebellion, which was filmed on tape delay on March 13, James relinquished the title as she was not medically cleared to compete.
## Music career
James' first country music album, Strangers & Angels, was released on May 18, 2010, on iTunes. The album was self-released with an independent team. On December 2, 2010, James released another single called, "Hardcore Country", which was also used as her entrance music with TNA and on their independent circuit appearances. A music video for the single was first shown during James's first appearance on TNA Spin Cycle. For her second album, James joined a Kickstarter campaign in order to partially fund the album. Fans who contributed donations received special items from the campaign. The online campaign was a success, with a total pledge of \$16,500 out of a \$5,000 goal. The funds helped to produce the first six songs from the album. The album, called "Somebody's Gonna Pay" was released on May 7, 2013, under the label Entertainment One (eOne) Music, and debuted on the music charts at No. 15 on the Billboards Heatseekers charts. James also filmed a music video for the song "Somebody's Gonna Pay", from her second album of the same name. The video features former WWE Women's Champion, Trish Stratus and James' then-fiancé Magnus. TNA founder, Jeff Jarrett, was also on set of the video in Nashville, Tennessee. Jarrett did not appear in the video, but taught James how to swing a guitar. While she worked for TNA, James also toured around the United States, holding small concerts at various venues.
James has opened shows for Montgomery Gentry, Randy Houser, Gretchen Wilson and Rascal Flatts. James also performed at the 2011 CMA Music Festival. James again performed at CMA Fest in 2013, where Eric Young and James Storm made appearances at the event. In 2014, James collaborated with country artist Cowboy Troy and fellow wrestler James Storm on a song titled "Is Everybody Doing OK", which is featured on Cowboy Troy's album, King of Clubs.
On November 19, 2016, James released a new song entitled "Shooting Blanks".
On October 14, 2017, James was inducted into The Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame. She also received a Nammy for "Song of the Year" for her recording "Shooting Blanks". On October 13, 2018, James won “Best Single Recording” for her song “Left Right Left” at the Native American Music Awards.
### Studio albums
### Singles
### Music videos
### Guest appearances
## Other media
James, along with Ken Anderson, represented WWE at the 2008 Republican National Convention, in an effort to persuade fans to register to vote in the 2008 Presidential election. On April 13, 2008, James, along with Layla, Melina and Kelly Kelly, appeared as guest trainers in Over the Ropes. On September 5 of that same year, James appeared on the USA Network show Psych, portraying a villainous roller derby girl called Rita "Lethal Weapon" Westwood, in the episode "Talk Derby to Me". James made a special appearance on Redemption Song which is hosted by Chris Jericho along with Candice Michelle, Maryse, and Eve Torres. It was originally aired on November 12, 2008. In 2012, James was featured in Bucky Covington's music video for his song "Drinking Side of Country". In June 2013, James starred in a Dr Pepper advert, which featured "One of a Kind" individuals talking about the role of Dr. Pepper in their lives.
James has appeared in ten WWE video games. She made her in-game debut at WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 and appears in WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010, WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011, WWE 2K18, WWE 2K19, WWE 2K20, WWE 2K Battlegrounds, and WWE 2K22.
## Personal life
When she is finished with her wrestling career, James plans to own a farm and be an equine trainer. James owns three Morgan horses named Rhapsody, Bunny and Casanova. James also owns two dogs, one named Butch and a Miniature Pinscher named Elvis. Outside of wrestling, James received her Associate of Arts degree in business administration, and studied for her Bachelor of Arts degree in operations management.
James has two tattoos: a symbol meaning 'love' on her ankle, and a dragon that wraps around it. James is a fan of Equine sports and American football, and is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
In 2007, James was engaged to fellow wrestler Kenny Dykstra. In December 2010 James started dating fellow professional wrestler Nick Aldis and on September 25, 2014, they had their first child, a boy named Donovan Patrick Aldis. James and Aldis got engaged in December 2014 and married on December 31, 2015.
On November 28, 2022, James' brother, Wayne, his 16-year-old stepdaughter, and her best friend, died in a car accident which also involved Wayne's wife, who was left in critical condition.
## Championships and accomplishments
- Association Biterroise de Catch
- Jean Corne Cup (2023)
- Cauliflower Alley Club
- Women's Wrestling Award (2023)
- The Baltimore Sun
- Woman of the Year (2010)
- Covey Promotions
- CP Women's Championship (1 time)
- Covey Pro Hall of Fame (2014)
- CyberSpace Wrestling Federation
- CSWF Women's Championship (1 time)
- Dynamite Championship Wrestling
- DCW Women's Championship (1 title)
- Florida Championship Wrestling
- FCW Women's Championship (1 time)
- NAWF Indian Tribal Women's Championship (1 time)
- Ground Xero Wrestling
- GXW Women's Championship (1 time)
- Impact Championship Wrestling
- ICW Super Juniors Championship (1 time)
- International Pro Wrestling: United Kingdom
- IPW:UK Women's Championship (1 time)
- Maryland Championship Wrestling
- MCW Women's Championship (1 time)
- Native American Music Awards
- The Jim Thorpe Sports Award (2019)
- Premier Wrestling Federation
- PWF Universal Women's Championship (1 time)
- Pro Wrestling Illustrated
- Woman of the Year (2009, 2011)
- Ranked No. 1 of the top 50 female wrestlers in the PWI Female 50'' in 2009
- Southern Championship Wrestling
- SCW Diva Championship (1 time)
- Total Nonstop Action Wrestling / Impact Wrestling
- TNA/Impact Knockouts World Championship (5 times)
- TNA World Cup of Wrestling (2013) – with Christopher Daniels, James Storm, Kazarian, and Kenny King
- Impact Year End Award (1 time)
- Knockouts Match of the Year (2021) vs. Deonna Purrazzo at Bound for Glory
- Ultimate Championship Wrestling
- UCW Women's Championship (1 time)
- Ultimate Wrestling Federation
- UWF Women's Championship (2 times)
- Wrestling Observer Newsletter
- Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic (2009) Piggy James angle
- World Wrestling Entertainment
- WWE Women's Championship (5 times)
- WWE Divas Championship (1 time)
## Luchas de Apuestas record
|
3,944,652 |
Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801
| 1,160,486,574 |
1996 aircraft crash in Svalbard
|
[
"1996 disasters in Norway",
"Accidents and incidents involving the Tupolev Tu-154",
"Airliner accidents and incidents caused by pilot error",
"Airliner accidents and incidents involving controlled flight into terrain",
"August 1996 events in Europe",
"Aviation accidents and incidents in 1996",
"Aviation accidents and incidents in Norway",
"History of Svalbard",
"Transport in Svalbard",
"Vnukovo Airlines accidents and incidents"
] |
Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801 was an international charter flight from Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow, Russia, to Svalbard Airport on Spitsbergen, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. On 29 August 1996 at 10:22:23 CEST, a Tupolev Tu-154M operating this flight crashed into the ground in Operafjellet during the final approach to Svalbard Airport. All 141 people (11 crew members and 130 passengers, of whom three were children) aboard the plane were killed, making it the deadliest aviation accident in Norway. The accident was the result of a series of small navigational errors causing the aircraft to be 3.7 kilometres (2.3 mi; 2.0 nmi) from the approach centerline at the time of impact.
The Vnukovo Airlines aircraft, with the registration number RA-85621, had been chartered by Arktikugol, a Russian state-owned coal-mining company, to fly Russian and Ukrainian workers to the towns of Barentsburg and Pyramiden in Svalbard. The accident was a contributing cause for Arktikugol's closure of Pyramiden two years later. The accident was investigated by the Accident Investigation Board Norway with assistance from the Interstate Aviation Committee and became known as the Operafjell accident (Norwegian: Operafjell-ulykken). After the accident, a series of lawsuits determined compensation for the victims' families.
## History
### Flight
Flight 2801 was a chartered flight flown by Vnukovo Airlines on behalf of Arktikugol, which operated mines at the two company towns of Barentsburg and Pyramiden in Svalbard. The aircraft was a Tupolev Tu-154M, with registration RA-85621, and serial number 86A 742. Its manufacture date was 14 January 1987. The crew consisted of captain Evgeny Nikolaevich Nikolaev (aged 44), co-pilot Boris Fedorovich Sudarev (aged 58), navigator Igor Petrovich Akimov (aged 50), flight engineer Anatoly Matveevich Karapetrov (aged 38), five cabin crew members, and two technicians. The captain had previously landed at Svalbard Airport; the co-pilot had not.
On board were 130 passengers, consisting of Arktikugol employees and their families, three of whom were children. Waiting at the airport for the return flight were another 120 employees and their families. The aircraft left Vnukovo Airport at 04:44 UTC (08:44 MSD). Estimated flight time was three and a half hours, and alternative airports were Murmansk Airport and Severomorsk-3, both in Murmansk Oblast. The flight proceeded normally until descent, following the routing W 29 from Moscow to Padun (west of Murmansk), before crossing to Bodø Flight Information Region over the Barents Sea cruising at FL 350, approximately 35,000 feet (11,000 m) at an average airspeed of 500 kilometres per hour (270 kn; 310 mph). It then proceeded over non-directional beacons over Bjørnøya, Isfjorden, and Adventdalen.
Svalbard Airport, Longyear, is the main airport serving the Svalbard archipelago. It is located on the south shore of Isfjorden, with high terrain to the south, southeast, and east. It has a single, 2,140-metre-long (7,020 ft) 10/28 runway, running roughly east–west. The airport has an elevation of 28 metres (92 ft) above mean sea level, and has an aerodrome flight information service (AFIS), which is subordinate to Bodø Air Traffic Control Center (Bodø ATCC). The airport is regarded as uncontrolled and does not provide approach service.
On that day, all aircraft had used runway 28 due to favorable wind conditions, climb-up conditions, and short distance from the terminal. The weather at the accident area was dominated by a low pressure trough, causing rain showers and wind from 15 to 30 knots (28 to 56 km/h; 17 to 35 mph) at 240–270°. Visibility exceeded 10 kilometres (6.2 mi; 5.4 nmi). Between 08:00 and 09:00, a weak trough passed, reducing visibility to 6 kilometres (4 mi; 3 nmi) and a cloud base at 400 to 450 metres (1,300 to 1,500 ft).
### Accident
At 07:55 UTC (09:55 local Central European Summer Time, CEST), the crew requested clearance to start their descent. Because of lack of communication with Bodø ATCC, this was not obtained. At 07:56, information from Longyear AFIS was given that it had no conflicting traffic, allowing a descent to 1,800 m (6,000 ft). The crew tried to request use of Runway 10, but this was, due to language problems, not understood as such by AFIS. Instead, Longyear communicated the actual weather and informed that Runway 28 was in use. An additional request for use of Runway 10 was again not understood, because of the misunderstanding of the term "runway in use". Because of this, the crew decided to instead use Runway 28.
The crew used Jeppesen charts dated 21 January 1994. According to procedures, both horizontal situation indicators (HSIs) were set to 283°, but the magnetic localizer course of 300° was not set. A global positioning system (GPS) was used as a back-up. No requests were made for VHF direction finding. From 3,000 metres (10,000 ft) until impact, the flight was carried out in instrument meteorological conditions and the flight controlled by automatic stabilization mode, with lateral navigation controlled by the navigator.
At 08:10 UTC, the aircraft reached 1,524 metres (5,000 ft), which is the minimum altitude to Advent and the initial approach altitude. At 08:15:32 UTC, it reached Advent and entered a base turn, reaching a magnetic heading of 160° at 08:16:28 UTC. While the crew had adjusted for the wind drift, they did not attempt to intercept the magnetic course 155° outbound from Advent. During this turn, a malfunction in the electric trimming mechanism caused the piloting pilot to deactivate the aircraft flight control systems' servogear in the pitch channel at 08:15:58. This was again activated at 08:16:42 UTC.
At 08:17:08 UTC, the crew started the turn to bring the aircraft to 300° magnetic inbound; however, the lateral deviation from the outbound magnetic course was 155°, or 3.7 km (2.3 mi; 2.0 nmi) to the left. At 08:17:57 UTC, the navigator said "Ah, abeam eight miles 2801 inbound", to which AFIS replied two seconds later "Correct". This was the last radio communication between the crew and Longyear. At 08:18:30 UTC, the piloting pilot turned off the autopilot pitch channel. For the rest of the flight, the plane continued with autopilot only in roll.
Following the aircraft passing through the localizer centerline and having rolled out on 290°, a discussion arose among the crew if the turn had been made at the right time. The initial comment about this was made by the first officer at 08:19:06 UTC. This resulted in a roll out of the turn to final approach and corrective turn to magnetic heading 306°. At this time, the aircraft was 27.4 nautical miles (50.7 km; 31.5 mi) from the airport and 2.8 kilometres (1.7 mi; 1.5 nmi) right of the centerline at 1,520 metres (5,000 ft) with an airspeed of 330 kilometres per hour (180 kn; 210 mph). Instead of intercepting the centerline, the crew continued to track on the right side, nearly paralleling the localizer course.
At 08:20:17 UTC, the pilot in command ordered the aircraft turned to 291°, which, when adjusted for drift, resulted in a course close to 300°. At this time, the aircraft had a lateral deviation from the approach centerline of 3.7 kilometres (2.3 mi; 2.0 nmi). The aircraft started descending at 08:20:24 UTC. A corrective turn was made at 08:21:13 UTC and completed 11 seconds later at magnetic heading 300°. At the time, the aircraft was descending 5 to 7 metres per second (16 to 23 ft/s). The aircraft started turning left at 08:22:05 UTC, and immediately entered an area of turbulence created by the surrounding mountains.
During initial approach, the radio altimeter warning had been activated several times, which indicated less than 750 metres (2,460 ft) from the aircraft to the terrain. During final approach, the ground proximity warning system was activated nine seconds before impact, which lasted until impact. Six seconds before impact, the radio altimeter warning was activated. At 08:22:23 UTC (10:22:23 local CEST) the aircraft collided with the top of Operafjellet at 907 metres (2,976 ft) elevation, located 14.2 kilometres (8.8 mi; 7.7 nmi) from Svalbard Airport and 3.7 kilometres (2.3 mi; 2.0 nmi) right of the approach centerline. The aircraft was destroyed and all occupants perished. It is the single deadliest plane crash to have occurred on Norwegian soil.
### Recovery
The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre of Northern Norway received a message about the crash at 10:30 CEST (8:30 UTC) and the search-and-rescue service was immediately deployed. This included seven Norwegian aircraft that were in the area. The area had bad weather with a low cloud height, resulting in difficult searching conditions. The aircraft was found at 12:06 CEST at Operafjellet, 14 km (8.7 mi) east of Svalbard Airport. Most of the aircraft was located on the mountain's plateau, although some debris had slid down a vertical cliff and was scattered along the valley and partially covered by an avalanche. Rescue workers and medics from Longyearbyen Hospital arrived at 12:36, and quickly established that no one survived.
The responsibility of the recovery was transferred to the governor of Svalbard on 30 August. In addition, police personnel from the mainland were transferred to Svalbard to work with the investigation and recovery. The work was supplemented by local volunteers. Because of the bad weather, which included fog and snow, transporting workers to the plateau was often impossible, so work started in the valley.
Governor Ann-Kristin Olsen traveled to Barentsburg on 30 August to inform the communities about the accident, and distributed ample written information in Russian about the then-known details about the crash. Later in the day, a Russian aircraft arrived with Deputy Minister Aleksandr Petrovich of the Ministry of Emergency Situations along with a team of 11 rescue workers, and representatives from the Interstate Aviation Committee, the Embassy of Ukraine in Moscow, the Federal Air Transport Agency, and Vnukovo Airlines. In a meeting that evening, Olsen accepted Russian assistance, while international agreement confirmed that the investigation would be led by the Norwegian authorities. On 31 August, Grete Faremo, the Norwegian minister of justice visited the Russian settlements as a representative from the government of Norway.
The accident had a large impact on the community, with only 1,600 people living in the two Russian settlements at the time. The population in the communities did not speak Norwegian, and did not have a road connection to Longyearbyen. This made it difficult for Olsen to give accurate and detailed information. Issues were further complicated by erroneous reports in Russian media that there were five survivors. The governor's cabin in Barentsburg was manned during the aftermath, and bulletins were distributed with updated information in Russian. The accident was one of the factors causing Arktikugol to abandon Pyramiden in 1998.
## Investigation
Agreements between Norwegian and Russian authorities were made on 31 August, where Norway resumed full responsibility for the recovery and investigation, but Russian help was accepted. To allow the Russian workers access from the morning of 1 September, the crew was allowed to fly in and establish a base camp, but no work was to be done until Norwegian supervisors arrived in the morning. However, two people were observed at the wreck at about 20:00 CEST, who were brought to the governor's offices for questioning. As they were both members of the Russian team, it was decided that the base would be disbanded.
Fog was still on the plateau on 1 September, but by 15:00 CEST it was possible to fly a team there by helicopter. Because the fog stayed, the team retained work until 03:00 CEST in the night. In the following days, the fog lifted, making work and transport easier. By 5 September, all bodies had been recovered and the work at the plateau could be terminated. The recovery in the valley was completed two days later. The accident resulted in about 40 journalists staying in Svalbard to cover the story. The Norwegian authority's costs related to the investigation and other activities related to the accident were estimated at 30 million Norwegian krone (NOK).
All identification of people was performed in Tromsø, as a cooperation between Troms Police District, National Criminal Investigation Service, and the University Hospital of North Norway. By 18 September, all people had been identified, and the bodies were transported to Russia and Ukraine on 20 September after a short memorial in Tromsøhallen. An autopsy was performed on all crew members, without finding any abnormalities.
The official responsibility for investigating the incident lay with the Air Accident Investigation Board/Norway (AAIB/N), although the investigation and report was a close cooperation with the Interstate Aviation Committee and to a lesser extent, the Federal Air Transport Agency. AAIB/N had the primary responsibility for investigations at the crash site, cooperation with the Norwegian police and the Norwegian Civil Aviation Administration, and writing the report. IAC was responsible for handling the investigations in Russia, the reading of the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder, the relationship with Vnukovo Airlines and a test flight. Both agencies agreed that English was to be the language of the final report; English is one of the ICAO languages.
### Cause
The official investigation concluded that the flight, regarded as a controlled flight into terrain, was caused by pilot errors and that no fault was found with the aircraft. Contributing factors causing the accident were lack of a procedure for offset localizer approach for setting approach course on the HSIs. Thus, both HSIs were set incorrectly, which along with the course deviation indicator hinted that the plane was being blown to the left and needed to adjust course to the right. Because he was in a stressed situation, the navigator set the GPS in the wrong mode. He also did not have sufficient time to recheck his work, allowing mistakes to happen, and his work was not monitored by the pilots. As the navigator was overworked, it was inappropriate for the first officer to transfer the responsibility of lateral control to him.
The AFIS air controller has a different role in Norway from in Russia, and the crew were not aware that they were being given information and advice, rather than orders. Communication with AFIS was left with the navigator, which is a breach of norms. Communication between air control and the crew was problematic, since the crew lacked sufficient English skills. The pilot in command had insufficient crew resource management knowledge. After the crew decided to carry out the approach to Runway 28, a new approach briefing was not accomplished. The aircraft overshot the approach centerline when turning inbound, because they did not try to intercept the outbound track from Advent. The crew showed a lack of situational awareness following their uncertainty of the aircraft position in relation to LLZ 28, caused by indications on the HSIs.
Situational awareness was also reduced because the pilots did not have a chart in front of them at all times. The crew were not aware that they could check the aircraft location in relation to the centerline with a VDF (VHF direction finder). The crew probably put too much emphasis on the indications displayed by the GPS. The aircraft descended into mountainous terrain without control over the lateral navigation. Despite uncertainty and disagreement in the group, the approach was not abandoned, as the aircraft should have climbed to a safe altitude while the problem was solved.
## Aftermath
On 20 September, the surviving relatives of each decedent received 2 million Russian rubles (about US\$40,000) for each person who died in the accident. Ukrainian relatives stated to Norwegian media that they had not received information about the cause and other issues surrounding the accident. At the time, Ukraine was experiencing very high unemployment, and Arktikugol offered wages many times what was then offered in Ukraine. Many miners not only had to support their immediate family, but also relatives. Vnukovo Airlines stated on Ukrainian television that the relatives would receive US\$20,000 per person killed. About a year after the accident, all relatives had been offered US\$20,000, but about two-thirds of them chose not to accept the amount, and instead started a process to sue the insurance company. Their lawyer, Gunnar Nerdrum, stated that according to both Norwegian and Russian law, they could demand at least US\$140,000.
In February 1998, the Norwegian Ministry of Justice stated that the relatives did not have a right to occupational injury compensation from the Norwegian National Insurance. Because of the Svalbard Treaty, the archipelago is an economic free zone and Arktikugol is exempt from paying social insurance, so its employees did not have a right to Norwegian benefits. Had this been the case, widows would have received about NOK 600,000 per worker. By 1998, a few of the relatives had accepted the US\$20,000 compensation, while the rest of them were planning to sue both the airline's insurance company and Arktikugol. Among the issues in the case, which took place at Nord-Troms District Court, was whether the accident was to be considered a working accident, and thus would result in injury compensation from the mining company. In November, it was decided that the Ukrainians needed to make a guarantee for NOK 2.5 million to run the case, which they could not afford. They, therefore, had no alternative but to accept the proposal from the insurance company. In June 1999, the parties agreed on a settlement, where the compensation was not disclosed to the public. It was later disclosed that the settlement was about three times the initial offer from the insurance company. In 1999, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs established a scholarship to help children who lost a parent in the accident to take senior secondary and tertiary education.
|
19,727,558 |
Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos
| 1,167,986,790 |
Catholic missions in Bolivia
|
[
"18th century in the Viceroyalty of Peru",
"18th-century religious buildings and structures",
"Buildings and structures in Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia)",
"Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos",
"Jesuit history in South America",
"Jesuit missions",
"Spanish missions in Bolivia",
"Tourist attractions in Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia)",
"World Heritage Sites in Bolivia"
] |
The Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos are located in Santa Cruz department in eastern Bolivia. Six of these former missions (all now secular municipalities) collectively were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990. Distinguished by a unique fusion of European and Amerindian cultural influences, the missions were founded as reductions or reducciones de indios by Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries to convert local tribes to Christianity.
The interior region bordering Spanish and Portuguese territories in South America was largely unexplored at the end of the 17th century. Dispatched by the Spanish Crown, Jesuits explored and founded eleven settlements in 76 years in the remote Chiquitania – then known as Chiquitos – on the frontier of Spanish America. They built churches (templos) in a unique and distinct style that combined elements of native and European architecture. The indigenous inhabitants of the missions were taught European music as a means of conversion. The missions were self-sufficient, with thriving economies, and virtually autonomous from the Spanish crown.
After the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spanish territories in 1767, most Jesuit reductions in South America were abandoned and fell into ruins. The former Jesuit missions of Chiquitos are unique because these settlements and their associated culture have survived largely intact.
A large restoration project of the missionary churches began with the arrival of the former Swiss Jesuit and architect Hans Roth in 1972. Since 1990, these former Jesuit missions have experienced some measure of popularity, and have become a tourist destination. A popular biennial international musical festival put on by the nonprofit organization Asociación Pro Arte y Cultura along with other cultural activities within the mission towns, contribute to the popularity of these settlements.
## Location
The six World Heritage Site settlements are located in the hot and semiarid lowlands of Santa Cruz Department of eastern Bolivia. They lie in an area near the Gran Chaco, east and northeast of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, between the Paraguay and Guapay rivers.
The westernmost missions are San Xavier (also known as San Javier) and Concepción, located in the province of Ñuflo de Chávez between the San Julián and Urugayito rivers. Santa Ana de Velasco, San Miguel de Velasco, and San Rafael de Velasco are located to the east, in José Miguel de Velasco province, near the Brazilian border. San José de Chiquitos is located in Chiquitos province, about 200 kilometres (120 mi) south of San Rafael.
Three other former Jesuit missions – San Juan Bautista (now in ruins), Santo Corazón and Santiago de Chiquitos – which have not been named UNESCO heritage sites – lie east of San José de Chiquitos not far from the town of Roboré. The capital of José Miguel de Velasco Province, San Ignacio de Velasco was founded as a Jesuit mission but also is not a World Heritage Site as the current church is a reconstruction, not a restoration.
## The name “Chiquitos”
Ñuflo de Chavés, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador and founder of Santa Cruz "la Vieja", introduced the name Chiquitos, or little ones. It referred to the small doors of the straw houses in which the indigenous population lived. Chiquitos has since been used incorrectly both to denote people of the largest ethnic group in the area (correctly known as Chiquitano), and collectively to denote the more than 40 ethnic groups with different languages and cultures living in the region known as the [Gran] Chiquitania. Properly, “Chiquitos” refers only to either a modern-day department of Bolivia, or the former region of Upper Peru (now Bolivia) that once encompassed all of the Chiquitania and parts of Mojos (or Moxos) and the Gran Chaco.
The current provincial division of Santa Cruz department does not follow the Jesuits’ concept of a missionary area. The Chiquitania lies within five modern provinces: Ángel Sandoval, Germán Busch, José Miguel de Velasco, Ñuflo de Chávez and Chiquitos province.
## History
In the 16th century, priests of different religious orders set out to evangelize the Americas, bringing Christianity to indigenous communities. Two of these missionary orders were the Franciscans and the Jesuits, both of which eventually arrived in the frontier town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and then in the Chiquitania. The missionaries employed the strategy of gathering the often nomadic indigenous populations in larger communities called reductions in order to more effectively Christianize them. This policy sprang from the colonial legal view of the “Indian” as a minor, who had to be protected and guided by European missionaries so as not to succumb to sin. Reductions, whether created by secular or religious authorities, generally were construed as instruments to force the natives to adopt European culture and lifestyles and the Christian religion. The Jesuits were unique in attempting to create a theocratic "state within a state" in which the native peoples in the reductions, guided by the Jesuits, would remain autonomous and isolated from Spanish colonists and Spanish rule.
### Arrival in the Viceroyalty of Peru
With the permission of King Philip II of Spain a group of Jesuits traveled to the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1568, some 30 years after the arrival of the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Mercedarians. The Jesuits established themselves in Lima in 1569 before moving east toward Paraguay; in 1572 they reached the Audience of Charcas in modern-day Bolivia. Because they were not allowed to establish settlements on the frontier they built chapter houses, churches and schools in pre-existing settlements, such as La Paz, Potosí and La Plata (present day Sucre).
In 1587 the first Jesuits, Fr. Diego Samaniego and Fr. Diego Martínez, arrived in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, located just south of where the future mission of San José de Chiquitos would be established. In 1592 the settlement had to be moved 250 kilometres (160 mi) west because of conflicts with natives, although the remains of the original town exist in the Santa Cruz la Vieja archaeological site. The Jesuits did not start missions in the valleys northeast of the cordillera until the 17th century. The two central areas for their activities were Moxos, situated in the department of Beni, and the Chiquitania (then simply Chiquitos) in the department of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. In 1682, Fr. Cipriano Barace founded the first of the Jesuit reductions in Moxos, located at Loreto.
### The Jesuits in the Chiquitania
While the mission towns in Paraguay flourished, the evangelization of the Eastern Bolivian Guarani (Chiriguanos) proved difficult. With encouragement from Agustín Gutiérrez de Arce, the governor of Santa Cruz, the Jesuits focused their efforts on the Chiquitania, where the Christian doctrine was more readily accepted. Between 1691 and 1760 eleven missions were founded in the area; however, fires, floods, plagues, famines and conflict with hostile tribes or slave traders caused many missions to be re-established or rebuilt. The Chiquitos missions suffered from periodic epidemics of European diseases killing up to 11 percent of the population in a single episode. However, the epidemics were not as severe as they were among the Paraguayan Guarani to the east, mainly because of their remote locations and the lack of transportation infrastructure.
The first Jesuit reduction in the Chiquitania was the mission of San Francisco Xavier, founded in 1691 by the Jesuit priest Fr. José de Arce. In September 1691, de Arce and Br. Antonio de Rivas intended to meet seven other Jesuits at the Paraguay River to establish a connection between Paraguay and Chiquitos. However, the beginning of the rainy season brought bad weather, and Arce and his companion only got as far as the first native village. The local Piñoca tribe, who were suffering from a plague, begged Arce and Rivas to stay and promised to build a house and a church for the Jesuits, which were finished by the end of year. The mission was later moved a number of times until 1708 when it was established in its present location.
Ten more missions were founded in the Chiquitania by the Jesuits in three periods: the 1690s, the 1720s, and after 1748. In the 1690s, five missions were established: San Rafael de Velasco (1696), San José de Chiquitos (1698), Concepción (1699) and San Juan Bautista (1699). San Juan Bautista is not part of the World Heritage Site, and only the ruins of a stone tower survive near the present village of San Juan de Taperas.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) caused a shortage of missionaries and instability in the reductions, so no new missions were built during this period. By 1718 San Rafael was the largest of the Chiquitos missions, and with 2,615 inhabitants could not sustain a growing population. In 1721 the Jesuits Fr. Felipe Suárez and Fr. Francisco Hervás established a split-off of the San Rafael mission, the mission of San Miguel de Velasco. To the south, San Ignacio de Zamucos was founded in 1724 but abandoned in 1745; today nothing remains of the mission.
A third period of mission foundations began in 1748 with the establishment of San Ignacio de Velasco, which was not declared a part of the World Heritage Site. The church is nonetheless a largely faithful 20th-century reconstruction – as opposed to renovation (a key criterion for inclusion in the World Heritage Site group) – of the second Jesuit templo built in 1761. In 1754 the Jesuits founded the mission of Santiago de Chiquitos. This church also is a reconstruction, dating from the early 20th century and likewise is not part of the World Heritage Site group. In 1755 the mission of Santa Ana de Velasco was founded by the Jesuit Julian Knogler; it is the most authentic of the six World Heritage Site missions dating from the colonial period. The last mission in the Chiquitania to be established was founded by the Jesuits Fr. Antonio Gaspar and Fr. José Chueca as Santo Corazón in 1760. The local Mbaya peoples were hostile to the mission[^1] and nothing of the original settlement remains in the modern village.
The Jesuits in the Chiquitania had a secondary objective, which was to secure a more direct route to Asunción than the road then being used via Tucumán and Tarija to link the Chiquitania with the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. The missionaries in Chiquitos founded their settlements increasingly further east, towards the Paraguay River, while those south of Asunción moved closer to the Paraguay River by establishing their missions increasingly farther north, thereby avoiding the impassable Chaco region. Although Ñuflo de Chávez had attempted a route through the Chaco on an expedition as early as 1564, subsequent Jesuit explorations from Chiquitos (e.g. in 1690, 1702, 1703, and 1705) were unsuccessful. The Jesuits were stopped by the hostile Payaguá and Mbayá (Guaycuruan-speaking tribes), and by the impenetrable swamps of Jarayes. In 1715, de Arce, the co-founder of the first mission in San Xavier, set out from Asunción on the Paraguay River with the Flemish priest Fr. Bartolomé Blende. Payaguá warriors killed Blende during the journey, but de Arce struggled on to reach San Rafael de Velasco in the Chiquitania. On the return trip to Asunción he too was killed in Paraguay. Not until 1767, when the missions had encroached sufficiently on the hostile region and just before the Jesuits were expelled from the New World, did Fr. José Sánchez Labrador manage to travel from Belén in Paraguay to Santo Corazón, the easternmost Chiquitos mission.
### Expulsion and recent development
In 1750 as a result of the Treaty of Madrid seven missions in present-day Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil were transferred from Spanish to Portuguese control. The native Guaraní tribes were unhappy to see their lands turned over to Portugal (their enemy for over a century) and they rebelled against the decision, leading to the Guarani War. In Europe, where the Jesuits were under attack, they were accused of supporting the rebellion and perceived as defending the native peoples. In 1758, the Jesuits were accused of a conspiracy to kill the king of Portugal, known as the Távora affair. All members of the Society of Jesus were evicted from Portuguese territories in 1759, and from French territories in 1764. In 1766 Jesuits were accused of causing Esquilache Riots in Madrid; consequently in February 1767, Charles III of Spain signed a royal decree with expulsion orders for all members of the Society of Jesus in Spanish territories.
From then on, spiritual and secular administration were to be strictly separated. At the time of the expulsion, 25 Jesuits served a Christianized population of at least 24,000, in the ten missions of the Chiquitania. The Chiquitos mission properties included 25 estancias (ranches) with 31,700 cattle and 850 horses. Libraries across the settlements held 2,094 volumes.
By September 1767, all but four Jesuits had left the Chiquitania, and they went the following April. The Spanish considered it essential to maintain the settlements as a buffer against Portuguese expansion. The archbishop of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Francisco Ramón Herboso, established a new system of government, very similar to that set up by the Jesuits. He stipulated that each mission be run by two secular (parish) priests, one to take care of the spiritual needs while the other was in charge of all other – political and economic – affairs of the mission administration. One change was that the Indians were allowed to trade. In practice, the shortage of clergy and the low quality of those appointed by the bishop – almost all of whom did not speak the language of the local peoples and in some cases had not been ordained – led to a rapid general decline of the missions. The priests also broke ethical and religious codes, appropriated the major part of the missions' income and encouraged contraband trade with the Portuguese.
Within two years of the expulsion, the population in the Chiquitos missions dropped below 20,000. Despite the general decline of the settlements, however, the church buildings were maintained and, in some cases, extended by the towns' inhabitants. The construction of the church in Santa Ana de Velasco falls into this period. Bernd Fischermann, an anthropologist who studied the Chiquitano, suggests three reasons that the Chiquitano preserved the heritage of the Jesuits even after their expulsion: the memory of their prosperity with the Jesuits; the desire to appear as civilized Christians to mestizos and white people; and to preserve the ethnicity that originated from a mix of various culturally distinct groups blended by an enforced common language and customs learned from the Jesuits.
In January 1790, the Audiencia of Charcas ended the diocese’s mismanagement, and temporal affairs were delegated to civil administrators, with the hope of making the missions economically more successful. Sixty years after the expulsion of the Jesuits the churches remained active centers of worship, as the French naturalist Alcide d'Orbigny reported during his mission to South America in 1830 and 1831. Although much diminished economically and politically, the culture the Jesuits established was still evident. According to d'Orbigny, the music at a Sunday mass in San Xavier was better than those he had heard in the richest cities of Bolivia. The population of the Chiquitania missions reached a low of around 15,000 inhabitants in 1830. In 1842 the Comte de Castelnau visited the area and, referring to the church in Santa Ana de Velasco, proclaimed: "This beautiful building, surrounded by gardens, presents one of the most impressive views imaginable."
By 1851, however, the reduction system of the missions had disappeared. Mestizos who had moved to the area in their quest for land began to outnumber the original indigenous population. Starting with the creation of the Province of José Miguel de Velasco in 1880, the Chiquitania was split into five administrative divisions. With the rubber boom at the turn of the century, more settlers came to the areas and established large haciendas, moving the economic activities together with the native peoples out of the towns.
In 1931, the spiritual administration of the missions was given to German-speaking Franciscan missionaries. Ecclesiastical control moved back to the area with the creation of the Apostolic Vicariate of Chiquitos in San Ignacio in that year. The churches not only serve the mestizo inhabitants of the villages but present spiritual centers for the few remaining indigenous peoples living in the periphery.
In 1972, the Swiss architect and then-Jesuit priest Hans Roth began an extensive restoration project of the missionary churches and many colonial buildings that were in ruins. These churches exist in their present form as a result of Roth's effort, who worked on the restoration with a few colleagues and many local people until his death in 1999. The restoration works have continued sporadically into the beginning of the 21st century under local leadership.
Six of the reductions were listed as part of the World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1990. The churches of San Ignacio de Velasco, Santiago de Chiquitos and Santo Corazón have been reconstructed from scratch and are not part of the World Heritage Site. In San Juan Bautista only ruins remain. UNESCO listed the site under criteria IV and V, acknowledging the adaption of Christian religious architecture to the local environment and the unique architecture expressed in the wooden columns and banisters. Recently ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, warned that the traditional architectural ensemble that makes up the site has become vulnerable following agrarian reforms from 1953 which threatened the fragile socioeconomic infrastructure of the region. At the time of the nomination, the World Heritage Site was protected by the Pro Santa Cruz committee, Cordecruz, Plan Regulador de Santa Cruz, and the local mayoral offices of the mission towns.
## World Heritage Missions
### San Xavier
Initially established in 1691, the mission of San Xavier was the first of the missions listed in the World Heritage Site. In 1696, due to the incursion of Paulistas from Brazil in the east, the mission was relocated toward the San Miguel River. In 1698, it was relocated closer to Santa Cruz, but in 1708 was moved away to protect the Indians from the Spaniards. The original inhabitants of San Xavier were the Piñoca tribe. The church was built between 1749 and 1752 by the Swiss Jesuit and architect Fr. Martin Schmid. The school and church, as well as other characteristics of residential architecture, are still visible today in the village. San Xavier was restored by Hans Roth between 1987 and 1993.
### San Rafael de Velasco
The mission of San Rafael de Velasco was the second mission built out of the six inscribed the World Heritage Site. Founded in 1695 by the Jesuits Fr. Juan Bautista Zea and Fr. Francisco Hervás, it was moved several times. The mission had to be moved in 1701 and 1705 because of epidemics in the region. In 1719 the mission was moved once more due to fire. Fr. Martin Schmid built the church between 1747 and 1749, which has survived. San Rafael de Velasco was restored between 1972 and 1996 as part of Hans Roth's restoration project.
### San José de Chiquitos
Founded in 1698 by the Jesuits Fr. Felipe Suárez and Fr. Dionosio Ávila, the mission of San José de Chiquitos was the third mission built of those of the World Heritage Site. At first, the mission was inhabited by the Penoca tribe. The church was built between 1745 and 1760 by an unknown architect. It is built of stone, unlike other mission churches in the area which were built with local adobe and wood. The mission is one of four that remain in their original location. A mortuary chapel (1740), the church (1747), a bell tower (1748), a house for the priests (colegio) and workshops (both 1754) still exist, and were renovated by Hans Roth's restoration project between 1988 and 2003. Restoration efforts continue.
### Concepción
The fourth mission in the World Heritage Site, the mission of Concepción, was initially founded in 1699 by the Jesuit priests Fr. Francisco Lucas Caballero and Fr. Francisco Hervás. A nearby mission, San Ignacio de Boococas, was incorporated in 1708. The mission was moved three times: in 1707, 1708 and 1722. The mission was inhabited by the Chiquitanos, the largest tribe in the region. The mission church was constructed between 1752 and 1756, by Fr. Martin Schmid and Fr. Johann Messner. From 1975 to 1996 the mission was reconstructed as part of Hans Roth's restoration project.
### San Miguel de Velasco
The fifth mission in the World Heritage Site, that of San Miguel de Velasco, was established by the Jesuits Fr. Felipe Suarez and Fr. Francisco Hervás in 1721. San Miguel was an offshoot of the mission of San Rafael de Velasco, where the population had grown too large. The mission church was built between 1752 and 1759, probably by Fr. Johann Messner, a collaborator with or student of Fr. Martin Schmid. The church was restored by Hans Roth between 1979 and 1983.
### Santa Ana de Velasco
The mission of Santa Ana de Velasco was the final World Heritage Site-inscribed mission to be established. It was founded by the Jesuit priest Fr. Julian Knogler in 1755. The original native inhabitants of the missions were the Covareca and Curuminaca tribes, who spoke dialects of the Otuke language. The mission church was designed after the expulsion of the Jesuits between 1770 and 1780 by an unknown architect and built entirely by the indigenous population. The complex, consisting of the church, bell tower, sacristy and a grassy plaza lined by houses, is considered to have the most fidelity to the original plan of the Jesuit reductions. Starting in 1989 and lasting until 2001, the mission underwent partial restoration through the efforts of Hans Roth and his team.
## Architecture
In their design of the reductions, the Jesuits were inspired by “ideal cities“ as outlined in works such as Utopia and Arcadia, written respectively by the 16th-century English philosophers Thomas More and Philip Sidney. The Jesuits had specific criteria for building sites: locations with plenty of wood for construction; sufficient water for the population; good soil for agriculture; and safety from flooding during the rainy season. Although most of the missions in the Chiquitania were relocated at least once during the time of the Jesuits, four of ten towns remained at their original sites. Wood and adobe were the main materials used in the construction of the settlements.
### Mission layout
The architecture and internal layout of these missions followed a scheme which was repeated later with some variations in the rest of the missionary reductions. In Chiquitos, the oldest mission, San Xavier, formed the basis for the organizational style, which consisted of a modular structure, the center formed by a wide rectangular square, with the church complex on one side and the houses of the inhabitants on the three remaining sides. The centralized organization of the Jesuits dictated a certain uniformity of measures and sizes. Despite being based on the same basic model, the towns of Chiquitos nonetheless show remarkable variations. For example, the orientation of the settlements toward the cardinal points differed and was determined by individual circumstances.
### Plaza
The plaza was an almost square area varying in size from 124 by 148 metres (407 ft × 486 ft) in the older towns of San Xavier and San Rafael de Velasco to 166 by 198 metres (545 ft × 650 ft) in San Ignacio de Velasco. As they were used for religious and civil purposes, these were open spaces free of vegetation except a few palm trees surrounding a cross in the center of the plaza. The evergreen palm trees symbolizing eternal love, deliberately hearkened to Psalm 92:12. Four chapels facing the central cross were placed at the corners of the square and were used in processions. Almost no remains exist of the chapels at the mission sites, as the plazas subsequently were redesigned to reflect the republican and mestizo lifestyle prevalent after the period of the Jesuits. Most have undergone recent expansion as well. Trees and shrubs were planted, and in some cases monuments were erected. Out of the original ten missions, only the plaza at Santa Ana de Velasco does not show major changes, consisting as it did in colonial times, of an open grassy space.
### Houses
The houses of the natives had an elongated layout, and were arranged in parallel lines extending from the main square in three directions. Those facing the plaza were originally occupied by the chiefs of the indigenous tribes, and often were larger. The architecture of these houses was simple, consisting of large rooms (6x4 meters), walls up to 60 centimetres (2 ft) thick, and a roof made of reed (caña) and wood (cuchi) that reached a height of 5 m (16 ft) in the center. Double doors and open galleries provided protection from the elements. The latter have had a social function as meeting places up to the present day.
Over the last 150 years, this layout has been replaced by the usual Spanish colonial architecture of large square blocks with internal patios. Remnants of the initial design can still be seen in San Miguel de Velasco, San Rafael de Velasco and Santa Ana de Velasco, places that were not as much exposed to modernization as the other settlements.
### Church complex
Along the fourth side of the plaza lay the religious, cultural and commercial centers of the towns. In addition to the church, which dominated the complex, there would have been a mortuary chapel, a tower and a colegio or "school", connected by a wall along the side of the plaza. Behind the wall and away from the plaza would have been the patio with living quarters for the priests or visitors, rooms for town council matters, for music and storage, as well as workshops, which often were arranged around a second patio. Behind the buildings, a vegetable garden surrounded by a wall and a cemetery likely would have been found. The cemeteries and workshops have disappeared completely from the mission settlements, while the other elements of the church complex still survive to varying degrees. Two stone towers (in San Juan Bautista and San José de Chiquitos) and one of adobe (in San Miguel de Velasco) can be traced back to the time of the Jesuits. Others are of more recent construction, or the result of the conservation and restoration work spearheaded by Roth toward the end of the 20th century. Many of these are tall wooden constructions open on all sides. Of the Jesuit schools only those in San Xavier and Concepción are preserved entirely. Like the houses of the indigenous residents, the buildings of the church complex were single-level ones.
#### Church
Once a settlement had been established, the missionaries, working with the native population, began to erect the church, which served as the educational, cultural and economic center of the town. The initial church in each mission (except in Santa Ana de Velasco) was temporary, essentially no more than a chapel and built as quickly as possible of local wood, unembellished save for a simple altar. The Jesuit masterpieces seen today general were erected several decades into the settlements’ existence. Fr. Martin Schmid, Swiss priest and composer, was the architect for at least three of these missionary churches: San Xavier, San Rafael de Velasco, and Concepción. Schmid combined elements of Christian architecture with traditional local design to create a unique baroque-mestizo style. Schmid placed a quotation from the Genesis 28:17 above the main entrance of each of the three churches. In San Xavier the quotation is in Spanish: CASA DE DIOS Y PUERTA DEL CIELO ; and in Latin at the other two churches: DOMUS DEI ET PORTA COELI, meaning The house of god and the gate of heaven.
The construction of the restored churches seen today falls in the period between 1745 and 1770 and is characterized by the use of locally available natural materials like wood, used in the carved columns, pulpits and sets of drawers. Artistic adornments were added even after the Jesuits’ expulsion in 1767, until around 1830. Some of the altars are covered in gold. Often the walls of the mission churches were made of adobe, the same material that had been used for the houses of the natives. In San Rafael de Velasco and San Miguel de Velasco, mica also was used on the walls, giving them an iridescent effect. The construction of the church in San José de Chiquitos is an exception: inspired by an unknown baroque model, it has a stone façade. The only other example where stone was used on a grand scale is in the construction of San Juan Bautista, although only the ruins of a tower remain.
All of the churches consist of a wooden skeleton with columns, fixed in the ground, which provided stability to the building and supported the tile-covered roof. The adobe walls were placed directly on the ground, virtually independent of the wooden construction, and had no supporting role. Porticos and a large porch roof provided protection from the heavy tropical rains. The floor was covered in tiles which, like those of the roof, were produced in local tile works. The churches have a barn-like appearance, albeit of monumental size (width: 16–20 metres (52–66 ft), length: 50–60 metres (160–200 ft) height: 10–14 metres (33–46 ft)) with a capacity for more than 3,000 people, with a wide structure and distinctive low-hanging eaves. This style also is evident in the building method of native community houses.
The construction of the church required a major effort by the community and employed hundreds of indigenous carpenters. Fr. José Cardiet described the process:
> All these buildings are made in a different way of those made in Europe: because the roof is built first and the walls afterwards. First large tree trunks are buried in the soil, these are worked by adz. Above these they place the beams and sills; and above these the trusses and locks, tins and roof; after that the foundations of stone are placed, and about 2 or 3 spans above the surface of the soil, and from here upwards they place the walls of adobe. The wooden trunks or pillars, which are called horcones, remain in the central part of the walls, carrying the complete weight of the roof and no weight on the walls. In the central naves and in the place where the wall will be placed, 9 feet deep holes are made, and with architectural machines they introduce the carved horcones in the form of columns. The 3 meters (9 feet) stay inside the soil and are not carved, and keep part of the trees roots for greater strength, and these parts are burned so they may resist the humidity.
The walls were decorated with cornices, moldings, pilasters and at times blind arcades. First the walls were plastered entirely by a mix of mud, sand, lime and straw, both inside and outside. Paint in earth tones was applied over the lime whitewash, and ornaments were drawn, featuring elements from flora and fauna, as well as angels, saints and geometrical patterns. As noted above, in some cases mica was used to decorate the walls, columns and woodworks. Large oval "oeil-de-boeuf" windows, surrounded by relief petals, above the main doors are a characteristic feature.
The churches had three aisles, divided by wooden columns, often solomonic columns, carved with twisted fluting resembling those at St. Peter's baldachin in St Peter's, Rome. Until modern times, there were no pews so the congregation had to kneel or sit on the floor. A variety of fine pieces of art adorn the inside of the churches, notably their altars, which are sometimes covered in gold, silver or mica. Especially remarkable are the pulpits made of brightly painted wood and supported by carved sirens. The pulpit in the church of San Miguel de Velasco features motifs derived from local vegetation. Elements specific to the Chiquitos missions exist also in other decorations. The altars of the churches of San Xavier and Concepción include depictions of notable Jesuits together with indigenous peoples. There remain a handful of original sculptures in retablos often depicting Madonnas, the crucifixion, and saints, carved in wood and then painted. These sculptures exhibit a style unique to the Chiquitos region, differing from that of the reductions in Paraguay or the Bolivian highlands. The tradition of figure carving has been preserved to the present day in workshops where carvers make columns, finials and windows for new or restored churches or chapels in the area. In addition, carvers produce decorative angels and other figures for the tourist market.
### Restoration
The missionary churches are the true architectural highlights of the area. Hans Roth initiated an important restoration project in these missionary churches in 1972. In San Xavier, San Rafael de Velasco, San José de Chiquitos, Concepción, San Miguel de Velasco and Santa Ana de Velasco, these churches have undergone meticulous restoration. In the 1960s, the San Ignacio de Velasco church (a non-current UNESCO WHS) was replaced with modern construction; in the 1990s, Hans Roth and his co-workers brought the restoration as close as possible to the original edifices. In addition to the churches, Roth constructed more than a hundred new buildings, including schools and houses. He also founded museums and archives.
Roth researched and recovered the original techniques used to construct churches prior to the restorations. He installed new building infrastructure including saw mills, locksmith shops, and carpentry and repair shops, and trained local people in traditional crafts. European volunteers, non-profit organizations, the Catholic Church, and the Bolivian Learning Institute (IBA) helped in the project.
Roth convinced the local inhabitants of the importance of the restoration works, which required a large labor force: typically 40 to 80 workers in towns with populations of 500 to 2,000 were required for church restoration. The effort indicates the strength of and commitment to the unique shared heritage present in the towns. This restoration has resulted in a revival of local traditions and a qualified workforce.
## Life in the mission towns
The reductions were self-sufficient indigenous communities of 2,000–4,000 inhabitants, usually headed by two Jesuit priests and the cabildo (town council and cacique (tribal leader), who retained their functions and played the role of intermediaries between the native peoples and the Jesuits. However, the degree to which the Jesuits controlled the indigenous population for which they had responsibility and the degree to which they allowed indigenous culture to function is a matter of debate, and the social organization of the reductions have been variously described as jungle utopias on the one hand, to theocratic regimes of terror, the former description being much closer to the mark.
Many Indians who joined the missions were looking for protection from Portuguese slave traders or the encomienda system of the Spanish conquistadores. In the reductions, the natives were free men. The land in the missions was common property. After a marriage, individual plots were assigned to newly founded families. For the Jesuits, the goal was always the same: to create cities in harmony with the paradise where they had encountered the indigenous peoples.
Though the settlements were officially a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru through the Royal Audiencia of Charcas and of the diocese of Santa Cruz in church affairs, their remoteness made them effectively autonomous and self-sufficient. As early as 1515, the Franciscan friar Bartolomé de las Casas had initiated a "foreigner law" for the "'Indian people'", and no white or black man, other than the Jesuits and authorities, was allowed to live in the missions. Merchants were allowed to stay for three days at most.
### Languages
The Jesuits quickly learned the languages of their subjects, which eased the missionary work and contributed to the success of the missions. Although initially each mission were conceived as home to one specific tribe, numerous tribal families lived in the Chiquitania, and often were gathered in next to each other on the same mission. According to a report from 1745, of the 14,706 people living in the missions, 65.5% spoke Chiquitano, 11% Arawak, 9.1% Otuquis, 7.9% Zamucos, 4.4% Chapacura and 2.1% Guaraní. It should, however, be understood that by this time most of the inhabitants of these missions spoke Chiquitano as a second language. Such ethnic diversity is unique among the Jesuit missions in America. Reflecting the view of the colonial powers, the Jesuit records only distinguished between Christian and non-Christian Indios. Eventually Gorgotoqui, the formal name for language spoken by the Chiquitano tribe, became the lingua franca of the mission settlements, and the numerous tribes were culturally united in the Chiquitano ethnic group. By 1770, within three years of the expulsion of the Jesuits, Spanish authorities instituted a new policy of forced "castilianization" or "Hispanicization" of the language, thereby causing the number of speakers of native languages to decline.
### Economy
Traditionally most of the Chiquitos tribes practiced swidden agriculture, growing maize and yuca on a small scale. After contact with the Spanish, cocoa and rice also were cultivated. Hunting and fishing provided additional nutrition in the dry season. The Jesuits introduced cattle breeding.
In each settlement, one of the Jesuits was responsible for church matters, while another dealt with commercial affairs and the general well-being of the community. As the Swiss priest, musician and architect Fr. Martin Schmid wrote in a 1744 letter from San Rafael:
> „...the Missionary Priests... are not only parish priests who have preach, hear confessions and govern souls, they are also responsible for the life and health of their parishioners and must provide all the things needed by their towns, because the soul cannot be saved if the body dies. Therefore, the missionaries are town counsellors and judges, doctors, bleeders, masons, carpenters, ironsmiths, locksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, millers, backers, cooks, shepherds, gardeners, painters, sculptors, turners, carriage makers, brick makers, potters, weavers, tanners, wax and candle makers, tinsmiths, and any artisans which may be required in a republic.“
The Jesuits administered labor, the introduction of new technologies, and the disposition of goods. They designated that each family receive all that was necessary to live. The Jesuits did not rely on donations, because by right the priests received a fixed income (usually insufficient for their needs) from the community to support their work. The thriving economy in the reductions enabled them to export surplus goods to all parts of Upper Peru, although ironically not to Paraguay – the region the Jesuits most wanted to reach. The income was used to pay royal tributes and to purchase goods not locally available, such as books, paper, and wine, from as far away as Europe. In the missions themselves money was not used. This laid the foundation of the belief that the Jesuits were guarding immense riches acquired through local labor. In reality the communities were economically successful but hardly constituted any important source of income for the Jesuit order.
All the inhabitants, including the young and elderly, were subject to a schedule of alternating work, religious practice, and rest. According to d'Orbigny, the inhabitants of the Chiquitos missions enjoyed considerably more freedom than those in the Mojos missions. There was also less time spent practicing religion. The catechumens were instructed by the Jesuits in various arts. They learned very quickly and soon became proficient carpenters, painters, weavers, sculptors and artisans. Each settlement had its own set of craftsmen; as a result, in addition to the caciques, a new social class of craftsmen and artisans emerged. This group and the rest of the population, who worked primarily in agriculture or cattle raising, were each represented by two alcaldes. Initially the main commercial products included honey, yerba maté, salt, tamarind, cotton, shoes, and leather. Later, artisans exported musical instruments, liturgical items, rosaries, and silverware.
### Music
Music played a special part in all aspects of life and in the evangelization of the natives. Realizing the musical capacities of the Indians, the Jesuits sent important composers, choir directors, and manufacturers of musical instruments to South America. The most famous was probably the Italian baroque composer Domenico Zipoli, who worked in the reductions in Paraguay. Fr. Johann Mesner and Fr. Martin Schmid, two Jesuit missionaries with musical talent, went to the Chiquitania. Schmid in particular was responsible for this skill being developed to such a high degree that polyphonic choirs would perform, and whole orchestras would play Baroque operas on handmade instruments. He directed the production of violins, harps, flutes, and organs, and wrote and copied masses, operas, and motets. He built an organ with six stops in Potosí, disassembled it, transported it by mules over a distance of 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) on a difficult road to the remote mission of Santa Ana de Velasco, and re-assembled it there from hand. It is still is use. The Jesuits used musical lessons as a first step to the Christianization of the natives.
As Schmid, who also acted as a composer, wrote in a 1744 letter from San Rafael de Velasco:
> „“...In all these towns the sound of my organs already can be heard. I made a pile of all kind of musical instruments and taught the Indians how to play them. Not a single day passes without the sound of songs in our churches... and I sing, play the organ, the zither, the flute, the trumpet, the psalter and the lyre, in high mode and low mode. All these musical art forms, which I ignored partially, I am able to practice now and teach them to the children of the natives. Your Reverence would be able to observe here, how children which were torn away from the jungle just a year ago, together with their parents are able today to sing well and with an absolutely firm beat, they play the zither, lyre and the organ and dance with precise movements and rhythm, that they might compete with the Europeans themselves. We teach these people all these mundane things so they may get rid of their rude customs and resemble civilized persons, predisposed to accept Christianity.”
### Today
Some Jesuit institutions still exist in the Chiquitania. For example, the towns of San Rafael de Velasco, San Miguel de Velasco, Santa Ana de Velasco and San Ignacio de Velasco have functioning town councils (cabildos), and the caciques and the sexton still retain their capacities. The majority of the population of the Chiquitania is staunchly Catholic; the Chiquitano cosmovision is now only a dimly understood mythology for its inhabitants. Between 1992 and 2009, the populations of San Xavier and especially Concepción tripled, and more than doubled in San Ignacio de Velasco, now the region's fastest-growing municipality. In other mission towns the population also increased, albeit on a smaller scale. As of 2011, San José de Chiquitos, San Xavier and Concepción have around 10,000 inhabitants each; and San Ignacio de Velasco, the largest town in the Chiquitania, has about 35,000 and is now boasts a campus of a national university. On the other hand, in Santa Ana de Velasco there are currently only a few hundred people. The remoter settlements of Santiago de Chiquitos and Santo Corazón are quite small as well. According to various sources, in Bolivia the number of ethnic Chiquitanos is between 30,000 and 47,000 of which less than 6,000 – mainly elderly people – still speak the original language. Only a few hundred are monolingual in the Chiquitano language.
Economically, the area depends on agriculture. Maize, rice, yuca, cotton and heart of palm are produced and exported. Cattle ranching and the industrial processing of milk and cheese have been developed extensively in recent years. Crafts, often carved of wood using the same techniques as in colonial times, provide additional income. Since the launch of the Jesuit Mission Circuit – a marketing label to promote regional tourism – in 2005, craftsmanship and tourism have been closely related.
The musical festivals and concerts held regularly in the Chiquitos formermission towns testify to the living heritage of this art form. Some of the original instruments and sculptures made by Fr. Martin Schmid and his apprentices survive in small museums in the mission towns, most notably in Concepción which also houses the music archive. In San Xavier, San Rafael de Velasco and Santa Ana de Velasco three original harps from the time of the Jesuits are preserved. The church in Santa Ana de Vealsco also houses the only original organ in Chiquitos, transported there from Potosí by mule, accompanied by Schmid in 1751. More than a dozen orchestras and choirs brought together by the Sistema de Coros y Orquestas (SICOR) dot the area.
Since 1996, the nonprofit institution Asociacion Pro Arte y Cultura (APAC) has organized the biennial Festival Internacional de Musica Renacentista y Barroca Americana "MISIONES DE CHIQUITOS".
Starting in 1975, restoration work on the church (now cathedral) of Concepción unearthed more than 5,000 musical scores from the 17th and 18th centuries. Later another 6,000 scores were found in Moxos and several thousand additionally in San Xavier. Some of these works have been interpreted at the 2006 and 2008 festivals. The statistics of these festivals over the years is as follows:
The festival is carried out in the designated Plazas Misionales (among other places), usually housed in churches and also in the main plaza of Santa Cruz. In one event, orchestras of various countries compete against each other. One of the local orchestras, Orquesta Urubicha, is made up of people native to the ex-missions who use instruments which they build themselves according to plans left by the Jesuit missionaries.
## Tourism
Shortly after the start of the restoration effort, the potential for tourism in the missions was assessed in a report published by UNESCO in 1977.
To promote the missions as a tourist destination, travel agencies, chambers of commerce and industry, the towns' mayors, native communities and other institutions organized the Lanzamiento mundial del Destino Turístico "Chiquitos", Misiones Jesuíticas de Bolivia, a five-day tourist event lasting from March 23–27, 2006. Journalists and international tour operators were shown the important tourist attractions, and introduced to the culture through visits to museums, local workshops, various concerts, native dances, high masses, processions, crafts festivals, and local cuisine. The organisers’ goal initially was to raise the number of tourists from 25,000 to 1 million per year over a ten-year period, which would have represented US\$400 million of income. Subsequently, in the face of lack of support from the Bolivian government and the downturn of the national and local economies, a more modest goal of attracting between 200,000 and 250,000 people per annum was established.
Tourism is now an important source of income for the region, amounting in Concepción Municipality alone to US\$296,140, or 7.2% of the annual gross production. An additional US\$40,000 or 1% comes from crafts. According to a report published by the "Coordinadora Interinstitucional de la Provincia Velasco" in 2007, 17,381 people visited San Ignacio de Velasco, the largest town in the region, as tourists in 2006. About 30% of them came from outside of Bolivia. The main attraction for tourists are the nearby missions of San Miguel de Velasco, San Rafael de Velasco and Santa Ana de Velasco. Tourism to San Ignacio de Velasco generated 7,821,450 Bolivianos in income in 2006. Tourism income is ostensibly translated to improvements in the infrastructure, although there has been criticism that earmarked funds do not always reach their intended destinations. Other than cultural tourism to the missionary circuit and musical festivals, the region offers many natural attractions like rivers, lagoons, hot springs, caves and waterfalls, although there is no infrastructure to support tourism in this regard.
## Cultural references
Many elements of the early days of the Jesuit missions are shown in the movie The Mission, although the movie attempts to depict life in the Guaraní missions of Paraguay, not those of the Chiquitos missions, which were considerably more culturally expressive. The events around the expulsion of the Jesuits (the Extrañamiento) are depicted in Fritz Hochwälder's play Das heilige Experiment (The Strong are Lonely). Both are set in Paraguay. It has been suggested that Das heilige Experiment'' sparked interest in the 20th century among scholars in the forgotten Jesuit missions.
## See also
- Society of Jesus
- Jesuit Reductions
- Chiquitania
Jesuit missions in neighboring countries
- Jesuit Block and Estancias of Córdoba (Argentina)
- Jesuit missions of the Guaraní (Argentina and Brazil)
- Jesuit missions of La Santisima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue (Paraguay)
## See also
- List of Jesuit sites
- Jesuit Missions of Moxos
[^1]: Gott, Richard (1993), Land Without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Watershed', London: Verso, pp. 133-135
|
19,431,373 |
Cubs Win Flag
| 1,165,642,160 |
Victory flag that is flown at Wrigley Field
|
[
"Chicago Cubs",
"Flags of Illinois",
"Sports paraphernalia",
"Victory"
] |
The Cubs Win Flag is a victory flag that is flown at Wrigley Field after every Chicago Cubs home win. The flag is variously referred to by approximately a dozen names, combining: either Cubs or Chicago Cubs; Win, W, White, White W, or W Win; and flag, banner or banner flag. Other common names for the symbol include Chicago Cubs W Flag and Chicago Cubs Win Banner Flag. It has become an important symbol for fans, and tradition of flying a win or loss flag over the stadium began soon after the construction of the scoreboard in 1937.
The flag has used two different color schemes with the letter "W" on a solid background, and there is a loss indicator flag with a letter "L". Additionally, the flags have been complemented by different color schemes of indicator lights. The flag is also changed after each Cubs win. The flag has become a very symbolic emblem for devout Cubs fans. Some retailers sell slightly different versions that also have the Cubs logo at the bottom.
## Detail
Flying a flag over Wrigley Field to denote wins and losses is a longstanding tradition. Currently, the Win Flag is composed of a large blue letter "W" on a white background while the Loss Flag is a large white letter "L" on a blue background. Early in the 21st century, the phrase "White flag time at Wrigley!" was used to explain that the Cubs had just won that day's home game. More recently, at least as early as the 2015 season, the Cubs have used the phrase "Fly the W!"; an accompanying social media hashtag "#FlyTheW" has been heavily promoted by the team and its fans. The flag is raised by a scoreboard crew member immediately after the completion of a game, and in the case of a doubleheader split, both flags are flown.
It is customary to fly flags from sunrise until sunset, unless they are directly illuminated. At the beginning of each day, the cross-shaped "masthead" atop the center field scoreboard displays the American flag at the top, and three strands of flags bearing the colors and nicknames of each of the National League clubs, one strand per Division in order of that day's standings. Immediately after the game, one of the strands of flags is lowered, and either the W or the L-lettered flag is raised in its place. The W-lettered flag is raised on the left field side of the board, above the blue light that also indicates a win. The L-lettered flag is raised on the right field side of the board, above the white light that indicates a loss. Once the Win or Loss Flag has been raised, the other flags are lowered and also stowed away inside the scoreboard.
The symbolism of the flag now serves a wide variety of purposes. It is commonly reproduced in 3-by-5-foot (0.91 by 1.52 m) dimensions, and car flag versions are also sold. The flag is also available in 2-by-3-foot (0.61 by 0.91 m) dimension versions. The flag has become a celebratory symbol for Chicago Cubs fans who purchase reproductions and take them to games at home and on the road to show support. The fans wave them after victories at Wrigley Field, and they hang them in the stands during playoff series. Some fans fly a win flag in place of or in addition to the Flag of the United States on days when the Cubs win. Since 1998, the flags have become ever more popular, with demand reaching a level where they are sold at Wrigley Field. In 2007, with the Cubs in playoff contention for the first time in 3 years, the Cubs' victory tune, Go Cubs Go! became more popular among the fans. Due to the song's growing popularity, after wins at home, Cubs TV broadcasters Len Kasper and Bob Brenly would have their microphones shut off, while the camera pans around the stadium to view the jubilant fans as Go Cubs Go! plays in the background. After fans discovered this, they started purchasing "W" flags and waving them after wins at home as an attempt to get on TV. However, in seasons when the Cubs are performing poorly the tradition has led to parody and satire, such as stories of the Cubs retiring the win flag due to signs of neglect.
While not having the popularity of the Win Flag, the Loss Flag has become increasingly popular with clubs who traditionally have rivalries with the Cubs, such as the St. Louis Cardinals, Milwaukee Brewers, or Chicago White Sox. Fans of those teams wave the blue flag after their team defeats the Cubs at Busch Stadium or Guaranteed Rate Field. However, because of the enormous fan base that the Cubs hold, it is not uncommon to see fans at games on the road waving their "W" flags during Cubs wins on the road. Another of the Cubs' rivals, the Pittsburgh Pirates, actually co-opted the Cubs Win Flag for themselves by waving a Jolly Roger pirate flag after each Pirates win.
The flag is known by many names, with none being more prevalent than the rest, and may often be referred to by more than one name by the same manufacturer. "Chicago Cubs W Win Flag" is the name used on Amazon.com, however the company also refers to the flag as Chicago Cubs 'W' Banner Flag in their marketplace section. CubWorld.com also refers to the flag by the name Chicago Cubs 'W' Banner Flag. Other retailers use the names Cubs Win W Flag, Chicago Cubs Win 3' x 5' Flag, Cubs W Flag, or (Chicago Cubs) W Flag in the case of Sports Fan Warehouse. One retailer even sells an item called the Chicago Cubs W Fan Banner. Another retailer sells two versions of the flag listed as Chicago Cubs Win W Flag and Chicago Cubs Win Flag, yet its advertisements mentions celebrating a Cub win with the Chicago Cubs White "W" Flag. An alternate version that has the Chicago Cubs logo beneath the W can be found under the name Chicago Cubs Win W Banner.
## History
The Cubs' then-owner Philip K. Wrigley ordered the reconstruction of the bleachers and the building of the manually operated scoreboard in 1937. The scoreboard's "masthead" was in place by 1938, displaying the American flag at the top and flags representing the eight clubs of the National League on the left and right strands of the masthead, four apiece. In the 1940s, the practice of raising the Win/Loss flags was begun.
The flags were originally a white "W" on a blue flag and a blue "L" on a white flag. This matched what was then the color scheme of the Cubs "team flags" that flew on the foul poles, and the many little "W.F." flags that flew on the grandstand roof (all of them serving to give the players a sense of the wind speed and direction). Ernie Banks was the first Cub to have his number retired on August 22, 1982, and his number 14 has been flown in blue on a white flag (echoing the pattern of a Cubs home uniform shirt) on the left field foul pole ever since. On August 13, 1987, Billy Williams had his number retired and it flew with the same color scheme, on the right field foul pole. The scheme of the Cubs Win flag was reversed in the early 1980s. The change in the flag color scheme matched the Win flag color with the honored colors of the retired number flags, as the white-on-blue Cubs "team flag" was retired. Subsequent retired Cubs numbers for Ron Santo, Ryne Sandberg and Ferguson Jenkins/Greg Maddux also match this color scheme.
In addition to the flags, Wrigley authorized Bill Veeck, the leader of the bleacher reconstruction project, to add colored lights on the crossbar of the masthead so that the Chicago 'L' passengers would be able to see the outcome of Cubs home games after sunset. In his autobiography, Veeck remembered the colors as green for a win and red for a loss. Hartell's book acknowledges Veeck's comments, but reports that contemporary newspapers stated that the colors of the lights were blue and white, as they are now. Eventually the original lights on the masthead were replaced by lights directly on the top of scoreboard, still visible from outside Wrigley field. The lights complement the flags by helping night time passersby learn the result of that day's Cubs game at a glance. The current blue and white Win/Loss lights were added atop the scoreboard in 1978, while the "Wintrust W" light on the left-field video board was implemented in 2015.
On April 23, 2008, the Cubs won for the 10,000th time in the history of the franchise on the road against the Colorado Rockies. Like the 9,000th win, the 10,000th win came in a 7–6 victory at Coors Field. The Cubs were the second franchise to achieve 10,000 regular season wins; the San Francisco Giants/New York Giants were the first. The franchise flew a special 10,000th win flag along with a Cubs Win flag to commemorate the landmark achievement for the franchise. This was unusual not just for the 10,000th win, but also for flying the flag in reference to a road game. The special flag flew from the afternoon of April 24, 2008, until immediately prior to the next home game on April 29, 2008, at 7:05pm against the Milwaukee Brewers. After the flag was taken down, it was autographed by all members of the 2008 Chicago Cubs and auctioned off for charity.
|
72,322,205 |
Andrew Planta
| 1,164,102,974 |
Swiss pastor and librarian (1717–1773)
|
[
"1717 births",
"1773 deaths",
"Employees of the British Museum",
"Fellows of the Royal Society",
"Planta family",
"Swiss Christian religious leaders",
"Swiss emigrants to the United Kingdom",
"Swiss translators",
"Translators to Italian"
] |
Andrew Joseph Planta, also known as Andreas Joseph von Planta (1717–1773) was a Swiss Reformed pastor who emigrated to England, where he became librarian at the British Museum. He was born in Susch, studied theology in Zürich and worked as pastor in the Italian-speaking Protestant parish of Castasegna. He published an Italian psalter and book of prayers in 1740. In 1745, he obtained an MA degree at the University of Erlangen.
After working as an educator at the court in Ansbach, he moved to London in 1752 to take up the post of pastor of the German Reformed congregation. He became assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1758, reader and tutor to Queen Charlotte in the 1760s and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1770. Several of his daughters worked as governesses at court or in noble families. His son Joseph Planta succeeded him at the British Museum and later became its principal librarian.
## Early life and family
Planta was born on 4 August 1717 (O.S.) in Susch. His father was the Landammann Joseph Planta (1692–1729) and his mother was Elisabeth Conrad from Fideris. The Planta family [de; it] was at this time one of the most important families of the Engadin area. While there are unverified claims that the family is related to a Roman family of the same name that had dealings with Emperor Claudius, the family is more reliably documented since 1139 or 1244. Planta had four younger siblings; the youngest was Martin Planta [de] (1727–1772), a theologian, educator and scientist.
## Education and early career
In 1734, Planta studied theology at the Schola Tigurina in Zürich; he passed an examination by the synod and was ordained in Ilanz in Grisons in 1735. In 1736 or 1737, he became pastor of the parish of Castasegna, one of very few parishes with an Italian-speaking Protestant population. In 1739, he translated the metrical psalter of Ambrosius Lobwasser into Italian as Li CL sacri Salmi di Davide, ed alcuni cantici ecclesiastici, which appeared together with an accompanying book of prayers (Preghiere sacre e divote) in 1740. He also translated Johann Hübner's children's bible into Italian, which appeared in 1743 as Due volte cinquant' e due Lezioni sacre without acknowledgment of the translator, but the second Italian edition of 1785 and the Ladin edition of 1770 both credit Planta.
In 1745, Planta went to the recently founded University of Erlangen, where he obtained an MA degree with a dissertation entitled Exercitatio Docimastica, Exhibens Delineationem Philosophiae Generalis (A docimastical exercise showing an outline of general philosophy). Reports that he obtained a doctorate or that he was professor of mathematics in Erlangen are not correct. From 1745, Planta worked as educator of prince Alexander at the Ansbach court of Charles William Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and his wife Princess Friederike Luise of Prussia. He likely also taught mathematics at the Gymnasium Carolinum.
## Life in London
After travelling to London, where his brother Martin had lived 1749–1750, with the permission of the Ansbach court, Planta became pastor of the German Reformed congregation at the Savoy Chapel in London in 1752, serving until 1772. His inaugural sermon on 22 October 1752, Die Ordnung GOttes in der Gemeine. Das ist der Lehrer Pflicht und des Volcks Schuldigkeit was printed in London. The family lived in Bloomsbury. In 1757, Planta became French tutor to Mary Eleanor Bowes. From 1758, he worked as an assistant librarian at the British Museum. He was Assistant Keeper of Natural History 1758–1765 and Assistant Keeper of Printed Books 1765–1773. After 1761, he served as reader and taught Italian to Queen Charlotte. In 1765, during Leopold Mozart's journey to London with his family, Planta entertained the Mozart family at Montagu House and showed them around the museum, probably on the occasion of a gift of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music to the museum. In his Natural History role at the museum, Planta was succeeded by Daniel Solander and in Printed Books by his son Joseph Planta. In 1768, Carl Gottfried Woide was appointed as assistant pastor; he later succeeded Planta as pastor of the German congregation.
Planta was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 15 March 1770. The citation on his election certificate was "Andrew Joseph Planta of the British Museum MA, & Minister of the German Reformed Church at the Savoy, a Gentleman of good learning, and well versed in natural knowledge, being desirous of becoming a member of the Royal Society; we recommend him, of our Personal acquaintance, as likely to be a valuable & useful member". His proposers were Gregory Sharpe, Gowin Knight, Henry Baker, Jerome de Salis, Joseph Ayloffe, Matthew Duane, Charles Morton, Samuel Harper, Matthew Maty, Richard Penneck, Henry Putman, Joshua Kirby and John Bevis. Planta himself was one of the proposers when Johann Reinhold Forster was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1772.
Planta died on 25 February 1773. His burial was on 3 March 1773 in St George's, Bloomsbury.
## Personal life and children
Planta married Margarete Scartazzini de Bolgiani from Bondo in 1738. They had six daughters and one son. Several of the daughters worked as governesses and educators for noble families; Wendy Moore later wrote "the Planta family had a seemingly endless supply of talented daughters." The family spoke Romansh at home also during their time in London.
The oldest daughter Anna Planta was born in Castasegna. In 1762, she married Christian Minnick or Minnicks, and they emigrated to Pennsylvania. The second child was Elizabeth Planta, born in 1740 or 1741. In 1757, she became governess to Mary Eleanor Bowes. From 1777, she was married to John Parish, who was Superintendent of Ordnance at the Tower of London. The next child was the only son, Joseph Planta, born 10 February 1744 in Castasegna, who succeeded his father at the British Museum and became its principal librarian. He died in 1827. His younger sister Frederica Planta was born in 1750. She later served as governess and English teacher of the daughters of George III and Queen Charlotte but died in February 1778. She was succeeded by her sister Margaret Planta [la] ("Peggy") who died in 1834. The second youngest sister, Anna Elizabeth (Eliza) Planta, was born in London in 1757. She succeeded her sister Elizabeth as governess to Mary Eleanor Bowes' children from 1776, but soon after married Reverend Henry Stephens. She moved to Russia after 1789 to work for Catherine Shuvalova. Her daughter Elizabeth later married Mikhail Speransky but died soon after giving birth to a daughter, Elisabeth Bagréeff-Speransky in 1799. The youngest daughter Ursula Barbara Planta, who was left money in Mary Eleanor Bowes' will, died in 1834.
|
24,960,959 |
Margaret Chin
| 1,157,422,593 |
American politician (born 1953)
|
[
"1954 births",
"21st-century American politicians",
"21st-century American women politicians",
"Asian-American New York City Council members",
"Asian-American people in New York (state) politics",
"Hong Kong emigrants to the United States",
"Living people",
"New York (state) Democrats",
"New York City Council members",
"Women New York City Council members"
] |
Margaret S. Chin (born May 26, 1953) is a Hong Kong American politician who served as a council member for the 1st district of the New York City Council. A Democrat, she and Queens Council member Peter Koo comprised the Asian American delegation of the city council.
Her district included all or parts of Battery Park City, Chinatown, Civic Center, East Village, Ellis Island, Financial District, Governors Island, Greenwich Village, Liberty Island, Little Italy, Lower East Side, NoHo, Nolita, SoHo, Tribeca, and the West Village. Chin controversially retained the right to run a third term despite its unpopularity in 2010. Seven years later, she ran for re-election and won her primary with 46% of the vote against a newcomer, Christopher Marte, who received 44%.
## Early life and career
Born on May 26, 1954, in British Hong Kong as the third of five children and the only daughter in the family, Chin immigrated to the United States in 1963. Her father, who arrived in the U.S. before his family, was an undocumented worker, working as a waiter in the Bronx; his experiences inspired his daughter to advocate for immigration reform during her political tenure.
Chin grew up in Chinatown in New York City and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York with a degree in education. She worked for 14 years at LaGuardia Community College's Division of Adult and Continuing Education.
She has been a member of several public service groups and organizations. In 1974, she was a founding member of Asian Americans for Equality, a group dedicated to "empowering Asian Americans and others in need", and she served as the board's president from 1982 to 1986. She was the chairperson of the New York Immigration Coalition, a policy and advocacy organization which works on issues concerning immigrants and refugees. She was a board member of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an affordable housing non-profit organization. Chin was also a founding member of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation, a group that was formed in 2006 to "rebuild Chinatown following 9/11, and to preserve the neighborhood's unique culture while ensuring its vitality in the future."
In local and state politics, Chin was a member of Manhattan Community Board 1 and Manhattan Community Board 3, and was elected to the New York State Democratic Committee for two terms from 1986 to 1990.
Chin has stated that her ethnicity helped her win the district that includes Chinatown. In her words, many new immigrants and seniors do not speak English, and appreciated that they could speak to her directly and "talk to a City Council member without having to go through an interpreter." Hunter College professor and sociologist Peter Kwong, who has written books on Chinese Americans, said that Chin's election victory at the time was a "milestone in an increasingly active Asian American community" and a "special moment in Chinatown history". Margaret Fung, head of Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national Asian American civil rights group, described her win as a "significant step forward for Asian American political representation".
## New York City Council
Prior to winning the 2009 city council election, Chin had run and lost in the Democratic Party primary election for the District 1 seat in 1991, 1993, and 2001.
In a primary with low voter turnout, she won the Democratic nomination with 39% of the vote, ousting two-term incumbent Alan Gerson. Chin earned 4,541 votes to Gerson's 3,520; the other three candidates, PJ Kim, Pete Gleason, and Arthur Gregory won 1,927 votes, 1,293 votes, and 235 votes, respectively. Campaigning on the issues of affordable housing, improving infrastructure, immigration reform, and better services for senior citizens, Chin won the general election held on November 3, 2009, against Republican candidate Irene Horvath in a landslide, carrying 86% of the vote.
In 2013, Chin ran for reelection. She received an endorsement from the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York prior to that year's September Democratic Party primary and received funding from REBNY for mailings. She was challenged in the primary by Democrat Jenifer Rajkumar, a Lower Manhattan District Leader, in a widely publicized race. Chin won with 58.5% of the vote.
The councilwoman retained the right to run a third term despite New Yorkers voting against the concept in 2010. In 2017, Chin ran for re-election and won her primary with 46% of the vote against her main challenger, Christopher Marte, a newcomer, who received 44%. Marte ran against her again in the general election on the Independence party line, and Chin won the general election with 49.8% of the vote.
## Election history
## Criticism
In September 2017 The Villager endorsed her opponent Christopher Marte, saying
> While [Chin] has ably served some portions of her district, she has alienated her constituents in large swaths of it, including the Village and Soho, as well as the Lower East Side waterfront area where enormous 'supertall' towers are now beginning to sprout out of control. Chin has repeatedly failed to stand with residents in these neighborhoods on issues that are vitally important to their quality of life. And those times when she has made a show of support, it has always come too late — long after the time for action has passed and when it could have actually meant or done something. (See Niketown in Soho, Met Foods supermarket in Little Italy, etc....) ... Chin has been both antagonistic and unresponsive to large segments of her community. She has dodged debates with her opponents — ours wasn’t the only one she avoided — and at the only town hall she has held during her time in office, the public’s cherished First Amendment right to express their views and disseminate information was stifled in a manner one would associate with a fascistic dictatorship.
Critics in October 2019 also opposed her lack of clarity before the vote to expand the current jail in her district; more than 1,000 marched to get her attention on the matter.
## Personal life
Chin is married to Alan Tung, a public school teacher. Their son, Kevin, also graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He completed his studies at Syracuse University, and is now studying photography in Santa Barbara, California.
|
1,208,584 |
Barrett (album)
| 1,171,813,292 | null |
[
"1970 albums",
"Albums produced by David Gilmour",
"Albums produced by Richard Wright (musician)",
"Albums with cover art by Mick Rock",
"Capitol Records albums",
"EMI Records albums",
"Harvest Records albums",
"Syd Barrett albums"
] |
Barrett is the second and final studio album of new material released by former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett. Recording began at Abbey Road Studios on 26 February 1970, and lasted for 15 sessions until 21 July. The album was produced by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and Richard Wright, who also contributed on bass and keyboards respectively, along with previous Madcap contributor Jerry Shirley on drums.
Barrett was released in November 1970 on Harvest in the United Kingdom, but unlike his debut LP The Madcap Laughs it failed to chart; it was re-released in 1974 as part of Syd Barrett, which was the first US issues of these LPs. No singles were issued from the album. It was remastered and reissued in 1993, along with Barrett's other albums − The Madcap Laughs (1970) and Opel (1988) − independently and as part of the Crazy Diamond box set. A newly remastered version was released in 2010.
## Background
The initial sales and the critical & public reaction to Barrett's first solo album, The Madcap Laughs, were deemed sufficient and enthusiastic enough by EMI to sanction a second solo album by Barrett. On 24 February 1970, a month after releasing Madcap, Barrett appeared on John Peel's Top Gear radio show, where he performed only one song from the newly released album ("Terrapin"), three that would later be recorded for Barrett ("Gigolo Aunt", "Baby Lemonade", and "Effervescing Elephant"), and a one-off ("Two of a Kind", which was written by Richard Wright). The session producers had no verbal contact with Barrett, having communication with him only via Gilmour. For the radio session, Gilmour and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley accompanied Barrett on bass and bongos, respectively. The version of "Gigolo Aunt" recorded for the radio session (and later released on 1988's The Peel Session) was unfinished, as Barrett had sung the opening verse three times. Barrett played slide guitar on the radio version of "Baby Lemonade", with Gilmour on organ.
Two days later, he began working on his second album in Abbey Road Studios, with Gilmour as producer, and a trio of musicians: Richard Wright, Shirley and Gilmour himself. The main aim for the Barrett sessions was to give Barrett the structure and focus many felt was missing during the long and unwieldy sessions for The Madcap Laughs. Thus, the sessions were more efficiently run and the album was finished in considerably less time than The Madcap Laughs (six months, compared to Madcap'''s one year). On 6 June 1970, Barrett gave his one and only official solo performance, at the Olympia in Kensington, backed once more by Gilmour and Shirley. At the end of "Octopus", the fourth number of the set, Barrett baffled the audience and his backing musicians by abruptly taking off his guitar and walking off stage.
## Recording
According to Jerry Shirley, "What David Gilmour wanted (and tried) to do, unlike the first record The Madcap Laughs, was have a unified rhythm section that played the entire record like any band would do. Which meant me on drums, David on bass, Rick Wright on keyboards, and Syd on ALL guitars, and that was something Dave was adamant about." The first session was on 26 February, three of the first songs—fully recorded—attempted during the session were "Baby Lemonade", "Maisie" and "Gigolo Aunt". However, Gilmour thought they were losing the "Barrett-ness". After "Baby Lemonade" was attempted, 2 takes of "Maisie" were recorded before Barrett went into 15 takes of "Gigolo Aunt". Jerry Shirley had commented on the final take of "Gigolo Aunt": "I was quite happy with 'Gigolo Aunt', Syd had played his parts so 'correctly' that I can remember at the end of the take we were flabbergasted. It was like we were thinking 'you're not that nuts afterall, you almost got through this take perfectly!'" The next day, two-track demos of "Wolfpack", "Waving My Arms in the Air", "Living Alone" and "Bob Dylan Blues", were recorded. The former two made it to the album; the latter two didn't. On the recording sheet, it lists Gilmour as having taken home a copy of the latter two, Gilmour later returned and took the master tapes too. Gilmour has since said "Those sessions were done so quickly. We were rushing to gigs every day and had to fit recording sessions in between. I probably took it away to have a listen and simply forgot to take it back. It wasn't intended to be a final mix. Syd knocked it off, I took a tape home." Despite some minor work made to "Gigolo Aunt", Barrett wouldn't return to Abbey Road Studios until 1 April, due to Pink Floyd working on their 1970 album, Atom Heart Mother. On various occasions, Barrett would "spy" on the band as they recorded the album. Again, Barrett recorded some work to a song, "Wolfpack", on the 3rd, before the sessions were postponed until 5 June, this time due to Gilmour and Wright going on tour in the US with Pink Floyd.
On the session of 5 June, Barrett managed to record an unknown number of two-track demos for three songs: "Rats", "Wined and Dined", and "Birdie Hop". The "Rats" demo recorded here, became the basis for the album master, and would later be overdubbed by musicians, despite the changing tempos. Two days later, on the 7th, Barrett recorded "Milky Way", "Millionaire", before being rounded off with overdubs for "Rats". "Millionaire" was originally titled "She Was a Millionaire", and was originally recorded by Pink Floyd. Barrett recorded two attempts at a backing track before abandoning it, and adding vocals. Yet another break in recording occurred, until 14 July, where Barrett recorded several takes of "Effervescing Elephant", while numerous overdubs were added to Barrett's "Wined and Dined" demo by Gilmour. Three takes of "Dominoes" ensued, with an unknown number of takes of "Love Song", "Dolly Rocker" and "Let's Split" were recorded. "Love Song" and "Dolly Rocker" were both overdubbed, the former being overdubbed from 17 to 21 July, but overdubs for the latter were wiped. On 21 July, Barrett worked on another Untitled track (later to be titled as "Word Song"), recording only one take, before recording 5 takes of the last new song to be recorded for Barrett: "It Is Obvious". Barrett worked on remakes of two tracks: "Maisie", and "Waving My Arms in the Air" (the latter now seguing into a new track, "I Never Lied to You").
Shirley said of Barrett's playing: "He would never play the same tune twice. Sometimes Syd couldn't play anything that made sense; other times what he'd play was absolute magic." Barrett's direction to the other musicians were limited to pronouncements like "Perhaps we could make the middle darker and maybe the end a bit middle afternoonish. At the moment it's too windy and icy".
## Songs
Animals are a recurring item in not only the album, but Barrett's entire solo output.
### Side one
"Baby Lemonade" opens the album. The intro was actually Barrett simply warming-up on guitar, that Gilmour had managed to record and placed it at the start of the album, making it seem like an intro to the song. The lyrics that describe the way for a person to kill time (such as the line "In the clock they sent / Through a washing machine"). The solo was performed by Barrett, not Gilmour as is often noted. A recurring theme in the album, starting with "Baby Lemonade", is the weather. Barrett performed the song twice, both times for the BBC (previously recorded on 24 February 1970, for John Peel's Top Gear, and later for Bob Harris' show on 16 February 1971).
"Love Song" tells the story of an ex-girlfriend fondly remembered ("I knew a girl and I like her still"). It is the first of two songs which feature dreamlike-senses in the lyrics ("I'll lay my head down and see what I see"). Barrett performed the song for Bob Harris' show in 1971.
"Dominoes" features imagery of regret and recollection in the lyrics. The song features a backwards guitar solo by Barrett, and organ and Wurlitzer by Wright. The song's "You and I" lyric refers to the tail end relationship Barrett had with Lindsay. The first of three songs on the album which lyrics point to anguish ("In my tears, my dreams"). Barrett performed the song for Bob Harris' show in 1971.
"It Is Obvious" is the second of two songs which feature dreamlike-senses in the lyrics ("Creep into bed when your head's on the ground"). It is also the second of three songs on the album which lyrics point to anguish ("Remember those times I could call / Through the clear day time / And you would be there"). The theme of weather is referenced again ("The softness, the warmth and the weather in suspense"). The song also references the Cambridge quarry pits, and the landscape.
"Rats" started off as a jam, but eventually evolved into a structured song. It contains taunting and maniacal lyrics ("Rats rats lay down flat / We don't need you we act like that").
"Maisie" is a blues jam, with Barrett muttering the lyrics.
### Side two
"Gigolo Aunt" was performed by Barrett for Top Gear in 1970. For Barrett's only solo performance, at the Kensington Olympia in 1970, he played four songs, one of them being "Gigolo Aunt".
"Waving My Arms in the Air" contains an echo of "Octopus" ("Waving my arms in the air / Pressing my feet to the ground"). The lyrics refer to a hard-learned experience. The song features a childlike section ("No care / No no"). The song segues into "I Never Lied to You" with the aid of Wright's organ.
"I Never Lied to You" is the final of three songs on the album which lyrics point to anguish ("It's been so hard to bear with you not there").
"Wined and Dined" dated from Barrett's Cambridge days, and is about the relationship between Barrett and his then-girlfriend, Gayla Pinion, a model from Cambridge. The song reflects on about Mediterranean evenings ("Musk winds blow"), and hauntings of Barrett's childhood ("Chalk underfoot / Light ash of blue") evoked during a summer party he didn't want to leave. Dave Gilmour added a sinuous sliding lead over Barrett's vocals.
"Wolfpack" had been mentioned by Barrett in an interview, he said the song was one of favourites, out of all his material.
"Effervescing Elephant" was pastiche of the verse form of Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children. In contrast to "Dominoes", "It Is Obvious", "Rats", "Waving My Arms in the Air", and "Wolfpack" previously mentioning one or two animals, "Effervescing Elephant" contains references to a whole jungle full of animals. Barrett performed the song for Top Gear in 1970. For Barrett's only solo performance, at the Kensington Olympia in 1970, he played four songs, one of them being "Effervescing Elephant".
## Release and aftermath
The cover of the album was designed by Barrett; it was originally one of many drawings Barrett had done in Cambridge, years earlier. Barrett was released in November 1970 to less interest than had greeted The Madcap Laughs earlier in the year, and as a result, failed to reach the chart. Talks of more singles and a third album were rumoured over the following months. Barrett dismissed the album and Madcap, saying: "They've got to reach a certain standard and that's probably reached in Madcap once or twice and on the other one only a little – just an echo of that. Neither of them are much more than that." Allmusic reviewer Ritchie Unterberger called the album "a bit fuller and smoother than the first album", referring to "Baby Lemonade", "Gigolo Aunt", and "Effervescing Elephant" as "among his peppiest and best-loved tunes"; however, "the tone is darker and more meandering" in the rest of the album. In an overview of Barrett's career, Rolling Stone referred to both Barrett's solo albums as "entrancing".
On 16 February 1971, Barrett recorded a short set for BBC Radio 1's Sound of the Seventies radio show; in contrast to 1970's radio appearance where Barrett performed new material, this time he played songs from Barrett: "Baby Lemonade", "Dominoes" and "Love Song". Bored and directionless, Barrett headed back to his hometown of Cambridge and – but for a brief dalliance with a band called Stars in 1972, and some abortive recording sessions in 1974 – left his music career behind for good.
> Doing Syd's record was interesting, but extremely difficult. Dave [Gilmour] and Roger [Waters] did the first one (The Madcap Laughs) and Dave and myself did the second one. But by then it was just trying to help Syd any way we could, rather than worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that! It was just going into the studio and trying to get him to sing.
The album was reissued in late 1974 with his first solo album The Madcap Laughs as record two of the two-record set Syd Barrett in Harvest's series of Harvest Heritage reissues. In 1993, Barrett (along with The Madcap Laughs and Opel) was reissued both independently and as part of the Crazy Diamond Barrett box set, on 26 April 1993. "Bob Dylan Blues" would later turn up on 2001's The Best of Syd Barrett: Wouldn't You Miss Me?. A newly remastered version was released in 2010. For release on An Introduction to Syd Barrett in 2010, Gilmour laid down a new bass track to four songs, only one from Barrett: "Dominoes".
## Track listing
### Original release
### 1993 reissue
This reissue splits "Waving My Arms in the Air" and "I Never Lied to You" into tracks 8 and 9 respectively.
## Personnel
- Syd Barrett – lead and backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, painting
- David Gilmour – bass, 12-string guitar, slide guitar (9), additional organ, drums (3), production
- Richard Wright - Hammond organ, piano, harmonium, Wurlitzer electronic piano, tack piano, production
- Vic Saywell – tuba (11)
- Jerry Shirley – drums, percussion
- John "Willie" Wilson – drums, percussion
### Technical personnel
- Peter Bown – engineering
- Gareth Cousins – mixing on Crazy Diamond'' bonus tracks
- Mick Rock – photography (uncredited)
|
69,244,311 |
Angel in Realtime
| 1,171,962,497 |
2022 studio album by Gang of Youths
|
[
"2022 albums",
"Albums produced by Gang of Youths",
"Alternative rock albums by Australian artists",
"Gang of Youths albums",
"Sony Music Australia albums",
"Warner Records albums"
] |
Angel in Realtime is the third studio album by Australian alternative rock band Gang of Youths, released on 25 February 2022 through Mosy Recordings. Written over the four years following the death of frontman David Le'aupepe's father, the album lyrically focuses on the emotions that arise from mourning, coming to terms with loss, and discovering family identity in the Pacific Islands. It consistently uses vocal and instrumental samples from Indigenous musicians collected by explorer David Fanshawe, marking a significant sonic departure from their previous album, Go Farther in Lightness (2017).
Supported by a world tour commencing in Dublin in March 2022, Angel in Realtime became the band's second album to debut at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart. The album was lauded by many critics, who particularly praised the lyricism and storytelling. Multiple outlets recognised it as the band's best work, however some found issue with the length and density. Angel in Realtime was nominated for Album of the Year, Best Group and Best Rock Album at the 2022 ARIA Music Awards, while winning Australian Album of the Year at the J Awards.
Angel in Realtime was preceded by four singles, as well as "Unison" and "The Angel of 8th Ave." from Gang of Youths' second EP, Total Serene (2021). The latter track polled at number six in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2021, while the third single "In the Wake of Your Leave" reached number eight in the 2022 countdown. Three of the album's tracks would later be re-recorded as part of the band's following EP, Immolation Tape (2022).
## Background
Following the release of their second studio album Go Farther in Lightness (2017), Gang of Youths relocated to London. In 2018, Teleso Le'aupepe, the father of frontman David, died of cancer. On his deathbed, he hinted that there were a number of secrets to be discovered in Polynesia – a surprise to his family, as Le'aupepe had always been insistent of his upbringing in New Zealand before settling in Sydney. David Le'aupepe and his wife travelled to Samoa, where it was revealed his father had disappeared to Australia in the 1970s, leaving behind two sons. This story is later recited in the album's piano ballad, "Brothers".
In 2019, founding member and guitarist Joji Malani amicably left the band. The following year, multi-instrumentalist Tom Hobden of Noah and the Whale joined as violinist. In July 2021, the band surprise released their second EP Total Serene, containing three tracks. Two of them – "The Angel of 8th Ave." (June) and "Unison" – would be included on Angel in Realtime. The former debuted at number 48 on the ARIA Singles Chart, and would later poll at number six in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2021. Total Serene was the first collection of new music from Gang of Youths since Go Farther in Lightness.
## Composition
### Production and recording
Angel in Realtime was recorded in various countries and took four years to complete. It was primarily self-produced at the band's own studio in London, however Peter Hutchings and Peter Katis are also credited for production on two tracks – Katis had mixed their first two albums. With Le'aupepe as lead songwriter, the other band members had not heard the bulk of the lyricism until the final two weeks recording – he finished writing "Goal of the Century" the morning it was due to be produced.
Sonically, the album relies heavily on samples of Indigenous music from the Pacific Islands, collected by English explorer and composer David Fanshawe. The band received permission from David's wife to use the recordings. Lead single "The Man Himself" employs recordings of an Imene tuki, a polyrhythmic hymn, from Mangaia in the Cook Islands. "In the Wake of Your Leave" features backing harmonies from the Auckland Gospel Choir and percussion by a number of drummers from the island, while "Spirit Boy" interpolates musician Shane McLean "speaking a Kōrero poem in the track’s breakdown before it gets swept up into string-laden revelry".
Penultimate track "Hand of God" transitions into "Goal of the Century" – referencing Diego Maradona's suite of goals at the 1986 World Cup. The former features only Le'aupepe on vocals and piano with the gospel choir, while the resplendent final track hosts over a dozen guest musicians as well as the Budapest Film Orchestra on strings.
The album has been described by music outlets as alternative rock, with elements of chamber pop, Britpop and Indigenous music. Some have also called Angel in Realtime a concept album. Andrew Tendell of NME noted a sonic shift compared to Go Farther in Lightness, writing the release of "The Angel of 8th Ave." was "marking a transition into their new sound", being their only new song that "sounds anything like [their] previous album".
### Lyricism
Lyrically, many of the tracks are dedicated to the life of Le'aupepe's father. "Tend the Garden" is about Teleso's work as a "gifted and passionate gardener", and is written from his perspective, hinting at secrets that would be revealed after his death. Le'aupepe wrote "The Man Himself" regarding the struggles in going through the normalities of life without the guidance of his father. "Brothers" features only the frontman on vocals and piano, reciting the story of discovering his family who had been left behind in Samoa, and coming to terms with his father's deceit. "In the Wake of Your Leave" more broadly discusses grief – when writing, Le'aupepe said: "I wanted to reflect on how I became dependent on grief for solace and inspiration. The cycle from numbness to acceptance to yearning plays a role in my approach to grieving my dad’s death."
Not all tracks continue these lyrical themes – "The Angel of 8th Ave." chronicles Le'aupepe's relocation to the Angel, Islington and meeting his future wife while in New York City. "Returner" is written about Le'aupepe's mental state after performing "21 gigs in 30 days in Australia, on this kind of record run, which I consider a shame and a blight because I wish I could have been my very best". Regarding the song's title, the frontman explained, "It’s called 'returner' because my fucking job as a musician is to fucking yield returns."
## Release and promotion
"The Man Himself" was released as the album's lead single on 7 October 2021. The track would later poll at number 57 in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2021. Angel in Realtime was officially announced on 10 November 2021, along with a track list, details of a worldwide tour, and "Tend the Garden", the album's second single. The artwork, designed by Bradley Pinkerton, was also issued, featuring the passport photo of Teleso. In December 2021, Gang of Youths performed "The Angel of 8th Ave." live on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "In the Wake of Your Leave" was released as the third single on 7 January 2022, followed by "Spirit Boy" on 22 February 2022. The former track would later poll at number eight in the Hottest 100 of 2022. Upon the release of Angel in Realtime on 25 February 2022, it debuted at number one on the ARIA Albums chart, becoming the band's second release to do so. The album also appeared at number six on the Scottish albums chart, and at number 10 in the United Kingdom.
At the 2022 ARIA Music Awards, Angel in Realtime was nominated for Album of the Year, Best Group and Best Rock Album. At the 2022 J Awards, it won Australian Album of the Year. Three of the album's tracks, "In the Wake of Your Leave", "Forbearance" and "Spirit Boy", were re-recorded in March 2022 and released on the band's succeeding EP Immolation Tape. Furthermore, Gang of Youths performed "Forbearance" on Jimmy Kimmel Live in May. On 5 August 2022, the band performed "Brothers" live for Like a Version – the performance later featured on their fourth EP, Triple J Like a Version Sessions (2022).
## Tour
Gang of Youths embarked on the Angel in Realtime Tour in Dublin on 3 March 2022. The first leg originally contained European dates, which were all later postponed to October through to November due to COVID-19 restrictions. Due to electrical issues, the Philadelphia show transitioned to an acoustic set with only Le'aupepe and Hobden performing. The final show in the third leg, at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, was advertised as an "intimate acoustic performance" and was notably attended by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The entire fourth leg in North America was cancelled due to health issues relating to Le'aupepe, but the fifth and final leg across Europe resumed.
The tour was acclaimed by a number of reviewers. Writing for The Music, Christopher Lewis praised Le'aupepe as "the best rock'n'roll performer this country has produced since Michael Hutchence". Al Newstead, reviewing for Triple J, called the band's Perth show an "epic stage production" that finished with a "triumphant encore of the record's epic two-part closer".
## Critical reception
Angel in Realtime was released to widespread acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised score out of 100 from the ratings of publications, the album received a score of 76 based on 10 reviews.
The album received high praise for its lyricism. Writing for Dork, Josh Williams described the album as "a truly great record that doesn't hold back on its emotions or its storytelling". Matt Collar of AllMusic shared a similar sentiment, commending the album's themes and noting it as a "deeply personal and autobiographical album, but one filled with a universally relatable emotionality". For Riff Magazine, Ben Schultz gave the album a perfect score, calling it "deeply personal yet all-embracing in spirit" and being an "early contender for best album of the year". Rhys Buchanan of NME called the album "some of their finest work so far", writing: "Not only does Angel in Realtime serve as a soul-stirring tribute to Le'aupepe's late father, but it's also a triumphant exploration of love and life." Many outlets agreed Angel in Realtime was the band's best work; Corbin Reiff of Spin referred to it as a "maximalist rock opus" and "their best record yet ... one that sets them up for greater success to come". Adam Feibel of Exclaim! praised Le'aupepe's storytelling, calling the album a "profoundly beautiful, meaningful album from a band that has decided that every record might as well be a new magnum opus".
Some reviewers were critical of the album's tightness. Bernard Zuel of The Guardian wrote "for much of the album, air to breathe is rare", but praised its lyricism, continuing "it is not a coincidence that the special moments on Angel in Realtime are the ones that best match the album's particularly personal story". Writing for Pitchfork, Shaad D'Souza claimed the album was "occasionally so dense that it's hard to listen to, with layers of interesting ideas compounded to something impenetrable" – also finding fault with its 67-minute duration. Andrew Burton of The Line of Best Fit criticised its lyrics that "come off basic and moralizing with lines of saccharine fluff" and claimed "far too many spots on Angel in Realtime are bland, generic, and overly sentimental".
### Accolades
Angel in Realtime was featured several times in various music publications' year-end lists. Citing its "musical power", Riff Magazine named it the best album of 2022, due to "how it made listeners feel, and probably will feel, for years". Australian radio station Double J placed the album at number five in their year-end countdown, summarising it as a "remarkable story of multiple lives". Angel in Realtime was also featured in the lists of publications Esquire, Exclaim! and PopMatters.
## Track listing
All tracks written by Donnie Borzestowski, Max Dunn, Tom Hobden, Jung Kim and David Le'aupepe; "Spirit Boy" co-written by Shane McLean.
1. "You in Everything" – 6:51
2. "In the Wake of Your Leave" – 4:03
3. "The Angel of 8th Ave." – 3:59
4. "Returner" – 4:43
5. "Unison" – 5:08
6. "Tend the Garden" – 4:27
7. "The Kingdom is Within You" – 4:23
8. "Spirit Boy" – 6:27
9. "Brothers" – 5:54
10. "Forbearance" – 5:38
11. "The Man Himself" – 4:24
12. "Hand of God" – 4:03
13. "Goal of the Century" – 7:03
Notes
- All track titles are stylised in all-lowercase.
- "The Angel of 8th Ave." and "Unison" previously appeared on the band's 2021 EP Total Serene.
Sample credits
- "You in Everything" contains samples from "Fatu Iva Chant, Marquesas Islands", "Hawaiian Hula Drums", "Conche Horns of Rano Kau, Rapa Nui, Easter Island" and "Chiefs and Orators 2 from Upolu, Samoa" from Fanshawe's South Pacific Collection 1 (1999).
- "Returner" contains samples from "Ute - Cutting Nuts, Aitutaki, Cook Is." from Fanshawe's Spirit of Polynesia (1995), "Himene Tarava Tamarii Tipaerui, Papa'ete, Tahiti" from Fanshawe's Heiva I Tahiti (2014) and "Vailoa Mens Chant, Savai'i, Samoa", also recorded by Fanshawe.
- "Unison" contains samples from "Himene Tarava 1, Group Tauraatua, Tahiti" from Spirit of Polynesia and "Himene Tarava Taunoa, Tahiti" from Fanshawe's Pacific Chants – Polynesian Himene (2002).
- "Tend the Garden" contains samples from "Muli tu pe, Mu'a, Tongatapu" from Music of the South Pacific, Nonesuch Explorer Series (2005) and "Utete Mouth Harps of 'Eua, Tongatapu" from Fanshawe's Chants of the Kingdom of Tonga (2008).
- "The Kingdom is Within You" contains a sample from "Imene Tuki Penrhyn, Tongareva, Cook Is." from Pacific Chants – Polynesian Himene.
- "Forbearance" contains samples from "Poipoi - Taro Pounding, Rapa, Austral Is" and "Bird Dance Hula, O'ahu, Hawai'i" from Spirit of Polynesia.
- "Goal of the Century" contains a sample from "Himene Tarava Pīr'e, Pape'ete, Tahiti" from Pacific Chants – Polynesian Himene.
## Personnel
Sampling and personnel credits adapted from liner notes.
Gang of Youths
- David Le'aupepe – lead vocals (all tracks), guitar (1–3, 5–6, 8, 10), bass guitar (3), piano (2–3, 9, 12–13), keys (7), backing vocals (6–7, 10), additional instrumentation (13)
- Donnie Borzestowski – drums (1–8, 10–11, 13), percussion (1–2, 4–8, 10, 13), piano (1, 8, 10), keys (7), backing vocals (5–8, 10–11, 13), additional instrumentation (8, 13)
- Max Dunn – bass guitar (1–2, 4–8, 10–11, 13), banjo (1, 5), piano (1, 4, 6, 8), keys (7), guitar (3, 7–8), backing vocals (10), additional instrumentation (8, 13)
- Tom Hobden – piano (7, 11, 13), keys (7), violin (1–8, 10–11, 13), viola (1–2, 4–8, 10–11, 13), string arrangements (1, 4, 7–8, 10, 13), woodwind and brass arrangements (13), additional instrumentation (10),
- Jung Kim – piano (3, 10), keys (1, 3, 4, 7, 13), guitar (1–8, 10–11), backing vocals (10), additional instrumentation (8, 10)
Additional musicians
- Péter Illényi – conductor (1, 8, 10, 13)
- James Larter – marimba (1, 6–7, 13)
- Aemon Beech – percussion (1)
- Anuanua Drummers – percussion (2, 6, 13)
- Daniel Ricciardo – backing vocals (2), percussion (11)
- Auckland Gospel Choir – backing vocals (2, 8, 11–13)
- Seumanu Simon Matāfai – vocal director (2, 8, 11–13)
- Ian Burdge – cello (5, 11)
- Nick Etwell – trumpet, flügel horn (5, 11, 13)
- David Williamson – trombone (5, 11, 13)
- Matt Gunner – french horn (5, 11, 13)
- Ilid Jones – Cor anglais, oboe (5, 13)
- Jonathan Griffiths – saxophone (5–6, 13), flute (5, 13), clarinet (13)
- Indiana Dunn – percussion, backing vocals (6)
- Simon Matāfai – piano (6)
- Kaumātua Tony Gibbs – Kōrero spoken word (6)
- Shane McLean – Taonga Pūiri instrumentalist (3, 6–7, 10, 13), Kōrero (8)
- Adam Duritz – backing vocals (7, 10)
- Peter Hutchings – modular synth (11)
- Blake Friend – percussion (11)
- Anna Pamin – percussion (11)
- Count – synth (13)
- Gretta Ray – backing vocals (13)
Technical
- Gang of Youths – producer, writing, engineer (all tracks)
- Shane McLean – writing (8)
- Peter Hutchings – producer (2, 11), engineer (2–3, 6, 8, 11–13)
- Peter Katis – producer (2), mixing (4–5, 9)
- Count – mixing (1–2, 4–13), mastering (all tracks)
- Craig Silvey – mixing (3)
- Richard Woodcraft – engineering (1, 5–7, 13)
- Gergő Láposi – orchestral engineering (1, 7–8, 10)
- Péter Barabás – orchestral engineering (1, 7–8, 10)
- Dani Bennett Spragg – mixing assistance (11)
- Emily Wheatcroft Snape – engineering assistance (2, 11)
- Jamie Sprosen – engineering assistance (2, 11)
- Luke O'Dea – engineering assistance (3)
- Tess Dunn – engineering assistance (6)
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
|
27,978,151 |
Deuces (song)
| 1,172,873,502 |
2011 song by Chris Brown
|
[
"2010 singles",
"2010 songs",
"2010s ballads",
"Black-and-white music videos",
"Chris Brown songs",
"Contemporary R&B ballads",
"Jive Records singles",
"Kevin McCall songs",
"Music videos directed by Colin Tilley",
"Songs written by Chris Brown",
"Songs written by Kevin McCall",
"Songs written by Tyga",
"Tyga songs"
] |
"Deuces" is a song written and performed by American singer Chris Brown featuring fellow American musicians Tyga and Kevin McCall. Produced by McCall, "Deuces" was released digitally on June 25, 2010, as the lead single from Brown's first collaborative effort with Tyga, titled Fan of a Fan (2010). The song is a slow, down-tempo R&B ballad featuring elements from the genres of house and pop music, while the song is lyrically about "breaking it off with a girl after failed attempts to make the relationship work". "Deuces" was later included on Brown's fourth studio album, F.A.M.E. (2011).
Following its release, some critics speculated that the lyrics of the song were about Brown's former relationship with Barbadian singer Rihanna. "Deuces" earned Brown two award nominations for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 53rd Grammy Awards and Best Collaboration at the 2011 BET Awards. The song was a commercial success in the United States, reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, becoming Brown's first number-one single on the chart since "Say Goodbye" (2006). Additionally, it peaked inside the top 30 in New Zealand and the top-seventy in the United Kingdom.
The accompanying music video was directed by Colin Tilley and shot in black and white at the Los Angeles River. Brown performed "Deuces" live on the television show 106 & Park, during his F.A.M.E. Tour (2011), and at Supafest (2012) in Australia.
## Background and composition
"Deuces" was written by Chris Brown, Lady A, Michael "Tyga" Stevenson and Kevin McCall, who also produced the track. Vocals were recorded by Michael Congdon at the In Your Ear Studios in Richmond, Virginia, with assistance by Dustin Faltz. The recordings were later mixed by Brian Springer at The Record Plant in Los Angeles, California, with assistance by Anthony Taglianett. "Deuces" leaked online on May 20, 2010, and was later released digitally on June 25, 2010 as the first single from Brown's collaborative mixtape with Tyga, Fan of a Fan (2010). In an interview with MTV News, Tyga elaborated on "Deuces" and its theme, stating: "Basically it's about you getting rid of this girl, you tried to make it work, but you got to move on. So you put up one finger, put up another, and then 'Deuces'". The song appeared as the opening track on Brown's fourth studio album, F.A.M.E. (2011).
Musically, "Deuces" is a slow, down-tempo R&B ballad that displays elements of house and pop music. The song has a length of four minutes and thirty-six seconds. It is backed by synth chords and "eerie harmonies", with Brown's "smooth vocals" making use of auto-tune effects. According to Sara D. Anderson of AOL Radio, the song contains lyrical content about "breaking it off with a girl after failed attempts to make the relationship work". In the first verse, Brown sings: "All that bullshit is for the birds, you ain't nothing but a vulture / Always hoping for the worst, waiting for me to fuck up / You'll regret the day when I find another girl, that knows just what I need / She knows just what I mean."
## Music video
The accompanying music videos for "Deuces" and "No Bullshit" premiered simultaneously online on May 24, 2010, and both were directed by Colin Tilley. The video was shot in black-and-white, and is set at the Los Angeles River. It begins with a woman walking down the river's culvert. As the song begins, Brown, wearing a dark sleeveless jacket, sunglasses, and light-colored pants, sings his verse while standing against a car with Tyga and Kevin McCall. This scene is intercut with scenes of Brown singing alone at the culvert, wearing a hooded jumper and skinny jeans. During the chorus, Brown is seen dancing in a tunnel. As Tyga raps his verse, he is sitting on a graffitied concrete barrier, while Brown appears in the background. This scene is intercut with scenes of Tyga, Brown and McCall walking down a street with a lowrider driving slowly behind them. As the second chorus begins, earlier scenes from the video are intercut with each other. McCall then begins to rap his verse while leaning against a wall, which is then intercut with scenes of him rapping from previous settings of the video. During the final chorus of the song, more scenes of Brown dancing in the tunnel are shown.
## Live performances
On May 15, 2010, Brown performed "Deuces" with Tyga at the "Virginia Stand Up! A Call to Action" benefit concert as part of a set list, which included "Say Goodbye", "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)", "Gimme That", "Kiss Kiss", "Take You Down" and "Forever". The concert was organized by Brown to help with continued relief efforts in Haiti following the January 2010 earthquake. Jayson Rodriguez of MTV News wrote that "the superstar singer couldn't have been more giving, doing his best to please the packed house". On December 3, 2010, Brown, wearing a charcoal grey suit with Adidas sneakers, performed the song with Tyga and Kevin McCall as part of his set list at the Cali Christmas concert. In March 2011, Brown and Tyga performed "Deuces" on the television music show, 106 & Park. "Deuces" was also added to the set list of Brown's F.A.M.E. Tour. In his review of the tour, Jeremy Trucker of The Baltimore Sun criticized Brown for lip syncing his performances, and remained unconvinced that Brown's "talent was special enough to warrant his continued, well, fame". In April 2012, Brown performed "Deuces" at the Supafest tour in Australia as part of a set list, which included "Run It!", "Yeah 3x", "Look at Me Now", "She Ain't You", "Wet the Bed" and "Turn Up the Music", among others. A reviewer for Rap-Up magazine praised his set, writing "A tatted Chris Brown thrilled with his chart-topping hits".
## Critical reception
"Deuces" received mostly positive reviews from critics. Joanne Dorken of MTV UK wrote that the song was "a good platform for Brown to show off his silky-smooth vocals". Hannah Ash of The Harber Herald called it "a great rap track" with "fantastic beats". In an album review for F.A.M.E., Mark Edward Nero of About.com wrote that "Deuces" was one of "the album's best material". A reviewer for Girlfriend magazine wrote that "Deuces" along with "Yeah 3x" and "Beautiful People", were the most "worth listening to" of the album. Mesfin Fekadu of the Associated Press labeled "Deuces" as one of the "best songs" of 2010, while August Brown of Los Angeles Times called it his "favorite single" of 2010. According to Steve Jones of USA Today, the song shows that "Brown is taking it to the next phase". Sean Fennessey of The Washington Post characterised "Deuces" as "the effervescent kiss-off" track. Shahryar Rizvi of Dallas Observer was critical of the song, writing that it "sounds minimally produced and quiet. As a result, it sounds kind of boring".
Critics also speculated that the lyrics of the song were about Brown's former relationship with pop singer Rihanna. Becky Bain of Idolator described "Deuces" as a "bitter woman-hating track" that could be "about Rihanna or just females in general", and wrote that "as damning as some of the lyrics are, this emotional jam is actually a step in the right direction for Brown". Anthony Benigno of The Faster Times observed that the song could be a reference to "the Rihanna incident", writing "is it about RiRi? Maybe, maybe not. He ain't telling, in any case". Jayson Rodriguez of MTV News wrote that "Deuces" was indeed a "standout" track from the Fan of a Fan mixtape, and that it "appears to be a dig at Rihanna". The song was nominated for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 53rd Grammy Awards, and Best Collaboration at the 2011 BET Awards.
## Remixes
In September 2010, during a Ustream session with fans, Brown announced plans of releasing an "all-star" remix to "Deuces", which would feature rappers Drake, T.I., Kanye West, Fabolous, Rick Ross, and André 3000." The remix appeared online on October 1, 2010, and was released as a digital EP on November 2, 2010. A day after the "all-star" remix premiered online, American R&B singer Ciara released her own remix of the song, which was supposed to be included on her Basic Instinct mixtape. American R&B singer Teairra Marí also recorded her own remix of "Deuces" for her mixtape, The Night Before X-Mas (2010).
## Chart performance
In the United States, "Deuces" debuted on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart at number 72 on the issue dated July 17, 2010. It peaked at number one in its ninth week on the chart, becoming Brown's first number-one single on the chart since "Say Goodbye" (2006). "Deuces" was tied with Monica's single "Everything to Me" (2010), for both being the fastest songs in 2010 to climb to the number one spot in nine weeks. "Deuces" peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 19 weeks on the chart. On the New Zealand Singles Chart, "Deuces" debuted and peaked at number 23 on July 26, 2010. It spent six weeks on the chart. In the United Kingdom, "Deuces" debuted and peaked at number 68 on November 20, 2010, and appeared on the chart for one week. It also charted on the UK R&B Singles Chart at number fourteen.
## Track listing
- Digital download
1. "Deuces" (featuring Tyga and Kevin McCall) – 4:36
2. "No Bullshit" – 4:07
- Digital Remix EP
1. "Deuces" (featuring Drake and Kanye West) – 4:34
2. "Deuces" (featuring T.I. and Rick Ross) – 3:42
3. "Deuces" (featuring Fabolous and André 3000) – 4:34
4. "Deuces" (featuring Drake, Kanye West and André 3000) – 5:38
5. "Deuces" (featuring Drake, T.I., Kanye West, Fabolous, Rick Ross and André 3000) – 6:43
## Credits and personnel
- Chris Brown – lead vocals
- Kevin McCall – songwriter, producer, featured vocals
- Brian Springer – audio mixing
- Anthony Taglianett – assistant audio mixing
- Michael Stevenson – songwriter, featured vocals
Credits adapted from the liner notes for F.A.M.E.
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### Decade-end charts
## Certifications
## Release history
## See also
- List of number-one R&B singles of 2010 (U.S.)
|
1,217,063 |
Mount Hope Bay raids
| 1,168,734,529 |
Series of military raids by British troops during the American Revolutionary War
|
[
"1778 in Rhode Island",
"1778 in the Province of Massachusetts Bay",
"1778 in the United States",
"Battles in the Northern Coastal theater of the American Revolutionary War after Saratoga",
"Battles involving Great Britain",
"Battles involving the United States",
"Battles of the American Revolutionary War in Massachusetts",
"Battles of the American Revolutionary War in Rhode Island",
"Bristol, Rhode Island",
"Conflicts in 1778",
"Fall River, Massachusetts",
"Freetown, Massachusetts",
"History of Bristol County, Massachusetts",
"Warren, Rhode Island"
] |
The Mount Hope Bay raids were a series of military raids conducted by British troops during the American Revolutionary War against communities on the shores of Mount Hope Bay on May 25 and 31, 1778. The towns of Bristol and Warren, Rhode Island were significantly damaged, and Freetown, Massachusetts (present-day Fall River) was also attacked, although its militia resisted British attacks more successfully. The British destroyed military defenses in the area, including supplies that had been cached by the Continental Army in anticipation of an assault on British-occupied Newport, Rhode Island. Homes as well as municipal and religious buildings were also destroyed in the raids.
On May 25, 500 British and Hessian soldiers, under orders from General Sir Robert Pigot, the commander of the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island, landed between Bristol and Warren, destroyed boats and other supplies, and plundered Bristol. Local resistance was minimal and ineffective in stopping the British activities. Six days later, 100 soldiers descended on Freetown, where less damage was done because local defenders prevented the British from crossing a bridge.
## Background
In December 1776, after completing the conquest of New York City, British Lieutenant General William Howe detached a body of troops from his army which occupied Newport, Rhode Island without significant opposition. The Newport garrison came under the command of Brigadier General Sir Robert Pigot when the original commander, Brigadier General Richard Prescott, was captured in the summer of 1777 in a daring commando operation led by Continental Army Major and Warren, Rhode Island, native William Barton.
Since the British occupation began American and British forces had been in a standoff. Major General Joseph Spencer had been ordered by Major General George Washington to launch an assault on Newport in 1777, but he had not done so, and was removed from command of the Rhode Island defenses. In March 1778 Congress approved the appointment of Major General John Sullivan to Rhode Island. By early May, Sullivan had arrived in the state and produced a detailed report on the situation there. He also began logistical preparations for an attack on Newport, caching equipment and supplies on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay and the Taunton River. General Pigot was alerted to Sullivan's preparations by a local Loyalist, and organized an expedition to raid Bristol and Warren. On the evening of May 24 he ordered a force of 500 British and Hessian soldiers under the command of the 22nd Regiment's Lieutenant Colonel John Campbell to march to the northern end of Aquidneck Island, from where they took whaleboats across to the mainland.
## Warren and Bristol raid
Arriving early on May 25, Campbell's forces landed on Bristol Neck, between Bristol and Warren. Campbell divided his force in two, sending one detachment into Warren, and the other to areas along the Kickamuit River where boats and other supplies were cached. The latter force destroyed 58 of 70 small boats that General Spencer had originally stored there, along with other military supplies and a corn mill. They burned down a bridge that crossed the river, and set fire to a sloop. After the British left, locals put out the fire on the sloop, which only suffered minor damage.
The Warren detachment had expected some resistance upon reaching the town, but Continental Army forces, numbering about 300 under the command of Colonel Archibald Clary, had fled the town upon rumors that the British force was much larger than it actually was. The British destroyed military supplies, and set fire to the local powder magazine. The ensuing explosion destroyed six homes and the town's meeting house. The troops also burned a sloop and destroyed five cannon. As they marched from the town, the first signs of organized resistance began to appear. The two British detachments rejoined and headed for Bristol.
Word of the British landing had reached Providence, and Colonel Barton immediately sprang into action. Recruiting about 200 volunteers, he rushed south, turned Clary's retreating force around, and caught up with the British shortly after they left Warren, heading for Bristol. The two forces skirmished as the British marched southward, with both sides incurring minor casualties. The notable exception was Colonel Barton, who took a musket ball that did him sufficient damage that it effectively ended his military career, although he continued to fight on that day. Campbell's men reached Bristol in good order despite the ongoing skirmishes, and engaged in a destructive rampage. In addition to military supplies and cannon, they destroyed 22 homes and a church, and looted everywhere, making, according to one account, "no distinction between their Friends and Foes".
Their work completed around noon, the British returned to their boats. They embarked, covered by the guns of the frigate HMS Flora and HM galley Pigot, and returned to Aquidneck Island and Newport. The raid prompted General Sullivan to renew calls to area governors for increased militia assistance. This recruiting did not have material effect before the next raid occurred.
The May 25 raids also included the capture of an anchored American galley, the Spitfire, near the entrance to the Taunton River.
## Freetown raid
Pigot next organized a smaller raiding force to go to lower Freetown (a portion that was later separated to form Fall River). On the night of May 30, a force of 100 men led by Major Edmund Eyre (who had served under Campbell in the previous raid) embarked from Arnold's Point on Aquidneck Island in flat-bottomed boats under the escort of several naval vessels, including the aforementioned HMS Flora and Pigot. The Pigot ran aground while passing through Bristol Ferry, but the rest sailed up the Taunton River, and landed near the mouth of the Quequechan River in lower Freetown on the morning of Sunday, May 31.
The local militia was under the command of Colonel Joseph Durfee (going by the title of Captain at the time), a Continental Army veteran, and had established a watch. The British landing was spotted by a sentinel and the alarm was raised. Forty men, including militia from Freetown and nearby Tiverton, mustered to give resistance. Eyre's men fired grapeshot from a small cannon and slowly pushed the militiamen uphill. As this took place, some of his men proceeded to burn a house, grist mill and sawmill, nine boats, and 15,000 feet of planking. The militia eventually reached a bridge across a stream, where about 25 men established a defensive line behind a stone wall on the far side. In a battle lasting about 90 minutes, Durfee's men repulsed repeated attempts by Eyre's men to gain control of the bridge. The British soldiers then took one local resident prisoner, set fire to his property, and retreated to their boats. The militia followed, harassing the soldiers with musket fire.
On their return to port, the British naval vessels worked to assist the Pigot, which had been grounded; in the process of doing so, they came under fire from an American battery on shore (which, by at least one account, included cannon-launched stone and spare iron) and suffered additional casualties (three killed and one wounded according to one account). The Pigot also sustained significant damage from the American battery. Some accounts describe the American prisoner (an elderly man named Richard Borden) as being aboard one of the boats coming under fire; these accounts describe the prisoner seeking shelter by laying flat on the floor of the vessel, despite attempts of his captors to have him stand (perhaps to try to dissuade the attackers); according to these accounts, one or two of the captors were eventually hit by shots from the Americans on shore. The prisoner was eventually released several days later. In addition to the casualties at Bristol Ferry, the British suffered two killed and five wounded in the battle at Freetown, while the Americans suffered no casualties beyond the one captive, who apparently emerged without any noteworthy injury.
## Aftermath
The destruction of the boats and supplies was a minor setback to American plans. In mid-July, General Washington informed Sullivan that a French fleet was available to assist in operations against Newport. This had a galvanizing effect on recruiting, and local shipbuilders embarked on a crash boatbuilding program to replace the boats destroyed in the raid. By early August, the French fleet of the Comte d'Estaing had arrived off Newport, and Sullivan commanded a force of 10,000 militia and regular army troops. Bad weather and the timely arrival of a British fleet to oppose d'Estaing frustrated allied plans. Sullivan, who had occupied the northern part of Aquidneck Island, was forced to retreat by the mass desertion of militia after the French withdrew their fleet and troops. General Pigot then broke out of his lines in pursuit, but Sullivan successfully fought off his attack in the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29 before retreating off Aquidneck Island.
The British occupied Newport until October 1779, when the garrison was withdrawn for operations elsewhere. The raided communities continued to contribute to the American war effort despite the damage and difficulties caused by the raids.
Major Edmund Eyre, leader of the Freetown raid, was by 1781 promoted to lieutenant colonel, when he again led British forces during a raid on New London and Groton, Connecticut on September 6 of the same year. He was wounded early in the Battle of Groton Heights, and his troops were accused of engaging in atrocities in the aftermath of the battle.
|
2,240,166 |
The Old Man and the Key
| 1,167,735,116 | null |
[
"2002 American television episodes",
"Television episodes set in Missouri",
"The Simpsons (season 13) episodes"
] |
"The Old Man and the Key" is the thirteenth episode of the thirteenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired in the United States on the Fox network on March 10, 2002. In the episode, Grampa Simpson falls in love with Zelda, an old woman who has just moved into the senior home in which Grampa lives. However, Grampa is not the only one in the home who is infatuated with Zelda.
The episode was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Lance Kramer. The storyline was pitched by Vitti, who based it on an article about social status in senior homes. The episode features Olympia Dukakis as Zelda, and Bill Saluga as his television character Ray J. Johnson. The song "Ode to Branson", which was written by Vitti and composed by Alf Clausen, was submitted for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music And Lyrics in 2002, which it ultimately lost to a score from The Blue Planet.
## Plot
The episode begins with the Simpson family visiting Grampa after his retirement home mistakenly reports his death. An old woman named Zelda moves into his retirement home in place of the actual deceased resident. Grampa is determined to win her love over Zack, another resident who owns and drives a minivan. After renewing his driver's license, Grampa convinces Homer to let him borrow the car to romance her. Although he impresses Zelda, Homer and Marge think she is a hoochie and only likes Grampa because he can drive. After he crashes Homer's car in a drag race with a rival seniors gang, Homer becomes furious with Grampa and takes his keys away, forbidding him to drive ever again. Zelda informs Grampa that she got them tickets to a theater in Branson, Missouri, but when he tells her he does not have a car, she leaves with Zack and his minivan.
Grampa steals Marge's car and takes Bart with him on the road to Branson to win back Zelda. When realizing that Grampa and Bart are heading to Branson, Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie take a bus there. At the theater, Grampa calls out to Zelda from on-stage, but then denounces her in front of everyone, who then chant to her a hoochie, forcing her to leave the stage. Grampa then reconciles with Homer.
## Production
"The Old Man and the Key" was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Lance Kramer. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on March 10, 2002. The idea for the episode was pitched by Vitti, who was inspired by an article about senior homes. The article described senior homes as being a lot like high schools, in that there are popular and unpopular people, and that those who, for example, own a car are "like kings". Vitti suggested that the episode should be that "Grampa's life [is] basically like that of a teenager", with Homer acting as if he was Grampa's father. The Souvenir Jackitos, who challenge Grampa to a death race in the episode, were conceived from an observation by the writers. The writers argued that the only ones buying expensive trademarked jackets are old people who want to appear younger.
A scene in the episode shows Grampa and Bart driving to Branson with Marge's car, listening to the radio. Because the scene consists entirely of auditive gags, the Simpsons staff had difficulty figuring out what to show visually during the scene. In the DVD audio commentary for the episode, Jean explained that these scenes “get a really big laugh at the table,” but are subsequently hard for the animators. The scene makes use of a repeated background, an animation technique made famous by Hanna-Barbera in order to cut budget.
The song "Ode to Branson," which is performed by several "washed-up" celebrities, was composed by Alf Clausen and written by Vitti. Even though Vitti received sole credit for writing the song, parts of the lyrics were written by Simpsons writer Carolyn Omine, which were then revised by fellow writer Matt Selman. Selman was especially satisfied with the rhyme sung by Mr. T; he stated that whenever he feels down, he thinks of that rhyme and that it "boosts [him] up inside." The episode features American actress Olympia Dukakis as Grampa's love interest Zelda. American comedian Bill Saluga also makes an appearance, as his television character Ray J. Johnson. The owner of the minivan is portrayed by series regular Hank Azaria, who imitated the voice of Clark Gable for the character.
## Cultural references
The title of the episode itself is a reference of Ernest Hemingway's book The Old Man and the Sea. At the beginning of the episode, Homer is excited about the start of the (original) XFL season, unaware that the "X" didn't stand for anything and that the league itself had folded after its sole season the previous year. A scene in the episode shows Grandpa wearing a zoot suit, a suit popular in the 1940s. When Grandpa and Zelda take off on one of their dates, three old men with long beards imitate ZZ Top as a short part of "Sharp Dressed Man" is played. Grandpa's interaction with the "Souvenir Jackitos" in Apu's store mirrors a scene in the 1961 musical film West Side Story, with Grandpa and his friends taking the role of the Jets in the film, the "Souvenir Jackitos" as the Sharks, and Apu as Doc. The "Death race" on the other hand, is a reference to the 1955 drama film Rebel Without a Cause. The abandoned aqueduct, in which the death race takes place, is based on the Los Angeles River. The closing credits parody those of The Beverly Hillbillies. At the end, Lisa says in a Southern accent, "This has been a Gracie Films presentation," which parodies the line at the end of The Beverly Hillbillies, "This has been a Filmways presentation."
## Release
In its original American broadcast on March 10, 2002, "The Old Man and the Key" received a 7.9 rating, according to Nielsen Media Research, translating to approximately 7.9 million viewers. The episode ranked 19 in the top 25 most watched television programs the week it aired. Later in 2002, "Ode to Branson" was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music And Lyrics, which it ultimately lost to a score from BBC's nature documentary The Blue Planet. In 2007, the song was included on the soundtrack album The Simpsons: Testify.
Following the thirteenth season's release on DVD and Blu-ray, "The Old Man and the Key" received mixed reviews from critics.
Writing for Project:Blu, Nate Boss stated that Grampa "just isn't all that funny when cornered, and that's what we get here," and that "the jokes are a bit too few and far between". Giving the episode a negative review, Ryan Keefer of DVD Talk wrote that it was "borderline painful" and one of the season's "duds". Casey Broadwater of Blu-ray.com wrote that the episode "moves at a geriatric pace", and R. L. Shaffer of IGN stated that it "represent[s] some of the worst of The Simpsons." On the other hand, giving the episode a positive review, Ron Martin of 411Mania enjoyed the "poke towards Branson, Missouri, a mecca for old people everywhere," and Jennifer Malkowski of DVD Verdict gave the episode a B rating. Colin Jacobsson of DVD Movie Guide wrote that, even though Grampa is "essentially a one-joke personality," "those gags tend to be pretty fun." He concluded his review by writing that the episode was "a likable program."
Despite the mixed responses, the episode features one of the "most used little clips" of the series. The scene shows Grampa getting his driver's license. Instead of taking a photo for the license on the spot, Grampa suggests that Selma, who works in the facility, use a photo of him from a newspaper headline that reads "Old man yells at cloud." Selma agrees, and Grampa, holding his newly acquired license, goes up to a window and yells "Who's laughing now?" at a cloud. Writer Michael Price credits Al Jean with pitching the gag. A still from the scene has been used several times on The Daily Show. Both Malkowski of DVD Verdict and Jacobsson of DVD Movie Guide considered it to be the best part of the episode. After Clint Eastwood's speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention, which featured Eastwood talking to an empty chair representing President Barack Obama, a modified version of the image with the caption, "Old man yells at chair", was used in an internet meme.
|
6,212,544 |
Smalltooth sand tiger
| 1,173,149,049 |
Species of shark
|
[
"Fauna of the Yucatán Peninsula",
"Fish described in 1810",
"Fish of Oceania",
"Fish of the Adriatic Sea",
"Fish of the Indian Ocean",
"Marine fish of New Zealand",
"Odontaspis",
"Taxa named by Antoine Risso",
"Vulnerable animals",
"Vulnerable biota of Africa",
"Vulnerable biota of Europe",
"Vulnerable fauna of Asia",
"Vulnerable fauna of Oceania"
] |
The smalltooth sand tiger or bumpytail ragged-tooth (Odontaspis ferox) is a species of mackerel shark in the family Odontaspididae, with a patchy but worldwide distribution in tropical and warm temperate waters. They usually inhabit deepwater rocky habitats, though they are occasionally encountered in shallow water, and have been known to return to the same location year after year. This rare species is often mistaken for the much more common grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus), from which it can be distinguished by its first dorsal fin, which is larger than the second and placed further forward. It grows to at least 4.1 m (13.5 ft) in length. They have also been recently sighted in Irish and English waters.
Very little is known of the biology and behavior of the smalltooth sand tiger. It is an active predator of benthic bony fishes, invertebrates, and cartilaginous fishes. This species is thought to be ovoviviparous with oophagous embryos like other mackerel sharks. In contrast to its formidable size and appearance, this shark is harmless, having never been known to behave aggressively towards humans. Concern exists that its numbers are declining due to human activities in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, though existing data are inadequate for a full assessment of its conservation status.
## Taxonomy and phylogeny
The smalltooth sand tiger was originally described as Squalus ferox by Italian-French naturalist Antoine Risso in 1810, based on a specimen from Nice, France. In 1950, Gilbert Percy Whitley described O. herbsti from Australian specimens, separating them from O. ferox on the basis of dentition and the absence of spots. Leonard Compagno synonymized the two species in 1984, as subsequently discovered Pacific specimens had blurred Whitley's distinguishing characters. The specific epithet ferox is Latin for "fierce". Other common names for this shark include blue nurse shark, fierce shark, Herbst's nurse shark, and sand tiger shark.
A phylogenetic study based on mitochondrial DNA, performed by Naylor et al. in 1997, suggests that the smalltooth sand tiger and its relative, the bigeye sand tiger (O. noronhai), are more closely related to the thresher sharks than to the grey nurse shark, to which it bears a strong resemblance. If true, this would indicate that the similarities between this species and the grey nurse shark arose as the result of convergent evolution. Fossil teeth belonging to the smalltooth sand tiger have been found from Lower Pliocene from 5.3 to 3.6 million years ago (Mya) in deposits in Italy and Venezuela.
## Description
The smalltooth sand tiger has a bulky body with a long, bulbous, slightly flattened snout. The eyes are medium-sized, with large, round pupils (as opposed to slit-like in the grey nurse shark), and lack nictitating membranes.
The mouth is large and filled with projecting teeth. Each tooth has a narrow, tall central cusp flanked by two or three pairs of lateral cusplets. Some 48–56 tooth rows are in the upper jaw and 36–46 tooth rows are in the lower jaw; the front large teeth in the upper jaw are separated from the lateral teeth by two to five intermediate teeth.
The fins are broad-based and angular in shape. The first dorsal fin is larger than the second and placed closer to the pectoral fins than the pelvic fins. The caudal fin is strongly asymmetrical with the upper lobe much longer than the lower. The coloration is gray to gray-brown above and lighter below. Juveniles are uniform in color with darker fin margins, while adults often exhibit dark spots or blotches that vary widely in pattern, size, and density. Coloration also appears to vary by region, with some individuals from the Mediterranean displaying a patchy, "piebald" pattern. The smalltooth sand tiger attains a maximum length of 4.1 m (13.5 ft) and a maximum weight of 289 kg (637 lbs). There are unconfirmed reports of much larger individuals from Malpelo Island off Colombia.
## Distribution and habitat
Smalltooth sand tigers have been caught at widely scattered locations throughout the world, indicating a possibly circumtropical distribution. In the eastern Atlantic Ocean, it is known from the Bay of Biscay south to Morocco, including the Mediterranean Sea, the Azores, and the Canary Islands. In March 2023, the species was also found in The Solent after a dead smalltooth sand tiger washed ashore at Lepe, Hampshire, and the following month a 14-foot (4.3 m) specimen was found in County Wexford, Ireland. In the western Atlantic, it has been reported from off North Carolina and Florida (USA), the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico), and Fernando de Noronha (Brazil). It occurs throughout the Indian Ocean, from South Africa, Madagascar, and Tanzania in the west to the Maldives and the Southwest Indian Ridge in the east. In the northern Pacific, it is known from off Japan, Hawaii, California, and Colombia, and in the southern Pacific it is known from New Caledonia, eastern Australia, and New Zealand. In New Zealand, this species can be found off the coasts of the Bay of Plenty, New Plymouth, and Hawkes Bay. It has also been filmed near Raoul Island.
Typically regarded as a deepwater species, smalltooth sand tigers have been caught down to 880 m (2,900 ft). They are usually found near the bottom in rocky, boulder-strewn regions on continental shelves and the upper continental slope, as well as around submarine ridges and mountains. The species has been reported near the drop-offs of rocky or coral reefs and in the upper layers of the open ocean. In the Mediterranean, smalltooth sand tigers occur at depths less than 250 m (820 ft), including at depths accessible to divers. They have been seen swimming over sandy flats at Cocos Island and Fernando de Noronha. The temperature range favored by this species is 6–20 °C (43–63 °F); in hot climates, they are found below the thermocline in cooler water.
## Biology and ecology
The smalltooth sand tiger is a strong-swimming shark that may be encountered singly or in aggregations of up to five individuals. Catch records suggest this species may cover long distances in oceanic waters along underwater ridges or "hopping" between seamounts. It has a very large, oily liver, which allows it to maintain neutral buoyancy in the water column with minimal effort. At a location called "Shark Point" off Beirut, Lebanon, small groups of smalltooth sand tigers appear every summer on rocky reefs at a depth of 30–45 m (100–150 ft). The same individuals have been documented returning to this site year after year. Their purpose there is unknown, being speculated to relate to mating. When confronted, these sharks have been observed to stall, gape their mouths, turn around, and shake their tails towards the perceived threat.
Adult smalltooth sand tigers have no known predators, though they are bitten by cookiecutter sharks (Isistius brasiliensis). A known parasite is the tapeworm Lithobothrium gracile, which infests the shark's spiral valve intestine. The carcass of a 3.7-m-long (12.1 ft) female found off Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands contained a number of snubnosed eels (Simenchelys parasitica) inside her heart, body cavity, and back muscles. Whether the eels contributed to the shark's death is unknown.
### Feeding
Compared to the grey nurse shark, the dentition of the smalltooth sand tiger is less robust and lacks specialized cutting and crushing teeth, suggesting that it tends to tackle smaller prey. The diet of the smalltooth sand tiger consists of bottom-dwelling bony fishes such as rockfish (Sebastes spp.), invertebrates such as squid, shrimp, and possibly marine isopods, and cartilaginous fishes including rays and chimaeras. The largest known prey item taken by this species was a 1.3-m-long (4.3 ft) kitefin shark (Dalatias licha), found inside the stomach of a 2.9-m-long (9.5 ft) male from New Caledonia.
### Life history
No pregnant smalltooth sand tigers have ever been found; this species is presumed to be ovoviviparous as in other mackerel sharks. Villaviencio-Garayzar (1996) described a 3.6-m (11.8 ft) female from the Gulf of California that contained "hundreds of ova" in her right ovary, which would support the embryos being oophagous. Whether the embryos also cannibalize each other as in the grey nurse shark is unknown. The size at birth is estimated to be 1.0–1.1 m (3.3–3.6 ft). With a few recorded exceptions, juveniles are found in deep water and only adults are present above a depth of 200 m (660 ft); this may serve to reduce predation on young individuals by large, shallow-water predators such as the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). Males mature at a length of 2.0–2.5 m (6.6–8.2 ft) and females at a length of 3.0–3.5 m (9.4–11.5 ft). Faint scars seen on some individuals may be related to courtship.
## Human interactions
Encounters with divers have shown that, despite their size, smalltooth sand tigers are docile and do not react aggressively even when closely approached. This species is taken as bycatch in gillnets and bottom trawls, and on longlines; most captures occur in the Mediterranean and off Japan. It is usually discarded when caught, except in Japan, where the meat is consumed (though considered very inferior to the grey nurse shark) and the liver oil is used. The fins, jaws, and cartilage are also of value.
Discoveries, beginning in the 1970s, of smalltooth sand tigers in shallow water have raised urgent conservation concerns, as this species is apparently more vulnerable to human activity than previously believed. At present, data are insufficient for the International Union for Conservation of Nature to assess the worldwide conservation status of this species. It has been assessed as vulnerable in Australian waters, due to a decline over 50% in catches off New South Wales since the 1970s. In June 2018, the New Zealand Department of Conservation classified the smalltooth sand tiger as "At Risk – Naturally Uncommon" with the qualifier "Threatened Overseas" under the New Zealand Threat Classification System.
Populations of this species in the Mediterranean are also believed to have declined, due to a combination of habitat degradation, overfishing, pollution, and human disturbance. The smalltooth sand tiger has been protected by the Australian government since 1984; this came about concurrently with protection for the grey nurse shark, which had been decimated in Australian waters, so as to prevent any claims of confusing one species for the other. However, these regulations have proven difficult to enforce.
|
4,215,139 |
Kolkata Suburban Railway
| 1,172,027,092 |
Rail system in Kolkata, India
|
[
"1854 establishments in British India",
"Eastern Railway zone",
"Indian companies established in 1854",
"Kolkata Suburban Railway",
"Rail transport in Howrah",
"Rail transport in Kolkata",
"Railway companies established in 1854",
"South Eastern Railway zone",
"Transport in Kolkata"
] |
The Kolkata Suburban Railway (colloquially called Kolkata local trains or simply locals) is a suburban rail system serving the Kolkata metropolitan area and its surroundings in India. It is the largest suburban railway network in the country with the highest number of stations. It is also the largest suburban rail system in the world. There are five main lines and nineteen branch lines. The suburban railway operates more than 1,500 services, carrying 3.5 million people daily and 1.2 billion people every year. It runs from 03:00 am until 02:00 am and the fares range from Rs.5 to Rs.25. The system uses power supply and runs on broad gauge track. It has interchange stations with the Kolkata Metro at various locations.
The Kolkata Suburban Railway is part of the second passenger railway constructed in British India during the mid 19th century. The first train ran between Howrah and Hooghly stations. A hundred years after the initial run, Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) services began. It is the largest suburban railway network in India by track length and the number of stations with 458 stations and a track length of 1,501 km (933 mi).
The system is operated by two zones of Indian Railways; the Eastern Railway zone and the South Eastern Railway zone. These zones are further divided into the Howrah and Sealdah divisions for the Eastern Railway and the Kharagpur division for the South Eastern Railway. Howrah, Sealdah and Kolkata railway stations are the three major terminals serving the network in the city. Shalimar and Santragachi are also the termini stations for mail/express trains as well as passenger/fast passenger trains.
## History
The Kolkata Suburban Railway is an offshoot of the second passenger railway to be built by the British in India. The first train ran between Howrah and Hooghly stations on 15 August 1854 and was operated by the East Indian Railway (EIR). Regular services on the 38.6 km (24.0 mi) line were introduced on the same day, with stops at Bally, Serampore and Chandannagore stations. The broad gauge Sheoraphuli–Tarakeswar branch line was opened by the Tarkessur Railway Company on 1 January 1885.
In 1951, all the railway companies, zone and divisions were integrated and recategorized. This led to the formation of the Eastern Railway (ER) and South Eastern Railway (SER) zones. These zones of Indian Railways currently operate the Kolkata Suburban Railway.
### Eastern Railway zone
The Eastern Railway zone was formed on 14 April, 1952, by the amalgamation of the East Indian Railway Company and the entire Bengal – Nagpur Railway (later it formed the SER). It has four divisions; Howrah and Sealdah divisions operate the system. The Sealdah division was part of the Eastern Bengal Railway before the recategorisation. Howrah division is the oldest in the ER zone.
On 1 February, 1957, the EMU services were introduced on the Howrah – Bandel section of the Howrah division. In 1963, services were gradually extended to Barddhaman and on the Sealdah Division of Eastern Railway were introduced on the Sealdah – Ranaghat route. In 1968, the Howrah – Barddhaman main and chord line was totally converted to power supply from a 3000 V DC power supply. Howrah–Sheoraphuli–Tarakeswar line was electrified in 1957–58.
### South Eastern Railway zone
The Bengal Nagpur Railway (BNR) Company was incorporated in 1887 to take over from the Nagpur Chhattisgarh Railway (NCR) and to convert the line to broad gauge. The work was completed in 1888. The extension of the main line from Nagpur to Asansol was completed by 1891. Later, it formed the Eastern Railway zone. On 1 August, 1955, the former Bengal Nagpur Railway portion was separated and a new zone, the South Eastern Railway (SER), came into existence. The SER comprises four divisions, and Kharagpur is the only division to operate the suburban railway.
In the SER zone, EMU service made its maiden run on 1 May, 1968 between Howrah – Mecheda of the Kharagpur division, and on 1 February, 1969, EMU services were extended to Kharagpur. Gradually the services were extended to eight other lines by 2003. The system under this zone was completely electrified by 1968.
## Network
Kolkata is the smallest of India's six A-1 cities in terms of area. However, the Kolkata Suburban Railway is the largest suburban railway network in India by track length and number of stations. The overall track length is 1,501 km (933 mi) and has 458 stations. The system is operated by two zonal divisions (under Indian Railways), Eastern Railways (ER) and South Eastern Railways (SER). The fast commuter rail corridors on Eastern Railway as well as South Eastern Railway are shared with long-distance and freight trains, while inner suburban services operate on exclusive parallel tracks. SER operates the South Eastern Line and ER operates the Eastern Line, Circular Line, Chord link Line as well as the Sealdah South lines.
Junction stations are marked in bold
## Lines
### South Eastern line
The South Eastern line in Kolkata consists of three major corridors, which divide into two branches as they run into the suburban satellite towns. Two corridors—one local and the other through—follow the South Eastern Railway and run from Howrah Junction to Midnapore, a distance of 128 km (80 mi). The mainline bifurcates (splits) into two branch lines—the Panskura–Haldia line at Panskura Junction 69 km (43 mi) to the south-east—and the Santragachi–Amta line at Santragachi Junction 45 km (28 mi) to the north. These corridors constitute the 'main' South Eastern line. The South Eastern line also includes two branch lines, 5 km (3.1 mi) and 94 km (58 mi), connecting Santragachi with Shalimar and Tamluk to Digha, respectively.
The South Eastern line has one interchange station with the Eastern Line at Howrah Junction. Rolling stock consists of a fleet of AC as well as dual-powered AC/DC EMUs. The major car sheds on this line are at Tikiapara and Panskura.
On 6 September 2009, then Railway Minister, Mamata Banerjee announced the introduction of Ladies Special local trains, namely Matribhumi (i.e. motherland), in the Kolkata suburban section. The first local Matribhumi Special local ran from Howrah to Kharagpur.
### Eastern line
The Eastern line in Kolkata, the largest network of the Kolkata Suburban Railway, consists of two divisions—Howrah and Sealdah divisions (named after their respective terminals)—which serve both sides of the Hooghly River.
In the Howrah division of the Eastern line, there are five corridors, which also bifurcates and runs into the northwestern suburbs. The first two corridors are the 107 km (66 mi) Howrah–Bardhaman main line and the 94 km (58 mi) chord line. On these two corridors, the Howrah–Tarakeswar branch line bifurcates at Seoraphuli Junction and terminates at Tarakeswar with a length of 39 km (24 mi) crossing over the chord line at Kamarkundu. Kamarkundu now this line has been extended to Goghat from Tarakeswar as Tarakeswar - Bishnupur branch, under Tarakeswar - Bishnupur rail project. The Bandel–Katwa line bifurcates at Bandel Jn with a length of 105 km (65 mi); the Bardhaman–Katwa branch line bifurcates at Bardhaman Jn with a length of 53 km (33 mi).
On the other side of the river, the Sealdah division of the Eastern line has seven corridors, splitting into branch lines to serve the northeastern suburbs. The Sealdah–Gede line, considered to be mainline, terminates in Gede, a small town on the India–Bangladesh Border with a length of 116 km (72 mi). On this corridor, the first branch line bifurcates from Dum Dum Junction terminating at Bangaon Junction with a length of 70 km (43 mi). The second branch line bifurcates at Ranaghat Junction terminating at Bangaon Junction with a length of 33 km (21 mi). The third branch line bifurcates at Ranaghat Junction terminating at Krishnanagar City Junction passing through Kalinarayanpur Junction and Shantipur with a length of 35 km (22 mi) or by bypassing Shantipur, passing only through Kalinarayanpur with a length of 26 km (16 mi). And also there is an extension of the third branch line which starts from Krishnanagar City Junction to Lalgola with a line length of 127 km (79 mi). The fourth branch line bifurcates at Kalyani Junction terminating at Kalyani Simanta with a line length of 5 km (3.1 mi). The fifth branch line bifurcates at Barasat Junction terminating at Hasnabad with a line length of 53 km (33 mi). The Eastern line also includes a connection from Bandel Junction to Naihati Junction with a length of 8 km (5.0 mi) which is an important link between the Howrah and Sealdah divisions.
The major car sheds (depots) on this line are at Howrah Jn and Bandel on the Howrah division and at Narkeldanga, Barasat and Ranaghat in the Sealdah division.
Sealdah division's first Matribhumi local started in October 2018; it was the first all-women passenger train in Indian Railway history. It had female motormen, guards, and security personnel. On 24 August 2015, train services were halted between the Barasat and Bangaon line after a protest by a group of passengers obstructed movement of the trains. They demanded that male passengers be allowed to travel on the Matribhumi ladies special trains. This occurred when Eastern Railway withdrew the decision to allow male passengers to travel on Matribhumi local.
### Circular Railway
The Circular Railway corridor encircles the inner city neighbourhoods of Kolkata. At a length of 42 km (26 mi) with 20 stations, this line is under the jurisdiction of Eastern Railway's Sealdah Division. From Dum Dum Junction to Tala, the line is double-tracked, while from Tala to Majerhat, the line is single-tracked. Running by the side of the Hooghly River from Tala to Majerhat, it joins and runs parallel to the Sealdah South tracks after Majerhat and elevates at Park Circus in order to bypass Sealdah (which is a terminal station). After bypassing Sealdah, it rejoins the mainline at Bidhannagar Road and again terminating at Dum Dum Jn. The line is also known as Chakra Rail.
The circular line is a point of interest for tourists. As it runs under Howrah Bridge, Vidyasagar Setu and runs parallel to the Hooghly River, connecting multiple tourist places and ghats it provides access to a scenic view for daily commuters and visitors.
### Sealdah South lines
The Sealdah South line is an important link to Sundarbans in West Bengal from Kolkata. It is also part of the Eastern Railway. This line has four corridors, and bifurcates as branch lines linking the southern suburbs to Kolkata. The main line starts at Sealdah terminating at Namkhana railway station with a length of 110 km (68 mi). The main line is double-tracked until Lakshmikantapur railway station and single-tracked from Lakshmikantapur to Namkhana. The first branch line of this corridor starts at Ballygunge Junction terminating at Budge Budge railway station with a length of 19 km (12 mi). A second branch line starts at Sonarpur Junction terminating at Canning with a length of 29 km (18 mi). The third branch line starts at Baruipur Junction railway station terminating at Diamond Harbour railway station with the length of 35 km (22 mi). This line has a sole depot at Sonarpur.
This line has three interchange stations, at Majerhat and Park Circus with Circular Railway and at Sealdah for Eastern line.
### Chord link line
The Chord link line connects Sealdah to Dankuni Junction on the Howrah–Barddhaman Chord. This line plays an important role in connecting the Sealdah Division's mainline with the Howrah–Bardhaman chord, which is primarily used by freight and passenger trains heading towards North India(The Howrah–Bardhaman chord is part of the Howrah–Delhi mainline and the Grand Chord). The Chord link crosses the Hooghly River on the Vivekananda Setu road-rail bridge.
This corridor has a famous tourist spot, the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, where Ramakrishna Paramhansa served as a priest. It also includes the road-cum-rail bridge, Vivekananda Setu, also known as the Bally Bridge.
It has three interchange stations. Interchange is possible at Dum Dum Junction for the Eastern line (Sealdah–Gede mainline), at Dankuni Junction for the Eastern line (Howrah–Barddhaman Chord) and at Bally Halt (lying above Bally station) for the Eastern Line (Howrah–Barddhaman mainline). The extension of the Kolkata Metro Line 1 runs parallel to this line, and will have interchange facilities at Dum Dum, Baranagar and Dakshineswhar stations.
## Expansion
A new line is under construction between Amta and Bagnan with a length of 16 km (9.9 mi) under the jurisdiction of the South Eastern Railway sanctioned in 2010–11. Another new line is in progress between the Dakshinbari and Tarakeswar with joint work by the ER and SER.
On the southern part of the Eastern Railways side, there is an expansion of the line between Canning and Jharkhali with a length of 42 km (26 mi). The second expansion is at Kakdwip railway station and Budhakhali with a length of 5 km (3.1 mi). It extends to Sagar Island on the Hooghly River delta. The island can only be reached by boat; expansion of this line is a boon for the people of island providing better connectivity. The third expansion is at Namkhana and Bakkhali with a length of 31 km (19 mi), and a fourth expansion between Kulpi railway station and Bahrarat with a length of 38 km (24 mi).
## Operations
### Services and security
Three types of local train services are operated. They are normal locals, trains which stop at every station; galloping locals, these trains have limited stops and skip the smaller stations; and women-only trains known as Matribhoomi local.
The Railway Protection Force (RPF) and Government Railway Police (GRP) are responsible for the security of Kolkata Suburban Railway. The major stations in Kolkata also have closed-circuit cameras.
### Travel classes
There are three travel classes:
1. Class II: These are regular compartments, where anyone can travel. The last rows on both ends of the compartment are reserved for physically challenged and senior citizens.
2. Class L: These compartments are exclusively reserved for women. Men are not allowed in them. The second compartment from both ends is for ladies.
3. Vendor: These are for vendors to transport heavy goods and luggage. The compartments have seats along the walls and are made to haul goods. The third compartment from both ends is for vendors.
### Ridership
During 2010–11, there was an average of 1,275 trains per day. The average passenger capacity per rake was 6,207. In 2014–15, the average number of trains was 1,511 with an average passenger capacity per rake of 4,141. In the last five years, there was an increase of three percent in the average number of trains per day and reduction of eright percent in the average number of passengers per rake. The number of passengers carried in 2013–14 was and in 2014–15 was —a reduction of three percent in total trips. The daily ridership as of 2017–18 is .
### Fares and ticketing
In the 2013 Railway Budget, the Railway Board increased the Kolkata suburban ticket fare by eight paise per kilometre, although the railway ministry has hiked it by two paise per kilometre. The number of slabs has also been reduced to four—₹5 (6.3¢ US), ₹10 (13¢ US), ₹15 (19¢ US) and ₹20 (25¢ US)—from the eight slabs earlier. Also, ticket denominations have been rounded off to multiples of ₹5 (6.3¢ US). As per the revised slab, a person travelling up to 20 km (12 mi) will have to pay ₹5 (6.3¢ US), between 21 km (13 mi) and 45 km (28 mi) ₹10 (13¢ US), between 46 km (29 mi) and 70 km (43 mi) ₹15 (19¢ US), and between 71 km (44 mi) and 100 km (62 mi) ₹20 (25¢ US). One can buy a monthly, quarterly or season ticket if commuting regularly on a particular route. This allows unlimited rides on that route. Season tickets are the most cost-effective and time-efficient option for regular commuters.
Kolkata Suburban Railway uses a proof-of-payment fare collection system. Tickets can be bought for a single journey (one way) or a return journey. Travelling without a valid ticket is an offence and if caught can result in a penalty. As per the Indian Railway Report, in 2016–17, the Eastern Railway and the South Eastern Railway generated ₹539.8 million (US\$6.8 million) through penalties imposed on ticketless and irregular travelers, an increase from 2013 to 2014 with ₹112 million (US\$1.4 million).
Offline tickets can be bought from the unreserved ticket counters present at every station and Cash/Smart Card operated Ticket Vending Machines (CoTVM) and Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVM) installed in most of the stations. One can issue online tickets using the UTSOnMobile app.
### Non-suburban routes
Some routes do not have any regular EMU services and therefore bypass the Kolkata Suburban Railway Network. To connect people on these routes, passenger trains run to help transport people from small towns and villages to the Kolkata Metropolitan Area and vice versa. There are two routes that bypass the Kolkata Suburban Railway and are not connected to any other network. The first route is from Tamluk to Digha, which is under the jurisdiction of South Eastern Railway with a length of 94 km (58 mi). The second route is from Krishnanagar City Junction to Lalgola, which is under the jurisdiction of Eastern Railway with a length of 128 km (80 mi).
## Infrastructure
### Rolling stock
The Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) for the Kolkata suburban services were built domestically at the Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Perambur; the first EMU rolled out in September 1962.
The Howrah division of Eastern Railways has a rolling stock of 12-coach EMUs made by Jessop, ICF and Titagarh Wagons. BEML EMU's have been purchased and are in use. A few Unique BEML stainless steel EMUs are also in service. A small fleet of 12-coach Siemens EMUs are also in service. MEMU Rakes from the Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala (RCF) and Diesel multiple units (DEMUs)) from the ICF are in service. Howrah division has 61 12-car rakes. The Sealdah division has rolling stock including nine and 12-coach EMUs, also made by Jessop, ICF and Titagarh Wagons. A small fleet of Siemens 12-coach EMUs is also in service. BEML EMU's have been purchased and are in use and a small number of unique BEML stainless steel EMUs are also in service. DEMU trains made by ICF and MEMU from Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala (RCF) are in service. The number of 9-car and 12-car EMU rakes Sealdah division are 49 and 66 respectively. There are 2 Mainline Electric Multiple Unit (MEMU) rakes also.
The South Eastern Railways uses 12-coach EMUs made by Jessop, Siemens, Titagarh Wagons and ICF. BEML EMUs have been purchased and are in use. A few unique BEML stainless steel EMUs are also in service. SER was the first Division in West Bengal to use the ICF Medha 3-phase rakes. DEMU rakes from ICF and MEMU from RCF are in service. In February 2018, SER launched Medha ICF Rakes on the Howrah–Kharagpur route and on 15 April 2018, Eastern Railway also started using them on the Howrah–Bandel Route. SER has 30 12-car EMU rakes.
Every division of the Kolkata Suburban Railway are rapidly replacing their old Jessop and ICF EMUs with the latest Medha 3-phase EMU rakes made by ICF with Bombardier Transportation. Almost all the EMU Units used by the Kolkata Suburban Railway are equipped with a GPS-based passenger information system. Some EMUs, which were previously in service with the Western Line of the Mumbai Suburban Railway, were later shifted to Kolkata for service.
### Electrification and gauge
The Howrah to Bardhaman section of Eastern Railway, got equipped with 3000 V DC electrification by 1958. Following the research and trials by SNCF in Europe, Indian Railways decided to adopt 25 kV AC system as a standard in 1957, as it was found more economical, and by 1968 the mainlines of both zones were electrified with 25 kV AC traction. Branch lines and other lines were gradually electrified later. On 5 January 2015, the Kalinarayanpur to Krishnagar City Junction route via Shantipur was totally converted into electrified broad gauge from meter gauge with three phases, Phase-I was from Krishnanagar City Junction to Shantipur Junction which was commissioned on 7 February 2012; Phase II was from Shantipur Junction to Phulia which was commissioned on 30 January 2014; and the last, Phase III, for Phulia to Kalinarayanpur was commissioned and later EMU services begun. On 12 January 2018, the Barddhaman to Katwa line was totally converted to electrified broad gauge from narrow gauge with two phases—Phase-I Barddhaman to Balgona and Phase-II Balgona To Katwa began to be converted beginning on 30 May 2012. Currently, the network has a 25 kV overhead catenary electrification system, with Indian broad gauge tracks.
### Signalling and telecommunication
An Electronic Interlocking signalling system is most widely used, replacing the old lever frames/panel interlockings system. To increase sectional capacity and efficiency, automatic signalling is being used. This is controlled by AC/DC track circuits, axle counters etc. The axle counter system is used to detect the presence of a train in an absolute block section, point zone area of a station and level crossings.
An optical fibre communication system is the backbone of the telecommunications network. The telecommunications facility is an omnibus circuit between stations and the central control hub at Sealdah and Howrah. For ground based mobile communication, Mobile Train Radio Communication (MTRC) is used.
## Incidents
In the early 1980s, down Kalyani Simanta local overshot the down starter signal at Kalyani rail station and rammed into up Krishnagar City local which was coming into pf. 1 from the opposite direction. Eye-witnesses say the 'head' of the down local hit the 'belly' of the up local. Several coaches derailed, and passengers sustained injuries as both trains were going slow (10kmph). Services on the mainline were suspended for a few days and the derailed rakes kept laying in Kalyani outers for several months.
Two local trains (Sealdah–Shantipur EMU local and Shantipur–Sealdah EMU local) collided on the same track at Phulia railway station on 7 January 2012. One person was killed and several were injured. Three coaches of both trains derailed.
On 12 December 2013, an accident was averted as two trains arrived on the same line at Sealdah Station. The driver of the Sealdah–Lalgola passenger train which left from platform seven had overshot the starter signal and entered the down main line but stopped because of the Bangaon–Sealdah local, which was coming from the opposite direction. This was reported to the control room and the passenger train was hauled back to platform seven of Sealdah Station.
Fourteen passengers were injured when an explosion took place inside a compartment of the Sealdah–Krishnanagar local train early on the morning of 12 May 2015. The blast took place just after a person boarded the train at Titagarh station, which is 21 km (13 mi) from Sealdah. Train services along the Sealdah Section were normal. However, two trains were cancelled as train movement was affected following the incident.
On 17 November 2015, a 40-year-old man, who had boarded the Howrah–Bandel Matribhumi special local for women only, fell off the train and died between Uttarpara and Hind Motor stations. This incident occurred when the man boarded the train. Some female commuters surrounded and abused him. He was eventually forced to get off the train. When the man realized a station was approaching, he ran to grab the handle but missed it and fell from the train to his death.
On 19 July 2017, a train from Sonarpur Jn to Sealdah (South) Station broke the buffer and hit the wall of platform number 13 in Sealdah (South) Station. This incident happened in the morning around 10:25 am (IST).
On 4 September 2018, Majerhat Bridge which was 40 years old, collapsed on the rail line between Majerhat and New Alipore at around 4:45 pm (IST), which results in the death of 3 people while injuring at least 25 others. After the collapse, Eastern Railways suspended train services via Majerhat railway station on the Kolkata Circular Railway and Sealdah-Budge Budge lines temporarily.
On 28 September 2018, one woman was killed while another woman sustained serious injuries after a slab of a foot over-bridge (FOB) at Baruipur railway station in South 24 Parganas fell on them from a height of 30 ft (9.1 m). This incident happened at night. According to locals and daily passengers, the foot over-bridge was in bad condition due to lack of maintenance.
There was a stampede on a foot over-bridge at Santragachi railway station in West Bengal on 23 October 2018. Two people died and twelve others were injured, including two children and two women. This incident occurred because of the arrival of two trains at the same time. People rushed to board the trains and that created a stampede-like situation on the bridge.
On 2 October 2019, A local train coming from Masagram was derailed, when it was entering on Platform no.6 of Howrah railway station. No casualties were reported. This incident happened around 8:10 pm (IST).
On 15 March 2020, a massive fire broke out in the Salimpur slum area which lies near the Dhakuria railway station track at around 8:30 am. No casualties were reported. After this incident, Sealdah South lines were suspended temporarily.
## See also
- Eastern Bengal Railway
- Bengal Nagpur Railway
- Trams in Kolkata
- Transport in Kolkata
- Mumbai Suburban Railway
- Delhi Suburban Railway
- Chennai Suburban Railway
- Bengaluru Commuter Rail
- Hyderabad Multi-Modal Transport System
- List of suburban and commuter rail systems
|
36,629,021 |
No. 1 Operational Conversion Unit RAAF
| 1,054,950,065 | null |
[
"Military units and formations disestablished in 1971",
"Military units and formations established in 1959",
"RAAF training units"
] |
No. 1 Operational Conversion Unit (No. 1 OCU) was an operational training unit of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Formed in January 1959 at RAAF Base Amberley, Queensland, its role was to convert pilots and navigators to the English Electric Canberra bombers flown by Nos. 1, 2 and 6 Squadrons. The unit's complement of Canberras included T.4 and Mk.21 dual-control trainers, and Mk.20 bombers. Originally a component of No. 82 Wing, No. 1 OCU became an independent unit at Amberley in April 1968, its focus being the provision of operationally ready pilots for service with No. 2 Squadron in the Vietnam War. No. 1 OCU was disbanded in June 1971, following the withdrawal of No. 2 Squadron from South-East Asia. By then the RAAF's only Canberra unit, No. 2 Squadron ran its own conversion courses before disbanding in 1982.
## History
During World War II, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) established several operational training units (OTUs) to convert recently graduated pilots from advanced trainers to combat aircraft, and to add fighting ability to the flying skills they had already learned. Post-war demobilisation saw the disbandment of these OTUs, and operational conversion of new pilots became the responsibility of front-line squadrons. This practice impacted upon the squadrons' standard duties, and the advent of the Korean War and introduction of jet aircraft further necessitated a more formal training system. The Air Force's initial move in this direction was to re-establish No. 2 (Fighter) Operational Training Unit at RAAF Base Williamtown, New South Wales, in March 1952; it was renamed No. 2 (Fighter) Operational Conversion Unit in September 1958.
In December 1953, No. 82 (Bomber) Wing, headquartered at RAAF Base Amberley, Queensland, took delivery of Australia's first jet bomber, the English Electric Canberra. Over the next five years, forty-eight Canberras built in Australia by the Government Aircraft Factories (GAF) re-equipped all three of the wing's flying units, Nos. 1, 2 and 6 Squadrons. During this period, operational training of new bomber aircrew was performed "in-house" by the wing, primarily by No. 6 Squadron. Aside from its adverse effect on regular flying duties, the task was made technically challenging and potentially dangerous by virtue of the Canberra being designed for only one pilot, with a single control column. On 12 January 1959, No. 1 (Bomber) Operational Conversion Unit (No. 1 OCU) was formed at Amberley. Coming under the control of No. 82 Wing, its purpose was to convert pilots and navigators to the Canberra, and train them for operations with Nos. 1, 2 and 6 Squadrons. On establishment, the unit was commanded by Squadron Leader B.F.M. Rachinger, and equipped with Mk.20 bombers and T.4 trainers. The T.4 was a dual-control model with three seats; the pilot and instructor sat side by side at the front of the cockpit, and the navigator was seated behind them. Two of these models had been purchased from Britain. The unit was subsequently allocated Mk.21 trainers; GAF built seven of these dual-control models by converting five early Mk.20s and two British-built B.2 bombers. Student aircrew underwent bombing and navigation instruction, as well as simulated operations. The first training course graduated in April 1959.
As well as training, over the course of No. 1 OCU's existence its aircrews flew operational sorties involving naval cooperation, aerial photography, target towing and radar targeting, and participated in exercises in Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand. During runway upgrades at Amberley in mid-1962, the unit was based for a month at RAAF Base Richmond, New South Wales. Later that year, it briefly maintained a detachment at RAAF Base Townsville, Queensland. On 11 September 1964, one of its Canberras was intercepted by a Sabre fighter of No. 76 Squadron based at RAAF Base Darwin, Northern Territory, as part of Operation Handover, a little-known contingency plan put into effect during Konfrontasi to guard against possible attack by Indonesian forces following the recent establishment of the Federation of Malaysia. No. 1 OCU suffered a fatal accident on 16 February 1965, when a Canberra Mk.21 ran off the runway and crashed at Amberley, killing both crew members. The unit was made independent of No. 82 Wing in April 1968. Its role from then on was to provide trained crews solely for No. 2 Squadron, which was on active duty in the Vietnam War. At the same time, maintenance responsibilities for the Canberras transferred from No. 482 Squadron to No. 1 OCU, along with relevant staff and equipment. Nos. 1 and 6 Squadrons effectively ceased operations while their crews underwent conversion to the General Dynamics F-111C, expected to enter service soon afterwards. Delivery of the F-111s was delayed, so Nos. 1 and 6 Squadrons began operating leased F-4E Phantoms as an interim strike force in 1970.
To prepare aircrew for their rotation through No. 2 Squadron in Vietnam, No. 1 OCU students participated in exercises such as Combat Skyspot in August 1968, which utilised radar controlled by No. 30 Squadron, and Strait Kris in September–October 1969, in conjunction with the Australian Army. The unit lost two more aircrew when a Canberra M.21 on a training flight crashed near Amberley on 23 March 1970. From 21 March to 25 April 1971, four of the unit's aircraft flew 10,000 miles around Australia to conduct seven flying displays as part of the RAAF's Golden Jubilee celebrations. Having completed thirty-six conversion courses in its twelve years of operation, No. 1 OCU was disbanded on 9 June 1971, following the withdrawal of No. 2 Squadron from Vietnam. Unit staff were transferred to No. 2 Squadron, which continued to operate the Canberra and carry out its own operational conversion until disbanding in June 1982. Ten of No. 1 OCU's fifteen Canberras were put into storage and the remainder, including surviving Mk.21 trainers, were taken on by No. 2 Squadron. When the F-111C eventually entered service with No. 82 Wing in 1973, No. 6 Squadron again took responsibility for conversion training, while No. 1 Squadron acted as the lead strike unit. Canberra A84-236, which was allocated to No. 1 OCU in 1968 and 1970 when not in service with No. 2 Squadron in Vietnam, went on display at RAAF Museum, Point Cook, Victoria, in 1982.
|
23,620,073 |
1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (United States)
| 1,173,149,491 |
Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the United States Army
|
[
"10th Mountain Division (United States)",
"1985 establishments in the United States",
"Brigade combat teams of the United States Army",
"Infantry brigades of the United States Army",
"Military units and formations established in 1985"
] |
The 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division is an active Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the United States Army based at Fort Drum in New York. The brigade headquarters carries the lineage of the 10th Mountain Division's original headquarters company, and served as such in World War II, and in peacetime at Fort Riley, Fort Benning, and West Germany in the 1940s and 1950s.
The brigade was activated in April 1986, at Fort Drum, New York, when the 10th Mountain Division was reactivated as one of the Army's new Light Infantry Divisions. 1st Brigade and its subordinates saw numerous deployments to contingencies around the world in the 1990s. With the Global War on Terrorism the brigade has seen multiple deployments to Afghanistan to support Operation Enduring Freedom and to Iraq to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.
## Organization
The brigade currently consists of seven subordinate battalions. The core of the brigade's combat power are its three infantry battalions: 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment; the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment; and the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment. The 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment provides reconnaissance to the Brigade Combat Team, while the 3rd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery Regiment provides field artillery support. The 7th Brigade Engineer Battalion provides combat engineering, military intelligence, and signal services, and the 10th Brigade Support Battalion provides the brigade's logistics support.
1st Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) "Warrior", 10th Mountain Division
- Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC)
- 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment
- 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment
- 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment (Triple Deuce)
- 3rd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery Regiment (FAR)
- 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment
- 7th Brigade Engineer Battalion (BEB)
- 10th Brigade Support Battalion (BSB)
## History
### 1980s
On 13 February 1985, the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) was reactivated at Fort Drum, New York. In accordance with the Reorganization Objective Army Divisions plan, the division was no longer centered around regiments, instead two brigades were activated under the division. The 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was activated at Fort Drum while the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was activated at Fort Benning, moving to Fort Drum in 1988.
### 1990s
Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida on 24 August 1992, killing 13 people, leaving another 250,000 homeless and causing damages in excess of 20 billion dollars. On 27 September 1992, the 10th Mountain Division assumed responsibility for Hurricane Andrew disaster relief as Task Force Mountain. Division soldiers set up relief camps, distributed food, clothing, medical necessities and building supplies, as well as helping to rebuild homes and clear debris. The last of the 6,000 division soldiers to deployed to Florida returned home in October 1992.
#### Operation Restore Hope
On 3 December 1993, the division headquarters was designated as the headquarters for all Army Forces (ARFOR) of the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) for Operation Restore Hope. Major General Steven L. Arnold, the division Commander, was named Army Forces commander. The 10th Mountain Division's mission was to secure major cities and roads to provide safe passage of relief supplies to the Somali population suffering from the effects of the Somali Civil War. Due to 10th Mountain Division efforts, humanitarian agencies declared an end to the food emergency and factional fighting decreased. When Task Force Ranger and the SAR team were pinned down during a raid in what later became known as the Battle of Mogadishu, 10th Mountain units provided infantry for the UN quick reaction force sent to rescue them. The 10th had 2 soldiers killed in the fighting, which was the longest sustained firefight by regular US Army forces since the Vietnam War. The division began a gradual reduction of forces in Somalia in February 1993, until the last soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry returned to the United States in March 1994.
#### Operation Uphold Democracy
The division formed the nucleus of the Multinational Force Haiti (MNF Haiti) and Joint Task Force 190 (JTF 190) in Haiti during Operation Uphold Democracy. More than 8,600 of the division's troops deployed during this operation. On 19 September 1994, the 1st Brigade conducted the Army's first air assault from an aircraft carrier. This force consisted of 54 helicopters and almost 2,000 soldiers. They occupied the Port-au-Prince International Airport. This was the largest Army air operation conducted from a carrier since the Doolittle Raid in World War II.
The division's mission was to create a secure and stable environment so the government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide could be reestablished and democratic elections held. After this was accomplished, the 10th Mountain Division handed over control of the MNF-Haiti to the 25th Infantry Division on 15 January 1995. The Division redeployed the last of its soldiers who served in Haiti by 31 January 1995.
### 2000s
#### Global War on Terrorism
In late 2001, following the 11 September 2001 attacks, elements of the brigade's 1-87th Infantry, deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. These forces remained in the country until mid-2002, fighting to secure remote areas of the country and participating in prominent operations such as Operation Anaconda, the Fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, and the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi. The division also participated in fighting in the Shahi Khot Valley in 2002. Upon the return of the battalions, they were welcomed home and praised by President George W. Bush.
In summer 2003, the TF Warrior returned to Afghanistan, relieving TF Devil from the 82nd Airborne Division for Operation Enduring Freedom IV. For more than 6 months, they operated in the frontier regions of the country such as Paktika Province, going places previously untouched by the war in search of Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces. Fighting in several small-scale conflicts such as Operation Avalanche, Operation Mountain Resolve, and Operation Mountain Viper, the division maintained a strategy of small units moving through remote regions of the country to interact directly with the population and drive out insurgents. The 1st Brigade also undertook a number of humanitarian missions.
Upon redeployment in 2004, the brigade began the process of transformation into a modular brigade combat team. On 16 September 2004, the brigade officially became the 1st Brigade Combat Team, sending the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment to the newly formed 3rd BCT, and receiving the permanent assignment of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery and 10th Support Battalion. The brigade also activated a new special troops battalion to consolidate the formerly separate engineer, signal and military intelligence elements, and the 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry to provide reconnaissance for the brigade.
The brigade returned to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. While one infantry battalion, the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, deployed in January 2010, the brigade officially assumed responsibilities for its mission in May 2010. The 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry advised the Kabul Military Training Center, the rest of the brigade conducted training and joint operations with Afghan Police and the Afghan National Army 209th Corps in northern Afghanistan, the provinces of Faryab, Balkh, Kunduz and Baghlan.
The brigade returned again to Afghanistan from February through November 2013, advising the 203rd Afghan Corps in Ghazni and Paktya Provinces as "Cross Functional Team Warrior". Under the command of COL Stephen Michael, the brigade advised and assisted the 2nd and 3rd brigades of the 203rd Corps, other Afghan National Army units, and various types of Afghan police, and also supervised the retrograde and redeployment of equipment.
In October 2014, the brigade reorganized under the BCT 2020 structure. The major changes were the addition of a third infantry battalion, the conversion of the brigade special troops battalion into a brigade engineer battalion, and the reflagging of the brigade's cavalry squadron.
In August 2015, 1,250 soldiers from the brigade were deployed to Iraq to support Operation Inherent Resolve.
On 5 December 2019, the Department of the Army announced that the 1st Brigade Combat Team would replace the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division as part of a unit rotation in support of Operation Freedom's Sentinel. The brigade deployed to Afghanistan February 2020.
## Lineage and honors
The division has received several awards over the course of its history, including the following:
Campaign participation credit
- World War II: North Apennines; Po Valley
- Armed Forces Expeditions: Somalia
- Afghanistan: Consolidation I; Consolidation III
- Iraq: Iraqi Governance; National Resolution; Iraqi Surge
Decorations
- U.S. Army Meritorious Unit Commendation, streamer embroidered: "AFGHANISTAN 2003-2004"
- U.S. Army Meritorious Unit Commendation, streamer embroidered: "IRAQ 2005-2006"
- U.S. Army Meritorious Unit Commendation, streamer embroidered: "IRAQ 2007-2008"
- U.S. Army Meritorious Unit Commendation, streamer embroidered: "AFGHANISTAN 2010-2011"
- U.S. Army Meritorious Unit Commendation, streamer embroidered: "IRAQ 2015-2016"
- U.S. Army Joint Meritorious Unit Award, Streamer embroidered: "SOMALIA 1992-1995" 10th FSB
|
15,554,754 |
Katori-class battleship
| 1,136,852,465 |
Imperial Japanese Navy's Katori-class of pre-dreadnought battleships
|
[
"Battleship classes",
"Katori-class battleships"
] |
The Katori class (香取型戦艦, Katori-gata senkan) was a two-ship class of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the early 1900s. As Japan lacked the industrial capacity to build such warships itself, they were designed and built in the UK. They were the last pre-dreadnought battleships to be built for Japan at overseas shipyards, and the last to be equipped with a ram. The ships were delivered after the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. They saw no action during World War I, although both were present when Japan joined the Siberian Intervention in 1918. They were disarmed and scrapped in 1923–1925 in accordance with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.
## Design and description
The Katori-class ships were ordered under the 1903 Third Fleet Extension Program. As with the earlier battleships, Japan lacked the technology and capability to construct its own battleships, and turned again to the United Kingdom, placing orders with Armstrong and Vickers in January 1904. The next class of battleships, the Satsuma class, were built in Japan.
The design of the Katori class was a modified and improved version of the King Edward VII-class battleships of the Royal Navy. The Vickers-built Katori was slightly smaller than her sister ship, Kashima. They had an overall length of 456.25–470.6 feet (139.1–143.4 m), a beam of 78–78.16 feet (23.8–23.8 m), and a normal draught of 26.6–27 feet (8.1–8.2 m). They displaced 15,950–16,383 long tons (16,206–16,646 t) at normal load. The crew consisted of 864 officers and enlisted men.
### Propulsion
The ships were powered by a pair of four-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller, using steam generated by 20 Niclausse boilers using a mixture of coal and fuel oil. The engines were rated at 15,600–16,600 indicated horsepower (11,600–12,400 kW) and designed to reach a top speed of 18.5 knots (34.3 km/h; 21.3 mph) although they proved to be faster during their sea trials. Kashima reached a top speed of 19.2 knots (35.6 km/h; 22.1 mph) using 17,280 ihp (12,890 kW) and Katori made 19.5 knots (36.1 km/h; 22.4 mph) from 18,500 ihp (13,800 kW). The ships carried a maximum of 2,150 tonnes (2,120 long tons) of coal and 377–750 long tons (383–762 t) of fuel oil which allowed them to steam for 12,000 nautical miles (22,000 km; 14,000 mi) at a speed of 11 knots (20 km/h; 13 mph).
### Armament
The armament of the Katori class ships differed due to being built by competing shipyards. Kashima had Armstrong-built guns, while Katori had Vickers-built guns. The primary armament of both ships was four 45-caliber 12-inch (305 mm) guns in twin-gun turrets fore and aft of the ships superstructure. Kashima had four EOC 12-inch Type 41 guns, while Katori had four Vickers 12-inch Type 41 guns. These were more powerful than the 40-caliber guns on Mikasa and earlier Japanese battleships. They fired 850-pound (386 kg) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 2,800 ft/s (850 m/s).
The secondary armament of the King Edward VII class introduced an intermediate caliber of 9.2-inch (234 mm) guns between the primary 12-inch guns and the tertiary 6-inch guns and the Japanese upgraded these to 45-caliber 10-inch (254 mm) guns in four single turrets mounted at the corners of the superstructure. Kashima had four EOC 10-inch Type 41 guns, while Katori had four Vickers 10-inch Type 41 guns. The guns had a muzzle velocity of 2,707 ft/s (825 m/s) when firing 500-pound (227 kg) shells.
The tertiary armament of both ships was twelve 45-caliber 6-inch (152 mm) guns, compared to the ten of the King Edward VIIs. Kashima had twelve EOC 6-inch Type 41 guns, while Katori had twelve Vickers 6-inch Type 41 guns. Ten of these guns were mounted in the hull and the remaining two were placed in the superstructure between the 10-inch gun turrets. Their 100-pound (45 kg) shells had a muzzle velocity of 2,300 ft/s (700 m/s).
Protection against torpedo boat attacks was provided by twelve to sixteen QF 12-pounder 12-cwt guns and three 47-millimetre (1.9 in) QF three-pounder Hotchkiss guns. The 12-pounders fired 3-inch (76 mm), 12.5-pound (5.7 kg) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 2,359 ft/s (719 m/s). The ships were also equipped with five submerged 18-inch torpedo tubes, two on each broadside and one in the stern.
### Armor
The waterline main belt of the Katori-class vessels consisted of Krupp cemented armour 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 m) high, of which 2 feet 6 inches (0.8 m) was above the waterline at normal load. It had a maximum thickness of 9 inches (229 mm) amidships. It was only 2.5 inches (64 mm) inches thick at the ends of the ship and was surmounted by a six-inch, 15-foot (4.6 m) strake of armour that ran between the main gun barbettes and protected most of the secondary guns. The barbettes for the main guns were 5–12 inches (127–305 mm) thick and those for the intermediate turrets were protected by six inches of armour. The armour of the main gun barbette hoods had a maximum thickness of nine inches and those of the intermediate barbettes were 6–8 inches (152–203 mm) thick. The sides of the superstructure between the intermediate barbettes had 4 inches (102 mm) of armour.
The flat portion of the deck armour was two inches (51 mm) thick and three inches thick amidships where it sloped down to the bottom of the armour belt. This significantly improved the ships' protection as any shell that penetrated their vertical armour also had to penetrate the sloping deck before it could reach the machinery compartments or magazines. Outside the central armoured citadel, the sloped deck had a thickness of two point five inches (64 mm). The conning tower was protected by nine inches of armour.
## Ships
## Service
Whilst conducting gunnery training in Hiroshima Bay on 16 September 1907, brown powder propellant in Kashima's starboard rear 10-inch gun mount ignited when it came in contact with burning residue from the previous shot. The fire killed seven officers and 27 enlisted men; wounding two officers and six enlisted men. When World War I began, Kashima was refitting while Katori was assigned to the 1st Battleship Squadron. The former was assigned to the 2nd Battleship Squadron when her refit was completed in 1915 and became the squadron's flagship in 1916. Katori began a refit in 1914 that lasted until late 1916 and was assigned to the 5th Battleship Squadron upon its completion. Kashima joined her sister in the 5th Battleship Squadron as its flagship in 1918 and both ships covered the landing of Japanese troops in Siberia in August of that year as Japan decided to intervene in the Russian Civil War.
In 1921, Katori, escorted by Kashima, carried Crown Prince Hirohito on his tour of Europe where he met King George V. Both ships were disarmed in 1923 and later scrapped to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. All of their guns were turned over to the Imperial Japanese Army for use as coastal artillery; two of Katori's main-gun turrets were installed around Tokyo Bay and on Iki Island in the Strait of Tsushima. The rest of their guns were placed in reserve and scrapped in 1943.
|
30,655,964 |
Southampton Castle
| 1,144,535,549 |
Castle in Southampton, England
|
[
"Buildings and structures in Southampton",
"Castles in Hampshire"
] |
Southampton Castle was located in the town of Southampton in Hampshire, England. Constructed after the Norman conquest of England, it was located in the north-west corner of the town overlooking the River Test, initially as a wooden motte and bailey design. By the late 12th century the royal castle had been largely converted to stone, playing an important part in the wine trade conducted through the Southampton docks. By the end of the 13th century the castle was in decline, but the threat of French raids in the 1370s led Richard II to undertake extensive rebuilding. The result was a powerfully defended castle, one of the first in England to be equipped with cannon. The castle declined again in the 16th century and was sold off to property speculators in 1618. After being used for various purposes, including the construction of a Gothic mansion in the early 19th century, the site was flattened and largely redeveloped. Only a few elements of the castle still remain visible in Southampton.
## History
### 11th–13th centuries
Southampton Castle was first constructed in the late 11th century, at some point after the Norman conquest of England. Southampton at this time was a relatively large town, but not as significant as in the later medieval period. The royal castle was erected within the existing town on the site of a probable large English hall, and considerable damage was caused to the surrounding local buildings as space was opened up for the new fortification. The town of Southampton was protected by water on most sides, surrounded by protective ditches and banks, and the castle was built on rising ground in the north-west corner of the town, overlooking the mouth of the River Test, an important medieval waterway. The initial castle was a timber motte and bailey design, with a motte 45 feet (14 metres) across; at least some of the bailey walls were rebuilt in stone during the first half of the 12th century. The wealthiest parts of Southampton were in the west of the town, just to the south of the castle, with some of the poorest districts just beyond the castle to the north-east. The castle was positioned so as to adjoin the town's quays.
During the years of the Anarchy, in which the Empress Matilda and Stephen fought for control of England, the castle was held by William le Gros, the bishop of Winchester and supporter of Stephen. When Henry II came to the throne in 1153, he took back the castle and took steps to improve the condition of Southampton castle, as part of his attempt to improve the general standard of security in the south. At this time, Southampton was considered a key fortification, classed alongside other important castles such as the Tower of London, Windsor, Oxford, Lincoln and Winchester.
By the second half of the 12th century, Southampton Castle was valued more for its role in coastal defence and as a coastal base for operations on the continent than for its value in ensuring internal security. Following the threat of French invasion in the 1170s, Henry II invested modest additional resources in the castle, and in 1187 the wooden keep was converted into a stone shell-keep. John increased spending on the castle during his reign. Royal visits to Southampton were quite common, and additional royal accommodation, called the King's House, was built outside the castle.
Southampton was an important trading port in the 12th century, with trade routes to Normandy, the Levant and Gascony. The castle played an important role in this trade, in part forming a warehouse for the king's imports, this process being managed by a Crown Bailiff. Royal purchases of wine were particularly important for the castle, being stored and distributed to royal properties across the south of England. The former castle hall was turned into a subterranean vault in the 13th century, probably for storing wine.
### 14th–15th centuries
By 1300, Southampton was a major port and a large provincial town, with a population of around 5,000. In 1338 there was a successful French attack on Southampton, burning various buildings down and damaging the castle. Edward III responded by improving the quality of the town defences, including building walls along the old ditch and bank defences, and particularly focusing on improving the west side of the town, but little work appears to have been done to improve the castle itself. By the middle of the 14th century, Southampton Castle sat alongside one and a quarter miles (2.0 km) of town walls, although the castle and the walls were kept administratively separate.
In 1370 the French made a successful attack on Portsmouth, commencing a new sequence of raids along the English coast. In due course first Edward, then Richard, responded with a new building programme of castles, including work at Southampton, where the castle was in a poor condition, owing in part to the theft of building materials, including stone and lead, by the citizens of the town. Henry Yevele and architect William Wynford rebuilt the keep from 1378 to 1382, whilst additional defences were added between 1383 and 1388, including a barbican and a protective mantlet wall. Thomas Tredynton was appointed to the castle as the chaplain, being paid an unusually high wage of £10 a year, reflecting his other skills as a military engineer. Southampton Castle was equipped with its first cannon in 1382, making it one of the first castles in the country to be so equipped. At this time cannon were still unreliable, only capable of reaching relatively short ranges and required the construction of specialist gunports; once again, the decision was driven by the fears of French attack. An "expert in guns and the management of artillery" was retained during the 15th century to manage the new weaponry.
After the scare of 1457, when French troops successfully attacked the town of Sandwich on the south coast, Southampton Castle was once again put on alert, and one of Henry VI's more "dependable captains", Nicholas Carew, was given control of the castle for life. Despite investment in the castle declining, the antiquarian John Leland could describe the new keep in the early 16th century as being "the glory of the castle, both large and fair and very strong, both by works and by the site of it".
### 16th–19th centuries
The castle began a second period of decline in the 16th century. After 1518, no more money was spent repairing the castle. The inner bailey became used first as a rubbish tip, then for small-scale agriculture. By 1585, the castle was "very ruynaise and in greete decaye". In contrast to many royal castles, Southampton Castle was never converted into a gaol, with Southampton's two prisons instead being built in the town at the Bargate and on Fish Street. In 1618 James I sold the castle to property speculators; it was then sold on to George Gollop, a local merchant, and a windmill was subsequently built on the motte. The castle played no role in the subsequent English Civil War, although some of the masonry was used to strengthen the town walls in 1650. Two of the entrances to the castle, Southgate and Castle Eastgate, were demolished in the late 18th century; and the remaining castle buildings fell into significant disrepair.
Several short-lived buildings were later constructed on top of the motte. The first of these around the turn of the 19th century was a banqueting house constructed by Lord Stafford. In 1808 Marquess of Landsdowne built a mansion in a Gothic style on top of the motte using some of the stone remains of the old keep; it became known as Landsdowne Castle, providing famous views across the town. Landsdowne Castle was pulled down in either 1815 or 1818, and most of the motte was subsequently flattened.
From the late 19th century onwards the castle site was subject to considerable development. A new road – Upper Bugle Street – was built through the old bailey site, and various local council buildings constructed. Development continued after the Second World War, in which large parts of the city around the castle were significantly damaged by bombing.
## Today
Only fragments of the medieval castle survive today, with most of the original site covered by modern buildings and dominated by the block of flats built in 1962 over the remaining part of the castle motte. A sequence of archaeological investigations between 1973 and 1983 excavated around 10% of the total castle area, and more limited work has occurred since, including a "watching brief" excavation carried out in Forest View road in 2001.
The castle hall, Castle Vault, Castle Watergate and the foundations of the garderobe tower were incorporated into the Town's city walls and still survive and are viewable as part of the Walk the Town Walls walking route. The hall can be viewed from above from a metal gantry and information panels provide the story of the site. Visitors can go inside the Castle Vault as part of guided tours run throughout the year or for special events including the Heritage Open Days events. Additionally, the castle gateway remains at foundation level as does sections of the southern and northern bailey walls, the latter of which stands to 20 feet high as the removal of the earth banks against these walls has exposed the foundation piers of these walls which are the prominent feature of the curtain wall.
As part of Southampton's bid to be named UK City of Culture in 2025, the city council announced a £6.7 million package of restoration and repairs to monuments across the city including the Castle.
## See also
- Castles in Great Britain and Ireland
- List of castles in England
|
16,883,351 |
Mary Polly Paaaina
| 1,173,510,973 |
Hawaiian chiefess and sister of Queen Emma
|
[
"1833 births",
"1853 deaths",
"19th-century deaths from tuberculosis",
"Hawaiian adoptees (hānai)",
"House of Keliimaikai",
"Royal School (Hawaii) alumni",
"Royalty of the Hawaiian Kingdom",
"Tuberculosis deaths in Hawaii"
] |
Mary Polly Paʻaʻāina, also known as Mary ʻĪʻī (c. 1833 – May 28, 1853) was a Hawaiian chiefess of the Kingdom of Hawaii. At a young age, she was chosen to attend the Chiefs' Children's School (later renamed Royal School) taught by the American missionary Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette Montague Cooke, alongside her half-sister Queen Emma of Hawaii and fourteen of her royal cousins.
## Early life and education
She was born circa 1833 to Henry Coleman Lewis and High Chiefess Fanny Kekelaokalani Young. Her mother was daughter of John Young, the British advisor of Kamehameha I. Her half-sister was Emma Rooke, who was three years younger than her and the daughter of her mother's marriage to George Naʻea. Her biological father Henry Coleman Lewis died in the first week of the influenza epidemic of 1845. She was adopted under the Hawaiian tradition of hānai by John Papa ʻĪʻī and his wife Sarai Hiwauli. Her hānai parents were lower-ranking aliʻi and her foster father also served as kahu (caretaker) to Princess Victoria Kamāmalu. Sources disagree on the spelling of her name. She was called "Polly Paaina" by the Cookes, while Liliʻuokalani called her "Mary Paaina" in Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen. The number of "a" letters in her name often varies.
Entering in May 1843, Paʻaʻāina was the fifteenth pupil and last girl to enter the Chiefs' Children's School (the last boy John William Pitt Kīnaʻu entered in 1844). Along with her classmates, she was chosen by Kamehameha III to be eligible for the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaii. She was taught in English by American missionaries Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette Montague Cooke, alongside her royal cousins. She was taught reading, spelling, penmanship, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, physics, geography, history, bookkeeping, singing and English composition by the missionary couple. In the classroom students were divided by their age and/or length of time at the school. The older group consisted of Moses Kekūāiwa, Lot Kapuāiwa, Alexander Liholiho, William Charles Lunalilo, Jane Loeau, Bernice Pauahi, Abigail Maheha and Elizabeth Kekaʻaniau who had attended the school since 1839. The next class consisted of Emma Rooke, James Kaliokalani, Peter Kaʻeo and David Kalākaua. Due to her late attendance, Mary Paʻaʻāina was placed in the youngest class together with Victoria Kamāmalu, Lydia Kamakaʻeha (Liliʻuokalani), and John William Pitt Kīnaʻu. During their Sunday procession to church it was customary for boys and girls to walk side by side, Paʻaʻāina would walk beside her first cousin Peter Kaʻeo.
American merchant Gorham D. Gilman visited the Royal School in 1848 and gave a brief description of Paʻaʻāina:
> The other and the last is the adopted daughter of John Ii who has been in the school the last few years—and who appears to be a pleasant and amiable young lady.
## Later life
The boarding school was discontinued in 1850. Little detail is known about her adult life. She may have moved back briefly with her hānai parents to their new home Mililani in Honolulu. In 1851, Paʻaʻāina married American James Augustus Griswold (1825–1868) in Honolulu, Oʻahu. Griswold was naturalized as a citizen of the Hawaiian Kingdom on December 26 of the same year in order to marry a Hawaiian woman. The exact date of their marriage was either December 21 or December 30.
In 1853, Paʻaʻāina fell ill and after much suffering from a lingering illness, died at Princess Victoria Kamāmalu's residence on May 28, 1853 of scrofulous complaints. Her funeral was held the next day at Mililani, the residence of her hānai father John Papa ʻĪʻī. The missionary newspaper Friends described her last days:
> Her sufferings during her last sickness were extreme. She felt conscious of danger, and, as far as human eye could see, prepared herself for her departure. She took a calm and effecting [sic] leave of her friends that were present, and sent her last message to absent ones. She expressed the wish that others whom she loved would prepare while in health for the trying hour of death. "Dearest Mary thou hast left us, Here thy loss we deeply feel, But ‘tis God who hath bereft us, He can all our sorrow heal."
### Descendants
Griswold's and Paʻaʻāina's only child was Mary Paʻaʻāina Griswold (March 19, 1853 – June 9, 1917). She married twice: her first marriage was to Lewis Albert (1826–1897) in San Francisco, 1871, and her second marriage was to Charles Ellet Kellogg (1855–1920) in Honolulu, April 15, 1886. Mary Griswold lived in California for most of her adult life and died in Oakland. By her first marriage, Mary Griswold had a daughter named Edith G. Albert (1872–1948), who married William Buchanan (1865–1940) and resided in California. No children are mentioned in Buchanan's 1948 obituary in The San Franciscio Examiner or in any United States Census records between 1900 and 1940.
## See also
- John Young (Hawaii) family tree
|
8,103,391 |
Hershey Creamery Company
| 1,171,686,915 |
American pre-packaged ice cream and cold dessert maker
|
[
"1894 establishments in Pennsylvania",
"Companies based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania",
"Companies traded over-the-counter in the United States",
"Dairy products companies of the United States",
"Food and drink companies based in Pennsylvania",
"Food and drink companies established in 1894",
"Ice cream brands"
] |
Hershey Creamery Company, also known as Hershey's Ice Cream, is an American creamery that produces ice cream, sorbet, sherbet, frozen yogurt, and other frozen desserts such as smoothies and frozen slab-style ice cream mixers. It was founded by Jacob Hershey and four of his brothers in 1894 and taken over by the Holder family in the 1920s. The company was one of the first to offer consumers pre-packaged ice cream pints.
The family-owned business has approximately 450 employees and operates 30 distribution centers in 28 states across the Eastern and Northeastern United States. It is a publicly traded company, with its stocks listed only on Pink Sheets as the company offers a limited number of shares to potential shareholders. In 1998, it modernized its operations to increase efficiency and reduce overhead.
Hershey Creamery Company has no connection to The Hershey Company, a candy manufacturer, though both companies were founded in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the same year. The companies have had a tumultuous relationship marked by multiple lawsuits over trademark issues. In the mid-1990s, the companies settled their most recent legal battles out of court, with Hershey Creamery Company agreeing to add a disclaimer to its ice cream products to note that it is not affiliated with The Hershey Company.
## History
The Hershey brothers, Jacob, Isaac, John, Paris, and Eli, founded Hershey Creamery Company in 1894, with the company originally operating out of the Hershey family's Lancaster County farmhouse. The ice cream was packed in metal-lined wooden containers that the Hershey brothers designed and built. The containers were loaded into trucks with ice packed around them to keep the ice cream fresh and cold. Salesmen traveled daily routes to deliver product to customers in the county and in surrounding areas.
In the 1920s, the company was merged with the Holder family's Bethlehem-based Meyer Dairy Company, retaining the Hershey name. In 1926, with demand for the ice cream exceeding the capacity of the farmhouse, the newly merged company constructed its first ice cream plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. During the Great Depression, the company became the first ice cream maker to offer its products in pre-packaged pints. It began creating new flavors of ice cream which it then sold to other ice cream makers. Following World War II, the company continued to answer the call for greater convenience in consumer foods and expanded its offerings to include single-serve, easy to eat items such as ice pops and ice cream sandwiches. In the 1960s, the Holder family assumed full ownership of the company.
As the company grew, it split its production operations, with the Harrisburg location mixing the ice cream and a new facility in Lower Swatara Township used for the actual hardening and packaging of the product. While local orders continued to be delivered in small Hershey's Ice Cream refrigerated trucks, the company shifted to transporting most of its ice cream to refrigerated tractor trailer trucks, enabling it to stretch its market beyond the state of Pennsylvania. It expanded its distribution facilities, eventually occupying 22 co-owned distribution centers. This enabled the company to ship products out more quickly after orders are received and resulted in less travel time for the products, ensuring freshness and quality were maintained. In the summer months, the company greatly increased its workforce and leased additional cold-storage space to help meet the seasonal orders, as the orders were prepared by hand. In 1998, operations were modernized and automated when the company purchased 105 acres (0.42 km<sup>2</sup>) in nearby Middletown where it constructed a modern 1.3 million cubic foot warehouse, enabling it to boost its efficiency, reducing the need to increase its summer workforce, and reducing the frequent product loss caused by hand orders and inefficient packing systems. The modernization of its warehouse also improved inventory management, order accuracy, and has helped the company continue its growth.
### Trademark disputes with Hershey Company
Hershey Creamery has been involved in multiple legal disputes with the similarly named Hershey Company, founded around the same time in the city of Lancaster by Milton S. Hershey; despite the proximity, Milton Hershey has no relation to the founding Hershey brothers. The first troubles came after the Hershey Creamery began producing chocolate candy and cocoa. Milton S. Hershey learned of the candies in 1919, and assigned Charles Ziegler to "find instances of confusion and infringement and of unfair competition". Ziegler found that in addition to making similar products, the packaging used on the chocolates resembled that used by Hershey Company—then called Hershey Chocolate. Investigating complaints from retailers in Boston, New York, Binghamton, Norfolk, and Richmond, Ziegler reportedly found that retailers were confusing the two products, and sometimes deliberately replacing the higher priced Hershey Company products with the Hershey Creamery products. In Harrisburg, Ziegler found a display of Hershey Creamery "Hershey Kisses", which were bite-sized chocolate drops similar to the chocolate company's creations. After cease and desist letters failed to resolve the problem, Milton Hershey filed suit in 1921 in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania for trademark infringement. In 1926, a district judged partially sided with Hershey Chocolate and prohibited the creamery from using the name Hershey's in connection with "manufacture, advertisement, distribution, or sale of, among other things, chocolate, cocoa, chocolate confections, and chocolate or cocoa products".
In 1958, the creamery registered for and was granted the "Hershey's" trademark for use with ice cream and butter products. Seven years later, the company filed suit in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Hershey Company and Consolidated Foods Corporation after learning the companies were planning to partner to make a line of Hershey's branded ice cream bars. Hershey Creamery alleged "trademark infringement, unfair competition, false designation of origin, false descriptions, and false representations", to which Hershey Chocolate responded with a counterclaim questioning the validity of the trademark, claiming it was fraudulently obtained. The companies settled out of court the following year, with the creamery agreeing to drop "butter" from its trademark and fix a filing error with it, and allowing Hershey Company to release the licensed bars within certain guidelines. Hershey Company also agreed not to challenge the creamery's "Hershey's" trademark for use on ice cream again.
Shortly after this, Hershey Creamery expanded its trademark to include other ice cream products: "ice cream, ice milk, sherbet, water ice, and frozen confections in which ice cream, ice milk, sherbet or water ice is a component". In 1989, the creamery expanded its products to include frozen yogurt and filed for a new trademark for this new line of products. Upon learning of the registration request, the Hershey Company—then named Hershey Foods—demanded the company cease production of the products claiming it violated Hershey Company's trademarks. The creamery dropped its application, but continued releasing the products, so in May 1990, Hershey Company filed suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania seeking a legal injunction to stop Hershey Creamery from producing and marketing its Hershey's branded frozen yogurt, as well as to attempt to stop the company from using the "Hershey's" trademark outside of its "traditional thirteen-state trading area" and to demand that the company include a disclaimer disavowing its relation to Hershey Company on all of its products. Hershey Creamery countersued in the New York South District court, concerned that Hershey Company demands reneged on the 1967 settlement, and requested the Pennsylvania court actions be transferred to the New York court as that was where the settlement was originally handled. The request was denied and the court instead blocked the Hershey Creamery's suit in New York. The Creamery appealed but this was denied.
After three years in court, the two companies again settled, with Hershey Creamery agreeing to put a disclaimer on all of its products, corporate website, and in promotional materials and press releases. On their website, the disclaimer simply notes "not affiliated with Hershey's Chocolate".
### Other legal issues
In November 2008, Hershey Creamery Company became the first company in the nation to be prosecuted and fined for failing to implement a Risk Management Program (RMP) as required by the Clean Air Act. The charges were brought by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which stated that the company failed to develop the required plans with regard to its storage and use of anhydrous ammonia, which is a regulated substance. In the charges, the EPA noted that the creamery twice certified that it had developed the RMP plan, once in 1999 and again in 2004. Later inspection showed that the certifications were false and on December 7, 2006, the EPA issued a civil compliance order against the company, ordering the company to come into compliance. Hershey Creamery complied and in April 2007 submitted the appropriate RMPs, which were confirmed to be in-place through subsequent inspection. The case was heard at the Federal Middle District court of Pennsylvania, with Hershey Creamery pleading guilty to the charges; it was subsequently fined \$100,000 and given a year probation.
## Business model
Hershey Creamery is a family operated business, with each new generation raised to assume roles within the company hierarchy upon graduation of high school. As of 2009, George Holder is its president, while his younger brothers, Walter and Tom, are vice president of manufacturing and vice president of sales and marketing, respectively. The company has approximately 450 employees.
The company operates 22 distribution centers, which serve some 22,000 clients in 28 states across the eastern United States, with Florida, Illinois, and the Carolinas being its newest market areas after its 2005 expansion. Since 1996, management has focused on the company's main distribution center rather than expansion outside of existing footprint. In 2003, it shifted its focus to moving its operations from the Harrisburg area, which is flood-prone and landlocked, to the Lower Swatara area. It opened a distribution center there in 1998, and plans to shift its headquarters and production facilities there over the next five to ten years. Unlike other ice cream makers, Hershey Creamery maintains ownership over its delivery trucks, distribution centers and warehouses, a practice the Holder family feels is important to maintaining the traditions of the "private, conservative" company.
Sales are primarily derived from branded ice cream parlors, quick-serve restaurants, and the distribution of its pre-packaged items to convenience stores, food service operators such as schools, hospitals, prisons, military installations, sports stadiums, amusement parks, and assisted living centers. Pre-packaged items are also sold in regional supermarkets, but this accounts for a minority of the company's sales.
### Financials
Hershey Creamery Company is a publicly traded company, with only 36,000 shares available, which are listed on Pink Sheets () and sold via the over-the-counter market. The company has fewer than 500 shareholders, primarily among the Holder family. Its stocks are considered to be "thinly traded" in that its shares are rarely traded, and then only a few shares are sold at a time. In 2006, the company maintained a 6.2 to 1 price-to-earnings ratio with no long-term debt and shareholders receive quarterly dividends and special dividends.
In 1936, the company shares traded at \$2.01 per share. The value of the stock continued to grow steadily and by 1996, shares were trading at \$2,300 per share; and hitting as high as \$3,600 a share in 2003. Though not required to provide U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, the company does distribute similar-style reports to its shareholders annually, and in the 1930s and 40s, its annual earnings were reported in the Christian Science Monitor. In 1936, the company reported a net income of \$195,077, up nearly \$10,000 from its 1935 earnings of \$185,320. As the company grew, so did its earnings. In 2001, the company reported sales of \$91.4 million, giving it a net profit of \$4.6 million. Sales began declining, and by 2007, they were down to \$44,800,000.
Hershey Creamery ranked No. 90 in Dairy Foods magazine's 2005 list of the top 100 dairy companies, which ranks dairy companies based on annual sales. This was one rank higher than its 2004 rank of 91st.
### Products
As of 2009, Hershey Creamery Company offered 108 flavors of regular, hand-dipped premium ice cream, with 31 of those varieties marked as super premium gold rim products and 4 available in no sugar added (NSA) varieties that use the alternate sweetening product Splenda. Additionally, it offers two flavors of sorbet, three flavors of sherbet, and eight flavors of frozen yogurt. For pre-packaged half-gallons, the company offers consumers 32 ice cream flavors, including 4 no-fat varieties of its basic flavors and five sherbet flavors. In pints, it offers 13 flavors in its traditional square packaging and 15 flavors in its newer round pint packaging, including 2 limited edition and 2 no-sugar added varieties. It also offers three basic pre-made ice cream cakes.
In addition to these traditional ice cream treats, Hershey Creamery offers a variety of novelty ice cream treats, including ice cream sandwiches, Ice pops, sundae cups, ice cream sticks, squeeze ups, and pre-made cones. It also distributes smoothies under its "Tropi-Kool Smoothies" brand and frozen slab ice cream under its "Creation Station" brand.
Energy drink: Banzai Energy Ice, which it created by using the then popular energy drink Banzai. Though the 4-ounce product received good reviews for its citrus flavor and convenient squeeze-up container for on-the-go consumer, the product was a financial failure and was dropped.
## See also
- List of dairy product companies in the United States
|
6,275,184 |
Welcome Wagon (Veronica Mars)
| 1,122,105,142 | null |
[
"2006 American television episodes",
"Television episodes about rape",
"Veronica Mars (season 3) episodes"
] |
"Welcome Wagon" is the season premiere of the third season of the American mystery television series Veronica Mars, and the forty-fifth episode overall. Written by series creator Rob Thomas and directed by John T. Kretchmer, the episode premiered on The CW on October 3, 2006. The series depicts the adventures of Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) as she deals with life as a college student while moonlighting as a private detective.
In this episode, Veronica transitions to life at Hearst College, meeting several new people and reconnecting with several acquaintances from Neptune High. Meanwhile, a student named Piz (Chris Lowell) gets his belongings stolen, and Veronica helps him. In addition, Keith (Enrico Colantoni) trails Kendall Casablancas (Charisma Carpenter) in the aftermath of receiving a large sum of money from her in "Not Pictured" before learning that she is actually a target of the Fitzpatricks. At the end of the episode, one of Veronica's newfound friends, Parker Lee (Julie Gonzalo) becomes the next victim of the Hearst serial rapist.
"Welcome Wagon" is the first episode of Veronica Mars to air on The CW as opposed to UPN. In order to attract new viewers, Thomas and the crew decided to make several changes to the show, including altering the theme song and the show's narrative structure, beginning with this episode. In contrast to previous seasons, which involved one major season-long mystery, the show's writers planned to have three consecutive mysteries play out over the course of the third season.
The episode also sees the introduction of series regulars Stosh "Piz" Piznarski and Parker Lee as well as the promotion of Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie and Don Lamb to series regular status. Upon airing, the episode received 3.36 million viewers and received mixed to positive reviews. Eric Goldman of IGN thought that the episode "proves that the show is as clever and witty as ever", while Rowan Kaiser of The A.V. Club was critical of the show's increasing focus on rape.
## Plot synopsis
Veronica starts her criminology class. Veronica solves a mystery given out in the class in six minutes. Logan (Jason Dohring), who is also at Hearst, is still dating Veronica. Dick (Ryan Hansen) has just returned, getting into Hearst, but he is shaken up from Beaver's suicide. Vinnie (Ken Marino) approaches Keith (Enrico Colantoni) with a case, but he refuses it. Keith is tracking a bail-jumper. Stosh "Piz" Piznarski becomes Wallace's (Percy Daggs III) roommate, and Piz loses all his belongings. Veronica comes in to help. Keith's bail-jumper, Cormac Fitzpatrick (Jason Beghe) is found, and he gets into the car with Keith. Veronica and Mac listen to a rape victim protesting the university's policies on the issue. Soon, Dick crashes the rally. Keith tells Cormac that he helped Kendall (Charisma Carpenter) get out of town, and Cormac is being targeted by the Fitzpatricks. Veronica and Piz visit the police department, and they say there have been other victims. Veronica learns that the Hearst "Welcome Wagon" is actually fake.
Veronica meets Parker Lee (Julie Gonzalo), who annoys both Veronica and Mac. Veronica, Parker, Mac, Wallace, and Piz go to a concert. Veronica talks about Piz's problem at the concert, and three kids say that they saw a white girl who was faking being fat. Dick shows up at Mac's door and tells her that Beaver never cared about her. Veronica finds Piz's guitar, and they visit the seller. The seller's description matches that of other people. Veronica talks to Piz about a suspect, but he says that it doesn't match the woman he saw. Keith and the bail-jumper's car gets stranded. Veronica signs up for the mentoring program in criminology class, and she notices that one of the kids at the concert has a criminal record. Dick gets beaten up when he talks to another man's girlfriend, but Logan tases the man. Veronica finds the Welcome Wagon girl, the seller's wife.
Piz asks Veronica if Logan is her boyfriend. Keith and the bail-jumper go to Kendall's house, and Kendall is romantically involved with Cormac. They have dinner, but Keith learns that Vinnie is working for Liam Fitzpatrick. When Keith returns, it is too late—Cormac has already killed Kendall and leaves Keith for dead in the cold night air. A disheveled Dick shows up at Logan's door and cries. Veronica sleeps on Mac's couch one night, and the next morning, they awaken to find that Parker has been raped, her head shaved.
## Production
### Development
"Welcome Wagon" is the first episode of the series to air on The CW as opposed to UPN. Paul Maguire, the spokesman for The CW, said that the series was picked up because "the critics are behind it and our research has consistently shown that Gilmore shared more audience commonality with Veronica than with any other show from UPN, except Top Model". Veronica Mars was placed on Tuesdays after Gilmore Girls, with the network hoping for the Gilmore Girls audience to stay tuned for Veronica Mars. Thomas stated that The CW had requested some changes to the show to fit in better with the Gilmore Girls audience: "The network really wants us to be a good companion piece to Gilmore Girls. They've had a couple of thoughts on storylines that are too dark." "Welcome Wagon" also introduces a new title sequence for the show. The visuals of the theme song are different, and although "We Used to Be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols was still employed as the theme song, a remix was used instead of the original. Regarding the changes, Thomas elaborated:
> Alright, the main titles. Why the change? As you'll see here, the previous titles were such a high school aesthetic. It would have felt silly for me to go back to college with the same sort of look—the notebook paper. So it felt like we needed to change for college anyway. And in season one when we first did the titles, the network was very clear on wanting to sell it as a high school show rather than a noir show. But once we went to college and had a chance to redo the titles I wanted it to feel noir.
For the new theme song, Thomas asked The Dandy Warhols to commission a remix of their original track, which Thomas reported enjoying upon first listening.
Thomas and the crew also introduced several narrative changes to the show starting in the third season. Thomas wanted to "invite new viewers to the show" by "trying to start with a clean slate" and ridding the show of references to former plotlines and character development. With regards to "Welcome Wagon", Thomas stated that he "wanted episode one this year to not rely much on past knowledge." He also tried to make the episode "very sort of breezy, and chattery and funny." The episode reintroduces the case of the Hearst serial rapist, a storyline presented in a second-season episode. In contrast to the previous seasons, which had several concurrent mysteries, Thomas planned for season 3 to have three consecutive mysteries, the first of which would be the serial rapist. "To service a 22-episode mystery, you have to have a large playing field. To service a 9-episode mystery, we can keep that tighter, more focused." It was made available on MSN for the week leading up to broadcast. However, the episode was only available for Microsoft users and not for Apple users.
### Writing
"Welcome Wagon" was written by series creator Rob Thomas and directed by John T. Kretchmer, marking Thomas's seventh writing credit for the series and Kretchmer's tenth directing credit for the show. On September 26, 2006, a week before its broadcast on The CW. "Welcome Wagon" features the final appearance by Charisma Carpenter as Kendall Casablancas, who appeared on a total of 11 episodes on the show. The previous summer, when asked about her role in season 3, Carpenter responded that she would be performing "a little more of the same, with a really, really interesting twist. And it starts the first episode; you've got to watch it. You miss the first episode, you're out of the loop. Gotta tune in right away."
### Casting
"Welcome Wagon" sees the promotion of four actors to star billing, two of whom, Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie (Tina Majorino) and Don Lamb (Michael Muhney), had previously served as recurring characters, and two of whom, Stosh "Piz" Piznarski (Chris Lowell) and Parker Lee (Julie Gonzalo) make their first appearance in the episode. Thomas revealed that Majorino was going to be a series regular the previous summer, a move that pleased many fans. Asked by Michael Ausiello whether Veronica and Mac would be roommates, Thomas replied that they would not, citing that such a living arrangement would prevent Veronica from having scenes with Keith. Nevertheless, Majorino commented that Mac and Veronica's relationship would continue to be close throughout the season. "The friendship with Veronica is one of my favorite parts of the entire show. It's great to have two really strong personalities getting along so well."
Muhney was told that he would be a series regular in season 3 the previous February, only a few days after his wedding. Muhney was very pleased to be a series regular, comparing his status to becoming a family member in the show rather than "someone who comes over for dinner occasionally." Piz (Chris Lowell) was named after the director of the show's pilot episode, Mark Piznarski. He was created in order to give Veronica a male friend who was not upper class. Thomas called Piz a "Lloyd Dobler mold" and "a middle-class kid from a Portland suburb who has too many words coming out of his mouth most of the time."
Parker Lee serves as Mac's roommate, with Thomas calling her "everything that Mac is not." Thomas also said that the character was not created or introduced in a reaction to negative fan opinion towards second season character Jackie Cook (Tessa Thompson). The episode features the first appearance of teaching assistant Tim Foyle (James Jordan; Jordan previously played another character, Lucky, in season 2). In addition, "Welcome Wagon" is the first appearance of the character of Moe Flater. Originally, Michael Cera, who guest starred in "The Rapes of Graff", was going to play a similar role, but the role of Moe Flater was created after Cera couldn't take the role due to scheduling conflicts.
## Reception
In its original broadcast, "Welcome Wagon" received 3.36 million viewers, ranking 82nd of 91 in the weekly rankings. This was an increase from both "Normal Is the Watchword", the second-season premiere, which received 3.29 million viewers and the second-season finale, "Not Pictured", which garnered 2.42 million viewers.
The episode received mixed to positive reviews. Eric Goldman of IGN gave the episode an 8 out of 10, indicating that it was "great." He wrote that although "Welcome Wagon" was designed to appeal to new viewers, that it was still a good episode. "'Welcome Wagon', written by Thomas, proves the show is as clever and witty as ever. [...] The more exposition-heavy aspects of the premiere mean the episode isn't a true standout for the series, but that's understandable, given what it's trying to accomplish." He went on to state that the episode featured more "lighthearted" content before what he predicted would be a return to more dramatic elements. Price Peterson, writing for TV.com, gave a positive review, stating, "Great first episode back...There was a lot to accomplish in setting up the new environment and characters, but it still felt really organic to the series as a whole." While criticizing the fact that the rape victims experienced a backlash against them, he enjoyed the characterization of Piz.
Rowan Kaiser, of The A.V. Club, gave a mixed review of the episode, commenting on the show's increasing focus on rape. He wrote that "There are things that I appreciate about the focus on rape. [...] It's fairly rare for a show to treat rape from the victim's perspective." However, he went on to state that he had "pretty significant issues" with the subject matter as well. He also disapproved of the killer's choice of victims, setting, and new characters, especially Piz. Television Without Pity gave the episode a "B". Reviewer Alan Sepinwall was fairly positive towards the episode. He was mixed towards the inclusion of the Kendall-Keith-Cormac storyline in the premiere, but he also praised the new cast members: "Piz and Parker both add new colors to the gang, though it's hard to say what Parker will be like post-rape." He eventually called the episode a "pretty good start".
|
3,701,546 |
Hotel Mario
| 1,172,558,016 |
1994 video game
|
[
"1994 video games",
"CD-i games",
"English-language-only video games",
"Mario puzzle games",
"Multiplayer and single-player video games",
"Nintendo CD-i games",
"Video games developed in the United States",
"Video games set in hotels"
] |
Hotel Mario is a puzzle video game developed by Fantasy Factory and published by Philips Interactive Media on the CD-i format on April 5, 1994. Players control Mario, who must find Princess Toadstool by going through seven hotels in the Mushroom Kingdom; each hotel is divided into stages, and the objective is to close all doors on each stage. Each hotel ends in a boss fight with one of Bowser's Koopalings, culminating in a battle with Bowser.
Hotel Mario was one of four games featuring Nintendo characters published for the CD-i; the others were three Legend of Zelda games. Another Mario game, Super Mario's Wacky Worlds, was never released while a third game, Mario Takes America was planned but eventually canceled. Nintendo licensed the characters after reneging on a deal for Philips to create the Super NES's CD-ROM add-on.
Hotel Mario initially received mixed-to-negative reviews; critics felt it was fun but had no lasting appeal. It has been retrospectively described as one of the worst video games, receiving criticism for its door-closing game mechanic, unresponsive controls, voice acting, and full-motion video cutscenes.
## Gameplay
Hotel Mario is a single-screen puzzle video game. Controlling Mario, or his brother Luigi in two-player mode, the player must search the Klub Koopa Resort for Princess Toadstool, who has been kidnapped by Bowser.
The game comprises seven hotels, which each feature several stages. The player must shut every door in the stage by moving up and down elevators and avoiding enemies. Mario can step on most enemies, as in previous games, but some must be avoided by changing floors or entering an open door. At the end of each hotel, the player engages in a boss fight with a Koopaling; in the final hotel, the player battles Bowser. The game features various power-ups: the Super Mushroom allows Mario to take multiple hits, the Star Man makes him temporarily invincible, and the Fire Flower allows him to throw fireballs.
## Development
In 1989, Nintendo and Sony agreed to develop a CD-ROM-based add-on for the Super NES (see Super NES CD-ROM), that would allow for full motion video (FMV) and larger games. However, Nintendo instead signed with Philips to make the add-on, and Sony redesigned their console as the PlayStation. By 1993, Nintendo had abandoned plans for the add-on. As part of dissolving the agreement, Nintendo licensed Philips to use some Nintendo characters for their CD-i console, resulting in three Legend of Zelda games as well as Hotel Mario. Another Mario game, Super Mario's Wacky Worlds, was canceled at the prototype stage. According to Stephen Radosh, Nintendo's only involvement in the development was ensuring that the source material was faithful to the Mario series. Nintendo was reported to be pleased with the finished project and Radosh stated that there were rumors that Nintendo considered bringing the game to their own platforms.
Hotel Mario was developed by Fantasy Factory. The developers and testers tended to be older in age; in an interview with The Black Moon Project, background artist Trici Venola noted one tester was "well past retirement". Since the target audience of children would have faster reflexes, the game was designed to play well for the testers, then sped up. Hotel Mario uses FMV cutscenes to tell its story. Feeling an early version was "mechanical" and "visually no fun", Venola and art director Jeff Zoern used elements from Disney and J. R. R. Tolkien to enhance the visual style. Illustrations of the stages were composed of several blocks, each with one detail. The first item Venola created for all hotels was the door. Each building took a week to complete and was designed with a specific theme; for instance, Bowser's hotel uses a gothic design. For voice acting, Marc Graue provided the voices of the Mario Brothers and Bowser, while Princess Toadstool was voiced by Jocelyn Benford. Graue was hired through an agency, while Benford was recommended by an employee of Phillips Media. She would later marry Michael Ahn, who was one of the producers of Hotel Mario.
Initially, jumping was not going to be a feature of Hotel Mario. According to Stephen Radosh in an interview with Samuel Clemens, jumping was added after a suggestion from Hollie Lohff. She was the daughter of one of the engineers, Thomas Lohff. She played Hotel Mario before its release, and criticized it for not allowing jumping like previous Mario games did.
## Reception
Hotel Mario initially received mixed reviews. Electronic Gaming Monthly praised its gameplay as simple yet addictive. GamePro said the game was fun but quickly grew boring, and stated "the only intriguing aspects of this game are the well-fashioned animated sequences". Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine gave the game 7 out of 10, but acknowledged its difficulty. Spanish magazine Superjuegos praised the game's simple mechanics, and recommended the game to CD-i owners.
Hotel Mario has since been described as one of the worst Mario games. IGN'''s Levi Buchanan said that while it was superior to Philips' The Legend of Zelda games, closing doors was not "a strong enough hook for an entire game", and J.C. Fletcher of Joystiq ridiculed the plot: "Apparently Bowser has nefariously plotted to have his underlings open doors in ... his own hotels, thus wasting air conditioning and increasing his own electric bill. Mario and Luigi must heroically latch all the doors and save their archenemy from having his hallways get too cold." GamesRadar described it as "craptastic", and Eurogamer as "little more than a really rubbish version of Elevator Action". The controls have been criticized as unresponsive.
The cutscenes have been widely criticized. 1UP.com described them as "outright terrifying", and IGN called them "abysmal", resembling "a bad flip-book of images printed out of Microsoft Paint". Joystiq described them as "amateurish, garishly colorful, shaky, randomly zooming animation". The voice acting was also criticized; both 1UP.com and IGN found Mario voice actor Marc Graue's performance ill-fitting for the character and lacking the playfulness of Mario's current voice artist Charles Martinet. Danny Cowan of 1UP wrote: "Mario sounds more like someone's ex-smoker grandpa trying to imitate a Mafia hit man... The dialogue is meant to sound playful, but the character voices imply acts of menace and hate." In 2008, IGN named Hotel Mario one of the ten worst Mario games. In 2017, GamesRadar ranked Hotel Mario'' 48th on their "The 50 Worst Games of All Time" list.
|
217,438 |
Parasitoid
| 1,172,460,221 |
Organism that lives with its host and kills it
|
[
"Biological pest control",
"Parasitism",
"Parasitology"
] |
In evolutionary ecology, a parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host at the host's expense, eventually resulting in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionary strategies within parasitism, distinguished by the fatal prognosis for the host, which makes the strategy close to predation.
Among parasitoids, strategies range from living inside the host (endoparasitism), allowing it to continue growing before emerging as an adult, to paralysing the host and living outside it (ectoparasitism). Hosts can include other parasitoids, resulting in hyperparasitism; in the case of oak galls, up to five levels of parasitism are possible. Some parasitoids influence their host's behaviour in ways that favour the propagation of the parasitoid.
Parasitoids are found in a variety of taxa across the insect superorder Endopterygota, whose complete metamorphosis may have pre-adapted them for a split lifestyle, with parasitoid larvae and free-living adults. Most are in the Hymenoptera, where the ichneumons and many other parasitoid wasps are highly specialised for a parasitoidal way of life. There are parasitoids, too, in the Diptera, Coleoptera and other orders of endopterygote insects. Some of these, usually but not only wasps, are used in biological pest control.
The 17th-century zoological artist Maria Sibylla Merian closely observed parasitoids and their hosts in her paintings. The biology of parasitoidism influenced Charles Darwin's beliefs, and has inspired science fiction authors and scriptwriters to create numerous parasitoidal aliens that kill their human hosts, such as the alien species in Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.
## Etymology
The term "parasitoid" was coined in 1913 by the Swedo-Finnish writer Odo Reuter, and adopted in English by his reviewer, the entomologist William Morton Wheeler. Reuter used it to describe the strategy where the parasite develops in or on the body of a single host individual, eventually killing that host, while the adult is free-living. Since that time, the concept has been generalised and widely applied.
## Strategies
### Evolutionary options
A perspective on the evolutionary options can be gained by considering four questions: the effect on the reproductive fitness of a parasite's hosts; the number of hosts they have per life stage; whether the host is prevented from reproducing; and whether the effect depends on intensity (number of parasites per host). From this analysis, proposed by K. D. Lafferty and A. M. Kunis, the major evolutionary strategies of parasitism emerge, alongside predation.
<table>
<caption>Evolutionary strategies in parasitism and predation<br />
(;<br />
')</caption>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th><p>Host fitness</p></th>
<th><p>Single host, stays alive</p></th>
<th><p>Single host, dies</p></th>
<th><p>Multiple hosts</p></th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><p>Able to<br />
reproduce<br />
(fitness > 0)</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><p>Unable to<br />
reproduce<br />
(fitness = 0)</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
<td><p><br />
'</p></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Evolutionary strategies in parasitism and predation
(;
')
Parasitoidism, in the view of R. Poulin and H. S. Randhawa, is one of six main evolutionary strategies within parasitism, the others being parasitic castrator, directly transmitted parasite, trophically transmitted parasite, vector-transmitted parasite, and micropredator. These are adaptive peaks, with many possible intermediate strategies, but organisms in many different groups have consistently converged on these six.
Parasitoids feed on a living host which they eventually kill, typically before it can produce offspring, whereas conventional parasites usually do not kill their hosts, and predators typically kill their prey immediately.
### Basic concepts
Parasitoids can be classified as either endo- or ectoparasitoids with idiobiont or koinobiont developmental strategies. Endoparasitoids live within their host's body, while ectoparasitoids feed on the host from outside. Idiobiont parasitoids prevent further development of the host after initially immobilizing it, whereas koinobiont parasitoids allow the host to continue its development while feeding upon it. Most ectoparasitoids are idiobiont, as the host could damage or dislodge the external parasitoid if allowed to move and moult. Most endoparasitoids are koinobionts, giving them the advantage of a host that continues to grow larger and avoid predators.
Primary parasitoids have the simplest parasitic relationship, involving two organisms, the host and the parasitoid. Hyperparasitoids are parasitoids of parasitoids; secondary parasitoids have a primary parasitoid as their host, so there are three organisms involved. Hyperparasitoids are either facultative (can be a primary parasitoid or a hyperparasitoid depending on the situation) or obligate (always develop as a hyperparasitoid). Levels of parasitoids beyond secondary also occur, especially among facultative parasitoids. In oak gall systems, there can be up to five levels of parasitism. Cases in which two or more species of parasitoids simultaneously attack the same host without parasitizing each other are called multi- or multiple parasitism. In many cases, multiple parasitism still leads to the death of one or more of the parasitoids involved. If multiple parasitoids of the same species coexist in a single host, it is called superparasitism. Gregarious species lay multiple eggs or polyembryonic eggs which lead to multiple larvae in a single host. The end result of gregarious superparasitism can be a single surviving parasitoid individual or multiple surviving individuals, depending on the species. If superparasitism occurs accidentally in normally solitary species the larvae often fight among themselves until only one is left.
### Influencing host behaviour
In another strategy, some parasitoids influence the host's behaviour in ways that favour the propagation of the parasitoid, often at the cost of the host's life. A spectacular example is the lancet liver fluke, which causes host ants to die clinging to grass stalks, where grazers or birds may be expected to eat them and complete the parasitoidal fluke's life cycle in its definitive host. Similarly, as strepsipteran parasitoids of ants mature, they cause the hosts to climb high on grass stalks, positions that are risky, but favour the emergence of the strepsipterans. Among pathogens of mammals, the rabies virus affects the host's central nervous system, eventually killing it, but perhaps helping to disseminate the virus by modifying the host's behaviour. Among the parasitic wasps, Glyptapanteles modifies the behaviour of its host caterpillar to defend the pupae of the wasps after they emerge from the caterpillar's body. The phorid fly Apocephalus borealis oviposits into the abdomen of its hosts, including honey bees, causing them to abandon their nest, flying from it at night and soon dying, allowing the next generation of flies to emerge outside the hive.
## Taxonomic range
About 10% of described insects are parasitoids, in the orders Hymenoptera, Diptera, Coleoptera, Neuroptera, Lepidoptera, Strepsiptera, and Trichoptera. The majority are wasps within the Hymenoptera; most of the others are Dipteran flies. Parasitoidism has evolved independently many times: once each in Hymenoptera, Strepsiptera, Neuroptera, and Trichoptera, twice in the Lepidoptera, 10 times or more in Coleoptera, and no less than 21 times among the Diptera. These are all holometabolous insects (Endopterygota, which form a single clade), and it is always the larvae that are parasitoidal. The metamorphosis from active larva to an adult with a different body structure permits the dual lifestyle of parasitic larva, freeliving adult in this group. These relationships are shown on the phylogenetic tree; groups containing parasitoids are shown in boldface, e.g. Coleoptera, with the number of times parasitoidism evolved in the group in parentheses, e.g. (10 clades)'. The approximate number (estimates can vary widely) of parasitoid species out of the total is shown in square brackets, e.g. [2,500 of 400,000].
### Hymenoptera
Within the Hymenoptera, parasitoidism evolved just once, and the many described species of parasitoid wasps represent the great majority of species in the order, barring those like the ants, bees, and Vespidae wasps that have secondarily lost the parasitoid habit. The parasitoid wasps include some 25,000 Ichneumonoidea, 22,000 Chalcidoidea, 5,500 Vespoidea, 4,000 Platygastroidea, 3,000 Chrysidoidea, 2,300 Cynipoidea, and many smaller families. These often have remarkable life cycles. They can be classified as either endoparasitic or ectoparasitic according to where they lay their eggs. Endoparasitic wasps insert their eggs inside their host, usually as koinobionts, allowing the host to continue to grow (thus providing more food to the wasp larvae), moult, and evade predators. Ectoparasitic wasps deposit theirs outside the host's body, usually as idiobionts, immediately paralysing the host to prevent it from escaping or throwing off the parasite. They often carry the host to a nest where it will remain undisturbed for the wasp larva to feed on. Most species of wasps attack the eggs or larvae of their host, but some attack adults. Oviposition depends on finding the host and on evading host defenses; the ovipositor is a tube-like organ used to inject eggs into hosts, sometimes much longer than the wasp's body. Hosts such as ants often behave as if aware of the wasps' presence, making violent movements to prevent oviposition. Wasps may wait for the host to stop moving, and then attack suddenly.
Parasitoid wasps face a range of obstacles to oviposition, including behavioural, morphological, physiological and immunological defenses of their hosts. To thwart this, some wasps inundate their host with their eggs so as to overload its immune system's ability to encapsulate foreign bodies; others introduce a virus which interferes with the host's immune system. Some parasitoid wasps locate hosts by detecting the chemicals that plants release to defend against insect herbivores.
### Other orders
The true flies (Diptera) include several families of parasitoids, the largest of which is the Tachinidae (some 9,200 species), followed by the Bombyliidae (some 4,500 species), along with the Pipunculidae and the Conopidae, which includes parasitoidal genera such as Stylogaster. Other families of flies include some protelean species. Some Phoridae are parasitoids of ants. Some flesh flies are parasitoids: for instance Emblemasoma auditrix is parasitoidal on cicadas, locating its host by sound.
The Strepsiptera (twisted-wing parasites) consist entirely of parasitoids; they usually sterilise their hosts.
Two beetle families, Ripiphoridae (450 species) and Rhipiceridae, are largely parasitoids, as are Aleochara Staphylinidae; in all, some 400 staphylinids are parasitoidal. Some 1,600 species of the large and mainly freeliving family Carabidae are parasitoids.
A few Neuroptera are parasitoidal; they have larvae that actively search for hosts. The larvae of some Mantispidae, subfamily Symphrasinae, are parasitoids of other arthropods including bees and wasps.
Although nearly all Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) are herbivorous, a few species are parasitic. The larvae of Epipyropidae feed on Homoptera such as leafhoppers and cicadas, and sometimes on other Lepidoptera. The larvae of Cyclotornidae parasitise first Homoptera and later ant brood. The pyralid moth Chalcoela has been used in biological control of the wasp Polistes in the Galapagos Islands.
Parasitism is rare in the Trichoptera (caddisflies), but it is found among the Hydroptilidae (purse-case caddisflies), probably including all 10 species in the Orthotrichia aberrans group; they parasitise the pupae of other trichopterans.
### Entomopathogenic fungi
All known fungi in the genera Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps are endoparasitic. One of the most notable fungal parasitoids is O. unilateralis which infects carpenter ants by breaching the ant's exoskeletons via their spores and growing in the ant's hemocoel as free living yeast cells. Eventually the yeast cells progress to producing nerve toxins to alter the behavior of the ant causing it to climb and bite onto vegetation, known as the 'death bite'. This approach is so fine-tuned it causes the ant to bite down on the part of the leaf most optimal for the fungus to fruit; the adaxial leaf midrib. In fact, it has been found that in specific circumstances, the time of the death bite is synchronized to solar noon. As much as 40% of the ant's biomass is fungal hyphae at the moment of the death bite. After the ant dies, the fungus produces a large stalk, growing from the back of the ant's head which subsequently releases ascospores. These spores are too large to be wind dispersed and instead fall directly to the ground where they produce secondary spores that infect ants as they walk over them. O. sinesis, is a parasitoid as well, parasitizing ghost moth larvae, killing them within 15-25 days, a similar process to that of O. unilateralis.
## Interactions with humans
### In biological pest control
Parasitoids are among the most widely used biological control agents. Classic biological pest control using natural enemies of pests (parasitoids or predators) is extremely cost effective, the cost/benefit ratio for classic control being 1:250, but the technique is more variable in its effects than pesticides; it reduces rather than eliminates pests. The cost/benefit ratio for screening natural enemies is similarly far higher than for screening chemicals: 1:30 against 1:5 respectively, since the search for suitable natural enemies can be guided accurately with ecological knowledge. Natural enemies are more difficult to produce and to distribute than chemicals, as they have a shelf life of weeks at most; and they face a commercial obstacle, namely that they cannot be patented.
From the point of view of the farmer or horticulturalist, the most important groups are the ichneumonid wasps, which prey mainly on caterpillars of butterflies and moths; braconid wasps, which attack caterpillars and a wide range of other insects including greenfly; chalcidoid wasps, which parasitise eggs and larvae of greenfly, whitefly, cabbage caterpillars, and scale insects; and tachinid flies, which parasitize a wide range of insects including caterpillars, adult and larval beetles, and true bugs. Commercially, there are two types of rearing systems: short-term seasonal daily output with high production of parasitoids per day, and long-term year-round low daily output with a range in production of 4–1000 million female parasitoids per week, to meet demand for suitable biological control agents for different crops.
### Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was one of the first naturalists to study and depict parasitoids and their insect hosts in her closely-observed paintings.
### Charles Darwin
Parasitoids influenced the religious thinking of Charles Darwin, who wrote in an 1860 letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." The palaeontologist Donald Prothero notes that religiously minded people of the Victorian era, including Darwin, were horrified by this instance of evident cruelty in nature, particularly noticeable in the ichneumonid wasps.
### In science fiction
Parasitoids have inspired science fiction authors and screenwriters to create terrifying parasitic alien species that kill their human hosts. One of the best-known is the Xenomorph in Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien, which runs rapidly through its lifecycle from violently entering a human host's mouth to bursting fatally from the host's chest. The molecular biologist Alex Sercel, writing in Signal to Noise Magazine, compares "the biology of the [Alien] Xenomorphs to parasitoid wasps and nematomorph worms from Earth to illustrate how close to reality the biology of these aliens is and to discuss this exceptional instance of science inspiring artists". Sercel notes that the way the Xenomorph grasps a human's face to implant its embryo is comparable to the way a parasitoid wasp lays its eggs in a living host. He further compares the Xenomorph life cycle to that of the nematomorph Paragordius tricuspidatus which grows to fill its host's body cavity before bursting out and killing it. Alistair Dove, on the science website Deep Sea News, writes that there are multiple parallels with parasitoids, though there are in his view more disturbing life cycles in real biology. In his view, the parallels include the placing of an embryo in the host; its growth in the host; the resulting death of the host; and alternating generations, as in the Digenea (trematodes). The social anthropologist Marika Moisseeff argues that "The parasitical and swarming aspects of insect reproduction make these animals favored villains in Hollywood science fiction. The battle of culture against nature is depicted as an unending combat between humanity and insect-like extraterrestrial species that tend to parasitize human beings in order to reproduce." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' lists many instances of "parasitism", often causing the host's death.
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Jane Fonda
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American actress and activist (born 1937)
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Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress and activist. Recognized as a film icon, Fonda is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Honorary Palme d'Or, and the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
Born to socialite Frances Ford Seymour and actor Henry Fonda, Fonda made her acting debut with the 1960 Broadway play There Was a Little Girl, for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and made her screen debut later the same year with the romantic comedy Tall Story. She rose to prominence during the 1960s with the comedies Period of Adjustment (1962), Sunday in New York (1963), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967), and Barbarella (1968) before receiving her first Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Fonda then established herself as one of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress twice in the 70s for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978). Her other nominations were for Julia (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), On Golden Pond (1981), and The Morning After (1986). Consecutive hits Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), California Suite (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979), and 9 to 5 (1980) sustained Fonda's box-office drawing power, and she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for the television film The Dollmaker (1984).
In 1982, Fonda released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, which became the highest-selling videotape of its time. It would be the first of 22 such videos over the next 13 years, which would collectively sell over 17 million copies. After starring in Stanley & Iris (1990), Fonda took a hiatus from acting and returned with the comedy Monster-in-Law (2005). She also returned to Broadway in the play 33 Variations (2009), earning a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination. She has since starred in the independent films Youth (2015) and Our Souls at Night (2017), and in Netflix's comedy series Grace and Frankie (2015–2022) for which she earned a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
Fonda was a political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War. She was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun on a 1972 visit to Hanoi, during which she gained the nickname "Hanoi Jane". During this time, she was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist and environmental activist. In 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, she co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda serves on the board of the organization. Based in Los Angeles, she has lived all over the world, including six years in France and 20 in Atlanta.
## Early life and education
Jane Seymour Fonda was born via caesarean section on December 21, 1937, at Doctors Hospital in New York City. Her parents were Canadian-born socialite Frances Ford Seymour and American actor Henry Fonda. According to her father, the surname Fonda came from an Italian ancestor who immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1500s. There, he intermarried; the resultant family began to use Dutch given names, with Jane's first Fonda ancestor reaching New York in 1650. Fonda also has English, French, and Scottish ancestry. She was named for the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother's side, and because of whom, until she was in fourth grade, Fonda said she was called "Lady" (as in Lady Jane). Her brother, Peter Fonda, was also an actor, and her maternal half-sister is Frances de Villers Brokaw (also known as "Pan"), whose daughter is Pilar Corrias, the owner of the Pilar Corrias Gallery in London.
In 1950, when Fonda was 12, her mother committed suicide while undergoing treatment at Craig House psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York. Later that year, Henry Fonda married socialite Susan Blanchard, 23 years his junior; this marriage ended in divorce. Aged 15, Jane taught dance at Fire Island Pines, New York.
Fonda attended Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut; the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York; and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Before her acting career, she was a model and appeared twice on the cover of Vogue.
Fonda became interested in the arts in 1954, while appearing with her father in a charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse. After dropping out of Vassar, she went to Paris for six months to study art. Upon returning to the US, in 1958, she met Lee Strasberg; the meeting changed the course of her life. Fonda said, "I went to the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father – who had to say so – told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!"
## Career
### 1960s
Fonda's stage work in the late 1950s laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s. She averaged almost two movies a year throughout the decade, starting in 1960 with Tall Story, in which she recreated one of her Broadway roles as a college cheerleader pursuing a basketball star, played by Anthony Perkins. Period of Adjustment and Walk on the Wild Side followed in 1962. In Walk on the Wild Side, Fonda played a prostitute, and earned a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. In 1963, she starred in Sunday in New York. Newsday called her "the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses". However, she also had detractors – in the same year, the Harvard Lampoon named her the "Year's Worst Actress" for The Chapman Report. Her next two pictures, Joy House and Circle of Love (both 1964), were made in France; with the latter, Fonda became one of the first American film stars to appear nude in a foreign movie. She was offered the coveted role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago, but turned it down because she didn't want to go on location for nine months.
Fonda's career breakthrough came with Cat Ballou (1965), in which she played a schoolmarm-turned-outlaw. This comedy Western received five Oscar nominations, with Lee Marvin winning best actor, and was one of the year's top ten films at the box office. It was considered by many to have been the film that brought Fonda to bankable stardom. The following year, she had a starring role in The Chase opposite Robert Redford, in their first film together, and two-time Oscar winner Marlon Brando. The film received some positive reviews, but Fonda's performance was noticed by Variety magazine: "Jane Fonda, as Redford's wife and the mistress of wealthy oilman James Fox, makes the most of the biggest female role." She returned to France to make The Game Is Over (1966), often described as her sexiest film, and appeared in the August 1966 issue of Playboy, in paparazzi shots taken on the set. Fonda immediately sued the magazine for publishing them without her consent. After this came the comedies Any Wednesday (1966), opposite Jason Robards and Dean Jones, and Barefoot in the Park (1967), again co-starring Redford.
In 1968, she played the title role in the science fiction spoof Barbarella, which established her status as a sex symbol. In contrast, the tragedy They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) won her critical acclaim and marked a significant turning point in her career; Variety wrote, "Fonda, as the unremittingly cynical loser, the tough and bruised babe of the Dust Bowl, gives a dramatic performance that gives the film a personal focus and an emotionally gripping power." In addition, renowned film critic Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker review of the film, noted of Fonda: "[She] has been a charming, witty nudie cutie in recent years and now gets a chance at an archetypal character. Fonda goes all the way with it, as screen actresses rarely do once they become stars. She doesn't try to save some ladylike part of herself, the way even a good actress like Audrey Hepburn does, peeping at us from behind 'vulgar' roles to assure us she's not really like that. Fonda stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties." For her performance, she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and earned her first Academy Awards nomination for Best Actress. Fonda was very selective by the end of the decade, turning down lead roles in Rosemary's Baby and Bonnie and Clyde.
### 1970s
In the seventies, Fonda enjoyed her most critically acclaimed period as an actress despite some setbacks for her ongoing activism. According to writer and critic Hilton Als, her performances starting with They Shoot Horses, Don't They? heralded a new kind of acting: for the first time, she was willing to alienate viewers, rather than try to win them over. Fonda's ability to continue to develop her talent is what sets her apart from many other performers of her generation.
Fonda won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971, playing a high priced call girl, the gamine Bree Daniels, in Alan J. Pakula's murder mystery Klute. Prior to shooting, Fonda spent time interviewing several prostitutes and madams. Years later, Fonda discovered that "there was like a marriage, a melding of souls between this character and me, this woman that I didn't think I could play because I didn't think I was call girl material. It didn't matter." Upon its release, Klute was both a critical and commercial success, and Fonda's performance earned her widespread recognition. Pauline Kael wrote:
> "As an actress, [Fonda] has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she's always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat – this quicker responsiveness – makes her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her full-scale, definitive portrait of a call girl in Klute. It's a good, big role for her, and she disappears into Bree, the call girl, so totally that her performance is very pure – unadorned by "acting". She never stands outside Bree, she gives herself over to the role, and yet she isn't lost in it—she's fully in control, and her means are extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she's Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us. There isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times also praised Fonda's performance, even suggesting that the film should have been titled Bree after her character: "What is it about Jane Fonda that makes her such a fascinating actress to watch? She has a sort of nervous intensity that keeps her so firmly locked into a film character that the character actually seems distracted by things that come up in the movie." During the 1971–1972 awards season, Fonda dominated the Best Actress category at almost every major awards ceremony; in addition to her Oscar win, she received her first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama, her first National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress and her second New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.
Between Klute in 1971 and Fun With Dick and Jane in 1977, Fonda did not have a major film success. She appeared in A Doll's House (1973), Steelyard Blues and The Blue Bird (1976). In the former, some critics felt Fonda was miscast, but her work as Nora Helmer drew praise, and a review in The New York Times opined, "Though the Losey film is ferociously flawed, I recommend it for Jane Fonda's performance. Beforehand, it seemed fair to wonder if she could personify someone from the past; her voice, inflections, and ways of moving have always seemed totally contemporary. But once again she proves herself to be one of our finest actresses, and she's at home in the 1870s, a creature of that period as much as of ours." From comments ascribed to her in interviews, some have inferred that she personally blamed the situation on anger at her outspoken political views: "I can't say I was blacklisted, but I was greylisted." However, in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, she rejected such simplification. "The suggestion is that because of my actions against the war my career had been destroyed ... But the truth is that my career, far from being destroyed after the war, flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed." She reduced acting because of her political activism providing a new focus in her life. Her return to acting in a series of 'issue-driven' films reflected this new focus.
In 1972, Fonda starred as a reporter alongside Yves Montand in Tout Va Bien, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. The two directors then made Letter to Jane, in which the two spent nearly an hour discussing a news photograph of Fonda. At the time, while in Rome, she joined a feminist march on March 8 and gave a brief speech of support for the Italian women's rights.
Through her production company, IPC Films, she produced films that helped return her to star status. The 1977 comedy film Fun With Dick and Jane is generally considered her "comeback" picture. Critical reaction was mixed, but Fonda's comic performance was praised; Vincent Canby of The New York Times remarked, "I never have trouble remembering that Miss Fonda is a fine dramatic actress but I'm surprised all over again every time I see her do comedy with the mixture of comic intelligence and abandon she shows here." Also in 1977, she portrayed the playwright Lillian Hellman in Julia, receiving positive reviews from critics. Gary Arnold of The Washington Post described her performance as "edgy, persuasive and intriguingly tensed-up," commenting further, "Irritable, intent and agonizingly self-conscious, Fonda suggests the internal conflicts gnawing at a talented woman who craves the self-assurance, resolve and wisdom she sees in figures like Julia and Hammett." For her performance, Fonda won her first BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, her second Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination.
During this period, Fonda announced that she would make only films that focused on important issues, and she generally stuck to her word. She turned down An Unmarried Woman because she felt the part was not relevant. In 1978, Fonda was at a career peak after she won her second Best Actress Oscar for her role as Sally Hyde, a conflicted adulteress in Coming Home, the story of a disabled Vietnam War veteran's difficulty in re-entering civilian life. Upon its release, the film was a popular success with audiences, and generally received good reviews; Ebert noted that her Sally Hyde was "the kind of character you somehow wouldn't expect the outspoken, intelligent Fonda to play," and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the San Diego Reader felt that Fonda was "a marvel to watch; what fascinates and involves me in her performance are the conscientious effort and thought that seem to go into every line reading and gesture, as if the question of what a captain's wife and former cheerleader was like became a source of endless curiosity and discovery for her." Her performance also earned her a third Golden Globe Award for Best Actress as well, making this her second consecutive win. Also in 1978, she reunited with Alan J. Pakula to star in his post-modern Western drama Comes a Horseman as a hard-bitten rancher, and later took on a supporting role in California Suite, where she played a Manhattan workaholic and divorcee. Variety noted that she "demonstrates yet another aspect of her amazing range" and Time Out New York remarked that she gave "another performance of unnerving sureness".
She won her second BAFTA Award for Best Actress in 1979 with The China Syndrome, about a cover-up of a vulnerability in a nuclear power plant. Cast alongside Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, in one of his early roles, Fonda played a clever, ambitious television news reporter. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, singled out Fonda's performance for praise: "The three stars are splendid, but maybe Miss Fonda is just a bit more than that. Her performance is not that of an actress in a star's role, but that of an actress creating a character that happens to be major within the film. She keeps getting better and better." This role also earned her Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. The same year, she starred in the western adventure-romance film The Electric Horseman with her frequent co-star, Robert Redford. Although the film received mixed reviews, The Electric Horseman was a box office success, becoming the eleventh highest-grossing film of 1979 after grossing a domestic total of nearly \$62 million. By the late 1970s, Motion Picture Herald ranked Fonda, as Hollywood's most bankable actress.
### 1980s
In 1980, Fonda starred in 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. The film was a huge critical and box office success, becoming the second highest-grossing release of the year. Fonda had long wanted to work with her father, hoping it would help their strained relationship. She achieved this goal when she purchased the screen rights to the play On Golden Pond, specifically for her father and her. The father-daughter rift depicted on screen closely paralleled the real-life relationship between the two Fondas; they eventually became the first father-daughter duo to earn Oscar nominations (Jane earned her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination) for their roles in the same film. On Golden Pond, which also starred four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn, brought Henry Fonda his only Academy Award for Best Actor, which Jane accepted on his behalf, as he was ill and could not leave home. He died five months later. Both films grossed over \$100 million domestically.
Fonda continued to appear in feature films throughout the 1980s, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her portrayal of a Kentucky mountain woman in The Dollmaker (1984), and starring in the role of Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God (1985). The following year, she played an alcoholic actress and murder suspect in the 1986 thriller The Morning After, opposite Jeff Bridges. In preparation for her role, Fonda modelled the character on the starlet Gail Russell, who, at 36, was found dead in her apartment, among empty liquor bottles. Writing for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael commended Fonda for giving "a raucous-voiced, down-in-the-dirty performance that has some of the charge of her Bree in Klute, back in 1971". For her performance, she was nominated for yet another Academy Award for Best Actress. She ended the decade by appearing in Old Gringo.
For many years Fonda took ballet class to keep fit, but after fracturing her foot while filming The China Syndrome, she was no longer able to participate. To compensate, she began participating in aerobics and strengthening exercises under the direction of Leni Cazden. The Leni Workout became the Jane Fonda Workout, which began a second career for her, continuing for many years. This was considered one of the influences that started the fitness craze among baby boomers, then approaching middle age. In 1982, Fonda released her first exercise video, titled Jane Fonda's Workout, inspired by her best-selling book, Jane Fonda's Workout Book. Jane Fonda's Workout became the highest selling home video of the next few years, selling over a million copies. The video's release led many people to buy the then-new VCR in order to watch and perform the workout at home. The exercise videos were directed by Sidney Galanty, who produced the first video and 11 more after that. She would subsequently release 23 workout videos with the series selling a total of 17 million copies combined, more than any other exercise series. She released five workout books and thirteen audio programs, through 1995. After a fifteen-year hiatus, she released two new fitness videos on DVD in 2010, aiming at an older audience.
On May 3, 1983, she had entered into a non-exclusive agreement with movie production distributor Columbia Pictures, whereas she would star in and/or produce projects under her own banner Jayne Development Corporation, and she would develop offices at The Burbank Studios, and the company immediately started after her previous office she co-founded with Bruce Gilbert, IPC Films shuttered down. On June 25, 1985, she renamed her production company, Fonda Films, because the original name felt that it would sound like a real estate company.
### 1990s
In 1990, she starred in the romantic drama Stanley & Iris (1990) with Robert De Niro, which was her last film for 15 years. The film did not fare well at the box office. Despite receiving mixed to negative reviews, Fonda's performance as the widowed Iris was praised by Vincent Canby, who stated, "Fonda's increasingly rich resources as an actress are evident in abundance here. They even overcome one's awareness that just beneath Iris's frumpy clothes, there is a firm, perfectly molded body that has become a multi-million-dollar industry." In 1991, after three decades in film, Fonda announced her retirement from the film industry.
### 2000s
In 2005, she returned to the screen with the box office success Monster-in-Law, starring opposite Jennifer Lopez. Two years later, Fonda starred in the Garry Marshall-directed drama Georgia Rule alongside Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan. Georgia Rule was panned by critics, but A. O. Scott of The New York Times felt the film belonged to Fonda and co-star Lohan, before writing, "Ms. Fonda's straight back and piercing eyes, the righteous jaw line she inherited from her father and a reputation for humorlessness all serve her well here, but it is her warmth and comic timing that make Georgia more than a provincial scold."
In 2009, Fonda returned to Broadway for the first time since 1963, playing Katherine Brandt in Moisés Kaufman's 33 Variations. In a mixed review, Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Fonda's "layered crispness" and her "aura of beleaguered briskness that flirts poignantly with the ghost of her spiky, confrontational screen presence as a young woman. For those who grew up enthralled with Ms. Fonda's screen image, it's hard not to respond to her performance here, on some level, as a personal memento mori." The role earned her a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
### 2010s
Fonda played a leading role in the 2011 drama All Together, which was her first film in French since Tout Va Bien in 1972. The same year she starred alongside Catherine Keener in Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, playing a hippie grandmother. In 2012, Fonda began a recurring role as Leona Lansing, CEO of a major media company, in HBO's original political drama The Newsroom. Her role continued throughout the show's three seasons, and Fonda received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.
In 2013, Fonda had a small role in The Butler, portraying First Lady Nancy Reagan. She had more film work the following year, appearing in the comedies Better Living Through Chemistry and This is Where I Leave You. She voiced Maxine Lombard in the season 26 episode "Opposites A-Frack". a character on The Simpsons. She played an acting diva in Paolo Sorrentino's Youth in 2015, for which she earned a Golden Globe Award nomination. She also appeared in Fathers and Daughters (2015) with Russell Crowe.
Fonda appeared as the co-lead in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie. She and Lily Tomlin played aging women whose husbands reveal they are in love with one another. Filming on the first season was completed in November 2014, and the show premiered online on May 8, 2015. The series concluded in 2022 after running for 7 seasons.
In 2016, Fonda voiced Shuriki in Elena and the Secret of Avalor. In June 2016, the Human Rights Campaign released a video in tribute to the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting; in the video, Fonda and others told the stories of the people killed there.
Fonda starred in her fourth collaboration with Robert Redford in the 2017 romantic drama film Our Souls at Night. The film and Fonda's performance received critical acclaim upon release. In 2018, she starred opposite Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen in the romantic comedy film Book Club. Although opened to mixed reviews, the film was a major box office success grossing \$93.4 million against a \$10 million budget, despite releasing the same day as Deadpool 2. Fonda is the subject of an HBO original documentary entitled Jane Fonda in Five Acts, directed by the documentarian Susan Lacy. Receiving rave reviews, it covers Fonda's life from childhood through her acting career and political activism and then to the present day. It premiered on HBO on September 24, 2018.
### 2020s
Fonda filmed the seventh and final season of Grace and Frankie in 2021, finishing production in November. The first four episodes premiered August 14, 2021, with the final 12 released on Netflix on April 29, 2022. In November 2021, it was announced Fonda would be in the second installment of Amazon Prime Video's Yearly Departed. She appeared alongside the host Yvonne Orji, and fellow eulogy givers Chelsea Peretti, Megan Stalter, Dulcé Sloan, Aparna Nancherla, and X Mayo. It premiered on December 23, 2021.
Fonda joined the cast of the 2023 film 80 for Brady, which pairs her with veteran actresses Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field. It also stars former NFL Quarterback, Tom Brady. She and Tomlin headline Paul Weitz's black comedy Moving On, co-starring Malcolm McDowell and Richard Roundtree. Her third project for 2023 is Book Club: The Next Chapter, which she made in Italy.
## Other activities
### Political activism
During the 1960s, Fonda engaged in political activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's visits to France brought her into contact with leftist French intellectuals who were opposed to war, an experience that she later characterized as "small-c communism". Along with other celebrities, she supported the Alcatraz Island occupation by American Indians in 1969, which was intended to call attention to the failures of the government with regard to treaty rights and the movement for greater Indian sovereignty.
She supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating: "Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood." She called the Black Panthers "our revolutionary vanguard ... we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk." She has been involved in the feminist movement since the 1970s and dovetails her activism in support of civil rights.
### Opposition to the Vietnam War
On May 4, 1970, Fonda appeared before an assembly at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, to speak on G.I. rights and issues. The end of her presentation was met with a discomfiting silence until Beat poet Gregory Corso staggered onto the stage, drunk. He challenged Fonda, using a four-letter expletive: why hadn't she addressed the shooting of four students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, which had just taken place? In her autobiography, Fonda revisited the incident: "I was shocked by the news and felt like a fool." On the same day, she joined a protest march on the home of university president Ferrel Heady. The protesters called themselves "They Shoot Students, Don't They?" – a reference to Fonda's recently released film, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which had just been screened in Albuquerque.
In the same year, Fonda spoke out against the war at a rally organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She offered to help raise funds for VVAW and was rewarded with the title of Honorary National Coordinator. That fall, Fonda started a tour of college campuses on which she raised funds for the organization. As noted by The New York Times, Fonda was a "major patron" of the VVAW.
In 1971, Fonda, with Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland formed the FTA tour ("Free The Army", a play on the troop expression "Fuck The Army"), an anti-war road show designed as an answer to Bob Hope's USO tour. The tour, described as "political vaudeville" by Fonda, visited military towns along the West Coast, aiming to establish a dialogue with soldiers about their upcoming deployments to Vietnam. The dialogue was made into a movie (F.T.A.) which contained strong, frank criticism of the war by servicemembers; it was released in 1972.
#### Visit to Hanoi
Between 1965 and 1972, almost 300 Americans – mostly civil rights activists, teachers, and pastors – traveled to North Vietnam to see firsthand the war situation with the Vietnamese. News media in the United States predominantly provided a U.S. viewpoint, and American travelers to North Vietnam were routinely harassed upon their return home. Fonda also visited Vietnam, traveling to Hanoi in July 1972 to witness firsthand the bombing damage to the dikes. After touring and photographing dike systems in North Vietnam, she said the United States had been intentionally targeting the dike system along the Red River. Columnist Joseph Kraft, who was also touring North Vietnam, said he believed the damage to the dikes was incidental and was being used as propaganda by Hanoi, and that, if the U.S. Air Force were "truly going after the dikes, it would do so in a methodical, not a harum-scarum way". Sweden's ambassador to Vietnam, however, observed the bomb damage to the dikes and described it as "methodic". Other journalists reported that the attacks were "aimed at the whole system of dikes".
Fonda was photographed seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun; the photo outraged a number of Americans, and earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane". In her 2005 autobiography, she wrote that she was manipulated into sitting on the battery; she had been horrified at the implications of the pictures. In a 2011 entry at her official website, Fonda explained:
> It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit ... The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day 'Uncle Ho' declared their country's independence in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: 'All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness.' These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. 'These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.' The soldiers asked me to sing for them in return ... I memorized a song called 'Dậy mà đi' ["Get up and go"], written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. I knew I was slaughtering it, but everyone seemed delighted that I was making the attempt. I finished. Everyone was laughing and clapping, including me ... Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don't remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed ... It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can't blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen ... a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever ... But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm.
Fonda made radio broadcasts on Hanoi Radio throughout her two-week tour, describing her visits to villages, hospitals, schools, and factories that had been bombed, and denouncing U.S. military policy. During the course of her visit, Fonda visited American prisoners of war (POWs), and brought back messages from them to their families. When stories of torture of returning POWs were later being publicized by the Nixon administration, Fonda said that those making such claims were "hypocrites and liars and pawns", adding about the prisoners she visited, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." In addition, Fonda told The New York Times in 1973, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture ... but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." Her visits to the POW camp led to persistent and exaggerated rumors which were repeated widely, and continued to circulate on the Internet decades later. Fonda, as well as the named POWs, have denied the rumors, and subsequent interviews with the POWs showed these allegations to be false—the persons named had never met Fonda.
In 1972, Fonda helped fund and organize the Indochina Peace Campaign, which continued to mobilize antiwar activists in the US after the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement, until 1975 when the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
Because of her tour of North Vietnam during wartime and the subsequent rumors, resentment against her persists among some veterans and serving U.S. military. For example, when a U.S. Naval Academy plebe ritually shouted out "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!", the entire company of midshipmen plebes replied "Goodnight, bitch!" This practice has since been prohibited by the academy's Plebe Summer Standard Operating Procedures. In 2005, Michael A. Smith, a U.S. Navy veteran, was arrested for disorderly conduct in Kansas City, Missouri, after he spat chewing tobacco in Fonda's face during a book-signing event for her autobiography, My Life So Far. He told reporters that he "consider[ed] it a debt of honor", adding "she spit in our faces for 37 years. It was absolutely worth it. There are a lot of veterans who would love to do what I did." Fonda refused to press charges.
#### Regrets
In a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, Fonda expressed regret for some of her comments and actions, stating:
> I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. ... I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.
In a 60 Minutes interview on March 31, 2005, Fonda reiterated that she had no regrets about her trip to North Vietnam in 1972, with the exception of the anti-aircraft-gun photo. She stated that the incident was a "betrayal" of American forces and of the "country that gave me privilege". Fonda said, "The image of Jane Fonda, Barbarella, Henry Fonda's daughter ... sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal ... the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine." She later distinguished between regret over the use of her image as propaganda and pride for her anti-war activism: "There are hundreds of American delegations that had met with the POWs. Both sides were using the POWs for propaganda ... It's not something that I will apologize for." Fonda said she had no regrets about the broadcasts she made on Radio Hanoi, something she asked the North Vietnamese to do: "Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I could to expose the lies and help end the war."
### Subject of government surveillance
In 2013, it was revealed that Fonda was one of approximately 1,600 Americans whose communications between 1967 and 1973 were monitored by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as part of Project MINARET, a program that some NSA officials have described as "disreputable if not downright illegal". Fonda's communications, as well as those of her husband, Tom Hayden, were intercepted by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Under the UKUSA Agreement, intercepted data on Americans were sent to the U.S. government.
### 1970 arrest
On November 2, 1970, Fonda was arrested by authorities at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on suspicion of drug trafficking. Her luggage was searched when she re-entered the United States after participating in an anti-war college speaking tour in Canada, and several small baggies containing pills were seized. Although Fonda protested that the pills were harmless vitamins, she was booked by police and then released on bond. Fonda alleged that the arresting officer told her he was acting on direct orders from the Nixon White House. As she wrote in 2009, "I told them what [the vitamins] were but they said they were getting orders from the White House. I think they hoped this 'scandal' would cause the college speeches to be canceled and ruin my respectability." After lab tests confirmed the pills were vitamins, the charges were dropped with little media attention.
Fonda's mugshot from the arrest, in which she raises her fist in a sign of solidarity, has since become a widely published image of the actress. It was used as the poster image for the 2018 HBO documentary on Fonda, "Jane Fonda in Five Acts", with a giant billboard sporting the image erected in Times Square in September 2018. In 2017, she began selling merchandise with her mugshot image to benefit the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential.
### Feminist causes
In a 2017 interview with Brie Larson, published by People magazine, Fonda stated, "One of the great things the women's movement has done is to make us realise that (rape and abuse is) not our fault. We were violated and it's not right." She said, "I've been raped, I've been sexually abused as a child and I've been fired because I wouldn't sleep with my boss." She said, "I always thought it was my fault; that I didn't do or say the right thing. I know young girls who've been raped and didn't even know it was rape. They think, 'It must have been because I said 'no' the wrong way.'"
Through her work, Fonda said she wants to help abuse victims "realize that [rape and abuse] is not our fault". Fonda said that her difficult past led her to become such a passionate activist for women's rights. The actress is an active supporter of the V-Day movement, which works to stop violence against women and girls. In 2001, she established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health, which aims to help prevent teen pregnancy. She said she was "brought up with the disease to please" in her early life. Fonda revealed in 2014 that her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, was recurrently sexually abused as young as eight, and this may have led to her suicide when Jane was 12.
Fonda has been a longtime supporter of feminist causes, including V-Day, of which she is an honorary chairperson, a movement to stop violence against women, inspired by the off-Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues. She was at the first summit in 2002, bringing together founder Eve Ensler, Afghan women oppressed by the Taliban, and a Kenyan activist campaigning to save girls from genital mutilation.
In 2001, she established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University in Atlanta to help prevent adolescent pregnancy through training and program development.
On February 16, 2004, Fonda led a march through Ciudad Juárez, with Sally Field, Eve Ensler and other women, urging Mexico to provide sufficient resources to newly appointed officials in helping investigate the murders of hundreds of women in the rough border city. In 2004, she also served as a mentor to the first all-transgender cast of The Vagina Monologues.
In the days before the September 17, 2006, Swedish elections, Fonda went to Sweden to support the new political party Feministiskt initiativ in their election campaign.
In My Life So Far, Fonda stated that she considers patriarchy to be harmful to men as well as women. She also states that for many years, she feared to call herself a feminist, because she believed that all feminists were "anti-male". But now, with her increased understanding of patriarchy, she feels that feminism is beneficial to both men and women, and states that she "still loves men", adding that when she divorced Ted Turner, she felt like she had also divorced the world of patriarchy, and was very happy to have done so.
In April 2016, Fonda said that while she was 'glad' that Bernie Sanders was running, she predicted Hillary Clinton would become the first female president, whose supposed win Fonda believed would result in a "violent backlash" but Clinton did not become president and got defeated by Republican Party's nominee businessman Donald Trump in the general election later that year. Fonda went on to say that we need to "help men understand why they are so threatened – and change the way we view masculinity". In March 2020, Fonda later endorsed Sanders for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election, calling him the "climate candidate".
### LGBTQ+ support
Fonda has publicly shown her support of the LGBTQ+ community many times throughout her career. In August 2021, Fonda, the cast of Grace and Frankie, and other advocates joined to support a fundraiser hosted by the Los Angeles LGBT Center to help members of the LGBTQ+ community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fonda spoke out as an LGBTQ+ ally long before it was common. She appeared in a video of a 1979 interview during the White Night Riots in San Francisco after the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in California. During the interview she was asked if the gay community was still being discriminated against, to which she replied that they "are culturally, psychologically, economically, politically" being discriminated against. Fonda was then asked if the gay community has used her as an advocate and she replied that she hopes they will use her, though she stressed that "they are a very powerful movement, they don't need me, but they like me (and) they know by working together we can be stronger than either entity is by itself."
### Native Americans
Fonda went to Seattle, in 1970 to support a group of Native Americans who were led by Bernie Whitebear. The group had occupied part of the grounds of Fort Lawton, which was in the process of being surplussed by the United States Army and turned into a park. The group was attempting to secure a land base where they could establish services for the sizable local urban Indian population, protesting that "Indians had a right to part of the land that was originally all theirs." The endeavor succeeded and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was constructed in the city's Discovery Park.
In addition to environmental reasons, Fonda has been a critic of oil pipelines because of their being built without consent on Native American tribal land. In 2017, Fonda responded to American President Donald Trump's mandate to resume construction of the controversial North Dakota Pipelines by saying that Trump "does this illegally because he has not gotten consent from the tribes through whose countries this goes" and pointing out that "the U.S. has agreed to treaties that require them to get the consent of the people who are affected, the indigenous people who live there."
### Israeli–Palestinian conflict
In December 2002, Fonda visited Israel and the West Bank as part of a tour focusing on stopping violence against women. She demonstrated with Women in Black against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip outside the residence of Israel's Prime Minister. She later visited Jewish and Arab doctors, and patients at a Jerusalem hospital, followed by visits to Ramallah to see a physical rehabilitation center and Palestinian refugee camp.
In September 2009, she was one of more than 1,500 signatories to a letter protesting the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival's spotlight on Tel Aviv. The protest letter said that the spotlight on Tel Aviv was part of "the Israeli propaganda machine" because it was supported in part by funding from the Israeli government and had been described by the Israeli Consul General Amir Gissin as being part of a Brand Israel campaign intended to draw attention away from Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. Other signers included actor Danny Glover, musician David Byrne, journalist John Pilger, and authors Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, and Howard Zinn.
Fonda, in The Huffington Post, said she regretted some of the language used in the original protest letter and how it "was perhaps too easily misunderstood. It certainly has been wildly distorted. Contrary to the lies that have been circulated, the protest letter was not demonizing Israeli films and filmmakers." She continued, writing "the greatest 're-branding' of Israel would be to celebrate that country's long standing, courageous and robust peace movement by helping to end the blockade of Gaza through negotiations with all parties to the conflict, and by stopping the expansion of West Bank settlements. That's the way to show Israel's commitment to peace, not a PR campaign. There will be no two-state solution unless this happens." Fonda emphasized that she, "in no way, support[s] the destruction of Israel. I am for the two-state solution. I have been to Israel many times and love the country and its people." Several prominent Atlanta Jews subsequently signed a letter to The Huffington Post rejecting the vilification of Fonda, who they described as "a strong supporter and friend of Israel".
### Opposition to the Iraq War
Fonda argued that the Iraq War would turn people all over the world against America, and asserted that a global hatred of America would result in more terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the war. In July 2005, Fonda announced plans to make an anti-war bus tour in March 2006 with her daughter and several families of military veterans, saying that some war veterans she had met while on her book tour had urged her to speak out against the Iraq War. She later canceled the tour due to concerns that she would divert attention from Cindy Sheehan's activism.
In September 2005, Fonda was scheduled to join British politician and anti-war activist George Galloway at two stops on his U.S. book tour—Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin. She canceled her appearances at the last minute, citing instructions from her doctors to avoid travel following recent hip surgery.
On January 27, 2007, Fonda participated in an anti-war rally and march held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., declaring that "silence is no longer an option". She spoke at an anti-war rally earlier that day at the Navy Memorial, where members of the organization Free Republic picketed in a counter protest.
### Fonda and Kerry
In the 2004 presidential election, her name was used as a disparaging epithet against John Kerry, a former VVAW leader, who was then the Democratic Party presidential candidate. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie called Kerry a "Jane Fonda Democrat". Kerry's opponents also circulated a photograph showing Fonda and Kerry in the same large crowd at a 1970 anti-war rally, though they sat several rows apart. A faked composite photograph, which gave a false impression that the two had shared a speaker's platform, was also circulated.
### Environmentalism
In 2015, Fonda expressed disapproval of President Barack Obama's permitting of Arctic drilling (Petroleum exploration in the Arctic) at the Sundance Film Festival. In July, she marched in a Toronto protest called the "March for Jobs, Justice, and Climate", which was organized by dozens of nonprofits, labor unions, and environmental activists, including Canadian author Naomi Klein. The march aimed to show businesses and politicians alike that climate change is inherently linked to issues that may seem unrelated.
In addition to issues of civil rights, Fonda has been an opponent of oil developments and their adverse effects on the environment. In 2017, while on a trip with Greenpeace to protest oil developments, Fonda criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying at the summit on climate change in Paris, known as the Paris agreement, Trudeau "talked so beautifully of needing to meet the requirements of the climate treaty and to respect and hold to the treaties with indigenous people ... and yet he has betrayed every one of the things he committed to in Paris."
In October 2019, Fonda was arrested three times in consecutive weeks protesting climate change outside the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. She was arrested with members of the group Oil Change International on October 11, with Grace and Frankie co-star Sam Waterston on October 18, and with actor Ted Danson on October 25. On November 1, Fonda was arrested for the fourth consecutive Friday; also arrested were Catherine Keener and Rosanna Arquette. On December 5, 2019, Fonda explained her position in a New York Times op-ed.
In March 2022, Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, a political action committee with the purpose of ousting politicians supporting the fossil fuel industry.
### Writing
On April 5, 2005, Random House published Fonda's autobiography My Life So Far. The book describes her life as a series of three acts, each thirty years long, and declares that her third "act" will be her most significant, partly because of her commitment to Christianity, and that it will determine the things for which she will be remembered.
Fonda's autobiography was well received by book critics and noted to be "as beguiling and as maddening as Jane Fonda herself" in its review in The Washington Post, calling her a "beautiful bundle of contradictions". The New York Times called the book "achingly poignant".
In January 2009, Fonda began chronicling her return to Broadway in a blog with posts about topics ranging from her Pilates class to fears and excitement about her new play. She uses Twitter and has a Facebook page.
In 2011, Fonda published a new book: Prime Time: Love, health, sex, fitness, friendship, spirit – making the most of all of your life. It offers stories from her own life as well as from the lives of others, giving her perspective on how to better live what she calls "the critical years from 45 and 50, and especially from 60 and beyond".
On September 8, 2020, HarperCollins published Fonda's book, What Can I Do?: The Truth About Climate Change and How to Fix It.
### Philanthropy
Fonda's charitable works have focused on youth and education, adolescent reproductive health, environment, human services, and the arts.
Fonda marketed her highly successful line of exercise videos and books in order to fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a California lobbying organization she founded with her second husband Tom Hayden in 1978.
Fonda has established the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential (GCAPP) in the mid-1990s and the Fonda Family Foundation in the late 1990s. In the mid-2000s, Fonda founded the Jane Fonda Foundation in 2004 with one million dollars of her own money as a charitable corporation with herself as president, chair, director and secretary; Fonda contributes 10 hours each week on its behalf. In 2017, she began selling merchandise featuring her 1970 arrest mugshot on her website, the proceeds of which benefit GCAPP.
## Personal life
### Marriages and relationships
Fonda writes in her autobiography that she lost her virginity at age 18 to actor James Franciscus. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she dated automobile racing manager Giovanni Volpi, producers José Antonio Sainz de Vicuña and Sandy Whitelaw as well as actors Warren Beatty, Peter Mann, Christian Marquand and William Wellman Jr. Fonda has acknowledged that during this period, like many single women in Hollywood, she often bearded for closeted homosexuals, including dancer Timmy Everett, theater director Andreas Voutsinas and actor Earl Holliman.
Fonda and her first husband, French film director Roger Vadim, became an item in December 1963 and married on August 14, 1965, at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. The couple had a daughter, Vanessa Vadim, born on September 28, 1968, in Boulogne-Billancourt and named after actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave. Separation reports surfaced in March 1970, which Fonda's spokesman called "totally untrue", though by mid-1972 she was conceding: "We're separated. Not legally, just separated. We're friends." In the early 1970s, Fonda had affairs with political organizer Fred Gardner and Klute co-star Donald Sutherland.
On January 19, 1973, three days after obtaining a divorce from Vadim in Santo Domingo, Fonda married activist Tom Hayden in a free-form ceremony at her home in Laurel Canyon. She had become involved with Hayden the previous summer, and was three months pregnant when they married. Their son, Troy O'Donovan Garity, was born on July 7, 1973, in Los Angeles and was given his paternal grandmother's maiden name, as the names "Fonda and Hayden carried too much baggage." Fonda and Hayden named their son for Nguyen Van Troi, the Viet Cong member who had attempted to assassinate US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Hayden chose O'Donovan as the middle name after Irish revolutionary Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. In 1982, Fonda and Hayden unofficially adopted an African-American teenager, Mary Luana Williams (known as Lulu), whose parents were Black Panthers. Fonda and Hayden separated over the Christmas holiday of 1988 and divorced on June 10, 1990, in Santa Monica. In 1989, while estranged from Hayden, Fonda had a seven-month relationship with soccer player Lorenzo Caccialanza. She was linked with actor Rob Lowe that same year.
Fonda married her third husband, cable television tycoon and CNN founder Ted Turner, on December 21, 1991, at a ranch near Capps, Florida, about 20 miles east of Tallahassee. The pair separated in 2000 and divorced on May 22, 2001, in Atlanta.
Seven years of celibacy followed, then from 2007 to 2008 Fonda was the companion of widowered management consultant Lynden Gillis.
In mid-2009, Fonda began a relationship with record producer Richard Perry. It ended in January 2017. That December, when asked what she had learned about love, Fonda told Entertainment Tonight: "Nothing. I'm not cut out for it!"
Patricia Bosworth's 2011 biography of Fonda notes that, over the span of her career, she also has been rumored to be romantically linked to numerous men, including co-stars Alain Delon, Kris Kristofferson and Jimmy Smits, musician Mick Jagger, cinematographer Sven Nykvist, talk show host Geraldo Rivera, columnist Robert Scheer and slain hairdresser Jay Sebring, but most of these liaisons are unconfirmed so far.
In a 2018 interview, Fonda stated that up to age 62, she always felt she had to seek the validation of men in order to prove to herself that she had value as a person, something she attributes to her mother's early death leaving her without a female role model. As a consequence, she attached herself to "alpha males", some of whom reinforced her feelings of inadequacy, despite her professional success. Fonda said that she came to see that attitude as a failing of the men in her life: "Some men have a hard time realizing that the woman they're married to is strong and smart and they have to diminish that, because it makes them feel diminished. Too bad we have defined masculinity in such a way that it's so easily shamed."
In 2018 she said, "I'm not dating anymore, but I did up until a couple of years ago. I'm 80; I've closed up shop down there."
### Faith
Fonda grew up atheist but turned to Christianity in the early 2000s. She describes her beliefs as being "outside of established religion" with a more feminist slant and views God as something that "lives within each of us as Spirit (or soul)". Fonda once refused to say "Jesus Christ" in Grace and Frankie and requested a script change. She practices zazen and yoga.
### Health
As a child, Fonda suffered from a poor self-image and lacked confidence in her appearance, an issue exacerbated by her father Henry Fonda. About that, Fonda said:
> I was raised in the '50s. I was taught by my father [actor Henry Fonda] that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly. He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: Unless you look perfect, you're not going to be loved.
In another interview with Oprah Winfrey, Fonda confessed, after years of struggling with her self-image, "It took me a long long time to realize we're not meant to be perfect, we're meant to be whole."
In adulthood, Fonda developed bulimia, which took a toll on her quality of life for many years, an issue that also affected her mother Frances Ford Seymour, who died by suicide when Fonda was 12. On the subject of her recovery from bulimia, Fonda said,
> It was in my 40s, and if you suffer from bulimia, the older you get, the worse it gets. It takes longer to recover from a bout ... I had a career, I was winning awards, I was supporting nonprofits, I had a family. I had to make a choice: I live or I die.
Fonda was diagnosed with breast cancer and osteoporosis in her later years. She underwent a lumpectomy in November 2010 and recovered. In April 2019, Fonda revealed she had a cancerous growth removed from her lower lip the previous year and pre-melanoma growths removed from her skin.
On September 2, 2022, Fonda announced that she has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that she had begun chemotherapy treatments, expected to last six months. On December 15, 2022, Fonda stated that her cancer was in remission and that her chemotherapy would be discontinued.
## Filmography
## Awards and honors
In 1962, Fonda was given the honorary title of "Miss Army Recruiting" by the Pentagon.
In 1981, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award.
In 1994, the United Nations Population Fund made Fonda a Goodwill Ambassador. In 2004, she was awarded the Women's eNews 21 Leaders for the 21st Century award as one of Seven Who Change Their Worlds. In 2007, Fonda was awarded an Honorary Palme d'Or by Cannes Film Festival President Gilles Jacob for career achievement. Only three others had received such an award – Jeanne Moreau, Alain Resnais, and Gérard Oury.
In December 2008, Fonda was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. In November and December 2009, she received the National German Sustainability Award and New York Women's Agenda Lifetime Achievement Award. She was also selected as the 42nd recipient (2014) of the AFI Life Achievement Award. In 2017, she received a Goldene Kamera lifetime achievement award.
She was one of fifteen women selected to appear on the cover of the September 2019 issue of British Vogue, by guest editor Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
In 2019, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and in the following year she was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on November 23, 2020.
## See also
- List of actors with Academy Award nominations
- List of actors with two or more Academy Award nominations in acting categories
- List of actors with two or more Academy Awards in acting categories
- List of peace activists
|
716,881 |
Snowy Mountains Highway
| 1,128,794,819 |
State highway in New South Wales, Australia
|
[
"Highways in New South Wales",
"Snowy Mountains Highway"
] |
Snowy Mountains Highway is a 333-kilometre-long (207 mi) state highway located in New South Wales, Australia. Its two sections connect the New South Wales South Coast to the Monaro region, and the Monaro to the South West Slopes via the Snowy Mountains. The higher altitude regions of this road are subject to snow over the winter months, and the road also provides access to many parts of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The highway bears the B72 shield along its entire length.
The highway originally bore the name Monaro Highway until 1958, when it received its current name. It originally ran from to Wagga Wagga but has been shortened to run from Princes Highway to Hume Highway instead. Part of the roadway was reallocated to what is now known as Monaro Highway in 1955. Reservoirs created as a result of dams built in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme required the creation of major realignments to avoid submerged areas. Previous to New South Wales' conversion to alphanumeric route markers, it was signed as National Route 18.
## Route description
Snowy Mountains Highway begins at a T-intersection with Princes Highway at Stony Creek, north of . It heads roughly west through hilly terrain, the terrain smooths eventually and the road crosses the Bemboka River at Morans Crossing. A short distance further the road passes through Bemboka, taking on the name Loftus Street within the urban area. West of Bemboka the road follows the southern bank of the Bemboka River, before crossing the Nunnock River near its confluence with the Bemboka River at the base of the Great Dividing Range escarpment. Up until this point the immediate landscape surrounding the road has so far consisted of farmland. From the base of the range the road enters South East Forest National Park and follows a steep and winding alignment up the range from about 250 m (820 ft) above sea level, to over 1,100 m (3,600 ft). At the top of the range the road then enters Glenbog State Forest before once again traversing farmland for a short distance until it meets the Monaro Highway at Steeple Flat, south of Nimmitabel. This intersection is a T-intersection, through traffic continues north along Monaro Highway, while traffic heading to the south from either direction must turn. To reach the western section of Snowy Mountains Highway, Monaro Highway must be taken north towards Cooma at this point.
The western section begins at the Bombala and Sharp Street roundabout in Cooma. The highway takes on the name Sharp Street from this intersection as it heads west within Cooma urban area. Upon leaving Cooma, the road heads west via farmland to the village of . Here the road meets a T-intersection, with through traffic taking Kosciuszko Road southwest towards Jindabyne. The highway turns to continue on its westerly heading. The roadway then makes its way through undulating terrain for some distance before it passes through Adaminaby, and on into Kosciuszko National Park. The park boundary is marked by a sign, there are no park entry gates on the highway, and park entry fees are not payable. The road winds through mountainous terrain as it climbs towards the abandoned mining settlement of Kiandra, situated at an altitude of around 1,400 m (4,600 ft). The landscape becomes open grassland at this point and remains relatively flat as the road continues relatively gently up an alpine valley created by the Eucumbene River and its numerous tributaries. At the top of the valley the road reaches its highest point a little below 1,500 m (4,900 ft). The road then descends into part of a similar valley created by the Murrumbidgee River as it passes by the access roads for Yarrangobilly Caves. The highway then veers northwest back into forested terrain and continues along the same rough heading through hilly terrain for some distance before a mountainous descent from 900 to 400 m (3,000 to 1,300 ft), near the town of Talbingo which is located a few kilometres west of the highway. Continuing on, the roadway passes by Jounama Dam and then roughly parallels the eastern side of Blowering Reservoir (created by Blowering Dam further downstream). It then leaves the National Park descending into farmland on the Tumut Plains, roughly 300 m (980 ft) above sea level.
From here the highway then crosses the Tumut River and heads into the town of Tumut itself, taking on the names Blowering Street, Fitzroy Street, and Adelong Street within the urban area. West of Tumut the road crosses a large valley created by Gilmore Creek and Deep Creek, before a small climb through Adelong Gap into the town of Adelong, taking on the names Tumut Street, Inglis Street, and Lynch Street within the urban area. Beyond Adelong, the road continues northeast through undulating terrain before crossing Hillas Creek and then following it for the last few kilometres until the highway's western terminus at Hume Highway, located roughly halfway between Gundagai and Tarcutta.
High altitude sections subject to snow and ice have yellow lane markings and red reflector posts (which are sometimes double or triple height); in contrast to the white lines and posts generally seen elsewhere around Australia. It is recommended that snow chains are carried for all two-wheel drive vehicles travelling on this highway within Kosciuszko National Park during the winter months.
## History
The passing of the Main Roads Act of 1924 through the Parliament of New South Wales provided for the declaration of Main Roads, roads partially funded by the State government through the Main Roads Board (later the Department of Main Roads, and eventually Transport for NSW). Monaro Highway was declared (as Main Road No. 4) on 8 August 1928, heading northwest from Tathra, via Bega, Nimmitabel, Cooma, Adaminaby, Tumut, Adelong, and Lower Tarcutta to Wagga Wagga. With the passing of the Main Roads (Amendment) Act of 1929 to provide for additional declarations of State Highways and Trunk Roads, this was amended to State Highway 4 on 8 April 1929.
The Department of Main Roads, which had succeeded the MRB in the previous year, proclaimed the portion of the highway between Wagga Wagga and Hume Highway at Lower Tarcutta to be part of Sturt Highway on 8 August 1933; the highway's western end was truncated at its own junction with Hume Highway near Hillas Creek instead.
When the Snowy Mountains Scheme commenced in 1949, the road began to increase in importance. Roadworks to increase the standard of the road were undertaken, and were often paid for by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority. In 1955, it was decided that what was still then known as Monaro Highway would be renamed as Snowy Mountains Highway. This was done as only a relatively small portion of the road was actually within the Monaro region. The section of road between Cooma and Nimmitabel was also reclassified as part of State Highway 19, which at that time ran from Canberra, to the Victorian border west of . The various roads classified as State Highway 19, were then named as Monaro Highway in 1958. In contrast with Snowy Mountains Highway, the entire length of that highway is within the Monaro region.
Over the years further changes to the alignment have occurred. The eastern section of the highway no longer runs west to Nimmitabel, instead meeting Monaro Highway to the south; the old section has been renamed as Old Bega Road. The western section has also seen some major changes with the highway being realigned to avoid Lake Eucumbene near Adaminaby due to the construction of Eucumbene Dam in the 1950s. Similarly realignment was required to avoid the Jounama Pondage and Blowering Reservoir near due to the construction of Jounama and Blowering Dams in the 1960s.
The passing of the Roads Act of 1993 through the Parliament of New South Wales updated road classifications and the way they could be declared within New South Wales. Under this act, the eastern end of the highway was truncated to the intersection with Princes Highway at Stony Creek north of Bega on 24 May 1996; the former section from Bega to Tathra was renamed as Tathra Road. Snowy Mountains Highway today retains its declaration as Highway 4, from the intersection with Princes Highway at Stony Creek to the intersection with Monaro Highway south of Nimmitabel, and from Cooma to the intersection with Hume Highway near Hillas Creek in Mount Adrah.
### Route markers
Route markers were first introduced in Australia in late 1954. Over the following decades they were progressively rolled out to the various highways around the nation, under a nationwide route numbering scheme, with the highway allocated National Route 18 across its entire length in 1955. In addition to this, the section of Monaro Highway between Cooma and Steeple Flat was also signed as National Route 18 in addition to the National Route 23 route marker used along the remainder of its length within NSW; this kind of arrangement is known as a duplex or concurrency. This allowed one route to cover the highway from end to end. With the conversion to the newer alphanumeric system in 2013, this was replaced with route B72. The concurrency along Monaro Highway remains intact with B72 used in addition to B23 between Cooma and Steeple Flat.
## Junction list
## See also
- Highways in Australia
- Highways in New South Wales
|
5,734,140 |
New York State Route 9N
| 1,117,690,932 |
Highway in New York, USA
|
[
"State highways in New York (state)",
"Transportation in Clinton County, New York",
"Transportation in Essex County, New York",
"Transportation in Saratoga County, New York",
"Transportation in Warren County, New York",
"U.S. Route 9"
] |
New York State Route 9N (NY 9N) is a north–south state highway in northeastern New York in the United States. It extends from an intersection with U.S. Route 9 (US 9), NY 29, and NY 50 in the city of Saratoga Springs to a junction with US 9 and NY 22 in the Clinton County hamlet of Keeseville. At 143.49 miles (230.92 km) in total length, NY 9N is the longest letter-suffixed route in the state. It is concurrent with its parent route for 1 mile (1.6 km) in the village of Lake George and for three blocks in the hamlet of Elizabethtown.
Much of NY 9N runs alongside either a river or a lake. It follows the Hudson River through northern Saratoga County and southern Warren County, the entirety of Lake George's western shoreline, the west edge of Lake Champlain between Ticonderoga and Westport, and the Ausable River from Keene to Keeseville. The other portions of NY 9N pass through predominantly rural and mountainous regions of the Adirondack Mountains.
The NY 9N designation was originally created as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York to replace New York State Route 9W, a route assigned to an alternate routing of US 9 from Elizabethtown to Keeseville. NY 9N was extended southward to Lake George in March 1936 and to Saratoga Springs in the early 1950s, supplanting several other routes (including New York State Route 9K) in the process.
## Route description
NY 9N is the longest suffixed route in the state, extending for 143.5 miles (230.9 km) from Saratoga Springs to Keeseville. The route stretches through four counties—Saratoga, Warren, Essex and Clinton—and serves several villages and hamlets, including Lake George, Ticonderoga, and Elizabethtown. It overlaps its parent route, US 9, in Lake George and Elizabethtown and meets Interstate 87 (I-87) four times.
### Saratoga County
NY 9N begins at the intersection of Church Street, Broadway (US 9, NY 29 westbound, and NY 50) and Lake Avenue (NY 29 eastbound) in the city of Saratoga Springs. Situated on the northwestern corner of the junction is the city's post office. The route heads west, following Church Street out of the city's center. At Bensonhurst Avenue, ownership and maintenance of NY 9N shifts from the city of Saratoga Springs to the New York State Department of Transportation. As NY 9N exits the city limits and enters the town of Greenfield, it turns to follow a more northerly routing. It meets County Route 21 (CR 21) just north of the town line, where the Church Street name ends, and CR 36 (Wilton Road) 2.5 miles (4.0 km) to the north in the hamlet of Greenfield Center.
The route continues on into the town of Corinth, where it crosses the Blue Line into Adirondack Park. Not far to the north, NY 9N enters the village of Corinth, situated on the west bank of the Hudson River. The highway follows Saratoga Avenue and Maple Streets into the village center, where it turns north and exits the village on Main Street. NY 9N follows the western edge of the river north for roughly 4 miles (6 km) through the towns of Corinth and Hadley before crossing over it and passing from Saratoga County to Warren County.
### Warren County
Across the county line in Lake Luzerne, NY 9N begins to deviate from the Hudson River, gradually curving to the northeast as it passes through the hamlets of Lake Luzerne, Fourth Lake, and Lake Vanare, all of which are named for small lakes bearing those names near the center of the communities. Just northeast of Lake Vanare, NY 9N enters the town of Lake George, where it connects to I-87 (the Adirondack Northway) at exit 21 and meets US 9. Here, it joins its parent route northward toward the village of Lake George. The conjoined routes intersect the northern end of NY 9L just south of the village line before becoming Canada Street and entering the village limits upon crossing over West Brook. US 9 and NY 9N serve as the primary north–south thoroughfare through the village before splitting at the north end of the village. While US 9 continues to the north, NY 9N heads northeast along the western edge of Lake George.
The portion of NY 9N between Lake George village and Hague is relatively isolated, with mountains lining the western edge of the highway and the lakeshore located to the immediate east. Along this stretch, NY 9N serves numerous lakeside hamlets, the southernmost of which is Diamond Point, a community just south of the Lake George–Bolton town line. The route continues on, passing through the hamlets of Bolton and Bolton Landing, the latter of which is home to The Sagamore, a resort situated on an island in Lake George.
North of Bolton Landing, the route leaves the main lake and instead follows the edge of Northwest Bay, an inlet separated from Lake George itself by a large, mountainous peninsula. The bay abruptly ends about 2 miles (3.2 km) to the north, at which point NY 9N curves to the east and proceeds through a pass in the mountains to rejoin the western edge of Lake George at Sabbath Day Point in the town of Hague. Here, the route turns back to the north and follows Lake George to the hamlet of Hague, where it meets the northern (signed as the eastern) terminus of NY 8. NY 9N continues to serve as the lakeside roadway for another 3 miles (5 km) before curving away from the lake and entering Essex County.
### Essex and Clinton counties
Now in the town of Ticonderoga, NY 9N passes through a valley before curving to the east and entering the hamlet of Ticonderoga. For the most part, NY 9N bypasses the community as it turns north onto Wicker Street, the westernmost north–south through street in the hamlet. Northwest of the former village's center, NY 9N meets NY 22 and NY 74, the latter of which serves as a northerly bypass of Ticonderoga. NY 22 joins NY 9N here, following the route out of the hamlet.
NY 9N and NY 22 head generally northward through an area of lowlands, which eventually give way to Lake Champlain as the conjoined routes pass into the town of Crown Point. Once again, NY 9N serves as the lakeside highway as it follows the western edge of the lake through the hamlet of Crown Point to the peninsula that gives the town its name. While NY 9N and NY 22 pass by Crown Point to the west, NY 185 directly serves the peninsula and the Crown Point State Historic Site, located at its tip.
The routes continue northward along the lakeshore through the town of Moriah and the village of Port Henry to the town of Westport, where NY 9N and NY 22 split in the hamlet of Westport. While NY 22 continues north towards Essex, NY 9N heads west to follow a more inland routing through a series of narrow valleys. NY 9N intersects I-87 once again at exit 31 just before entering the town of Elizabethtown. The route continues west, passing over the Bouquet River and entering the hamlet of Elizabethtown, where it rejoins US 9 in the former village's center. Unlike the overlap in Lake George, this concurrency lasts for only three blocks before the two routes split.
NY 9N continues to the west for 12 miles (19 km) through deep, narrow valleys to Keene, where it meets NY 73 north of Keene Valley. Here, NY 9N turns north, joining NY 73 for 2 miles (3.2 km) to the hamlet of Keene, located on the east branch of the Ausable River. NY 73 heads off to the west from this point toward Lake Placid; however, NY 9N follows the river northward into the town of Jay, where it intersects the east end of NY 86. The highway continues alongside the western bank of the river branch to the hamlet of Au Sable Forks, situated on the Essex–Clinton County line and at the point where the Ausable River's east and west branches come together.
The highway enters Au Sable Forks from the south on South Main Street and becomes North Main Street upon crossing the west branch of the river and entering Clinton County and the town of Black Brook. NY 9N immediately turns east upon crossing the river, following Ausable Street out of the hamlet and along the northern edge of the Ausable River into the town of Au Sable. Here, NY 9N meets I-87 one final time at exit 34 just southwest of the village of Keeseville. NY 9N continues on into Keeseville, where it meets NY 22 once again at an intersection across the river from the village center. NY 22 and NY 9N come together once more, overlapping for 0.25 miles (0.40 km) to an intersection with US 9 a short distance downstream from the center of Keeseville. NY 9N comes to an end here while NY 22 turns south onto US 9.
## History
In 1908, the New York State Legislature created Route 22, an unsigned legislative route that was initially split into two segments. The northern half of the route ran from Riparius to Rouses Point and mostly followed what is now US 9 between the two locations. From Elizabethtown to Keeseville, however, Route 22 followed a more westerly alignment via Keene, Jay, and Au Sable Forks. When the first set of posted routes in New York were assigned in 1924, all of legislative Route 22 north of Riparius became part of NY 6, which continued south toward Glens Falls on what is now US 9. At the same time, the section of modern NY 9N between Saratoga Springs and Lake George was designated as part of NY 10. The portion between Ticonderoga and Westport became part of a realigned NY 30 by the following year.
By 1926, the piece of current NY 9N from Hague to Ticonderoga was designated as the easternmost leg of NY 47, which continued west to Chestertown on modern NY 8. In 1927, most of NY 6 north of Round Lake was replaced by US 9 when U.S. Highways were first signed in New York. The lone exception was between Elizabethtown and Keeseville, where US 9 followed a previously unnumbered highway to the east instead. The bypassed section of NY 6 between the two locations was redesignated as NY 9W at this time. NY 9W was renumbered to NY 9N as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, eliminating the alphanumerical duplication between itself and US 9W.
NY 47, meanwhile, became part of the new NY 8 in the 1930 renumbering, allowing the NY 47 designation to be reassigned to a previously unnumbered roadway along the western shore of Lake George between NY 8 in Hague and US 9 in Lake George village. At the same time, NY 10 was realigned south of Long Lake and replaced with NY 9K from Saratoga Springs to Lake George while the roadway connecting Ticonderoga to Westport became part of NY 22 after NY 30 was reassigned elsewhere in the state. The segment of modern NY 9N from Westport to Elizabethtown, previously unnumbered, was designated NY 195.
NY 9N was extended south to Lake George in March 1936, supplanting both NY 47 and NY 195 in an effort to aid tourists. From Westport to Hague, NY 9N overlapped with NY 22 (from Westport to Ticonderoga) and NY 8 (from Crown Point to Hague). The route was extended once more in November 1953 to its current southern terminus in Saratoga Springs, replacing NY 9K and creating a short overlap with US 9 through Lake George village in the process. The overlap with NY 8 was eliminated in the mid-1960s when that route was truncated to end at its junction with NY 9N in Hague.
## Major intersections
## See also
|
4,291,613 |
Tylocephale
| 1,173,414,338 |
Extinct genus of dinosaurs
|
[
"Campanian genera",
"Fossil taxa described in 1974",
"Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of Asia",
"Marginocephalians of Asia",
"Ornithischian genera",
"Pachycephalosaurs",
"Taxa named by Halszka Osmólska",
"Taxa named by Teresa Maryańska"
] |
Tylocephale (meaning "swollen head") is a genus of pachycephalosaurid dinosaur, a group of dome-headed, herbivorous ornithischians, that lived during the Late Campanian stage (75-73 million years ago) of the Late Cretaceous in what is now Mongolia. It is known from a partial skull and associated mandible that were unearthed in 1971 by a Polish-Mongolian Expedition to the Barun Goyot Formation of the Gobi Desert. The specimen was described in 1974 by Polish paleontologists Teresa Maryańska and Halszka Osmólska as a new genus and species.
It was average-sized for a pachycephalosaur, reaching 2 m (6.6 ft) in length and 40 kg (88 lb) in body mass. The skull is triangular in back view, the widest point being at the jugals with an apex at the top of the dome. Tylocephale's dome is the tallest known from a pachycephalosaur. This dome is also unusually thick and rugose on its exterior. Behind the dome, an array of spikes, nodes, and tubercules protrude posteriorly over the neck. The eyebrow ridge was ornamented with small, bony nodules and was thicker than in other genera. Tylocephale is closely related to other Asian pachycephalosaurs, like Homalocephale and Goyocephale, being part of the Old World branch of the group.
Being a pachycephalosaur it was herbivorous with small, ridged teeth adapted to break down fibrous plants. Its dentition also bears serrations, implying a potentially more heterogeneous diet of leaves, nuts, seeds, and insects. Fossils were found in the Khulsan locality, which preserves fossils of many other dinosaur groups like ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, oviraptorosaurs, dromaeosaurs, and a titanosaur. The Barun Goyot Formation was an alluvial plain, featuring large riverways in an arid to semi-arid climate.
## Discovery and naming
During a joint Polish-Mongolian Expedition to the Khulsan outcrop of the Barun Goyot Formation in the Gobi Desert, a large skull and mandible of a pachycephalosaur (catalogue number ZPAL MgD-I/105) was unearthed in 1971. The rock layers of the Barun Goyot Formation derive from the Late Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, in numerical terms around 75 to 73 million years old. This was one of a series of expeditions carried out between 1963 and 1971 that were spearheaded by Polish paleontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, which collected scores of well-preserved dinosaur skeletons. Several other Polish scientists joined the venture, including Teresa Maryańska and Halszka Osmólska, who were aided by local Mongolian aides. The skull was incomplete, missing much of the anterior portions and the rest of the bony dome. The mandible and skull were preserved in articulation, laying loose in weathered sandstone blocks from a former river channel. The specimen was one of several dinosaur individuals discovered at Khulsan during the 1970s, with material of the ankylosaurs Tarchia and Saichania, ceratopsid Breviceratops, and theropod Hulsanpes found in the locale. All of the fossils unearthed during this expedition were then transported to the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where they were described in the following years.
The pachycephalosaur skull found at Khulsan was one of several collected during the Polish-Mongolian Expeditions, with other specimens in the nearby Nemegt Formation gathered in addition to Barun Goyot. The pachycephalosaur material from both formations was described in scientific literature in the journal Palaeontologica Polonica in 1974 by Teresa Maryańska and Halszka Osmólska. The skull found at Khulsan was designated the type specimen of a new genus and species, Tylocephale gilmorei. The genus name Tylocephale comes from the Greek words tyle ("swollen") and cephale ("head") and refers to the skull's prominent cranial dome. The species name honors American paleontologist Charles Gilmore, who wrote the first detailed description of a pachycephalosaur. The 1974 paper also dubbed two new pachycephalosaurs based on the fossils from Nemegt, Homalocephale and Prenocephale. All of these taxa were grouped in a new order Maryańska and Osmólska named Pachycephalosauria, which contained North American genera like Stegoceras and Pachycephalosaurus as well.
## Description
Tylocephale was a medium-sized pachycephalosaur, with estimates of 2 m (6.6 ft) in length and 40 kg (88 lb) in body mass. No postcranial fossils belonging to Tylocephale have been found, though there are well preserved skeletons of the related Stegoceras, Homalocephale, and Prenocephale. Based on these taxa, Tylocephale had a short neck, tiny forelimbs, long hindlimbs, and a thick, rodlike tail for balance. The neck was slender and "U"-shaped, and held in a curved posture, attaching at the occipital condyle on the back of the skull. Its spinal column bore firm connections between the vertebrae that were reinforced by ossified tendons. Its arms were lightly-built and slender ending in a hand with five fingers. The limbs terminated in a pes with three toes, the middle being the longest, all of which had unguals.
### Skull and ornamentation
The only known specimen consists of a partial skull lacking the braincase, palate, and anterior parts of the skull. Its posterior half of the mandible is preserved as well. Most dinosaurs have three fenestrae (hollow spaces) in their skulls, but Tylocephale bears only two. The infratemporal fenestra is angled vertically and is the same width for much of its length. The skull is very tall and narrow posteriorly with a stubby postorbital portion. Notably, the skull roof is tall with an apex very close to the posterior margin of the cranium. This roof is also thicker and bears a peak further posteriorly than observed in other members of the group, a distinguishing feature of the taxon. The dorsal part of the squamosal is the densest element of the skull, as well as being sharpened and not smoothened or swollen. However, the ventral surface of the squamosal is thinner and contacts the exoccipital.
All of the occipital bones are thin compared to the rest of the skull. The quadrates are elongated and align near perfectly with the mandibles. This allowed for a solid articulation of the skull and lower jaws. Its quadrate is positioned vertically and is perpendicular to the margin of the maxilla. In contrast, the jugal (cheek bone) is robustly built and oriented laterally. The jugals are the widest point of the skull and triangular in cross-section. The splanchnocranium's (back part of cranium) lateral wall, jugal, and quadratojugal (cheekbone) form a transversely broad structure. The orbit (eye socket) is very broad with an eyebrow ridge above the opening, as in other pachycephalosaurs. Its upper edge is flattened, with a narrow postorbital bar parallel to the quadrate. Both supraorbitals are preserved but incomplete. They are tall and thick in cross-section, making up a large section of the dome.
Cranial ornamentation is characteristic of pachycephalosaurs, which often bear three structures; nodes, tubers, and spikes. These ornaments became largest in the squamosal and smaller closer to the front of the cranium. The supraorbitals and postorbitals exhibit some ornamentation, but it is not exceptionally rugged. Tylocephale's jugals have giant, protruding, and irregularly spaced tubers. The dome, unlike in some other pachycephalosaurs, had a rough texture. The squamosals on the posterior margin of the skull had a series of giant spikes and tubers. Of these, the biggest was located below the outermost node of the series. These spiked nodes continue along the length of the squamosal and postorbital.
### Teeth and mandible
The tooth row is incomplete, but nine teeth from the back of the jaws are preserved. All of the teeth but the last are arranged in a straight line, a unique trait of the genus. The teeth have been damaged due to outside factors like erosion and taphonomy. Maryańska and Osmólska noted that proportionally, the dentition of Tylocephale is much larger than that of other pachycephalosaurs like Homalocephale. Teeth, seven in number, have high crowns and arched cutting surfaces. Like the teeth, the mandible is very poorly preserved, consisting only of the posterior portions. It has a weakly-elevated coronoid process of the ramus, which would articulate with the jugal. However, the adductor fossa is very deep and well-developed in transverse view. This fossa, located between the dentary and articular surface, was used for muscle connections, nerves, and veins with the jugal.
## Classification
Tylocephale was a member of the group Pachycephalosauria, a family of thick-skulled, herbivorous, bipedal dinosaurs which lived during the Cretaceous period in Asia and North America. The last pachycephalosaurs went extinct during the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the last surviving genus being Pachycephalosaurus itself. Tylocephale However, a 2020 cladistic analysis recovered the heterodontosaurids as an early branch of the group, which extend the age of pachycephalosaurs as far back as the Early Jurassic. Currently, pachycephalosaurs are recognized as being part of the larger group Marginocephalia which encompasses it and the gigantic, horned ceratopsians.
Within Pachycephalosauria, the phylogenetic position of Tylocephale and other genera are in flux due to a lack of many well-preserved specimens. Despite this, the pachycephalosaurs of Asia such as Tylocephale, Homalocephale, and Goyocephale are often recovered in a similar grade, whereas the North American Pachycephalosaurus, Stygimoloch, and Alaskacephale are in a distinct group. The Asian members also are more basal, with fewer advanced characteristics compared to their North American counterparts. This is due to pachycephalosaurs originating in Asia before dispersing to North America during its brief Late Cretaceous reconnection with Asia. Tylocephale specifically is most closely related to the dome-headed Foraminacephale and flat-headed Homalocephale according to most recent phylogenetic analyses. It has been suggested that instead of being its own species, Tylocephale gilmorei is a synonym of Prenocephale prenes. A similar suggestion has been made about Homalocephale. Later studies on the histology of younger Prenocephale specimens also prove its distinction from Homalocephale and Tylocephale.
Below on the left is Tylocephale's position within Pachycephalosauridae according to Schott & Evans' 2016 publication on the classification of Foraminacephale, which recovers it as more basal to a larger North American clade. On the bottom right is the phylogenetic location of Pachycephalosauria as a whole based on Dieudonné et al (2020):
<table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><p>Pachycephalosauria</p></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><p>Wannanosaurus yanshiensis</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><p>Pachycephalosauridae</p></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><p>Pachycephalosaurinae</p></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><p>Goyocephale lattimorei</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><p>Homalocephale calathocercos</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><p>Tylocephale gilmorei</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><table>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td></td>
<td><p>Foraminacephale brevis'</p></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
## Paleobiology
### Diet
It is uncertain what pachycephalosaurs ate; having very small, ridged teeth they could not have chewed tough, fibrous plants as effectively as other dinosaurs of the same period. It is assumed that their sharp, serrated teeth were ideally suited for a mixed diet of leaves, seeds, fruit, and insects. Tylocephale may have had an entirely herbivorous diet, as the tooth crowns were similar to those of iguanid lizards. The premaxillary teeth show wear facets from contact with the predentary bone, and the maxillary teeth have double wear facets similar to those seen in other ornithischian dinosaurs. Every third maxillary tooth of UALVP 2 are erupting replacement teeth, and tooth replacement happened in backwards progression in sequential threes. The occipital region of Stegoceras was well-demarcated for muscle-attachment and it is believed that the jaw movement of Stegoceras and other pachycephalosaurs was mostly limited to up-and-down motions with only a slight capability for jaw rotation. This is based on the structure of the jaw and dental microwear and wear facets of the teeth indicate that the bite-force was used more for shearing than for crushing. However, it has been suggested that Tylocephale differed from Stegoceras by having a back-and-forth jaw motion instead of up-and-down. This propalinal motion would shift food back-and-forth in the mouth.
### Dome function
Tylocephale has been noted for its prominent dome, a trait shared by other pachycephalosaurids, which was covered in keratin. The dome function of Tylocephale itself has not been analyzed in detail, but a similar dome of Prenocephale was tested by biologists Eric Snively and Adam Cox in 2008. The study conducted a finite element analysis of 2D and 3D pachycephalosaur skulls, which found that high-vaulted domes like that of Tylocephale could sustain higher forces of impact than other pachycephalosaurs'. Tylocephale's dome is most similar to Pachycephalosaurus' with the presence of fused sutures, tubercules on the mandible and nasal, and expanded shelves on the squamosal. These traits are missing in primitive taxa such as Stegoceras, Homalocephale, and Goyocephale. Tylocephale, Prenocephale, and Pachycephalosaurus' extra ornamentation suggest that the dome was not purely for display or species recognition, but for agonistic behaviors like head-butting. Another study found that the correlations between head-striking and skull morphologies found in living animals also existed in the studied pachycephalosaurs. Stegoceras and Prenocephale both had skull shapes similar to the bighorn sheep with cancellous bone protecting the brain. They also shared similarities in the distribution of compact and cancellous regions with the bighorn sheep, white-bellied duiker, and the giraffe. The white-bellied duiker was found to be the closest morphological analogue to Stegoceras; this head-butting species has a dome which is smaller but similarly rounded. Stegoceras was better capable of dissipating force than artiodactyls that butt heads at high forces, but the less vascularized domes of older pachycephalosaurs, and possibly diminished ability to heal from injuries, argued against such combat in older individuals. The study also tested the effects of a keratinous covering of the dome and found it to aid in performance.
## Paleoenvironment
The Barun Goyot Formation, based on sediments, is regarded as Late Cretaceous in age (Middle-Upper Campanian). This formation is mostly characterized by a series of red beds, mostly light-coloured sands (yellowish, grey-brown, and rarely reddish) that are locally cemented. Sandy claystones (often red-coloured), siltstones, conglomerates, and large-scale trough cross-stratification in sands are also common across the unit. In addition, structureless, medium-grained, fine-grained, and very fine-grained sandstones predominate in sediments of the Barun Goyot Formation. The sediments of this formation were deposited in alluvial plain (flat land consisting of sediments deposited by highland rivers), lacustrine, and aeolian paleoenvironments, under relatively arid to semiarid climates.
Tylocephale is endemic to the Barun Goyot Formation, which was also home to many other vertebrates, including the ankylosaurids Saichania, Tarchia and Zaraapelta; alvarezsaurids Khulsanurus and Parvicursor; birds Gobipipus, Gobipteryx and Hollanda; protoceratopsids Bagaceratops and Breviceratops; dromaeosaurids Kuru and Shri; halszkaraptorine Hulsanpes; and oviraptorids Conchoraptor, Heyuannia and Nemegtomaia. Other taxa are represented by the large titanosaur Quaesitosaurus'', and a wide diversity of mammals and squamates.
## See also
- Timeline of pachycephalosaur research
|
422,907 |
JALways
| 1,172,806,354 |
Defunct charter airline of Japan (1990—2010)
|
[
"Airlines disestablished in 2010",
"Airlines established in 1990",
"Companies based in Chiba Prefecture",
"Defunct airlines of Japan",
"Former Oneworld affiliate members",
"Japan Airlines",
"Japanese companies disestablished in 2010",
"Japanese companies established in 1990"
] |
JALways Co., Ltd. (JAZ) (株式会社ジャルウェイズ, Kabushiki-gaisha Jaruweizu), formerly Japan Air Charter Co., Ltd. (ジャパンエアチャーター株式会社, Japan Ea Chātā Kabushiki-gaisha), was an international airline registered in Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan, with its headquarters and its main hub at Narita International Airport. The airline had a secondary hub at Osaka's Kansai International Airport. Its operations included scheduled and non-scheduled international passenger services to 15 high-density low yield tourist destinations in nine countries using a fleet of Boeing only aircraft wet-leased from Japan Airlines.
JALways was founded as Japan Air Charter on October 5, 1990 and began charter operations with a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on February 22, 1991. The airline obtained a license to operate scheduled services on July 30, 1999 and operated its first scheduled passenger service on October 1. On the same day, the airline changed its name to JALways. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 1999, JALways, together with its sister airlines within the JAL Group, carried over 32 million passengers and over 1.1 million tons of cargo and mail.
JALways was once a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan's flag carrier, Japan Airlines, but on December 1, 2010 its operations were merged into those of its parent company.
## History
The airline was established on October 5, 1990, as Japan Air Charter Co., Ltd. (JAZ), an 80 percent-owned low-cost charter subsidiary of Japan Airlines (JAL), to operate leisure flights to Asia-Pacific resort destinations from regional airports in Japan; in response to a Ministry of Transport policy. JAZ obtained its aircraft from JAL; its cockpit crews were American contract pilots based in Hawaii and its cabin crews were hired and based in Bangkok, where it operates a cabin crew training centre. JAZ obtained license to operate non-scheduled services on February 22, 1991 and operated its first charter flight from Fukuoka to Honolulu with a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on July 1. The airline celebrated its 100,000th passenger on July 9, 1993, in a ceremony held in Sendai.
During the 1990s, JAL was hit by the effects of Japan's recession, increased foreign competition and the strengthening of the Japanese Yen, JAZ was given a new role to help reduce costs. The airline obtained the license to operate scheduled services on July 30, 1999 and would operate as a scheduled carrier on a wet-lease basis for JAL. It would operate on high-density low yield tourist routes in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly the Japan–Hawaii services; with a fleet of four McDonnell Douglas DC-10s and five Boeing 747s. On October 1, the airline changed its name to JALways Co., Ltd. and operated its first scheduled passenger service from Tokyo to Kona and Honolulu.
JALways became a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Airlines on March 9, 2001 through an exchange of shares. The change in ownership enabled JAL to consolidate and improve management and operational efficiency in the JAL Group's international passenger operations, part of the JAL Medium Term Corporate Plan 2000-2002. The airline introduced new uniforms for its cabin crew on April 1, 2005, and retired its last McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on October 31. JALways became an affiliate member of Oneworld on April 1, 2007, together with four of its sister airlines, in the alliance's biggest expansion in its young history.
As part of the JAL Medium Term Corporate Plan for 2005–2007, announced on March 10, 2005, the JAL Group accelerated the retirement of older Boeing 747 aircraft. The airline operated its last Boeing 747-300 Classic Jumbo Jet as JALways Flight 73 from Honolulu to Tokyo on July 30, 2009; after 26 years of service to the airline group. The aircraft was draped in a giant Hawaiian lei before departure at Honolulu International Airport; and the day was declared as "Japan Airlines Classic Jumbo Jet Day" by the State of Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle and Lt. Governor Duke Aiona The aircraft was met on arrival in Tokyo by the "Father of the 747", Mr Joseph F. "Joe" Sutter. A sell-out commemorative flight flew fans of the Boeing 747-300 Classic Jumbo Jet from Tokyo (Haneda) to Shimojishima on a round-trip day tour on July 5, 2009.
In May 2009, it was reported that the airline terminated the assignments of 130 American contract Hawaii-based Boeing 747 pilots and closed its Oahu office. Japan-based JAL cockpit crew now operates the five daily flights previously operated by the JALways crew.
## Corporate affairs
Prior to closing, its headquarters were on the third floor of the Japan Airlines Narita Operation Center (日本航空成田オペレーションセンター, Nihon Kōkū Narita Operēshon Sentā) at Narita International Airport in Narita, Chiba Prefecture and its main hub at Narita International Airport.
Previously its headquarters were on the 23rd floor of the Spheretower Tennoz (スフィアタワー天王洲 Sufiatawā Tennōzu) in Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa, Tokyo.
## Destinations
Until November 30, 2010, JALways operated scheduled services to 12 international and 3 domestic destinations in 9 different countries and 3 different continents.
## Fleet
JALways operated a fleet of Boeing 747-400, Boeing 767 and Boeing 777-200 aircraft, wet-leased from its parent, Japan Airlines.
### Fleet history
Aircraft that has been in service with JALways are (in alphabetical order):
- Boeing 747-100 (JA8128)
- Boeing 747-200
- Boeing 747-300
- McDonnell Douglas DC-10
## JAL Mileage Bank
JAL Mileage Bank (JMB) is the travel rewards program of JAL Group, including Japan Airlines, JALways, JAL Express, Japan Transocean Air, Japan Air Commuter, Hokkaido Air System and Ryukyu Air Commuter.
## Incidents and accidents
On August 12, 2005, JALways Flight 58 operated by a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 from Fukuoka to Honolulu experienced left-wing engine trouble shortly after takeoff. The aircraft immediately returned to Fukuoka Airport. Some engine parts fell on the Sharyo district of Fukuoka and several people were slightly injured and parked car windscreens damaged.
## See also
- Air transport in Japan
- List of airports in Japan
- List of Japanese companies
- Transport in Japan
|
1,376,993 |
Justice (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
| 1,157,632,143 | null |
[
"1987 American television episodes",
"Religion in science fiction",
"Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 1) episodes",
"Television episodes directed by James L. Conway"
] |
"Justice" is the eighth episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode first aired in broadcast syndication on November 9, 1987. Directed by James L. Conway, writer John D. F. Black originally pitched the story, but after Worley Thorne and Gene Roddenberry modified it, Thorne wrote the script. Because of the changes to the story, Black chose to receive his credit under the pseudonym Ralph Wills.
Set in the 24th century, the series follows the adventures of the Starfleet crew of the Federation starship Enterprise-D. In this episode, Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) is sentenced to death after inadvertently breaking the law on an alien planet. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) must deal with the powerful and mysterious protector of the planet while deliberating whether to violate the Prime Directive to save Wesley's life.
This was the first episode of The Next Generation to feature multiple shots filmed on location, with scenes filmed in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. "Justice" was the second most viewed episode of the first season, with 12.7 million viewers. However, on review, the episode received many negative responses, with critics pointing to issues with the quality of the acting and plot.
## Plot
The USS Enterprise arrives for shore leave at the paradisiacal, newly discovered planet of Rubicun III. A small advance party from the ship are sent down to meet with the Edo, the native people of the planet. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) sends Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) as part of the away team to evaluate the planet on behalf of the young people on board the Enterprise. Upon their arrival, they are greeted by Rivan (Brenda Bakke) and Liator (Jay Louden) in a very comfortable way, triggering Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) to determine it a "nice planet", while Wesley leaves the adults to socialize with native teenagers. On the Enterprise, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) reports something unusual orbiting the planet, but nothing appears on the viewscreen. He sends out a communications signal which reveals another vessel in orbit. A small ball of light enters the bridge and communicates with Picard in a booming voice, warning him not to interfere with the Edo, calling them his "children". The intruder then incapacitates Data.
On Rubicun III, the Edo explain to Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) and Worf that capital punishment is used to enforce their laws. The away team rush to warn Wesley, only to discover he has accidentally broken a greenhouse while playing catch with the Edo youths. An Edo mediator, or policeman, attempts to give Wesley a lethal injection for this infraction of the law, but Yar and Worf draw their phasers. On the ship, the sphere leaves Data's body and departs. Picard, upon hearing of the situation with Wesley, transports to the surface. He meets with representatives of the Edo in a council chamber and explains that Earth no longer practices capital punishment. Some Edo interpret this stance as an attempt by the Federation to push their superiority and suggest that Picard should mount a rescue effort for the boy. He says he cannot, quoting the Prime Directive.
Picard asks about the mysterious vessel in orbit and discovers that the Edo worship it as a god. He returns to his ship with Rivan and Counsellor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis). Rivan sees the strange ship from orbit and confirms it is the Edo's god. She is transported back to the surface when the ship threatens the Enterprise for taking her away from the planet, and that the captain and the rest of the ship must now share Wesley's fate according to the Edo code. Data reveals that, while he was in communication with the entity, it will protect the Edo as if they were its children. After considering their options, Picard returns to the planet's surface and announces that he is willing to risk the wrath of the entity. He orders the transportation of Wesley to the Enterprise, but the entity disables the transporters and again threatens to destroy the rest of the ship. Picard has had enough, and pleads with the Edo god that laws must allow for exceptions to ensure justice, and after this statement the transporters go back online, allowing the away team to return. Upon leaving the planet, Picard communicates with the entity to inform it that they are leaving and that they will remove recently placed colonists at a nearby star system under the entity's claimed jurisdiction, if the entity expresses so. However, the final offer was refused as the entity informs Picard to steer clear of the Edo before disappearing. Picard regrets they did not communicate more, and the Enterprise departs.
## Production
John D. F. Black's original pitch featured a story about capital punishment. His idea was based on a film treatment detailing the colony planet of Llarof where capital punishment is handed down as a sentence for any offense except against those who are immune from the law. In the treatment, a security officer is killed by a local law enforcement officer, who is then killed himself by his partner for unjustly killing the Enterprise crewman. The planet would have had a rebel faction who wanted to overthrow the laws, which Picard refused to back initially while citing the Prime Directive. A second draft featured a rebel leader executed for treason. Black explained the premise of a society that developed laws to prevent terrorism and chaos: "Let's say that what we do is kill everybody who is a terrorist or suspected of being a terrorist. Now the people who have killed everybody, what do they do?"
The idea was re-written by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry and writer Worley Thorne. It was Roddenberry and Thorne who created the godlike entity and sexed up the Edo. James L. Conway directed the episode, having just finished the MacGyver episode, "Jack in the Box". Josh Clark, who plays a Conn officer in "Justice", later appears as Lt. Joe Carey in all seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager.
"Justice" is the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation filmed mostly on location, and the first of any scenes on location other than those set in the holodeck in "Encounter at Farpoint". Scenes shot at The Japanese Garden (Tillman Water Reclamation Plant) in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, were located under the flight path for the Van Nuys Airport. The noise from overhead planes was so loud, the actors were required to re-record their lines in the studio. Filming for the scene where Wesley crashes into the greenhouse occurred on the grounds of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.
The 2012 book, Star Trek: The Next Generation 365 notes that Tillman Water Reclamation Plant was so successful as a shooting location, it was re-used for production in the episode "The First Duty" and several more times as a shooting location for other shows including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
## Reception
"Justice" first aired in broadcast syndication on November 8, 1987. It received Nielsen ratings of 12.7 million, placing it in third place in the timeslot. It ranked the second highest viewed episode of the first season, after the premiere "Encounter at Farpoint", which was seen by 15.7 million viewers.
Several reviewers re-watched the episode after the end of the series. Castmember Wil Wheaton watched "Justice" for AOL TV in December 2006. He observed problems with his acting and the plot development, particularly where Picard transports the Edo woman to the Enterprise. Wheaton felt Picard's actions were a clear breach of the Prime Directive which was otherwise at the heart of the episode. On the other hand, he thought the episode showed a proper dynamic between Picard and the bridge crew, and he believed it tackled a real ethics problem in a manner more frequently seen in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica television series. Wheaton gave the episode of "Justice" a grade of B+.
Keith DeCandido reviewed the episode for Tor.com in May 2011. He said the episode "collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness", and he criticized the Edo as caricatures. DeCandido thought that the plot involving Wesley was predictable, but that the scripting for Picard helped to cement him as a "great character". He gave the episode a score of two out of ten.
James Hunt reviewed the episode for Den of Geek in November 2012. He liked the central idea, but said it was typical of the poor quality of the early episodes of the series. Hunt also thought multiple plot details were not addressed, such as the origin of the alien entity and the reason for the Edo's fear of it. Jamahl Epsicokhan for his website Jammer's Reviews, said that the episode featured "yet another Trek-clichéd Infinitely Superior Life Form", and featured a debate which was "more obtuse than enlightening". He gave it a score of one out of four. In 2018, CBR included this episode in a list of Star Trek episodes that are "so bad they must be seen."
WhatCulture ranked this episode the 16th worst episode of Star Trek. In 2019, ScreenRant ranked it the 7th worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation based on IMDB ratings, which was 6 out of 10 at that time.
## Home media release
"Justice" was first released on VHS cassette in the United States and Canada on July 1, 1992. The episode was later included on the Star Trek: The Next Generation season one DVD box set, released in March 2002. The episode was released as part of the season one Blu-ray set on July 24, 2012. The Blu-Ray features the episode in 1080p video format with 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio.
Episodes from "Encounter at Farpoint" to "Datalore" were released in Japan on LaserDisc on June 10, 1995, as part of First Season Part.1. This included the first season episode "Justice", and the box set has a total runtime of 638 minutes across multiple 12-inch optical video discs.
## See also
- "The Apple" – an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series which sees the crew visit an idyllic planet under the guardianship of a godlike machine.
- "Bem" – an episode of the animated series Star Trek where a primitive planetary society is cared for by a god-like alien entity whom an Enterprise captain must contend with over what is just.
- "The Measure of a Man" (Star Trek: The Next Generation) – one of the most noted TNG shows about a Federation court case and was re-released as an extended HD version in 2012
|
72,241,911 |
Mirtha Arce
| 1,171,862,393 |
Bolivian politician (born 1963)
|
[
"1963 births",
"20th-century Bolivian lawyers",
"21st-century Bolivian lawyers",
"21st-century Bolivian politicians",
"21st-century Bolivian women politicians",
"21st-century Bolivian women writers",
"Bolivian educators",
"Bolivian non-fiction writers",
"Bolivian senators from Tarija",
"Bolivian student activists",
"Bolivian women activists",
"Bolivian women educators",
"Bolivian women lawyers",
"Bolivian women's rights activists",
"Living people",
"Members of the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies from Tarija",
"Plan Progress for Bolivia – National Convergence politicians",
"Women members of the Chamber of Deputies (Bolivia)",
"Women members of the Senate of Bolivia"
] |
Mirtha Natividad Arce Camacho (born 25 December 1963) is a Bolivian academic, lawyer, and politician who served as senator for Tarija from 2015 to 2020.
Arce got her political start in student leadership before developing her career in academia and women's rights activism. She held multiple executive positions in women's rights–related organizations in Tarija, including presiding over the Association of Women Lawyers and the Association of Women University Professionals. Between 2002 and 2008, she held law-related public service roles at local and departmental levels, including serving as legal director of the Departmental Road Service of Tarija.
In 2009, Arce was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, accompanying Adrián Oliva [es] as his substitute from 2010 to 2014 when she resigned to launch a successful bid for a seat in the Senate. Though elected as part of the Democratic Unity coalition, Arce became estranged from the bloc partway through her term and operated as an independent from then on. In 2021, she contested the Tarija governorship, becoming the first woman nominee in the department's electoral history. However, she came in a distant fourth place at the ballot box.
## Early life and career
Mirtha Arce was born on 25 December 1963 in Tarija, to Rosandel Arce Gonzales and Ana Camacho Gallardo. Arce completed her secondary schooling at the Santa Ana School, where she served as class president. She went on to attend the Marshal Sucre Normal School [es] as well as Juan Misael Saracho University [es] (UAJMS), where she graduated as a lawyer and teacher, completing two master's degrees in crime science and higher education and five postgraduate degrees in the fields of educational research and university teaching.
During her time in university, Arce continued to be active in student leadership, serving for two terms as executive of the UAJMS Law Student Center, where she was its first female head. From there, she went on to form part of her Local University Federation and the Bolivian University Confederation and was named executive of the Bermejo Teachers Federation.
Arce developed much of her career in academia, starting out as a university professor at UAJMS and the Bolivian Catholic University's Tarija campus. She was a founding member and president of the Association of Women Lawyers and the Association of Women University Professionals, served as vice president of the Tarija Women's Civic Committee, and composed part of the directorate of the National Confederation of Women's Institutes of Bolivia. Starting in 2002, Arce began a career in public service, serving as deputy prosecutor for controlled substances until 2005, when she joined the Cercado Province as its chief legal advisor. In 2006, she joined the administration of Mario Cossío [es], Tarija's first popularly elected prefect, serving as legal director of the Departmental Road Service until 2008.
## Chamber of Deputies
### Election
Arce's political ideology has been described as "liberal in economics" but "conservative in morals". She was an early supporter of departmental autonomy, a political system heavily pushed by the country's lowland departments in the early 2000s. Despite her lack of party affiliation, Arce's adherence to decentralization and prominence in women's rights organizations contributed to her nomination for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 2009. She accompanied Adrián Oliva [es] as his substitute, topping the National Convergence alliance's electoral list in the department.
### Tenure
In parliament, Arce accompanied Oliva during his four terms on the lower chamber's Energy and Hydrocarbons Committee between 2010 and 2014, in addition to spending a few months on the Planning, Economic Policy, and Finance Commission in her final year.<sup>[§]</sup> The majority of her tenure, however, reflected that of many substitute parliamentarians, focusing less on legislating from the capital and more on fostering local connections in her home department.
### Commission assignments
- Planning, Economic Policy, and Finance Commission
- Budget, Tax Policy, and Comptroller's Office Committee (2014)
- Plural Economy, Production, and Industry Commission
- Energy and Hydrocarbons Committee (2010–2014)
## Chamber of Senators
### Election
Nearing the end of her term in the Chamber of Deputies, Arce resigned from office to contest a seat in the Senate. She aligned herself with Samuel Doria Medina's Democratic Unity coalition, a bloc that recycled much of National Convergence's previous electoral list in a bid to guarantee a high degree of parliamentary representation. Benefitting from a favorable position at the top of her alliance's electoral list, Arce won the seat, becoming Democratic Unity's only senator in the department.
### Tenure
Sworn in the following January, Arce spent her first year heading the Senate's Electoral System, Human Rights, and Social Equity Committee. Even as she exercised leadership over a key parliamentary post in the field of women's rights, Arce often found herself contending with machista currents within her own caucus, an issue that ultimately led to her estrangement from the opposition alliance. These internal divisions culminated in 2016 when Arce refused to chair a committee her caucus had assigned to her, opting instead to seek a position on the Senate's powerful Ethics Commission. With the supporting votes of legislators from the ruling Movement for Socialism, Arce obtained the post, beating out the candidate nominated by the rest of the Democratic Unity caucus. The following year, Arce officialized her break from the alliance with which she was elected. For the duration of her term, she operated as an independent, unaffiliated with any of the Senate's three parliamentary caucuses.
### Commission assignments
- Constitution, Human Rights, Legislation, and Electoral System Commission
- Electoral System, Human Rights, and Social Equity Committee (Secretary: –)
- Plural Justice, Prosecutor's Office, and Legal Defense of the State Commission
- Prosecutor's Office and Legal Defense of the State Committee (Secretary: –)
- Territorial Organization of the State and Autonomies Commission (President: –, –)
- Ethics and Transparency Commission (–)
## Tarija gubernatorial campaign
Soon after the conclusion of her senatorial term, Arce jumped onto the campaign trail, announcing a bid for the Tarija governorship. Though initially invited to be the Christian Democratic Party's nominee, Arce instead registered her candidacy with a local party: Integration, Security, and Autonomy. Of the candidates contesting the governorship in Tarija, Arce stood out as the only woman, making her the first woman to do so in the department's electoral history, as well as one of just seven women nationwide nominated to run in gubernatorial elections that cycle. Of the participating parties, Arce's campaign represented the most conservative segments of Tarija society, a fact she did little to disguise or grow past. According to journalist Miguel V. de Torres, this factor—in addition to her campaign's comparatively low budget—made it difficult for her to "find any space in which to fish for votes that are not [already] hers". Arce found herself unable to gain significant traction, and she ultimately lost the election, finishing in a distant fourth place.
## Electoral history
## Publications
|
51,022,466 |
Weaves (EP)
| 1,116,042,694 | null |
[
"2014 debut EPs",
"Indie pop EPs",
"Weaves (band) albums"
] |
Weaves is the debut extended play of Canadian indie pop group Weaves. Two-thirds of the record was produced by guitarist Morgan Waters with Garageband, the other third produced by David Newfeld. Praised by music journalists for its varied style and Burke's vocal performance, Weaves combines elements of high-quality recording common in pop music with lo-fi noise music styles to create a "disgusting" yet "catchy" feel. Released for streaming on March 26, 2014 and in stores on April 1, 2014 by Buzz Records, the EP was promoted with four singles ("Hulahoop", "Motorcycle", "Take A Dip" and "Buttercup"), with music videos for the latter three, a two-month tour and a remix record. Weaves was ranked number eight on Popmatters' list of best indie rock albums of 2014.
## Production and composition
Jasmyn Burke and Morgan Waters, who first met each other in a bar, started Weaves in 2012 when the two made demo songs based on files of song ideas Burke recorded on her iPhone. In 2013, bassist Zach Bines and drummer Spencer Cole joined the project and started recording their self-titled debut EP immediately after. "Motorcycle", "Take A Dip", "Do You See Past" and "Hulahoop" were produced by Waters in his bedroom using Garageband, while "Buttercup" and "Closer" was produced by David Newfeld in his church studio of Dobbstown North. Waters described Newfeld's production contributions as "music lessons and artist lessons in a way," given that he knew what he was making. He also said, "That open mindedness and visibility to capture what happens in the moment and allow mistakes and encourage them brings you out of your comfort zone."
The indie pop album combines elements of high-quality recording common in pop music with lo-fi noise music styles, leading to a complicated sound of "bombast and confusion" and a feel of the tracks being "disgusting" yet "catchy" as the band described. Now's Carla Gillis gave style descriptions such as "soul-grunge" and "sludge-pop" to label this sound. Elements from a big number of genres are present on Weaves, such as neo-pop, R&B, soul, art rock, and psychedelic music. The lyrics on the songs are filled with sexual innuendo such as "Won't you ride my motorcycle / Take a ride", which Gillis wrote "can turn into both amusing nah-nah-nah insolence and wailing, dead-serious desperation on a dime."
## Promotion
Four songs were released as singles before Weaves was issued: "Hulahoop" on April 30, 2013, "Motorcycle" on July 23, 2013, "Take A Dip" on September 23, 2013, and "Buttercup" on February 18, 2014. "Take a Tip" was a premiere by Spin magazine. The blog BrooklynVegan premiered Weaves for streaming on March 26, 2014. A tour in Ontario and New York promoting the EP last from April 10 to June 22, 2014. On July 21, 2014, Noisey premiered the remix EP for Weaves, which features a re-edit of "Hulahoop" by Bram Gielen. The video for the remix was released by Chart Attack on July 29, 2014, and in the video, Burke "drinks from straw glasses, waves torches and sparklers and performs some lounging, laconic dance moves."
On August 12, 2013, a music video for the song "Motorcycle" was released. Chart Attack noted the video's "weird, wrong-handed sketches, which divert from the Badlands 4 Kidz plot with lots of delightful non-sequiter cutaways to make it a junky feast for your rapidly deteriorating attention span." On March 24, 2014, Rookie magazine premiered the video for "Buttercup". The weird, crazy look of the video is meant to match the pretty-looking yet poisonous aspect of a buttercup, a flower the song is named after. Both videos were directed and created by Jason Harvey, who Waters described as "a really talented guy" with his own "strong voice". On October 15, 2013, the video for "Take a Dip" was released; it depicts Burke dressed in a white-colored shawl in a dark-lit church. The other band members appear near the end of the video, where she grates cheddar cheese onto their heads as they bow to her.
## Critical reception
Response towards Weaves from music journalists upon release was generally favorable. Critics from publications like Exclaim! and Noisey praises included the record's combination of numerous musical styles to the point where the overall genre the EP could be labeled its own category or could be very hard to pin-point. Noisey said that the EP "experiments and dips across genre lines in a balancing act between of laxity and concentration, without all of the pretension and exclusivity that normally accompanies a buzzing indie band". A more mixed review came from Liz Fox of Popmatters, finding most of the aspects of Weaves typical of indie music released in the previous fifteen years but praising Burke's "sultry" vocal performance that "improve the elaborate backdrop, allowing for some simplicity among the chaos". Now called the EP an "excellent introduction for new fans", writing that its only downfall was the track "Do You See Past" due to its "more sophisticated, less interesting electro-pop sound". In a list by another Popmatters journalist of the best indie rock albums of 2014, Weaves ranked number eight.
## Track listing
## Credits and personnel
Credits adapted from liner notes of Weaves.
Locations
- Produced, mixed and engineered at Dobbstown North (unknown location), also engineered at Candle Recording in Toronto, Ontario and Echo Valley (unknown location)
Credits
- Jasmyn Burke – Lead vocals
- Morgan Waters – Lead guitar, bass and production on "Motorcycle", "Take A Dip", "Do You See Past" and "Hulahoop", mixing on "Hulahoop",
- Bram Gielen – Organ on "Motorcycle" and "Take A Dip"
- Spencer Cole – Drums
- Zach Bines – Bass on "Buttercup" and "Closer"
- Nathan Vanderwielen – Engineering on "Motorcycle" and "Take a Dip"
- David Newfeld – Production, engineering, mixing and synthesizers on "Buttercup" and "Closer", mastering
- Leon Taheny – engineering on "Motorcycle", "Take a Dip" and "Do You See Past", mixing on "Motorcycle"
- Nick Stumpf – Mixing on "Motorcycle", "Take A Dip" and "Do You See Past"
- Alanna Questell – Artwork
- George Kokomo – Artwork photography
## Release history
|
8,794,645 |
Teso Dos Bichos
| 1,168,140,841 | null |
[
"1996 American television episodes",
"Television episodes about curses",
"Television episodes about shamanism",
"Television episodes directed by Kim Manners",
"Television episodes set in Boston",
"The X-Files (season 3) episodes"
] |
"Teso Dos Bichos" is the eighteenth episode of the third season of the science fiction television series The X-Files. It premiered on the Fox network on March 8, 1996. It was written by John Shiban, and directed by Kim Manners. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, unconnected to the series' wider mythology. "Teso Dos Bichos" earned a Nielsen household rating of 10.7, being watched by 17.38 million people in its initial broadcast. The episode received mostly negative reviews.
The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files. In this episode, Mulder and Scully investigate a series of deaths that occur immediately after an ancient artifact is brought to Boston from an excavation site in South America. According to Scully, the deaths appear to be the result of political terrorism, but Mulder suspects something more improbable.
The production for "Teso Dos Bichos", which was strongly disliked by the cast and crew of The X-Files, was plagued by several issues. Director Kim Manners, who had particular disdain for the episode, later made T-shirts and gave them to the cast and crew that read "'Teso Dos Bichos' Survivor". The episode's title translates from archaic Portuguese into English as "Burial Mound of Small Animals," although other translations have been proposed.
## Plot
At an archaeological dig in the Ecuadorian highlands, two archaeologists, Dr. Bilac and Dr. Roosevelt, get into an argument over the removal of a burial urn that contains an Amaru, or a female shaman. Roosevelt argues that the urn must be taken from the site and preserved in a museum, much to the chagrin of Bilac and the tribespeople present. Later, a native shaman distributes Yaje to the local villagers and Bilac. During this ritual, a jaguar spirit kills Roosevelt in his tent.
Later, in Boston, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate the disappearance of Dr. Craig Horning, an archaeologist from a local history museum, after a security guard discovers a large amount of blood in Horning's lab. They interview both the curator, Dr. Lewton, and graduate student Mona Wustner. They also visit a reclusive Bilac. After closing, Lewton is killed by the jaguar spirit after his car doesn't start. During an investigation of the crime scene, Scully comes across rat corpses in the engine compartment of Lewton's vehicle. Mona denies that anything unusual has happened in the museum.
Mulder and a group of police search for Lewton's remains. Scully sees blood dripping on Mulder's face from above and, upon looking up, they see a portion of Lewton's intestine hanging from a tree. Scully, about to perform an autopsy on the intestine, is interrupted when Mona suddenly calls and reports that Bilac was under the influence of Yaje. At the museum, Mona hears noises from a restroom and, upon opening a toilet lid, she sees rats forcing their way out of the sewer. When the two agents arrive, they discover Bilac crying beside one of the toilets, saying that Mona is dead.
Later, Bilac escapes from the room in which he is being held without exiting through the only door. Mulder notices a large drag mark through the dust on the floor, discovering a hatch leading to the museum's old steam tunnels. While exploring the tunnels, the agents find the remains of the victims and are attacked by a multitude of feral cats. As they try to escape, they come across Bilac's mutilated body. The two agents make their way out and close the hatch on the pursuing cats. The episode closes with Mulder suspecting that the animal attacks were associated with the burial urn that had been removed against the wishes of the Ecuadorian tribespeople; it is shortly returned to the burial grounds, where the local shaman watches the urn's reburial with jaguar-like eyes.
## Production
"Teso Dos Bichos" was written by John Shiban, who claims to have derived the episode's title from an ancient chant. The words translate into Galician-Portuguese as "Burial Mound of Small Animals," although other translations have been proposed. Unbeknownst to Shiban, in parts of Colombia and Venezuela, the word "bichos" is a euphemism for testicles; Shiban later joked that this "controversy" would be "good for ratings".
The production of the episode was plagued with issues. At the last minute the ending of the episode had to be rewritten; originally, the episode was to feature "hordes" of common house cats attacking Mulder and Scully, but the cats refused to attack under direction, doing "pretty much nothing". To further complicate matters, Gillian Anderson had a severe cat allergy, and so the whole sequence was nixed. While director Kim Manners felt that the episode's first three acts were "the best three acts of television [he had] ever directed", he believed that the fourth act was "an absolute disaster." Manners reportedly asked series creator Chris Carter to film a leopard for the fourth act rather than house cats, saying "I begged Carter 'Please let's revisit the leopard in the teaser because I'm never going to make these cats scary.'"
"Teso Dos Bichos" was strongly disliked by the cast and crew of The X-Files, including both David Duchovny and Kim Manners. Manners found the story uninteresting because "pussycats are not scary." He later made T-shirts and gave them to the cast and crew that read "Teso Dos Bichos Survivor." The episode earned two distinctive nicknames courtesy of Manners: The first, "Second Salmon," referred to the number of re-writes the episode went through. Every time an episode was re-written, the color of the script changed accordingly; "Teso Dos Bichos" went through so many re-writes that the cast eventually received a second round of salmon colored copies. The second nickname, again, courtesy of Manners, was "Teso Dos Bitches."
## Broadcast and reception
"Teso Dos Bichos" premiered on the Fox network on March 8, 1996. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 10.7, with an 18 share, meaning that roughly 10.7 percent of all television-equipped households, and 18 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 17.38 million viewers.
The episode received negative reviews from critics. A writer from Entertainment Weekly gave "Teso Dos Bichos" a C, and sardonically wrote, "No es bueno!" Reviewer Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C− and criticized the laziness of the writing, saying, "Maybe I'm missing something here. There could be some subtext in, um, yeah, I got nothing. The dead rats in the toilet were freaky, right? And they did kill that dog off, so that's hardcore. Really, though, I'm just too disappointed to say much else. This is paint-by-numbers at its most tedious, and while it's nice to have evident proof of how far the show has come since it started, that doesn't make it any easier to sit through." Critical Myth's John Keegan gave the episode a scathing review, only awarding it 1/10. He criticized the seriousness of the plot and wrote, "Overall, this has to be one of the worst episodes of the series. In nearly every possible way, the episode fails to live up to the usual expectations. Perhaps aware of how silly the whole thing sounds, the cast and crew seem weary of it all from beginning to end. Even some of the bad ideas in the later seasons don’t fall to this level of inadequacy." Cyriaque Lamar from i09 called the Jaguar Spirit one of "The 10 Most Ridiculous X-Files Monsters" and wrote, "In this fairly ridiculous Season 3 episode, an Ecuadorian artifact possessed by a Jaguar Spirit (or something) causes tabbies to go bonkers and murder people. This scene of Scully fighting a cat deserves the GIF treatment. Make it happen, folks!" Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode one star out of five, calling the premise "achingly unambitious". The two roundly criticized the plot, calling it a "retread of a cursed mummy movie without a mummy", as well as the performances of Trevino, Duchovny, and Anderson. Despite the overall negativity, Shearman and Pearson noted that the "much derided" cat sequence was not "that badly handled."
|
29,464,655 |
So Appalled
| 1,170,877,854 | null |
[
"2010 songs",
"Jay-Z songs",
"Kanye West songs",
"Posse cuts",
"Pusha T songs",
"Song recordings produced by Kanye West",
"Song recordings produced by No I.D.",
"Songs about Donald Trump",
"Songs written by Cyhi the Prynce",
"Songs written by Jay-Z",
"Songs written by Kanye West",
"Songs written by Mike Dean (record producer)",
"Songs written by No I.D.",
"Songs written by Pusha T",
"Songs written by RZA",
"Songs written by Swizz Beatz",
"Swizz Beatz songs"
] |
"So Appalled" is a song by American hip hop recording artist Kanye West from his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). The song was produced by West, along with No I.D. and Mike Dean, and features verses by Jay-Z, Cyhi the Prynce, Pusha T, Swizz Beatz, and RZA respectively, who all receive writing credits. Lyrically, the song explores topics such as the troubles produced from being famous, social concerns and features numerous pop culture references.
The posse cut received mostly positive reviews from music critics, with West and Jay-Z's verses commonly being cited as the highlights. Critics generally praised the production of the song. Originally released in an unmastered form through West's GOOD Friday initiative, a weekly free music giveaway started by the rapper to promote the album. Following this, "So Appalled" made its way onto My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with the addition of an extended verse. "So Appalled" charted on the Billboard Bubbling Under R&B/Hip-Hop Singles singles chart. West performed the song with Jay-Z at their Watch the Throne Tour and with Pusha T on his own tour.
## Background
"So Appalled" was first released on September 24, 2010, and was the seventh song to be featured on West's GOOD Fridays, a music giveaway that provided free MP3 downloads every week. It was originally believed to be a song for West and Jay-Z's collaborative album Watch the Throne, but it was later confirmed not to be. The song would later find its way onto West's fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy along with two other GOOD Friday songs. The version on the album was altered production-wise and was longer, and featured a sample of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band's song "You Are – I Am". The song was released with two covers, one with a famous photo of a model vomiting red nail polish, taken by Guy Bourdin; and the other containing the same image, with dimmed lighting and obscured by thick red letters. Before its release the song was leaked online and was nearly scrapped.
### Recording
The majority of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, including "So Appalled", was recorded in Oahu, Hawaii. Following several media controversies, West decided to record his next album in a reclusive manner only working with artists he considered himself familiar with. Amongst the various artists invited down to Hawaii to record songs for the album was Pusha T, a rapper known for the hip-hop duo Clipse. While in Hawaii, Pusha-T commented that the very first thing he recorded was his verse for "So Appalled". He favorably compared recording with West with another producer he was used to working with, Pharrell Williams, commenting that he enjoyed how the process was more of a canvas.
When working with other producers usually a majority of the track was already done by the time he got to the recording studio, but with West, the process was more creative in nature. Pusha described the recording process with West as a "roller coast" and stated that he never knew what to expect while working with the producer. Upon hearing the production of the song, Pusha-T commented that it was so good it persuaded him to write a particularly inspired verse. On the production of "So Appalled", he said "it's Kanye, the beat brings the ghost out of you." The rapper described his verse as "self-explanatory" and stated that it was one of his favorite of his career. Pusha T called his verse "his personal favorite" and that the track was originally supposed to be just him and Kanye. When the song was finished, Pusha-T was so impressed with the track that he argued with West to include it on his album, stating that the song was so good it didn't matter whether or not it had leaked. He commented;
> "I had already raved over the record because it leaked. I was like listen, there is no way this cant [sic] be on your album, you'd have to be crazy. He was like 'Really, you think so?' I was like c'mon man we got to stop treating rap like oh it came out it's dead. When it's good, we have to make people love it and digest it. We can't treat this like mixtape throwaways like everybody else does. Everybody else does half-ass music. So what people don't know is that what Kanye did during that album is literally, I walked into the studio and I had the pick of 17 records and he was like do what you want to do to any of these, do what you like."
One of the producers and guest appearances on the song is RZA, frontman of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. RZA spoke positively of West, viewing that he embodied the mentality of the Wu-Tang Clan. RZA sent several beats to West, including some that he cited as being edgy, because he felt that West was the type who could work well on more forceful production, including the brooding beat for "So Appalled". The song was nearly featured on Last Train to Paris, a studio album by Diddy. According to another producer on the song, No I.D., it was offered to both Jay-Z and Diddy before it leaked. West freestyled over the track for fun and found that he actually liked it enough to ultimately use it himself, stating that it would make a good group song. Cyhi the Prynce's verse only appeared on the song because he "tricked" West. Originally he was only supposed to deliver a quick hook, but at the time West was tired and let Cyhi record his verse alone. When West awoke and played back the tape, he was surprised to find that Cyhi had recorded an entire verse. Impressed with it, West decided to include it on the track anyway. The song reportedly offended M.C. Hammer, who Jay-Z references on the line "I spent another 30 / Cause unlike Hammer 30 million can't hurt me".
## Composition
"So Appalled" has been described as an epic posse cut featuring a large roster of performers. West uses his verse to address his past critics and comment on his status as a celebrity. West's performance on the song is notably intense, forcefully rapping lines such as "we above the law, we don't give a fuck 'bout y'all / I got dogs that'll chew a fucking hole through the wall." Swizz Beatz sets the tone of the song using several ad-libs such as "one hand in the air, if you don't really care" and the line "this shit is fucking ridiculous" which is repeated several times throughout the song, delivered by nearly every rapper. The second verse is delivered by Jay-Z, who spends the majority of his verse deconstructing the hate that surrounds fame and poses the question, "would you rather be underpaid or overrated?" Jay-Z comments on how a career in the music industry creates many opponents. The third verse is delivered by Pusha T, who muses on cocaine dealing.
The song contains numerous pop culture references, including The Dark Knight, the breakfast cereal Cheerios, the business figure and future United States President, Donald Trump, rapper M.C. Hammer and "We Major", a song from West's album Late Registration. On the unconventional structure of the song, Sputnikmusic's Channing Freeman said that verses were "very lengthy – Kanye appears within the first minute and then drops out for good – but the droning beat is so mesmerizing that it's barely even noticeable." Andy Gill of The Independent explained the use of several guest appearances, writing "Kanye has never been short on ambition or ego, so it's no surprise he should have his guests (including such hip-hop luminaries as Jay-Z, Swizz Beats and RZA) queue up on "So Appalled" to confirm in turn how 'this shit is fucking ridiculous'".
## Reception
"So Appalled" received mostly favorable reviews from contemporary critics. David Browne of Time wrote that he felt that the track was "built on rumbling tanks of pianos and strings" and that it sounded as if West was "marching into the apocalypse." David Amidon of PopMatters compared the production to West's album Late Registration which found West "inviting his friend Jon Brion to impart slices of film scoring to the odds and ends of his tracks". He commented that much like every song on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the song "contains an underscore as ambitious as the beats upfront", concluding that tracks "Hell of a Life" and "So Appalled" alone "carry enough auditory sugar to make listening to this album on any regular sort of listening device almost a fool's errand."
Jayson Rodriguez of MTV praised the song, reporting "this all-star cipher is a backpackers dream as Ye's GOOD Music soldiers fire away with resolve. But the Brooklyn icon, Jay-Z, steals the show with an edgy verse dismissing his critics with a 16 that's as pushy as a New Yorker during rush hour. Please, Hammer, stop replying." Slant Magazine's Cole Mathews thought that the song returned West to his hard rap origins, commenting "with the posse cuts 'Monster' and 'So Appalled', Kanye kicks out the two hardest rap tracks of his career." Becky Bain of Idolater described the song as a "dramatic, gloomy epic of a tune that has each artist taking turns at the mic." He expressed that trying to find Kanye's verse was "virtually a musical Where's Waldo". It was noted for its impressive roster of features and was described as "another Kanye West-helmed all-star collabo" by MTV's Hawuse Ziegbe. He noted that Cyhi managed to hold his own against several much more regarded rappers. Embling of Tiny Mix Tapes described the song as a super-sized cypher, stating that the track was packed with plenty of "shitalking" from the group of rappers.
Pitchfork's Tom Breihan criticized Cyhi's lyrical contributions to the song, stating "On the otherwise amazing Kanye track 'So Appalled', CyHi offers a black hole of a verse. His most memorable line ('If God had a iPod, I'd be on his playlist') mostly just raises questions. Like: Why does God's iPod only have one playlist?" IGN's Chad Grischow described the song as a star-studded banger, and cited Jay-Z's verse as the most notable. In addition, Grischow stated that the song was unfocused. Chris Martins of Spin reported that much like the track "Monster", the guest appearances on the song had the potential to be toned down. Chicago Sun-Times writer Thomas Conner cited the line "praise due to the most high, Allah / Praise due to the most fly, Prada" as an example of genius songwriting on West's part. The song charted at 14 on the Bubbling Under R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart as reported by Billboard, however it only spent one week on the chart. The song also appeared on the South Korean Gaon Chart at number 95.
### Reaction from M.C. Hammer
M.C. Hammer promised to release a track on October 31, 2010, in response to Jay-Z's "So Appalled" lyrics which he felt attacked him. Jay-Z raps a verse targeting Hammer about his financial dilemma in the 1990s. Within it Jay says: 'Hammer went broke so you know I'm more focused / I lost 30 mil' so I spent another 30 / 'Cause unlike Hammer 30 million can't hurt me'. Hammer addressed his displeasure about the diss on Twitter, claiming he would react to Jay-Z on Halloween.
Hammer released a sample of his "beef" with Jay-Z (a.k.a. 'Hell Boy' according to Hammer) in a brief teaser trailer called "Better Run Run" by 'King Hammer'. At one point, it was uncertain if his reaction would be a film video, a music video or a combination of both. Regardless, he claimed he would show evidence that 'Jigga worships the devil'. It's possible that Jay-Z was offended by an analogy Hammer was conveying in an earlier interview in response to "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" on AllHipHop.
On November 1, Hammer's song and video titled "Better Run Run!" hit the web in retaliation to Jay-Z's September 2010 diss towards him. M.C. accuses Jigga of being in league (and in the studio) with Satan — and then Hammer defeats the devil and forces Jay to be baptized. Speaking on the video, Jacob O'Gara of Ethos Magazine wrote: "What's more likely is that this feud is the last chapter in the tragic cautionary tale of M.C. Hammer, a tale that serves as a warning to all present and future kings of hip-hop. Keep your balance on the pedestal and wear the crown strong or you'll have the Devil to pay."
In an interview with BBC's DJ Semtex, Jay said he didn't mean the verses as a personal attack. "I didn't know that [Hammer's financial status] wasn't on the table for discussion!" he said. "I didn't know I was the first person ever to say that..." He continued, "When I say things, I think people believe me so much that they take it a different way — it's, like, not rap anymore at that point. I say some great things about him in the book I have coming out [Decoded] — that's wasn't a cheap plug," he laughed. "He's gonna be embarrassed, I said some really great things about him and people's perception of him. But it is what it is, he took it that wrong way, and I didn't know I said anything wrong!"
## Marketing
The track was nightly performed by West and Jay-Z during their Watch the Throne Tour. Pusha T performs the song live during his own live sets. The song was one of the few songs on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy not to be featured on Runaway, a 35-minute music video directed by West set to music from the album.
## Personnel
- Produced by Kanye West and No I.D.
- Co-produced by Mike Dean
- Recorded by Andrew Dawson, Anthony Kilhoffer and Mike Dean at the Avex Recording Studio, Honolulu and Noah Goldstein & Pete Bischoff at Electric Lady Studios, NYC
- Engineered by Ken Lewis and Brent Kolatalo
- Mixed by Mike Dean at Electric Lady Studios, NYC
- Assistant Mix Engineers: Gaylord Holomalia, Christian Mochizuki & Pete Bischoff
- Keyboards: Mike Dean & Jeff Bhasker
- Cello: Chris "Hitchcock" Chorney
- Cello arrangement: Mike Dean
## Charts
## Certifications
|
57,078,559 |
Waw an Namus
| 1,137,289,629 |
Volcanic mountain in Libya
|
[
"Calderas of Africa",
"Fezzan",
"Mountains of Libya",
"Oases of Libya",
"Pleistocene calderas",
"Sahara",
"VEI-4 volcanoes",
"Volcanic crater lakes",
"Volcanic fields",
"Volcanoes of Libya"
] |
Waw an Namus (also spelled Wau-en-Namus, Arabic: واو الناموس) is a volcano in Libya. Of either Pleistocene or Holocene age, it is located within the eastern Fezzan region. The origin of the volcanism there and at Al Haruj farther north is not clear. Radiometric dating has yielded an age of about 200,000 years, but other circumstantial evidence points to a formation of the volcano during Holocene or even historical times.
Waw an Namus is characterized by a caldera surrounded by an apron of dark tephra, which has a notable colour contrast to the surrounding desert terrain of the Sahara. A smaller crater lies northwest of the Waw an Namus caldera. The caldera itself contains a scoria cone. Several small lakes and associated vegetation are located within the caldera.
## Name
The volcano is also known as Uaw en Namus, Uau en Namus, Wau-en-Namus and Wau Sqair. It means "Oasis of mosquitoes", a reference to the small lakes around it and the numerous mosquitoes that exist at Waw an Namus, nurtured by the lakes at the volcano.
## Geography and geomorphology
The volcano lies within the Sahara, in the eastern Fezzan and was discovered by scientists a few decades before 1951. The caravan route between Kufra and Sebha passes by the volcano. Ancient graves have been found at Waw an Namus. While the oasis was probably visited by herders and hunters and may have been the source of raw materials, the place is otherwise uninhabited. The landscape around Waw an Namus has been described as "very beautiful" and is reportedly a tourism target but logistical issues and the Libyan Civil War make it difficult to access the area.
Waw an Namus is a 100-metre-deep (330 ft), 4-kilometre-wide (2.5 mi) caldera, which has a small relief outwards but a steep margin inwards. During its formation, over 800,000,000 cubic metres (2.8×10<sup>10</sup> cu ft) of rock were displaced. Another crater lies 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) northwest from Waw an Namus. That vent was formed by overlapping craters which feature no volcanic rocks and which have produced salty mud; this may have been a site of phreatic activity and of volcanic degassing. The caldera contains ash deposits and some dunes, but also a humid zone with reeds.
Within the caldera lies a 140-metre-high (460 ft), 1.3-kilometre-wide (0.81 mi) scoria cone constructed out of phreatomagmatic material with an 80-metre-deep (260 ft), 150-metre-wide (490 ft) crater. Another crater, now reduced to remnants, is located west of the summit crater of the cone. The cone has been modified by gullies.
Dark-coloured tephra of basaltic composition has buried the desert sand around the caldera to distances of 10–20 kilometres (6.2–12.4 mi), resulting in a conspicuous colour contrast to the much brighter desert sand. This contrast can be noted even on spaceborne images. The tephra deposit consists of volcanic ash and lapilli and covers a surface of about 300 square kilometres (120 sq mi). 2–150-centimetre-high (0.79–59.06 in) waves are formed by the tephra, which in its western part is baked together by mudflows. The tephra deposit is stratified, implying that it was generated by more than one eruption. Trade winds have blown the tephra over 100 kilometres (62 mi) southwestward, and a large number of megaripples formed by volcanic material occur both inside and outside of the caldera.
### Lakes
Also within the caldera are three small lakes and additional smaller water bodies, which together form a semicircle around the northern, eastern and southern flanks of the central cone. One of the lakes is north of the scoria cone, the second southeast and south and the third southwest. These lakes cover a total surface of 0.3 square kilometres (0.12 sq mi) and the largest lake has a surface area of 0.146 square kilometres (0.056 sq mi) with a depth of 12.5 metres (41 ft), while the deepest of these waterbodies reaches depths of 15–16 metres (49–52 ft). The water surface reaches 434 metres (1,424 ft) elevation above sea level, although seasonal variations sometimes cause the lakebodies to dry up. These lakes, some of which have red colours, give Waw an Namus a multicoloured appearance.
The lakes are probably groundwater-fed, as evaporation in the area greatly exceeds precipitation, with the lakes losing about 1,500,000 cubic metres (53,000,000 cu ft) water per year. Freshwater springs nourish the lakes. At least one water body was reported to be fresh in 1951 while the others are warm and saline. Deuterium isotope ratio analysis indicates that the water at Waw an Namus is recent water, certainly more recent than 8,000 years.
## Geology
Waw an Namus is an isolated volcano. About 70 kilometres (43 mi) north lie lava flows of basaltic composition and the Haruj volcanic field, of which Waw an Namus is sometimes considered to be a part. These in turn are only two out of several large but little known volcanic fields in the Sahara. A number of theories have been proposed to explain the volcanism in the Sahara, such as the activation of ancient crustal lineaments by the collision between Africa and Europe; in the case of Waw an Namus the magmas originated in the mantle at about 130 kilometres (81 mi) depth.
The terrain surrounding Waw an Namus is covered by Quaternary sediments. The basement beneath the volcano is crystalline, and is in turn covered by limestone, marl and the Nubian Sandstone.
Alkali basalts have been identified in the scoria, and the occurrence of foidite has been reported. Minerals contained within these rocks include apatite, clinopyroxene, magnetite, nepheline and olivine, and occasionally melilite and sodalite. The rocks contain xenoliths of harzburgite, lherzolite and peridotite. Sulfur occurs within the crater of the scoria cone, as well as white deposits that may be formed by alunite.
## Climate
Waw an Namus is part of the Sahara desert, one of the world's largest and driest deserts although parts of it were wetter in the past. In some parts of the Sahara it has only rained a few times during a whole century; at Waw an Namus the little precipitation mostly occurs during winter. Wind is the most important weather factor, forming ventifacts and dunes among other structures; at Waw an Namus it mostly blows from the northeast and is sometimes accompanied by dust devils south of the volcano.
## Eruptive history
The central scoria cone may be only a few thousand years old, possibly even of historical age. The arid climate may mislead as to its actual age, as there is little erosion in the desert. Early geological studies estimated an age of less than 800–1,000 years. Salty muds and rocks erupted by the scoria cone and the crater northwest of the main Waw an Namus caldera must have been emplaced after the last pluvial. The Waw an Namus caldera cuts a Holocene drainage system in the Sahara and there is no evidence of Neolithic artifacts at Waw an Namus, further supporting a recent origin of the volcano.
Radiometric dating failed to yield a reliable age for the rocks; only an imprecise age of 690,000 ± 1,100,000 years ago was obtained. Later potassium-argon dating yielded an age of 200,000 ± 9,000 years before present for a lava bomb associated with the central cone, and the Global Volcanism Program assigns a Pleistocene age to Waw an Namus. Hot springs are active at Waw an Namus and produce sulfurous water.
## Biology
Acacias, date palms, doum palms, and tamarisks (including Tamarix tetragyna) grow within the caldera, as well as swamp vegetation to varying degrees. Part of the largest lake is covered with reeds (including Phragmites australis) up to 4 metres (13 ft) high; smaller reeds and tamarisks grow around the saline lake as well.
Animal life includes aquatic birds, flies and mosquitoes. The oasis has a rich bird life; among the birds are the ducks Anas clypeata (northern shoveler), Anas crecca (Eurasian teal), Anas strepera (gadwall), as well as Acrocephalus scirpaceus (Eurasian reed warbler), Anthus cervinus (red-throated pipit), Anthus pratensis (meadow pipit), Bubulcus ibis (western cattle egret), Corvus ruficollis (brown-necked raven), Falco biarmicus (lanner falcon), Fulica atra (Eurasian coot), Gallinula chloropus (common moorhen), Luscinia svecica (bluethroat), Motacilla alba (white wagtail), Oenanthe deserti (desert wheatear), Passer simplex (desert sparrow), Phoenicurus ochruros (black redstart), Phylloscopus collybita (common chiffchaff), Podyceps nigricollis (black-necked grebe), Rallus aquaticus (water rail), Saxicola rubicola (European stonechat) and Tachybaptus ruficollis (little grebe). Some migratory birds likely use Waw an Namus as an overwintering place. Among microbiota, cyanophyceae, diatoms and green algae are found in the lake waters.
## See also
- List of volcanoes in Libya
|
30,803,148 |
Kepler-9d
| 1,164,235,358 |
Super-Earth orbiting Kepler-9
|
[
"Exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope",
"Exoplanets discovered in 2011",
"Lyra",
"Super-Earths",
"Terrestrial planets",
"Transiting exoplanets"
] |
Kepler-9d (formerly known as KOI-377.03) is a planet in orbit around the Sun-like star Kepler-9. Initially discovered by Kepler spacecraft, a terrestrial planet-searching satellite built and operated by NASA, Kepler-9d is most likely a Super-Earth, with an estimated radius approximately 60% larger than that of Earth's, although its exact mass cannot be determined. Kepler-9d orbits Kepler-9 every 1.56 days at a distance of .0273 AU from its star, an extremely close distance. Although Kepler-9d is the closest planet to its star in its system, it is named Kepler-9d instead of Kepler-9b because two gas giants, Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c, were confirmed first. The original studies into the system first suggested that Kepler-9d might be a planet, but a follow-up investigation made by the Kepler team later confirmed that it was; the confirmation of Kepler-9d as a planet was made public with the team's paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal on January 1, 2011. The team used telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to follow up on the Kepler space telescope's initial discovery.
## Discovery and name
Kepler-9d's name comes from it being the third planet discovered in the orbit of Kepler-9. Kepler-9 was named for the Kepler spacecraft, a NASA satellite that aims to discover terrestrial planets in transit around, or crossing in front of, their host stars as seen from Earth. This transit causes a regular interval in which the star briefly and slightly dims as the planet crosses it.
Flagged initially as a transit event by the satellite, Kepler-9d was given the designation KOI 377.03. It was recognized as a potential planet after a study into the system confirmed Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c, but follow-up studies had to be completed to verify that it was indeed a planet, and that the apparent transit event was not due to a background eclipsing binary star in the aperture of Kepler's photometer. Kepler's team exhaustively disproved that the small transit event could have been anything but a planet, and their results were published in the Astrophysical Journal on January 1, 2011. Follow-up observations were conducted by the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as the WIYN Observatory in Arizona and the Palomar Observatory in California.
## Host star
Kepler-9 is a Sun-like star in the constellation Lyra that lies some 640 parsecs away from Earth. With a mass of and a radius of , Kepler-9 is almost exactly the same size and width of the Sun, being only 7% more massive and 2% wider. Kepler-9 has an effective temperature of 5777 (± 61) K, as compared to the Sun's at 5778 K, and is approximately 32% more metal-rich (in terms of iron) than the Sun. Kepler-9 is younger than the Sun, and is estimated to be one billion years old. Kepler-9 has two planets other than Kepler-9d: the gas giants Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c.
## Characteristics
Based on the size of its light curve, Kepler-9d is assumed to be a Super-Earth, although its exact mass is not known. It is presumed to be at least 1.5 Earth masses. The planet's radius is inferred to be 1.64 R<sub>E</sub>, or approximately 64% larger than Earth's radius. With an equilibrium temperature of 2026 K, it is hotter than all the previous planets discovered by Kepler (not counting the three previously discovered ones located in its field of view). Its density is not known. With an average distance of .0273 AU (2,537,695.73 miles) from its star, which it orbits every 1.592851 days, Kepler-9d is the closest planet to its star in the Kepler-9 system. To compare, the planet Mercury is .3871 AU away from the Sun, which it orbits every 87.97 days.
|
1,985,166 |
David Morse
| 1,171,252,953 |
American actor (born 1953)
|
[
"1953 births",
"20th-century American male actors",
"21st-century American male actors",
"American Episcopalians",
"American male film actors",
"American male stage actors",
"American male television actors",
"Drama Desk Award winners",
"Living people",
"Male actors from Massachusetts",
"Male actors from Philadelphia",
"Obie Award recipients",
"People from Beverly, Massachusetts",
"People from Hamilton, Massachusetts",
"William Esper Studio alumni"
] |
David Bowditch Morse (born October 11, 1953) is an American actor. He first came to national attention as Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison in the medical drama series St. Elsewhere (1982–88). His film career has included roles in The Negotiator, Contact, The Green Mile, Dancer in the Dark, Disturbia, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Rock and 12 Monkeys.
In 2006, Morse had a recurring role as Detective Michael Tritter on the medical drama series House, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. He portrayed George Washington in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams, which garnered him a second Emmy nomination. He received acclaim for his portrayal of Uncle Peck on the Off-Broadway play How I Learned to Drive, earning a Drama Desk Award and Obie Award. He has had success on Broadway, portraying James "Sharky" Harkin in The Seafarer. From 2010 to 2013, he portrayed Terry Colson, an honest police officer in a corrupt New Orleans police department, on the HBO series Treme. Morse appeared in the WGN America series Outsiders (2016–17), the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora (2018), and the Netflix comedy drama series The Chair (2021).
## Early life
Morse was born October 11, 1953, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the son of Jacquelyn Morse, a teacher, and Charles Morse, a salesman. He was raised in Essex, Massachusetts and Hamilton, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he was confirmed in the Episcopal church, and he has said that he continues to pray daily into adulthood. His middle name, Bowditch, comes from mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch.
## Career
### Early career in theater
After graduating from high school in 1971, Morse was invited by Esquire Jauchem, who had directed him in one of his school plays, to audition for the repertory theater he was helping form in Boston, the Boston Repertory Company. Morse became a member that summer at age 17 and spent six years performing there while living in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury.
In 1975, Jauchem, by then the artistic director of the Boston Repertory Theater, adapted and directed a stage musical version of The Point! that starred Morse as Oblio. The production later toured to the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence. In the late 1970s, Morse moved from Boston to New York to further his stage career with the Circle Repertory Company and to study acting at the William Esper Studio.
### Film and television
In 1980, Morse made his theatrical film debut in the drama Inside Moves. Morse was listed as one of the twelve most "Promising New Actors of 1980" in John A. Willis's Screen World, Vol. 32.
Morse's big break came in 1982 when he was cast in the television medical drama St. Elsewhere. He played Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison, a young physician who is forced to deal with the death of his wife and the struggles of a single parent professional.
Morse appeared in a number of supporting roles following St. Elsewhere. He is quoted as saying, "I made the decision that I didn't care if there was any money in the role or not. I had to find roles that were different from what I had been doing." His turn in Desperate Hours as antagonist showed a darker side of Morse. He later starred in The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard. He has appeared in three adaptations of Stephen King stories: The Langoliers, Hearts in Atlantis, and The Green Mile. He was a guest star on Homicide: Life on the Street, playing a racist cousin of Detective Tim Bayliss.
In 2002, Morse starred as Mike Olshansky, an ex-Philadelphia police officer turned cab driver, in the television film Hack. For his role in the 2002 crime-drama film Shuang Tong, Morse was nominated as Best Supporting Actor in the Golden Horse Awards, the first ever nomination for an English-speaking actor. He appeared as suspicious neighbor Mr. Turner in the 2007 thriller Disturbia. Film critic and commentator John Podhoretz wrote that Morse is a "largely unsung character actor who enlivens and deepens every movie fortunate enough to have him in the cast."
In 2006, Morse received a phone call from David Shore, who had previously worked with him on the Hack series. Shore asked him if he would be interested in having a guest role on House. When Morse watched the show, he could not understand why people enjoyed it because he believed "this House guy is a total jerk." When he told some of his friends about the offer, however, their excited reactions convinced him to accept the role. Morse portrayed Michael Tritter, a detective with a vendetta against Dr. House. He earned his first Emmy Award nomination for his work on the series.
In 2008, Morse portrayed George Washington in the HBO miniseries John Adams, for which his nose was made bigger with prosthetics. Morse commented, "The first thing that comes to mind is my nose; it was my big idea to do that nose. We didn't have a lot of time, because they asked me to do this about three weeks before they started shooting, and I just kept looking at these portraits and thinking 'this man's face is so commanding.' And I did not feel that my face was very commanding in the way his was. So I convinced them that we should try the nose, and we tried it on, and everybody went, 'Wow, that's Washington.'" Morse's portrayal earned him his second Emmy Award nomination. He also portrays Washington in voice form as part of The Hall of Presidents show in Walt Disney World Resort's Magic Kingdom.
Morse has stated that out of all of the films he has done, his favorites are The Green Mile, The Crossing Guard, and The Indian Runner.
In 2010, he guest starred in two episodes of the HBO drama series Treme as Lt. Terry Colson of the New Orleans Police Department. He was promoted to series regular starting with the show's second season, which began in April 2011. Later that year, Morse won the best actor award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for his role in Collaborator. He played an ex-CIA agent in the film World War Z (2013). He played the late NFL player Mike Webster in the biographical sports drama Concussion (2015).
### Stage
In addition to performing in films and on television, Morse has continued to appear on stage. For his performance in the 1997 Off-Broadway production of Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama How I Learned to Drive, he received an Obie Award, a Drama League Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award. That same year, he played Father Barry in the play adaptation of On the Waterfront. From 2007 to 2008, Morse appeared on Broadway in Conor McPherson's play The Seafarer. He received a Tony Award nomination for his role in the 2018 Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh.
## Personal life
Morse has three younger sisters and had one stepsister. He has been married to actress and author of The Habit Susan Wheeler Duff Morse since 1982. They have one daughter and twin sons. After losing their home in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Morse and his family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Morse has food sensitivities and has to prepare almost all food he eats himself.
## Filmography
### Film
### Television
### Selected stage work
### Audiobook performances
|
45,526,032 |
Final Symphony
| 1,167,109,454 |
Concert tour of music from the Final Fantasy video game series
|
[
"2014 classical albums",
"Final Fantasy music",
"Video game concert tours"
] |
Final Symphony is a symphonic concert tour first held at the Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal in Wuppertal (Germany) on May 11, 2013. The concert tour features arrangements of video game music selected from the Final Fantasy series, specifically Final Fantasy VI, VII, and X. It is divided into three acts: a symphonic poem for VI, a piano concerto for X, and a symphony for VII. The concert is produced and directed by Thomas Böcker, with arrangements provided by Finnish composer and musician Jonne Valtonen, along with Roger Wanamo and Final Fantasy X composer Masashi Hamauzu with consultation from Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. The original works were composed by Uematsu and Hamauzu, and an introductory piece was composed by Valtonen. The premiere concert was performed by the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra under conduction from Eckehard Stier, with guest performer Benyamin Nuss joining the orchestra on piano.
Following the initial performance, Final Symphony was performed in several other venues. It was first performed in London (United Kingdom) at the Barbican Centre by the London Symphony Orchestra on May 30, 2013. Between 2014 and 2018, additional concerts took place in Tokyo (Japan), Aarhus (Denmark), Stockholm (Sweden), Tampere (Finland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), San Diego (United States), Baltimore (United States), San Francisco (United States), Auckland (New Zealand), Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China), Hamburg (Germany), Berlin (Germany), Munich (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Melbourne (Australia), with each performance location handled by a different orchestra. From 2023, concerts were held in Birmingham and Newcastle (United Kingdom), with more announced for Stuttgart (Germany) and Wrocław (Poland).
A video of the Stockholm performance of the Final Fantasy VI Symphonic Poem was released on October 11, 2014, and a full album recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios was released on February 23, 2015 by Merregnon Studios. The album, along with the concerts themselves, were heavily praised, both for the quality of the performance and for the quality of the arrangements, which overlaid themes from multiple pieces rather than relying on a more traditional medley. The concert series was followed by Final Symphony II, a similar concert tour by Merregnon Studios which began in 2015 with music from Final Fantasy V, VIII, IX, and XIII.
## Concert
### Production
Thomas Böcker first began producing orchestral concerts of video game music in 2003 with the first Symphonic Game Music Concert in Leipzig, Germany. In 2008, he, through his production company Merregnon Studios, began a series of four concerts of video game music that used longer, more elaborate arrangements of themes from the individual pieces of music from the games. This Symphonic series of concerts stood in contrast to the more standard concerts, which played straightforward orchestral versions of individual songs. The four concerts were Symphonic Shades – Hülsbeck in Concert (2008), Symphonic Fantasies: Music from Square Enix (2009), Symphonic Legends – Music from Nintendo (2010), and Symphonic Odysseys: Tribute to Nobuo Uematsu (2011). Both Symphonic Fantasies and Symphonic Odysseys featured music from the Final Fantasy series composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Böcker has said that he considers Uematsu to be "the most famous composer of video game music and in general one of the most influential", and that Uematsu's 20020220 - Music from Final Fantasy concert in 2002 was a big influence on his own concerts.
By May 2012, Böcker was working on a concert of music solely from the Final Fantasy series, titled Final Symphony. The idea for the concert was first proposed by Uematsu in 2009 after Symphonic Fantasies; the concert had featured Final Fantasy music as one of its four components, but unlike the other three the music had been a straightforward medley rather than a more complicated arrangement. Uematsu had asked the team to keep the arrangements similar to those in other Final Fantasy concerts, but after the concert he felt that an opportunity had been missed to create something unique like the other three arrangements, especially the Secret of Mana section. He encouraged Böcker to take more liberties with the source material if the opportunity arose, and hoped that another concert could be created in the future. Böcker proposed Final Symphony later that year to Uematsu, and got approval from Square Enix while coordinating a Tokyo concert of Symphonic Fantasies. Final Symphony is the first concert consisting entirely of new Final Fantasy arrangements in over ten years, since 20020220 - Music from Final Fantasy.
Böcker and the arrangers intended the arrangements in the concert to be "about telling the stories of the games". In order to "capture the atmosphere of the games", they limited the concert to three games from the series, so as not to spread the concert too thin. They chose the games to be Final Fantasy VI, VII, and X, not only because they liked the music in the games but because they felt previous concerts, including to an extent Symphonic Fantasies and Odysseys, had failed to evoke the feeling of the games due to focusing on the battle music in an unbalanced manner. In an interview Böcker used Final Fantasy VII as an example, stating that only part of "the game's dark, romantic, melancholic, and hopeful story" was being portrayed by solely orchestrating the battle music from the game. Böcker wanted to focus on "longer pieces [and] deeper storytelling" than other concerts like the Distant Worlds series, so as to offer fans "something they really never heard before". Final Symphony was the first concert produced by Merregnon Studios without outside financial support, and Böcker regards it as the riskiest venture Merregnon Studios had undertaken to date, as they could only rely on their own belief that audiences would respond strongly enough to the concert for it to be successful despite the production costs of producing a concert of the quality they wanted.
Jonne Valtonen, Roger Wanamo, and Masashi Hamauzu created the arrangements for the concert. Valtonen and Wanamo had previously worked with Böcker on the concerts in the Symphonic series, and Böcker has stated that if they had been unavailable for the project he would not have created Final Symphony at all. Hamauzu, in addition to arranging the Final Fantasy X music, was one of the composers of the original pieces he arranged. Uematsu, who composed music for all three games, served as a consultant for the project, though he did not arrange any pieces. When they first began the project, Böcker, Valtonen, and Wanamo took a few months to play through the games, watch playthrough videos, and read reviews and analyses of the games. They did not research other arrangements that have been done of the pieces, as they feel the general approach to video game music orchestration is very different from their style. They then got together to propose which tracks would be arranged, and decide which soundtracks worked best as a piano concerto, a symphonic poem, or a symphony. They chose a symphonic poem for VI, a piano concerto for X, and a symphony in three movements for VII. As director and producer, Böcker was involved in the work on the arrangements from the beginning. He set the direction and was able to comment on the progress of the arrangers' work via e-mail and ICQ. He has emphasised, however, that Valtonen and Wanamo are "masters of their art" and were given all the necessary artistic freedom.
The Final Fantasy VI poem follows the journey of Terra Branford, "the heroine born with the gift of magic". The poem explores the stages of her life through the game, as she escapes from slavery, faces her amnesia, discovers the source of her powers, and saves the world from the insane Kefka Palazzo. Final Fantasy VI was the first Final Fantasy game that Wanamo had played, and he wanted to tell the story of the game as it felt to him. Wanamo has described the arrangement as the most difficult one he had done to date. Originally, the poem was going to follow the story of the group of heroes, before Wanamo made Terra the focus, and ended up dropping the themes of the other heroes due to length. The Final Fantasy X piano concerto was arranged by Hamauzu not to tell the story of the game, but to express the "continuum" of the series through the lens of the game. While inspired by the game's story, Hamauzu also drew inspiration from the rest of the franchise to make the concerto more than "a series of separate scenes and stories". He feels that a hallmark of Böcker's concerts is that they are not limited to directly translating the original works, but instead tie them to a wider creative process. Valtonen created the three movements of the Final Fantasy VII symphony to show three aspects of the game's setting. The first movement, "Nibelheim Incident", follows the villain Sephiroth in his journey through the game; the second, "Words Drowned by Fireworks", explores the relationship between Cloud Strife, Aerith Gainsborough, and Tifa Lockhart; while the third movement, "The Planet's Crisis", depicts the final clash between Cloud and Sephiroth. He tried to "bring out both the darkest moments as well as the heart" of the game.
### Performances
The first performance of Final Symphony was in Wuppertal, Germany at the Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal on May 11, 2013. The concert was held twice that day, performed by the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, and was conducted by Eckehard Stier, who had previously conducted for Symphonic Fantasies in Tokyo. It featured Benyamin Nuss, who had also performed in Symphonic Fantasies, on piano for the Final Fantasy X piano concerto. The concert was performed again on May 30 at the Barbican Centre in London, England by the London Symphony Orchestra. It was the first concert of video game music by the orchestra. Stier and Nuss repeated their performances from the premier. The following year, the concert was presented in four more locations. Stier conducted for all four performances, while Katharina Treutler replaced Nuss for the Tokyo, Aarhus, and Stockholm concerts, and Mischa Cheung performed in Tampere. The arrangements were slightly modified for the 2014 performances, and a new encore piece, "Suteki da ne", was performed at the Tampere concert.
The Tokyo concert was the first video game music concert in Japan to receive a standing ovation, according to Merregnon Studios. It was described by both Dengeki Online and Famitsu as magnificent, with a bold and refreshing style that was met with "thunderous applause". The London performance was also praised by critics; Joe Hammond of Video Game Music Online, Ed Williams of The 405, and Mariusz Borkowski of Gamemusic.pl all praised the concert for its powerful performance as both video game and classical music, and Audun Sorlie of Original Sound Version noted the fierce applause and standing ovations at both the London and Wuppertal performances. In 2016, Final Symphony made its North American debut. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was present for concert and audience Q&A sessions at the California shows, the concert in San Francisco boasted a crowd of over 2,700 and made it the largest ever audience for a single performance produced by Merregnon Studios. Additional concerts will be held in Birmingham and Newcastle (United Kingdom), Stuttgart (Germany), and Wrocław (Poland) in 2023 for the series' tenth anniversary.
Parts of the Final Symphony programme have been presented over the years by various orchestras, such as by the Munich Radio Orchestra at the Prince Regent Theatre Munich, the London Symphony Orchestra at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen at the Stadthalle Reutlingen and the Dortmunder Philharmoniker at the Theater Dortmund. This approach was continued in Böcker's later production Symphonic Memories – Music from Square Enix, which premiered in 2018 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Konserthuset Stockholm and has since been performed by the Oulu Symphony Orchestra at the Oulu Music Centre, the St. Gallen Symphony Orchestra at the Tonhalle St. Gallen, the Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra at Culttz Kawasaki and the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz at the Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen.
### Set list
## Album
In December 2014, Merregnon Studios produced an album for the concert. Unlike prior Merregnon Studios concert albums, the Final Symphony album did not record of one of the performances but was instead a studio recording of the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, produced especially for the album. The version of the concert recorded was the one used in the final performance in Tampere, rather than the one originally performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2013. The performance was recorded on December 15–17, was conducted by Eckehard Stier, and featured a piano performance by Katharina Treutler. Nobuo Uematsu supervised the production of the album. The album was published by X5 Music Group, who had previously published the Symphonic Fantasies Tokyo (2012) album for Merregnon Studios. It was released as a digital album on February 23, 2015, while a preview of the album was performed on British radio station Classic FM on February 21. Prior to the album's release, the only available recording of the concert was a video of the Stockholm performance of the Final Fantasy VI symphonic poem by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, released on their website on October 10, 2014. A physical version of the album was released on Blu-ray on September 16, 2015. A promotional mini-album was released on April 23, 2015, containing the Final Fantasy VI symphonic poem, and one part each from the Final Fantasy VII and X sections of the concert. In December 2016, Laced Records released the Final Symphony album on double CD and triple vinyl, as well as a double album combination with the Symphonic Fantasies Tokyo album. The Final Symphony album was re-released as a lossless digital album on Bandcamp for streaming and download on January 1, 2021.
The album was highly praised by critics. Stephen Meyerink of RPGFan described it as "the absolute top of the mountain in the world of video game music arrangement". He claimed that the "complexity and passion" of the concert could be appreciated by any music fan, but urged even mild fans of the source material to immediately buy the album. He praised the album's production values, saying that it was the closest a listener could get to the live performances from their home. Joe Hammond of Video Game Music Online also enthusiastically praised the album, declaring it not only the best album Merregnon Studios had ever produced but also "one of the best video game music albums ever made". He noted both the complexity and quality of the arrangements, calling them out as superior to the ones in Symphonic Fantasies and Symphonic Odysseys due to their narrow focus, as well as the "world class" performance of the London Symphony Orchestra on the recording. Classic FM noted the album as a "spectacular arrangement" that they compared to the best of film music while naming it their album of the week. The Final Symphony album reached the top position on the iTunes Classical Charts in over ten countries, as well as the top five classical albums on the Billboard charts and the Official UK Charts.
## Legacy
Final Symphony was followed by Final Symphony II, a concert of music from Final Fantasy V, VIII, IX, and XIII. It features long arrangements like the Final Symphony concerts. The majority of the music was originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu, while the Final Fantasy XIII suite was originally composed by Masashi Hamauzu. Valtonen created the arrangements for the Final Fantasy V section, Wanamo worked on the VIII and IX portions, and Hamauzu arranged his own compositions from XIII with orchestration by Valtonen. The concert was performed at the Barbican Centre in London by the London Symphony Orchestra on September 12, 2015, and later an earlier performance on August 29 in Bonn, Germany by the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn. After the debut performances, the London Symphony Orchestra traveled to Japan to perform the concert there three times: in Osaka at the Festival Hall on September 27, and twice in Yokohama at the Minato Mirai Hall on October 4. 2016 performances of the concert included a concert on April 1 at the Tampere Hall in Tampere, Finland by the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, and a June 9 concert by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. Two concerts were performed in 2019, with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra on 5 July at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and one day later by the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra at the Philharmonic Hall in Essen.
## See also
- Music of Final Fantasy VI
- Music of the Final Fantasy VII series
- Music of Final Fantasy X
|
474,400 |
HMS Hotspur (H01)
| 1,115,451,824 |
H-class destroyer
|
[
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"H-class destroyers of the Dominican Navy",
"Maritime incidents in April 1940",
"Ships built on the River Clyde",
"World War II destroyers of the United Kingdom"
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HMS Hotspur was an H-class destroyer built for the Royal Navy during the 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 the ship spent considerable time in Spanish waters, enforcing the arms blockade imposed by Britain and France on both sides of the conflict. During the Norwegian Campaign of the Second World War, she fought in the First Battle of Narvik in April 1940 where she was badly damaged. After her repairs were completed, Hotspur was transferred to Gibraltar where she participated in the Battle of Dakar in September. A month later the ship was badly damaged when she rammed and sank an Italian submarine. She received permanent repairs in Malta and was transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet when they were finished in early 1941. Hotspur participated in the Battle of Cape Matapan in March and evacuated British and Australian troops from both Greece and Crete in April–May. In June the ship participated in the Syria-Lebanon Campaign and was escorting convoys and the larger ships of the Mediterranean Fleet until she was transferred to the Eastern Fleet in March 1942.
Hotspur did not see any action during the Japanese Indian Ocean raid in April, but she did escort an aircraft carrier in September during the later stages of the invasion of Madagascar. In June 1942 the ship returned to the Mediterranean to escort another convoy to Malta (Operation Vigorous). She was converted to an escort destroyer beginning in March 1943 in the United Kingdom and was assigned to escort convoys in the North Atlantic for most of the rest of the war. After a lengthy refit in late 1944, Hotspur escorted convoys in the Irish Sea until the end of the Second World War in May 1945.
After the war the ship was used both as a training ship and on active duty until she was placed in reserve in early 1948. She was sold to the Dominican Republic late that year and renamed Trujillo. After the death of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the ship was renamed Duarte in 1962, and finally was sold for scrap in 1972.
## Description
Hotspur displaced 1,350 long tons (1,370 t) at standard load and 1,883 long tons (1,913 t) at deep load. The ship had an overall length of 323 feet (98.5 m), a beam of 33 feet (10.1 m) and a draught of 12 feet 5 inches (3.8 m). She was powered by Parsons geared steam turbines, driving two shafts, which developed a total of 34,000 shaft horsepower (25,000 kW) and gave a maximum speed of 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph). Steam for the turbines was provided by three Admiralty 3-drum water-tube boilers. Hotspur carried a maximum of 470 long tons (480 t) of fuel oil that gave her a range of 5,530 nautical miles (10,240 km; 6,360 mi) at 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph). The ship's complement was 137 officers and men in peacetime, but this increased to 146 in wartime.
The ship mounted four 45-calibre 4.7-inch (120 mm) Mark IX guns in single mounts. For anti-aircraft (AA) defence, Hotspur had two quadruple Mark I mounts for the 0.5 inch Vickers Mark III machine gun. She was fitted with two above-water quadruple torpedo tube mounts for 21-inch (533 mm) torpedoes. One depth charge rail and two throwers were fitted; 20 depth charges were originally carried, but this increased to 35 shortly after the war began.
Beginning in mid-1940, the ship's anti-aircraft armament was increased although when exactly the modifications were made is not known. The rear set of torpedo tubes was replaced by a 3-inch (76.2 mm) (12-pounder) AA gun and the quadruple .50-calibre Vickers mounts were replaced by 20-millimetre (0.8 in) Oerlikon autocannon. Two more Oerlikon guns were also added in the forward superstructure.
## Construction and service
Hotspur was laid down by Scotts Shipbuilding & Engineering Company, Greenock, Scotland on 27 February 1935, launched on 23 March 1936 and completed on 29 December 1936. Excluding government-furnished equipment like the armament, the ship cost £253,037. She was assigned to the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet upon commissioning. Hotspur patrolled Spanish waters in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War enforcing the policies of the Non-Intervention Committee. The ship received an overhaul at Gibraltar between 16 December 1937 and 17 January 1938. She resumed patrolling Spanish waters in 1938 and 1939. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, Hotspur began a refit in Sheerness Dockyard in August 1939, but this was cancelled later in the month as tensions rose just before the beginning of the Second World War.
### Wartime career
She sailed later that month for the Mediterranean, but, once she reached Gibraltar, she was diverted to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to search for German commerce raiders. The ship was transferred to the North America and West Indies Station in October and was refitted in Sheerness between 18 January and 6 March 1940. On 6 April Hotspur and the rest of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla escorted the four destroyer minelayers of the 20th Destroyer Flotilla as they sailed to implement Operation Wilfred, an operation to lay mines in the Vestfjord to prevent the transport of Swedish iron ore from Narvik to Germany. The mines were laid on the early morning of 8 April, before the Germans began their invasion, and the destroyers joined the battlecruiser Renown and her escorts.
During the First Battle of Narvik on 10 April the ship, together with her sister ship, Hostile, was initially deployed to secure the escape route of the other three destroyers of the 2nd Flotilla and deal with any captured coast defence guns. Hotspur did eventually move forward and fired four torpedoes into Narvik harbour, sinking at least two merchant ships. As the British ships were leaving the vicinity of Narvik they encountered five German destroyers at close range. Two of the German ships crossed the T of the British ships and quickly set Hardy on fire and forced her to run aground. Hunter eventually took the lead, but was severely damaged by the Germans, probably including one torpedo hit, and her speed dropped rapidly. Hotspur, immediately behind her, was temporarily out of control due to two hits and rammed her from behind. When the ships managed to disengage, Hunter capsized and Hotspur moved ahead slowly, engaged by all five German destroyers. Havock and Hostile had disengaged earlier, but came back to save Hotspur. Hostile laid a smoke screen that allowed Hotspur to escape while Havock engaged the German ships. Hostile escorted the badly damaged Hotspur to the repair base set up at Flakstadøya in the Lofoten Islands. During the battle the ship had been hit seven times by German shells which knocked out No. 2 boiler, all electrical circuits, her depth charges, her rangefinder and killed 18 of her crew. Temporary repairs allowed Hotspur to sail for Chatham Dockyard where she was repaired from 2 May to 16 July.
After her repairs were completed the ship was transferred to the 13th Destroyer Flotilla of the North Atlantic Command, based at Gibraltar. During Operation Hurry, Hotspur, and three other destroyers, escorted the aircraft carrier Argus to a position south-west of Sardinia so the carrier could fly off her Hawker Hurricane fighters to Malta on 2 August. On 11 September, the ship spotted the Vichy French cruisers Georges Leygues, Gloire and Montcalm and three escorting destroyers en route from Toulon to Gabon. She escorted the capital ships of Force H during the Battle of Dakar on 23 September, but was not engaged. On 20 October, Hotspur, the destroyer Griffin and her sister Gallant sank the Italian submarine Lafolè east of Gibraltar. The ship was badly damaged when she rammed the submarine and she was given temporary repairs at Gibraltar between 22 October and 20 November. She escorted a troop convoy from Gibraltar to Malta in late November during Operation Collar. Permanent repairs were made at Malta between 29 November and 20 February 1941.
After her repairs were completed, Hotspur was assigned to the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet. The ship escorted the capital ships of the Mediterranean Fleet during the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941. In mid-April she escorted the fast transport and three battleships from Alexandria to Malta before going on to escort the battleships as they bombarded Tripoli on 20 April. After refuelling in Alexandria on 23 April, Hotspur sailed for Greece to begin evacuating British and Australian troops from the beaches. On 8 May, the ship again escorted the capital ships of the Mediterranean Fleet as they covered another convoy from Alexandria to Malta before being detached to escort the light cruiser Ajax as she bombarded Benghazi harbour on 7/8 May and sank two Italian merchant ships. During the evacuation of Crete Hotspur had to scuttle the destroyer Imperial on 29 May after the latter ship's steering had been disabled by a near miss by a bomb.
The ship escorted the LSI(L) Glengyle during the opening stage of the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of June 1941 and also hunted for French submarines. From July to November, Hotspur escorted convoys to Tobruk On 25 November, she was escorting the battleship Barham when that ship was torpedoed by German submarine U-331. Hotspur and the other escorting destroyers rescued 451 men. The ship escorted the light cruiser Naiad when she bombarded Derna in early December. While escorting a convoy, Hotspur and her sister, Hasty, sank U-79 on 23 December north of Sollum.
During a convoy to Malta in January 1942, the ship was detailed to escort the merchant ship Thermopylae to Benghazi when she started having engine trouble. En route, however, Thermopylae was sunk by air attack on 19 January. On 23 March Hotspur was transferred to the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean and was assigned to Force A of the fleet during the Indian Ocean raid by the Japanese in early April 1942. The ship returned to the Mediterranean to participate in Operation Vigorous, another convoy from Alexandria to Malta, in June. Hotspur was forced to sink her sister, Hasty, after the latter was damaged by a torpedo from German motor torpedo boat S-55. After the ship returned to the Indian Ocean, she escorted the carrier Illustrious when that ship supported operations on Madagascar in September. Hotspur remained in the Indian Ocean until January 1943 when she was transferred to Freetown, where she arrived on 14 February. The ship remained there only briefly before being transferred home to begin a conversion to an escort destroyer. The conversion began at Sheerness on 1 March and lasted until 31 May.
A Type 271 surface search radar replaced the fire-control director and rangefinder above the bridge. A Type 290 surface warning radar was added at the top of the foremast. A High frequency direction finding system was added on a pole mast aft. The ship also received a Type 242 IFF system. Two 4.7-inch guns were removed, one each forward and aft, and the forward gun was replaced by a Hedgehog anti-submarine spigot mortar. The 3-inch anti-aircraft gun amidships was also removed, but the number of 20 mm AA guns was increased to six.
Hotspur was assigned to Escort Group C4 in June after working up and escorted convoys in the North Atlantic. She was transferred to the 14th Escort Group in June 1944 and refitted in Barrow-in-Furness between 31 October and 9 March 1945. Escort duties in the Irish Sea followed until Victory in Europe Day. Sometime before this, the ship's Hedgehog was replaced by a 4.7-inch gun. Hotspur was briefly assigned to the Rosyth Escort Force before being transferred to the Derry Training Squadron in August.
### Postwar
Hotspur was reassigned to the 4th Escort Group in June 1946 until she was refitted at Portsmouth Dockyard in February–March 1947. The ship was then assigned to the 3rd Escort Flotilla based at Portland Harbour. She was selected to be scrapped in November 1947 and was placed in reserve on 20 January 1948 pending disposal.
Hotspur was sold to the Dominican Republic on 23 November 1948 and renamed Trujillo. By this time the ship carried a Type 291 air warning radar and an American SG-1 surface search radar. Four Bofors 40-millimetre (1.6 in) guns replaced the 20 mm Oerlikons. In June 1953, she was one of a number of foreign warships to attend Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation Review at Spithead. After the death of Rafael Trujillo, the ship was renamed Duarte in 1962. She was sold for scrap in 1972.
|
12,887,061 |
Empire: Total War
| 1,166,182,571 |
2009 video game
|
[
"2009 video games",
"Age of Discovery video games",
"American Revolutionary War video games",
"BAFTA winners (video games)",
"Creative Assembly games",
"Feral Interactive games",
"French Revolution in fiction",
"Games for Windows",
"Grand strategy video games",
"Historical simulation games",
"Linux games",
"Lua (programming language)-scripted video games",
"MacOS games",
"Multiplayer and single-player video games",
"Real-time tactics video games",
"Sega video games",
"Total War (video game series)",
"Turn-based strategy video games",
"Video games about the American Revolution",
"Video games developed in the United Kingdom",
"Video games scored by Walter Mair",
"Video games set in Africa",
"Video games set in Europe",
"Video games set in India",
"Video games set in North America",
"Video games set in South America",
"Video games set in the 18th century",
"Video games set in the Caribbean",
"Video games set in the Middle East",
"Windows games"
] |
Empire: Total War is a turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. The fifth installment in the Total War series, the game was released in 2009. The game, which focuses on the early modern period of the 18th century, was announced at the Leipzig Games Convention in August 2007. The macOS version of the game was released by Feral Interactive on 10 June 2014. The Linux version was released, also by Feral Interactive, on 8 December 2014.
Players choose an 18th-century faction and set out to achieve domination over the known world through military force, diplomacy, espionage and economics. The interface and play are similar to earlier Total War titles. Although the campaign element of the game is turn-based, players can direct battles in real time. Empire: Total War is the first game in the series to allow naval battles to be conducted in real-time. In addition to the standard campaign mode, a special campaign follows the development of the United States from the settlement of Jamestown to the American War of Independence. The game also includes five playable historical battles: the Battle of Fontenoy, Battle of Rossbach, Battle of Pondicherry (called Battle of Porto Novo in game), Battle of Brandywine Creek and Battle of Lagos.
Empire: Total War was met with universal acclaim; several critics commended it as one of the foremost strategy titles of recent times. Praise was bestowed upon the extensive strategic breadth, accurate historical challenges and visual effects. The real-time land battles, with a far greater focus on gunpowder weaponry than earlier Total War titles, were considered successful. Criticisms focused on shortcomings with the game's artificial intelligence and on the real-time naval battles being difficult to control and coordinate. The game was a commercial success, topping sales charts within a week of release; nevertheless, several Creative Assembly employees later commented on various issues caused by a perceived early release.
On 18 November 2018, Empire: Total War (along with Medieval II and Napoleon) was rebranded as Total War: Empire – Definitive Edition, making all downloadable content free alongside the core game, and thus giving access to players who already owned a copy.
## Gameplay
Empire: Total War is focused on exploration, economics, politics, religion, the founding of colonies and, ultimately, conquest. The game is set in the early modern period from 1700 until the end of the 18th century, allowing players to lead various nations and attempt to dominate Europe, the Middle East, India, North America and the Caribbean, along with the maritime trade theatres of the South American coast, Gulf of Guinea, Mozambique Channel and the East Indies. As with previous Total War games, Empire: Total War consists of two separate areas of gameplay: a turn-based geopolitical campaign that allows the user to deploy complex strategies by moving armies and navies across the globe, conducting diplomacy, trade, espionage, and managing the internal politics of their nation, as well as a real-time battle mode that enables players to command military forces in battle both on land and at sea.
The game features about fifty 18th-century factions; however, only eleven of the most powerful and influential are playable. In western Europe, these are Great Britain, France, the United Provinces, Spain and Sweden, and in central and eastern Europe, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Poland–Lithuania. In the Balkans and the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire is the principal faction. At the same time, the Mughal Empire and Maratha Empire are the major powers on the Indian subcontinent. The New World colonies of the major powers are represented as protectorates of their home nation. The establishment of new nations during the era, such as Revolutionary France and the United States is reflected in the game, although these major events may be averted by player actions. Smaller factions, such as the German and Italian states, Native American tribes, and North African countries such as Morocco, are also represented.
A story-driven campaign entitled "Road to Independence" is also included, allowing the player to guide the foundation of the United States of America in three structured chapters. The first sees the player establish and develop the English colony of Jamestown, the second focuses on George Washington seeking to expel the French from the Ohio Valley in the French and Indian War, whilst the third has the player directing the American Continental Army against the British in the War of Independence. This campaign is goal-oriented and strictly historical and also functions as a tutorial for the gameplay, both military, economic and political. Completion of "Road to Independence" unlocks the newly formed United States to use in a shorter, later version of the full campaign.
### Campaign
The main campaign of Empire: Total War involves a player choosing a faction and moving to forge a global empire during the 18th century. Each faction controls various historical provinces, each with a regional capital, and a number of other settlements ranging from minor villages to prosperous sea ports (as long as they are coastal territories). The player can recruit armies and navies to take and defend provinces by military means, or adopt diplomacy and politics to make advances in the game. In addition, players can use economics and religion to their advantage, as well as clandestine means such as espionage and assassination. The campaign mode is turn-based, with each turn representing six months starting in summer or winter, allowing the player to attend to all needs of their faction before ending their turn and allowing the artificial intelligence to make all other factions' moves.
The campaign mode is similar to those in Rome: Total War and Medieval II: Total War, but with several enhancements. It features three main theatres of play: Europe (which also includes North Africa and the Middle East), the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent, as well as four minor trade theatres: the East Indies, the Ivory Coast, the Straits of Madagascar and Brazil. The way provinces work has been decentralised: although a central settlement is still used, other locations within a province can generate trade and technology, allowing factions to disrupt a province's productivity without assaulting the main settlement. Diplomacy, taxation, and trade have been streamlined to reduce the need for micromanagement, including allowing the player to appoint ministers to govern the nation. Previous Total War games required the player to promote a governor for each major city, whereas in Empire ministers' qualifications affect the government of all cities, modified in each case by the size of the metropolitan administration, reflecting the shift from premodern city-statehood to modern nation-statehood. The wandering scholars, spies, emissaries and assassins used in previous titles to deal with diplomacy, trade and espionage have been replaced with just three units: gentlemen, rakes, and missionaries. The former handle research and can challenge other characters to a duel (thus eliminating the diplomatic risk of being implicated in an assassination plot), while rakes perform clandestine tasks such as spying, assassination, and sabotage. Missionaries serve to convert the populace to the state religion, which reduces religious unrest and softens cultural unrest. Isomorphic units also exist for the Ottomans, Persians, and other near eastern nations, replacing rakes with Hashashin, while Indian nations use Thugees for the same purposes, and all nations south and east of the Ottoman Empire use Eastern Scholars instead of gentlemen (although these cannot duel). The isomorphic religious leaders are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant missionaries, Imams, and Brahmin. The way armies are produced also differs: in addition to being produced at settlements, generals can now build their armies in the field by recruiting from nearby settlements. Players can now research technologies along a technology tree, advancing in areas such as infrastructure, politics, agriculture and the military.
Changes in government may occur during the campaign, for example as a consequence of a rise in republicanism. The United States may only come into existence if the ruling British Empire is unable to maintain social order. In addition, nations with highly unpopular governments and a history of workers' unrest may experience revolutions similar to the French Revolution. When the middle or upper classes become disenchanted with a current government, a civil war or revolt may occur. Upon revolution, the player can choose to side with the rebels or with the loyalists. The type of government selected by the player will determine how other factions view the player and influence their diplomatic relations. While religion no longer plays a central role (as in Medieval II: Total War), it is still important in helping bring under control newly captured regions and in influencing diplomatic relations between nations.
Factions will have varying objectives as their victory conditions, such as establishing successful colonies and trade routes and controlling specified regions.
In January 2009, after the delay of the release of Empire: Total War, the addition of a full campaign multiplayer mode was unveiled. The technology to create a multiplayer campaign game was not available in previous Total War games, and the extended development, due to the delayed release, allowed the Creative Assembly to implement the underlying technology for such a mode in Empire: Total War. On 7 December 2009 Sega released keys for a beta multiplayer campaign where two players could play online together as separate nations. Eventually, due to the incomplete and buggy nature of the beta alongside other development focuses, it was cancelled, never being fully patched into the game. In 2013, CA's community team released some additional keys for fans of the game, so they could play the incomplete multiplayer beta. Even after the closing date at the end of 2013, beta keys for the campaign was still available from Sega customer support.
### Warfare
The second major area of gameplay is the battle system. Unlike the campaign game, here players control battles in real time. As with all titles in the series after Shogun: Total War, battles can take place on both land and at sea. However, Empire is the first to allow naval battles to be fought in real-time; in previous titles, they were automatically resolved by the game's artificial intelligence. Automatic resolution of battles remains an option for both land and sea battles. Separately from the main campaign game, players can recreate individual historical battles in the 18th century and early 19th century.
In land engagements, players have an 18th-century army consisting of units such as cavalry, musketeers, riflemen and artillery. Each has its own intrinsic advantages, disadvantages, cost, and overall effectiveness. Players must use 18th-century tactics and formations to defeat their enemies. The battlefield terrain and the weather are also important. Factions can lay siege to settlements, replacing open land battles with street fighting and close-quarter combat. Each unit has morale, which increases if the battle goes well, or decreases after heavy casualties, army losses, coming under artillery bombardment, or with the death of the general. Tactical situations such as attacking from a flank or the rear, or depriving a unit of allied reinforcements, also hit morale. When a unit's morale is sufficiently depleted, it will be routed and flee the battlefield. Depending on whether morale is merely broken or entirely shattered, the player may be able to rally the unit and regroup. Victory is achieved by causing every enemy unit to rout, or annihilated. In addition, sieges can be won if the attacker manages to take control of the settlement's central square for a set amount of time. Empire: Total War also introduces several new battlefield elements to the Total War series. Units can take cover behind walls or in buildings, allowing increased interactivity with the terrain and making some buildings points of tactical importance. Field defences may be constructed on the battlefield. Infantry units can also scale small obstacles such as walls and fences. Each unit has capabilities such as Square Formation, Wedge, Diamond, Equip bayonets, or Fire at will.
In naval battles, players control a fleet of up to twenty varied ships and use 18th-century tactics to overcome enemy fleets. As with army units, each ship's crew has a set amount of morale that changes as a battle progresses; a crew may attempt to withdraw their vessel from the battle if their morale is broken, or in extreme cases may surrender. A battle is won when all hostile ships have been sunk, captured, or have left the map. Individual ships can be manoeuvred, or remain in formation with other ships from the fleet. Players can designate which parts of a hostile ship they want a crew to target, making ships prone to sustaining authentic damage during a battle: masts can be toppled, sails and gun ports can be destroyed and damage can entirely disable a ship's ability to manoeuvre or eventually sink it. The types of ammunition that can be used during a battle are grapeshot, chain-shot and round shot, which have different uses, from killing enemy crew to disabling enemy movement. As battles progress, crews can try to board enemy vessels and fight hand-to-hand in an attempt to capture the ship. The weather in a naval battle is also important; bad weather can create poor visibility. Ships cannot be repaired in mid-battle, unlike its successor, Napoleon: Total War, but fires on board ships can be put out automatically.
## Development
Empire: Total War was announced by Creative Assembly and publisher Sega at the Leipzig Games Convention on 22 August 2007. In their press release, Creative Assembly outlined various features in the game, such as the new game engine and the addition of real-time naval combat. However, while the game had been in the planning stages since the release of Rome: Total War, it was still in early development; no gameplay footage was demonstrated at the convention. The game was announced alongside The Creative Assembly's console title Viking: Battle for Asgard. Media releases over the subsequent months showed screenshots of the game and elaborated more on Empire: Total War's game mechanics. The game's trailer, consisting of computer-generated cut scene footage, was released 10 July 2008. A playable demonstration of the game's naval combat was showcased at the E3 convention later in July 2008, where it was estimated that the game would ship in 2009. The land combat was demonstrated at the later 2008 Leipzig Game Convention in August 2008. At the convention, Creative Assembly announced that the game was out of the alpha development phase, and that they were aiming for a release date of 6 February 2009.
On 28 October 2008, it was announced that the game would be released on Valve's content delivery system Steam on the official release date of 6 February; the game requires Steam to install and run for both retail and electronic versions and is integrated into Valve's Steamworks programme to allow updates and multiplayer to function more efficiently. The game's release was delayed in December 2008 to allow for the development of extended multiplayer features, with a new release date for March 2009. A demonstration of the game, featuring the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of Lagos, was released over Steam on 20 February 2009. The game was released on 3 March 2009. Since release, Empire: Total War has been subject to updates delivered through the Steam system, aimed at optimising performance and removing any bugs remaining in the game.
James Russell, the lead designer on the project, stated in an interview that the 18th century was chosen as the setting as "it's a fabulously colourful period... the 18th century is the great age of fighting sail, and it's the obvious arena in which to set our spectacular new sea battles." Russell also stated that the dynamic and far-reaching changes of the era, from political revolutions such as the French Revolution, economic revolutions such as the Industrial Revolution to military revolutions such as the widespread use of gunpowder, gave the "opportunity to develop some really interesting new features and gameplay dynamics that make for a lot of variation". Motion capture animation was used extensively to make characters seem more lifelike. For increased authenticity, research was conducted into 18th-century aspects such as duels, although designers also observed the choreography of actors in related films and TV series, such as Sharpe.
Empire: Total War ships with nine different versions of box art, eight of which represent the major faction for the market the game is sold in, and one general international version. For instance, German customers are presented artwork displaying colours with the Prussian eagle and Prussian army uniforms, whilst the American artwork shows the American revolutionaries and the Betsy Ross flag. A special edition version of Empire: Total War entitled Special Forces incorporates six elite faction-specific units: HMS Victory, the French Irish Brigade, Spanish guerillas, Gurkha infantry, Rogers' Rangers and the Ottoman Ribauldequin. Additionally, three retailers were provided with a special unit for customers to receive; Amazon.com customers were given the Dahomey Amazons, buyers from Best Buy were able to receive the USS Constitution and customers buying from Game received the Death's Head Hussars. A further 14 units were added with the objective of increasing graphical and unit variety among the factions. These 14 units were released as part of the game's 1.3 patch in June 2009; accompanying the update was a second set of 14 units, released as downloadable content for purchase.
In September 2009, a DLC pack titled The Warpath Campaign was announced for release the following month, as was the next game in the series, Napoleon: Total War. The campaign, released as downloadable content, focuses on the battles of the Europeans and Native Americans throughout most of North and Central America. The new campaign expands the North American territories and features 5 new playable factions: Iroquois, Cherokee, Huron, Pueblo and Plains Nations. New researchable technologies were also added, along with the new scout and shaman agents and new faction-specific objectives. Napoleon: Total War, released February 2010, focuses on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, building upon the technology used for Empire: Total War. Napoleon was released as a standalone game rather than an expansion for a number of reasons, mostly to do with technical limitations; according to Mike Simpson "the level of detail required to successfully depict the Napoleonic Wars is an order of magnitude greater than we were working to with Empire: Total War". Empire and Napoleon Total War Collection – Game of the Year was then released on 1 October 2010 joining both games together, including all of the available downloadable content.
## Release
Empire: Total War was released on 3 March 2009 to the North American market, on 4 March in Europe, on 5 March in Australia, and on Christmas Day in Japan. The game has become the fastest selling Total War title to date; Empire topped British video game sales charts for all platforms in the week of release, the first PC exclusive title to do so in a year and a half. The game was reported to have sold nearly double the number of Rome: Total War and Medieval II: Total War. In the United States, Empire: Total War and its Special Forces edition were ranked as first and second respectively in the PC sales charts for the week of release. The game's Australian version debuted as the top PC game; across all platforms Empire: Total War was ranked fourth, behind Halo Wars, Wii Fit and Killzone 2. Sega reported the game sold 810,000 units worldwide during their last fiscal year period of 2008. However, consumer response was hampered by technical problems arising from incompatibility with certain Nvidia drivers released after the game's development was completed and reports of installation problems with the Steam content delivery system. In an interview with IGN, Studio Communications Manager Kieran Brigden discussed the problems inherent in developing such a huge and ambitious game, saying: "Are there some issues with Empire? Yes there are." As part of its post-release support, he said that Creative Assembly is planning on addressing issues with stability and performance, as well as adding improvements for gameplay and artificial intelligence.
Mike Simpson, Creative Assembly's studio director, started a blog in October 2009, in a deliberate attempt to engage with the game's user community and counter some of the negative reaction which the game had received. He explained The Creative Assembly "were not entirely happy with the state of Empire: Total War when it went out", but felt the Metacritic user rating of 67 percent was unfair, stating that his reason for blogging was a concern that the negative ratings could even damage the amount of money available for developing future games. In later posts he described the February 2009 release date as "commercial reality", and explained why they had hit significant problems with the game's AI close to release. Simpson describes the campaign AI as "by far the most complex code edifice I’ve ever seen in a game", and said that they had reached a tipping point where consideration of too many factors led to an AI which "disagrees with itself chronically and often ends up paralysed by indecision". It was only after patch 1.5—six months after the original release—that Simpson felt comfortable sending it to friends of his, having previously been too embarrassed about the flaws. With regard to the battle AI, Simpson said that the lead battle AI programmer had left to return to his family just before the end of the project. The battle AI at that stage struggled to beat good players even with an obvious level of handicapping, and it had taken some time for other programmers to understand three years' worth of code; progress had been "frustratingly slow" as they strived for a game where real world tactics would work.
## Reception
Empire: Total War received "universal acclaim" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Reviewers praised the large scope of the game's strategy map PC Gamer UK noted that the game "takes a great deal of its design philosophy from the events and trends of its era", which enabled the game to reasonably reflect the challenges faced by the factions' historical counterparts. Praise was also given to the extensive number of factions, down to very small factions such as the Knights of St. John and a renegade pirate settlement. Kieron Gillen, reviewing for Eurogamer, described the campaign map as "endless" and due to the large amount of content, observed that he had managed to complete the entire campaign without even visiting the Indian theatre of play (approximately a full one fourth of the playable game world); a factor that enhanced the game's replayability. Other reviews echoed this sentiment; GameSpot stated that "even a short, 50-year campaign can take a good amount of time to complete, given that each turn requires strategic thinking on multiple fronts". Praise was further bestowed on the refined interface, introduction of a technology tree and level of strategic thinking required for the campaign map. However, some reviewers noted inconsistent behaviour with the campaign artificial intelligence; 1UP.com noted that it could perform illogical choices, such as "the occasional suicidal war between Dagestan and Russia", while GamePro was critical of the artificial intelligence in a number of areas, including the inability to mount a naval invasion or utilise effective strategies on the campaign map.
The real-time land battles in Empire were considered well constructed. Expressing that The Creative Assembly had effectively implemented what it had learned since Shogun: Total War, GameSpy described the addition of personal firearms and friendly fire as something that "changes the tactical nature of the game much as it did in real life", and noting that the player controls and enemy AI were "competent". IGN felt that the real-time aspects captured "the cinematic brilliance of it all without ever falling back on obvious exaggerations or pretences" and that the controls, specifically in relation to unit formation, were much improved. GameSpot put the real-time land battles as "enjoyable to command and enjoyable to watch", particularly commending the amount of detail in each model and animation for every soldier, points carried in several other reviews. However, GameSpot thought that the artificial intelligence could appear "confused" in some circumstances, and the Game Informer "second opinion" review said that "the enemy AI falls apart from time to time". In addition, Eurogamer felt that units' pathfinding abilities in fort sieges were insufficient, and Game Informer also criticised pathfinding around obstacles.
Naval combat was subject to more criticism than land battles. PC Format described the visuals in a naval battle as "incredible", but stated that the controls were "frustrating; genuine naval tactics fast disappear out of the window as [the player] struggles to bring [their] navy’s cannons to bear on the enemy". PC Gamer UK reciprocated this view, but noted that naval strategy was a "deeply difficult task" for a developer, and that "The Creative Assembly have done the best that their game template would allow". IGN praised the graphical quality of the naval battles and stated that "trying to line ships up correctly, making the most of the wind and choosing targets appropriately is very rewarding", but that "the formations and pathfinding leave a lot to be desired". GameSpot commented that "the AI seems incapable of managing [a naval battle] with much success".
Despite criticisms, most reviews were ultimately favourable to Empire: Total War. While IGN felt that the game "drags a bit and there are some small, rough edges in the tactical battles", the game still "deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest names in gaming history". 1UP.com finished by saying "For all its problems, it's undoubtedly progress", while Eurogamer felt that issues "limit [the game] to being merely one of the games of the year," but implied that a post-release patch could deal with these flaws. GameSpot summarised that the game was "complex and rewarding" and GameSpy praised the game for "the simplified interface elements, great campaign, and much-improved map and information screens [that] make this the most accessible Total War yet, and a great place for those unfamiliar with the series to get started". Crispy Gamer, while acclaiming the game "spectacular" and "lovingly historical", criticised the documentation and concluded that the game falls apart due to its bad AI. The Game Informer reviewers criticised the AI, but still described the overall game experience as "fantastic" and "outstanding". GamePro provided a dissenting opinion; although describing Empire: Total War as a game with a potential that "with some extra tweaking, could have proven itself an excellent title", noted that it "has a heap of problems that need resolving" with bugs and crashes. PC Gamer UK enthusiastically proclaimed the game as "one of the most playable, important and accomplished games ever created".
The downloadable content The Warpath Campaign was criticised by Game Watcher for not integrating into the original campaign and for only adding a few new units. Concerns were also voiced about the difficulty curve, though the reviewer felt the DLC provided players with a challenge by playing as the technologically backward Native Americans against the European interlopers.
|
36,835,397 |
2002 West Bengal cyclone
| 1,054,633,947 |
North Indian cyclone in 2002
|
[
"2002 North Indian Ocean cyclone season",
"2002 disasters in India",
"2002 in Bangladesh",
"Disasters in West Bengal",
"Severe cyclonic storms",
"Tropical cyclones in 2002"
] |
The 2002 West Bengal cyclone (JTWC designation: 03B, officially known as Severe Cyclonic Storm BOB 03) was a deadly tropical cyclone that affected India and Bangladesh in November 2002. The sixth tropical cyclone and fourth cyclonic storm of the 2002 North Indian Ocean cyclone season, it developed in the Bay of Bengal northeast of Sri Lanka on November 10, as a tropical depression. After tracking northeast, the system strengthened into a cyclonic storm on November 11, as maximum sustained winds exceeded 65 km/h (40 mph). On November 12, it further intensified into a severe cyclonic storm. Later that day, the storm made landfall on Sagar Island in West Bengal with winds of 100 km/h (60 mph). After moving inland, it rapidly weakened and dissipated over Bangladesh on November 12.
Rough seas offshore Odisha caused two fishing trawlers to collide, resulting in 18 fatalities, while two additional trawlers were reported missing. In West Bengal, the storm uprooted trees and dropped heavy rainfall. Throughout India, 124 deaths were confirmed. Strong winds and heavy rainfall in Bangladesh impacted many cities and villages, including the capital city of Dhaka, forcing thousands to evacuate. Ten wooden trawlers carrying 150 men sank offshore Bangladesh, with only 11 reaching safety. Eight additional boats with 60 occupants were reported missing. One death was reported in Bangladesh after a man attempted to cross a swollen river. Overall, there were 49 fatalities in Bangladesh. The storm was attributed to at least 173 fatalities in India, Bangladesh, and offshore areas.
## Meteorological history
Around 0300 UTC on November 10, a depression developed in the southwestern Bay of Bengal. Three hours later, a bulletin from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) indicated that BOB 03 formed about 265 km (165 mi) east-southeast of Chennai, India. The system steadily intensified and headed northeastward. At 1200 UTC on November 11, the depression reached gale force and was upgraded to Cyclonic Storm BOB 03. At that time, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) initiated warnings on Tropical Cyclone 03B. Further strengthening briefly slowed later on November 11. However, early on the following day, the storm resumed intensification.
At 0600 UTC on November 12, BOB 03 became a severe cyclonic storm and reached its maximum sustained wind speed of 100 km/h (60 mph), in addition to an estimated minimum barometric pressure of 984 mbar (29.1 inHg). However, the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) in Kolkata, India bulletin at 0530 UTC on November 12, reported maximum sustained winds of only 55–75 km/h (35–45 mph). At 0900 UTC on November 12, it made landfall near Sagar Island, West Bengal with winds of 100 km/h (60 mph). Shortly after moving inland, the storm rapidly weakened to a depression. The JTWC issued their final advisory on the storm at 1200 UTC on November 12, while it was centered about 200 km (125 mi) northeast of Kolkata. However, the IMD tracked the cyclone until about six hours later, at which time it dissipated over eastern India.
## Impact
As the storm approached, residents of low-lying areas were advised to seek shelter. According to the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority, the communication system had been activated and collectors in coastal districts were given satellite telephones. Additionally, district authorities collected food, water, and other essential emergency supplies. Offshore Odisha, rough seas caused two trawlers to collide, resulting in 18 fatalities; their bodies were later found floating Dhamra Port in the Bhadrak district of Odisha. Two additional trawlers were reported missing. Nine fishing trawlers sank offshore West Bengal, with only 66 fishermen accounted for. Initially, as many as 600 were estimated to have been missing, though 250 people swam back to Digha, where most of them received treatment at either a medical clinic or a hospital. According to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, 111 people were still missing offshore West Bengal by late on November 12. Forty-nine fatalities were confirmed offshore India, while two deaths occurred inland in West Bengal. Later, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters raised the death toll to 124.
Prime Minister of Bangladesh Khaleda Zia urged senior officials in Dhaka and coastal districts to prepare for the storm. Officials in Chittagong asked that all 24 ships be moved out of the harbor and river channel. In coastal areas, thousands of Red Crescent volunteers reported for duty in order to assist vulnerable villages in preparation of the storm. Winds destroyed bamboo huts, uprooted trees, and disrupted road transport between towns and villages on the shore of the Bay of Bengal. Torrential rainfall in the area flooded dozens of villages, forcing thousands to evacuate. Heavy precipitation also lashed the capital city of Dhaka, inundating streets, which caused a shutdown of electricity and interrupting public transportation. One death was reported after a man drowned while attempting to cross a river in southern Bhola Island. Ten wooden trawlers carrying 150 men sank near Cox's Bazar; only 11 of them were known to have survived. An additional eight fishing boats transporting 60 people was reported missing off of Barisal Division. By November 15, 47 fishing vessels were still unaccounted for. A navy motor boat also sunk near Kutubdia, though its six crew members swam ashore. In the aftermath of the storm, the number of deaths in Bangladesh rose to 49.
Overall, the storm resulted in 173 confirmed fatalities. Officials in West Bengal accused the meteorological offices of issuing warnings too late, as most of the fishermen were already in deep sea areas. Immediately following the storm, the Indian Red Cross Society and the Participating National Societies began to assess the situation and plan. At a warehouse in Salt Lake City, Kolkata, the Indian Red Cross Society prepared to distribute 2,000 tarpaulins, 2,000 blankets, 200 kitchen sets, and 20,000 mosquito nets.
## See also
- 2002 North Indian Ocean cyclone season
- Cyclone Bijli
- Cyclone Viyaru
|
4,150,841 |
Maryland Route 331
| 1,161,962,187 |
Highway in Maryland
|
[
"Roads in Caroline County, Maryland",
"Roads in Dorchester County, Maryland",
"Roads in Talbot County, Maryland",
"State highways in Maryland"
] |
Maryland Route 331 (MD 331) is a 28.74-mile (46.25 km) state highway on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the United States. Signed north-south, the route runs from Vienna in Dorchester County northwest to Easton in Talbot County, intersecting U.S. Route 50 (US 50) at both ends. MD 331 is a two-lane undivided road most of its length that passes mostly through agricultural areas. The road also passes through the communities of Hurlock and Preston along the way. It encounters several routes during its journey, including MD 14 near Rhodesdale and MD 16 in the Preston area, both of which the route forms concurrencies with. In addition, the route also intersects with MD 392 and MD 307 in Hurlock and with MD 318 near Preston.
Most of present-day MD 331 was designated as part of US 213 in 1926 when the U.S. Highway System was established. By 1940, US 213 was moved to a new alignment that crossed the Choptank River at Cambridge on a bridge built in 1935 and MD 331 was designated to run from Vienna to Easton. Both ends of MD 331 have been shortened since, with the southernmost portion of MD 331 curtailed following the completion of the US 50 bypass of Vienna by the 1990s and the northern terminus of the route cut back to US 50 in 2004 when the state-maintained portion of Dover Road to Dover Street in Easton was turned over to the city.
## Route description
MD 331 is a part of the National Highway System as a principal arterial within the town of Easton.
### Dorchester County
MD 331 begins at an interchange with US 50 (Ocean Gateway) in Vienna, Dorchester County, a short distance west of the Nanticoke River. MD 331 signage continues south of US 50 on county-maintained Rhodesdale Vienna Road to an intersection with Old Ocean Gateway in Vienna. From this interchange, the route heads north on Rhodesdale Vienna Road, a two-lane undivided road. It passes through wooded areas, with a set of power lines and an abandoned railroad right-of-way owned by Delmarva Power and Light Company located along the east side of the road. MD 331 continues into farmland, with some rural residences alongside the road, before it approaches Reids Grove, where MD 819 (Reids Grove Road) loops to the west of MD 331. Past Reids Grove, the route continues through a mix of woodland and farmland, still paralleling the power lines and the abandoned railroad.
MD 331 reaches Rhodesdale, where it intersects MD 14 (Rhodesdale Eldorado Road). At this intersection, the route makes a left turn to run concurrent with MD 14 along East New Market Rhodesdale Road, heading west through Rhodesdale. The road leaves Rhodesdale and heads into farmland. MD 331 splits from MD 14 in Shiloh Church by turning north on Shiloh Church Hurlock Road at an intersection. Along Shiloh Church Hurlock Road, MD 331 passes a few residences before heading through more farm fields.
MD 331 enters Hurlock and heads into residential areas, with the name changing to Main Street at the Jackson Street intersection. It passes more residences before intersecting MD 392 (Delaware Avenue). Past MD 392, the road passes more homes before it heads into the downtown area of Hurlock, where it crosses the Maryland and Delaware Railroad's Seaford Line at-grade and MD 307 (Broad Street). Past this intersection, MD 331 heads northwest on Academy Street past numerous homes before the road leaves Hurlock. Upon leaving Hurlock, the road becomes Waddells Corner Road and it heads into farmland. The road turns to the west and continues through agricultural areas with intermittent residences. It comes to an intersection with MD 16 (East New Market Ellwood Road), where MD 331 makes a right turn to head north along with MD 16. MD 16/MD 331 head north through a mix of woods and farms with some residences. The road continues through rural areas with an increasing number of residences as it approaches the Preston area. The road intersects the western terminus of MD 318 (Preston Road) near businesses. Past this intersection, MD 16/MD 331 continue northwest on Preston Road.
### Caroline and Talbot counties
The road crosses the Hunting Creek into Caroline County. In Linchester, MD 817 loops off to the west of MD 16/MD 331 on Linchester Road. Past MD 817, the road enters Preston, where it becomes Main Street, passing by residences and some businesses. The route intersects MD 324 (Maple Avenue) before reaching the center of town, where MD 16 splits from MD 331 by heading northeast on Harmony Road. Past this intersection, the route passes more residences before leaving Preston, where it becomes Dover Bridge Road. It heads north into rural areas of woods and farms with some residences along the road. The road turns to the northwest and intersects Tanyard Road. MD 331 turns west and continues to the residential community of Bethlehem, where it intersects MD 578 (Bethlehem Road). Past Bethlehem, the road continues past many rural residences.
MD 331 enters wetlands as it approaches the Choptank River, which it crosses into Talbot County on the Dover Bridge, a high-level bridge. Upon entering Talbot County, the route becomes Dover Road and continues to the northwest through a mix of woodland and farmland. It turns to the west with the number of residences increasing as it approaches Easton. Upon reaching Easton, MD 331 heads into commercial and industrial areas. The route ends at the intersection with US 50 (Ocean Gateway), where Dover Road continues west as a local road toward downtown Easton.
## History
MD 331 from Rhodesdale to Easton was one of the original state roads marked for improvement in 1909. In 1910, the only paved sections of the highway were the approaches to Dover Bridge in both Talbot County and Caroline County. The state road was paved from Hurlock to Shiloh Church in 1912, from Easton to Waddell's Corner in 1913 and 1914, from Waddell's Corner to Hurlock in 1915, and within Hurlock in 1916. When the U.S. Highway System was organized in 1926, the state road became part of US 213.
The first section of the Vienna–Rhodesdale highway was 2 miles (3.2 km) of pavement south from Rhodesdale that was completed by 1923. The remainder of the highway was under construction by 1924, with another 2 miles (3.2 km) section of the road completed north from Vienna by 1927. The gap between Vienna and Rhodesdale was filled in 1928. When the Nanticoke River Bridge at Vienna was completed in 1931, US 213 was rerouted between Mardela Springs and Rhodesdale to pass through Vienna. A new Dover Bridge, replacing a bridge built in the 19th century, was completed in 1932. In 1939, the original MD 331 and US 213 swapped routes; US 213 also assumed MD 344 between Vienna and MD 16 at Mount Holly.
MD 331 has seen little change since 1939. MD 331 and MD 16 were realigned around Ellwood and Linchester around 1960. MD 331's southern terminus was truncated at its newly constructed interchange with US 50 in Vienna in 1991 shortly after US 50 bypassed Vienna. MD 331's northern terminus has been rolled back twice in Easton. The state highway was rolled back from Washington Street to Park Street in 1983. MD 331 was truncated at US 50 in 2004. On October 14, 2014, groundbreaking for a new Dover Bridge took place, with Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown and other state and local politicians in attendance. The new bridge, which was built to the south of the former swing bridge, was constructed as a fixed-span steel girder bridge. Construction on the new Dover Bridge cost \$64 million. The new bridge opened to traffic on June 12, 2018. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Dover Bridge was held on June 13, 2018, with Governor Larry Hogan and other state and local officials in attendance.
## Junction list
## Auxiliary routes
- MD 331A is the designation for the 0.08-mile (0.13 km) section of Linchester Road from MD 16/MD 331 to MD 817A near Preston in Caroline County.
- MD 331B is the designation for the 0.06-mile (0.097 km) section of Seaman Road from MD 16/MD 331 near its intersection with MD 318 in Dorchester County to Langrell Road (MD 817B) on the Dorchester/Caroline County line near Preston.
- MD 331D is the designation for the 0.21-mile (0.34 km) section of Payne Road from MD 16/MD 331 to the terminus of County Route 201 southeast of Preston.
## See also
|
19,111,790 |
German attacks on Nauru
| 1,165,332,114 |
German attacks on Nauru during the Second World War
|
[
"1940 in Nauru",
"Conflicts in 1940",
"December 1940 events",
"History of Nauru",
"Military attacks against Australia",
"Naval battles and operations of World War II involving the United Kingdom",
"Naval battles of World War II involving Australia",
"Naval battles of World War II involving Germany",
"Naval battles of World War II involving Norway",
"Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II",
"Wars involving Nauru"
] |
The German attacks on Nauru refers to the two attacks on Nauru in December 1940. Nauru is an island country in Micronesia, a subregion of Oceania, in the Central Pacific. These attacks were conducted by auxiliary cruisers between 6 and 8 December and on 27 December. The raiders sank five Allied merchant ships and inflicted serious damage on Nauru's economically important phosphate-loading facilities. Despite the significance of the island to the Australian and New Zealand economies, Nauru was not defended and the German force did not suffer any losses.
The two attacks were the most effective operations conducted by German raiders in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. They disrupted supplies of phosphate to Australia, New Zealand and Japan, which reduced agricultural production in these countries. In response, Allied naval vessels were deployed to protect Nauru and nearby Ocean Island and escort shipping in the South Pacific. Small garrisons were also established to protect the two islands.
## Background
Nauru and nearby Ocean Island were important sources of phosphate for Australian and New Zealand fertilizer production and played an important role on both countries agriculture industries at the time of World War II. The Melbourne-based British Phosphate Commission (BPC) managed the extraction and export of phosphate from the islands and dominated all aspects of Nauruan life. During the year ending 30 June 1940, the BPC shipped almost a million tons of phosphate from Nauru and about half that amount from Ocean Island using its fleet of four vessels (Triadic, Triaster, Triona and Trienza) and chartered merchant ships.
As the islands have no harbours or anchorages, the phosphate ships were loaded by securing to deep moorings and embarking their cargo via cantilever jetties. During south-westerly wind periods—which are common from November to March—the ships had to stop loading and sail away from the island until conditions improved. It was common for these ships to be allowed to drift to save fuel, and there were often several vessels lying off Nauru.
Despite their importance to the Australian and New Zealand economies, Nauru and Ocean islands had been allocated a low priority for the limited military assets which were available to protect the Australia Station and both islands were undefended in December 1940. Strategic stockpiles of phosphate had been built up in Australia, however, to lessen the impact of an attack on the islands.
In late October 1940, the German raider Orion, which was commanded by Captain Kurt Weyher met Komet, which came under the command of Captain Robert Eyssen, and the supply ship Kulmerland at Lamotrek in the Caroline Islands. Eyssen was the more senior of the two captains, and assumed overall command of the force. The three ships operated off New Zealand's east coast for 18 days during November and sank the small coaster Holmwood and large ocean liner with gunfire without being detected by the weak New Zealand defences on 25 and 27 November respectively. Following these attacks, the raiders proceeded to the Kermadec Islands where they transferred their women and children prisoners to Kulmerland on 29 November. The three ships then proceeded to Nauru to attack the island's phosphate industry and the concentration of shipping which the German captains knew was usually present.
## Attacks on Nauru
The German force encountered its first BPC ship while en route to Nauru. On 6 December, Triona (4,413 long tons (4,484 t)) was attacked north-east of the Solomon Islands and was sunk with torpedoes after a chase in which three of her crew were killed by the raiders' guns. All 68 survivors were captured.
The raider captains intended to land a shore party and bombard Nauru's shore installations at dawn on 8 December, but bad weather forced them to concentrate on the ships which were off the island. On the evening of 7 December, Komet—which had gone ahead to reconnoitre and was disguised as the Japanese merchant ship Manyo Maru—sank the Norwegian merchant ship Vinni (5,181 long tons (5,264 t)) approximately 9 miles (14 km) south of Nauru. While the raider was spotted from the shore, her disguise was successful and she was assumed to be a merchant ship bound for Japan.
Orion joined Komet off Nauru in the early hours of 8 December, and attacked and damaged Triadic (6,378 long tons (6,480 t)) and sank Triaster (6,032 long tons (6,129 t)). Komet then tried to sink Triadic with scuttling charges, but this was unsuccessful and Orion sank the merchant ship with gunfire. Komet later sank the British steamer Komata (3,900 long tons (4,000 t)). Following these attacks, the two raiders and Kulmerland withdrew and assembled 20 mi (17 nmi; 32 km) east of Nauru. As the weather precluded a landing on the island, it was decided that Komet and Kulmerland would go to Ailinglaplap in the Marshall Islands, where Komet would refuel while Orion operated north-west of Nauru. Following this, the ships would meet off the island and make another attempt to land a raiding party.
When the German force reassembled off Nauru on 15 December, the weather continued to be too bad to permit a landing and the attack on Nauru was broken off. Further attacks on shipping were judged impractical, as the raiders had intercepted radio messages ordering vessels bound for Nauru and Ocean Island to disperse. Instead, the three German ships proceeded to the Australian-administered island of Emirau to disembark the 675 prisoners they were carrying. While Weyher refused to release any of the European ethnic prisoners on board Orion, as he believed that "trained officers and crews are as much a problem for Britain as shipping itself", the ships landed 343 Europeans and 171 Chinese and South Pacific-ethnic people. The prisoners on the Orion were eventually taken back to Germany, where most of them saw out the war in the Marlag und Milag Nord prison camps in Germany.
Fortunately for the Germans, Emirau was one of the few islands in the region to not have a Royal Australian Navy-supplied radio to contact the Australian authorities. The two European families on the island provided the released prisoners with supplies, and sent a canoe to Kavieng in New Ireland to notify the Australian colonial government. A schooner was dispatched to bring additional supplies to Emirau, and arrived there on 24 December. The colonial administrator of New Britain and further supplies was also flown to Emirau on board a flying boat. The released prisoners were embarked onto the steamer Nellore on 29 December to be transported to Townsville in Queensland, where they arrived on 1 January 1941. They provided useful intelligence on the German raiders' operations, and the German Naval Staff issued a directive on 19 February 1941 prohibiting raiders from releasing further prisoners.
The three German ships parted company after leaving Emirau on 21 December. Orion proceeded to Lamutrik and then Maug in the Mariana Islands to overhaul her engines, Kulmerland went to Japan, and only Komet continued operations in the South Pacific. She attempted to lay mines off Rabaul on 24 December using her motor boat, but this project was abandoned when the boat's engines failed.
Komet returned to Nauru following the unsuccessful attempt to mine Rabaul, and arrived off the island at 05:45 on the morning of 27 December. After issuing a warning for those on shore to not use radio and signalling her intent to destroy the phosphate loading plant, she opened fire at 06:40. The bombardment lasted for about an hour, during which time the raider wrecked the loading plant, oil tanks, boats, buildings and mooring buoys. Following this attack, she sailed to the south-east and Nauru broadcast news of the attack to Australia. This was the last visit of German ships to Nauru during the war, and Komet transferred her activities to the Indian Ocean.
## Aftermath
The German raids on Nauru affected the Australian and New Zealand economies and were the greatest success achieved by German raiders in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. It took ten weeks to resume phosphate shipments from Nauru, and the loss of ships and damaged infrastructure led to a significant decline in output. The resulting phosphate shortages forced the introduction of fertilizer rationing in New Zealand from July 1941. Komet's bombardment of the island also interfered with phosphate consignments to Japan, which caused the Japanese government to threaten to reduce the aid it was providing to Germany. The success of the attacks on Nauru led to rumours in Australia and New Zealand that the raiders had been aided by treachery in the islands. Several investigations were conducted into the rumours and proved them to be unfounded.
Following the raids, the Commonwealth military forces in the Pacific took steps to prevent further attacks by raiders. The Royal Australian Air Force and Royal New Zealand Air Force flew an increased number of patrols in search of raiders operating near major ports. In addition, the Australian Naval Board requested that the British Admiralty authorise the redeployment of Australian naval units to meet the threat posed by raiders. This was agreed to, and the light cruiser and armed merchant cruiser returned to Australia from other stations. This allowed naval protection to be provided to Nauru and Ocean islands, and the armed merchant cruiser arrived off Ocean Island on 4 January 1941 escorting Trienza. Several Australian and New Zealand warships maintained a continual presence off the islands during subsequent months, and two field guns were deployed to each island. The attacks also led to the introduction of convoys between Australia and New Zealand. The naval authorities were able to use the intelligence they gained from the prisoners landed at Emirau to re-route merchant ships away from the areas in which the German raiders were operating; this greatly reduced the effectiveness of the raiders, and Komet and Orion only sank three ships in the period between the attack on Nauru and their return to Europe in late 1941.
## Ships sunk
by Komet
- 1940-12-06 Triona 4,413 GRT
- 1940-12-07 Vinni 5,181 GRT
- 1940-12-07 Komata 3,900 GRT
by Komet together with Orion
- 1940-12-08 Triadic 6,378 GRT
- 1940-12-08 Triaster 6,032 GRT
## See also
- Japanese occupation of Nauru
- Japanese occupation of the Gilbert Islands
- Frederick Royden Chalmers (Administrator of Nauru)
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